The Teething

“What’s wrong?”
“Fuck you. That’s what’s wrong!”

No, she didn’t say that.
She thought it, though.

Saying it that would have been tantamount to killing that goddamned mockingbird that Atticus Finch said was such a sin to shoot. Although her husband was hardly Boo Radley, there was something very vulnerable to the viper’s sting about him. It would have been criminal to yell at him.

So she denied herself the release. She denied herself for his sake, not for the salvation of her mortal soul. She didn’t believe in sin, heaven, hell or martyrdom, but she did believe in that golden rule…
It offered a fair exchange rate.

Christianity was capitalism wrapped up in satin ribbons and presented on a silver holiday platter with twinkling lights and bouquet garni.
No wonder the Marxists and Muslims preached against it.
How can you compete with Santa Claus?
He’s such a jolly old bloke.

And Christ? She figured would be a freemarket guy… as long as you weren’t hawking your Tickle Me St. Peter Velveteen Rabbit dolls in a place of worship, he was fine. He has a studied apathy toward all things material, but he could afford to… being the son of God & all.

He did not negate the laws of man. “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s”. Maybe he did say it as a canard, a sly reverse psychological way of saying this world and its laws were meaningless because he believed the rewards would be doled out all candy-coated & rainbow striped in the Emerald City that is Paradise….
Die now, live later…

Capitalism, Communism, all schisms in the isms… UGH!
Governments & economic systems were a thorn in her side.
People are corrupt, no matter what the system of government… Communism uses political fealty as a commodity, Capitalism uses the almighty kopek… Same shit, different day.

She believed that people need to strive & if it is all handed to them on a plate with parsley & watercress, society at large devolves into the Eloi with the politically savvy Morlocks feasting upon the baa baa sheep. Struggle is essential to growth. The best wine in the world is made from grapes that suffer… suffer too much, of course & you die a fruitless death… it is a balance we need, an equilibrium, but it cannot be achieved through false means.
Social engineering suffocates the soul of man…

And she loved the soulful, no matter the religious implications of it.

So…
She did her best to do unto her husband as she would want him to do unto her.

Yes.
She considered his feelings, even as she wondered what made him so sensitive to certain modes of dissension.

Maybe he’d been bitten by too many snakes in his time or maybe he hadn’t been bitten by enough of them. Either way his tolerance for the spittle-inflected invective was low, even when the barb was just in jest.

No swearing allowed in Mr. Roger’s neighborhood.
No jaywalking.
No gum chewing.
No fucking.

It was not easy being married to a middle-aged boy scout.
No, not easy at all.

No.
Was a word she never liked.
It sounded so curt, so dismissive, so rude.
Yet, she preferred the honest No to the deceitful Yes.
Or to the insidious ambiguous silence.

The silence…

That quiet constrictor that snaked it’s way around your feet, tickling your ankles… crawling, slithering its way up your knees, coiling around your belly til it worked its way around your throat and squeezed…. Hard.

No.
He never said the word to her.
He didn’t have to.
He lived it…

Their relationship had become The No incarnate.
A living breathing enactment of the negative with viscera, but it had no teeth.
It was like an infant or an aged relative, gumming you incessantly.
No bite.
It was a slow horrible suckling.

It was not that he was unkind or uncaring.
On the contrary, he was constantly telling her he loved her, asking her what she felt, what she did, what she wanted… always so solicitous. And yet… she knew, he really didn’t mean to give it to her… not the things she most needed.

Oh, he’d give her jewelry and vacations, fine wining and dining.
Nothing with a price tag or a barcode was ever denied, but then again, these were not things she ever needed or asked for.
In fact, she had been slowly but surely declining invitations out, suggested getaways, and every other offer for purchase.

The pleasure of her company was not a marketable commodity.
No exchange of goods could secure it.

She no longer spoke of what she really wanted from him.
The truth is she no longer wanted it.
Her desire was gone.
Drowned in pablum and platitudes.
It had been gummed to death.

Ku Klux Khan

“And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry: “Beware! Beware!”

There was a rustling sound. The hunter, who stood motionless
as an unwound clock for longer than time had a name, slowly
raised the gunsite to eye level. Just beyond the dense brush,
in the clearing, stood his target. He zeroed in on it.

His trigger cocked.
The crook of his index finger tracing the curvature of
cold smooth promise, delicately rubbing death’s single bolt-action:
iron-clad and ready to ignite the primer with a will to kill.
His will was a thing that shot anthwart the apathetic chasm in
spineless currents of electric sea.

