All Good Things Come to An End

Someone asked me recently whether a blog like this would stay in the ether long after the writer is gone. I thought the answer was "yes." But it appears that I am wrong. AOL is ending its Journals on which this one has been lodged at the end of October. They are, they say, working on a way to move those who wish to continue to a new blog site, but in the meantime, they have offered this method to save that is still printing out behind me, and I can see is difficult for the endless novice like myself and far too time consuming for the impatient. So, I will see if I can download to a memory stick and reconcile that after a bit over a year, and then see what happens. I will be looking for a new site, something easy, preferably, to begin again. I'll hope that whatever "easy" method for transitioning AOL is talking about will let this journal survive and make the end a new beginning without ado, with nary a beat skipped. But warning to those few of you who have been faithful readers. According to the counter, in only a bit over the year well over 1,000 hits. Not many comments, but a fair number of hits. Some of them are me checking in, others, friends, others who knows.

I wonder if this all means that AOL is about to go bust. Blogging is hot, so when they have to end their blog site, one wonders.

In this fragile economic and culture time, everything is in transition.

So, as they say, "we shall see what we shall see". Maybe the next version of this blog or another blog on another site will be more creative. I hope that you'll stay here until it fades away, or follow me to the next site.

Djinn from the Bronx

Sunday Rambling

The last debate that was of any interest was the one between JFK and Richard Nixon in 1960, and I was too young to see it live.

This recent one, with Obama and John McCain, was lackluster. Who won? Nobody. I don't think debates really demonstrate who can lead, although I wouldn't mind a stirring one, one election year, if only to engender a temporary confidence.

As to the Biden-Palin one coming up, I worry that they have been hiding Ms. Palin from spontaneous speaking. A National Review Commentator (a woman herself and conservative) is expressing some rising doubts about whether Palin can hold her own in any dialogue about foreign policy or the economy. I am hoping that my sense of her being a bright woman, well spoken, quick study, was not misplaced. But I will still vote Republican because the ideals simply match mine more than those of the present Democratic party (which is nothing like its predecessor back in the day when JFK was its candidate). But wouldn't it be nice if Sarah shows she is sensational?

With the failure of major financial entities, WaMu, Lehmann Brothers, AIG, some of them like a hundred years old, I find myself amazed that we humans, have actually made it this far, without complete self-destruction. If you look too closely, everything we lay a hand to is probably falling apart, like the new construction with cut corners, that as long as there isn't a earthquake, nobody will know about, like the engineers on trains who probably regularly don't pay attention at the controls, but usually, the unknowing passengers squeak by in continuing to live, or the airplane passengers who find out that a pilot (thank God, not the co-pilot) had a few before he took the big can up 30,000 feet.

There is a lot of luck, providence, something, that keeps us intact, more or less. But let's not get too wild and crazy folks. It's all very tenuous, the line between life and death, safety and destruction.

Was over to see my dad at the cemetery today. A particularly beautiful day to sit in that corridor with the breeze blowing, writing in my journal, doing a tiny bit of praying, and just taking in the sounds of life where so many rest. Birds. Flowers. Laughter of visiting families.

Bought a new camera yesterday. My present digital works just fine, but I could not resist a Nikon Cool Pix, 10 megapixels and a much bigger screen than the one I had. So, the purchase was made, along with a new album to put loose pictures in from different time periods.

There's always so much in my head, but just now, I feel like I'd rather vegetate by watching further television. So, off I go to a well used living room couch.

 

 

Dreams of Change

My father has been dead for over five months, surprisingly close to the six that mark half a whole year. Nothing, and everything has changed in that time. Nothing in so far as I still am at the same job, still in the same apartment, still living essentially the same life, except he's not in it. On the other hand, his entire condo has been emptied, and freshened up. The furniture, with a few exceptions, is gone. The place is up for sale now. But though it looks the same, there are things in the works that will complete the turn of the page, begun as if a wind had blown, but completed by my hand.

I am not sure how this is related, or if it is. But the other day as I walked down the aisle of my church before Mass, a woman who had known my father, had driven him home sometimes from a class he attended on Thursdays asked me how I was doing.

"You know, I miss him, but I'm doing good." My father was 90 and it almost seems ungrateful to be complaining how I lost him when he had as long a life as he did and I had him 54 years of mine.

