Bearing Gifts

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Friday December 24, 2010 · 12:21 PM PST

2010/12/24 · 12:21

The peri-pubescent 13 year old standing in a bathrobe. Head draped in a towel. A stringy piece of rope trying its best to hold it all together. The side of the refrigerator carton was horizontal, transformed into the silhouette of a camel. The Christmas Concert parents crammed into the darkened church-school basement hall, gawking with admiration at their precious little performing royalties. One third of the traveling kings was over-whelmed with freaking-out panic. Throat in paralysis. The solo of the king was so low it didn’t even exist. That king was incapable of bearing a gift. Be it gold. Be it frankincense. Be it myrrh. Or be it an emerging mystery deep within his very being.

steamkettle

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Monday March 01, 2010 · 9:21 PM PST

2010/03/01 · 21:21

I entered the room and quietly waited for my turn. But it was the movements of another that caught my eye. There was something going on that was not a part of the intended purpose of the room.

He was at the far wall, standing next to the last sink. His back was toward me. I could hear the howl of the air dryer. He seemed to be hunching over it, but it was the movement of his arms that was not typical. And then there was that scrunched up black garbage bag at his feet.

steamkettle

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Monday January 04, 2010 · 7:19 PM PST

2010/01/04 · 19:19

Andy's Market is a landmark in Southeastern Washington State. A virtual Ft Knox of fake veggie comestibles . . . and those rows and rows of bins and bins of self-service bulk food dispensers.

I had been looking for dried cranberries. Felt a real craving for cranberry scones . . . and I thought they had dried cranberries in bulk.

But alas, I couldn't find them. So wandered to the baking section were "Craisins" were on display, sweetened, dried cranberries . . . at an exorbitant price. Scones with currants would have to be the current scones.

But I went back to the bulk section one more time. And behold! I spotted the bin with dried cranberries.

But there was this old guy . . . 3-day stiff white whiskers . . . Mackinaw cap pulled low down . . . nice green water-proof jacket . . . but fumbling around right in front of my dried cranberry bin.

steamkettle

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Wednesday May 27, 2009 · 9:17 PM PDT

2009/05/27 · 21:17

"If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble,... "the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience."

Such a classic quotation.

Frustrated words, fumbled out by the badgered Mr. Bumble with his mumbled mendacity of naivety. And uttered, no less, within the confines of the institutional benevolence of the parish church with respect to the care of the indentured orphans in the workhouse.

Law.

Family law.

Marriage law.

And the Supreme Court of the State of California ruled on the law.

"Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." Proposition 8.

steamkettle

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Wednesday April 08, 2009 · 6:41 PM PDT

2009/04/08 · 18:41

The "National Review," one of America's significant purveyors of right-wing ideology, let it out the bag today. Why same-sex marriage is simply wrong for America.

The Future of Marriage

In their lament of the creeping onslaught of the granting of either civil unions or same-sex marriage by certain states, they posture their criticism to even their more tolerant fellow conservatives:

"One still sometimes hear people make the allegedly "conservative" case for same-sex marriage that it will reduce promiscuity and encourage commitment among homosexuals. This prospect seems improbable, and in any case these do not strike us as important governmental goals."

Government goals. Government ? Goals?

And just what might be these government goals?

steamkettle

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Saturday March 21, 2009 · 11:52 PM PDT

2009/03/21 · 23:52

Such as it would seem to the casual observer. But just which of the stories I have been reading this past week is believable.

This past week has seen a circular firing squad on just who is to blame for bonuses. Those CEO bailout bonuses of the stench of obscenity. The epitome of capitalistic raping of the working class. But of course, it was all an essential part of some divine will . . . you know, how "he" helps those who help themselves. The religion of prosperity. Or is it the prosperity of a true religionist. That saddlebag preacher would know.

I managed to catch a few snippets on the teevee of the excoriation of AIG CEO Liddy. Heard a little more on the talking-head shows, and read a little more in the blogosphere. Seems nobody could be outraged enough. Even those who precipitated this catastrophic debacle were blustering the feigned rage.

And the way it seems to work, the "worse" the CEO is, the greater the reward. Apparently, it is the redefining of the American Way.

And then another story I was reading.

steamkettle

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Friday July 04, 2008 · 3:56 AM PDT

2008/07/04 · 03:56

An advertisement in The Nation caught my eye. And this ad did what ads seldom do to me, compelled me to procure its offering.

