Paul is Dead and the Revolution is Upon Us

The Three Pauls and The Second American Revolution

The three Pauls represent the three centers of pop music in their age – San Francisco gave us Paul Kantner (3/17/1941), New York gave us Paul Simon (10/13/1941) and Liverpool/London gave us Paul McCartney (6/18/1942) – having come from Liverpool, he was gifted to the world via London.  All three emerged at roughly the same instant, in cosmic time, both in the world and in music history.  The Beatles, of course, were first, but to someone of my generation, that goes without saying.

On July 6, 1957, Paul McCartney met John Lennon at the garden fȇte at St Peter’s Church, Woolton, Liverpool.  The Beatles first release in America was Introducing the Beatles, in VeeJay Records, on 1/6/1964, which signaled (if its release did not actually trigger) the beginning of Beatlemania.  By February 9th, the world would be forever changed.

FYI:  Meet the Beatles on Capitol Records was January 20, 1964.  I have them both.  *bragging*

Yet, all the same, by 1957, under the name Tom & Jerry, the teenaged Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel “had their first minor success with ‘Hey Schoolgirl’, a song imitating their idols the Everly Brothers.”   The separated and when they rejoined, their first Columbia release, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., came out 10/19/1964.

Paul Kantner was the latecomer, or late bloomer in the trio; he joined Marty Balin to become the Jefferson Airplane (later the Jefferson Starship, hereafter referred to as the Jefferson Incarnation, except where the initials are significant). 

  After the Beatles-led British invasion of 1964, Balin was inspired by the success of the Byrds and Simon & Garfunkel in merging folk with rock to form a group in 1965 that would follow that lead. With a group of investors, Balin purchased a former pizza parlor on Fillmore Street, which he converted to a music club, the Matrix, and began searching for members for his group.  Balin met folk musician Paul Kantner at another local club, The Drinking Gourd. Kantner, a native San Franciscan, had started out performing on the Bay Area folk circuit in the early 1960s, alongside fellow folkies Jerry Garcia, David Crosby and Janis Joplin.  

Balin and Kantner then recruited other musicians to form the house band at the Matrix. After hearing female vocalist Signe Toly Anderson at the Drinking Gourd, Balin invited her to be the group’s co-lead singer. Anderson sang with the band for a year and performed on their first album before departing in October 1966 after the birth of her first child.

Kantner next recruited an old friend, blues guitarist Jorma Kaukonen.   The group made its first public appearance as Jefferson Airplane at the opening night of The Matrix on August 13, 1965. The band expanded from its folk roots, drawing inspiration from the Beatles, the Byrds and the Lovin’ Spoonful, and gradually developed a more pop-oriented electric sound.

Paul Kantner and Signe Toly Anderson both died the same day.  The only similar circumstance that comes to mind is the concurrent, yet separate deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the Jefferson/Adams connection.  Both of the Founding Fathers died on July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after the official signing date of their greatest joint work (if indirectly, as two of the Founding Fathers, not co-writers of the document, the Declaration of Independence).

What happened 50 years ago last week?  What was the significant event January 28, 1966 signifies?  That historical significance got me to thinking about the Second American Civil War, the Culture Wars.  It was on November 4, 2008 that Obama gave his acceptance speech (for the nomination) in Grant Park, where 40 years prior, at the Democratic National Convention, in the same location, that August 28, 1968 came to be known as the day a “police riot” took place. The title of “police riot” came out of the Walker Report, which amassed a great deal of information and eyewitness accounts to determine what happened in Chicago. At approximately 3:30 p.m., a young man lowered the American flag at a legal rally taking place at Grant Park”, and so it began, or so I’d always thought.

I’d always thought that was the moment the Culture Wars truly ignited, with the War in VietNam raging, civil unrest and social unrest at large across the land, if there was a “Bunker Hill” moment for the Second American Civil War, this was it.  Yet, 40 years later, the newly elected President thanked a grateful nation from the same spot, and I thought that would put a rest to it, that the Culture Wars were clearly won by the progressive faction that believes in society moving forward, not back – and not only did nothing positive resolve itself out of that act of atonement, conditions only continued to deteriorate.  Congress excoriated the President, the press excoriated Congress and took potshots when it could at both the President and Congress.  It started nasty and got worse, for eight years!

Why hadn’t it worked?  Why hadn’t the atonement brought at-one-men-ship back to the country?  Why had the unifying mojo not worked?  Because what didn’t cause it wouldn’t cure it, so to speak.  The violence at the Democratic National Convention that summer didn’t signal the beginning of hostilities, those had been going on for a while already.

The Civil War did not cause the division, it was a result of the split in the American mindset that caused the Culture Wars in the first place.  It’s been going on almost as long as I can remember – “dirty hippies”, “Commie pinko fags”; these were just some of the more printable epithets thrown across the divide, but they brought the divide into high relief, so everyone could see it, and most would then choose sides, or surrender to being co-opted by the ruling Establishment.  I was fourteen in 1966; impressionable but alert, I read the daily paper, such as it was, kept up on the news while learning the history conjointly at school. 

Fifty years ago last week, Paul Kantner and Signe Anderson during their year working together from 1965 to 1966, were a part of something meaningful, something important, something big.  Something bigger than themselves and their own individual destinies.  Something happened 50 years prior to their concurrent deaths, if I could only figure out what it was.

I graduated high school in 1970, just as the Beatles and, significantly, Simon and Garfunkel issued their final albums and broke up as performing entities.  The revolution in consciousness had already been going on, and in fact as a senior at university in upstate New York, taking a course in Utopias, I’d focused my research on the social development of the Haight-Ashbury and the legend developing around the Summer of Love.  I didn’t know the story, but I knew the story was there, so after my fourth year at university, off I scampered to San Francisco to continue my search.  I settled down on Hayes Street, just blocks down from Stanyan Street where, around the corner on Fulton at Arguello, lay the Airplane House.  I lived for a while at 1969 Hayes; my imagination, however, lived downstairs, in 1967 Hayes.

This is the research that I found, from my initial search:

Jefferson Airplane

On December 10, 1965, the Airplane played at the first Bill Graham-promoted show at the Fillmore Auditorium, supported by the Great Society and others. The Airplane also appeared at numerous Family Dog shows promoted by Chet Helms at the Avalon Ballroom.[7]

The group’s first single was Balin’s “It’s No Secret” (a tune he wrote with Otis Redding in mind); the B-side was “Runnin’ Round The World”, the song that led to the band’s first clash with RCA, over the lyric “The nights I’ve spent with you have been fantastic trips”. After their debut LP was completed in March 1966, Skip Spence quit the band and he was eventually replaced by Spencer Dryden, who played his first show with the Airplane at the Berkeley Folk Festival on July 4, 1966. Dryden had previously played with a Los Angeles group called the Ashes, who later became the Peanut Butter Conspiracy.