Narrowing his mind suddenly,
he felt a pride swell: a hardening that jackhammered his desire
into a progressive mechanism as the realization of the coming
propitious moment dawned on him, and after allowing himself that
momentary frisson, he re-focused intently on his intent.

His trophy would be magnificent.

Visualizing the event first in his mental retina, he pictured
what would be his prey’s collapse as the projectile he fired
pierced a thick dermal splendor, the threshing of bare supple flesh,
a revelation fulfilled.

Then he imagined the first burst of breathy shock expelled
by her lungs; then the knee-buckling surrender to the giving earth;
as blood mingled with sweaty fear, and neural excitation.

The musky scent of her initial unwilling submission giving in
to his exalted domination. It was never a matter of the fittest
surviving. Not in this Xanadu. Carnage never tasted sweeter
than it did here.

He pictured the inevitable mounting of his trophy.

The tangible proof that he was indeed a very patient hunter
and gifted marksman. By the end, he would eventually tan that hide
til it shone with a gleaming uniformity: awash in his lusty red rage.
And he would teach those who lurked in the shadows of that
Pleasuredome, watching the spectacle safely from the security
of their glass enclosed cages, that a zebra should never
bleed its stripes outside the acceptable lines of its captivity.

Do Not Feed The Zoo Animals

She crossed the street. It was a sparkling, sunlit afternoon. The air was brisk with a bright tang to it, lively as a bugler’s cry at revelie.

Suddenly the day darkened….

Looming immediately in her future was a dreadful apparition: the spectre of a man; young, oxy-scrubbed and attractive, but for the menace of his Greenpeace t-shirt and his requisite, army-issue, clipboard bearing petitions of the kind that such militant creatures always burdened a hapless pedestrian public with.

He bared a mouthful of environmentally-active teeth in a coin-operated grin. Seeing her got all his clockwork wound. She imagined she heard the rev of the political machinery vrooming… “Gentlemen, start your engines!!!”.

She braced herself for the inevitable onslaught.

“You look like someone who cares!”, he said cheerfully, “Hi, my name is Marcus.”, thrusting his hand at her for a handshake.

She grasped his hand, feeling the steel-wool of his calloused skin. Being a tactile creature, she loved a bit of texture, especially the friction caused by the rough hands of a man on her, but Marcus failed where he might have succeeded in arresting her attention.

He didn’t actually squeeze her hand at all, barely taking hold of it.
He just let it hang there, like a flaccid penis.
Nothing was a bigger turn off to her than a man with a weak handshake.

Handshakes are meant to be visceral.
A real connection to an individual.
A nexus to their past and your future.
A bite into their psyche.

A man with a weak handshake would likely fuck you in the ass without having to good grace to give you a reach around and probably go Dutch on the dinner tab afterward, if he bothered to take you out at all.

After feeling his barely modulated touch, she smiled sweetly as she said, “Hi Marcus. Nice to meet you. Bye.” and walked on wondering how she could have possibly looked like someone who cared.
The truth was she was someone who really didn’t give a shit. She always thought if she projected anything, any part of her persona, at all, she was more likely to exude a buzzing chainsaw aura than a Save the Whales vibe.White noise was her mantra.Thunder was her theme song.

Living was, in practicality, a static panic state, why feed into those hair-triggered notions that fired the gears of futility in motion… the never sated stale, vitamin-fortified, Wonder Bread empty calorie hunger that force-fed us a bologna-wrapped, mayonnaise-dream coating the gluttonous belief-on-a-stick that we served some higher purpose? Wasn’t being alive enough? Why were we always so greedy for more? Live well, cause no harm, help someone if you can and dance on til the music stopped playing.

Purpose… what purpose did ANYTHING truly serve? Life, as she saw it, is just one big old trip to the carnival funhouse…. crammed with all manner of amusing distortions to distract us. Distract us from the sober truth that all that we see or seem is just good old Poe’s dream within a dream. We’re born, then we die somewhere in the blink of mortality’s eye. Our perceptions of it all were faulty, but what the hell… it still gave us the occasional laugh! Like Woody Allen so famously said, “What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.”

Like Woody, she was a native New Yorker. Her “give-not-a-shitlessness” was as much an integral part of her nurturing as it was a trait of her cynical, anarchal nature. She ate her sandwiches on dark rye with mustard. Preferably sandwiches made with her own two hands. She was a big girl now. She knew how to feed herself, but never tried to cram her recipes for life down anybody else’s throat.

Petition-bearing signature collectors held no place of honor in her planet; be they green and peaceful or red and angry, she’d rather they’d all spontaneously combust to prevent the further contamination of San Francisco street corners on glorious spring days! But Marcus failed to oblige her by napalming himself. So, she just walked on, still smiling at the thought of him and his kind. Mostly, she loved the circus that life was, but she never fed zoo animals, no matter how cute they were.

