Forward in this generation --triumphantly

As a white heterosexual male, I don't really have much empirical experience of "otherness," unless one cares to count the fact that I work the kinds of jobs that typically require initial screening and vetting by women, many of them black, and gay men. It's hardly oppressive; I have plenty working against me, but I've never been given to wonder, "I'm white, I'm straight and I'm a man --how will I ever cope?"-- but in any case it's impossible to hide the fact that one is an oddball in such circumstances.

In any event, Michelle Obama's speech to the Democratic National Convention was to me an utterly extraordinary event. I was exposed, at the age of six and in an all-white school in an affluent suburb of Chicago, to the story of a courageous and selfless Harriet Tubman, and it remains with me to this day. As a twelve-year-old, I watched, in turns mortified, outraged and inspired, the televised presentation of Alex Haley's dramatic encapsulation of the lives of black people upon this land through the generations.

The most interesting and rewarding experience of my four years' pursuit of a bachelor's degree was an independent-study crash course in black American writers dating from Frederick Douglass to now, during which I was putting away a novel or a collection of selected essays or poems every other day for six weeks. The groundings of my conception of what is listenable music are rooted in jazz and the blues, two forms that were born of oppression, dared to rejoice in its face and now stand as everlasting gifts of black American creative artists to the entire Western world.

I have been given, in both heartbroken and optimistic moments of contemplation of matters human, to intone spontaneously the lyrics to Bob Marley's "Redemption Song," its words speaking directly to the theft of his ancestors from their homes for the purpose of generating wealth and progeny for others and their own successors, of building a way of life that is, for better and worse, the inheritance of us all. I relate to the sentiments that he expresses in a vaguely personal way, as though on some level he speaks to things somehow only too well known to me but lying beyond my powers of direct identification.

All of this and the lynchings, the subsequent acquittals by all-white juries, the police dogs, the water cannons, the poll taxes and the literacy tests aside, I know well the stories of redlining and blockbusting, of planned shrinkage and the segregation of school districts into separate and unequal halves, of underservice from the banks and supermarket chains and overservice from the currency exchange and fast-food titans --the sad and sorry legacies of which remain with us to this day; I need only step to the end of my block, cross the boulevard and walk two more blocks to see it up close, thru the same eyes as I did when I first moved to the neighborhood 20 years ago before fleeing after three years of --when I wasn't barricaded inside my studio apartment in hiding from it all-- having no choice but to look at it each day.

As a white man, it pisses me off; were I the same man only black, it well might have driven me past the point of madness long ago. Knowing what at least I do, if any facet of the significance of Michelle Obama's performance last nite somehow was lost on me, I daresay it would be difficult for a knowledgeable observer to identify it. I heard and recognized well her song of freedom, and she sang it to the very core of my being not less than to that of anyone else who looked on.

Appy Polly Loggies

Hiya, been a while. Strange summer, lots of rain, but not too much heat or humidity.

My reservoir of creative juices has been at low ebb for a while now. Just don't know quite what to say or do with all of this magnificent technology now that I've, you know, arisen from ten years' somnambulence and have at one bound entered the 21st Century.

But it'll come along. I've got plans to chuck up some vids with tales of this-could-only-happen-to-a-poor-schlump-like-me stuff, guaranteed to arouse LOLs the world over.

So hang with me. Campaign '08 remains boring, tedious, pedantic and just kinda stupid. Can't wait for the OLOLympics to come and go and get on with the Democratic convention end of the month.

Anyway, back soon.

Tuesday Poem

Right, I've been getting heat from several directions, all clamoring for new materiaLOL --so here is. It's a little number I knocked out called "Language Lesson," and it might as well be subtitled, "How NOT to approach a person on the spectrum."



This is but one example, and there will be others to follow --the time I got attacked at a festival by some wacky broad with whom some bloke I'd just met tried to set me up is priceless stuff, but time and effort will be required in putting that one together to a degree sufficient to do it justice.

