Sunday, November 29, 2020
Thursday, November 26, 2020
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
In honor of the government's autocratic BS we have included all the strays this year, party of 10.
Thanks for the inspiration, Governor Gavin H (for "Hyprocrite") Newsom.
(Sorry for the politics but I loathe hypocrisy & corruption; always have, always will.)
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
THE INEFFABLE JOY OF CHRISTMAS HAS BEGUN...
...just before Thanksgiving.
The most wonderful time of year.
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing | Paul Cardall - YouTube
Sunday, November 22, 2020
HALO & HORNS
Friday, November 20, 2020
"FEAST-FORWARD"
Let the Holiday Season begin the weekend before Thanksgiving with a "Feast-Forward," which signifies and celebrates an event not yet manifested.
Courtesy of Jack Stack Kansas City Barbecue.
Covid may change our habits (only moderately for us) but it will never alter our spirit.
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Lulu: Tranquilized by tri-tip |
Thursday, November 19, 2020
IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER-IN-LAW
She defied all the stereotypical sayings about mothers-in-law.
She was amazing, wonderful and loving.
Claire DeSapio Gesualdi passed away today aged 94.
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, the daughter of that city's mayor, Fred DeSapio, Claire led a long, joyous life surrounded by family and friends: four children, nine grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren, an abundance of aunts and uncles (real and honorary) and almost anyone who crossed her path and was smitten by her kindness.
We first met in February 1979 when I arrived in West Long Branch, NJ jet lagged and bedraggled from London to claim her daughter.
Without hesitation, Claire opened her heart and soul to me; never a cross word between us in 40 years.
Claire taught me Scrabble. One of my most enduring memories of her (and there are many) are our nightly Scrabble tournaments. She was a smart and shrewd player and probably more responsible than anyone for improving my vocabulary as I struggled to become a writer.
The tournaments followed some of the best home-cooked meals I've ever eaten, all lovingly prepared from scratch by the best Italian chef I've ever known.
In every new home we ever moved into (and we moved a lot), "Granny" Claire never failed to appear and assist with the transition.
Ditto the birth of two daughters, her beloved grand-daughters.
Always there when you needed her.
Now Claire's soul has been set free into a soaring spirit to rejoin the universe.
Monday, November 16, 2020
COMING UP ON 57 YEARS...
Dallas, August 2016
I knew
it would be a tedious trek but I did not count on just how tedious and
depressing and surreal but what better place to free-fall into the depths of
depression than Dealey Plaza in Dallas where a U.S. President was so brutally slain more than half-a-century-ago; a place where the direction of the USA was diabolically diverted into decline.
The three-hour drive from Austin feels like six, the road flat and dry with the unmerciful hot trying to penetrate our air-conditioned bubble through every crack or just by broiling the windshield.
The Dallas skyline finally appears and a jumble of highways suck us, the artist Van Stein and me, into its “historic” downtown.
Moments later, before we know what hit us, we’re smack outside the Texas State Depository from which Lee Harvey Oswald supposedly shot President John F. Kennedy as he rode in an open limousine down Elm Street.
We ascend to the sixth floor, now a museum, though the only real “attraction” is the corner window from which Oswald may have concealed himself, taken aim and shot.
We descend and alight from the building to inspect the infamous grassy knoll.
So-called “conspiracy theorists” have long speculated this mound to be the true location from which a shooter stood.
It is certainly closer to an “X” permanently taped onto Elm Street marking the spot where Kennedy took a fatal head shot, a trajectory that makes far more sense than Oswald’s distant perch from on high and consistent with a frontal bullet impact, as graphically captured by Zapruder’s infamous eight-millimeter film.
I’m not over it. I’m depressed.
Which is exactly what I am supposed to be this day, the fourth stage of midlife crisis, what this summer trip to Texas is all about.
Dallas does not disappoint.
During the mid-1970s I became obsessed with the JFK assassination, which I attribute to mild ADHD.
My quest for knowledge, which came late (customary for ADHD enjoyers, who only switch on around the age of 20 when most others switch off), focused on the forbidden, the mystical, the esoteric, sparked by research into the Kennedy assassination.
