Envy

The woman was driving too fast and knew it. It would be just her luck to get a speeding ticket. She was going to be late and her sister would make a point of it. They had just come off a two-month period of not speaking. Which was not easy when you factored in the elderly mother and her nurses and shuttling her between the three houses. Her sister's kids were grown, long out of the house. Her sister should be the one rushing to pick up their mother for her doctor's appointment. Not the woman, with the youngest one still at home

The woman still marveled at how her sister had gone about the second half of her life. She, herself, had plans along the same lines once her youngest was away at school. The woman's no-good husband, who was so full of schemes, had amounted to nothing. The woman was working in order to supplement the high costs of college. This was never in the woman's plan. The woman had been a good mother and wife for so many years, to no avail. The woman's youngest couldn't wait to get out of the house. Her eldest didn't even try to attempt a relationship. And when the woman's husband wasn't at his dead end job he was golfing. The woman's sister, who married her ex-husband's best friend, lived the life of luxury. If anyone deserved the huge serving of shit that passed as a life, it was her sister. No. Her sister spent her vacations in exotic places. She always had a new handbag to match her new pair of shoes. Her nails were always perfectly manicured. Her perfect life infuriated the woman to no end.

One of the woman's guilty pleasures was thinking back to a day so many years ago -- a day that had been almost perfect. She was a young newlywed and she and her husband were planning on spending the summer on the Island. She planned on getting pregnant the following summer: long enough to enjoy married life without the hassles of children but soon enough so that people would not start to whisper. It would take big leaps and bounds to catch up with her sister.

That nearly perfect day had been an early summer's day. Hot but not humid. A slight breeze had kept the air moving. The woman had had lunch with a friend. She remembered thinking her friend was most likely going to end up alone. After lunch, the woman went shopping. She exchanged a few pieces of china that were almost the right pattern. The woman needed a blender. The woman remembered the store smelling of cinnamon and apples and thinking to herself that that was not really a summer smell.

The woman and her sister were to play tennis at 4:00 that afternoon. The woman remembered thinking that things were starting to fall into place -- the woman and her husband had just joined her sister's club and, at this rate, she figured, by the time their first baby arrived they would be able to afford the right house in the right neighborhood. And the woman would be even with, if not ahead of her sister. She waited at the court for her sister but she did not show up. The woman had to forfeit the court. But today, nothing bothered the woman. She had a cocktail at the bar and familiarized herself with the clubhouse. She met a very handsome man at the bar. Had made sure he saw her wedding band and then shamelessly flirted. She loved the attention. Somehow an hour and a half slipped by and it was time to head home.

Her husband would be home from the office in less than two hours -- they had dinner reservations at nine. The woman was about to get off at her exit when she decided to find out what had happened to her sister. Normally, the woman would have been quite upset by such a slight by her sister, but that day she was feeling generous and even some sisterly compassion. So the woman stayed on the parkway and went the extra three exits to her sister's house.

The woman remembered pulling into the driveway and noticing how perfect the perennials looked. Her sister's gardener had a waiting list. He gave the garden that extra touch that made people stop and notice how beautiful the flowers were. That thought quickly vanished and the woman noticed that her sister's husband's car was parked in the driveway. That was odd since he was never home before 7:00 PM at the earliest. The woman decided she would go around back and enter through the yard. The woman opened the gate. The perfectly manicured lawn looked cool and inviting. The woman made her way across the lawn and was just stepping foot on the slate patio and thinking how inviting her sister's pool looked. Smooth as glass. More like a mirror. The woman distinctly remembered thinking that her life could not be more perfect when there was a scream. Not quite sure where it was coming from, the woman hurried along the patio toward the sliding glass doors that opened into the kitchen. All of a sudden she saw something thrown against the sliding glass door. It startled the woman so much that she almost screamed. The woman took a few steps back before she realized that it was her sister that was thrown up against the glass. What was going on? Had someone broken into her sister's house? Then the woman saw her brother-in-law's big hand grab a handful of her sister's hair, his face purple with rage. He pulled her sister away from the door and the woman could see no more.

After the few seconds of shock had worn off, the woman thought, "NOW my life could not be more perfect". That had been the best day ever. The thought of it still evoked a smile. The woman was still smiling when she noticed the flashing lights in her rearview mirror.