It’s Only Words

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.”

W.H. Auden

She was tired. Very tired.

She placed her folded hands on the desk then followed by laying her flushed forehead on top of the them, allowing the weight of her head to sink into her hands as deeply as the lead of her heart sank into her chest.

She promised herself she would stop crying.
STOP…. crying.

This melancholy was ridiculous.

Why couldn’t she eat or sleep or… feel… anything but pain?

Pain in waves.
Crashing into her, over her…. through her.
Washing out the last bits of wreckage within her. She hoped anyway.

She hoped that when the deluge of tears finally subsided, there would be nothing left within her to mourn, to lament… to regret.
Nothing.
Not even the bits of flotsam or driftwood that occasionally floated on her consciousness.

Like those snippets of conversation.
The loving smiles.
The sweet succor of his mouth on hers.

The daisy petal days.
The sultry mango ripe nights.

No!

She wanted it all banished. The sweat, the tears… the love.

Oh God…
She was suffocating… suffocating.
Wrapped tight in that cold blanket of doubt and deceit… but…

Dammit!

SHE had been the one vanquished and battered.

Why then was she the one made to feel penitent for the crimes committed against her? Why was she seeking the benediction of her transgressor?

It doesn’t matter…
It doesn’t matter!!!

Doesn’t it?

No, not anymore…
Not now.
Not here.

Alone in the dark with only the blue flickering light of a computer to warm her.

What was it exactly that happened… the other day?
Did she even really want to remember anymore…

No, PLEASE, don’t…

Down the rabbit hole she tumbled…

“I’m sorry.”, he said.

Two words.
Three syllables.
Seven letters.
Two punctuation marks and…

One broken heart, splayed wide open.

Excised, precised, incised…
with the most cutting of blades…
the stark ugly truth.

Those two little words when uttered with sincerity she believed to be one of the most powerful declarations one sentient human being could promise to another.

“I love you.” being in her mind the very first in that short list of words strung together like pearls to create long strands of luminescent humanity.

“I forgive you.” ranking second amongst the most welcome phrases in the universe.

This sacred trilogy of pledges being the most healing ones a body could ever hear, but, she felt, the most difficult to qualify.

As Bartelby fell to his knees with the agony of several thousand years of torturous exile weighing upon his bloody tattered angel wings, seemingly full of atonement and begging the forgiveness and benediction of a cartwheeling, barefoot, flower child-like Almighty Being in the guise of Alanis Morrisette; after the decimation and attempted annihilation of the creatures he envied for garnering Her ultimate favor and cherished love, his plea for mercy was real… but was it an apology?

Of course, it was just a movie.

But was he like Bartelby?

Did he really feel penitent, sorrowful, full of regret, ready for his expiation or was it just self-pity?

How could she really know?
The difference?

Not being able to see into his soul as though it were a display window to a glorious boutique handicapped her, didn’t it?

What price this apology, this regret?

Bargain basement or Tiffany diamond?

Accountability, responsibility & a willingness to accept the consequences of his actions. To own this destruction that he caused. He needed to eliminate those pitiful twins, Pain and Need, who come knocking at the door of your heart like some mad Seventh Day Adventists trying to sell you their godforsaken magazines that you know you don’t want, can’t use and will never read.

He needed to realize they are so damned persistent that Pain & that Need, they get their foot in the door and well….. unless you’re careful they make a good long stay as unwelcome houseguests. You have to start purposefully cleaning your soul’s home, purging it of old toxic fumes, clean that dirty laundry, put away those dishes; start getting active and busy cleaning out that soul and chase those sonofabitches out of the house with a broomstick, sweeping up after them as they run for cover.

It would not be an easy thing to do because he wouldn’t always acknowledge that those pitiful Twins have entered his soul. They can masquerade as things like Love and Desire, so very easily…

But even then…if he would… could she trust him?

Could he really transfigure, transmute himself after those five Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, and one Glory Be?

Or would he just lather his conscience in the suds of sorrow until he could become preoccupied with the washing away of his sins and get them all soapy, wet, drowning in the bubbles of distraction and denial. Only to come out feeling shiny and clean for the short term until he was willing and able to sin again?

Trust , forgiveness, they were so easy for her to give to him, if she chose that route. Impossible for her to give to herself… she lifted her head up from the desk, out of her hands, her face cooler, her breaths deeper, more settled. She stared out the window to the world outside of her misery.