Longshoremen’s Hall

Two significant early concerts featuring the Airplane were held in late 1965; the first the historic dance at the Longshoremen’s Hall in San Francisco on October 16, 1965, the first of many “happenings” in the Bay Area, where Gleason first saw them perform. At this concert they were supported by a local folk-rock group, the Great Society, which featured Grace Slick as lead singer and it was here that Kantner met Slick for the first time.  A few weeks later, on November 6, they headlined a benefit concert for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the first of many promotions by rising Bay Area entrepreneur Bill Graham, who later became the band’s manager.

 

Jefferson Airplane Fillmore poster, February 1966.
This was the first non-benefit concert held at the venue.

 

In November 1965, Jefferson Airplane signed a recording contract with RCA Victor, which included an unheard-of advance of US$25,000. Prior to this, they had recorded a demo for Columbia Records of “The Other Side Of This Life” with Bob Harvey on bass, which was immediately shelved by the label. On December 10, 1965, the Airplane played at the first Bill Graham-promoted show at the Fillmore Auditorium, supported by the Great Society and others. The Airplane also appeared at numerous Family Dog shows promoted by Chet Helms at the Avalon Ballroom.

The Social Consciousness of the New Age Is Born

Then I stumbled on a reference to the First Trips Festival with the Grateful Dead, “later that month”, and opening “the doors of perception” became part of a social consciousness, ultimately, the collective social consciousness, a community of shared vision(s).  No longer an isolating experience, huddled in dark corners afraid of the light, the psychedelic experience found or generated a community, and the new awareness became part of the social fabric. 

The first Trips Festival, sponsored by the Merry Pranksters and held at the Longshoremen’s Hall in January 1966, saw The Grateful Dead, Big Brother, and the Holding Company play to an audience of 10,000, giving many their first encounter with both acid rock, with its long instrumentals and unstructured jams, and LSD. Also from San Francisco, Blue Cheer played psychedelic-influenced rock in a blues-rock style.

Then I realized the psychic split America was experiencing which was so obviously reaching a climax was not the Culture Wars, after all.  That was just a symptom, not the condition itself.  The thread ran even deeper than I suspected.  It was the entrance of the psychedelic mindset into modern society that was the change.  THAT was “the moment”, everything else – the War on Drugs, the “Death of Hippie” (and all that entails), the resurgence of evangelical Christianity, the “born again” movement as a movement – these things spring from the early emergence of a new consciousness, a new Way of Being.

Many people will put a different date, perhaps, on the dawning of the new age, but my candidate has now become January 28, 1966.  Its earthly parallel was the birth of the San Francisco sound; the course it followed, the course Haight Street followed in the decade after the Summer of Love, through and beyond the Death of Hippie (the funeral having been held as early as January 1968), those were the birth pangs of a new consciousness on Earth.  It is now, it seems, reaching maturity and stepping up to act in a mature, adult capacity, instead of a commercial slave cowed into submission by “stuff”.

The revolution is real.  The revolution is here.  The revolution is now.  The revolution is in your head.

P.S. (Privit Sayin) to Mel Rivers..(updated and enlarged)

GRIEF is like coming back from the moon.  You never expect to go there, you’re changed by the experience, and only someone who is also back from the moon would understand what you’re going through.

P.S. (Privit Sayin)

Melissa,

I don’t know if you will be following the tradition or reciting Kaddish for Joan Rivers over the coming year, but I want to share something I’ve learned over the years.  There is a sound psychological reason for allowing the full year to pass.  In the tradition, it is said the soul of the deceased is sitting in judgment over that first year; in many ways, I’ve found that the judgment is on the survivor, as much as the deceased.  But the lesson is this:

You have a year.  Take a year, full and complete.  FEEL what you feel.  THINK whatever you think, you’ll sort it out.  If you need to cry, CRY.  And for heaven’s sake, if you need to laugh, LAUGH.  That is, after all, your mom’s legacy.  But don’t let anyone tell you any different FOR THE FULL YEAR.

When I said that we, as survivors, are as much under judgment as the departed soul, in terms of how we built our lives around that person is our judgment.  When we lose a parent or a partner, we experience a disorientation, as if the ground isn’t solid.  It isn’t.  Our lives are built up on the support poles, as it were, of those in our lives around us, who support us.  When one of those supports goes out, when someone we’re close to, that we depend on to be there departs, we lose a support pole, and the entire structure becomes wobbly, uncertain.

The judgment comes in how we respond to the missing support beam.  How independently have we established our own support structure, in addition to the first and earliest supports, our parents and immediate caregivers.  And in how well we have established the support of others around us, in our current day-to-day lives; when we fall down, and we do, each and every one of us, will there be someone there, to help us right ourselves, and rebuild the support that was taken away from us.  The decision is rendered both in terms of how independent we can be, and how reliant our support structure remains, during the rebuilding.

That’s why coming back from the moon takes a full year, for us humans.  Many people don’t realize the rebuilding we have to do, even those with major life changes thrust upon them by the experience of death; many people stumble through unaware and unprepared.  Take YOUR time, for time is what is left us.

Grieve – remember, the process is composed of many and all different stages, those outlined by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (they’re the same for the dying as well as the surviving), and many more besides.  I have a feeling you’ll be going through all of them, and more, and many of them simultaneously over the coming year.  Be gentle with yourself, and you’re allowed to tell people (1) that they’re intruding and (2) NOT to intrude.  Including me.

You are in my heart, you are in my prayers, you remain in my thoughts.

 

 

Taking another stab at it

Facing the prospect of my own death, I started this blog to explore my experience with death, and to explore my understanding of life, death and the afterlife (should such a thing exist).I got as far, chronologically, as my grandparents’ and my mother’s death, life sort of got in the way.

Actually, death got in the way.  Over the past month, both of my pet Pekingese died.  Born, as near as I’ve been able to determine, four months apart, they died four days apart, and basically from the same thing.  To the degree that it was negligence, It’s hard to deal with; I don’t want to take responsibility for allowing the situation to degrade to the point that death became an inevitability.  We went to the vet, as all this was starting last year – I was still working, then, but was able to make time for a vet visit; but it was a short visit (they only charged me for the yearly checkup, and did damn little of that).

They were old women.  They were my millenial dogs, born around the turn of the century – I have a vet bill for the blonde that stated she was 9 months old in April 2000, and I’d been told repeatedly that the black-haired Peke was just months younger than the blonde.  They were 14 years old (over 100 in dog years, they’d lived full and exciting lives – born in Arkansas, they grew up and lived out their lives in the North Bay, in California.  They each started out in life with a daddy – John and Shawn were living together, and when Shawn got LeiLee, John got BeBe.

BeBe had been raised in a breeding mill, she lived the first part of her life in a cage, but when they realized she would be too small to breed, they released her, and John adopted her.  There was a lot of early socialization the darling never quite picked up on – she didn’t cuddle, she wasn’t affectionate – but she was excellent at communication; she wasn’t a “yappy” dog, both dogs were fairly quiet, except when they needed my attention to do or to get something, or to go somewhere (like “out”); we communicated well.