Ballad of a Thin Old Man

eyes that have beheld so little
a spirit so strong and renewable
long before black and white had bled to gray
when an ocean of possibilities lay before me
and the world seemed round and full
my bright unseeing eyes happened upon
a pair of pale watery eyes

i thought i saw hope glimmer in those eyes
and i hoped that one day if my eyes grew pale
youth, dressed in all of its hope and fervor
would stop and say hello

i have not given thought to those pale eyes
until now

i have swum my way through so many oceans of tears
and washed up on distant shores
i find that i am the one now with pale watery eyes

and what you are mistaking as a glimmer of hope
is only recognition

tomorrow will find you with no remembrance
of pale watery eyes

until one day if you are lucky
when you find that your tides have recessed
almost back to the oceans from which you came
you too will remember how youth
dressed in all of it's hope and fervor
stopped to say hello one last time
before your pale watery eyes melt into the tide
and are washed out into the great beyond

Sorrow

There seems to be so much sorrow on the planet
Can you work within the framework of the test before you
Can you put on your armor and shields of sacredness and walk through the sorrow, fear and disappointment of what other Humans have done, without judgment of them or without being discouraged
The more light you carry, the more you will see that which is sorrowful on Earth
Only the masters can "see" these things as reasonable within the scheme of why you're here
It is important that the Lighthouses are not distracted by the storms as they shine their lights
Otherwise, they become useless

—Kryon

A Father's Days Poem

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

— Robert Hayden

Letter to a friend

Let me begin by saying, you’re not the only one on that ship. I would like to blame a good part of this on the governing administration, but it goes deeper than that. All of the people that I consider good friends are at a place, where too much is wrong, and they just cannot continue sticking their heads in the sand like nothing is wrong, with good conscience.

We are the members of a really fucked up culture, and I feel like it is incumbent upon us to make the change. But I don’t know where to begin. I find that I am so pissed at so much all of the time. The administration is a given. But breaking it down, and starting on a very personal level and broadening to the global scope, there are recurring themes. And I truly believe that it can be categorized by two emotions. Fear and Love.

My family is a perfect example of what I am pissed about on a personal level. You know most of my siblings. They are all smart people. Not one of them is outraged about the state of the world. They are busy raising their kids and as long as their little bubble is not shattered, they don’t give a flying fuck about anything or anyone else. We were all raised by the same people so I don’t understand where their apathy comes from.

I guess being from the white upper middle class, you don’t have to worry about much, unless you decide to go looking for it. That however is a really trite answer for a really complex question, and I am tired of people living their lives with platitudes that they either:
Do not believe in
Refuse to recognize all of the ramifications that go along with their decisions (lack of accountability)

It was interesting Mike and Sarah came to visit, and once you had removed them from their environment of their children and their jobs, they had no idea how to relate to people. They could not even answer simple questions like, what do you want to do. They relinquished all control. Maybe some of that was, they really had no idea. But I think a part of that is a prevalent attitude in America. If you let other people decide what it is that you are going to do, if you have a bad time or something does not go exactly as planned, you have someone to blame it on. No one ever chalks it up to, well we tried that and we wont be doing that again. We are so used to being lied to and not being held accountable for our actions. It has become so ingrained into our minds that I don’t think most people are even aware of what they are doing. Think about your friends, and among them at least one of them is one of these people, whom, when asked what do you want to do, they say they don’t care, but when someone offers up an idea, they say no, yet they never counter it with an idea of their own. Too many of us spend our life in react mode instead of acting, and seizing the responsibility that goes along with that control, or freedom or choice or whatever verb you would like to insert here.

Moving outward into the social structure that I am most familiar with, I find it to be so tedious and vapid and boring and all about posturing. So many gay men have had retarded adolescence, and after finding a social network in which they are accepted, they don’t move forward. They revert back to seventh grade and recreate that social hierarchy that caused them so much grief and made them doubt themselves as human beings, except they are no longer the ones on the outside looking in. Really it is seventh grade all over, with credit cards.

Revisionism on a micro level.

But isn’t that what most things are about on a global stage? Trying to rewrite the history books? Trying to change, what we think peoples perceptions of us are. We have no control over other people. Let alone what we perceive as their perceptions. We have even less control over what has happened in the past. Yet we use that as driving motivation for our present actions. So the question has to be asked. What primal instinct is being sated:
If we think we know what someone else is thinking
If we feel that we are being accepted by them

Why do we care so much about something that is so out of our control? Is this the human condition? Or is that the only way that we are capable of viewing our perception of our own frailties and shortcomings. Is it all an exercise in futility?