It was a beautiful day and it beckoned to her with its lush green hills and its sparkling bay just beyond them, so close she felt certain that if she flew out this window she would dive safely into that refreshing drink.

She sighed once as she pondered what she would do for the next hour, and the hour after that & tomorrow & the following days, weeks, years ahead…

That atonement would she really ever know if he was really, truly and deeply sorry?

Or was it only words?

http://www.youtube.com/v/kjRo_CHSdt0&hl=en&fs=1

http://www.youtube.com/v/Ib897OuUQjw&hl=en&fs=1

Words can be strung together like pearls to create phrases of timeless beauty and joy or they can be hurled artlessly, barbarically like rocks aimed to bruise & batter their target with the blunt edge of humiliation.

***********************************************************************

The Portrait of the Penitent Mary Magdelene is by El Greco

Questions In The Dark

“Are you happy?”

He asked her.

Suddenly.

Four syllables.

Three words.

Forming one question.

Every pixel blinking brightly from the flickering screen.

Glaring at her.

Judge and jury combined.

Collective fingers pointing accusingly.

Daggers piercing through her Kevlar-clad heart.

Those deadly arrows poised at the ready accompanied by enormous trebuchets bombarding the firewall she thought she had so carefully erected between them.

How had he amassed such weaponry in siege against her?

For a pixelated eternity, she stared blankly at her computer.

An insurrection of the self began formulating its coup.

A firing squad of furious feelings callously ambushed her and so she answered, finally surrendering…

The last bit of her reason abdicating its throne.

With great trepidation, she slowly typed into the keyboard:

“I try to be…”

Sullen heart sinking more deeply into that ever quickening sand beneath feet of clay. Her eyes no longer able to focus as they clouded up with tears that had remained unshed for far too long. How had he struck these chords within her? Stroking her so surely. Why was he asking this… now?

Oddly, despite the shock & dismay, she wondered all of this hopefully.

Hoping that it was more than just a whim or an idle curiosity of his to pass the time. Hoping she was not merely the game of chance & skill he felt like playing tonight.

He, on the other side of her connection thousands of miles and millions of hummingbird-like heartbeats away, waited expectantly; patiently, already anticipating her response.

He felt he knew her quite well.

He had spent some time in the study of her… as he did all things that captured his imagination.

“Do you love him?”

He pressed on…

Asking very sweetly, very tenderly from his own little encapsulated world.

Or so it seemed to her.

She could imagine the intonation in his voice.
In her mind’s ear, it fairly crooned to her…

His midnight voice as she called it; though she had only heard it a handful of times in the wee hours, the dangerous ones after her husband went to bed & she was left to her own devices, dreaming…

Half whispering, throaty, yes, that’s how she thought of it always… his midnight voice… with a ready laugh that tickled her mind as it moistened her thighs. Though it was likely he was intoxicated when he did speak to her, he was the happiest, most charming drunk she’d ever heard. She generally had zero tolerance for those who became inebriated in order to socialize.

But he was exceptional in so many ways, she rather relished his sweet dip into the blushful Hippocrene.

“DO you love him?“, he typed again, a bit more insistently.
Impatient for her response now.

His impatience excited her.
She accepted it was wrong for her to feel such a frisson of pleasure, but she felt it she did, nonetheless. Something about his insistence to know her feelings for her husband thrilled her, despite its obvious perversity.

She tried to quell the romantic sensations because his comraderie was far more important to her than any unlikely sexual liasion. Although they had always had a palpable desire for one other, they never voiced it; at least not in the base, obvious ways that so many who troll the internet do.

He was, by and large, a quiet thoughtful man who usually kept his cards close to the vest; except for moments like these when he seemed to have a need to express himself. Particularly, after keeping his feelings, the ones he always denied having, so bottled up all week long.

He had tremendous depth of emotion when he allowed himself the indulgence. This she knew, even if he would never admit it. She noticed he was incredibly vulnerable when stirred which is why he strove always to be so coolly logical, to avoid the heartache from his innate sympathy for humanity as a whole, and for her in particular.

He would scoff if she ever said as much to him.
However, she also knew that he would secretly delight in thinking that this was her belief about him.

During these twice weekly chats, he released everything, nearly incinerating her with his fury or catapulting her to the ionosphere with his exuberance. She seemed to invoke both sensations equally within him.

Knowing she needed to respond soon, she considered whether she should try now to explain the nuances of her marital relationship to him, but realized it was unnecessary. After all, they had exchanged many emails on the subject.

He knew her sad story almost as well as she did….

