Le Trash Whisperer

New Blog Address

2009-04-28T14:25:00.000-07:00

As part of my effort to move back to the use of Mark instead of Marc Olmsted, I have reconstituted the blog at a new address:

http://thetrashwhisperer.blogspot.com/

Please head over there for the latest entry.

If you are searching for the San Francisco-based poet, Marc Olmsted, I am not him. His website is under construction at www.marcolmsted.com

Thanks.

MCO 2009

What Really Happened?

2009-04-27T10:12:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about the accident a lot, and the more and more I think about it, the more I think I got conned. Set-up. Played.

I have been driving for 33 years. I've had a few fender-benders, some worse than others, but never an accident with physical injuries, to me or others. I have been at countless corners making the same kind of turn as I was on Saturday, and if a cyclist was coming from the direction opposite from traffic, he always knew to make sure I could see him. How many times have you noticed a cyclist or pedestrian waiting to cross if front of you until you make eye contact? How many times have you waved someone past you in the same situation I describe, perhaps apologetically because you had to move forward to get a clear view of the traffic due to parked cars obscuring your view?

I honestly think this guy proceeded precisely because he could see I was watching for traffic in the other direction. If I had clearly been at fault, why wouldn't he have wanted my insurance info? I think he ran into my car in a way that was maximally dramatic but minimally painful. All he could show me was a scraped--barely--elbow.

He played on my unconcious racist assumptions. Of course he doesn't want the police--he's illegal, look, he doesn't speak a word of English. (That was too well done. Everyone has a smattering.) But he knew I would be afraid of a lawsuit--who wouldn't? Isn't the person in the car always wrong? What he couldn't know is my kneejerk fear of somehow finding myself behind bars again--irrational in this situation, but real as concrete as far as my stomach went.

No, he wanted cash, and I wanted to make the whole situation unhappen as far as I possibly could. "Otto" played me like a violin.

And you know what, that's okay. I am actually relieved that all of my streetwise training via dealing and prison has not left me jaded enough not to be conned. It's okay that I assumed I was at fault, distracted, not paying enough attention. It's right that I felt terrible. I was grateful to get out of it for $200. He did the classic con thing of making you somehow feel better while being duped.

Perhaps things happened just as I described yesterday. I take comfort in there being just enough doubt. But if he did con me, it's on his karma, and my paying him probably burned off some of mine.

But if there's ever a next time, I think I'll just wait for the cops and ambulance. And what do I pay my insurance premiums for except for this very reason? It's probably time that I move past my fear of being tossed in the back of a cruiser. There's a reason they call them accidents.

MCO 2009

Poor But Rich

2009-04-26T13:32:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I'm at the corner of Hollywood and El Centro, in the car, talking to my friend Michael on the Bluetooth. I look to my right, for pedestrians, none. I look to my left at the traffic going east, from left to right, and wait for an opening. I have done this same turn well over a thousand times.

From my right, down the sidewalk at a speed fast enough that I hadn't seen him a moment ago when I looked, a bicycle comes. He sees me at the stop sign, but doesn't bother to make sure I see him. I think he brakes just as he realizes I am looking the other way and am advancing because of a break in the traffic. When I hit him I am going 1 mph, and I brake instantly. He is knocked over but doesn't go flying. I am more shocked than I have ever been in my life. He literally materialized from thin air.

I climb out immediately, seized with visions of doing 10-20 for vehicular manslaughter. "I am SO sorry!" are the first words out of my mouth, taking full responsibility, sure that I must have been at fault. He is unhurt, a scrape on the elbow only. He is a young Hispanic man, very thin and short, without a helmet, who speaks no English, except to tell me "no police!" I gather he is illegal. I ask if he wants to go to the hospital, in Spanish. No. I go to get my insurance card, then realize we'd have to file an accident report with the police to process it though insurance. I don't know what to do, and then realize what he is hoping for. "Do you want some money?" I ask. He nods. Bingo.

He locks his bike, and I usher him into my car, observing him closely to make sure he's not hurt or limping. His name is Otto, he's from Mexico, and he has two daughters. When we get to the ATM I say: "$100?" He nods no. "$200." Dos cientos.

At this point, I could have realized that he was going against the flow of the traffic, on a sidewalk, and that had something to do with the accident. I could have realized that if he wasn't willing to go to the police, he wouldn't have much to go on in court. I could have insisted on $100, because I have just paid for the trip to my nephew's wedding and barely had enough to make it through the next month as it is. But frankly, I didn't think the request was unreasonable. It is far less than my deductible, and I will not face an increase in insurance premiums. And what if he wakes up the next day with pain on his side and has to go to the doctor? What if his bike turns out to be damaged? And though yes, I am poor, he is poorer.

When we return, from a block away was see an ambulance and cops, and he tells me to drop him off where we are, he will get his bike when they leave. I am delighted to do so. I feel like I've done something wrong, but I'm pretty sure we're in our rights to settle it this way. And for someone who has had dealings with the police like I've had, I am just too afraid. I know I was sober, it was an accident, it happens. But the fear is overpowering.

Today, I actually wonder if he wasn't pedaling blindly to some sort of rendezvous that would have made him some desperately needed cash. Money to send home, or to buy food for his daughters, or to pay the electric bill. Some request God found completely reasonable, and so decided to make happen there and then, but in a way that would also scare him into driving safely in the future so he stays around for his family. (No I don't really believe God works so specifically, but I still need to find meaning in the seemingly arbitrary and financial painful.)

My sister calls this morning, and without me telling her this story, she tells me she's paying for my trip to the wedding. So I won't be eating spaghetti and shopping at the 99 cents store for a month after all. I feel like the universe is telling me when you do the right thing, it'll take care of you. And gave me a chance to help some people survive in these tough economic times.

For God's sake people, learn from me. If you're on a headset while driving, compensate by being exta alert. And try to stay off the phone for all but essential conversations. I know it's nice to get more done by talking while driving, but studies say your brain is less available for the road. Let's remember we managed for decades and decades without phones in cars. It won't kill you to go without, but it may save a life.

MCO 2009

Where are the Good Republicans?

2009-04-25T07:31:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I look at the oppressed state of so many of the world's women, and I have to think of our own history. It was only a generation ago that single motherhood was a cause for shame and shunning; a century ago getting a divorce was almost unthinkable and domestic violence never prosecuted. Women couldn't vote in 1909. Going back a few centuries, women couldn't even inherit property, and often died from having too many children.

I need to remember this when I hear reports of the Taliban taking over sections of Pakistan. Things evolve over time, usually in conjunction with the spread of democracy and the lifting of poverty. Men who don't feel oppressed feel less compelling to oppress at home as the only realm in which they can feel powerful.

I really have nothing but contempt for the right wing in this country, but I take little satisfaction in it. Okay, I lie. I take a great deal of satisfaction in it. After what they did under Bush, I want them to twist in the wind, I love how they are making ridiculous fools of themselves with their hyberbolic denunciations of everything and refusal to offer any constructive alternative solutions.

But I was born under Eisenhower, and as much as I would have probably voted for Adlai Stevenson, I'm pretty sure there were few democrats who dreaded what would happen when he lost. Eisenhower was a smart, practical man. He wasn't an ideologue. He wasn't particularly progressive either, but the country probably needed the social upheaval of the 60s to make the way for civil rights and Johnson's Great Society. Eisenhower was prescient enough to warn about the military-industrial complex-it's an extraordinary farewell speech.

I can't for the life of me understand why Republicans look back to Reagan to "reinvent" themselves, and not to Eisenhower. Reagan was a doddering fool who started us on the ridiculous path of tax cuts for the rich and monster deficits. Eisenhower got us out of Korea and presided over relative prosperity. He wouldn't pretend global warming was a liberal conspiracy.

The Republican descent into ideology, power for power's-sake, and messianic self-righteousness has helped create the kind of conditions that ensure the continued threat of fundamentalism and terrorism. The trillions dollars spent in Iraq could have alleviated a helluva lot of poverty, put a lot of Muslim girls through school, fed the progress to more open-minded societies. The consequences of their misrule may be irreversible; climate change alone threatens the planet existentially.

As I said, I have no affection for the right, but I do think a healthy, civil, two-party system where fringes remain on the fringe is good for democracy. Where are all the moderate Republicans who used to provide balance and some common sense, who didn't fetishize tax cuts as the solution to everything? The Republicans who were likely to be your small-town doctor making a house-call, the farmer who didn't want subsidies, the fair-minded sheriff who hunted but didn't see the point of assault weapons? Why won't they take their party back?

MCO 2009

War Crimes

2009-04-23T09:54:00.000-07:00

I can't say I'm the least bit shocked at any of the revelations coming out about the prevalence and severity of torture occurring during the last 8 years. Olbermann and Maddow can say it better than I can so I won't go into all the chilling details nor debunk all the insane reasoning. What I will note is the absurdity of claiming torture "works" when one suspect was waterboarded 83 times and the other 183 times. If it "worked," a few times would easily suffice to get all the information necessary to find out actionable intelligence.
183 times means it's NOT working.

The men in our custody have been told that Americans are violent infidels capable of montrous cruelty--torture just proves them right. When these suspects are treated humanely, they are far more likely to start questioning what they've been told about America, and give helpful information--if they have it. American agents, working in a foreign country and culture (often having no command of native languages) often pick up someone low-level or not involved at all. The bad-guy's drivers brother-in-law, as it were. (The real life CIA is nothing like it is in the movies. It's full of people making mistakes, pursuing faulty leads, getting the wrong guy.) And even if they might have the right guy, whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?" Why should one have to be a citizen to be due this fundamental assumption?

What happened was that Cheney and Bush didn't get the intelligence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda, because there was no such link. So the order went out to continue the torture until the suspects finally figured out what they had to say to make it stop. Whatever they coughed up, whether verifiable or not, was then seized on by Cheney et al. to justify the invasion, with no details given as to how the intelligence was obtained for reasons of "national security." The torture "worked" when they said what the torturers wanted to hear. Might as well be the Spanish Inquisition.

The truly pathological part is that once this phony narrative was established, it assumed the status of "fact" in the minds of those propounding it. When the Nazis lied, they knew they were lying. When they said they were "resettling" Jews, they knew damn well they were killing them. I honestly think Cheney believed the intelligence he made sure was invented.

It's the scariest kind of mendacity, when the liars believe their own lies. I also think George Bush believed it when he said "The United States does not torture." He'd read the memo from his lawyer saying it wasn't.

Torture is never, ever, ever okay. (Big Mark, if you defend it, I will reject your comment. Read Matt Alexanders "How to Break a Terrorist" instead.) It may be dreadful for the victim, but it is soul-killing for those who perpetrate it. And it begs the question, where was the conscience of these people? (Hence today's Hy-Art). When did their self-righteousness cloud out their sense of right and wrong? When did they start to believe you are an American before you're a human being? A citizen of this country before you are a citizen of the planet?

The truth is the vast bulk of this torture, from waterboarding to Abu Ghraib, had nothing to do with getting intelligence. It was about revenge. These people had dared attack the United States, had dared question our power and hegemony, and that justified any amount of abuse. We dehumanized our enemy and in doing so, lost our humanity.

I'm relieved that Obama put a stop to these techniques, but make no mistake about it, they continue all over and America and certainly the world. Things go on in prisons and detentions centers in this country that are cruel, inhuman and degrading. I was stuck in a tiny holding room with 50 other men for 4 hours once, and this goes on every day. People kick drugs in prison, unattended, all the time, and if you've ever watched someone go through that, the lack of even minimal medical supervision is horrific. There isn't enough staff--we want criminals off the street, but we don't want to pay for anything resembling rehabilitation. Most of the discipline and punishment in prison occurs between inmates, doing the dirty work so that the administration can keep technically "clean" hands. If you declare that you will refuse to engage in any violence under any circumstances, as in a race riot, you risk getting beaten to a pulp for it, and forced into protective custody. Inmates are victimized by other inmates all the time--the adminstration is too overwhelmed to prevent it, or doesn't really care.

Human beings who exercise dominance over other human beings will abuse that power, no one is exempt. Thinking we are different, just by virtue of our Americanness, is the height of arrogance. If it still means anything special to be American, we need to investigate and prosecute the torturers to the fullest exent of the law, period.

Insanity and Unmanageablity

2009-04-22T12:59:00.000-07:00

I googled
"unmanageability" and the first result was of Brad Pitt in "Burn After Reading" in which (unbeknownst to me) he plays an alcoholic. Then I googled "insanity" and the first result was this skydiving poster. So I layered one over the other at exactly 50%. Have I stumbled upon the successor to Hy-Art? Googlebrids?

Those two words were on my mind because I was reminded by a story I heard in the rooms of AA that insanity is not always preceded or even accompanied by unmanageability. My life as a dealer is a perfect example: all that money made my life much more manageable, practically speaking; but doing something with such horrific potential consquences was the height of insanity. That's one of the reasons I didn't choose to get sober when it would have made all kinds of sense to do so. I thought my life was supposed to be unmanageable--as it reads in Step 1--and if I paid my bills and walked my dog and kept my appointments, I didn't qualify. I didn't get "unmanageability" until guards were managing my life 24/7.

Of course, insanity is more than enough qualification for AA, but that sort of self-diagnosis is almost impossible. Insane people never think they're insane; sane people question their sanity all the time. That's why Bill Wilson put unmanageability before sanity in the 12 steps. He knew a person in the throes of alcoholic insanity will tell you they are the sanest person in the room and believe it. (What could be saner than wanting to feel better?) But when they lose their job, car, family etc., only then can it be undeniable that their lives have become unmanageable.

I've probably shared most of this before, but in downloading my entire blog (5 years worth) to a text file, it came out to over 2400 pages, so good luck writing that much and not repeating onself. I also saved all the work I had on the website, and realized my output of art has been prodigious. (I almost said "insane")

The creative life is the only one I want to live--the only one that is both sane and manageable.

MCO 2009

This is What Happens When I Skip a Day

2009-04-20T10:10:00.000-07:00

Well, yes, first, I do note the irony that producing an amusing piece of art about not procrastinating, is, at heart, an act of procrastination.

My poor Libra-American soul is locked in a daily search for balance. From the blog, email, TV, and Facebook, I get an enormous amount of immediate pleasure and gratification, not the least because these are interactive forms of communication (Yes, even TV, because watching it is a shared experience with everyone else watching it.) Writing is just me and the screen and my brain. Once a week or so I post another piece of the memoir and get a few reactions, but 90% of the gratification is what I derive from writing. In order to get that other 10%, as in the pleasure of perhaps publishing it and being read on a large scale, I have to engage over and over in that solitary process that is rather like going to the gym. Right after you're finished it feels marvelous, but they don't call it working out f0r nothing. So I tend to choose what feels good in the short term (being connected with people) over the longterm cultivation of a career that has tremendous meaning for me. It's a problem. But a quality problem, by any measure.

You'd think with all the walking around the neighborhood I do that I would witness more actual acts of littering, but it's very rare. Yesterday was one of the few times; a man in his van waiting double-parked for someone dropped an empty pack of American Spirit cigarettes from his window. I really need to have a better reaction rehearsed, but what came out was along the lines of: "Why do you do this? WHY? Why can't you just take it from the car, and into in the house and put it in the trash?" To which he responded with his own question {insert Armenian accent} "Why you pick up the trash when they pick it up?" It was clear he was talking about the weekly streetsweeping machines. "Oh c'mon. " I answered. "They don't pick it up, I pick it up! And you can make a little effort to help out!" At which point I walked over the the dumpster and tossed in his pack. "See how easy it is!" I'm happy to say he seemed to be hanging his head a little, though the satisfaction of shaming a litterer was less than the discomfort of confronting a stranger.

It's funny because I'd just walked the dog down a parallel street where I never pick up trash, and was disgusted by how absolutely clogged with litter it was. The street was strewn with plastic bags, fast food wrappers, Starbucks and Jamba Juice cups, and endless empty cigarette packs. The streetsweepers get a fraction of it, and certainly don't get anything on the sidewalks. The only reason any of this finally gets picked up is because the apartment buildings have gardeners that come once a month and usually will clean whatever is there, but that leaves the area trashed most of the time. And this guy knows it. He has eyes.

What I saw was a sense of entitlement combined with very little sense that anything he does has an impact. It's a weird combination of "I pay taxes so I want to see what I pay them for" combined with "nothing I do makes any difference, so it doesn't matter if I litter" (and then probably complain about what a crappy neighborhood he lives in.) It's maddening!

What I should have probably said is: "Have some pride in you neighborhood! Aren't you proud to be Armenian? Don't you want to keep Little Armenia beautiful?" I think I might try that tack next time.

And since I've totally blown my non-procrastination vow with this long-ass entry, I'd like to share one last thing. I reconnected with an old friend on Facebook, and she offered condolences about my brother, adding "you've had to endure way too much for one family." She was right, of course, in that two of us dead out of five is a huge amount of loss. At the same time, the thought that immediately sprang to my mind was "no, no, we're actually extremely blessed." Perhaps I'm projecting my own sense of amazement every time I realize how extraordinary my own survival through both AIDS and drug addiction has been, but if I look at my sisters, I know that every day they also look at their 2 children respectively, and there can be no measuring the joy that comes the fact they are healthy and happy. And we all profoundly appreciate each other and my Mom on a daily basis as well, not to mention that none of us worries about where our next meal is coming from. That's huge.

The truth is that no one gets through life without their "fair" share of grief. Nobody. Once you accept the inevitability of that reality in your own life, you can stop railing against the what, and concentrating on the how. How can I put these events in a perspective that helps me live with them, find meaning in them?

For example, I have noticed that the worst traumas endured by my family-Luke's death, my Dad's death, my imprisonment, Steve's suicide--have never been closer than 5 years apart. That has been enormously comforting to me. It also gives me great compassion for those who suffer multiple losses in a short amount of time. Those of us"lucky" enough to have our tragedies spaced out can be there for those who are overwhelmed, helping them get through it. How beautiful is that?

MCO 2009

The "Other" Marc and Me

2009-04-18T14:43:00.000-07:00

These are two chairs designed by my friend Jerry, back when we had an art studio. Kinda cool, eh? And oddly appropriate for what I have to blog about.

I have a doppelganger, another Marc Olmsted, who, wouldn't you know it, is a writer. He has recently run into some difficulty, as he reads his published poetry at workshops and festivals, and well-meaning researchers google him for a bio and come up with my blog and history. You can imagine the confusion.

He is a very nice guy I friended on Facebook, and as I had told him my legal name (as it still is on my license) was actually spelled "Mark," he gently asked me if I couldn't possible revert to that spelling. I've been using "Marc" creatively for years, simply because my mother named me after my grandfather, Marcel. My father had been the one who'd insisted on the "k," because he didn't want me to be made fun of. (It was 1958, and America was very xenophobic.) I suppose there was some pretentiousness in my choice as well, a need for a nom de plume, a desire to be a little less American, a little more exotic. But I started using it back in the 80s, way before google brought my the "other" Marc to my attention.

It would have been easy enough for me to be an asshole about this, but let's be honest: the Marc of 4 years of blogging and some magazine articles is easier to change than the Marc listed in anthologies and who can be found on Amazon.com. It means giving up the website, but I'd started that pre-blog, and really don't need it to show off my work or my poetry, which I post here.

Eventually, I will even adopt a new "k" email address, because there has been minor confusion when the name on my license differs from the name on my resume. Still, it's technically all sort of a pain, all that exporting and cancelling, so I just wanted points for my incredibly noble self-sacrifice.

MCO 2009

Follow Your Conscience

2009-04-17T10:26:00.000-07:00

We are in the midst of trying to figure out whether my Mom should go back east for my nephew's (her grandson's) wedding in August. It is such a difficult decision. On the one hand, the wedding is a cause for great joy, not to mention an opportunity for her to see dear friends from New York. On the other hand, all things logistical fill her with dread. Getting to the airport. Needing a bathroom during the flight. Jet lag. The noise and music of a reception. The anticipation of having to get back on a plane. And above all, her everpresent sense of disorientation whenever she does something unfamiliar.

Luckily there is a little time to get a ticket, so we are starting by letting her know she can give herself permission not to go. The whole process is exacerbated by her extreme suggestibility. If one of us chimes in that we think she should go, she shows enthusiasm. If we bring up any considerations, trying to anticipate her concerns, she jumps on that bandwagon. Sometimes I wish we lived in France, and then we'd be three hours away, max, by high speed train, to anywhere in the country.

Speaking of high speed trains, bravo for Obama putting that on the national agenda. Unfortunately, on a topic of arguably more importance, I am very disappointed in his decision not to pursue practitioners of torture, and I think he is succumbing to some behind-the-scenes pressure from the CIA. This should not be a presidential decision, this should be determined by the Attorney General or a Special Prosecutor determining if the law was broken, after an investigation. The idea that a corrupt Justice department can issue a memo saying if you let someone sleep once every 11 days, than it is not torture (one of the more obscene determinations), ergo, those who enforce that technique are absolved, is ridiculous. Soldiers, CIA officers, etc. need to know that in this country, if a superior officer tells you to do something wrong, you do not do it, period. You don't need a lawyer to tell you whether almost drowning someone repeatedly is torture or not. That we are even debating this turns my stomach.

I concede that the punishment should be far more severe for those who ordered the torture than for those who carried it out, but the signals must be clear for all future soldiers. You need to follow your conscience over following an order. End of story. (And the medical personnel who participated should all lose their licenses, and be pubically shamed.)