When they were puppies, though, and I was with Shawn, and the dogs had come to live with us (John had left the North Bay to go into a monastery, but even after he left, he never even inquired about BeBe, her status in the house, or her well-being.  When he left, he abandoned her – and all of us – for good.  Good riddance to bad rubbish, is what I say, but I don’t wish to be ‘unkind’; it still irked me that he could just live out his life as if pet ownership had never happened.  After we heard he’s been disinvited to the monastic community and returned to town, none of us ever heard from him, which sparked some resentment on my part over the years, but there was little I could do about it, anyway.

They were my pack, or rather, we were a pack.  Shawn had become so jealous of my relationship with the dogs that he claimed, “You stole my dogs.”  Aside from whatever personality defects he may have had, I took care of the dogs almost entirely by myself, so it was natural they’d bond with me.  It used to irritate him so much that, when I left for work, the two dogs would sit at the door and howl after me, and then when I got home, they’d be at the door to eagerly greet me.

We had become a pack, and Shawn was the invalid member, but I was the one who fed them, and walked them, and bathed them, and gave them significant attention, so it was natural they’d look to me, and not to him, for their needs.  Then, when he passed away, in October 2009, it was left to me to lead the pack.  We settled in together a half-block from where we’d been living for most of the last four years. BeBe was a show Peke, with the huge coat and undercoat.  LeiLee was much easier to care for; she was a sleek-hair Peke, without the undercoat.  BeBe hated the brush, she would scream like someone was raping her pet turtle every time I tried to brush out her coat.  And I mean SCREAM!  You never heard such frantic wailing as BeBe under the brush!

The details of their deaths, gruesome though they are, are really not the topic under discussion, but if I had been more diligent about their coats, they might have lived longer, but again, they were old ladies who had lived full lives, so there’s little room for anything but acceptance, but the grief is mingled with the guilt that I could have pushed harder to keep the mats in their hair under control.  What I’d come to realize in the days after putting LeiLee to sleep was essentially how I failed all the people in my life that had passed – my grandparents, my disappointed mother, even my beloved St♥.  I may have tried my best, but my best simply wasn’t good enough, and I had nowhere to go for help.

There was Shawn’s other ex-lover, who wanted to be around, who wanted to count, who wanted to be important in Shawn’s life, but was congenitally incapable of taking care of an invalid, without the patience to deal with the necessities of the situation, and without the deep well of compassion that would enable him to see things from the invalid’s perspective, not the healthy’s expectations of functional ability.

I was on my own, and although they lived to a ripe old age, and they had a home and food and companionship, I wasn’t really up to the task all on my own, anyway.

LeiLee was the alpha ‘male’ in the pack, I was just the human guide.  The cat, Lyta, had passed two years earlier, at 18 years old, and when BeBe died the night of July 4th, it seems as if LeiLee knew her job as pack leader had ended, the pack was dissolved, with both other members dead; I was a person, not a pack.  The day I buried BeBe, I was at the desk, when I heard LeiLee in the kitchen, she yelped once – and that was all.  When I went in to check on her, her rear left leg was completely incapable of supporting her any longer.  It was as if, with the rest of the pack gone her job as pack leader was gone as well.  LeiLee had some sort of degenerative condition, and her left rear leg had been undependable for a while, but the use of the leg would come and go – sometimes she would walk and even run, but sometimes only be able to hobble, but never for more than a day at a time before she was “back to normal”.  She hung on for two more days, dragging her hindquarters along after her, but she was already blind, now crippled and isolated from her pack, we both knew it was time.  So, Tuesday morning, after the 4th of July holiday weekend, I brought her in to the vet.  She died in my arms – the vet had had to install a pick line, being unable to find an adequate vein – and it was peaceful.  She’s being cremated now, even as I write this, and her ashes will come with me.

 

It had been coming on for nearly a year; the blonde had been infested with fly eggs –which hatched into maggots.   The first infestation was followed up by a visit to the vet, which was not helpful at all.  Without money is this county, no one is willing to “help” you in many ways.  “What’s in it for me?” seems to be the question, instead of”How can I be of service to my fellow man?” – AND this is a cultural thing, not a human thing.

People can learn, and grow, and develop maturity; some people just don’t.  If people are rewarded for “getting what they want”, why should they seek compassion and altruism, with no direct and obvious reward?  It’s the instant gratification crowd that rules the day, while the rest of us rue the day.

INTERLUDE: YOKO ‘n’ Me, an Appreciation

It’s hard to say that I was a museum junky when I was a high school and college student, but MOMA was like my heart’s second home (hey, what can I tell you, I’m a Tin Pan Alley baby, and Times Square has been and always shall be the Center of the Universe.  I was in Bryant Park one Monday night in the 90s, and we were watching an outdoor showing of THE SOUND OF MUSIC, and the crowd would be singing along (mayhaps this was the origin of the Sing-Along trend; when I did later on attend one the first official showings of Sing-Along Sound of Music, it was with some of these same people.  When we were singing “Edelweiss”, I was looking around from the park at the skyscrapers that encircled us, looked toward the northwest, and remembered my grandfather was a projectionist at one of the string of movie theaters that used to line Time Square (where the hotels are now), and that this, Times Square, Manhattan, New York, these are my deepest roots, and this is my own fatherland, the land of my father, and his father before that (but only that far; I am a 2nd generation American).

I was born 30 miles outside the Center, in a now-defunct hospital in Amityville (yes, that Amityville), New York, but I’ve always been a city boy, not a suburban one.  We started going to museums in grade school; sure, it started with the Museum of Natural History (and I remember going twice), but it’s still a museum.  I don’t believe we ever made it to the Met as children, but I had certainly been introduced to MOMA by high school.  I loved that place; with the water lilies along one wall, and in an adjoining space, another room featuring Guernica.  I was in total awe of that picture; I would return whenever I could and just sit in front of it, totally absorbed.  I can’t say, “I ‘got’ it”, I can’t say what it’s ‘about’; I knew then about the Spanish Civil War, and what happened at Guernica, but the details of what he included (the slaughtered horses, the light bulb) and the relative placement didn’t ‘speak’ to me, rationally, intellectually; it absorbed me intuitively.  I’d been to galleries on class trips that I’ve never found since; there was one museum with a central sculpture gallery – for all I know, I may have returned to that space and had lunch there after they converted it to a dining area, but one can never be sure about confirming or substituting these early memories.

By the time I went to Syracuse to attend university, I was no stranger to art museums, both traditional and modern.  Originally, I thought it was in 1973, when I would have been a junior or senior, but later internet evidence places Yoko Ono’s exhibit YOU ARE NOT HERE in Syracuse at the Everson Museum in 1971 – and I would have been a freshman.  I wouldn’t go, at first; throughout the years before I came out, I was a total coward, cowed by anything and everything.  John and Yoko came to town (where I was!  Of all the world, they came to me, it seemed remarkable, so I’m remarking on it.  Actually, the Everson was the museum closest to New York City that would exhibit Yoko’s artwork.  Lucky for me), David Bowie showed up, Elton was there – it was a huge event, and I was too cowed to go while all the hubbub was going on.  Oh, I went; I waited until everyone was gone and went scurrying over like a vampire in the daylight, trying not to be seen.