Anyway, bear in mind that I'm no poet, with no formal training of any kind and no grasp of such basics as form, rhyme, meter, texture and all of that happy horseshit; on the other hand, I've sat thru plenty of other folks' absolute dreck at readings stretching back nigh on fifteen years, so I think that I might be indulged if only just this once.

The Almighty Cathleen Schandelmeier, unqualified living LOLegend and hostess extraordinaire of the summertime Beach Poets series for the eighteenth year running, with some lovely remarks in reply to one of my recent posts --amazing what a lady will say about you if you slip her a twenty-- and others are always welcome to post comments so long as they're properly signed up to do so.

Jed

Mind your volume controls...


Tasty! Headphones are best --Phil's bass really stands out.

From 5/8/84 in Eugene.

Remembrance of 18th (?) July

Andrew Sullivan over at TheAtlantic.com is feeling pretty good these days, what with public pressure being brought to bear in what may prove to be a decisive fashion on the whole matter of our severe --and, to put it frankly, embarrassing-- travel restrictions upon foreign visitors who are HIV-positive, of which Sullers himself is both.

Then there's the fact that the anti-same-sex marriage ballot initiative in California appearing a good bet to go down to defeat in November (and do forgive me for not referring to it as "gay marriage" --last I knew, the non-corporeal legal arrangement of marriage doesn't have a sexual orientation; is its opposite-sex counterpart "straight marriage"?).

Speaking as one who is not gay but who counts a number of gay people among his friends (just as his daddy said that he one day would do) and who believes in the principle of fairness under the law --which should, to the reasonable extent possible, amount to complete and total equality-- I reckon these two developments to be most welcome.

Indeed, I marvel at the social, cultural and political advancement of openly and unapologetically gay people in this country that has occurred within my very own lifetime. A lot of hard work went into it, plenty of disappointment and abuse was (and continues to be) endured, and the degree of cooperation and support lent by the majority straight population --us folks who exist in sufficient numbers to determine just who around here gets what-- in helping to advance these goals is also noteworthy.

These developments and my attendant reflections come at what is a rather weighty time for me, given that it is now 23 years ago this week --before antiretrovirals, before Magic Johnson, before ACT-UP and SILENCE=DEATH, before Ryan White and even a few months before Rock Hudson-- that my father succumbed to the ravages of AIDS, making him the first of around 10,000 in this country to do so.

A number of profound and in many cases conflicting emotions are aroused by this annual season of remembrance. It all sort of pivots off of the fact that my old man was pretty much an asshole who caused a lot of pain for many of the people in his life. It has to be said that he never had things too great himself, being a product of the South Side of Chicago, a Catholic parish kid and altar boy who never offered anything athletically and was unaccomplished as a man of intellect.

His own parents separated when he was three and eventually obtained a divorce --something that Catholics just didn't do in those days-- and by his own recollections, he was engaging in homosexual behavior from the onset of puberty. Quite how and why he got involved with my mother after leaving home for university is beyond me, and so you're looking at the written output of one of the two products of that rather unholy union --which itself was rent asunder by my father's dalliance with at least one of the students under my mother's tutelage in a suburban high school.

None of this is any sort of embarrassment to me; it is what it is, and I neither could nor can do anything about it. At the video link above, you will see my reflections that I recorded whilst testing out my webcam earlier this month. As I note in it, the whole thing began for me when I pulled a weekly edition of Newsweek out of the mail pile during the summer of 1983.

On the cover was an oversized photograph of a test tube filled with red blood and the markings KS/AIDS on the tube label. Atop the photo was the word EPIDEMIC splayed across the breadth of the cover, and my mind turned at once to the notion of a swine flu outbreak. Thus intrigued, I turned to the article inside, and I was greeted by a photo of a group of men in their 30s riding in an open convertible down Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood at what I recognized in an instant to be the annual Christopher Street West celebration of gay pride.

I'd spent the previous summer out there with the old man and in fact had strolled around at the pride parade. I knew West Hollywood well, having spent plenty of time enjoying its restaurants, shops and magazine stands as a 15-year-old with bugger all to do for the summer whilst the old man worked his gig at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. I sought no trouble on those streets, and it never managed to find me.