Almost…

She had withheld certain vitally important things about her husband from him, about why she had really sought the sanctuary of a virtual world late at night. She just wasn’t ready to share that with him yet… though tonight they were as close and open to each other as they had ever been; feeding off the mutual empathy. They had shared many such moments after which he felt a need to pull away for a week to regroup & reassess his feelings for her. Trying to put everything in perspective. It did not behoove him to think so much of her which is why she thought… no, better not say anything yet.

After rejecting the idea of exposing this news to him now, she told the partial truth.
Though it was not the whole, complicated truth because qualifying the entire matter required a tacit understanding of love between them. A deep abiding love.

Brother, lover, friend… didn’t really matter to her.
Yet, she was still not quite certain he was worthy of such commitment. She did so want him to be. She adored lavishing her attentions upon him.

The connection was the most important aspect of any relationship, she felt. The mode was irrelevant. She trusted him implicitly, but felt he did not fully trust her. She sensed that hesitance from him in their every interaction. She understood why he couldn’t trust. He had been so badly burned by other women, including his current wife.

Still, his distrust wounded her deeply. So shaking off the sudden impulse to share her little all as was her usual custom with him, she simply typed:

“Yes, I love him.”

Wanting now to share more of himself with her, he responded almost instantaneously, knowing intuitively what her answer would be:

“I believe you. Will you believe me?”

Of course, she would believe him!
What she couldn’t believe were her eyes! Was he really going to let his guard down?
Of this she was certain, he was many things; some characteristics not always as uniformly pleasant as others, but he was no liar.

It went against his nature which was almost child-like in its wide-eyed wonder of the more tempestuous aspects of the world. He was guileless despite being one of the most brilliant people she would ever know. Deep down she sensed how much he cared for her, yet it was not merely of a carnal nature. It seemed to transcend such vulgar concerns.

They both knew that the undeniable physical attraction between them was at best a transient, fatuous thing. A passionate duet they would likely never sing; not with the distance between them and the marriages they both valued, but theirs became instead the truest meeting of the minds.

Ahhh…
Someone who would understand.
Really, truly without judgment or expectations.
To be so valued and comprehended was a consummation devoutly to be wished for two such as they. So few people had the capacity to fully absorb their personas.

He told her some of his personal story before tonight; when the weight of woe seemed to deflate his heart. Compressing it, accordion-like into tight folds.
Lifeless, airless, crushing her, too; for she felt his pain so very deeply sometimes that it was tantamount to being her own. In fact, his pain reached through thousands of miles of co-axial cable with the gravitational pull of a dwarf star & sucked her into his rancorous clouds of miasma. She was asphyxiating along with him; choking in the dusty unplayed instrument that personified his lament of love.

Anxious to hear his thoughts, she began to respond to his query.
To let him know she would always believe him, no matter what… reveling in the abrupt shock of his question and the promise of what it would reveal, BUT suddenly her computer networking connection died off….

She cried out in frenzy and frustration:

“NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!”

Tears streaming down her face….

Knowing…
He would think that the termination of their connection was because she had rejected him.

Knowing…
They could never be that close again.

Knowing…
He would feel prompted to shut himself up in his little box again.
The very one she had been trying to help pry open for so long. More for his sake even than her own. He so rarely ventured out beyond its confines, but she knew he needed a friend. Of course, she did too…

“…Will you believe me?”

His need to be accepted apparent.
Her wish to fulfill that need unrealized.

His question was left hovering in cyberspace.
Forever unanswered…

“Yes, you think you’re all right,
And now you’re lonely ev’ry night
Well, you need a friend
Someone on whom you can always depend

Take yourself a friend
Keep ‘em till the end
Whether woman or man
It makes you feel so good
So good”

~ Alex Lifeson

The Day The Earth Stood Still

Self indulgent…
Yes, that’s what she was, she felt as she adjusted the brim of her golf cap, just so…

Peering into the mirror with a degree of satisfaction & applying the lustre of Lipfusion’s gloss as the finishing touch, that cherry on her sundae of satisfaction.

Sundays.

Incredibly, they were actually her “busy” days when she spent time tending to the needs of her over-worked, but always cheerful husband. His “needs” were few really, but she, being the relentless tease that she was, always made him feel that her overtures were magnanimous gestures.

She often told him that she would one day be martyred as St. Lisa of Spruce Street by the papal commission when they heard of the miracle of her selfless sacrifices like accompanying him to the gym and golf course while tearing herself away from her uber-important work. Of course, they both knew she was joking.

