I admit I haven’t been at my best this last decade.
- The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

I woke early the morning of January second – 5:30 or so. I’ve had to give some attention to sleep lately – as well as to how I spend my waking hours – and this was an odd enough wake time to give me pause, about forty-five minutes’ worth, while I tried to figure out how getting up that early (or not) might affect the shape and substance of the day. I might have literally tossed or turned a few times, but it was – I was – quite peaceful. I half-dozed enough to form (for example) a dream-version image of a particular suburban mall parking lot that I’ve often crossed, but has never been part of my dreamscape; the dreamy bits seemed to alternate with moments of lucid, waking thought. Eventually my mind did what it often does, returned to some small failure from the past – some imagined slight from a casual remark, or some misstep arising from a lack of attention, sensitivity or feeling on my part. Now, my old habit when this happens is to mentally replay the scene until – what? I was right? I was wrong? I’m sorry? it hurts? And the new habit is to catch the old habit, maybe laugh, shake my head, and ask myself “Umm, are you ready to let go of this yet?” That morning – and even a few hours later I honestly couldn’t remember the particular memory that had bubbled up – I had an immediate and different response: “I was who I was. I am who I am”, and of course, after a beat, “I will be who I will be”. Hmmm. Not bad. Another thought was “It’s a new year.” To my surprise, that fact seemed not to carry any freight: neither dread nor promise.

…Hey, ya know breakdowns come and breakdowns go.
So what are you gonna do about it, that’s what I’d like to know.
- Paul Simon

Also in the mix that morning was not so much a revisiting of as a random reflection on the greatest of several apparently defining childhood traumas: a failure of parenting that after some fifty years I still can’t talk about in public, a sudden shock that at the time filled me at once with righteous indignation and abject terror. Does it sound as if I hold a grudge? Oddly enough, I seem not to. There I lay in bed, recalling the scene with a certain detachment, asking myself if I was angry at my mother, my father, both of whom failed me in that moment. And the answer was no. Angry at what? At their being young, being human, being unsuited for each other? For a moment’s indiscretion born of years of frustration and mismatched desire? No. No.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work.
- Thomas Edison

OK, so then came another long-familiar, oft-looping, interior script: “I need something. What do I need?” Usually this is followed by a perplexed and dissatisfied silence. On this morning of unsought, apparent attunement with the universe, though, the answer came as swift and certain as it was unexpected: “Work.” Work. Duh.

I don’t see myself as a person who’s in this situation. I don’t see myself this way.
- The Squid and the Whale

How did I get to be a bum? How did I lose touch with the reality of daily living? What’s going to snap me out of this? Maybe it starts with that simple realization: the thing I need, the thing that has been missing from my life, is work. Somehow the gift of realizing this lack and this need implies to me a resolve that goes beyond resolution.

At a certain point, research is no different from running. I had done plenty of both. Eventually you’ve got to stop, make a leap, and leave the ground behind.
- Sean Wilsey

When I got up it was still dark, and too early for breakfast. But I could write. It’s taken me another month to get this little memory down in black and white. But here it is.

Love to all,

M.

I’ve moved to an easier format for doing the work of this space: alerting friends to published news and commentary that have caught my interest or outrage and may not have caught theirs. Headlines feed at left; excerpts, rare comment, more context, and a link for a direct feed (updates intermittent) are at: delicious.com/Michael.Massing/outbasket
With simple syndication (subscription) widely available, I’ve discontinued the update emails. The help page here still works if you have questions. As always, thanks for your interest and attention.
Love to all,
M.
p.s. Click on a tag or category at right to return results from this archive. Clicking on a category or tag below a post takes you out of this archive and into a list of posts on WordPress.com, mine or not depending on the popularity of the tag or category.

My friend Lillian Robinson died about ten days ago. My best friend died. The person on this earth I owe the most to after my mother, the person who had more to do with the formation of my consciousness as an adult than anyone else, who taught me such Yiddish and Yinglish phrases – those flying buttresses to expressiveness and sanity – as I know, who taught me the usefulness of class analysis and reinforced the usefulness of looking things up, who was on the short list of people who challenged me to be the best poet I could be, the person who gave me my best approximation of the experience of parenthood, who may have saved me in some sense by suggesting I go back to school, and then helped make it possible to do so – those I suppose are as close as I can come for now to describing her place in my life.

I was able to visit Lillian for about ten days when she was in palliative care and knew herself to be terminal, and to reconnect with her family, including her son (I lived with Lillian and Alex for five years as the other adult in the household after the breakup of her marriage to Alex’s father, and with Lillian for a few months after that before I resettled in the Bay Area). Since her death I’ve been helping her family – my second family – with making announcements to her wide network, and with memorial activities. This is the first moment I’ve taken to reflect in writing – almost the first moment I’ve taken to reflect – on what her loss means to me. And beyond the bare bones that I’ve given you above, I don’t know what to say.

You will find on Lillian’s memorial page a number of links to appreciations of her life, as well as to photos showing some of her vitality and to a video from her last recorded public appearance, which suggests some of her strengths as explainer and exhorter, as analyst, activist, and teacher. I suppose I will be able to write more one of these days, but for now I just wanted to let those of you fortunate enough to have known her have this brief summary of what she meant to me, and to give the rest of you a brief introduction to an extraordinary and all too short life.

Little children, love one another.

M.