At some point, I created a montage on poster board of images that emphasized conspiracy theory over lone-nut whitewash and I showed it to my father, the artist, looking for commendation.
What I got was the exact opposite.
“You’ve got to get over that,” he said.
And he was right.
Not just for my own sanity but because all of human history is, as Napoleon put it, “a pack of lies agreed upon.”
And so, finally, here in Dallas, I let it go (try to anyway).
Earlier, in Austin, I went looking for the third-stage of midlife crisis: anger.
I found it at the LBJ Presidential Library, where we're supposed to learn how Johnson anguished over Vietnam, no mention of his Texas cronies profiting on armaments and war support services while millions of lives on both sides were extinguished, countless more lives destroyed through drug addiction or losing loved ones, no mention of the so-called domino effect and how Johnson lectured the American public that if we didn’t take a stand in Vietnam the rest of Southeast Asia would fall and Communist combatants would roll up on the shores of Hawaii.
David Halberstam called those Kennedy academics who went on to mis-advise Johnson The Best and the Brightest.
Even the worst and the dimmest might have done a better job.
Needless to say, no mention of napalm, of Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing campaign that cost money, lives and led to America, for the first time in history, losing a war (albeit one it never should have fought).
But what truly causes the bile in my stomach to revolt is a serial on a TV screen showing something called Times of 1957-1965.
An old TV commercial advertising Alka-Seltzer immediately follows JFK's delivery of the most inspiring line of his inaugural address...
This is not a memorial library but a hellacious monument to whitewash and prevarication.
Anger realized, before noon.
Here are two pics illustrating LBJ's legacy you won't see at his Library:
Okay, so maybe renewal is about mid-life crisis.
And though I’m quite likely beyond mid-life, let’s face it, sixty is the new forty, which means I fit very rationally (as in rationalizing) into the first of six stages of mid-life crisis: DENIAL.
Rationalizing this further, I decide to abbreviate my trek on the basis that I’d already covered the first third—from Santa Barbara to Texas—on previous road trips, right?
So why not fly to Texas and carry on east, take in New Orleans with its voodoo culture and famed cemeteries (a metaphor for death) and roll to St. Augustine on the Atlantic coast in Florida where Ponce de Leon discovered the Fountain of Youth (a metaphor for rebirth).
Yet the deeper my research into Austin, my intended first stop, and its “Sixth Street live music scene,” the more I rationalize that this city’s historic downtown and nightly live music is an ideal setting all on its own for renewal; about re-experiencing young adulthood in a music and merriment zone, or REPLAY, the second stage of mid-life crisis.
Tagline: Mid-summer, midlife, writer and artist (Van Stein) flux off like snakes shedding skin to renew their lives.
“It’s going to be filthy hot,” says Thomas Sanchez over coffee at Starbucks in Montecito, trying to divert me northward toward Seattle or Vancouver.
But the Pacific Northwest sounds awfully sedate, just the kind of summer trip a sexagenarian would take—and what’s summer without hot weather?
And though I friggin’ hate the heat, I think of Native American sweat camps and saunas and how heat is revered for its healthful and spiritual qualities to detoxify the body and boost endorphins, a natural purge that, like snake skin-shedding, ultimately leads to… renewal!
The Big Seedy, we soon discover, is not just hot but grimy, like most American cities, having grown (and still growing) without any kind of building oversight—aesthetics and community-planning shot to hell, like cancer cells run amok.
The historic and reputedly haunted Hotel Driskill offers refuge and provides novelty when I opt for their LBJ Suite just for the hell of it because a) it’s available for one night only and b) they offer me a super-duper discount and c) with Lyndon Baines Johnson it’s definitely the hell of it.
This is where the old bull-crapper stayed when visiting Austin and also the room in which he watched the 1964 election returns roll in and I sure hope his ghost lives here because I’d like to give it a swift kick in the ass.
The artist and I park ourselves at the Driskill’s famed bar to absorb the vibe and clink their house cocktail, Bluebonnet (Tito’s vodka, Crème de Violette, St. Germaine).