Lisa was certainly not employed in the traditional sense, though she always found ways to occupy her time, often feeling that there were not enough hours in the day to accomplish all she wished to indulge herself in…

Indulge.
What a word!
Such a negative connotation.
So decadent.
Yet, it was precisely why she enjoyed using it.
She was perverse by nature & enjoyed the idea of reversing polarities . Taking what others would consider a crime and turning it into a virtue.

People seemed so awfully limited to her.
Limited in their capacity for understanding.
Limited in their desire to accept other ways of thinking and being.
Limited by their envy and jealousy of those whose qualities they openly admired, but it seemed that the green-tinged would begrudge in them just as readily.

Yes, by and large, when you weighed this against that, whither where they thither, people were full of sheer sucktitude. Lisa always considered envy a black eye on the face of humanity & it seemed that most people would like to do nothing more than sucker punch each other; trying to pick each other’s pockets while they did…

Empathy.
That’s what the so-called sapiens of hominids needed more of… empathy.
She recalled this Shelley quote:

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

Yet, this modern zeitgeist that seemed to Lisa like the Church of the self & the worship of the ego has resulted in nothing more than an alienation of the species… Technology has conspired to make automatons out of us. We are more humanoid than anything human, she mused despondently.

We are so busy congratulating ourselves on such worthy accomplishments as denying ourselves things that we had no need for to begin with, that we actually believe we are doing something constructive for society when we buy “organic” or drive a “Prius”.
Such nominal gestures have taken the place of real interaction with others, of trying to help directly in the most civic-minded sense.

We have all branded ourselves with a USDA stamp of approval, but the meat of the things that matter to us are far from prime-cut.

No, she thought disdainfully, social conscience seems to be a thing relegated to the more esoteric view where we are far removed from our fellow man as we sit high atop Mount Olympus in judgment of the so-called worthy causes. Most of which the majority seem to think doesn’t exist outside of voting for their favorite “American Idol”.

Mary “Fuck me on a pogo stick & Yell Tallulah” Mother of God!
No wonder she had long ago lost her religion.
If man was made in God’s image, then God must suck mighty lemonade!

God, her mind reeled with thoughts of all of the people she knew who thought they were so entitled to everything whether they earned it or not… especially if somebody else had “it” & they didn’t.

She remembered that cab ride where she had wildly thrown her workout-outfit clad self into the street in her usual dramatic matter to hail a cab because she was late as always, and the cab driver, a young attractive black man exuding his best “alternative lifestyle” attitude like some women douse on Chanel No. 5, began to flirt and joke with her. Both of them having a delightful time until they reached her destination, a 10, 000 sf mansion in the poshest part of town.

The cab driver with a charming smile & the “hey, I’d like to see you again” lilt in his voice that Lisa always seemed to evoke from these men in driving husbandry asked her point blank, “So, you work for the lady of the house, huh? What are you? Her personal assistant?”

Lisa laughed lightly & smiled wryly, ” Haha… No, I am the lady of the house!”

A dark cloud passed over the handsome driver’s face, the look of amusement & attraction turning into a glare of disgust & disdain. “What?”, he shouted at her. “When I picked you up, I thought you were so cute & funny, so you’re telling me that you OWN this house!”

Lisa stiffened. A tidal wave of rage came welling up from the pit of her bowels consuming her, her retort was dripping in acidic bile, “Excuse me? Are you saying that NOW I’m no longer the person I was a minute before we arrived at my door?”

The driver was undeterred and full of righteous indignation when he exclaimed to her, “Look, I’m NEVER going to live in a house like that, okay? I work 12 hours a day in this cab & I can barely make the rent with a roommate.”

Lisa’s next words shot out at him like the Operation Neptune air during the storming of Normandy; she came at him with a vehemence blazing from all quadrants by air & by sea.

“Are you fucking KIDDING me?!?!? My husband busted his ass & nearly killed himself to earn enough money to buy this house. You heard me tell you where I was from!! East Harlem, asshole!! The projects. My family was on welfare! My husband was just a normal middle-class kid from New Jersey! You should be happy that people like us made it. So… you wanna house like this, huh? Fucking do something to earn it!

Go into a trade that makes you money. Write a book. Film a movie! Get off your ass, out of this cab & get the education or the materials you need & WORK at it!! You think my husband has his shit handed to him? FUCK NO!!! He took a RISK! A big risk! We put all of our money into this shit & if he had failed, he’d be driving a cab, too, BUT he wouldn’t be complaining about other people making good! He’d still be cheering them on!

YOU are the problem with the world today, bro!

I feel sorry for you!”

The cab driver sat there in silence during her tirade…
There they were two people occupying the same little cab, but now with a chasm a world apart dividing them. A chasm that he dug…

He said very quietly, “Okay, look… nevermind… alright. I’m sorry. You don’t even have to pay me, okay?”