MCO 2009

P.S. What I want to know is, are there any soldiers/personnel who didn't follow orders? Were they punished? If so, they need to get a ticker tape period. If not, how sad that there was probably no dearth of willing volunteers.

Be Two or Not Be Two

2009-04-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

In one of the boxes of my work that had been in storage at my brother's, I found this poem that I'd utterly forgotten about, that evidently I hadn't thought worthy of putting into the chapbook I'd made back in 2002.

I was at the height of my addiction when I wrote it, and you can tell from themes that love and death were on my mind. (Not that I was conciously suicidal, but addiction is, at heart, slow self-annihilation.) I thought I was in love with someone; in fact I was addicted to him as he was addicted to the drugs I supplied him.

It was an affair between educated, well-bred drug addicts who had money, so even though unhealthy by any standard, it could masquerade as fairly functional. He was working, a good job; and though I was dealing, I could point to the necessity of supplementing my disability income. And as a very busy tweeker, writing poety and arting it, I could pretend the dealing was a minor sideline subsidizing my true vocation. There was a semblance of truth to this narrative for about six months, but the relationship continued past all illusion that it could ever be "normal." No such scenario was remotely possibly while we both used. There was some passion, some pretty decent conversations, and some intense sex; but there was also an extraordinary amount of pain. For him, it was a friendship that turned sexual under the influence of meth; for me, it was much more, and the sense of rejection I felt, of being used, was awful. I tried breaking things off many times, it took prison to wean me off both the meth and him. He barely wrote me when I was inside, which was devastating, but looking back the best thing that could have happened. I finally got hurt enough to get angry, and that anger was invaluable in getting over him. (I wish my mother could get angry at my brother, but she can't.)

Out of it came two invaluable things. 1) some very decent if very painful poetry; 2) an intimate understanding of the pathology of codependency. I know the difference, now, between love and infatuation. I may not have a husband (pronounced "huz-bin") but the relationships I have had are marked by mutual affection, respect and concern for each other. All my relationships are now threesomes, with the God of our understanding as the third-party.

I'm still hoping for another result from the relationship, that he will follow me into the rooms instead of continuing to control and manage his addiction. But I have learned to respect the journey of others, including the reality that not everybody uses the 12 steps to get sober. Some people continue "recreationally" for years, some people finally find the willpower to quit, some people get involved in relationships in which they quit for their partner.

Good for them, I suppose. It just seems very odd to me to that someone could be so close to someone else who was as hardcore an addict as I was can see them get successfully sober, and instead of imitating how they did it, still try to keep treating their own addiction with endless attempts at course corrections--as if getting back to the gym, for example, could conceivably do battle with such a powerful substance as meth. How many times do you have to fall off the wagon before you try getting on a different wagon, the one where there are so many arms to surround you, to keep you steady?

He knows where to turn to if he chooses, I've made that clear. But I've stopped checking in, it's too frustrating to hear, yet again, that he's "almost out of the woods." He still makes me crazy, but now, for entirely different reasons.

MCO 2009

HIV All Over the Place

2009-04-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

I was asked to contribute a short article to the SIN (Strength in Numbers) newsletter on being HIV in prison, and this is what I came up with. It amazes me: I can spend all day unable to work on my own stuff, suffering from distraction after distraction, but when I have a request/deadline/expectation, I can spin something out in a few hours.

Most men in prison have several things is common. They’ve almost all been there before, and they’re almost all straight. They are largely undereducated, and almost all have drug problems. On the outside, they’re marginalized from the “mainstream,” but on the inside, they are the mainstream.

Those with HIV who go to prison are almost all gay, and in prison are marginalized on either count. At large urban county jails, they may be in gay dorms, but when they “catch the chain” – or get sent to state or federal prison—it’s a scary, demoralizing experience. (Not that the gay dorms are a picnic, but it is much less lonely there.)

When I spent 9 months in California jails and prisons in 2004, (after being convicted of dealing crystal meth) I never knew whether it was homophobia or fear of AIDS that caused me more problems. In fact, those who felt compelled to express either were mostly reacting to perceived peer pressure, trying to figure out what reaction would curry them the most favor from the shotcallers and others who held sway. (The same men who couldn’t stop at a red light on the outside were often the most slavish rule enforcers on the inside.)

Such was the level of ignorance, that on my first day at the prison where I would spend my final four months, at a meeting of the whites (racial politics still rules prison life) we were warned by Jimmy, our nominal head, that he would personally “deal” with anybody whom he saw smoking or eating “after” someone who might be gay or HIV+. Later on Jimmy befriended me because I was funny and had a full locker--thanks to plenty of money sent to me at home to spend at canteen. He later convinced the other whites it would be okay to allow Earl and me—I made and actually became bunkies with another poz guy--to use the communal clippers to cut our hair.

I was lucky. I could pass for straight when I had to (like during the first weeks at any new prison) and had the resources to be generous. I was also in minimum security, got plenty of mail, and knew I would change my life when I got out and never go back to prison. As unpleasant as being there was for me, it could not be compared to the time done by ethnic minorities for whom being gay or HIV+ often qualifies them for pariah status in or out of prison. For the transgendered, it is even worse, and truly a profound miscarriage of justice that they are forced to be quartered with their biological instead of chosen sex. They have the toughest and most isolated time of anyone incarcerated.

My advice: Don’t break the law, and if you have a drug problem, get help. My plea: Don’t forget your HIV+, gay and transgendered brothers and sisters inside. They have zero access to power, and zero clout to change things. We must be their voice out here.

Click on the picture to read a poem called "Identity," that I wrote in prison. And since I'm all about HIV and/or prison today, here's an article on the state of AIDS in the South. It's like we're living in two different countries.

MCO 2009

Mobama Lisa

2009-04-14T11:41:00.000-07:00

God forbid that I should just start writing first thing in the morning. But if I get an artisitic idea, I have to put it out there, hence, please Welcome Mobama Lisa to the world. (I was sure I was going to find some version of this on the internet, but I might have actually been the first to think of it.)

That's it for today. (I'm working on my tendency to procrastinate.)

MCO 2009

Periodic Romance Report

2009-04-13T10:42:00.000-07:00

My cerebral cortex is all over the place in the past 24 hours. I took one of those emotional dips yesterday afternoon for which I was unprepared. I never know if there's a real cause or one I grab onto to explain a dip I'm gonna feel anyway, but it did seem to relate to a sense of discontent in the relationship department.

I ran into Mister Mister, and he was flirtatious and affectionate, and yet the wall is still there. He seems to be perfectly happy--as far as concerns me--with the occasional roll in the hay, spiritual conversation and funny texting. And even though I enjoy all of these interactions enormously, I want more. I think. Or maybe I just want him to want more. Or at least to be open to exploring more. When we've talked about it, he says his reluctance has nothing to do with me, is internal. I have chosen to believe that for the most part, but after a while, it's hard not to take personally. I realize I would feel like crap if he got seriously involved with someone else, and wonder if I should protect myself from being in that position.

The reality is that when it comes to my love life, I flirt alot, but I almost never say the words: "Do you want to go out on a date?" I sort of wait for one of my compliments to hit a target, or vice versa, and then stumble into the occasional undefined "relationship," usually when there are logistical challenges to make things even harder. Most of the time, I end up getting most of my romantic stimulation from brief conversations that show promise. That's fun up to a point, but you can't kiss a possibility, and you can't cuddle with it.

Maybe it was watching Julie Andrews last night as Fraulein Maria, but I've decided to face my fears. Or fear. The really silly one, considering it never actually happens. No one has EVER said, dripping with contempt: "Go out with you? I don't think so." And yet, this is the exact fear that holds me back. (I had to think about it to realize it.) The "worst" that has every happened is that someone had a relationship I didn't know ab0ut, and they are completely flattered by my attention.

And what if I did bark up the wrong tree, misread the cues? If they just didn't go for me, and told me so? Would I turn to salt, be stoned by angry villagers? At the very least, I'd probably get credit for asking, just as I give credit to anyone who asks, even if the answer is no.

Of course, thinking it through doesn't mean I'm not still nervous about the idea. So, be nervous Marc. Be nervous and do it anyway. Uncomforable feelings never killed anyone.

No risk, no reward.

MCO 2009

Rich, Renewal, Redemption

2009-04-12T08:23:00.000-07:00

Frank Rich, as usual, does an excellent job of dissecting the damage done to America by the "money culture" of the past decade. I thought I'd throw in my two cents about the reason for this, by stealing from my article for Being Alive, which is turn stolen a bit from my blog of a few days ago. (Can I sue myself for plagiarism?):

...I’m also realizing that the fear that so marked over a decade of my life was not confined to me, or even to other long-term survivors. I’m actually convinced that AIDS, along with things like global warming and terrorism, have created a society-wide anxiety with far-reaching effects. For the first time in history, anyone watching the news was inflicted with a sense that the continued existence of the world could not be depended on.

From the hope for instant stardom on reality TV, to the emphasis on short-term profit on Wall Street or via housing speculation, Americans seemed to have become fixated on cramming all the rewards or excitement of a long life into a short time frame. It’s as if everybody, not just people with AIDS, became afraid they wouldn’t be around in another decade.

I’ve learned to think in terms of living a whole life again, and I’m hoping our new President is leading the country in the direction of that kind of thinking as well. Surviving AIDS and addiction has taught me the difference between living in the moment and living for the moment. I take things a day at a time, but I also plan ahead. I have my future back.

I think this sequeways nicely into an Easter theme, n'est-ce pas? I've written this before, but the focus by the Church on the actual physical ressurection of Christ is silly. In a world in which lives were often short and brutish, defined by enormous cultural and political constraints, revolutionary change could only occur if people believed it was possible. The resurrection story was invented to 1) position Christian faith as more powerful (i.e. magical) than pagan/Hellenic belief systems with which they competed; 2) reinforce the narrative of that suffering was redemptive, that endings-however painful, like the crucifixion--were often necessary prerequisites to change.

The ressurectional theme obviously resonates in my own life powerfully, even if my spiritual awakening is not Christ-specific. I also can't help but note that this past year we had, in California, the painful reversal of the right to gay marriage, and just in time for Easter, Iowa and Vermont renewing the movement in the most unexpected places. Change is a'coming.

MCO 2009

All That

2009-04-11T07:31:00.000-07:00

I enhanced the tile work of this bench in this abandoned hotel in Palm Springs. I so enjoy imagining all the people who sat there, back in the 60s when Palm Springs was very MadMen, a lot of cigarettes and cocktails and Frank Sinatra.

I came across this quote:
In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose. -Madame Anne Sophie Swetchine, mystic (1782-1857)

Is she right? I don't know. I think an argument can be made that we start out with nothing but illusions--after all, what is childhood? As we get older we gradually shed them. In our youth I think it makes us feel mature to do so, when we get into middle-age, I think it makes us a little sad.

But not too sad. It's White Party weekend in Palm Springs--it's gotten so well known I just heard it talked about on NPR's California Report. Ten of thousands of gay men descend in their desert to shake their booty with their shirts off at a series of events. And I guarantee you, the vast majority of them are high, mostly on Ecstasy.

I'm both extraordinarily grateful not to be there, and a little bit wistful. The only circuit party I ever went to where the drugs worked perfectly was at the White Party a decade ago. It really felt like I was at the center of the universe--it was the complete glorification of the senses, which masquerades quite well as a spiritual experience when you're in it.

If this had been what every circuit party was like, I would have become a devotee, as many do. But for every seeming alignment of the planets, there were 5 times in which fun was had for maybe an hour. Then you were too high, or not high enough; you felt completely inadequate in the midst of the Adonises; a friend needed caretaking or lost his hotel key or wanted to go back to the room with someone else; on the middle of a crowded dance floor you felt terribly alone and lonely. It always cost too much, and the trip home you were drained and hungover.

So I am able to glance back like I'm able to admire the tiled bench in this photo. I had more real "fun" last night at a meeting in which I exchanged 7 sincere hugs, and laughed heartily about 12 times. There was real love there, not its sparkly illusion.

When it comes to the White Party, I'm so glad I've been there, done that; and certainly don't begrudge the young 'uns their fun. But all that glitters is not gold.
MCO 2009

The Second Half

2009-04-10T13:49:00.000-07:00

There was also an abandoned hotel in Palm Springs I walked by with Gaza, and here's a slightly enhanced view of the tennis court.

It's been very strange. I've been running into people I know well, mostly from AA, who didn't know about my brother. It's not something you lead with, at the same time it's hard not to mention it if you honestly answer the question "How've you been." Then you have to cram in a lot of information into a minute or two, to the point where it sounds rehearsed. But what are you going to do? People care, and this is a good thing. They want to love and support you, and this is a good thing. You want to share the burden of life's tragedies, and this is a good thing.

I finished my article for Being Alive, and am waiting to find out if they run and it and when. I've also been asked to be an a blogradio show for Poz people, to discuss being HIV in prison. It would seem between HIV, prison and the memoir, the second half of my life seems fairly defined by the first half.

I guess, to a great extent, that applies to most of us. If you get married and have kids, that usually determines much of the second half of your life. Career are sometimes shifted, (Sheria), but usually doctors remain doctors, teachers, teachers etc.

Discuss this idea amongst yourselves. I'll come back when you're finished.

MCO 2009

As You Can See

2009-04-09T13:41:00.001-07:00

As you can see, I've "monetized" this blog.

Please support my advertisers and hence me. [INSERT SMILEY FACE]

The Other Side

2009-04-09T10:41:00.000-07:00

At long last, my friend Michael and I made the trek to Lake Hollywood, which, as far as we can tell, is only accessible via some winding-ass roads that serve to discourage tourists. This is thoroughly understandable, considering the people who live up in the Hills are paying a lot to do so, they want a modicum of privacy. In any event, it's the closest one can get to the Hollywood sign, and I snapped this shot (only slightly enhanced by Photoshop.)

I'm working on the article I promised for the next Being Alive newsletter, which is basically an overview of 25 years of living with HIV. As I trace my history, I realize how completely my addiction accelerated in conjunction with the advent of the drugs that would make me one of the lucky few to survive. It's almost as real hope became justified, I committed more to the idea that it wasn't justified. I lived for the moment instead of in the moment. It's not the same thing.

I found myself feeling a real revulsion for my choices. How could I have been so contemptuous of this extraordinary gift of life? I was one of the few who might make it in the face of horrific odds, and what did I do? Became a daily user, a drug dealer, sped onto the Darkside Highway. What a fucking asshole. (And yes, I recognize that there might be some displaced anger for my brother here for his contempt of the gift of life.)

And yet, thank God for it, for all of it. I'm so grateful for every bit of my journey, because it led me to a life of recovery that is so much richer than it would have otherwise been. I have friends who came back from the brink, who stopped using out of willpower or fear or making a relationship their higher power. I'm not judging their lives, but I'm certainly not envious of them. They stopped in the tunnel and turned around. I came out on the other side. My story isn't just fodder for dinner party anecdotes about my wasted youth, I get to help others with it.

That's huge.

But it doesn't mean that Marc circa 10 years ago doesn't still deserve a good slapping around. SMACK! Knock some sense into my past self.

MCO 2009

Shifting Back

2009-04-07T12:19:00.000-07:00

This is a church I passed in Palm Springs that I took some pictures of while I walked the dog. Photoshop makes it really pop.

David and I had a very nice weekend, spending much of it with my buddy Ray, who was also kind enough to show us some real estate possibilities in the area. After seeing a bunch of places, both houses and condos, yesterday morning David and I had a long talk about what he was really looking for--an investment? a place to live? a place to vacation? We were able to sort out one thing: that he needed to get out of L.A. more often. (Visiting my Mom so much over the past three years, not to mention the sojourn with Tony, has taken me out of the city fairly often.) I also confronted David's haste to beat age to the punch. You've never seen a 49-year old who talks more about being an old man ready to die. Even if it's cloaked in humor, there seems to be an underlying fatalism, a desire to subvert the inevitable by co-opting it. It's as if he so dreads growing older that he's decided to make best friends with the idea. I think the result is not appreciating enough all the considerable blessings of his life in the here and now.

I like Palm Springs well enough, but it just doesn't have the charm of a Provincetown or even a Santa Fe. I don't like the sense that 4 months a year, you feel completely baked. Mostly I feel too old to make new friends. I could, but I don't want to. And the idea of going back and forth on the 10 freeway is fraught with potential woe. Yesterday we had to deal with an hour long back-up because of a jacknifed tractor trailer. Talk about tarnishing a nice weekend. Any sense of being relaxed or rejuvenated is impossible to retain when it takes 90 minutes to move 5 miles.

I got the best phone call this morning from Molly, who, after 5 1/2 months of an arduous process of negotiation, letter-writing, and articles in the press, finally managed to obtain a new, reasonable mortgage on her adorable little house right down the street from Tony in Nashville. It was the best news I could have heard, and if this kind of change is occurring around the country, then I really have hope for this country and what Obama's leadership is finally bringing with it.

I think what we may have been witnessing over the past decade was a massive shift to fear-based thinking. Between AIDS, global warming and 9/11, among other things, events have telegraphed the message that we can't trust the future to be in any way predictable. Look how the internet has made life almost unrecognizable in little more than a decade. The result has been an emphasis on the present, on instant gratification, on the deal. Millions have reacted to the sense of uncertainty by trying to cram a lifetime into a few years.I want my trip now, my bonus now, my big car now. Corporations stopped choosing to build long term wealth in favor short term gain---GM even killed the very successful electric car because it wouldn't have made money for them any time soon. Talk about a shortsighted decision.

What I'm hoping is that Obama's new perspective is part of a shift back to thinking we have a future again, that we don't need to flip a house in two years or become famous right now (look how many thousands try out for American Idol every year.) I know of what I speak, because living on the 6-month plan for the better part of 20 years severely distorted my thinking. It's only recently that it's occurred to me that it wasn't just those of us certain they were going to die of AIDS that were thinking that way, that perhaps this emphasis on living for short-term gratification may have been society-wide.

There's a new entry on the memoir.

MCO 2009

Que Sera, Sera

2009-04-04T10:26:00.000-07:00

So I'm off to Palm Springs in a little bit, off to meet a Facebook friend and do a little househunting with David. Now that I have my own car, an arrangement where we keep the apartment here and have a place out there is not out of the question.

My relationship with David is so particular. In some ways, it's perfect, because we get along so well, never fight, and enjoy each other's company. But at the same time, it's so comfortable that I don't feel the unpleasant parts of being single. That loneliness is often what drives you to take the kind of risks and make the kind of effort to find a romantic relationship.

Am I really willing to forgo that for the rest of my life?

Luckily, these questions don't weigh too heavily on me. What will be will be.

Here's some pix of the last trip to Chico.
'MCO 2009

You Never Know What You're Going to Blog About

2009-04-03T09:37:00.000-07:00

Well, this morning I woke up to a Facebook Status Update by one of the cutest guys I know, which read: "I heart Rush Limbaugh." At first I thought it was some kind of sarcasm, and I checked his page, and found out he was a Log Cabin Republican who had posted a bunch of anti-Obama updates, all the while as he belong to every Repeal Prop 8 group imaginable.

I can't believe how much this upset me. He's not only incredibly cute, but incredibly nice. How could he be so incredibly stupid? I had to defriend him. Just can't bear that shit.

I found some solace when walking the dog. An Armenian grandpa walking his 2-year old grandson in his stroller crossed the street so that the little one could pet Gaza. This little boy had the most amazing blue eyes I'd ever seen. It was such a tender little moment.

Then I come back home and my friend Billy had written me this:

I challenge you to come up with a character description for the fictional character Arianna Allred. I saw a woman today who reminded me of a cross between Arianna Huffington and Gloria Allred and I figured there had to be a good joke in there somewhere, but I couldn't come up with one.

I'm pretty sure you all know who Arianna Huffington is, but some of you may not know that Gloria Allred is a well-known feminist lawyer out here who is rather comfortable in front of a camera, to put it mildly. Never one to shirk from a challenge, I came up with this bio (and the photo, which is a 50/50 amalgam of the two women) :

Arianna Chavez was the widow of Cesar, then in 1986 married the tycoon and adventurer Ted "Red" Allred, who disappeared balloning in 1993, soon after being knighted. She then dusted off an old law degree and began LadyRedLaw, a chain of cheap do-it-yourself legal clinics, making millions before selling it in 2002. In 2004 she ran for California Attorney General and narrowly lost in a bitter campaign in which charges were made that her ex-husband had embezzled millions and faked his own death. Briefly rumored as a Vice-Presidential possiblity in 2008, she is a confidante to Michelle Obama and appears regularly on Politically Incorrect and as a pundit on MSNBC. She has two daughters and an autistic son, and is an anti-vaccine activist. Tracey Ullman has famously parodied her Argentinan accent and friendship with Laurie David on her show, States of the Union.

Maybe I should be writing satirical novels in the vein of Christopher Buckley or Tom Wolfe.

By the way, I'm going to start posting excerpts from the memoir at a site that will accept comments, but only from those people I pre-approve. Please email me if you'd like to be one of them (you'll need to be a follower of this blog) and I will direct you to the site. (If you don't care to comment, you can still read it at the usual site.) I need to do this because my cyberstalker has reared his ugly head again. Although for this blog, I merely have resumed my practice of rejecting his comments without reading them, though I do transfer them to another file in case I ever need a paper trail to prove harassment. It's actually very empowering not to read hateful things said about you, especially when you know the hater is still reading you.
It must be very frustrating for you, Dixon Hurlocker (two of his aliases) to know that nobody is listening. Not my other readers, not me. Your venom just disappears into the deleted internet, but I'd watch out, because the Karmic Gods may be taking note.
MCO 2009

Different Kinds of Grief

2009-04-02T11:32:00.000-07:00

I got back a bunch of boxes I'd stored at my brother's, including some containing several photo albums. This photo is one of my favorites, taken in the mid-eighties, in San Francisco or maybe San Diego.