And again, I entered a familiar place – only this time, to an entirely unfamiliar configuration.  I’d never seen “an installation” before, but the entire front rooms of the museum were dedicated to Yoko’s work; there was a video room (first I’d ever seen) with multiple screens going at once, mostly in silence from what I remember), but there were also art pieces I’d never have recognized as pieces of art before.  Yoko Ono taught me to see with new eyes.  Her marriage did that; I looked past her appearance, and credited John with some sense; I had been GROWING UP WITH THE BEATLES, along with a generation, and I understood viscerally that it was time for the Beatles to move on; 1970 was my high school graduation, it only made sense the Beatles moved along at the same time.  Over the years, I’ve read every analysis of the phenomenon and it’s life-time I could get my hands on, and I understood when John said it had become time to stop hanging around with the mates, and get serious about an adult relationship.  Yoko liberated John, and her art liberated me.

She was  avant garde, certainly.  She challenged viewers and visitors, audiences and the general public, but as an artist she both expressed herself and communicated her understanding, her perspective in new and “dangerous” ways.  So, while the “Yoko broke up the Beatles” ruckus was going on, I was sitting back, amused and bemused, watching both John and Yoko for their next public foray, knowing I could trust that they were who they said they were, artists, wizards, and holy fools.  You know what it was like, living in Atlanta in the early 1980s, having this argument at work with an adult woman?  The best I could get was, “I’m not really familiar with her art.”  Yeah. thanks.

After It Happened, she was my bud.  I wrote her a note of condolence (the address of the Dakota not being hard to find), and was so gratified that she responded with a public thank-you letter, she is such a classy lady, I admired her for that as well.  I sent her a personal note of thanks for the acknowledgement, and started periodically writing her letters.  There was a restaurant on Peachtree Avenue (!) near Peachtree Hills, that was going out of business and selling the interior of the restaurant.  When the Beatles played Atlanta, they ate here, and John (if not all four boys, it was a long time ago, and I’m a little fuzzy on these details.  It would all be in Yoko’s letter, though) autographed plates, and John not only signed the plate, but drew a little impromptu design as well.  I wrote Yoko to tell her the plates were going to auction, if she were interested.

Then I moved to Los Angeles, toting Yoko’s two albums produced after John’s death with me.  Probably right from the time I bought SEASON OF GLASS, I was listening to it daily.  I often did that with albums, and then stopped when I’d absorbed as much as there was to absorb, and move on.  I never moved on from SEASON OF GLASS and IT’S ALRIGHT (I SEE RAINBOWS); until at least the fall of 1986, listening to Yoko deal with her grief in very direct and immediate ways (there are reflections of Janov’s primal scream in there that I still find painful to listen to, emotionally – not intellectually nor artistically. LOL) every night before bed first the one, then both, sometimes alternating between them, but every night I was listening to Yoko.

I had known about my mother’s diagnosis of cancer since 1975, and although she was following a full treatment course of radiation and chemotherapy, she continued to smoke daily until the day they put her in the hospital the last time.  I know because I was there.  The week after Labor Day in 1986, I took a week off from work, and arranged a trip back to Long Island to visit.  I didn’t do any side-trips this visit, I stayed close to home, and my mom.  The day I left, I went to the airport from the hospital where we were waiting for her to be admitted for what turned out to be the final time.  I’d know what was coming, although one never knows the hour; it wasn’t a shock, and I’d had time to prepare, and Yoko’s help in getting through the process of releasing a loved one to death’s embrace.

When Yoko went to Budapest and sang “Imagine” with 500,000 people, I read the news amazed and gratified, wondering, “Can that happen here?”  She announced booking a theatre in L.A. (the Beverly Theatre, maybe?) to do a performance, only to have the show cancelled due to lack of ticket sales (we hadn’t yet bought our tickets, due to budget constraints anyway, but I was still hoping to go.  When we lived in Atlanta, we would go to shows at the drop of a hat, but in L.A., the stressors were greater and the budget constraints were greater as well.  I wrote Yoko another letter, this one about my disappointment at not getting to go to the show (for which I had not yet bought tickets, and was cancelled because no one else had done it, either – I know, mea culpa).

In response, I got my first card from Yoko.  Written on the face of it was “Yes!” and signed “Y.O.L.” CONTACT!  After OnoBox came out, I wrote her again, expressing my regret about not having one yet.  I had a lot on vinyl, including Two Virgins and the Wedding album, but her stuff proved difficult to find on CD at first.  She sent a second card, this one expressing her hope I get my OnoBox soon!  Sorry to say, I was pleased; pleased at the acknowledgment, admittedly pleased with myself.

I wasn’t hounding her, I was respectful of her privacy, and respected her request for distance.  When I went to New York (the first time had been in 1983, when I took St♥ for his first trip to the Big Apple) after It Happened, I made my pilgrimage to the Dakota and later, after I moved back to New York in 1989, to Strawberry Fields.  The glasses I wear as I write this are the same glasses I bought – round gold-rimmed frames – in honor of John on my first trip to Strawberry Fields.  Even after returning to New York, I maintained my life, she maintained hers and the twain didn’t meet.  In 1993, when I was Chairman of the first Heritage of Pride PrideFest committee looking for entertainment for the festival stage, I invited Yoko to come downtown and do a set for Pride.  She didn’t respond, and never showed.  Ironically, while looking in the village for talent, I went to see Penny Arcade and fell in love.  Over the objections of nearly everyone else – she’s not ‘gay’, this and that – Penny and I arranged for her to be the centerpiece of the stage acts; she would take the stage just before 2:00, and time the moment of silence for a particular place in her set.  One of my proudest moments.  Turns out, I didn’t know she was a Warhol superstar, and I’d actually seen her on film in the past; she wasn’t a braggart, she was all into the now and the next performance, not the historical ones; and I’m given to understand they’d been around the village at the same time, and she knew Yoko as well.

In 1994, with a broken leg, I went to see Yoko’s show at the WPA Theater, NEW YORK ROCKS.  It was my 42nd birthday, I was either barely out of my cast, or about to be, but still on crutches –  and one of the actors comes out on stage in a cast, with a broken leg.  No reference was made to it in the script nor songs, so it was genuine, and he just believed, “The show must go on.”  I said hello to Yoko that night, who attended the performance, sitting with Sam across the aisle and just enough rows ahead the I could see her from my seat on the aisle, and she said hello back, but that was the extent of my first encounter with my guide to art enlightenment.

In 1996, Sean turned 21.  During the summer before his birthday, Yoko and Sean announced a performance at Central Park’s Summer Stage series.  Ever since Los Angeles a decade earlier, I’d waited and wanted the chance to see Yoko live in performance.  The play had been great; it was the songs from the Double Fantasy series – Double Fantasy, Milk & Honey, Season of Glass and It’s Alright (I See Rainbows) – strung together in such a way to tell the story of What Happened, but Yoko and I were in attendance, they were performing her music, but it wasn’t her performance, so it didn’t quite count.  Suddenly, here it was, my first chance to see a performance in person.  The billing was Yoko and Sean, with Chiba Matto and Ween, whom I didn’t know at the time, but would later come to love.  I’d have missed it, been late for the performance except for a flyer sent from Yoko’s office about the concert taking place in the afternoon, instead of the evening as I had anticipated.  If Yoko’s assistant hadn’t sent the flyer directly to me, I’d have missed it entirely!