It’s already dark out when we take our first run at “Dirty Sixth,” the temperature hovering around 93- degrees, a night illuminated by colorful neon signage and rock bands competing with conflicting sound waves and booze barkers trying to drum up biz (“Two dollars a shot!”)
So now I’m wishing I’d stayed in my room and drawn the curtains and at this point I’m not planning to venture from the Driskill bar even though Van Stein plans to paint the bats when they swarm from the underside of South Congress Bridge 15 minutes before sunset.
I change my mind, make my way to the Colorado River where the artist is already laying an undercoat and at 8:05 on the dot a 1,500,000 bats awaken and fly off in waves, heading east.
I’ve only ever associated bats with Halloween and vampires so this is a cool learning experience and a message from the universe to pay attention to bats, an Austin phenomenon I’d not known till deep into this trip.
That night I dream I have the ability to take giant steps and hover above ground, defying gravity.
Upon awakening I enquire into the dream symbolism of levitation:
Lifting up your emotions and thoughts beyond normal to benefit the spiritual state, enlightenment.
And that’s how I feel this day, returning home, the sixth and last stage of midlife crisis:
ACCEPTANCE (the same word I wrote in caps in my journal in 1972 after being blown away by Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan).
I pop bats into a search engine and learn that these winged mammals (who most people regard as creepy) symbolize death and rebirth because, after “going inside” to roost, they emerge at dusk “from the womb of mother Earth.
If the bat has been "flying" into your life as an animal totem, this symbolizes great intuition and utilizing your sensitivities to explore the world around you. The Native Americans sought the bat for its connection to the "other world.” If this animal totem has appeared to you in your dreams or in waking life perhaps it is a sign that it is time for you to go within. It might be time to take some time off and go on a vacation and bring a journal with you as a way of becoming quiet and allowing your true self to speak... and explore your inner demon.
And though I'd hoped this midlife adventure in Texas would conclude a much longer mystical journey initiated by my father in a dream, I realize it’s not over yet.
The timing of this message itself is an exercise in synchronicity:
One week before launching to Austin I had booked a family stay in Sedona, the same mystical locale in northern Arizona where we’d vacationed just before I rediscovered the notes about my father’s dream visit, a discovery that launched this quest.
One year, full circle.
Take some time off, a vacation, become quiet and explore your inner demon...
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KURT VONNEGUT, 11 11
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On the ledge over KV's front door |
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is why I became a writer and he became a writer because of Mark Twain and they both believed, as Humanists, that the universe is a crock and that humanity, as Vonnegut put it, is here just to fart around.
(The principal’s staff whispered that he had been distracted by his mistress that dark drizzly day, or hung-over and, well, seeing double.)
Upon entering I discovered that a queue to reach him snaked around three aisles and I realized there was no point joining because the time allocated for this event would soon expire and Vonnegut’s temperament would not allow him to stay a second longer than commitment required, so I stood and watched from a distance.
My Memphis buds bid farewell as my driver, who I will soon nickname Nashville, rolls up.
Nashville is pleasant and efficient and off we zoom, northward toward autumn, mercury falling, rainclouds gathering.
I dump my bags and we carry on to Red Key Tavern, Vonnegut’s hang, but they don’t open till four o’clock and there’s no time to waste.
Returning to the city center we inadvertently pass Crown Cemetery where the Vonnegut clan is buried, all except Kurt (whose whereabouts remain a mystery though I suspect his ashes were spread near his brethren).
I’d read
about this graveyard but hadn’t placed it on my itinerary, yet here it is anyway
and Nashville, now sharing the spirit of my adventure, cuts a roscoe and glides
through the gateway.
The last time I saw so pretty a cemetery was in Oslo where I’d gone with Van Stein to see Edvard Munch’s final resting place and scribbled these notes into my journal:
“We
need to go where Munch is buried,” I tell Tom, our driver, handing him a
printout from findagrave.com.
In
all the years Tom’s been shepherding tourists around his hometown, no one asked
to see Munch’s gravesite. He shakes his head good-naturedly, already understanding
we are not his normal tourists.