Ah, the beauty of youth, as my aunt said, describing her own grandchildren. There's my sister Erica, my brother Luke, my mom, and Steve. Luke was already HIV+, but didn't know it yet. He was a young doctor with the future spread wide in front of him. Isn't he great looking? Steve was no less Steve, with all that entailed as far as obsessive thinking goes, but he did have the hope that most of us have just being in our thirties. A lot of things seem possible at 36 that you have to close the door on at 56.

The death of Luke (5 or 6 years after this photo was taken) entailed a grief of loss. He had an eccentric brain (trust me on this) but he was interesting, loving in a slightly stern way. (I needed stern--he diagnosed my alcoholism way before anyone else did.) His absence was felt so deeply and still is, by my family. We miss him, pure and simple.

By the end, Steve and I barely spoke, perhaps twice a year. This state of affairs evolved over a period of 30 years, when it became clear how many conversations we had ended badly. The grief I feel is not one of loss. I don't "miss" him. My grief comes the realization that my brother, as maddening as he was, was in enormous pain. I can debunk all the claims he made about its cause, but whether it was physical or psychic doesn't really matter. It was enough for him to take drastic action for it to end. And when I get past my anger at him for what this act did to my mother, I'm still left with the cold hard fact that being here was intolerable for him.

When I allow this to sink in, it feels awful. No doubt I hold onto the anger because it is far easier than feeling the sadness. Frankly, I don't allow myself to feel it for long. It starts to bring up all the grief over Luke and the long roll call of my friends dead from AIDS. I just can't go there. I have done my time.

And yet there is that much more comfort in knowing that Steve is no longer in that pain. With Luke, it was almost impossible to find a silver lining, even if I told myself the financial shenanigans I got into with his credit was just that, a form of redemption. What a convenient lie that was for me.

With Steve, what I can do is refuse to let my life be defined by his pain. I can let him take it with him, and that which I hold onto still need have no bearing on my capacity to love, even if the alcoholic side of me wants to run with it, to let it justify all sorts of things in its name. I can continue to choose the light, even if Steve chose the dark. His choice has nothing to do with mine.

MCO 2009

April Fools 2012

2009-04-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

April 1, 2012

Dear Diary:

Well, we won the Wisconsin primary. Barack told me I can take a few days off, it's not as if we have any serious opposition. Between you and me, I don't really think he needs a spiritual advisor, I learn more from him than he ever learns from me. I think he likes to have me on the campaign trail because I make Michelle laugh and because Sasha and Melia feel they can talk to me about boys in a way they can't talk to their parents. What a stroke of luck--or perhaps fate--it was for us to be scheduled on The View together in 2010, just after Oprah had chosen the memoir for her book club. I love being thought of as her "secret weapon" just as she is Barack's. She sure wowed them in Paris with the French I taught her. That was one fun trip.

Still, I miss Adam. He's on tour so much, and I know how many temptations there are on the road. The "Lambertinis" they call them. Oh well, I was young once, I can't begrudge him his wild oats. When we rendezvous in our Tuscan hideaway he's all mine.

The girl's school in Kabul needs another million--thank God the Foundation is doing well. With the other O's backing me (isn't it wild how that letter became so powerful?) it hasn't been hard to raise money, not to mention with the success of the solar economy. I wish I could supervise things a little closer, but between the election, trying to churn out a new script for La Ullman (I love calling Tracy that), and squeezing in meetings, my hands are kind of full.

Gotta run. Michelle's mother has got it in her head that my nephew can give her a part in his new movie. I've got to see what I can do.

MCO 2012

12 Step Call

2009-03-31T09:47:00.000-07:00

So on my way into the pharmacy, I see a guy sorta checking me out, who rings the vaguest bell imaginable. Not bad looking, early 40s, short, balding, goatee. Turns out he remembers me, from probably a decade or so ago, from the bars.

We catch up a little, he needs a ride to the Social Security office and so I give it to him. Oddly enough, I recognize his voice, which is gravelly. He tells me we got together once and I believe him.

As the conversation progresses, it comes up soon enough that I am sober now and that he used to be. For 13 years. In fact, I smell the vague whiff of alcohol, and there is vodka in the shopping bag he's carrying with various items. We talk about a few things, including the difference between being alone and loneliness. "You don't have to 12-step me" he says. "I know where to go if I want to."

But as I drop him off, he does ask for my number, writing it down in a notebook. There is really no reason for him to take it unless he is hoping to keep the door open to returning to sobriety. He was clean, well-groomed, I imagine he has a room somewhere. But he also referred to some recent hospitalizations.

It's a hard life out there. I hope he calls.

MCO 2009

P.S. Oh "Dixon, " please. Did you really think I wouldn't know you are? {My stalker-commenter tried to slip one in.} Funny how you say you want to get together for coffee, and yet your address is no-reply@blogger.com

Heat and Light

2009-03-30T14:23:00.000-07:00

The static nature of this photo doesn't really do the scene justice. While I was waiting at the light, there was something in the way these guys shifted from one foot to the other that was just plain hot.

The weekend was the perfect contrast to last week up in Chico, in that I was reminded of all those who chose the light instead of the dark at our annual Crystal Meth Anonymous Convention here in Los Angeles. I've never been prouder to be a member of any group. I was also able to share with my mom the intense gratitude that I felt for the journey that got me into a fellowship where so much love and support marked each moment. At least she could feel there was a happy ending to the pain of one of her sons, and that was a gift.

My brother's car runs well, the only problems are that my mechanic tells me it tends to attract thieves, and it's going to cost me about $600 to repair the air conditioning. I tried to exist in L.A. for my first three years here with a car that didn't have A/C - it was the quickest route to become a true believer in global warming imaginable. So it's in the shop till tomorrow, but when it's repaired, I can confront the L.A. heat with a cool head, if a lighter checkbook.

MCO 2009

Meat and Vegetables

2009-03-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

As I spent the last day in Chico, I was glad to get this shot of my Mom, looking almost carefree as she did the crossword puzzle while we sorted away the stuff my sister brought up from my brother's. I think my Mom enjoys listening to my banter with my sister, particularly when I tell her things like "No, the trampoline goes in the porch, not the living room." Young mothers live in such a bubble of putting the needs of their kids first, and sometimes they need reminding that telling their kids, or example, that "this is an adult space, where you are expected to behave accordingly" is doing those kids a huge favor. I wish it was easier to get up there, I feel like my presence is really helpful for my mom and my sister. I may have to make that happen.

One problem is that my brother's 84 Toyota Celica GT, which I'll be picking up later, has a whole lot of miles on it. Even with a rebuilt engine, long trips are doubtful, though city traffic is no picnic either. I may just sell it before I run it into the ground, and buy a new car for myself. Of course what I want is a Smart Car, but I imagine Ford or GM is making it very easy to buy a car these days. (I've been splitting car ownership with David, but if I want to drive up and back to Chico, I have to have my own.)

I'm typing this from the house of my friend Brian, in Sacramento, where I stayed last night. Brian's an old boyfriend from back when I first moved to San Diego and lived with my brother, in 1989. We hadn't seen each other for 18 years. The similarities: no cocktails were consumed at dinner last night, and we're both still TV addicts. The differences: he lives like a real American grown up, in a beautiful house he owns; and I still live in a studio apartment with thrift store furniture. This relative lack of material prosperity on my part doesn't leave me indifferent, at the same time it doesn't reduce my appreciation of the kind of prosperity I do have. I've got three meals a day, hot and cold running water, indoor plumbing, a phone, computer, TV and internet access; everything else is gravy. I don't have much gravy, but I do have wonderful relationships with people, and that is really the stuff of happiness. Brian and I still giggle alot, and we did last night. My only regret is that I don't have a guest room for when he (and his very nice boyfriend) come to visit LA. That's the reason I'd like a house more than any other--for visitors.

No matter the size of where I live, I'd still spend most of my day in front of a screen, in the kitchen, in a church basement or picking up trash. My sense of inner prosperity is simply not dependent on how much I have or how nice my view is. Gravy is great, but I live in the meat and vegetables. That's where the nutrition is.

MCO 2009

The Man Who Wouldn't Get Help

2009-03-26T10:09:00.000-07:00

So my sister brought back a notebook in which my brother kept a diary of sorts intermittingly documenting the last few months. What's clear is the unrelenting nature of his circular reasoning. My brother was obsessed with cause and regret, he literally drove through life with his hands on the rearview mirror. When he realized that he'd had a momentary flash of light that preceded the retinal detachment by a few weeks, he has several entries lamenting why he didn't go to the doctor then, as if he could have known what caused it. "I feel so stupid!" he repeats over and over, as if he can undo what was done with enough self-reproach.

He refers to me twice. Once on December 5, when I stopped by on my way to see my mother, he writes "I forgot how annoying Marc is. He is a master projector. He is depressed so he sees depression in everyone else." This after an argument in which he harangued me with all of his theories about the possible cause of his eye trouble, to which I suggested that he consider a cruise or a vacation to plan for when it was all over. He became furious that I wouldn't engage with him over his theories, and I responded that I didn't see the good in it, what happened what happened and all he could do was deal with it the best he could. This pissed him off more, "Wouldn't you want to know why?" he insisted. I answered, "Steve, of course I'd be curious, but if you can't know, you can't know. You've got to deal with the matter at hand. And to be honest, I don't think this obsessive thinking serves you as a person. I think it causes you a lot of unhappiness." This is when he accused me of projecting my own depression on him. This from a man who was planning already considering suicide. (Where ever did I get the idea that he was depressed?) Although he does have a small point. Whenever I was with him, I was instantaneously depressed.

The next reference is to my "coming up in March. That would be a good time to plan it." Well, thanks, I guess. The lack of any entries that would indicate him imagining the effect of his suicide on others is appalling. All he can discuss is his experience. He mentions his love for his ex-girlfriend, but only asks from her that she think him brave. Brave for choosing death over dealing with 6 months or so of discomfort and reduced vision.

Not one word on what it would do to my Mom.

Well, Fuck You Big Brother.

I'm going to try to give my anger over to this blog, and I hope this is the last entry about him. I am enormously grateful that I understand that the most precious thing in this world is the love of family and friends, that it should be honored and cherished as such.

If you cannot see anything but your pain, GET HELP. Do not trust the endless loop of your own thinking to heal what ails you. That very thinking is what got you there in the first place.

MCO 2009

Goodbye, Alma

2009-03-25T13:29:00.000-07:00

Well, I woke up to evidence of my brother's cat having sprayed my mother's chair overnight, and this is the second "accident" there. My mother had already said she couldn't see herself with the cat, unable to tolerate the nipping and kneading, and my sister couldn't take it because she has some pet rats. After this incident, my sister told me the cat could literally ruin the house. She told me I had to do something about Alma before she got back from Salinas because once the kids bonded with her, giving her away would be a nightmare. So, with a heavy heart and a decent donation to salve the conscience, I took Alma into the Butte Humane Society this morning.

I felt more sadness walking away from that animal shelter than I did walking away from the funeral home after viewing my brother. I guess it was because the cat was so innocent. My brother wasn't. He did some things which were clear evidence of mental illness, then refused all entreaties to get help, insisting we were the ones with "issues." Had he been willing to face his demons, I would have gone to the ends of the earth for him, just as my sisters did for me once I agreed I-not the rest of the world--was the one with the problem. But he wasn't willing, and we have to clean up the mess his suicide left behind.

On a more pleasant note, I took my mother to the Chico Library yesterday and we got three large-print books. Yesterday she spent half the day reading Amy Tan's "The Kitchen God's Wife." That's the good news. The bad news is that today, she had to put it aside, because she had no idea who the characters were from yesterday. Luckily, I got her two non-fiction books as well. I'm hoping she'll do better when the thrust is observational or sociological rather than plot-driven. Anything but the People's Court.

MCO 2009

Unhappiness is a Choice

2009-03-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

As my mother's grief goes from acute to chronic, it's harder to penetrate and alleviate, as it's more diffuse, related to global regrets accumulated over the course of a lifetime.

I reminded her yesterday that she still has so much to be grateful for, that she lives in extraordinary abundance, surrounded by beauty and wonder, not to mention surviving children and grandchildren who are healthy, smart and love her dearly. She "gets" all the arguments in principle, but they're up against an entire system of thinking born of a time and culture in which happiness is considered a result instead of a context. Her generation was trained to believe you get married, have children, make money, buy a house and then hope that everyone dies in their sleep at 89. Anything that deviates from that is considered a legimate cause for unhappiness and regret, in fact requires it.

My mother has always found hooks on which to hang her discontent. Some highlights over 80 years: her mother's death, my brother's illegitimate birth, her brother's death, my homosexuality, my first brother's death, my AIDS, my father's drinking, my imprisonment, my sister's divorce, her mental disorientation, now my brother's suicide. And I don't think it's particularly worse than what most people go through over the same timespan. This is life, period. (And I didn't die from AIDS, I recovered from addiction, my sister is happier unmarried. If you get unhappy over the problem, you need to get happy when your fears do not materialize or the situation resolves well. My mother--like most people--just keeps shifting her focus to the new source of pain.)

Between the newer thinking of my generation and the training of recovery, I have come to believe serenity is much more important and sustainable than "happiness." Serenity comes from acceptance, and that means acceptance of everything, even that which you don't like or have been taught must cause you pain. Contentment is a context, it comes from how you think, not what you think; how you perceive what happens, not what happens. There's always going to be stuff going on that you don't like or that is painful. It is perfectly possible to meet all these challenges without turning them into reasons to gnash, wail or regret. But it's almost impossible to impart this kind of thinking successfully to an 83-year old. It requires the overlay of new neural pathways on a brain that won't accept them. I do my best, but it feels like shoveling snow in a blizzard.

My sister is doing a great job of being in the moment and doing the next indicated thing down at my brother's house in Salinas. Yesterday she found some short-term renters who can pay very little but who are presently homeless, a family living in a men's shelter. Since the house cannot be sold for the amount left on the mortage, it will no doubt need to be foreclosed. Until that time (good luck arranging anything with the banks before you're late on payments) you can at least keep the property in good shape, and in this case, answer the prayers of some very nice people suffering in this economy.

In AA, we call this a "Godshot."

MCO 2009

Looking Out

2009-03-23T08:55:00.000-07:00

This is Alma, my brother's cat, who is now on probation here at my Mom's, where I arrived last night. Alma's a funny creature. She will jump on your lap, demanding affection, and then in the middle of a major purrfest, will suddenly nip at you. This tends to piss you off. So I just don't know how this is going to work out. I

hope it does, my Mom could use it.

The thing about cats is that they aren't that good in the unconditional love department. They seem much more conditional, at least to my eye. Alma is fun to watch though. It's like having a second TV.

My mother is doing pretty well, considering. We went out to dinner last night and then watched Planet Earth. I'm determined to keep her as much as possible in the present moment. I will wake her up soon--the morning fog is always a challenge. Meanwhile my sister and my niece are down at my brother's, cleaning out his house and settling his affairs.

I realize what uncharted territory I'm in. There are models for losing someone you love to suicide, not so much when the love was lost. I am both very angry at my brother for doing this, and don't miss him at all. It's incomparably easier than it is for people who were close to the person who died, and yet still very disorienting. There's an odd confluence of emotions that I've never quite dealt with. I know grief well, I know anger well, I know indifference well. All three are in the mix. That I don't know well.

Luckily, my sisters identify. We are having some very therapeutic conversations. And the takeaway is always the same. What was, was; and what is, is; and the glass as is is extremely full.

MCO 2009

P.S. The cat is on my lap, demanding affection, jealous of the keyboard.

Off to Chico

2009-03-22T07:54:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of me and my buddy Glenn. We were both at church last Sunday. (He sang there a couple of months ago.)

I am about to leave to go back up to Chico, to be with my Mom while my sister is settling affairs and closing my brother's house in Chico. I am feeling a fair amount of discomfort, a vague feeling of anxiety in my stomach. I don't know if it's because travel is increasingly annoying to me, or because my body is about to get sick. It's so hard to parse things out when there is an undercurrent of emotion clouding things.

Even though it sounds shocking to say so, I feel so little grief over my brother, at least on a conscious level. But there no way of knowing how much I'm feeling it in other ways. I keep catching myself holding my breath.

In any case. I did manage to bang out another installment in the memoir. Enjoy.

MCO 2009

Where the Happiness Is

2009-03-20T11:36:00.000-07:00

I took this picture of a coyote in the parking lot in Griffith Park. He was very intently watching a car whose occupants I suspect were feeding him, though not when anyone was looking.

One thing I find fascinating about animals is that they have zero idea that they are not the center of the universe. They have no concept of anything but their own world. And do they experience happiness? Is it like the happiness we experience? Dogs seem to experience a level of joy that transcends anything that we know, except as children. How is it that as we grow older, our capacity for joy seems to diminish?

I'm a little sad that any kind of serenity, much less happiness, seems no longer available to my mother. It was already an uphill battle before the death of my brother, she's seemed almost intent for a while now on translating her disorienation and memory loss into a rockribbed rationale for discontent. She was even resistant to the idea that living next to my sister, with almost no demands on her, might be enough to make for a pleasant enough existence. It's as if her life is pervaded by a sense that there will be test tomrrow, one that she hasn't studied for, and will fail. This leads to a near constant unease.

I don't know how to combat her anxiety, and the truth is, I must accept that what I can do will not be enough. The best case scenario is one in which I manage to bring her back to the present moment. It's a challenge. How do you argue with a mother's grief? But how, either, do you stand by and watch it?

MCO 2009

From Head to Heart

2009-03-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

I would say this hy-art gives a pretty good idea of what the fantasy life was of a novel-reading young lady of late 19th century. Will she run off with the dashing matador or the brooding painter? Decisions, decisions.

This morning I spoke at a meeting, and this was one of the first times I only briefly referred to the dramatic details of my story. I see a bigger picture now. Basically, for 25 years I struggled with the Step 1. I pretty much got the first part of it, that I was powerless over alcohol and drugs; but it took prison guards managing every moment of my existence for me to get the second half of it, that my life was unmanageable.

I was speaking to a group who knew me very well, as I went to that meeting almost every morning for two years. I was wonderful to hear in several of the shares how marked they found the change in me. Someone put it this way: "You used to come so much from your head, now you come from your heart."

That's exactly how it feels in here too, but it's different when you think it about yourself and when you hear it from others. It's a magical thing to have sobriety brothers and sisters, a posse of men and women who got sober around the time you did, give or take a year. You get to see the change in them as they see the change in you. Which isn't really change, but removal. People drop stuff, let go of shit. Everyone is perfect the way they are, it's they way they aren't that gets them in trouble.

I still use this wonderful gift that is my brain, but I no longer worship at the altar of cerebrality. I truly understand that kindness is more important than wit. (Though wit is a very close second. After all, with wit comes laughter, and laughter is what separates us from the lower orders. Note to self: Look up whether Charles Darwin ever figured out why we evolved the capacity for humor. It could be the one thing that is only a gift from God.)

MCO 2009

Even Keel

2009-03-18T11:30:00.000-07:00

Boy, do I have a lot of outlets to prevent and treat stress. I can create a work of art, clean my block, or go to a meeting. I can call a friend or one of my sisters. I can write a blog entry, cuddle with the dog, or flirt on Facebook. And that's just the short list.

It seems odd now that my only answer to stress was to drink or to do drugs. That created so much more stress than it cured.

And while I'm not feeling that consciously stressed by the aftermath of my brother's death, I am noticing some distracted behavior. I will take 20 minutes between texts, or put my meds where the salt and pepper go, or put the lemonade on top of the fridge instead of in it. I think my brain is downloading the "Steve" file from active to inactive, and it's slowing up my processing capacity overall.

I do feel like I've discovered that under my house there is a basement I didn't know was there. I don't mean a basement in the sense of a dark place, but in the sense of an anchoring foundation. Not only did my sobriety never feel threatened, it even feels like it's deepened.

I also feel physically more tired than usual, and am finding it very hard to write, but as my sister Erica reminded me, "we have to be gentle with ourselves as well as others." I can cut myself a little slack.

MCO 2009

Annie Ferran Chabal, 1922-2009

2009-03-17T10:46:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I came up with this faux movie poster to honor my French relatives, plus my sister and her daughter, in this picture taken when they were in France. It reads "The Women of a Certain Beach" which in French is a play on words involved "plage" and "age." or, "Women of a Certain Age." The tagline reads, "In some families, you don't need feet to dance" which I thought made sense because their feet don't show in the poster, but now I think was trying a bit too hard.

In any event, the woman at the center is Annie, who married by mother's brother Roger, in 1946. Theirs was really a great love, and his death in 1960 not only left behind 5 children, but a woman who never remarried, or even dated. The letters she wrote to my mother about her love of her husband tell a cautionary tale. Such loves, if lost, can take two lives with them.

She was extremely smart, well-read, and gentle. She was also a world-class cook. I have never eaten better than at her table, and considering how well my mother cooks, that says a lot.

Her last months were difficult, it is hard to understand how such frail bodies seem to hang on past all reason. But finally she passed on Sunday night. We're all choosing to assume, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, that she's been united with Roger.

Not surprisingly, I'm a little emotionally exhausted. Annie's death has prompted a new round of transatlantic correspondence that falls largely on my shoulders. But I did write about the Steven's death in a way that may keep a few addicts from picking up, here.