(click image to play – 03:00)
Everyone I’ve shown Wilfrid Brimo’s French public service cartoon on STD protection who has taken time to respond has done so with enthusiasm and usually with warmth. No French is required to enjoy it: the tagline is “Live long enough to find the good one. Protect yourself,” bracketing the name of the ad’s producer, AIDES (not AIDS in French, but “helpers”; they claim to be the oldest French organization devoted to combating HIV/AIDS). Here’s an English-end-titled version. The same production team also made a similarly structured predecessor to this film, aimed at young women.

credits (pdf)

You may have read or heard about Buddhist monks in Cambodia being forbidden to watch the World Cup, or if they did, to maintain detachment and show no enthusiasm, on pain of expulsion from their monasteries; a somewhat more tolerant pronouncement was made in Thailand.

Well, gosh darn it if that didn’t get me to thinking, and what follows from thinking but a limerick, right? *clears throat*

Whether watching football like a stick
in the mud, or believing a dick,
if unused, is an odd
sort of pipeline to God,
I believe I would rather not pick.

Yeah, yeah, I know, celibacy is practiced and valued in both traditions, but I think it’s only in Roman Catholicism that male professional (if corrupt) celibacy is regarded as a prerequisite for passing on divinity to the unenlightened, not to mention dictating (of all things!) their sexual behavior.

By the way, recent attention on the part of Buddhist heirarchs to the behavior of their charges during the World Cup may have been prompted in part by the warm reception given Khyentse Norbu’s film The Cup.

Caren MacDonald testifies at her trial on felony charges of interfering with custody and a misdemeanor charge of violating a restraining order, following her abduction of her son from the custody of his father:

[T]he mother charged with snatching her 11-year-old son and fleeing the country told a judge Monday that she feared her gay ex-husband was trying to ”turn” their son gay….

[Caren] MacDonald…described for the jury how her son told her about a man in his father’s home cooking pancakes for breakfast while wearing pajamas.

At first, her son liked [his] father’s lover, Carlos Diaz, MacDonald testified. But she said that later, her son told her that he hated Diaz and that Diaz had massaged him on his buttocks several times…

[A] courtroom guardian for the boy in 2001 recommended that Diaz not have contact with the boy — but also suggested that the the boy spend more time with his father than with his mother.

Investigators could not substantiate her allegations, and…[c]ustody decisions continued to go in the boy’s father’s favor. A court-appointed psychologist described Caren MacDonald as ”mentally undone, delusional, bipolar, just about every mental illness in the book,” she said skeptically on the stand.

Ultimately, the judge ordered her to have no physical contact with her son….

The boy…testified last week that his mother forced him to lie about being molested because she felt it was unfair that he lived with his dad. He said the only touching involved a shoulder rub he asked for from his dad’s partner.

reported by Amy Sherman in the Miami Herald

News4Jax, a Jacksonville, FL, television station, reports:

Leander Pickett, a teacher’s assistant at Englewood Elementary, said he was manhandled and handcuffed by two plain clothed Homeland Security officers in front of the school Tuesday for no reason at all….[A]s Pickett was directing bus traffic, he said he was handcuffed and roughed up and humiliated…

“I walked up to him and said, ‘Sir, you need to move.’ That’s when he said ‘I’m a police officer. I’m with Homeland Security … I’ll move it when I want to.’ That’s when he started grabbing me on my arm,” Pickett said….

Several people were outside of the school, watching the incident take place, and those witnesses agree with Pickett’s story.

OK, the graphic is a bit of a stretch, but I couldn’t resist. The only attribution I have for it is hackthissite.org. If you have a better one, please let me know.

video report, News4Jax.com

The Chicago Tribune reports on library arson:

Chicago police are investigating a fire in a Chicago Public Library branch on the North Side that damaged about 100 books, most of them in the gay and lesbian collection….[Library spokeswoman Maggie] Killackey said fire damaged about 10 books in the branch’s African-American history collection and 90 books in the gay and lesbian collection.

The Wikipedia article on book burning includes Heinrich Heine’s 1821 observation that “Where they burn books, they will end in burning human beings”, and a photo from the infamous Nazi book burning of May 10, 1933 – which another article reminds us was fueled primarily (and I’m afraid we must say not coincidentally) by the library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Research on Sexuality.

He’s a Senator. He’s an MD. He’s a demagogue. He’s a medical missionary and a hospital profiteer. And he always has his intrusive fingers on the pulse of America. See what happens when Bill Frist ventures into the wild and wacky world of gay semiotics.

Al Kamen reports in The Washington Post:

It was with some trepidation that we opened a most interesting card, which announced on a blue-jeaned cowboy’s belt buckle something called the “5th Annual VOLPAC ‘06 Weekend” in Nashville on April 21-23.

Problem was you had to unbuckle the cowboy’s pants and look inside to see what this was all about. Seemed a bit too “Brokeback Mountain.”

Imagine our relief to find only that we were “cordially invited” to the event honoring Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and “Mrs. Bill Frist, M.D.” This is Frist’s political action committee to raise money for other senators, making friends and positioning him nicely for his 2008 presidential bid.
….
The back of the card shows the cowboy from behind with a red flowered handkerchief sticking out of his right pocket. Wait a minute — wasn’t there something about how this used to be some kind of code in the gay community years ago? A way to signal each other in crowded, noisy bars?

So we checked the GayCityUSA.com’s Hanky Codes. Sure enough, there it was in the chart explaining what they mean: red hanky in right pocket. Oh, dear.

At the risk of giving Mary Cheney more attention than she deserves, I pass along Keith Boykin’s comments on her memoir and her career. Boykin’s perceptive and eclectic site covers books, movies, music, pop culture, sexuality, spirituality/religion, sports, and theater. He writes and publishes effectively and affectingly on the dilemmas facing queer African Americans.

Incidentally, the source links for the “Black Clergy for Prejudice” cartoon by Don Asmussen that Boykin excerpts take you to the current strip. The excerpted one is archived here.