"Do you dream about him?" I wanted to say, yes, but truth is, I haven't. I had one dream he was in before he died that I am guessing was an unconscious premonition, except for the part that involved Pierce Brosnan (yes, Pierce and my father were in the same dream, make whatever Freudian conclusions you will!). But it was before any crisis. I have felt his presence, I think. Could be wishful thinking, though. And then there have been a couple of events, the near fire in dad's refrigerator averted because I decided to stay over, my wallet that was nearly lost, should have been lost, but ended up not getting lost on Waikiki beach. I could have sworn he was looking after me. Could have been coincidence though. A dream seems like it would be a more direct contact. People tell me they dream about loved ones all the time. I have had three people die that I cared most particularly about (meaning I have cared about others but the death of these folks was, well, life changing, so maybe there is a connection to my introduction), my father, my mother, so long ago that sometimes I forget how much of a change her death effected in my life, and the man who had been my therapist, but after the termination of my therapy, became, along with his family, a friend. This latter association with the attendant aspects of how it came about, the dicey issues of ethical boundaries (is a continuing relationship with a former client ever tenable, even if it is not forbidden? ), transference, countertransference, is a story unto itself but I will save that for another time, perhaps never, who knows. The crux, though, is that my mother, dead 30 plus years, I have dreamed of only once and in the dream she had aged, gracefully, and smiled at me ever so briefly in a way I had never seen in life. Bill, my erstwhile therapist, appeared twice, each time offering the lessons of the mentor and caring soul he was to most anyone (as I have come to learn) whose path he crossed. In the dream, as in life, I heard him saying, knowingly, "Grist for the mill." Everything that happens in life gets ground up and processed within us, if we are lucky, teaches us things that better enable us for our relationships. Make it possible for us to love, and be loved. But I don't exactly kick out dreams of family and friends with any regularity.

And not at all so far with dad, has there been a dream. I'm not pushing it, though, because even the not dreaming of him is grist for that mill. And change is indeed happening, especially when I least notice it.

    I can see our time is up.  . .

Maximilian is Diogenes?

This will be my first "crossover" entry. The crossover is to my other blog, the one dedicated to my father, "Legacy of a Courtly Curmudgeon". http://djinnfromthebronx.blogspot.com/

The precipitating story is my encounter with a homeless man. I did not realize initially that he was homeless.

I decided about 1 this afternoon that I wanted to run a garage sale with a few items I have been putting in a pile for just such an impulse. I put out a table to house some collected, but mostly unused mugs, and DVD's, some really good films, but not ones that I have tended to watch a second or third time, a bunch of books, some of them from the psychology book clubs that I always kept even when I could have sent them back cause I really did not want them (I'd always think, well, maybe it'll have some use for me, but they never did). I put out a tiny color television I used to keep in my kitchen. A not inexpensive print from Cost Plus (over 100.00, and that's a lot for a garage sale) that used to hang in my dad's apartment, but isn't something I think I'll use anywhere for me. I really wasn't looking to make a buck, and quitely literally, in the three hours I was out there, with little foot traffic, I only made about three fifty selling a few DVD's and a cap. I always feel a little guilty running such sales, cause I am either going to give away the stuff ultimately or leave it out there for someone to pick up. But I figured, some of this stuff is useful, so why not.

A man who clearly had been at the local thrift shop judging by the plastic bags that encased his purchases, wearing a baseball cap, a nice, though open black filipino style shirt and khaki pants and a gray wild beard came up and scanned the various books.

Yes? No? Will he? Won't he? He did. He picked two, one "The Uses of Enchantment" by the late suicided Bruno Bettleheim and another on Asperger's Syndrome, an autism spectrum condition.

He asked "how much". I said "Fifty Cents for both". "Really?"  "Yeah, I am not trying  to make money on this stuff."  And by now I had realized he wasn't flush anyway, since he pulled his coins out of a tight plastic bag. I liked something about him too. Couldn't put my finger on it.