I haven't been able to muster up a new chapter to the memoir, but I did want to mention that my google adsense dollars are stuck at $75, and they don't disburse until you reach $100. I would be very appreciative if you could take a visit and click on one of the ads now and again, at www.marcolmsted.com/trashwhisperer.

MCO 2009

The Multi-Colored Map

2009-03-15T13:38:00.000-07:00

So I find this page from a map of Los Angeles on the street, and the street is on the map. I don't know whether the term irony applies, or whether it's just mildly poetic, in a syllogistic way, but it made for a nice enough visual.

Neither do I know if it's ironic or just darkly coincidental, but my Aunt told us that my French cousin who is exactly Steven's age is going in tomorrow for surgery for retinal detachment, the operation that proved the beginning of Steven's unraveling. This cousin is like Steven in other ways that I won't go into, suffice to say she's been the focus of much family concern over the years. As my Aunt said "on ne pourrait pas l'inventer," or basically, "you can't make this shit up."

Meanwhile, I'd say it's time for some good news, so let me share that my nephew Keir got through the first hurdle of a multi-tiered and extremely competitive internship program with an institution that I am not at liberty to name yet. The letter came here, and I was able to read it to him in New York, where'd he'd just screened his film to the NYU Alumni Film Association. (By the way, anyone interested can now get his documentary "As the Call, So the Echo" on Amazon.)

The shouts of joy coming from the other end of the line were such a tonic. Just what the doctor ordered.

MCO 2009

All of It

2009-03-13T18:05:00.000-07:00

So two nights ago I had my awful recurring dream, the one I have about once a year that continues where it left off (this for about a decade now.) In it, I have murdered someone and have gotten away with it, and am riven with guilt and remorse. If I wake up in the middle of the night to pee, while I am doing so I am not sure what is real, and when I go back to sleep the dream continues. It's an awful feeling that takes a while to shake off when I wake up.

So I was particularly surprised when this dream was followed last night by one of the best dreams I've ever had. It was a movie, really, that I was both in and watching. It was set in Germany, in 1946, in a gay bar that had a Weimar Cabaret vibe to it, at least when the movie switched from black and white "reality "to color fantasy musical sequences. They were so spectacular, with marvelous music and lyrics, that in that hazy stage right before I woke up, I was convinced I was watching a brilliant movie. Boy, would I like to have a machine where I could replay my dreams. Were the music and lyrics really brilliant? Is my subconcious brain a talented composer? Or would it play back as a bunch of disjointed gobbledygook that only made sense with the perception of sleep?

This week has been both a nightmare and a beautiful dream. Obviously, the nightmare started with the call from my sister about my brother's disappearance. But the beauty of the dream came from the extraordinary love expressed in the days that followed between those he left behind. It was not a hallmark love of storebought words, but of a willingness to be there for each other in the most concrete way. I don't think I heard (or said) "I'll do the dishes" more any week in my life than this one, along with "let's go for a walk," "let me read you this email," or "are you doing the crosswords?' -- in two languages. We literally competed to be kind with each other, to offer an ear, to tell a comforting story. Whether you call it God or love or both, it was so strong and present that it will be by far the more dominant memory of the week.

This may seem hard to believe, but as I live in acceptance, and stop resisting reality exactly the way it is, I end up experiencing very little if any sense of conflict. Of course my brother's suicide was awful, but I did not spend a moment on its unacceptablity, on trying to undo it in my mind, by wailing against it as if my objection could somehow undo it. This allowed me to be front and center for my family, for his co-workers, for his neighbors. And--as perverse as it may sound--to find the entire week nothing less than riveting. Death is a part of life, a highly dramatic part, and sometimes the most interesting part of a good book. And I love life, all of life, even the bad parts, even this. The more I apply this attitude, the less I find any part of life "bad" at all.

As far as I'm concerned, if you're bored with life, you just aren't paying attention.

MCO 2009

Laughter and Truth

2009-03-11T23:21:00.000-07:00

This is me in the local Boot n' Barn, when we took my Aunt to buy shirts for her husband back in France. I did not buy this hat, but I did buy a belt, because I only have one. Pathetic, even if the Millionaire Matchmaker claims no men wear belts anymore. I beg to differ. In fact, considering the baggy pants epidemic, all men who stopped wearing belts should start again.

At a time like this, I have discovered the great value in my ability to be funny. There's nothing like a well-timed one-liner in a silly accent to lighten up the situation, and we've needed it. My sister keeps telling me I remind her of Robin Williams, a comparison I used to get a lot when I was drinking and was often the life of the party. I felt if I could make people laugh, I should, but of course, this bled into a fair amount of compulsive entertaining. Like I would be "on" even when it was time to turn "off," or I would dominate the proceedings when it was time for a different vibe entirely. Still I laughed a lot, and I made sure those around me did too. That was part of the package of me, for good and for bad.

Then I got into meth, and slowly I got way more serious. Soon before my arrest, in fact, I remember thinking that I hardly ever laughed any more and neither did those around me. This bothered me greatly, but not enough to stop using. Had the LAPD not forced that change upon me, I like to think it might've been at least one of the factors that got me to change my ways.

In sobriety, I still have to battle with my tendency to take control of the room or the dinner table, to interrupt, to talk too much. I can still tread on the edge of compulsion in the entertainment department. But, on the whole, I have rediscovered my capacity for the good one-liner or the amusing character, and use it mostly for the good. With little kids, it can be sheer heaven, because I can get across a lot of important messages under the guise of silliness, like be kind to your mother.

I did realize one thing while talking at length tonight with my Aunt about writing about the livies of family and friends. She admonished me to remember that just because I have no more secrets and don't care who knows what about me, that I can assume everyone else feels the same way. I'm not talking about the obvious stuff, like details of Uncle Linda's sexual proclivities (no, i don't have an Uncle Linda), but stuff like the crush I had on a neighbor in 1967, or the last name of the family we were on vacation with in 1975. I can't imagine minding being mentioned in someone else's memoir but I need to realize lots of people might mind being mentioned in mine.

I'll start erring on the side of caution when it come to changing names, but it bugs me. It feels less authentic, less truthful. But I don't want people I love to hate me because they feel their privacy has been invaded. Look what happened to Truman Capote? Babe Paley never spoke to him again. (But then again, his crazy aunts--he immortalized them.)
MCO 2009

Aunts and Brothers

2009-03-10T22:44:00.000-07:00

This is my my wonderful Aunt Francoise, when I took her in to Urgent Care here yesterday because she was feeling like "merde." Turns out she had the flu and an ear infection, and has been forced to take to bed a lot and sleep, as we feed her antibiotics and hope she'll be in shape for her long trip back to France on Thursday. (I will drive her to the airport and then fly home myself.)

As usual she has been a great joy to spend time with, and to have her here at this time a great gift. In fact, we wonder if Steve waited until she would be here to kill himself, so my mother would have the support. It hard to know what was going through his head. He certainly tried to do a lot of paperwork to make this as smooth as possible.

God forbid he might have called a psychiatrist and said "I'm suicidal."

Yeah, I'm pissed. My mother lost a son already, to AIDS. She almost lost one to drug addiction. Steve knew this, and yet he convinced himself he had no other rational reaction to a difficult period with his sight than to kill himself. That's fucked up. It also infuriates me how vehemently he denied that he was an unhappy person, how insistent he was that he didn't need help. I haven't even told you of some incidents because I have to respect the privacy of others, but he crossed some lines you simply don't cross and then pretend there is nothing wrong. For this reason I feel an extraordinary lack of grief, even if, on a detached level, I feel compassion for the pain he was in.

What I can do now is reassure my mom that if a mother's love were enough to cure a mentally ill son, hers would have. I can help her find a reason to get up in the morning by counting with her all the people who love her. I can tell her I can't see that she could have done anything differently as a mother. (I don't know what I could have done differently as a brother either. A relationship with Steve was a study in powerlessness.)

My other favorite Aunt, Annie, the woman who married my mother's brother, Roger, is on her deathbed. Theirs was a great love between two extremely smart, witty, charismatic and spiritual people that brought 5 equally wonderful children into the world. Then Roger died, in 1960, and Annie was never the same again. She was a good mother, and loving to her children, but utterly lacking in the joie de vivre that had so marked all testimony about her youth.

Of course none of that mattered to me growing up. She was no less of a wonderful aunt to me, and a hallucinatorily good cook, world class, I kid you not. But as we await news of her death any moment in France, I want to try to remember her entire life, not just the part I bore witness to.

MCO 2oo9

Sisters and Silver Linings

2009-03-08T16:41:00.000-07:00

This is my sister Erica, my mother, Simone, and my sister Sandra, coming back from a walk around the lake where Erica lives.

The love that is being expressed now between us, in its most practical, kind, considerate form, is an extraordinary balm. Ever since I've come through the experience of prison, I have been extremely close to these women, but now there is a degree of kindness to the way we are treating each other that moves me deeply. We are of course first and foremost gentle with my mother, with each other my sisters and I more robust. Not in the sense of any kind of meanness, but in a willingness to tease, as if we have an unspoken agreement that says: "I won't take myself too seriously if you don't take yourself too seriously."

We reserve the right to laugh even in the face of tragedy, in fact we insist on it. In front of my mother it is good-natured and light, with each other it can take the form of gallows humor. We allow ourselves, also, to be angry at Steven, if not with each other. It is impossible not to get angry at someone who commits suicide, one should not ask it of oneself.

I think we all realize, on some level, we were expecting this for years. It is a relief to be able to confess that to each other.

The memorial service was sweet and gentle, we were very touched by three of his co-workers making a 5-hour drive both ways and all the cards and emails the others sent. I also met one of Steve's ex-girlfriends, Joan, who was so incredibly nice. I can't believe he didn't marry her, but Steven was secretly determined to find a fantasy girlfriend who had the looks of Jennifer Aniston and the mind of Maureen Dowd. "The grass is always greener" was the platitude made for my brother.

I did have the most interesting conversation with my cousin, Rebecca, who told me our mutual uncle was in the CIA, who also told her that this might have been the case with his father, my grandfather. (Well, the intelligence services before they were the CIA.)

Boy would that explain alot. There was so much secrecy about his life and his death, so much so that I thought he was hiding a homosexual double life. While that might have been true, this is eerily plausible as well. (I wondered why his company sent a "special train" to Miami to get him when he was injured in Cuba. Why would a foreman get that kind of treatment?)

The big question would be if it had anything to do with his suicide. Was he suffering from intense guilt over some operation gone wrong? Or maybe the secret was not another man, but another woman, someone he met in the field? Perhaps she was killed in the war?

Conversations like this one with my cousin go under the list of "silver linings," good thing that happen because of a death that would not have otherwise, like getting closer to family. Our lives are full of such bittersweet happenstance.

MCO 2009

The Man Who Cried Wolfie

2009-03-07T22:20:00.000-08:00

There is a comment on the last entry from a woman who used to work with Steve, and she mentions an incident that represented so clearly what was wrong with his thinking. Every 6 months or year or two, Steve would have an occurrence that would become an obsession, usually marked by variations on the same questions: Why did this happen? Why did this have to happen to me? Why didn't I do it differently? This was always cloaked as a healthy degree of curiosity, normal to any inquiring mind. Of course we want to figure things out, right? But over the years, as I saw this happen repeatedly, it became clear to me that if was a form of magical thinking. If he could figure it out, dissect the why of it, he could somehow make it unhappen, and the cause of all of his current discontent would disappear. It's behavior akin to an animal caught in a steel trap, his only way out to gnaw his paw off.
Steve had adopted a dog, Wolfie, a very sweet shepherd mix who proved a fine companion to my dog when Gaza came to live with Steve during my "troubles." After I got Gaza back, it was just Steve and Wolfie, but Fumi had dogs so Wolfie was often part of a little troupe of hikers.
Now, a little detour. Steven had ongoing problems with his foot, after a cycling accident in the nineties. This preoccupation lasted a decade, one of his worst. He regretted an operation he had no doubt insisted upon, hated the doctor who he was sure had to be one of the most incompetent that ever lived. He told me that he understood what it was like to live with AIDS, because he had endured pain that would "kill most people." For years I thought this hyberbole, as this man in such supposed intense pain took up cycling again, and walked with no evident impediment, even as I limped around with my plantar fasciitis. I would bet that my actual physical pain was no less than his. But surely he hurt more.
I believe that how intensely Steven felt physical pain was in direct proportion to how doggedly he denied his emotional pain. His body became the repository of his psychic discomfort as well as the bearer of genuine material injury. I also believe the degree of pain he felt had everything to do with the lack of joy in his daily life. My plantar fasciitis could hurt like hell, but it was barely a footnote (pardon the pun). I will never remember those two years as pain-filled, because too many other memories crowd them out. Steve remembered little else. When the foot difficulties were supplanted by his eye difficulties, it was like discovering you have a reoccurence of cancer and need to go through chemo again. You can do it if you love your life, if not, it feels like torture; a tunnel with no light at the end of it.
Back to Wolfie. One day she was on the couch, and out of the blue, with no warning, she attacked Steven's foot. It was a brief assault, as Steve of course reacted. Almost immediately, Wolfie was back to normal. But Steve wasn't. He couldn't believe Wolfie could have done such a mean, horrible thing--to the foot that he had pain in! "I know this sounds weird," he later told me, "but I just can't get over the feeling that she did it deliberately!" Six months later, he gave Wolfie away to a nice family, after discussing the matter ad nauseam with others, defending his conclusion that he could never trust her again.
When he told me why he gave away the dog that I thought he adored, I was shocked. "But Steve, don't you think that maybe the dog attacked your foot because she sensed it was faulty? How do you think a pack of wolves figures out which member of the herd to go after but a sick or weak one? Why do you think Gaza always barks at homeless people? Dogs sense when things are 'off.' They don't like it, it's instinctive, the same way a mother dog won't feed its deformed offspring."
In all this time, in all this excavating, this had never once occurred to Steven, and he admitted as much. He agreed that it was perhaps plausible as any other explanation, but just barely. He still resisted letting go of the conclusion that Wolfie had just decided, for no reason at all, to turn on him.
This was a man who went to the Animal Shelter twice a week to play with the dogs. He supposedly understood that dogs act and react out of fear or boredom or territoriality, that acting out is never to be taken personally. And yet he was unable to react with more emotional sophistication than that of a child.

I know I'm not following the script one is supposed to when a loved one dies. Wonderful, special, loved by all--these are the cliches you almost always hear at funerals and memorial services, and yesterday was no exception. But when I look at the life of someone who took his own, I cannot let these adjectives go unchallenged. Or at least unexplored.
I guess the question of "why" nags at me as much as it nagged at Steven. Except I don't have as much trouble answering it, and no matter how close I get, I attach no magical thinking to it. Steven won't come back, nor would I wish him to. If someone tries and tries to find happiness, and fails and fails, I actually consider it an form of self-deliverance to choose to leave this planet. When someone is young, it is a permanent solution to a temporary problem; but at 57, this problem was not temporary. If he'd been an alcoholic or a drug addict, there would have been a defining issue around which to construct a narrative of before and after. Unfortunately, he wasn't.
Who would've known that I was the lucky one.
MCO 2009

Suicide is not Painless

2009-03-07T11:10:00.001-08:00

As the song (almost) goes and Sheria reminded me, Suicide is not Painless.

I spend 24 hours at my brother's with my sister. We saw his co-workers, and comforted them as they did us; viewed the body--very peaceful, just as one wo uld hope; retrieved the car (which I will inherit, an aging Toyota Celica GT),;and spoke to his eye doctor. The last was by phone and by far the most difficult. He was very upset, couldn't understand for the life of him why Steve would have killed himself over this. "He was going to make a full recovery." We at least got a chance to reassure him this was really a perception problem on my brother's part, and not the kind an eye surgeon can fix.

I am here with my Mom, her sister, my sisters, two nephews, one nephew's fiance, and a niece. "Here" is my sister's in Chico. The good Steven's suicide has left behind is the extraordinary awareness that life is so precious and the deep gratitude we feel for being able to perceive the glass as almost full instead of almost empty. We have never been closer.

I am alternating between mourning for my brother's life and between the old feelings of extraordinary frustration at never having been able to "get through" to him. I am humbled by my own experience, realizing what it must have been like for others to try to get through to me. I am full of thanks to the LAPD, the California Prison System, and AA for "nudging" me back to sanity, but I get to take credit for the willingness to take the hand of the Goddess so she could bring me along. But I can't throw stones at my brother's unwillingness. I was made willing, and it took a lot to get me there. (My brother likes to smoke pot and drink beer, but fairly moderately. Would that he were an addict. That we know how to treat.)

Getting angry at my brother is like getting angry at an autistic child, for though his problem was not autism, it was crippling inability not to think obsessionally, even if it was a disability around which he could function. He could "pass." His co-workers liked him, though they certainly noted he was a loner, quiet, unwilling to discuss his personal life, even his girlfriend. (Fumi is character study onto herself. I can't do her justice with a few words, so she'll have to wait.)

Suicide brings with in an almost automatic guilt. We sink in the shoulda, woulda, couldas. I am very grateful that the last Steven heard from me was a message I left on his machine Sunday night, when I thought he was having surgery the next day. I told him I loved him and to stay strong. Though I suspect he was no longer listening by then, lost in the loop of seeing no exit but one.

It's a terrible thing not to be comfortable in your own skin. That was the oddest senstation when I saw him at the funeral home. That he finally was.

MCO 2009

Steven J. Olmsted, 1952-2009

2009-03-05T07:25:00.000-08:00

Tuesday night, after a particularly nice day, I was watching American Idol with David when my sister Erica called. She told me no one had been able to get in touch with my older brother Steve all day, and so his ex-girlfriend, Fumi, went to his house. (We’d all been concerned for my brother because he discovered he was have problems with his left eye as well as his right. He was supposed to have emergency surgery to prevent retinal detachment and had delayed the operation for reasons we didn’t understand.)

Fumi found a suicide note and a detailed map to the where the car would be, as well as instructions on what to do after his death and a will. She called the police, and they discovered the body in a nearby hiking area. He’d purchased a gun and shot himself in the heart. It turns out the prospect of surgery, and the possibility that he would be visually impaired even with it, was too much for my brother to bear.

That, of course, is not the whole story. I will probably be dealing with that in parts in the memoir, but I’ve been dealing it emotionally, along with everybody else in the family, for as long as I can remember.

And yet, whatever we had to deal with, what it was like for Steve was far worse. He was a deeply unhappy person, obsessed with the past, with his regrets. He was never able to maintain any friendships. His girlfriends lost patience with a man whose social skills were stuck around the 8th grade, so he could never sustain the relationship he craved. Thank God Fumi, his last girlfriend, remained close to him, one true friend to the end.

As heavy as our hearts are, my sisters and I, and even my Mom, find relief in the knowledge that he found relief, from his pain and from a life in which the moments of joy were few and far between the many moments of obsession and anxiety.

Today I drive up to his house my nephew and his fiancé, to rendezvous with my sister to handle his affairs before continuing up north to spend time with my mother and her sister, here from France. My brother waited until her trip, planned for a while, to do this, so she would have the support and love of my Aunt in the aftermath.

In this picture, he is the boy in brown hair to the right, in between my mother and sister, when she was visiting in 1966. He is 14. That’s how I’d like to remember him, as my big brother who could do no wrong, even if that wasn’t as he saw himself. (I’m the obnoxious one on the left, going through my face-making stage.)

I’ll be blogging intermittently for a week, but there is a new installment to the memoir at www.marcolmsted.com/trashwhisperer

MCO 2009

Life's a Beach But My Dog's a Boy

2009-03-02T11:06:00.000-08:00

You need to click on these to see them enlarged in another window. No matter how hard I try with Blogger, when I try to post a succession of individual pictures, they don't seem to come out one after the other, so I just put them all in one tableau. The middle one on the right is worth looking at because of the caption. Hee hee. March Fool's Day!

It was Gaza's 12th birthday yesterday, so I said yes to the beach with my friend Michael, for a change. I usually am afraid the traffic is going to ruin it all for me, but it wasn't bad at all. A very nice day--we even saw a dolphin!

Saturday I had the singularly heady experience of telling my story at a CMA meeting--a big one too. Wow, what a difference a few years of sobriety makes. You learn what you really want to say about your story and your experience in the program. My challenge is to not get too into the drama of how I got here, because I have been known to drop a few jaws just with what I did with death certificates alone.

I am happy to say I avoided getting too bogged down in a drugalogue. I included a fair amount about the spiritual side of the journey and some practical suggestions on how to stay sober and practice the steps in one's life. It was an amazing feeling to connect with a Group Of Drunks (G.O.D.) like that.

I actually got my rent rolled back today. So many people are doubling up and moving in with family and friends because of the economy that apartment buildings are finding it very hard to keep high occupancy rates. So I thought I'd give it a try and it worked! I'm still paying almost half my income in rent, but 40% is better than 50%!

MCO 2009

Marc Defies Gravity - And Loses

2009-03-01T11:58:00.000-08:00

This is proof of how dangerous is the life of a trashwhisperer. My friend Mike was filming me, back when we were playing with the idea of doing a documentary, and what we ended up with might be appropriate for something else entirely.

MCO 2009

The Mind of a Writer

2009-02-27T11:00:00.000-08:00

This Hy-Art evokes the writer at her desk, imagining what plot development will come next. I have always felt dreams, memory and imagination are the realm of contact between the world we can see and the world we can't, between past and present, the living and the dead.