The
Cemetery of Our Savior is just across the Akerselva River, once the divide
between wealth and poverty, good health and bad; this exclusive graveyard the
final resting place for notable Norwegians.
Perhaps from stress brought on by the Nazi occupation of Norway, Munch in 1944 succumbed to bronchitis, which plagued him most of his life. He believed that the Nazis, who labeled his art degenerate, would find and destroy his paintings—his “children”—just as they had done, to his horror, in Berlin.
There are no directions in this cemetery and though it is not vast, it is not small. It is serene, however, with rolling hills and quietude.
Tom asks directions from someone who, though alive, belongs to this graveyard and we endeavor to follow the caretaker’s point, ambling among the dead, inspecting inscriptions. Finally, I come upon Munch’s head in bronze atop a five-foot monolith.
We
pose, Van Stein and I, for a goofy mug shot with Munch and I leave a wooden
nickel for a free beer on the cement slab covering his bones.
The graveyard brings to mind mortality, which I do not fear, not since my death dream. Instead it cheers me that I am here, alive and living in the moment.
“You might as well enjoy the time you’re here,” I say to Van Stein as we saunter back to the car. “Being alive is just a drop in the bucket compared to how long you’re going to be dead. And it’s coming faster than you think.”
“How’s that?
“You’re over 50 now. Going from 49 to 50 is one-fiftieth of your life. You know how long it seemed to get from four to five years old? That’s because going from four to five was one-fifth of your life. Time is relative. But I wouldn’t worry about it,” I add.
“Why
not.”
“Does
it bother you that you weren’t here for billions of years before you were
born?”
Van
Stein shake his head. “Why should it?”
“Exactly. You won’t even know, or care, when you’re not
here for billions more.”
Nashville, bless her, is as much into this as I am and, on this gray moody day, she cruises this cemetery’s sections and plots, straining her neck to find what we’re looking for.
I alight at a section I misidentify as the
Vonnegut residence and happen upon a prominent gravestone inscribed with this
name: Stanley.
Onward we drive, onward my mind tumbles.
Downtown Indy is quiet on a Sunday and Vonnegut’s tidy memorial library is even quieter; we, its only visitors.
I am excited to be here, finally, to see Vonnegut’s electric typewriter, reading glasses, his last pack of Pall Malls (found hidden on a bookshelf after he died).
Particularly poignant is a display celebrating the first line of Slaughterhouse Five:
Afterward, Nashville drops me at the Severin where I fight for a better room and wind up on the rooftop top floor with a patio to look at the cityscape, then launch to Bluebeard, a restaurant named after one of Vonnegut’s novels and whose decor features vintage typewriters, hence not overdone as a theme, subtle and discreet, an emphasis on what emanates from the kitchen, which for me is the best Caesar salad I’ve ever eaten and, this being Sunday, one dollar-apiece “pink” oysters on the half-shell.
Dinner at the bar is made all the more delightful by conversation with a pair of sisters from Kansas City happily relocated to this clean, well-kept city.
Finishing up, I realize I’m not done; that I must revisit Red Key Tavern while open and, even better, in the dark.
And, indeed, 30 minutes later I’m sitting at the long bar nursing pale ale, coaxing Kurt’s spirit to manifest.
After draining my glass I aim for Vonnegut’s childhood homestead, alight from the cab into darkness and quiet.
I don’t know this for certain until next morning when I lighten pitch-black digital photographs to reveal a single orb hanging between tree branches and then another photo with three distinct orbs hanging around the front yard, checking me out.
And I smile, knowing that Vonnegut found a way to get back home with his siblings after all.
Two years earlier (June 2016)
Rain is merely threatened as we ease our way through traffic to St. James’s and The Cavendish Hotel and I can hardly believe my last time inside this hotel was a quarter century ago working with the legendary spymaster.
My mind further boggles when my friend Curt steps from the elevator to claim his room, 1111, which, with a space in the middle, pops from the door as 11 11, an image that evokes my 45 year-old dream riddle, one is doubles, that I never got to ask Vonnegut about.