"People say that I have Asperger's" he pointed at the book. And we were, or rather, he was, off. It's always hard to know what to believe when anyone speaks about their lives, let alone a man who acknowledged he was a street person, by choice. But he was surely smart, and listening him talk about radiation beams and sun spots (yes, he got there somehow), and his book that only sold in Germany and Iceland, "Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Roadkill", I found myself fascinated, although it surely looked as if he were content to stay with me for hours. He was born in Germany, speaks several languages, had taught but found his life long resistance to authority made it easier for him to live the life he was. He goes to libraries. He hangs out in Starbucks. I said, "You seem happy". He said he was.

I believed him. His real name, he said, was Maximillian, but he calls himself, to others, "Miles Smith."

I suggested that he write about the various things he shared with me. I told him that if I saw him in Starbuck's I'd say, "Hi Maximillain" and I'd hope he'd remember me.

It occured to me after we parted that maybe I had met the man that my father, in his writings, dubbed "Diogenes", an intelligent, articulate homeless man that he wrote truth about and used for his fictional process as well. Somewhere I have pictures of that man, in my, in dad's stuff, if I haven't misplaced them.  Or thrown them away.

We cannot know what is behind the face of anyone, homeless or wealthy or smiling.

There was much behind the face of Maximillian, story upon story that led to our meeting on the stoop of my LA apartment. I felt lucky to have met him somehow and luckier still that I had not disregarded him as I otherwise might have.

So maybe now you'll go to my other blog and read a story my father wrote regarding one of his talks with his homeless man, maybe the same one.

But for all practical purposes herein, Maximillian and Diogenes, they are one.

Questions Without Answers

I am beginning a purge of my apartment, slow and seeming without a dent in the clutter. Lots of reasons for "why now?" The idea of moving is settling into my brain. The aftermath of losing my last parent. Maybe other things. All culminating in a need to turn the life page, which includes going through some old life remants.

I bought some albums in which to put items, things from high school and college I still can't let go of-the handout for the 1972 MSU graduation, the entrance song a the Mass, "You've Got a Friend". The announcement of passing the Bar Examination in New York. A letter/announcement and photo from some friends whose son, then 7, and a budding drummer, met Phil Collins.

And some of my "writings", pre-blog age. Sometimes I actually think I was a good writer when I look at my scribblings. This one happens to be somewhat apt, given the train  wreck in LA, a man made disaster, albeit one without evil intention, and the hurricane battering Texas. Why?

It was written in 1999, nearly ten years ago, it stuns me to realize. And yet still that same question.

Chalk it up to news media hype, if you will, but like it or not it remains true--horrible things are happening.  They always have.  They always will, till the end of time. Acts of nature.  Acts of man.  The most recent courtesy of nature is a 7.8 earthquake in Western Turkey. Twelve thousand are known to be dead.  The reporter says that due to inadequate rescue resources many now alive under the rubble of buildings which were badly constructed in the first place, will join the dead.

Then there are the acts of man. Well known to be a spewer of angry platitudes caused by some long ago real or imagined pain inflicted on him, an otherwise impotent Buford Farrow goes to a Jewish Day Camp and tries to kill children with a gun.  Several kids are wounded, one almost fatally, but all have lived.  Of course, he has succeeded in killing their innocence, maybe some souls too. That remains to be seen. 

All this is to be borne with stoicism for after all it is the portion of the first sin. Two creatures (allegorically speaking) disobey. Death enters the world.  Paradise is lost. The Judeo-Christian traditions agree on that. I think. After that, it's every religious man and woman for himself or herself on how to cope with it all.

In the abstract, theological answers bind anxiety. I can only write a little of my own tradition. Christianity says that we have been saved because God became Man and took all our sins on his back, with the Cross. He was nailed to it.  He died. He rose with a promise of eternity with Him if only we take on our own comparatively little crosses and follow Him in His Act of Trust and Faith in God. No matter what we see, no matter what happens in the world, of in our own lives, that is al we are asked to do.  We are asked to be as Job, to love God when the answer to our cry of "WHY?" is "My Ways are not your ways." That all we are asked to do? The person under the rubble, the shot child reaching for the paramedics on the stretcher, the psychiatric patient battling schizophrenia, the endlesly lonely, it is indeed a demand for ALL, in the face of apparent absolute abandonment. I remember an old priest I once knew, Fr. Skiffington, who, after a number of medical problems ended up in a nursing home. He asked why he had been abandoned. He looked forsaken. this was a believer. A holy man. A Jesuit trained in the Faith. We are creatures, weak, in need of proofs, beset on all sides by ourselves, by our environment, and by knowledge of our certain death, and yet God asks that we have the faith of His So. How can He ask this of us? His Son was fully Man, but He also was fully God Himself. Is that not a huge advantage over us?