This is where I've been spending a lot of time in the past few days, you can see the results in three entries about my Aunt Nancy over at the other blog.

I'm intrigued by the idea of temporality; that my past was my Aunt's present, that my present will be someone else's past, just as their present is my future. I don't need Einstein to explain relativity, any memoirist has a pretty good idea of what that's about.

The entries about Nancy are rewrites of a piece I have edited extensively over the past few years. It's fascinating to chart my growth as a person and as a writer by seeing what I add and what I take out. Paragraphs I'd left intact several times are suddenly demolished or expanded upon, as I realize that I was perhaps just scratching the surface, missing the authentic core of things, the details that bring it life and resonance.

Having worked the 12 steps on a daily basis in the past 4 years, I am far more cognizant of my character defects than I used to be, two of those being intolerance and a tendency to judge. You'd think someone who's benefitted so much from the tolerance and lack of judgment of others--given my checkered past--would know better, wouldn't you?

The more I let go of my biases, the more clearly I observe. For example, on the third rewrite, I suddenly saw that a moment with my father was his attempt to teach me empathy. I could see the man who broke my Aunt's heart probably loved her very much. I could see that my Grandmother's indimidating demeanor masked an intense hope for her daughter's happiness.

The result is much more interesting to read, but also much more interesting to write.

MCO 2009

Wrestling with The Wrestler

2009-02-25T07:30:00.000-08:00

I finally saw "The Wrestler" yesterday. I had resisted because I knew enough about professional wrestling to understand that the violence of it is only half-cartoon. There are a few scenes that are hard to watch for the squeamish, butthe film as a whole is well worth looking at those scene with your eyes half-closed.

I chose this shot because it's one of the few scenes in which these two characters, Mickey Rourke as the Wrestler and Marisa Tomei as the stripper, try to operate together in the "outside" world, going to a thrift shop together. Boy, did I identify. Going to thrift shops was one of the only forays I made regularly into "regular" life when I was a drug dealer. It was the closest I came to a vacation or a day off.

The movie makes the Soprano's depiction of Jersey practically idyllic. The Wrestler looks at the New Jersey in the songs of Bruce Springsteen. Half-empty union halls, cramped strip joints, cold and gray trailer parks, abandoned amusement parks. The starkest depictions are reserved for the attempts of the characters to connect, to be honest, to allow themselves to drop the masks they have so long confused with their real selves.

It's an ugly America, but strangely beautiful in its squalor, if you can step back from the urge to judge. Sort of our version of Mumbai in Slumdog Millionaire, but I'm not sure which place I envy less.

The one gift of my own upside down history is I get the underside. I get how the same human drives and instincts are at play in a prison or in Newport Beach. It's all a big hunt for love.

MCO 2009

MCO 20009

And the Oscar Goes To...

2009-02-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

I LOVED this year's Oscars! I thought the new Producers got the formula just right. And how could you not love Hugh Jackman? I think he landed himself a permament job.

Everyone has their favorite moment, of course, and for me, it was the acceptance speech of Dustin Lance Black for Best Original Screenplay, for Milk. While I certainly had to suppress waves of major envy--so young, so goodlooking, so talented--these feelings were by far outweighed by the immense gratitude I felt by his reaching out very specifically to the gay youth of this country. He did an enormous service, as I can guarantee you, there were thousands of 14 and 15 and 16-year old gay kids in conservative households in this country for whom his encouragement was a ray of hope like a match in a prison cell. Even in my ultraliberal household, if I'd been able to hear that message when I was 13 and riven with self-hate (it was 1972, after all) it would have had an enormous impact. Bravo Dustin.

Back to the envy. The Oscars are both extremely motivating and extremely discouraging for me. In this town, there are 50 qualified people in line for every creative job, 1000 screenplays written for every movie made. Only maybe 1 in 5 movies make any money, 1 in 100 get any awards. I spend all year redefining success as the fact that I get to spend much of my day writing whatever I want, and in one evening it's impossible not to feel hopelessly inadequate. The only consolation is that my sentiments are shared across this city and in the creative class of this country. My envy doesn't compare to some of my friends much deeper in the business.

Though anyone can, in principle, win an Oscar, it only happens to an infinitesimal sliver of the population. And yet TV gives one the illusion that with a little talent and a little luck, it can happen to you too, particularly when you live right down the road from the ceremony and pass the limos leaving the Kodak theatre that very night! (I waved at them, as if I can see inside. For all I know, Sean Penn thinks I have x-ray vision.)

Oh well, back to reality. They may have Oscars, but they don't get to pick up trash, do they? For me only is the satisfaction of living on the sole clean street in Hollywood, of making friends with the Armenian ladies and handing empty cans to homeless scavengers. Hell, I got to pick up two used condoms in my parking lot this morning! Take that, gowned and tuxedo'd ones!

Don't get me wrong, living out here in real world is a good year-round gig, and I ain't complaining . But it would be nice to be King for a day. (Queen for a day, that happens all the time.)

MCO 2009

Serenity Prayer

2009-02-22T09:42:00.000-08:00

It sure is a challenge to maintain any sense of serenity these days, isn't it? Especially for a news junkie like me. I'm finding it hard even to find comfort in history. Take the truism that the final cure for the Great Depression turned out to be World War II. In our case, the nightmarish expenditure on the Iraq War is what got us into this mess as much as anything else. And how awful that war could be a "solution" to anything. It certainly won't be for us.

Sometimes I feel like my life is very in synch with the zeitgeist of the times, and sometimes, not at all. I was at ground zero when AIDS hit New York in the 80s, moved to LA in the 90s to become one of an army of aspiring screenwriters, just to detour into a huge drug epidemic just as it peaked. I was in prison when Martha Stewart was, and now I'm sober and a blogger when a whole lot of people have taken the same route.

At the same time, I've always done okay in difficult economic times and haven't necessarily benefitted from any general wave of prosperity. I've rented when people were buying homes and am househunting when everyone is in foreclosure. I got jobs in the middle of the last two recessions ('82 and '91). For years I've bumped along in the state I call "independently poor," which, considering how bad things have gotten for so many, is starting to feel positively rich.

It seems almost disrespectful to those going through such tough times to be walking around with a spring in my step, but I am. It's so clear to me that the best things in life are indeed free. Friendship, kindness, laughter, the love of good dog and a few good men. God isn't some distant entity I pray to. God is right here, in the present moment, all the time.

On the one hand I certainly can perceive that we might all be, as a world, on the verge of quite the precipice. December 2012 seems dead on for an Apocalypse. On the other hand, I've decided not to judge the apocalypse as a good or a bad thing. The earth has been here for millions of years, it'll be here for millions more. It has endured ice ages and asteroid strikes wiping out species far grander than our own. Whether we billions have lives shorter than expected may be the reality we confront, but why should I let that ruin today?

Now is all I have, all any of us every have.

MCO 2009

Oy is "Yo" spelled backwards

2009-02-21T07:49:00.001-08:00

So last night I got a call from an addict who is really struggling to make his way back from a relapse. He'd made plans for the night, to go to Jarhzeit at Temple, an annual commemoration in which one goes to Synagague each year on the date of the death of a loved one, in this case, my friend's father. I could tell from talking to him that he was inches away from making another less healthy call instead, this being a Friday night and full of temptation.
My plans had been cancelled because of someone's cold, (I guess I won't see The Reader before the Oscars) so I told him I'd go to the service with him and then afterwards we'd go to a late meeting designed to address the Friday Night restlessness that so afflicts the newcomer. I hadn't been to temple since my youth in Mount Vernon, when I attended inumerable bar and bas mitzvahs.
I enjoyed it alot, mostly because the singing was in Hebrew and I could read along phonetically. I love foreign languages and alphabets, it all feels like a delicious code. It's a gay congregation, of course, but not terribly gay. A camera scanning the group would probably not even picked it up.
So it was a pleasant hour, with a pleasant talk from the Rabbi, and the cantor's voice was beautiful. They've definitely contemporized the music--kinda catchy actually. But the point, for me was not to honor God and the People of Israel. The point was to stick to my friend like glue: ironic enough because "Kol Ami" in French is Colle-Ami, or "glue-friend."
We ate afterwards, and he admitted to an ongoing battle in his head with thoughts of using. I realize how far I've come, how lucky I am to have been relieved of the obsession. I gave him the best I could of my experience, but the magic really happens in the meetings. And by the end of this one, I could see that he was going to survive the night, and I pray felt an inner shift farther away from the obsession.
It may look like I was going to any lengths to keep him sober, but that's an illusion. I was going to any lengths to keep me sober.
Good Sabbath, everybody.
MCO 2009

An Eye for an Eye

2009-02-20T12:59:00.000-08:00

There was a report on the news about this Iranian woman who was the object of unwanted attention for a man who became obsessed with her. As seems to happen with distressing regularity in the fundamentalist Arab world, her "suitor" decided the appropriate response to her rejection was to throw acid in her face.

The reason this story stands out is that the woman took him to Islamic Court, and rather than take blood money from his relatives, she obtained a judgement that he receive the same punishment he inflicted on her. He is set to be blinded next week, by acid.

Certain elements of the blogosphere are up in arms, it seems, at the "barbaric" punishment. Well, I guess I'm a barbarian. Though I certainly find it shocking, I cheered at the news. Finally, a punishment that might actually make future potential acid-throwers think twice. In fact, watch how fast the rate of this obscene crime plummets if the court doesn't back down.

I can't even begin to understand the psychology of men who are so insecure that they think they can threaten their way into marriage. Clearly, they do not understand the language of rational psychology. So they will have to be made to understand in the most graphic and unalterable way that evil actions have terrible consequence, not just for the victim, but for the perpetrator.
Of course, it would be a nice world if the punishment was not possible because there could be no one found to administer it. I think it's deserved, but I couldn't do it, any more than I could torture a war criminal. Of course, in that kind of world, the crime might not have been conceived of in the first place.

I just finished editing the subtitles of this film set in Russia in 1612. It's a wonderfully made film that captures how desperately hard life was at the time. We remember the history of kings, but the reality for 99% of the people who were not in the tiny upper tier of nobility was a life of more suffering than most of us can even begin to imagine.

As much as I am aware that for many of the world's poor, things are scarcely better, on the whole I at least appreciate that there is an idea of human rights than almost everyone recognizes. Tyrants are recognized as tyrants, torture is not considered justice, and poverty is not considered inevitable or anyone's deserved lot in life.

If that hasn't led to a material improvement in the lives of many, I think there has been a spiritual progression in the world as a whole. I take some comfort in this.
MCO 2009

P.S Two more entries in the memoir.

All Kinds of Ideas

2009-02-19T07:19:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I have thoughts before I go to sleep that I want to write down, but I'm afraid if I get up it will take me forever to get sleepy again. I figure if the thought is interesting enough, it'll come back to me in the morning. Most of the time, it's lost to the ether, but sometimes it comes back.
Last night the thought was this: What if cause and effect is an illusion, caused by our need to perceive time as going in one direction? If time is actually circular, on a metaphysical level, is it possible that what we perceive as an effect is actually a cause? For example, maybe the universe being here actually caused the Big Bang? What is our brains are constructed in a way that can't possibly grasp how this would work? Maybe we are like cavemen trying to conceive of cellphones.
I know, it's weird. Enough to give you headache. But it would explain a lot of things. (Ken or Beth or both have probably read a book about this and will tell me my thought is not the least bit original.)
I spent most of yesterday back in Russia in 1612, editing the subtitles to this gorgeous historical film. I'm usually just generally grateful for my life, but sometimes I am specifically grateful for things, and in this case, I love this work like none I've ever done.
I'm also enjoying the Republican's making complete asses of themselves. I thing Right Wingnut Syndrome needs to be in the DVM of Psychiatric Illnesses. Surely there's an abandoned asylum we can reopen somewhere with so Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, Bachmann, Beck, Cantor, McConnell and Palin can all "retire" to. We can get some Disney Imagineers to create this Wonderland, where they think they have the America they want full of crisp happy white Christians drinking a lot and playing golf at exclusive country clubs. Enclose the grounds, of course, with heavy security, under a huge cone of silence. If it sounds too nice for them, you're wrong, it would be torture of the most exquisite kind. They'd be completely miserable cut off from the world, from any capacity to attack reasonable and sane leaders. They live to attack, they would become shadows of themselves unless they could hate all day. Ballons without hot air to fill them up.
That's another idea of mine. What if scientists of the future sent back a virus into the past, one that made you sick the more you hated? They one's who learned to love would get better, the haters would die. How cool a movie would that make?
You read it here first.
MCO 2009

A Day in the Life

2009-02-18T07:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, in some ways, was the perfect day.

It stopped raining long enough in the morning for me to stay dry while walking the dog and pick up some trash. (Yes, people do manage to litter in the rain, and tend to think they don't need to pick up after their dog.)

I wrote all day, finally posting a new entry on the memoir at: www.marcolmsted.com/trashwhisperer.

I got an email from my cousin in France who I sent a collection of my best Hy-Arts to. He's a very talented painter, and he was very impressed, even moved by them. He's processing the idea of whether or not to paint them, which is my request, as it's a huge technical challenge. (He's a perfectionist who would want them to look as good as the originals.) To be honest, as delighted as I would be if he painted them, I was very happy to get that reaction from him. I respect him profoundly, and we have this mutual affection going back 40 years.

Then I landed a subtitling editing gig, the first in many months. I was just wondering how I was going to pay my car insurance in March. I will be spending the next 3 days in Russia, in 1612. It's so much fun! (I am not translating from the Russian. I am making sure the subtitler's English translation is fluid and clear.)

I had a long talk with a mi grande amiga Andrea at 5, and at 7, a good meeting and fellowship afterwards. I made some new friends, and cultivated old ones. I had some great conversations on line and on the phone, punctuating the day. I spoke with my Mom and urged her to stay in the present, to not fixate on such thoughts as "will I die in my sleep or not?" something, I pointed out, over which she has no control.

Nothing happened, and everything happened. But I lived in the present, keeping the walls of my life decorated with laughter, living in gratitude: the best address in town.

The sun is coming out again and today is going to be a fantastic day.

MCO 2009

Friday Night Lights on Sunday Morning

2009-02-15T10:55:00.000-08:00

I'm watching the 2006 movie, "Friday Night Lights." with Billy Bob Thornton and Lucas Black (pictured above. Isn't he hotter than hot?) It chronicles what high school football means to Texas, and combined with this morning's dose of Frank Rich, I'm pondering the two Americas.

I really thought Obama, with his extraordinary and repeating willingness to reach across the aisle, might make more inroads with Republicans in Congress and in the Senate. The obstructionism and willful amnesia of these dickheads is appalling. They had 8 years of doing it their way, running the country into the ground, and they have the unmitigated gall to call the stimulus bill all manner of "garbage" and "pork?' All they can ever be for is torture and tax cuts. Like a tax cut ever built a school, a highway, paid a police officer or teacher, or a soldier, for that matter. These SeNOtors should be locking themselves in their offices and shooting themselves in shame, frankly. I'm not kidding. That would be the honorable reaction to their part in wrecking this country.

And as I watch Friday Night Lights, which portrays the Bushest of Bush country (back in 1988), I realize how deeply warped the culture is which produces these Congressional yahoos. Notice I say warped, not the politically correct and neutral "different." In my opinion, it is a perverse culture which emphasizes at all costs winning, maintaining power, using agression, dominating others, HAVING THINGS, all justified with a veneer of properity gospel that so fundamentally distorts the message of Christ as to be heresy, as far as I'm concerned.

It just fills me with sadness and a little horror to know that there are literally millions of men in this country who hang their very sense of worth as a human being on whether or not football games are won. (And I love football.) And I ache for all of young gay men who have to survive growing up in Texas towns in which getting beat to death by your Dad for your sexual preference would be considered an honor killing by a local jury.

I know I'm mixing football and politics and not doing so terribly coherently. I'm writing during commercials, distracted by this really beautiful film. The ultimate irony of all of this is that it takes a lot of bunch of liberal elite Hollywood types, so held in contempt in by the Lindsey Grahams and Eric Cantors of the world, to render the lives of these young men, their hopes dreams, and disappointment so vivid and extraordinarily moving.

Maybe there's hope after all.

MCO 2009

The View from Up Here

2009-02-14T13:20:00.000-08:00

This is the view from the top of Runyon Canyon, where I go with the dog often.

It's very interesting and rather simple. When I participate heavily in 12-step programs and activities, I am able to maintain a remarkable level of contentment and serenity. This week I was turned to for help in two "relapse retrievals," i.e being the one called when someone is ready to get off the drugs. These are never simple. You have to watch your desire to swoop in and wave a magic wand filled with your wisdom and experience to make them feel better and see the light. The reality is that someone is in a lot of pain, very close to their last consumption of the drink or the drug, and under its influence to some degree. You cannot bestow willingness to change on them, and too much information cannot be absorbed. The best you can do is show kindess and understanding, with a generous dollop of tough love. You give money for a meal and a train ride, not enough to buy drugs. They need to stay out of the past and the future, and concentrate on the present--because that's where God is.
And as I got the chance to remember, a successful intervention is one in when the intervener stays sober.
But the gratification of being there when another addict reaches out--this is an amazing feeling. Likewise the fellowship I've been experiencing going to more meetings, culminating in a sober dance last night that was just fantastic.
Whether I have a valentine, I'm going to leave murky. I really need not to discuss anything romantic here until something has truly developed. I've been doing way too much cart before the horse putting.
I'm really enjoying life. And put up some more memoirs entries over at: www.marcolmsted.com/trashwhisperer.
MCO 2009

To Whom Amends Are Owed

2009-02-11T12:11:00.000-08:00

I hung out at my superhot (but straight, helas) friend Barron's tres cool motorcycle shop this morning, and I promised to help him drum up some business, as the economy is not being kind to small business owners. If you're an LA-based motorbiker in need of a repair or a rebuild, go see him and tell him I sent you.

Yesterday started out with that impromptu trip downtown to help out my teacher-neighbor, and just got more and more event-filled. David and I found a house that seemed too good to be true--a dream for under 300,000, and by the end of the day, we discovered we were right. (Just priced that low to spur a bidding war. Very disappointing but hardly a surprise.) I had my appointment for my sculptra consult, and will probably get my first treatment in May. While walking the dog, I found a jacket with money in it, and waiting until its owner came back to claim it, meeting a homeless tweeker with whom I had a long talk about getting off the merry-go-round. (I may have planted a seed. It's the best you can hope for sometimes.)

In the middle of all this, as I periodically checked my email, I discovered I had been defriended on Facebook by, and blocked from reading the blog of, a longtime blogami. His new (now -ex) long-distance boyfriend had had the audacity of friending me on Facebook, and as far as I could tell, this was unacceptable, conspiratorial behavior. I tried to get clarity via email, and the best I could get was a non-explanation in these words: "I'm not required to be completely reasonable - nor would it be completely reasonable for me to be so." Oh really? Well, a mutual willingness to at least try to reason things out in the event of a misunderstanding does happen to be a requirement of mine in a friendship. It's called sane, adult, behavior; the kind we supposedly try to embrace as part of our choice to get sober.

Still, it was disturbing, so I called another blogami this morning, one who knows us both and has also had to negotiate a bit of stormy weather with this person. Here's the funny thing: almost as soon as he answered, I found myself apologizing for a comment I had left on his blog that was very opinionated but not really helpful. (I would explain but it's a new entry entirely.)

Funny how that works. You can keep your side of the street clean on one block, but it doesn't mean you haven't left a dirty trail around the cormer. Not that we didn't eventually have the conversation I called to have, but the relief over came less from his assurance that I wasn't crazy than from what I got the chance to apologize for.

MCO 2009

Seek and Ye Shall Find, or Keep Your Eyes Open

2009-02-10T09:40:00.000-08:00

The man is from Sargent, the dancers from Degas.

So this morning I wake up surly. I missed my regular Monday morning meeting yesterday, because David had the car, but I usually take Tuesday mornings off because both meetings I might go to are Big Book meetings, and to tell the truth, two years of those in early sobriety were plenty. The Big Book is indispensable, but I've never been one who goes back to it over and over. I find NA's Basic Text much better, thank you.

So I'm staring desultorily at my email, which is on the uninteresting side, just drinking my first cup of coffee, and I hear, just outside my window, the wheezing sound of a car that won't start. My building is full of a close-knit extended family of Philipino friends, 6 apartments worth, and I assume one of them will come to the aid of the car that won't start. When this doesn't happen, I crack open my slats and ask a young woman I don't recognize if she needs a jump. She does.

It turns out her boyfriend has just moved in across the hall and she'd stayed over. She's panicked because she's training to be a teacher, a History major at U.S.C. and today she's teaching at a Junior High and being evaluated. So I hook up the cables, and expect the car to start. Woowoowooowoo-ahhh. Wooowoooowooo-ahhh. Asthmatic still.

I realize that I truly have nothing better to do than drive her to class. I'd like to finish my coffee, and Gaza needs walking, but the coffee and the dog can wait a hour. She can't believe her luck, and climbs in with copious gratitude. I tell her my Mom taught for 30 years, I can't not come to the aid of a teacher.

Wouldn't you know that I had just applied for three administrative positions at U.S.C? And I remember that I got my job at NYU 20 years ago by getting my resume directly to the French Department--human resources hadn't even sent it along. So when she asks what she can do to thank me, I tell her to keep her eyes out for incompetent secretaries and empty desks. I also tell her to tell the principal at the Junior High School she can have a volunteer who can teach French, English, History, SAT prep, even Math. (I volunteered to do that on Volunteer.org and have heard nothing back. 2nd time that has happened.)