One of the best things I like about about being a gay man, is that since we are not even acknowledged by the status quo, we don’t have to try and attempt to hit those milestones, which everyone measures whether you are living a worthwhile life. But so many gay men want to model their lives after hetero people once they have coupled off and are ready to settle down. I don’t think many people are aware of the box that they allow themselves to be contained in, let alone trying to live outside of it.

I am really sick of the indifference. I am so tired of everyone being so afraid. Did you see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? The overwhelming message that I brought away from that movie, was allow yourself some compassion. You did not know. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with not knowing. Most of the smart, educated people I know have crafted irony as a defense mechanism. God forbid they should actually express an actual opinion about what they feel. No one ever expresses anything that someone might hold them to task for somewhere down the line. When did it become a crime to actually feel something and have the resolve to actually follow through on that emotion? For all of the communication devices that we have access to it is amazing how little is actually said. I think there is truth to the statement that we can never really know what goes on in the soul of another man. However that should not preclude us from trying to figure out or trying to express to those around us what it is that we would like at this moment in time. And it is a constant struggle to be yielding enough to hear what others are saying that they need. But we are so occupied trying to figure out what other people are thinking about what we are doing that we forget to check in with ourselves and see what we think about what we’re doing.

What I think western culture has not fully comprehended, is deep pride. Obviously pride, like anything for that matter, gone unchecked is a huge stumbling block. But we have been indoctrinated into a culture that views pride as a sin instead of a virtue. Black. White. Why do we limit ourselves to only those options? Life’s rich pageant comes in so many shades of gray and I refuse to have someone else legislate how I experience life.

Ordinary World

I am not a big fan of pop music. I find it to be vapid and I mean that in every meaning that you can assign to the word.

However there come along the exceptions. And I think one of the best, was brought to us from Duran Duran. The song is Ordinary World. Let me digress.

This song starts in such a "woe is me" tone. "I turned on the lights, the TV and the radio still I can't escape the ghost of you". You can almost imagine Simon LeBon writhing around on the ground in a manner that is only befitting of Morrisey.

They start to crawl out of their morass of self pity with the chorus of "But I won't cry for yesterday there's an ordinary world somehow I have to find and as I try to make my way to the ordinary world I will learn to survive". Although if you only heard the chorus, you could interpret it in a couple of ways, one of which is boo-hoo, my life is hard, however will I do this, boo-hoo.

The second verse, they almost lost me. "pride's gone out the window cross the rooftops run away left me in the vacuum of my heart" almost makes me want to vomit, but then again, love hurts. But, I hate sentimentality and this is borderline schlock.

Again the chorus runs the risk of making you want to make children cry for no good reason.

Now the final verse. The lyrics, "Papers in the roadside tell of suffering and greed, here today, forgot tomorrow, here besides the news of holy war and holy need ours is just a little sorrowed talk", speaks to an awareness of the place that we are taking up in this moment in time. It goes from a very pin pointed example to a very broad stroke in a seamless and beautiful way. The final verse most importantly puts the chorus into a bigger context.

The fact that this song starts out in this self indulgent tone, and ends on a note of self awareness speaks to Duran Duran's genius. The ability to convey something that everyone can relate to, a broken heart, as well as self awareness, something that pop culture in general is not aware of, and define it in such simple terms, on top of being a catchy tune, is nothing short of sublime.

The Bush Crime Family - A little family history

War is good for the Bushes! They have for the last three, going on four generations made a damn fine living on war.

Samuel Prescott Bush, a steel company president and later a federal government official in charge of coordination and assistance to major weapons contractors during World War I, is monkey boys great-granddaddy.

Harriman Bank was the Wall Street connection for the financial interests of Fritz Thyssen, who had been an early financial backer of the Nazi party until 1938, but who by 1939 had fled Germany and was bitterly denouncing Hitler. Dealing with Nazi Germany wasn't illegal when Hitler declared war on the US, but, six days after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed the Trading With the Enemy Act. On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City.

The Harriman business interests seized under the act in October and November 1942 include:
Union Banking Corporation (UBC) (Thyssen and Brown Brothers Harriman)

Bush's interest in UBC consisted of one share. For it, he was reimbursed $1,500,000. These assets were later used to launch Bush family investments in the Texas energy industry. This is monkey boy's grand-daddy.

The Bush family has long been involved with the Bin Laden family. This started with monkey boy's daddy and his administration continues the grand old tradition.