The little red book, identified as a "pamphlet" by the authors, Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer, is entitled The True Patriot.

Thomas Paine with his Common Sense is reincarnated.

As the authors concede in their pamphlet, not one idea expressed is original to them. So I too, shamelessly, take inspiration from them and incorporate ideas that I read in The True Patriot, reinforced with ideas that I have read over and over and over again in this and other political blogs, into yet another harmonic to recapture patriotism.

As our political machinery now seems destined for an epochal change, a tension of the repulsion from patriotism has been welling within me, to a bursting point. When I used to listen to that transfixing anthem I’m Proud to be an American, I would nearly be overcome with bursting emotion. Now, I cringe when I hear it.

This little red pamphlet ruptured the bung holding back my fomenting frustration over "patriotism."

This little pamphlet has given me hope.

steamkettle

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Sunday June 08, 2008 · 5:15 AM PDT

2008/06/08 · 05:15

A snippet of overheard conversation is a projectile in suspension. The hearer knows nothing of the antecedents. Can know nothing of the aftermath. But that snippet I did hear. I have been frightened, haunted, filled with an angst.

I watched the two ladies, obviously hospital employees, characterized by their togs and dangling name badges, enter into the serving area of the hospital cafeteria through one door. I entered through another. We converged at the beverage station.

"But I don’t want any grandsons."

steamkettle

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Monday April 14, 2008 · 3:43 AM PDT

2008/04/14 · 03:43

I feel like John McCain and his campaign mantra: "My friends, I’m constipated and I’m ready to go."

This stuff has been building up within me.

Another conjunction this past weekend: The mutual agreement with a friend to read Emerson at respective picnic tables thousands of miles apart on Saturday, the Adult Education forum at church, talking of the Transcendentalists with their utopian experiments, the responsive reading in church authored by Henry David Thoreau that included the quotation: "I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear," the incessant political harangue which is beginning to infuriate me.

And so: "I gotta go!"

steamkettle

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Tuesday March 18, 2008 · 6:04 AM PDT

2008/03/18 · 06:04

In a few hours, Barack Obama is going to give a speech that will effect history.

If he succeeds in his message, there is a hope for reconciliation within this country. If he transcends as the first black man in history to become a nominee for President of the United States, it will be a testimony to we Americans and to the world, that we can be a diverse culture and still rally together in our differences, rather than fragment and ultimately fail as a society.

If he fails, or if American’s fail him, it will be a tragedy that will be for another generation to try and heal.

steamkettle

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Saturday February 23, 2008 · 7:05 AM PST

2008/02/23 · 07:05

I had one of those indelible moments in Wal-Mart last evening. It couldn’t have lasted even 10 seconds, but it burned an image within me.

You simply can’t tell from lookin’.

But he did look like one of those knurled, Texas juniper trees that protrudes out of the side of a road-side cut bank. Weathered. Bent. Taught. Projecting upright.

The cattleman’s hat sunk low over his ears. Wrangler jeans and jacket. Cowboy boots. No spurs. No guns. No neckerchief. A little residue of odiferous cattle on his britches.

In some respects, he looked like a statue. Immobile. Fixated. Peering upward. Totally engrossed. Oblivious to his surroundings.

steamkettle

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Tuesday January 22, 2008 · 5:41 PM PST

2008/01/22 · 17:41

My heart just felt like it had been ripped out.

CNN Breaking news on my laptop: Heath Ledger found dead.

I bonded with that guy . . . with the Ennis Del Mar in "Brokeback Mountain."

I was that same age in the 60’s. I didn’t have the guts to live my true identity. It would be decades before I had the courage to break from that horrible closet. It was after a divorce where I refused to meet the marriage counselor because I was terrified that a skilled counselor would get it out of me that I was gay. I could not deal with that reality at that time.

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Bearing Gifts

The Unintended Purpose

The Movement

And the Ass of Prop Hate8 will be no more.

National Review's Deuteronomic Definition of Male-Sex Driven Marriage

Achan' for a Stoning

Busting the Bung of My Bunged-Up Patriotism

". . . isn't manly enough . . ."

A 21st Century Transcendentalist?

A Speech to Change History

You can't tell just by lookin'

And my children refused to see it . . . Brokeback that is.