I got her to class with 5 minutes to spare. It will be very interesting to see what kind of karmiquences, if anything, that this has, but I would bet there's something, and not in the next life, either.

On the way back, I hear the news California might be forced to release prisoners early. I am praying and hoping this occurs, as my friend Mike is rotting away and there is no less risky person to be back on the streets. Watch the crime rate NOT go up if these releases go through, even if one or two cases will be blown up by the media to create a frenzy for ratings.

All in all, this looks to be an interesting Tuesday.

MCO 2009

February 9th

2009-02-09T13:58:00.000-08:00

Today is the anniversary of my brother Luke's death in 1991, but rather than dwell on that, I thought I'd commemorate a time when such an occurrence was literally unimaginable. This photo dates from 1963, Easter weekend, I think, when families still dressed up for such rites and rituals. Look how friggin' cute we are! I remember loving wearing a suit, particularly as the patch on it gave it the allure of a uniform.

I've been spending a lot of time in my head in the middle part of the last century, writing about my mother's life before we were born. There are three new installments of the memoir at: http://www.marcolmsted.com/trashwhisperer/

So yesterday my friend Molly calls me from Tennessee, and she wants to tell me the good news. She's met a man on Eharmony. He's bright, funny, sexy, they've been writing for six weeks and tomorrow is their first phone call.
"Where's he from?" I ask.
"That's the bad news" she says.
"What," I take a wild guess. "Is he from Saskatchewan or something?"
There is a brief, shocked silence, the she lets out a scream.
"YES! He's from REGINA!"

Regina is the capital of Saskatchewan.

What are the chances?

MCO 2009

The Man Who Threw Too Much

2009-02-08T10:24:00.000-08:00

This is what the oh-so-dramatic sky looked like yesterday afternoon when I walked the dog. There is every shade of blue and grey in that. Amazing.
As you can imagine, this was followed by more rain, which, as I found to my dismay, doesn't seem to affect the urge to litter much. As I was walking the dog at nine--miserable with a head so full of mucus I thought it would just implode--a taxi driver waiting for a fare to come out of the building decided to choose that particular moment to do some cleaning of his cab, and out from his window tossed a cup of Starbucks, landing in the gutter just as I passed.
As much trash as I pick up, I'm always shocked when I actually see it happen. I think people are ashamed enough about it to usually do it when no one's looking, but in the dark and in the rain, I'm sure the cabbie didn't notice me. I stopped in my tracks and glared at him, unable at first to find words. Then I cried out:
"Did you just throw something out of your car?"
I think he thought I thought he had thrown it at me, at least that's what his semi-aplogetic shrug told me. That or he was trying to say: "Hey, I had a coffee cup to get rid of, what the hell what I supposed to do?" (This is how these litterers think--and the cabbies are the worst, because I find their water-bottles full of urine, with ashtrays-full of cigarettes within, on a daily basis. The idea of bringing it home to throw out doesn't seem to even occur to them.)
Finally the words came to me:
"SHAME ON YOU!" (I know, it sounds a little school-marmy, but it encapsulates the message rather concisely.)
This, he didn't appreciate, which was embodied in his response:
"FUCK YOU"
I searched for something appropriate, and being a crappy street that I do not clean but where I only walk Gaza at night, I immediately located a Carl's Jr. Jumbo size empty cup, that I tossed at the cab, barely missing it.
"FUCK ME? FUCK YOU!"
His response was to speed away, as if he was afraid I was going to chase him and batter his taxi with the umbrella. The thought did occur to me, but it was raining and I was walking the dog.
And it was fairly satisfying just to yell at someone like that, even if he perhaps thought I was some paranoid and oversensitive bystander, instead of understanding it was the litter I objected to.
I do wonder what the conversation between he and the fare was like.
MCO 2009

A Person Can Develop a Cold

2009-02-06T21:47:00.000-08:00

In other words,

Just from waiting around for that plain little band of gold,

A person can develop a cold.

You can spray her wherever you figure the streptococci lurk,

You can give her a shot for whatever she's got,

but it just won't work.

If she's tired of getting the fisheye from the hotel clerk,

A person can develop a cold.

Well, if there's anything more boring than someone discussing what a bad cold they have, I'm sure don't know what it is. And yet, when you have a bad cold (are there any other kind?) it's almost impossible to think or talk of anything else. So rather than bore you, I managed to remember that Adelaide in Guys and Dolls does sing the most delightful song about having a perpetual cold as a function of a perpetual engagement.

Mine of course, cannot be ascribed to such a cause, although it did force the kabosh on a weekend trip to Palm Springs where I was going to investigate the possibilities of my budding Facebook romance. Instead, I will be going out next weekend as part of a little entourage, as David and the realtor and I have long been discussing Plan B, buying a house out there instead of here, where twice a big (with a pool) is available for half as much due to the present foreclosure crisis.

The idea would be to live in both places, with an eventual full time move to Palm Springs for retirement, along with about half of the aging gay population of California. (At 50, it's the last chance I might have to be a pretty young thing again.) Nothing is etched in stone, we're just checking out the options. We just don't want to kick ourselves in a few years for not having taken advantage of the opening in the housing market, and I think that a big change every 5 years or so does a body good.

Since it sure as hell doesn't look like that change is likely on the job front anytime soon, it may just be on the horizon via a geographic change, a romance, or both!

MCO 2009

The New Buzz

2009-02-04T11:40:00.000-08:00

I was going to find some way to add these handcuffs to my pregnancy test/condoms/flowers trilogy, but then I realized what a perfect illustration it is for the 5th anniversary of the arrest that led to my imprisonment, and eventually to my freedom. Not just the obvious freedom that came with release, but liberation from the shackles of addiction, from a thinking based on self-will and the illusion that I could live sanely with just the tools of my ego and an intoxicating substance. Oy.

Five years ago I was forced, by the West Hollywood Police Department and the California State Prison system, to start on the path of the 12 steps, starting with Step 1, in which "we admitted we are powerless over [Insert Substance] and our lives had become unmanageable." I didn't know I was taking the step, but in retrospect, nothing could be clearer.

There is nothing so powerless as being handcuffed in front of your dog, as he whimpers with fear at all the strangers in uniforms with guns. And there is no unmanageability worse than when other people in uniforms are telling you when you can eat, sleep and shower. Unmanageability is when you have to do #2 in full view of Loco Jimenez, Unmagic Johnson and Jack Swaztikaryan on the toilets surrounding you.

This should be my 5-year sober anniversary but noooooooooo, I just had to try some controlled drinking after prison. Well, at least I closed the door that might have stayed open in the back of my mind that I could carry that off. I did not, in fact, drink to excess, but I never once enjoyed the buzz.

There's a different buzz that permeates my life now. The buzz that comes from being 100% present, from trying to live a kind life while doing the next indicated thing, one day at a time. The buzz that comes from an Armenian woman getting out of her car yesterday to tell me that my picking up trash has "inspired her."

You can't bottle or bag that buzz. Not in a million years.

MCO 2009

Summer in Winter

2009-02-03T12:28:00.000-08:00

I do like the Hy-Arts where you practically can't tell what the added element is. Though I guess I cheated by using two artists of very much the same school. I call this entry "Summer in Winter" because it is over 80 degrees here in Southern California.

On the one hand, I think after the age of the Bush Robber Barons, that ethics is vital under Obama. On the other hand, this zealous vetting has got to be measured against the crises we face and the competence we need. If someone didn't declare a driver and car as income, and he pays back all the taxes owed on it, give him a frigging break. And who the hell pays income taxes on household help who asks to work off the books? When I think of the war criminals that got us into Iraq collecting their $50,000 speaking fees when they should be facing prison, and then Tom Daschle not being able to help reform our Health Care System--it turns my stomach.

I am having one helluva great correspondence with someone in Palm Springs I met on Facebook, I'm not going to jinx it by saying too much too soon, but I'm smiling a LOT. I still think the world of my other facebook flings, but no matter how smart or handsome or both, they have lacked the crucial cachet of proximity. I need to reach out and TOUCH someone, dammit. Particularly one who is extremely creative and has a way with words, not to mention blue eyes of the melty variety.

MCO 2009

Old Moons, New Friends

2009-02-02T11:21:00.000-08:00

(Click for larger)

So yesterday I was friended by this intriguing guy on Facebook. I found his pix and profile attractive, to say the least, but what really hooked me was his photography, which betrayed an extremely discerning (beautiful blue) eye, and a willingess to look at things from an offbeat angle, a trait I like to think I share.

One of his photos, above, just leapt out at me, and I asked him if I could use it as a backdrop for a poem. He assumed it was a poem I'd already written, so was quite surprised when two hours later (all while watching the stupendous Superbowl) I had written "Moons." What can I say, I was inspired.

It was a lovely weekend. I had the grey taken out on Friday by David and so looked my best for a big sober party Saturday night. I had a wonderful lunch with my friend Glen on Saturday and Sunday there was the very entertaining football game and correspondance with new friends, some of whom are increasingly geographically appropriate if we choose to explore that side of things.

Mercury came out of retrograde yesterday, and I'm feeling it very personally. Things are flowing, baby.

MCO 2009

P.S. I put up another installment of the memoir.

Flowers and Football

2009-02-01T15:45:00.000-08:00

I know it's the Superbowl and everything, but I just had to share the last pic of the trilogy I didn't know I was creating with the pregnancy test and the unopened condoms.

See, I figure that the expectant father-wannabe didn't use the condoms, and, expectant that the pregnancy test would turn out positive, had this bouquet of flowers all ready for news that he was going to be a Daddy. Helas, when she announced not only that she wasn't pregnant, but seemed happy about it, he certainly wasn't going to get the flowers from the car, and feigning a phone call from a friend who needed a "jump," angrily tossed the bouquet from the car window as he rounded the corner.

Of course, I say a disappointment in one's romantic life is still no excuse to litter. But at least they're biodegradable.

As for the Superbowl, I am the first one to cheer on the narrative of Kurt Warner, who warms the cockles of any man's heart over the age of 35. However, I do not approve of the practice of naming football teams after states. I would accept the "Phoenix Phonebooths," for example, but I reject the "Arizona" Cardinals, just as I find the Tennessee Titans unseemly. (What would have been wrong with the "Nashville Nastyboys?" " The Memphis Manly Men?")

As of this typing, Pittsburgh is winning, and I'm pretty sure that's why.

MCO 2009

P.S. Installment #8 is up at the Memoir.

The Parking Ticket

2009-01-31T07:50:00.000-08:00

I find it rather ironic to find this selection of unopened condoms just days after the negative pregnancy test. Shouldn't I have found them opened, and before the test?

Yesterday I got a parking ticket. I was as irritated as anybody is when that happens, especially because, as ever with parking tickets, there's no one to blame but oneself.

I realized I had done some convenient math in my head, calculating the time I had on the meter from the beginning of my appointment, not from the moment I was actually putting in the coins.
The result was a $48 reminder of a hallmark character defect of mine, and particularly common among alcoholics and addicts: a willingness to cut corners. I do it much less than I used to, for sure, but it still crops up here and there, and I'm grateful to recognize it and express it rather than let such magical thinking morph under the surface to the point where me and my ego think we can do anything sans effort. Of such thinking relapses are born--and prison terms.

I reminded myself that I often park in that space and the meter reads "fail," so have gotten a lot of free parking there (next to my physical therapists). I reminded myself that I get free medical care from the state, that a $48 rebate to the city government it its time of need was karmically appropriate, even if it meant forgoing two movies out with popcorn, and an impulse buy at a thrift shop of a shirt or two I don't really need.

Yes, I wish I'd put in that one extra quarter. But no experience, however irritating, is without its purpose.

MCO 2009

Flying By Days

2009-01-29T09:44:00.000-08:00

I've taken a similar picture before--this is where I leave cans for the shopping cart guys to pick up--but this time I happened to lay my trashpicker down on the phone utility box and I like the rifle-like effect. Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could wave a magic wand and all of the guns on earth magically turned into E-Z reachers? How fantastic it would be if we could settle disputes by seeing how much trash someone could pick up in an hour. (Interestingly, one of the homeless guys who I often talk to told me "it's terrible right now. Everybody is picking up cans. Yesterday I only made $6. I usually make $22." And meanwhile the friggin' Republicans are voting against the stimulus package. ASSHOLES. History will remember them like it remembers the early Union generals of the Civil War--incompetent, clueless, cowardly buffoons.)

After feeling like I was running in place recently, I'm on a productive jag. On Monday I sent a bunch of Hy-Arts to my cousin Henri, in France, realizing I had an extraordinary painter in the family. I'm hoping he'll want to paint them. We have a long history of collaboration, he's translated most of my poetry into French! He's a brilliant guy, though shy and solitary by nature.

On Tuesday, David and I went househunting. He's very hard to please--I thought at least 2 of the properties worth pursuing, if flawed. And he has the money, I'm just the future tenant. So that's part of the reason I spent most of yesterday filling out the USC job application on line and then applying for three jobs there. I used to work at NYU in the 80s, and it was one of my favorite jobs. Of course I had to confront head on in the cover letter the triple issues of my age, the gaps in my resume, and my criminal history. I'm hoping I get points for honesty.

I've just posted installment #7 of the memoir. I realize that what I wrote so far flows well enough into the version I was working on last year, and many of the memory pieces I've written in and since prison will work as stand alone chapters. I just have to keep in movement on this.

Today I'm going to fix up "Valley of Deception" (Sheria, did you read it?) on the computer and pass it around to some theater people I know. I really think it would make a great show, perhaps a benefit.

I am so grateful for my life. It's pretty rough out there, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

MCO 2009

P.S. We've been extracting oil from the ground for 100 years. Hasn't that created a whole hell of a lot of empty space in the earth? When the ocean levels rise from global warming, isn't it possible to put some of that water back into the earth? And can't we used abandoned mines for landfills?

Just asking.

The Trash Whisperer Dispatches - The Pregnancy Stick

2009-01-27T09:25:00.000-08:00

I went up to Bronson Canyon with the dog yesterday, that's where they filmed some of the Batman TV show, at least the parts where the Batmobile had to emerge from the Batcave. It's a pleasant little hike, and if I don't go too often there's enough litter for me to fill up a bagful of trash. Right at the end of the walk, I came across this pregnancy test stick. As I put it in my bag, I imagined the situation.

She peed on the stick in her bathroom, then put it in her bag and drove to the park. She needed a quiet place to look at it, to have an emotional reaction away from the roommate chattering on about unimportant things but likely to be curious about her silence. She'd been in the middle of "the longest break-up known to man," with a guy who has wanted to "take it to the next level" while she wanted to pursue her career in filmmaking unencumbered by a relationship. You get a lot of jobs flirting with the right men. Ironically, the boyfriend's in the business too, he's an Assistant Director, she's a Production Assistant, that's how they met, on a student film shoot right here in the Canyon. She's loves him, she loves him not, she's doesn't know what she wants.

But the idea of an abortion is daunting. She knows her boyfriend well enough to imagine for the rest of her life exactly what her unborn child would have been like. And yet that very imagination make it seem impossible for her not to pursue her dream of making movies. She knows having a child would make that doubly difficult. 28 in Hollywood isn't so young, there are 22-year olds ahead of her on the ladder.

She imagines putting a baby up for adoption, then being confronted by the child in a few decades, and telling her son--she imagines a boy--she wanted to "make" it in filmmaking. How shallow an explanation could you come up with? And when he asks about his father? What would she say; "Oh yeah, he wanted to marry me." And what if she ended up marry him anyway?

At that point, she takes a deep breath, and reads the marker. One line = Not pregnant. She looks at it twice, then lets out a whoop of joy and relief. She practically runs back to her car, dropping the stick along the way.

Why can't she shake a vague feeling of disappointment that comes over her on the way home? It must be the playground she saw on the way out of the park.

Suddenly she suspects she won't break up after all, and might even "forget" to put in her diaphragm soon enough.

MCO 2009

A Day at the Gallibreum

2009-01-26T11:40:00.000-08:00

The genesis of this artpiece is an odd one. In Provincetown in October, at Serenity-by-the-Sea, I attended a creativity workshop in which everyone took an old album cover and created a collage that would represent one's "totem." What I put together was lame--it really was--but I did promise myself one day to salvage what I did, scan it and cut and paste in Photoshop until I came with something I could live with. (The above one doesn't look much like the original, plus I threw a poem of mine on it.)

I came across the album cover while cleaning my little apartment and looking through and throwing out some of the files I brought down from my brother's. I also came across more of my old writing, artwork and letters. I am truly addicted to the creative process and always have been. I could open a frigging library. Or museum. Or art gallery. A gallibreum.

Creativity is my therapy. And not for any personal woes, which I really don't have many of in any case. Listening to the news is plenty enough to drive any sane person to distraction. On the one hand, for example, there are those fundamentalist settlers on the West Bank who are making a two-state solution in the Middle East virtually impossible, and Israel is at fault for permitting it. On the other hand, the Taliban is making life for women miserable again in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that alone is reason enough for the U.S. to intervene. Religious fundamentalism of all stripes is a scourge on humanity, and that's just one slice of the immense suffering in the world. (Closer to home, the little newcomer I did NOT bed has disappeared from his Sober Living. He is "out there," on the streets. )

I literally have to tell myself on a daily basis that I have a right to be happy even when others are suffering, that bleeding into rage or commiseration doesn't do anyone a bit of good. What I do--what we all often do, as human beings--is up our emotional response in an effort to give ourselves the illusion of taking action. Like when you're in bad traffic, and you get frustrated and angry to the point of inducing an ulcer, trying to make the traffic unclog. Has this ever worked? Though we understand it doesn't intellectually, when the traffic finally speeds up our brain creates a cause and effect relationship. We made the traffic move by wanting it enough, or so our brain tells us.

Taking a deep breath in the face of this mess of a world is not an easy thing for this grandiose semi-delusional with a Messiah-complex. But we've just seen what 8 years of such alcoholic thinking can do to a planet. I like being able to take my cues from a different role model.

MCO 2009

Being Alive - The Sequel

2009-01-25T10:10:00.000-08:00

This Hy-Art is for anyone who's ever endured the end of a love affair.

Yesterday I was in the art store with my friend Michael, who paints as a hobby, and he told me he has an overhead projector. Sometime this spring, I'm going to go over to his place and see if I can actually project a hy-art onto a canvas and paint it. Alternately, I can also submit a photo of one to the Art Store and they turn it into a painting. This is very tempting, but it would cost me several hundred dollars to do each one, plus framing. (I may perhaps do it as a wedding present for my nephew and his fiance. THAT would be an original gift.)

So yesterday I go into the offices of Being Alive to sign up for free Sculptra treatment, which I really do need for the lipodostrophy in my face but is not covered by Medicare. (It is cosmetic, strictly speaking. I can't really blame Medicare for not covering it in the current financial climate, it is a very expensive drug.) The doctor they work with (Being Alive is a service organization for the HIV+) gets the Sculptra free from the pharmaceutical companies that makes it for poor poz people just like me, (facial wasting is a side-effect of the meds.) I am very happy about this, the extra set of lines in my face is a big downer.

Almost none of you would have been reading me back at this time in 2005, but I applied to work at Being Alive back then, to help lead up a new anti-meth campaign they were spearheading. They also published in their newsletter several of my blog entries about being HIV+ in prison. (I had used to write for them back in 1999, right before the addiction took over.) After several interviews, it was between me and another guy, and he got the job. I was very disappointed, and a little perplexed because I'd really thought myself well-qualified. If I couldn't get this job, I asked myself, what job could I get?

It was only recently, when I thought of it again, that the reason why I didn't get the job was clear to me. Of course they hadn't hired me. I was 2 months sober when I interviewed, just out of prison. They knew all too well that the relapse rate for meth addicts in the first year is something like 70%, to entrust me at that time with a job that was being created specifically to combat HIV infections by combatting meth use would have been risky to the point of irresponsibility. It turned out, of course, that I didn't relapse, but they couldn't have known that and neither could I.

But the fact that I didn't put me in a particular strong position to ask the Director yesterday if I might be reconsidered for any other openings they might have. Wouldn't you know that the same project is up for refunding? And wouldn't you know that I have lot of very good, creative ideas that I would never have had without the four years of sobriety that has passed?

I don't want to put any carts before any horses, etcetera. I will just add I have a very good feeling after my talk to the Director, particularly as I am in the singularly advantageous position of being able to work for very cheap, as I don't need to replace my income, just supplement it. This is also one of the few outfits at which I not only do not have to apologize for the gaps in my resume, they completely understand why they are there.

For starters I will be volunteer editing their newsletter and contributing some articles, although the next issue is months away. Meanwhile I will stay in touch because I'll be going in on February 10th to start the process of looking as purty as I can look again. I feel very optimistic on all fronts.

MCO 2009

Fantasy and Reality

2009-01-23T13:00:00.000-08:00

I know it's silly to take a picture of the television, especially of the most photographed person in the world, but it felt a little like I was there. Not that I wanted to be there. (History, schmistory, who the hell wants to freeze to death in a crushing crowd instead of languishing in the warmth of the California sun? I'm not kidding, you couldn't have paid me to go.)

Going to the inauguration is the perfect example of an idea that sounds great on paper but would not have been so great in reality (at least for me.) I have a lot of those. I realize that I love the idea of a job, (read paycheck) way more than the reality of actual work. Same thing with a boyfriend. A relationship in the abstract seems lovely, but if the past is a guide, when I have one I'm usual impatient to be alone again.