I had written her one longest letter, after my mother passed away, about how she had guided me though the process of grief, a huge fat thing.  I still have it here, somewhere, I never had the nerve to actually send it on.  She was with me every step of the way through what was to come, and for that I will always be grateful.  She taught me as much about art as any other teacher in my life.  She opened my eyes, taught me to see in a new way, and when it became hard to watch, she stood by and said, “You’ll get through it.  I did.  It’s all right; I see rainbows.  You will, too.”

It happened

So, do I really want to write, in the first place?

Ah, do I really want to do what it takes to be a writer, after all?

Can I really do it?  “Aye, there’s the rub…”  I can quote, but can I actually write?

This entire exercise isn’t working out as expected, nor as I’d hoped.

What do I know of Death? I started out trying to express my understanding of death by describing my experience of death, but it feels like a futile exercise, a self-absorbed picture of “Me and my friend Death”, which is both pointless and narcissistic. Or maybe I’m just taking too much time to get to the point.

But I have to know what the point is, to get there directly; so I’m going about this indirectly, looking for clues to comprehension of this immense subject.

A new month, a long list of things to accomplish and no money or means or initiative to accomplish them. 

I’ve started blog posts, and left them sketchy at best.  I‘m in my comfort zone where I’ve developed competence, and thus confidence: on the game grid.  That is its appeal, I believe; when people are overwhelmed, out of their depth, disenfranchised from work, or worse within work, outplayed and outperformed, they resort to their computerized comfort zone: the Game Grid, to demonstrate competence.

I may display competence in the writing, but I don’t have confidence, so it’s not comfortable; it never has been, and that’s why it’s so frightening to me.   And then there’s the issue of content.  What have I got to say that is of interest to anyone?  And how do I separate the genius from the idiocy?  In retrospect, it always looks like idiocy.

I know what I have to say, I am in the midst of writing it, but I’m avoiding saying any of it, posting any of it. 

I know what I’m trying to talk about – if not quite what I want to say about it – but all I wind up talking about is myself, and my circumstances, not my reactions, not my thoughts or emotions about John and the loss we sustained that Monday night, but about the chaos in my own personal life, during which I could maintain no wider perspective than the next day, the next paycheck, the next argument, the next movie, the next record, the next joint, and the next session of passionate lovemaking.  I felt for the widow and the young son, I felt for my City, I felt for the wider world, but my own personal feelings were such a whirlwind, it may have taken a back seat, but it never goes away.  43 years and counting, and that December day never dawns that I don’t think about it, continue thinking about it in the days and months leading up to it.  I mourn John Lennon every day between October 9th and December 8th every year.  Consideration of the Christmas season doesn’t even begin in my house until after the 9th of December, and frankly it’s hardly observed at all.  Same thing with Gay Pride and 4th of July.  The 4th of July is usually a day of rest for me, after the madness that can be Gay Pride Month, Week and Day.  I’m not active as I once was, but the days surrounding the 27th of June and that last Sunday in June are always marked in my yearly observances.  Now, in 2009, Shawn passed away on October 3rd, on the Full Hunter’s Moon, further extending back the time of mourning observance, sometimes by as much as a month.  My mother died on September 22nd, so basically, the entire Autumn season is about mourning for me, by now.

 

 

Everyone alive and conscious on the day Kennedy died remembers where they were when they heard the news.  It was a moment of such shock that everyone remembers it.  Now we are less than three months later, the holiday season has passed, and The Beatles are on Ed Sullivan.

I didn’t think much of the Fab Four before that night; my sister had bought the first #1 single, so I knew I Want to Hold Your Hand and I Saw Her Standing There.  Frankly, I wasn’t impressed; too noisy and raucous for my refined tastes – at 11 years old.  But that has been a pattern, it turns out.  I never judge by first impressions, because with art, some things have to develop on their own and in their own way.  Already at 11, I believe I was looking for maturity I didn’t find in “Hold Your Hand”, or later “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”, or “Sweet Dreams”; I had to be convinced, I had to be shown.  And on that February night in the basement of my parents’ house, watching on the old TV I’d watched my earliest cartoons on, I witnessed the future, I saw the world crack back open.  That was the last time we watched our first TV as a family; by the next spring, my dad had sprung for a brand-new COLOR TV.

That winter, we had been an entire nation in grief, still uncomprehending, as yet as unknowing of the reality of the situation as we remain to this day; everybody believes they know, but at the same time, everybody knows they’ll NEVER know, because those actually in the know don’t want the rest of us TO know.  It was that trust, along with historical certainty and many other hard-held beliefs, that died that day.  We would never again know what to believe of what we were told.  The events that were to come only manifested that change we had already experienced.

But the Beatles were the real deal; they were talented AND charming, young and vibrant, full of the hope of ideals and hope in the future, something we’d believed we’d lost the previous November.  In the midst of our grief, the Beatles gave us something to smile about, something to be grateful for, something to look forward to, with the next sunrise we’d felt we’d never experience again.  The Beatles gave the human spirit the burst of joy it needed to carry on.  They offered, they promised, and over the course of their career as the Beatles, they delivered – gloriously, to a degree no one originally thought possible.  They transformed popular music, popular entertainment; they transformed the world, but the world resisted.  That is as it will always be.

Over the 17 years between VJ Day and President Kennedy’s death, the world had been constant and consistent; humanity knew, men and women knew, who they were, and they knew their place in the world.  After Kennedy’s death and the shifting of the ground beneath our feet, everyone seemed to regain some kind of footing, albeit on altered terrain, but the world went on turning.  It would be another 17 years, but another assassination would rock our world, and wreck our sense of who we are as humans, and who we are as humanity.

It wasn’t just the actions of Mark David Chapman that wrecked our sense of ourselves; it was a larger struggle going on throughout society, throughout politics, and throughout the world.  With the advent of Reagan conservatism, our very identity as human beings was undergoing a battle between who we are as a society, and who we are as individuals.  Our innate nature was pulling us one way, but conservative forces in society were pulling in the opposite direction, and the forces of “rugged individualism” won out over the forces of community.

What John Lennon said to Cynthia that London afternoon, about the popularity of the Beatles – and by this time, it was worldwide; the music of the Beatles, and the forces of Beatlemania transcended all worldly and ideological barriers – Russians today proclaim the Beatles had as much to do with the fall of the Soviet Union as the politics and economics of the period.  The Beatles influenced minds in ways beyond ideology and partisanship, beyond personal chauvinism.  John spoke his mind, and he spoke the truth as he saw it – the Beatles had become more popular than the Church.  Popularity is not a value, popularity has no intrinsic worth, because attention is fickle, and popularity doesn’t always translate into loyalty.