Lisa was shaking her head in disbelief.
Did he STILL not understand??
She saw him as a brother, not the enemy.
She wanted to help him SEE… not deny him anything.

“Of course, I’m going to pay you… here…”, as she handed him double the fare on the meter, “Good luck to you, bro. I hope you can make whatever dreams you have come true… That’s the beauty of this country. Anything is possible. It’s all up to you. Take care of yourself.”

Lisa stepped out of the cab.
Quietly closing the door.
Waving goodbye as he pulled away from the curb, she walked into the home of her dreams a little sadder than she had walked out of it early that morning.

Excerpt from the Day The Earth Stood Still:
Klaatu:

“I am leaving soon, and you will forgive me if I speak bluntly.

The universe grows smaller every day, and the threat of aggression by any group, anywhere, can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all, or no one is secure. Now, this does not mean giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly.

Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves and hired policemen to enforce them. We, of the other planets, have long accepted this principle. We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets and for the complete elimination of aggression. The test of any such higher authority is, of course, the police force that supports it. For our policemen, we created a race of robots.

Their function is to patrol the planets in spaceships like this one and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression, we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked. At the first sign of violence, they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk. The result is, we live in peace, without arms or armies, secure in the knowledge that we are free from aggression and war. Free to pursue more… profitable enterprises.

Now, we do not pretend to have achieved perfection, but we do have a system, and it works. I came here to give you these facts. It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration.

We shall be waiting for your answer.
The decision rests with you. “

Love: The Final Frontier

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Beautiful, isn’t it?
I only wish I could claim authorship.
No, this was the work of the incomparable master of sensuality & love: ee cummings. (all lowercase letters, don’t ask me why?)

His deepest explorations into the meanings of love using the tools of the sensual to unleash the wonders of a lover brings to my diseased mind the endless fascination of celestial beauty that spurred on the voyage to the moon in Jules S. Verne’s “The Moon Voyage”. Here is the first paragraph from his chapter V entitled, “The Romance of the Moon” which discusses the formation of the universe:

“The spectator endowed with infinite power of sight, and placed at the unknown centre round which gravitates the universe, would have seen myriads of atoms filling all space during the chaotic epoch of creation. But by degrees, as centuries went on, a change took place; a law of gravitation manifested itself which the wandering atoms obeyed; these atoms, combined chemically according to their affinities, formed themselves into molecules, and made those nebulous masses with which the depths of the heavens are strewed.”

That chaotic epoch of creation, steeped in love for under any scenario of the universal beginnings that you can imagine it is the powers of attraction, that most basic law of Nature that formed those heavenly bodies. Gravity is nothing more than attraction, a wanting, a needing, an endless pull toward one another.

Love, baby.
That’s what started it all.

Love in all it’s glory & madness.
Love in it’s nascent molten hot galaxial passion.

It’s that star that suddenly increases exponentially in luminosity exploding catastropically before ejecting all of its mass.

Totally orgasmic!

Love in its more sustainable form, after the cooling of its initial supernoval state of splendor that allows life as we know it to exist.

Kinda sorta sounds like what we earthlings experience as our forays into love & desire, doesn’t it?

Hard not to see the parallels between the rhythms of the spheres of paradise and those of earthly inhabitants. Easy to understand why we feel the need to explore both. Why all those NASA engineers kept sending Apollo mission after Apollo mission to the moon.

The search for understanding ourselves & universal life as we know it, is the search for love… the final frontier… like the search for knowing the “unknowable” yet to be be tangibly seen & felt true fabric of the universe is always compelling.

Why?

Shouldn’t we do better things with our time than sit in front of our computers in this world wide circle jerk, trying to discern the meaning of life & love? I mean the laundry is piling up, people!!!

Johannes Kepler, the great German astronomer, that mad believer in the Copernican theory who took it to its next logical progression from describing Copernicus’ planetary orbits of perfect circles to the now known orbit of ellipses, was accused of what modern astronomers called “cosmological hedonism”.

The claim was that his language suggests a kind of sexualized universal energy and joy pervading the nature of all things that ultimately emanated from God, a being that he worshipped as a “kind creator”.

In 1596, he wrote of astronomy a sort of ode to joy & love,

“Must one measure the value of the heavenly objects with dimes, as one does food?
But, pray, one will ask, what is the good of the knowledge of all astronomy, to an empty stomach…
Painters are allowed to go on with their work because they give joy to the eyes, musicians because they bring joy to the ears, though they are of no other use to us…
What insensibility, what stupidity, to deny the spirit an honest pleasure but permit it to the eyes & ears!
He who fights against that joy fights against that nature.”