This dichotomy also applies to alcohol and drugs. The idea of drink seems pleasant and harmless enough. The reality of drinking, even (or especially) controlled drinking involves a level of effort that is exhausting. (Do I have a second drink? A third? More? Was my conversation influenced by it? Did I say something I didn't mean/regret? Do I smell of it? How much did I spend? Will I get up to pee 3 times a night? Will I wake up with a hangover? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.) I don't even want to touch the chaos entailed by using drugs. I just have to remember the dopamine-drenching comes at a horrific cost of mess management.

Then there are the things I like the idea of and also the reality of. Writing. Blogging. Walking the dog. Picking up trash. Going to meetings. Reading. Flirting. Watching movies.

Does this mean I should never do something I like the idea of but not the reality of? No. Working for example. What I can do, though, is try to make sure I only apply for work that I would find meaningful and/or fun, so that even if I'm not crazy about my boss, or the pay, I'll feel like it enhances my time on the planet.

Unfortuately (or fortunately, depending on how I'm feeling) the easiest thing in the world in Los Angeles now is NOT getting a job. Unemployment is up to 9%, and that just the offical rate. And since I can manage without one, if barely, I have the added feeling that if I did work, I could be taking a job away from someone who has no fallback, who might be feeding a family. What a convenient justification for a big old lazy rationalizer like me, eh?

Of course it's not like my applications are getting any bites. I used to land interviews without too much effort, now I don't even get a form letter email, acknowledging receipt. I don't take it personally--because of my particular history, my resume simply doesn't reflect my capabilities. You just can't cite a job that occurred 10 years ago as your greatest professional accomplishment and expect to impress someone, and of course it's a no-no to vaunt your growing of a business from nothing to an operation bringing in 100K a year in 3 years' time if that business happened to be an illegal one.

Although let me tell you, I am tempted. Maybe radical honesty is the way to go.

MCO 2009

Where the Money Went

2009-01-22T11:37:00.000-08:00

This Hy-Art certainly speaks to the human reality that what others see does not always reflect how we experience ourselves.

I am thrilled by the start of the Obama administration, if completey irritated by the continued misdiagnosis by the media as to the cause of the financial crisis.

When Bush came into office, the top 1% of the population had 8% of the wealth, now they have 22% of the wealth. That means 99% of us have to share 78% of the money, instead of 92%. The Republican ideology that everyone can get rich if the rich get really rich is, indeed, voodoo economics, and has been irrevocably proved as such by the last 8 years. I find it very distressing that Obama might backtrack on his intention to levy taxes on the superrich so that they pay what they did during the Clinton era. This is not part of the problem, it's part of the solution.

I was flipping through channels and actually caught a moment of Sarah Palin on Fox spouting the facile sound bite that "people know better how to spend their money than the government." Well, that's nice, Sarah. How many people have you ever met who decided to spend their "extra" money on repaving a road, improving a school, paying a policeman, or funding disaster relief? The Palins spend it on snowmobiles and rifles. And diapers, of course.

This idea needs to be smashed that the goverment is something out there, above and beyond and foreign to us as citizens, instead of an expression of our collective selves. You can call me a communist till the cows come home, but the communists were never democrats. Power came from the top down, and Bush/Cheney made a pretty good stab at doing the same here. In the democracy emerging via the internet and the millenial generation, a new economy might actually be evolving that is based on fairness instead of consumption. That's American.

Some people will always more power and wealth than others, this is the nature of human culture. But the utter lack of proportionality that has marked American society during certain periods of our history always has the consequences of egregious poverty (the turn of the century) or massive economic downturn (the Great Depression and now). Americans have got to stop thinking in terms of individual wealth and start thinking in terms of collective wealth. It makes for a lot more happiness, even for the rich.

Unfortunately, if you asked, say, the Real Housewives of Orange County, if they had a choice between taking home $100,000 more a year each or there being Universal Health Care, they would almost certainly choose making the extra money. I guess that's pretty American too, but I find it very sad.

Installment #6 of the memoir is up.

MCO 2oo9

The Glow over the Horizon

2009-01-20T08:20:00.000-08:00

This photo is what the last 8 years have been like. The little green light on the left was Al Gore, the sharper orange light in the center (for me) was Keith Olbermann, and the two little lights, Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert.

And then, far at the end, was a brighter glow over the horizon. We didn't know who it was, it was too indistinct, but it was clearly the future, and it bore with it hope.

We now know who the light at the end of the tunnel was.

Welcome Barack Obama. Welcome Mr. President. The sun is up again.

MCO 2000

Glen sings at MCC

2009-01-19T19:09:00.000-08:00

This is a video of Glen's performance, about which I blogged in the previous entry.

The Days before the Day

2009-01-19T12:58:00.000-08:00

What a great day it was yesterday. In the morning I went to church at MCC, because my friend Glenn Hill was singing in honor of MLK day and the upcoming inauguration. The congregation was packed. Rev. Pat put together an extraordinary montage of images from black history to music, and Rev. Neil preached an inspired sermon about the meaning of Obama's ascendance and the links of blacks and gays in their oppression and liberation, and how all of it related to the meaning of Christ's life.

The stage was set for Glenn to sing The Battle Hymm of the Republic, seguewaying into We Shall Overcome, an appropriate enough song as I was exactly that, overcome. I held hands with the lesbians on my right and left, one white and one black, and halfway through, just started bawling like a baby. It felt like the full weight of our awful/glorious history was upon me and being lifted from me at the same time, and I daresay this was the feeling of most of the people in the room. It was a truly profound and memorable experience, and I will always remember my neighbors Janet and Audrey, who were equally transported by the moment. Mostly I will remember Glenn, whose voice and delivery was simply amazing. I knew him as a great human being, of incredible service to others, but I did not know he was so talented.

Then I spent a few hours with my hottie newcomer, walking the dog in Atwater, along the LA river, where this picture was taken. I have told him we will not be sleeping together in the near future, but I am perfectly happy to get to know him and leave that door open sometime down the road. Soon enough it was clear my willingness to get to know him, to find out about him as a person, was far more important to him than my willingness to get down his pants. When we walked to get some orangina, the girl behind the counter said we looked like really nice guys, and just told us it was on the house. That somehow didn't feel accidental at all.

Then I came home and David and I watched "Cabaret," my favorite movie; the end of the Ravens/Steelers playoff game; the pre-Inaguration concert on the Capitol Steps, and the first two episodes of Toni Collette in "The United States of Tara," which is just so much fun.

This morning, in honor of Obama's request that we use MLK Day to volunteer, I doubled the size and length of my route and picked up twice the usual amount of trash. As the task wore on, I found myself in mutter-mode ("damn litterering idiots") but the universe put an end to that in the guise of a handsome neighbor named Jeremy who went out of his way to shake me hand. "I see you every day. You even take those stupid fliers off my car. You're awesome, man." That somehow didn't feel accidental either.

I was thinking that the sad part about the trashwhispering is that it would all be so unneccessary if people just didn't litter. I could spend the time doing something preventative, like mentoring kids or planting trees. Of course, I could spend time doing that anyway, and so I'm thinking about it. If Obama's inauguration is not a call to service, then nothing is. There are no accidents.

MCO 2008

Family Secrets Exposed

2009-01-18T09:54:00.000-08:00

Yes, I've been keeping a secret. I'm actually old friends with the Obamas, and I didn't just come up with Hy-Art last year. They were the first buyers of it, back in 1996, as this photo of them at home for that time attests.

Of course I was invited to the inauguration, but it's too damn cold and I told them so. I said: "Mich" (that's what I call Michelle) "the first think Rack (pronounced 'Rock') needs to do is sign an executive order moving the next inaguration to L.A. It's 80 degrees out here."

I also told them I understood that until the landslide of '12, they won't be in a position to use my art to decorate the White House. I don't need to add to any grief from they'll already be getting from the right wing.

But in four years, when he's been re-elected with 72% of the vote, you can be damn sure I'm doing my very own extreme makeover of the family quarters. And I'll want my own art studio in the West Wing.

MCO 2009

Wyeth and Why Not

2009-01-17T07:39:00.000-08:00

Andrew Wyeth died yesterday, so I thought I'd find one of the Hy-Arts I did using his work (this with Vermeer) to commemorate him. I have to say, looking though 4 folders to find this work, I am newly astounded by how beautiful some of Hy-Arts are. This is completely a reflection of the artists I used, but it does remind me not to put this whole effort on the shelf forever. They really need to be painted, as their own work, and displayed somewhere. I saw an author on Jon Stewart talking about the archaic nature of copyright law, how we need to change the system to encourage new forms of art from previous work, and I'm thinking if this is going to change, it's going to be in the next 8 years. My personal challenge is whether to shift my priorities to a different artistic pursuit than writing. To do the Hy-Art for real, not digitally, would be a huge undertaking. Too bad I'm not Benjamin Button (which I enjoyed last night) getting younger and more energetic. Although in the end, he had no more time than the rest of us.
I got an email on Facebook from someone trying to start a movement to create a cabinet post for Secretary of GLBT affairs. It just set me off. Here we have a new President about to confront a domestic and international situation that is more daunting than any in American history, and some activist, concerned with feeling important and advancing his career, is asking him to add to a plate that is ridiculously overflowing something that is at best, ineffectual, at worst, a slap in the face to women, blacks and hispanics who would OF COURSE claim their own right to cabinet posts. Just what we need, 4 new Federal bureaucracies. This is not going to happen in a million years, and it's a waste of effort. Do they realize how many Americans have no idea that the "T" in LGBT stands for "transgendered?" Way to start off the next 8 years throwing to the rabid right the golden egg that could kill the goose.
People, ask not what Obama can do for you. Ask what we can do for Obama.
MCO 2009

What to Do, What to Do

2009-01-16T10:31:00.000-08:00

This is Rita. Rita is the puppy my sister Sandra has gotten in one of her sneakiest strategies yet to get me to move to Albuquerque. I have to admit it's almost working. You just can't get any cuter than this.

One of the results of the Facebook binge I've been on for two weeks is that I had all this email backed up, mostly from www.truthout.org and the Huffington Post, two of the news sources on which I depend that used to provide me with all I required to procrastinate. I finally realized that my problem was neither the news or social networking sites, but my willingness to avoid, fed by my insistent belief that more information will make me a better person.

More information will make me more informed, and that is not a bad thing. Where it bleeds into delusions of grandeur is when I imagine, on some level, that not reading that article or adding that friend or commenting on that status update somehow represents essential work left undone.

The truth is Obama is not calling asking me for advice, if he needs a quick rundown of someone's point of view, he can call the person who wrote the article. It's a lot of fun to flirt on Facebook, but the occasionally stroke of someone's ego or LOL received for a witty comment isn't very consequential in the great scheme of things.

Pursuing my passion, which is writing, that is consquential, if not on the world at large (at least not yet) on how I feel about my life when I look back on it. What do I want my obituary to read?
That's actually not a bad thing to keep in mind when guiding one's choices. Wouldn't it suck if it read: "A lifelong fan of One Live to Live, Marc particularly loved the split personality story arc of Jessica Buchanan. He also never missed a posting by Bob Cesca on the Huffington Post."

Though as I think about it, I realize no matter how much I'd like it my obit to read: "Mr. Olmsted wrote 17 books--5 of them bestsellers-- and 8 screenplays including an Oscar-winner," it wouldn't matter much if it didn't also read "his friends spoke of an extremely kind person, noting that he gave most of his fortune away."

Clearly, I have my work cut out for me, but it's good to have a plan.

MCO 2009

January 15, 2009

2009-01-15T18:26:00.000-08:00

I've been working on the memoir, and decided I coudn't blog until I was satisfied with the next installment. Now I have two of them ready, one of which is up on the other blog. (The other I'll put up tomorrow.)

There is no feeling as good for me as the one I get from writing. It's just at times that I have to pray for the willingness to be patient with the process itself. Being willing to turn off the TV helps to, and to log off Facebook.

This morning I apologized to two people involved in a brouhaha I was in last year about trust, friendship, advice, honesty and things told in confidence. I had a lot of justification on my side, but the bottom line is that I reacted impulsively and emotionally and said some things it wasn't my place to say. For that, I sincerely said I was sorry, and they appreciated hearing it. I felt really good.

I was in the kitchen making lunch when I heard "This is a Special Report from ABC News." My heart jumped up into my throat, fearing the worst about Obama. Instead I witnessed the immediate aftermath of a the "miracle on the Hudson." Bravo. (It seems impossible no camera caught it live. Though a video will probably surface.)

I had posted on Facebook the suggestion that everyone film themselves throwing shoes at the screen during Bush's farewell address, so I could stitch together something on You Tube to the tune of "The Boots are Made for Walking." But when the time came, I couldn't bear to watch him. I can only tolerate the man if Keith Olbermann is breaking in with caustic narration. I can only hope and pray Atty General Holder with be authorized to prosecute Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld for War Crimes for authorizing torture. It is the one area about which I fear being disappointed in Obama.

Happy Birthday, King of Kings.

MCO 2008

Unburied

2009-01-13T09:08:00.000-08:00

Since my release from prison, I've had remarkable luck putting my past behind me. My two best using friends got sober pretty much with me, and with them I had the most ties. We had a lot of wreckage between the three of us, but we faced firmly forward. At first it was rocky with one of them, and then with the other, but eventually we all stayed friends. I spent a fortune on both of them when I was a dealer, but no one twisted my arm to do so and it was all drug money. I don't consider myself owed by either of them.

There were two other addicts who were less friends than hangers on that I could never quite get rid of, so I employed them and let them often stay with me. This is fairly typical dealer behavior. In your mind, if you do something you're not proud of (and believe me, no one is proud of selling drugs) you compensate by what you see as Robin Hood behavior. I did a lot of that, which is why I had very little to show for all the money I made.

I could write a novel about these two barnacles--can't begin to do these characters justice in a blog entry. One was very handsome, but psycho, the other was very sweet, but not very bright. The word "hapless" comes to mind. Suffice to say, knowing neither of them got sober or was willing to, I've avoided them both like the plague since I got out of prison.

The looker I have seen once from a distance. The dim bulb I finally ran into at APLA last month. I could have ignored him, but I decided that perhaps God was showing me an opportunity to be of service. I gave him a ride to a bus stop. We talked, exchanged numbers, he told me he wanted to see Gaza. About his using, he told me just enough to confirm what I pretty much assumed. (I KNOW addicts and I KNOW lying.) I did let him know to call me if he was open to going to a meeting.

Last week he phoned and I let it go to voicemail; "Mahk!" (he has a very strong Boston accent one doesn't expect from a black man) "It's Hal. I've been off Miss T. for a month and Dan"--his barnacle, perhaps responsible for my arrest-- "is OUT of my life! I really want to see you and Gaza! Call me when you get this!" I waited, and thought about what he said and what my instinct heard, and the next day left him a message: "Hal, I know how many times in the past 5 years you've probably been able to say the same thing. So while that's all good, it doesn't make me comfortable enough to resume our friendship. If you want to go to a meeting, let me know though, and maybe I'll call you when I'm in the neighborhood to see Gaza." (Gaza did love Hal. Hal would call Gaza "his best friend. The only one who listens to me and understands my problems.")

This morning I wake up to indignant texts from Hal, one insisting I owed him money--ludicrous to the point of insult considering our history, only a slight sense of which I gave here. This request indicated to me that he is high and out of money. We exchanged some past-dredging angry texts until I decided to leave a very clear message on his voicemail that this conversation was over.

Feeling the blowblack from my pathological past manifested in me an immediate craving for cigarettes. Well, that's better than other kinds of cravings, at least. Instead of smoking, I called a friend and then turned turned to the blog. This has become my "go-to" therapy.

It's hard to know how to engage in the amends process with someone who is still out there. In putting Hal up and letting him stay with me for that last year of my using, "employing" him to walk the dog and do the dishes, and above all keeping him high, I did him no favors. I merely enabled him, played God in his life. But to aplogize for such things, to an active addict, just comes off as sarcastic. All I know to do is keep the hand of the 12 steps out to him, but that offer also comes off as trying to play God in his life.

I'm gonna let God play God in his life and just stay away. Sometimes saying "no" is a spiritual act. But I am relieved he doesn't know where I live.

Where I might not be living much longer. David and I are still in the running for the house we like so much. (A bunch of things have to happen first.)
MCO 2009

The Ups and the Downs

2009-01-12T11:10:00.000-08:00

I'm not a big fan of most post-modernist abstract painting, like a simple "target" painted by Noland, but it does make a good frame for this surrealistically-tinged falling horse from Nolan. (I found these on opposing pages of my ART boook.)

With an increase in the time I spend socializing, whether virtually, via Facebook, or saying yes to parties and barbecues (I sound like Scarlett O'Hara) comes an increase also in the friction that is bound to occur when you interact with others more. Along with more good conversations and budding friendships, I also have come across more behavior I find attention-getting or manipulative. In one case, I shared my opinion about it and feathers were rather ruffled.

I have a sharp tongue, and a perceptive take on the world, a writer dedicated to shrewdly observing human behavior and reporting my observations as elegantly as possible. This is an alloyed good when cloaked in fiction or anonymity; when that is not the case, the reaction can be tart, this time from someone I've known for ten years and always thought obnoxious, (though he didn't know that.)

While I think what I said was dead on, I also have to look at my willingness to have said it. It really would have been so easy to let it go, to let his behavior speak for itself. Who appointed me Denouncer of False Sincerity and Melodramatic Attention-Getting? All I had to do was ignore some annoying Facebook postings.

Restraint of Pen and Tongue. They teach us that in AA, and I didn't practice it. The truth is my instinct is never to shut up. I have had to learn that habit, completely, and it's a definite work in progress.

So that was the downside of my increased sociability. The upside was a wonderful party yesterday at which I got to be very affectionate with Carpenter Smith and also enjoy the attentions of a very handsome young man who is, unfortunately, a newcomer. In AA we try to keep our hands off of those recently sober because we know what a tender time that is and how distracting any sort of intense feelings that might develop can be. I would never chase after a newcomer out of respect for this suggestion. But I've never had one come on to me, at least who I was very attracted to.

Mmmhh, there's a dilemma for you. I have the angel on my shoulder telling me to say no, and the devil in my pants noting his sponsor told him he could have as much sex as he wanted. Oy.

MCO 2008

P.S. Installment #3 is at www.marcolmsted.com/trashwhisperer

Luck You

2009-01-10T07:14:00.000-08:00

I found this CD picking up trash. I can't for the life of me figure out what that label is. Puck You? Muck You? Luck You? That must be it: Luck You!
The plan was for me to continute to write both a blog entry a day and a memoir entry a day, but I think I'm going to have to aim for a more realistic routine of alternating daily between the blog and the memoir, even though, yesterday I did neither. Facebook and laundry ate up my day.