I just asked God if it's ok that I wrote all this.  I am not being facetious when I note that I am afraid of the answer. I try to remember that also in my faith it is said that God loves us unconditionally. I hope that at least, is true. Maybe sometimes it's better not to ask any questions.

 

 

Thursday Fragments

Just finished watching the last of "Live Free and Die Hard" I think it was, Bruce Willis' latest incarnation of fighting policeman John McClain. I admit it. I enjoy this series. I like his snappy comebacks in the middle of threats of personal and global destruction. But of course I know that it isn't real.

The real. Seven years since 9/11. And we said we'd never forget. What do you think? I think we did at least based on the coverage in the LA Times today. 3,000 plus people haven't had a life course because of pure evil. There are those who think you can negotiate with evil. Woe unto us should they hold sway.

On a cheerier note. I think. Today in LA managed to feel like fall. Dropped temperatures, clouds, a kind of gauze over the colors that just were summer.  Dark by 7. I always resist its coming on, the fall, loving the pervasive warmth of summer. I hear that we'll have some regenerated warmth this weekend.

Saw a movie this past weekend I thoroughly enjoyed. The only thing that exploded were some Napa Valley grapes. Really they were crushed, to make wine. It is the story of the California Winery, Chateau Montelena,

 

whose Chardonnay rated number 1 in France in 1976, and blew the myth of European (specifically French) wines were always best. It is also the story of the people in the middle of the fray, including a irascible, snobbish, but ultimately loveable wine expert who samples the Napa fare and finds the gem that changed the industry. Go see it. It really makes you smile this film. Called Bottle Shock. Word of mouth will make it profitable, in the small movie way. And anything would be better than Dark Knight. Talk about mass hysteria that people called that one the best of the year.

 

This weekend, our last Hollywood Bowl outing, Brian Wilson, Beach Boys' founder. I think I shall listen to his new album before I go, then I'll be familiar with the songs, which he absolutely will be playing in between the old stuff. I hope he'll do the old stuff.

And fireworks! Yippee. Later dude. 

  Djinn Avatar.

 

Tell the Lies Enough (about Palin) and Hope the American People Will Buy Them

Just noticed as I begin my journey to Circuit City, Supermarket, and ultimately, home, the headline on today's Los Angeles Times, to wit, "Defiant Palin comes out Swinging".  Well, I guess you could say that's true. Except the full picture is that she was swinging back at her nasty detractors when she had the floor, finally, at the Republican Convention. Then, the little header for the column says, "McCain's running mate shakes off controversy and mocks Obama in her speech introducing herself to the nation". Then under her picture:  "Debut:  Sarah Palin cast herself as a victim of hostile reporters and a scornful Washington establishment." She CAST HERSELF? She MOCKS? Dear dear. She responded to very real hostility and a scorn that eclipses any of which Clinton (Bill or Hillary) supporters bemoaned in days gone by. And she pointed out the frailties of her confreres in the Democrat party. What she did, is defend herself. And, yes, some of those defensive remarks included sarcasm directed at the people who have been mercilessly attacking and making pronouncements that make no sense.

Suddenly, liberal democratic women are saying that she should stay home and take care of the kids and not be bothering herself about this VP thing. I agree with Dennis Prager that a woman is only considered a feminist if she accepts the liberal democratic worldview. If a woman candidate of the Democrat party had five kids and a Republican suggested that she wasn't properly directing her focus to her wifely and motherly duties, there would be recrimination for that pool soul. Double standard. Double think. Double Speak. I'm seeing double. It's ok if you don't agree, but don't say whatever comes to mind and expect that no one is going to call you on it.

But's it's ok, I think you've overplayed your hands folks. Keep it up. A lot of the undecideds are deciding, and they aren't buying the lies and vitriol.

 

 

 

 

Tags: Palin, double speak, lies, left