Yeah, good old Johannes would have been all for Oprah & “Dr.” Phil. He had that “sacred madness”. The pleasure that he felt in scientific research was a visceral one. He totally got off on exploring the sensual music of the spheres.

He was the author of what was then a new genre of literature called “the first modern scientific moon-voyage”. It is a document full of emotion that delves into the voyage of his unconscious mind.

It also pre-dated Freud’s much later writings because while in his sexual explorations into space & mind, he used his oedipal dreams about his mother to describe his fantasy journeys to the moon.

See… it’s all about S-E-X!!!

Every exploration is a penetration, be it of space, mind or body. That knowing between the seeker and the sought after is always a consummation divinely to be wished.

Even the purest explorations of the divine from the most celibate saints are called ecstatic. Think that’s a coincidence? Be it tantric or catholic ecstatics the rapture of knowing is the attraction.

That is what love & sexual exploration are, after all.

The knowing, the telling, the yearning, the needing, the madness drives us to plunge into the other, head first & steep ourselves in their otherness until we are submerged in a roiling sea of sweat and sweetness, rollicking in rapturous rhythms and melodies.

It’s the music of the spheres.

I quote one of cyberspace’s own intrepid explorer’s along this frontier of love.  I read it in just Dale’s space some time ago, this is one of many of his astonishing gems that sent me off on this tangental rocket ship to the moon. It’s number 7 out of top 10 checklist of things the man had learned in a single week of healing & cohesion:

“That this thing called Love makes no sense at all. It breaks all the rules. It is a seed that grows inside the crack in a rock. It cares not about want, or care, or smart. It is the face that shows itself at 3:15 am.”

Indeed, it is.

That’s what makes it so goddamn fascinating.
That’s why I, like ee cummings and countless road warriors before me, will continue to travel through the sometimes terrifying territory, sometimes familiar, often not.

This blog was written as my justification to myself for going to bed at all hours with a need to rise & begin again before that raveled sleeve of care has felt one bit of the pearl stitch that is promised to us by sleep, often seeing that haunted, hollow-eyed 3:15 am face that beckons to me,

“C.C. come, you know there’s work to be done. Don’t just lie there woman, rise and shine. There are heavens to be explored.”

It’s like Spock’s mind meld with V’GER.

(V’Ger is a sentient being that evolved from Voyager 6, a fictitious space probe from the 20th Century that vanished into a black hole and was given life by a race of living machine in the original Star Trek film)

Totally mindblowing, it is so braingasmic:

I feel like V’GER wanting to know his maker and understand the why for his endless quest. With a hunger so powerful that it nearly destroys itself and everything in its quest for knowledge.

I mean look at what VGER did to Spock…
Imagine how my poor hubby feels.

V’GER’s quest was from that incredibly philosophical movie of the one & only true Star Trek series, the original with the hunky Captain Kirk, Spock, & Bones who our pal -slj  would tell me is known as “Pille” in Germany.

(Steve once also rightly points out that the guy was a pill, pain-in-the-ass really… but that would be a ridiculously long word in German, those Aryans do like to string their words together into a long train wreck for the verbally challenged. I mean Dr. Seuss was of German heritage, need I say more? It’s a vast third reich conspiracy for mental domination!!! :D).

Well, it’s also the opening of those tender petals and their closing with every expiration of a lover’s breath…. and beautiful songs this that explore the tenderest, most painful but ultimately hopeful feelings that a crazy little thing with four letters and infinite appeal has:

Here’s the fabulous Bette Midler & “The Rose”:

Some say love it is a river
that drowns the tender reed
Some say love it is a razor
that leaves your soul to bleed

Some say love it is a hunger
an endless aching need
I say love it is a flower
and you it’s only seed

It’s the heart afraid of breaking
that never learns to dance
It’s the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance
It’s the one who won’t be taken
who cannot seem to give
and the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live

When the night has been too lonely
and the road has been too long
and you think that love is only
for the lucky and the strong
Just remember in the winterfar beneath the bitter snows
lies the seed
that with the sun’s love
in the spring
becomes the rose.

Roger that, Houston!!!
Countdown has begun.

T minus 10..9..8..7

The sky shots were taken from my last plane trip with my iPhone. Fun!
The peony was taken with a Nikon digital camera.
Can’t take credit for the Apollo 13 shots, though :(

What are you shooting for?
What makes you jump out of bed to face the day?
Is it love or other things stranger than fiction?

Curious minds NEED to know…