So it is rather needless to add that my concern was aroused when I delved into the Newsweek article, and I developed an immediate sense that I would be touched by this awful new disease within the confines of my own life. I had heard vague talk the previous summer about a "gay cancer," but details were lacking. The article brought it all into focus, with its dire tales of pneumonia and Kaposi's sarcoma and its stark presentation of rates of infection and mortality.

A year and a half after that, my old man rang me up and asked what I was up to. I'd graduated from high school in June and was up to fuck all, and he thereupon invited me out west for an indefinite stay. Things were full of promise for this then-17-year-old, not least of all with the prospect of spending a warmer winter than anything that the Midwest might serve up.

I soon was disabused of any notions that the good life was my inheritance once I stepped off a plane on the day after Christmas in 1984. The old man's psoriasis was giving him fits, and the L.A. weather wasn't cooperating; he relied upon the sun's rays to work magic on his skin condition, but it was a gloomy December, and he was receiving regular light treatments from a Westwood dermatologist.

By the end of my first month there, two unwelcome developments had cropped up: my skin was itching something awful, keeping me up nites scratching myself raw, and showering only made it worse; also, the old man sprouted one and then a second purple lesion on his face --one on his forehead, and the other along his jawline.

I had no idea what was bothering my skin and torturing me to the point of near-madness in the bargain, but I knew at once what the old man's lesions were all about. Having read the Newsweek article a year and a half before and taken note of the accompanying photographs, I knew that it was Kaposi's sarcoma and that my father was exhibiting one of the known symptoms of AIDS.

I recount in the above vid the occasion of when he and I made one of his regular trips to the dermatologist for a light treatment, at which time he paraded me before the doc for a look at my skin --and an instant diagnosis of scabies for me, which also accounted for his own persistent skin problems. He also had asked about his lesions, and the doc referred him for a biopsy.

So it was another trip to a doctor a few mornings later for a biopsy, immediately after which the old man, in an irritated and unceremonious fashion, declaimed to me that it was very possible that he had AIDS. What followed in the weeks ahead was a series of doctor visits to specialists at locations spread throughout the Los Angeles Basin, with the end result of that being regular treatment at the hands of one Dr. Mitsuyasu at the UCLA Medical Center.

The waiting room alone was an education in the AIDS crisis, packed wall to wall as it was with sick people --some of them desperately so and dying. They started the old man off on Interferon, which he injected subcutaneously twice each day; eventually he was moved to chemotherapy, which sickened him horribly --he would shiver with cold on sweltering 90-degree afternoons, and he found air-conditioned indoor environments utterly intolerable-- and only hastened his demise.

As the end neared, he dropped me off at Cedars-Sinai one morning --I had gotten a job there tracking down loose reports in the medical records department-- and drove himself to UCLA, where he got himself admitted and stayed for a few days. He only spent one or two nights at home after his discharge --an unspeakable nightmare to witness-- before being admitted to the hospice center at Cedars, where he lived out his final couple of weeks.

And so on the morning of what I believe was the 18th July, upon being picked up for the ride to work by a friend of his who worked at the hospital, I was informed that he had succumbed on the previous evening. Living a life in denial to the very end, the old man had not made aware of his illness any of his family members --mostly elderly aunts and uncles, as he had no surviving parents and no siblings-- and so upon me devolved the dubious privilege of taking phone calls from crestfallen 80-year-old Catholic grand-aunts demanding answers and sobbing into the phone; truly my father's son to the bitter end and beyond, I did as I knew that he wished in lying about the cause.

My grand-aunt Bernice was one exception in this parade of stunned grief --she was the gentlest of souls, the sort who would trap a fly in the kitchen and release it outdoors in preference to swatting it dead as would any of the rest of us-- and she was a picture of calm understanding; she didn't say as much, but she knew.

What followed for me was the discomfiture of a public memorial service in the conference center at Cedars --he was far from universally beloved there as elsewhere, but there was a huge crowd, and more than one chuckled at the spectacle of a Catholic priest presiding over a service in a Jewish hospital (in spite of himself, the old man would have loved that).