Personally, I draw a direct line from that statement to his assassination.  He died because he offended American evangelical Christians, by pointing out the futility of their efforts.  When authority turned on us, and killed a popular leader because he was leading the nation in a direction those in authority didn’t want to pursue, all authority suffered, the Church foremost among them.  In America, certainly, people had always maintained a healthy cynicism about politics, politicians and government, but the Church was something else again, and John Lennon challenged that, as was his wont, as was his right.

If you read Chapman’s story, you’ll see he was another early Beatlemaniac like me and my friends, but he was a Southern Christian boy, we were New Yorkers; we took everything with a grain of salt.  His conversion from Beatle fan to evangelical led him to turn against John Lennon, on a very direct and personal way.  America was beginning to turn away from organized religion, and the religious organizations and organizers were fighting back with every weapon they had, outrage chief among them.

Now, I don’t know if the reborn Christian movement was as yet in its infancy, or was in fact born as a result of John’s sacrilege – he wasn’t “a believer”, it wasn’t sacrilege; it was opinion, based on his beliefs in the nature of the world –  but the fact of the matter is, I’d never encountered the evangelical movement or the Christian evangelicals until I was already in high school, in the mid- to late-60s.  Which is the cart, and which is the horse?  How can we ever know?

This is where it gets sticky and personal, for me.  I grew up on Long Island, and by 1980, I was living in Atlanta.  St♥ and I had just gotten together that previous Spring; he led a rock‘n’roll band, and at the time, his bass player HAD GONE TO SCHOOL WITH MARK DAVID CHAPMAN.

MDC had grown up in Atlanta, and wound up in New York to accomplish his dirty deed.  As I read more about his history, his fractured mind, I began to notice the “there but for the grace of God go I” nature of this.  I have since come to believe MDC is my shadow.  He came from, where I went, I went where he came from; we had the same experiences (of John and the Beatles), but we reached very opposing conclusions about what we’d been through, and what we’d witnessed.  During his early solo career, John had lost a lot of appeal, to me; “This is a song about pain” was his introduction to the live rendition of his song about heroin addiction (Cold Turkey?), and at the time, ranging through bouts of cyclical depression, I ha dmore than enough of my own, and I couldn’t take on any more, even that of an earlier hero, John Lenon.  I never even listened to Walls and Bridges until I bought the CD 25 years after his death.  His music was not to my taste, but he was still former-Beatle John, and I followed the misadventures of John and Yoko, Quixote and Panza, the wizard and the witch, avidly.

I was happy in their happiness, and when they split, I followed the stories of the fabled Lost Weekend, watching the appalling self-destruction that often accompanied addiction.  I didn’t know the details at the time, I didn’t understand addiction either by then, but I recognized pain when I saw it, and sympathized rather than attacked.  I knew, somewhere in there, “All You Need” still lived within the suffering shell of this wonderful, unhappy man.

When he retired, my reaction was simply, “Do what you need to do, man.”  It wasn’t until the end of the decade that I would give up the artistic strivings of young adulthood, but I understood the urge NOT TO compete, not to HAVE TO show off (of course, I had nothing TO show off, but I understood the impulse, for some internal reasons).  Now, how much of my own behavior was directly influenced by the story of John and Yoko, but the parallels were strong and remain significant for me.

When he re-emerged, it was a joyous occasion for every former Beatlemaniac – or so I thought, until I learned of the twisted path and the twisted psychology of MDC.  I was working early the next morning, so I was asleep when IT HAPPENED.  When I found out the next morning, I crumbled, my world fell apart, and I didn’t have the wherewithal to hold it together.  I DON’T KNOW WHY.  I only know THAT.  My life was largely intact, I was in a new relationship with the man it would turn out is the love of my life.  And yet, what came out of the assassination, and the Vigil the following Sunday was a stronger bonding than we would have had otherwise; we were shattered together, and when we put ourselves together, it was as a unit, troubled and with problems to be sure, but we were well and truly bonded in our love and our grief.  And those pesky, uncanny parallels.

After half of our time together, we would break up – AND I WOULD MOVE TO L.A. TO GET AWAY from the dissolution of my very life; I couldn’t remain across town from him, and not be with him, so when the invitation to move to L.A. came, I didn’t think about the Lost Weekend parallels, I just jumped.  Nine months later, he jumped to be with me, and we were together until the day and the hour of his death, 8 years later.

We were Holy Fools for Art, but as St♥ was fond of responding when I pointed out the parallels to him, “They’re nothing like us.  They’re RICH.”

 

Grow Old Along With Me/The Best Is Yet To Be

But the rest was not to be.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1NZg2GJI5Y

 

Yoko Ono taught me that true art two elements: expression AND communication; you’ve got to have both.  For me, John Lennon’s “This is a song about pain…” was more expression than I could take at the time, it overpowered me I suppose,   but instead of communicating with me, it alienated me.  And I stayed that way almost until the end.  I never even heard Walls & Bridges all the way through until I bought the CD, somewhere around 2004.  Actually, he recorded that album during the exact time I was crossing the country on my way to California; he was in New York City, and I was running as fast as I could toward San Francisco.  Once there, I had little money for “records”, and though I had a record player, I don’t think my records would have traveled that well, by thumb in 1974; what I had in San Francisco was stuff I’d have managed to buy while I was there.  But the end result was that I sat on the sidelines for those first 5 years of John’s solo career.  I was still an ex-Beatlemaniac, and he had chosen my own, “The City”, for his home, but even Imagine wasn’t iconic, really, until 1981; it was a genius pop song by one of the foremost artists of his generation, but his work gained so much .. stature and depth and resonance .. after What Happened.  I “came back” to John, as a musical artist, with the first things I heard from DOUBLE FANTASY.  “He’s back, and Yoko’s with him,” I told myself.  And so it was.  As it should be.  Until, that night between his birthday and Christmas, it wasn’t any more.

I remember being so .. deflated .. that day, so drained, just by standing up and walking around in my “normal” day.  I was anything but normal that day, and that was anything but a normal day.  I lost that job almost immediately afterward.  It was the suddenness, the inappropriateness, the absoluteness that just staggered me.  There was no going back from this one.  I had just met St♥ that previous spring; our first night was their wedding anniversary; by the time it was the anniversary of our first night, it wasn’t theirs any longer.  I mean, it still had been, but they didn’t share it any longer.  Then, eight years later, neither would St♥ and I.  We had moved into midtown during that first year, so we were two blocks away, so we attended the vigil together, everyone had joined up into a gigantic circle on the golf course on the east side of Piedmont Park.   I wrote Yoko a condolence note after What Happened, and when she publicly published a note thanking everyone for the notes she’d received, I wrote back and thanked her for the acknowledgment, and started writing to her periodically, over the next 15 years, and I know she saw my letters because I got two and a half responses.  The half-response was a flyer her assistant mailed out, as a reminder of her performance with Sean – with Cibo Matto and Ween – in Central Park’s SummerStage the year he turned 21 – which I would have missed by a few hours without it.  SummerStage was an afternoon music series, and it would have been over by the time I stumbled over to the Park to have a look-see.  As it was, I was there, chair and all, camera in hand, and primed and ready by the time they took the stage.  So, thank you, Yoko and your staff, and Sean, of course.

But, on a drearier note, it’s hard to imagine it was 17 years since the previous “everybody remembers where they were” moment – well, moments, if you count the Ed Sullivan show following the holidays – but remember, this was before Reagan got shot, the Challenger blew up, any of it.  This was earth-shattering because it was worldwide, it was again, one of those instant and absolute moments when everything seems to change, seems to have changed in retrospect – and it’s not a question of direct consequence, but more the operation of the Law of Unintended Consequences.  No one could have foreseen the world that emerged from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  No one can point directly to the assassination of John Lennon 17 years later, and say, “This changed that”, because nothing changed, but everything changed.  We, as members of the human race, had been changed.  Everyone was affected – detractor and supported both, especially in light of the way his death came about, by a former fan driven to extremes of behavior by inner demons and outer indoctrination by the sensitive Christians Righteous that turned on him, and turned his fans on him with such vengeance that this is the only direct line I draw between John Lennon’s life and his death at age 40; he insulted their religion, and they incited the hate that led directly to his death.  It’s even in Mark David Chapman’s biography – he was a Christian camp counselor at some point – and took on and made personal the Christian Righteous offense at John’s statement about popularity of popular music vs. religion – and that is the essence of the point he was making.  AND IT’S MORE TRUE TODAY than it WAS over 45 years ago.

I was 28 when What Happened, still young enough to be in love, think of myself as invincible (“I’ve lived forever so far, so what’s to say I won’t continue to?”  Now, I know better, viscerally, immediately, not mentally or imaginatively; I don’t have to imagine it, I feel it, every day, this lack of invincibility and its inevitable consequence), still imagine an open road ahead, a chance to accomplish something, to make a mark, to express and communicate, all at the same time.  We weren’t failures, we were struggling artists; well, he was an artist, I was just a struggling human being, with artistic sensibilities.  Henry James describes it this way, “he had a little taste, a little cleverness, a little reading, … a little French and Italian …”, and I think it was a Huxley reaction, perhaps in one of his own novels, about the limitations of “a little taste, a little cleverness” when life requires true talent to succeed – even if only talent at achieving success in whatever way lies open ahead.  I had the drive but not the driver, I suppose.  Half of you will think to yourself, “What is he talking about?” and the other half will think, “Oh, I get it.”  There is no way to convey this drive/driver dichotomy unless you’ve experienced it, but it’s a condition I suffer from.

I fell apart that (next) day, my life fell apart that month, and stayed fallen apart until Honeywell, early in 1981, which lasted until 1984, when I skedaddled to L.A. I lost the job I’d had on December 9th by the 15th.  By the 31st, my next employer had evacuated the premises, in fact the state, to avoid prosecution.  It would be two months later that I found the job that would keep me going for the next 4 years.  In the meantime, I found I could not for the life of me sit down and write any of the tales taking shape in my head. This was a continuation of my inability to be productive the previous May/June, when I was between jobs after failing as a Book Buyer at Georgia Tech; I didn’t know what I was doing, so it was no surprise, and no true loss, except in the moment

The world shifted, and I shifted with it, and like my cat, Mr. Huxley, I landed on my feet.  Those were safe years, productive years.  All the drama was in the relationship, and I rode it out through biannual moves, in and out of Midtown or the Perimeter, for 4 years of 2 not living as cheaply as one, but living on one reliable paycheck much of the time.  Our lives together followed theirs together, but when I pointed that out to him St♥ fairly screamed, “We’re nothing like them.  They’re RICH!”  Oh, sensitive, that one.  But we were; we were Sancho and Panza, a wizard and a wizard, holy fools; they lived their lives at a different strata than we did, but we  joined our lives on the same day, split up when one partner went to L.A., got back together and loved one another until death did us part.   They laid a path that we followed, but then something even stranger happened.  Yoko started to release music; her first album (they were albums back then) was ‘SEASON OF GLASS”.

 

SEASON OF GLASS

Spring passes, and one remembers one’s innocence
Summer passes, and one remembers one’s exuberance
Autumn passes, and one remembers one’s reverence
Winter passes, and one remembers one’s perseverance
There is a season that never passes, and that is the season of glass

http://imaginepeace.com/archives/3615

While I was living in San Francisco in the mid ‘70s, we found out that my mother had cancer, from which she would die 10 years later.  Yoko taught me how to grieve, or she gave my grief a focus, and every night after we picked up our copy (it came out June 9th, we got ours that next Sunday, the 14th) until my mother’s passing 5 years later, I would listen to Yoko, and learn about grief, understand grief, and with the release of her follow-up, “It’s Alright (I See Rainbows)”, I learned that there is life after grief.  Yoko got me through the greatest losses of my life, and for that alone, I will be forever grateful. 

Going through the loss of John, with Yoko, for whom it was immediate and direct helped in immeasurable ways to prepare me for my own losses that were to come.  That much is true, that much is a given.

Death: an introduction

Death.  I’m not prepared to give Death its proper due, but a man’s got to start somewhere.

Death and I were fairly well unacquainted until later in life; my great-grandfather passed away at 99, when I was 17.  Other than that, except publicly, death hardly touched my life until the Challenger tragedy, when I was 34.  The experience of public death was something altogether different.

On November 22, 1963, I was 11 years old, in sixth grade.  Decades later, when discussing Kennedy’s death with my classmates, some said they knew during gym class, others that they spoke about it in the locker room on the way back to class.  We had gym directly after lunch (who’s the scheduler here?) I knew nothing until we got back to our classroom, and we sat down at our desks, and the loudspeaker was on.  We were listening to the news, a rare and special occasion.

Then it sank in; the President had been shot.  By 1:45 Eastern time (we were on Long Island), the official announcement of his death was made.  I remember my neighbor across the street, standing in front of the coat closet, just breaking down in tears.  She doesn’t remember this, but it’s still vivid to me.  We were sent home early that day, it being a Friday, nobody would have to be back at school for a couple of days, and we had a funeral to obsess over.  I got home, and my mother had taken down all the blinds in the living room, and was scrubbing them like a madwoman; she just didn’t know what else to do but clean.  she was a housewife of her generation, after all; and that generation was about to come crashing down on its head, but nobody knew that, that weekend.  All we knew was grief and TV coverage.

The next Spring, we said goodbye to the education and school we’d known, and said goodbye to many classmates with whom I’d have little interaction until 40 years later, on Facebook.  But that was change, and not death.  Kennedy’s death was final, and life-altering, even at a remove.  That was my first insight into death.  Things changed; and when it’s a death at a high level like that, the death itself had consequences and changed conditions around it, and around the world.