His uncle, a former executive at Marshall Field's State Street flagship store, and his uncle's (ahem, gentleman) companion flew out from Chicago for that, and it was the last occasion upon which I received holy communion --which I wouldn't have done except for the fact that my granduncle was in attendance, and, as with so many other things in my life where my father was concerned, it was the keeping up of appearances that mattered.

Then there was cremation and a burial at sea in the company of a handful of his friends outside of San Pedro Harbor, and the bastards at the Neptune Society charged an extra fee for the handling of his remains on account of his death having been due to complications from AIDS; if subsequent legislation in that regard entitles me to a refund for that, then I would like it to be paid with interest.

So I returned home in mid-August to north-central Illinois for three weeks' R&R --a lot of beer, weed and mushrooms, in other words-- before heading back out there, staying with a host family and working another job at the hospital before pretty much losing my mind and coming back here for good two months later. My last day in L.A. was spent consuming a fifth of Tanqueray before noon and heading off to Westwood in search of Marilyn Monroe's final resting place, but that's another story to be saved for some other time. I haven't been back since.

So anyway, enjoy the vid if you can --it's kind of eerie, and I look like about a dozen different people throughout. I've got sores on my face from bug bites --can't keep 'em out of here during the summer-- and regret that this is so. As I noted, I did it late one nite when I was testing out the webcam, and it was lit only by the TV perched upon my desk. I'm sure that I'm capable of better, both in video and in writing --but it's anniversary week, and I felt a need to get something up here. So cheers for your indulgence.

Week 2 Recap

Not a lot said; not a lot to say.

Big Blasts and a Mighty Wind

Just to be clear, I'm a big fan of fireworks and always have been --so long as they're done by professionals in appropriate settings. Crowds of morons and post-display traffic insanity aside, the Fourth has been a favorite of mine since I was a wee 'un of four; the White Sox have the exploding scoreboard for celebrating home runs hit by the home side and always put on a good fireworks show after games on Saturday nites, and there was nothing quite like when the Grateful Dead used to play Soldier Field and then blast off a massive display after the run's final gig --you'd get the feeling they were going to blow the place up. Terrific stuff, professionally done and in settings entirely appropriate for it.

Anyway, this here blogaroo is supposed to serve a multitude of purposes, not least among them as a resource for individuals on the spectrum and those who would like to know more about it. I've chucked up a couple of vids over @ Y'allTube and have provided a link at the right side of this page --so do check 'em out.

Speaking of links, I've added one to the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at --of all places-- the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It's absolutely indispensable during hurricane season and has it all: maps with actual and predicted storm tracks, links to forecasts from the National Hurricane Center, satellite photos and movies --the works, kids.

As far as I know, there's no better place to look during hurricane season, and so with Bertha now the first named storm of this season to reach hurricane strength (Bermuda in the crosshairs, but not a threat to land other'n that, it would appear), give that link a click and go have a butcher's.

Local Color

It occurred to me long ago --and the point was hammered home last nite-- that there are two kinds of people who live in Chicago: those who clear the fuck out of here for the Fourth of July, and the rest who remain behind to blast off fireworks like maniacs in this big, tightly-packed city.

I'm serious --I live steps from a beach, it's a gloriously sunny and dry but not hot day, and there is an abundance of available on-street parking out front during the noon hour of a Saturday, which is otherwise unheard of (and the same goes for other major summer holiday weekends, but it's particularly noticeable on and around the Fourth).

As for those who stuck around, they were at it bigtime late into the evening last nite. Loud, colorful, elaborate and seemingly endless displays went on, with howls of delight and approval issuing forth into the nite. I tried to bed down at about 10:30 I guess and just put up with it for a while --just when you'd think that a moment's silence indicated that the show was over, you'd be rudely corrected by the next salvo-- but I at least managed to sleep until nigh on 7 this morning.

After 9:30 or so this morning I cued up Hunky Dory on Y'allTube and let it play. I didn't blast it, but I played it loudly enough to hear it from across the unit whilst doing the dishes --and if it distracted anyone else's sleep, well, serves the buggers right for staying up so goddam late with their fireworks displays...