Is there such a thing as “common” death and “high-level” death?  Over the next two years, I would begin to notice public deaths in the newspapers.  Political figures and figures of world renown were singular and rare.  It wasn’t the “front page” deaths that caught my eye, it was the death notices in the entertainment pages.  It was not the mid- to late-60s, TV had been bringing entertainers into the home for a decade, after prior decades of radio introducing them to a home audience.  Vaudeville had been dead since before WWII, now 2 decades past, many of the stars of vaudeville had experienced rejuvenated careers in the early days of television; all the older character actors of the ‘30s and ‘40s whose movies we watched on the MILLION DOLLAR MOVIE, or TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES, were getting older, and their obituaries and retrospectives were hitting the news.  It was a much larger laboratory in which to view and analyze a large group of public deaths.

The old adage always went, “Deaths come in threes,” but I found that to be a rare occasion.  November 22, 1963 was such a world-changing date – Huxley, Lewis and Kennedy all passed away that day.  What I did notice was, if they didn’t always come in strict threes, these deaths didn’t come in a steady stream, as would be expected if life were truly random, but in clumps, in clusters.  There was a lot of, “There’s two, now we’re waiting for the third to drop,” which rarely did.

I was fascinated enough to ask the school newspaper in junior high if I could write an interview article about it, and ask teachers their observations.  It was the only time I ever submitted anything to the school newspaper, and the only time I was ever published there.  It was obscure, and a little pre-Goth for 1966, but this inquiring mind wanted to know.

Everyone alive and conscious on that day remembers where they were that day.  Something shifted that day, something changed.  It was as if the magnetic poles of the universe that tilted towards justice and its responsibilities shifted away towards gluttony and greed, consolidation and control.  Our modern world was shaped out of the consequences of that terrible act.  The world shifted in ways we couldn’t track, much less acknowledge and recognize.  In nearly 20 years, the world had been constant and consistent; in the peace that followed the end of WWII, people knew who they were, where they came from, and where they belonged.  After Kennedy’s death, that was no longer true; the ground beneath our feet had shifted in some unfathomable way, and we were going to have to find our footing in the strange new world.

A Thousand Words Before Coffee: On Distraction and Lack of Focus

My normal routine is simple: get up, feed the dogs, have coffee.  Then I turn on the computer and scan the news, posting the days interesting stories on my Democratic Club Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/SRDemClub).  This can be as few as one or two stories or as many as a dozen postings in a day, depending on the news cycle.  Then, when I’m ready to take a break (or if the pups start yelling at me they need a walk, or water, or fresh food), I’ll play some computer solitaire; but from that point on, the day is wasted; I try to put down the mouse (so to speak), step away from the keyboard, and get on with errands for the day, but the pull of “just one more round”, or “just one more game” becomes hypnotic, and the work – the housework, the intellectual work, the yardwork – never gets accomplished.

Trying to blog regularly, I’ve taken to going to the library (between Tuesday and Saturday; the downtown library is open on Sundays, but I never get down there) to give myself someWHERE to focus; when I’m at home, everything undone is a distraction, and everything is undone, so everything is a distraction.  I’ve been going to the library to specifically focus on my blogging – I’ll sit down in the library, remove what distractions I can (the dogs, the house mess, the phone, the neighbors) and resist the rest, and try to focus on writing for an hour, maybe two.  After an hour or so, I need a break – sometimes breaking the line of thought along with it – but I can’t leave my stuff unattended at the public library, so I pack up for a break, and usually don’t make it back afterward.  I’ll go to Star*ucks, but then the strong coffee will start my stomach reacting, and I can’t sit and concentrate, so I go home, and then the day is well and truly shot, and it’s time to do a bowl of herbal analgesic – and then the rest of the day is REALLY shot.

I was doing well, during February and March, writing regularly, following the trajectory of the blog itself fairly well; then I went to the doctor for a checkup, and everything stopped dead in its track.  I just couldn’t bring myself to get back to what I was doing.  Death seemed so much more a pressing target than “rewriting the rules of reality”.  Before this, whenever I posted a piece, I knew where the next one was going; suddenly, I’m too preoccupied to keep track of where I’m going with philosophy, preoccupied by death.  If I was going to write, I was going to have to clear the boards of my history with Death, from the death of President Kennedy on, but what I write is not what I want to say,  I don’t just want to chronicle my experiences with and around death, but that is all that it seems I have to write about.  It’s interesting to me, and I keep seeing flashes of insight in the scribbling, but nothing worth publishing.

And that’s a separate issue; even when I sit myself down and actually do some writing, what comes out on paper is nothing like what I was trying to say, and I junk it, or file it, or save it into drafts, thinking someday, some way, I was going to “fix” it, and make my ramblings presentable, worthy of being published, if only on my personal blog.  And in a lot of ways, blogging is publishing, today – getting the word out there, presenting your ideas for public scrutiny, giving people the opportunity to exchange ideas without having corporate interference about form and/or content.

I’d been journaling for years; when I was 24, I started a biographical journal.  I was simply writing down everything I remembered from the first part of my life, so I would have something to refer to with names and details I’d otherwise forget.  My Aunt Gloria was sceptical; “do you think you have enough living to write about? Of course, not for publication, public presentation, but I did have a good memory, and rather than telling the story (it would change shape very few years, in any case.  The story I thought I was writing in 1975 didn’t turn out to be the story that had been taking place, as I found out in 2001; more on that later), I was preserving my memory for when I would be able to write “The Story”.

Hasn’t happened yet.  I’m not illiterate, I’m erudite and intelligent (not Mensa material, but then – would I want to be?), and I know how to construct a thought, and a sentence, but writing for public scrutiny is a daunting endeavor.  Am I interesting?  Am I interesting enough?  Are my ideas and thoughts worthy of sharing?  Would anyone else be interested?

But the blogging format is good for that – there is an element of “Fuck You, We Do What We Want” in publishing a blog, and not worrying about working with an editor, pleasing a publisher, attracting the public.  I kind of like the idea of sitting in my own little corner of the universe, saying, “This is what it looks like from here”, without having to worry about someone’s approval before it goes out into the universe.  But it does require its own form(s) of discipline: HOW do I make my boring life interesting?  WHAT do I say, and what do I not say, what self-censoring am I going to do?

And the final problem is that introverts think differently than the majority of the public that is going to encounter the blog entries, and think, “This writer is whack.”  As an introvert, I’m less interested in the circumstances in the material world than I am the qualities of my experience, and most readers would find such writing “soft” and “immaterial” and dismiss it as “irrelevant”.  If your orientation is outward, inward reflection is superfluous, we introverts recognize that, and no amount of convincing is going to change the perspective of the “extrovert”, the materialist; they have no concern for what consumes the introvert.  We not only think about different things, we think about things differently.  We’re more involved in the “how” and the “why” than the “what” and the “when”; I’m loathe to make general statements about “introverts in general”, it’s about viewing life though a different framework than the material world itself.  How do we express our interest in different “factors” with people focused on “just the facts, ma’am; just the facts.”  You go your way, you do your thing, and let the rest of the world think what it will.  Wasn’t it Voltaire that taught, “Tend your own garden”?  And right now, what I’m doing is preparing the plot – but that’s all I’ve been doing for 35 years!!  When does the planting and the harvesting begin?!