And I also saw "Slumdog Millionaire." Boy, they're not kidding about it being the crowdpleaser of the year. Congrats Danny Boyle (direction) and Simon Beaufoy (writer) not to mention all the actors. I also thought it was invaluable for its portrayal of what life is really like in the developing world for poor kids. Very few American teenagers have much of an idea that millions survive by literally picking through trash for pennies a day; that beggars are part of Dickensian networks, exploited by adults and sometimes their own parents; that torture is often a routine part of an arrest.
At the same time, a country that you couldn't pay me to go to a decade ago is appearing increasingly interesting to me. I don't think I'll be visiting anytime soon, but India is definitely "in." Is there anyplace in the world where the past and the future collide so spectacularly in the present?
Carlos and I are IMing, if not Skyping. It is a far more realistic way to go.
Last night I dreamt that I threw a dinner party and gave everyone a poem or a song or a joke to read. It was a grand idea, and I am definitely going to use it one day.
MCO 2008

This and That

2009-01-08T09:57:00.000-08:00

So this is a display I often confront while picking up trash: an array of empty Airwick or HairNet spray cans.
They are, I am almost certain, used as makeshift torches, as their output is lit to heat the crack pipe. I am the last one to judge this behavior. However, I will judge their littering. There is a dumpster less than 20 feet away, after all.
What this tells me is that when these guys gather to get high, whoever might show the kind of civic consideration involved in disposing correctly of his litter would lose status in the eyes of his friends. In their value system, real men don't give a shit. They throw their trash where they stand, even if it's their own neighborhood. It's sad more than anything, the idea that anyone would have such a limited sense that what they do might have an impact on the world, negative or positive.
As I replay what occured with Carlos, I realize how adolescent it was to launch into it in the first place. A sane reaction to "can I call you" would have been "You're very hot, and nice, but you live in England. What's the point?" No, my mature response kicked in 10 days later, and now feelings have been hurt. I need to just say no at the appropriate moment. What am I, in 8th grade?
Tennessee Tony called yesterday and told me he'd bought the house he was living in. (This is what happens when you get sober at 30 instead of 45, like SOME people.) I'm so proud of him! I hope to go out and visit during baseball season because he plays in a league and it would be so much fun to cheer him on. In all kinds of ways.
Although God knows when I'll have the money to visit anyone but my mother. All my extra freelance work has dried up. It's cold comfort knowing that if I'd gone through all the hoops required for a felon to teach in LAUSD (not a sure result at all), and lost my disability income, I would almost certainly now have been out of a job. (They just announced huge layoffs based on seniority--or the lack thereof.)
I did spend three hours with my nephew last night going over a script written by a friend of his. I can't believe that little pischer lives in a much bigger and nicer apartment than I do! But it's so great to watch him and his fiance, so lovely and in love, build their life here. And he loved all my script suggestions and is going back to the writer with a huge proposed revamp.
Lastly, I can report my foot seems to finally be better, thanks to my stupendous physical therapists, who are also great guys to spend time with.
The glass remains way fuller than anything else.
MCO 2008

Feet on the Ground

2009-01-07T14:43:00.000-08:00

I posted on my Facebook status update something meant to be funny but is more and more appealing as I ponder it. The idea is arranged marriage for gays. I mean if we're going to go for marriage, why not go all the way? Wouldn't it be nice to just have all this choice taken out of our hands? There's something very attractive (for five minutes, at least) at the idea of just having to make it work, period.
I sort of had to rain on the parade of the idea of an imminent future for Carlos and I. I realized I'd done him a disservice by just sitting back and enjoying the romance of intercontinental dating when if I was honest and clear, there is no way, absent the deaths of both my mother and my dog, that I would consider anything more than just a visit in the forseeable future. Not that he was expecting anything more, he was just in the moment, but it was clear to me that feelings were developing that could cause great pain to either of us if someone available and local appeared on the scene, and that could very easily have happened.
I felt like I have learned enough from two long distance relationships in the past two years (Tony and Garris from Tennessee), to know to bring things down to earth, even at the risk of it being heard like the arm of a record player scratching the LP in mid-symphony. The thing is, changing the context changes the relationship. You're a lot less likely to put aside an hour a day to Skype for a friendship with overtones of romance than for a romance with overtones of friendship.
I still would like to stay open to all kinds of possibility, including that of living in Europe again in my lifetime, maybe even with a lover, maybe even with Carlos. I would like to take advantage of the marvels of the internet, including the possibility that if there is such thing as a soulmate, who knows what continent on which he might be found? But the Big Book of A.A. says "we reject fantasy." I lived in fantasy for so many years, in which, with every drink or drug I had the illusion that not only everything was possible, but would actually happen if I willed it hard enough. The truth is that some scenarios are far more likely than others, and I need to devote my energies to completing the projects and fulfilling the commitments I have already made. I've committed to making sure my mother has me reasonably close until she dies, I've committed to take care of this creature named Gaza, and I need to keep pursuing my various writing projects in the best city in the world for doing so. David and I are buying a house. I love AA here and many of the men here are smart, single and available. We are about to have a political change that I want to witness up close and be a part of. There is no hole in my life.
The work of building your life and fulfilling your dreams is mostly that: work. I enjoy it more than most, feel blessed by how lucky I am inspite of my lack of material wealth. But it's very tempting to want to use relationships in the same way I used drugs and alcohol. It's very intoxicating to be on the receiving end of compliments, to indulge in flight of fancy of a idealized rapport and sex life in foreign places. But that's not a place I can live in anymore, emotionally or spiritually. I can only visit.
Today is installment #2 of the memoir over at www.marcolmsted.com/trashwhisperer

MCO 2009

A Very LA Day

2009-01-06T10:00:00.001-08:00

So finally, we have a picture of Sheria SMILING here, taking me and her friend Sarah to lunch at The Ivy. Yes there were paparrazzi. No they took no interest in either of us. (Not that there were other celebrities there either, just people who didn't blink at paying $32 for a salad.)

We had some really good conversation. Watch for some really interesting blogs from Sheria. I think I may have nudged her into territory that she has written about so far with circumspection. Damn if I'm going to be the only one to spill my guts about sensitive personal issues!

Then we went to see a taping of the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Chunky B., the warm-up guy, was very funny, and the Audience Coordinator, Brian, was not only funny but extremely easy on the eyes. Craig, however, really impressed me. Very witty man. All in all it was a delightful yet cheap way to spend the afternoon. You really see how much work goes into these shows, how much talent there is put to use.

On other topics, I just want to say that Norm Coleman should give it a rest. If Al Gore can cede the Presidency for 562 votes, he can gracefully lose over 225.

MCO 2008

KNOW82SJ

2009-01-06T09:38:00.000-08:00

It seems the link did not work to the poem I read on New Year's Eve, so here it is.

i had this dream
that bob weinstein
calls me on his cell.
he says my script
is ultra hip
and rescues it from hell.
from turnaround
to surroundsound
i'm flavor of the month
my grocery lists
cause bidding tiffs
i'm dating kirsten dunst.
quentin pleads
but i say please
my fiction's hardly pulp.
i'm nibbling prawns
on oprah's lawn
she wants me for her club.
steven's spiel
is quite unreal
but he can wait in line,
cause bill awaits
at my front gates
with editors from time.
larry king?
right after sting
the amazon needs saving.
steven hawkings
won't stop squawking
al-qaeda won't stop raving.
the paparazzi
act like nazis
i'm one degree from bacon.
when proust drops by
with lady di
i know it's time to waken.
wish me well
the road to hell
is paved with good intentions.
but know the way
to san jose
i'll give you great directions.
mco 2008

Memoir #1

2009-01-05T11:15:00.001-08:00

I created this blog for my former AOL readers, who found it easier to comment on BLOGGER than at the blog I already had at another site. The content has been the same, but all my commenters have migrated here, in any case.
I've decided the only way I'm going to successfully write a memoir is if I work on it every day, a little bit, just like I blog. And last night it occurred to me I could try something very simple. I could continue this blog in its present form to maintain my relationship with all of you and report on my life, and I could use the other blog to write the memoir in daily installments., like Dickens. I realize I will never get this project done if I don't create some sort of expectations around it. I need to feel accountable, to create motivation in the absence of an advance or a deadline.
Here is the very first installment, and the last time it will appear in this blog. If you would like to follow it, you need to bookmark www.marcolmsted.com/trashwhisperer (There will be no comments enabled on the other blog.)
#1
It was in the fourth grade when I first realized my mother had an accent. We were watching a film strip, and each of us, in turn, were charged with the task of reading the captions that accompanied each frame. I think the subject was the state of Oregon, and since we lived in Maryland, I imagine it was one of those strips that was less important in content than that it allowed Mrs. Manclark to take a break.
Of course I prided myself on being one of the best readers in the class. As the first class President, (my term was a month, after which my best friend Kent Ruffo was voted in, followed by my "girlfriend," Kathy Cho), I felt entitled to intervene in all classroom matters. So when one of the readers stumbled over the pronunciation of "geog...geogra" I stepped in.
"GEE-oh-graphy" I offered.
To which, as if on cue, every single student in the class turned, and in unison, declared:
"Gee-AH-graphy"
I would have been less shocked had I stuck my finger in an electric socket. But my mother said "GEE-oh-graphy," I was sure of it. And yet, I had to admit, "gee-AH-graphy" did sound right.
What was so deeply irksome was the monolithic nature of the response. Mrs. Manclark did not step in to say "both pronunciations are correct." She let me stew in the humiliation of correction. Even I could not escape the obvious and intolerable conclusion that I was wrong, wrong, wrong.
And yet, escape it I did. It was my first encounter with Denial, who was to become a close and enduring friend.
I did become aware that my Mother spoke differently than other mothers, but it was an abstract understanding. I didn't really "hear" it. It wasn't until Mrs. Neves substituted in Math that I thought I heard my first real French accent. The Neves lived close to us, and Karen Neves was in my class. I somehow felt compelled to point out to her what a heavy accent her mother had.
"My mother!" countered Karen. "My mother doesn't have nearly the accent your mother has."
I was a non-violent child in the extreme, but I had to restrain myself from slapping her. How dare she.

MCO 2008.

The One You're With

2009-01-04T11:47:00.000-08:00

So this is a picture of Gaza the adorable against the only thing that passes for an autumnal lawn in L.A. (I know it's winter, but in L.A., but we only do a fair imitation of Fall in January and February.)

I have a character defect that gets me in trouble sometimes. I am pretty good at banter and wisecracks, and I can talk A LOT. But too often, I just make one joke too many, go one witticism too far, say too many words. "Overshare" as I heard someone in the rooms call it. What happens is that I'll think of something funny, and because it is funny, I'll ignore the inner whisper that tells me it will come off as somehow inappropriate, or calculated, or just plain not listening. I am happy to say this happens far less in sobriety than when I was drinking or drugging, but it still happens way too much. I'm hoping by acknowledging it, I'm less likely to do it. I have to remember, life is not a Noel Coward play. It's okay to just shut up, even if you think you have something sparkly to say.

I really lead a lovely life. It only feels lacking in relation to my ambitions for it. Ambition is one of those very dicey traits. On the one hand, great and grand things can come of it. Think of the buildings built, the books written, the inventions created, etc. that came about because someone with a healthy ego wanted to make his or her mark on the world. And then, think of all the horrors that resulted from the same impulse. The pernicious effects of greed and the desire for dominance represented by slavery and colonialism, for example. Torquemada, Cortez, Stalin, Cheney--all ambitious. And so were Galileo, Flaubert, Lincoln, the Wright Brothers. It truly cuts both ways.

Why should it matter if I produce that screenplay, if I am made happy writing it? And yet it does. And I want way more than that. I don't want the foundation to be called "The Anonymous Center for World Peace through Creativity, " I want it to read: "The Olmsted Center." I still want to meet every frigging beautiful man on the internet and in Los Angeles, and be told by him he must have me or die. I want to play the piano, and surf well, and write speeches for Obama and have 7 children and support an orphanage in Honduras and provide medical care to rural Afghani women. I want it ALL.

Ah, to believe in yourself and to still operate in the world with humility, accepting that the most you can do will not make your life any bigger in the eyes of God than those of 5,999.999,999 other people. To accept that most of the people who have all the things you think you want aren't usually any happier than you are, nor are necessarily more valuable to the planet.

I'm not there yet. The pendulum swings madly back in forth in my brain, from acceptance to raging grandiosity. But I think, a little bit every day, I'm getting better.
MCO 2008

Distracted but Grateful

2009-01-02T21:48:00.000-08:00

It's not like me to blog at 7 in the evening, but I have Carlos on Skype distracting me twice a day. Obviously, it's not a distraction I mind, but it seems to be occupying the time of the day I usually devote to blogging.

I have zero idea what the future might bring with this man, all I know is that I enjoy getting to know him and it's hard to hang up the phone. He's very interesting, and rather romantic, and we always seem to have something to more to say to each other.

When not flirting with goodlooking foreigners, I try to read/catch some news and try not to become to upset about it. For all the justification Israel can muster--they are not imagining rocket attacks, after all, and Hamas is a dogmatic and violent organizaton--the people of Gaza already live one of the most wretched existences of the planet, in one of its most densely populated corners. With the Israeli attacks, hell on earth just got hotter.

And then there's Zimbabwe, and the Congo, not to mention being imprisoned almost anywhere in the world. Of course, blogging about any of it here--yet again--isn't going to do a whole lot of good in the great scheme of things. But it sure helps me stay in gratitude.

MCO 2008

First Day

2009-01-01T14:55:00.000-08:00

So last night finally came the long awaited encounter between Sheria and I. What did you expect? We get along as well in reality as we do on line, and I passed along the requested hugs. The friends of her friends were very nice, fed us a grand feast in house just one block from the beach. I've had easier times finding a place, but no homosexuals were harmed in the making of the New Years Eve party. I'll be seeing Sheria again on Tuesday I think, when she's going to play LA tourist and we're going to do touristy things.

I actually had a second party to go to, close to my house, and made it there by ten. We were all supposed to bring a song, a poem, or a joke, but it turned out I was the only guest who complied! I read this poem, and it was a big hit.

I was home at 11, to ring in the New Year with Gaza and David, watching Anderson Cooper. That was the second time yesterday I did so, having rung in the New Year with Carlos in London, via Skype, at 4 pm my time.

The Skype thing is very interesting. You can have the same conversation you might have had over a date,but there's no waiter handing you a check at the end of the night. But the no sex thing isn't a bad way to keep your head about you. We're having a grand time getting to know each other, but I think do a good job of staying out of the expectations game. He is a across a continent and an ocean, after all. But I call this new capacity to have relationships and friendship around the world emotional globalization.

Along those lines, I just watched a beautiful film, The Namesake, which is about the loves and lives of Indian immigrants to America and their children. It's a very beautiful film, and there were a few scenes that reminded me completely of my own childhood, for example, when the mother says: "Sometimes I feel like I have raised strangers!" (When we were teenagers in the seventies, the chasm felt wide for my French mother.)

Now the Rosebowl, stew, and a nap in between. I'm taking it very easy. Hope all of you are too.

MCO 2008

Happy Last Day of 2008

2008-12-31T07:50:00.001-08:00

I was in this hallway yesterday in a beautifully restored art deco building in downtown L.A. The doors were all oak or some other rich brown wood, I was ready for Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes in Chinatown to emerge from one of them any moment.

I was there with David, who was making an offer on a great house we found in Echo Park, perfect for living in one half and renting out the other. Here's hoping the New Year sees us moving in. My rent would go down significantly, not to mention it is my dream to have 5th year sober anniversary party next year not to mention a belated 50th, and it has a great yard for entertaining.

I have done enough philosophical summing up of late on the subject of the past year. Suffice to say that the one most important thing I did was vote for Barack Obama, at least in the public sphere. In the private sphere, it was definitely moving my mother out west. In the professional sphere, it turned out to have been retrieving boxes from my brother's which are literally a treasure trove of an immense amount of writing I've done for 20 years that is ready for revision and revival. In the personal (romantic) sphere, 2009 looks very interesting! (Hint: I'm hooking up Skype today, for face to face international communication!)

But less exotically, David and I had a very funny moment yesterday, when we did an errand. He said "Oh, Lawd" (his favorite expression), "we dropping off the vacuum cleaner to get repaired! We don't need no ring! We about as married as we can be, now!" (Did I tell you David and I usually talk in the voice of various ethnic characters, from black and latina women, to British royalty, to the accents of our mothers, and so on?)

He really wants to move, because his roommate is going off the deep end. No kidding. She will be homeless or hospitalized in 2009, to be sure. There is no feeling so helpless as being confronted by someone who is spiraling into paranoia, especially when there is no alcohol or drug addiction to be blamed. Nothing you do it right, every act of generosity or concern is considered suspect. She only trusts the cats--about 7 of them now. It's been hell on David, one of the reasons he is almost always here.

I'm feeling remarkably optimistic though, overall, and looking forward to meeting Sheria in the flesh tonight, for a New Year's Eve dinner party. In chic Manhattan Beach, no less. I can't tell you how nice it will be to have no concern for sobriety checkpoints along the way...

Happy New Year to everybody!

MCO 2008

A Christmas Story

2008-12-30T10:10:00.000-08:00

I'm not nuts about this time of year, but one thing I do enjoy is finding new witnesses to the trashwhispering. What happens is that between about the 27th and the 3rd, all these people are leaving back to where they are visiting from, and this is what happens.

They are standing on the sidewalk, bags in front of them, waiting for their host to pull the car out from the driveway. I walk by, smile perhaps if our eyes meet, but usually there seems to be a wad of fast food wrapping in the gutter that needs my attention. I can feel the out-of-towner's eyes follow as I pass.
Then the car comes out, he puts the luggage in the trunk, and gets in. This is how I imagine the conversation (the host is a girl, to make it easy):

Him: What was that about?
Her: What was what about?
Him: That guy, picking up trash.
Her: You mean cans?
Him: No, trash! That guy over there with the dog!
Her: Oh him! He does that every morning.
Him: Every morning?
Her: I think every morning, I'm usually at work at the time.
Him: But not just for the holidays.
Her: No, I've seen him many times. Even the weekends.
Him: Is that like, a California thing?
Her: No, just him. It's actually nice. I live on the only clean street in Hollywood.
Him: That is SO weird. And he's not homeless? He doesn't look homeless.
Her: No, he lives right down the street.

So where it gets fun is in the repetition. Back home, he gets picked up, and tells his friend all about his visit to Hollywood. They finish all the main catching up, and then he adds:

Him: Oh, and I saw the strangest thing just as I left.
Friend: Someone from Celebrity Rehab?
Him: Not quite. I saw this guy, walking his dog, and cleaning the street with this funny trashpicking thing. Linda said he does it every morning, keeps the street clean.
Friend: Like a homeless guy?
Him: No, he looked totally normal. She said he lived down the street.
Friend: Mmhh. I never litter.

THEN the friend gets a little drunk, in a bar, and is trying to find conversation with a girl he trying to pick up.

Friend: You know what my buddy Steve told me? He's the one who I just picked up at the airport.
Girl: What did he tell you, Howie?
Howie: He said, in California, they pick up trash.
Girl: Oh, really, Well I hope so.
Howie: No, what I mean is he saw this guy walking his dog, picking up trash. Just, like, to just keep the neighborhood clean.
Girl: Was he wearing an orange vest?
Howie: What?
Girl: Like he got a DUI and he's doing community service.
Howie: Oh my God, that must be it.
Girl: Ya think?

Poor Howie. He's not going to get laid tonight.

MCO 2008

Art and Life

2008-12-29T13:44:00.000-08:00

I found this scrap of paper picking up trash this morning. I think it's Thai.

I always find alphabets from other languages fascinating, and some of them are truly beautiful. I completely understand the oriental fascination with calligraphy as an art form.

I love the idea that the last thing whoever wrote this would be thinking was that her driving directions or food order or whatever would end up seen by a few score people who take a second to admire the lines and curves of a another form of writing. Finding art in the detritus of every day is truly an art iself.

Yesterday I went to a party and got some real face time in with program and facebook friends. It was great fun and reminded me nothing replaces the real thing, even if someone I thought I was going to date transitioned into a friendship before harm was done. It turned out my intuition was just that--it was not my insecurity at work. I read mixed signals because they were mixed.
MCO 2008

P.S. Meanwhile I am flirting mercilessly with this man. I'm having absurd visions of a life as the husband of a hot Eurpoean Baritone flooding my senses. Of course, God forbid I'd met him before you did all your Christmas shopping, so you could buy his album.

Earth to Marc

2008-12-28T10:01:00.000-08:00

So after physical therapy yesterday, (I love my guys, Shy and Rafael--they're very good), I went to McDonalds, and I watched through the window as this truly handsome Dad had lunch with his four kids. Or maybe three kids and a friend, as one was African-American. Or maybe he was adopted, which somehow, I suppose, fed the fantasy this was a gay Dad, although he gave no indication of it.

When it comes to men, I sure can spend a lot of time in fantasy. And I'm not talking about sexual fantasy, although certainly that. I'm talking about a willingness to project onto them all sorts of qualities that they may not really have, which feeds into a bigger fantasy of a chemistry we could have.

Now, I know this isn't remotely unique or even particularly special. Human minds do this, particularly male minds, which don't need anything more than a visual to get going overtime . (In my experience, women need at least one indicator that the man is nice/funny/interesting, and usually, more than one.)

What I am becoming increasingly aware of is how easily I can engage in this fantasy-making addictively. It's like I do "hits" of fantasy, momentarily stepping away from life while I'm doing it. It would be pretty harmless, but in the computer age, photos and profiles can provide all sorts tantalizing ammunition for whatever it is you want/need to believe about someone, and lend the illusion of weight to the fantasy. I really have to take a moment and remember that these are flawed and real human beings that get their pants on one leg at a time, that are just as likely to be insecure and fearful as I am, that I don't need to use the compliments they might proffer as I would a joint being passed, nor offer them in the same spirit. Pedestals are fun to hop on for a few minutes, but successful relationships between adults occur at ground level.

I thought I'd grown out of all this kind of nonsense. Very humbling to realize I haven't.

Luckily I'm going to a party this afternoon. I need me some RealFace.

On the topic of Obama, this observation. I may not agree about Warren, but I think the way Obama is refusing to engage in any extended argument about it may be a good omen for the future. Whether it was Wright or Blagojevich, his position is stated and explained, and then he moves on. It's rather like telling your kids "no," once, and meaning it, and then avoiding a whole lot of needless argument and negotiation. I think this man is going to get things done.'

MCO 2008

Untitled

2008-12-27T09:47:00.000-08:00

Boy, this is a lousy picture of what was a spectacular view of L.A. from the house where I was on Christmas.
David doesn't come back with the car until tonight, so my schedule is out of whack. I gotta run to my various commitments using public transportation.
I blog like I breathe though, so am unable to leave the house without posting something,
My date was delayed, but this might be a good thing. I'll leave things at that--all mysterious-like.
MCO 2008

Happy Boxing Day

2008-12-26T12:10:00.000-08:00

Look at how many blues are in that sky. Nothing I could manage with Photoshop.

My friend Michael just finished reading my play, Valley of Deception, out loud, and it is every bit as much fun as I remembered. (He agreed.) I think I'm going to definitely pursue this project. Think Now Voyager, Mildred Pierce, A Stolen Life, and Dark Victory, all mixed up in a blender.

Yesterday was great. Church, Ben-Hur, Casablanca and then dinner at friends, where one of the other guests I've met over the years there came to the same conclusion as I did (without, in her case, the benefit of the LAPD) and has been a friend of Bill's for three years. We knew some of the same people and it felt like I lived in a small town.

My haranguer, "Hurlocker' is at it again. This time he tried to get through with the monkier of "crystalwallet." Well, at least he's being honest about where all of his money goes.

MCO 2008

Hope for the Holidays

2008-12-25T14:21:00.000-08:00

Well, Obama is going to use the same Bible that was used to swear in Lincoln, so I thought this would be a fun Hy-Art.

I'm really grateful on this Christmas Day that this man is going to be our new President. Yes, I am pissed about the choice of Warren, but to say Obama has slack with me is a huge understatement. I consider Obama family, and when you're in my family, you get a lot more love and understanding than judgment and derision. God knows he'll have many mistakes to make before he would even reach the halfway point of how many I've made.

Invocations concern me far less than how America is going to respond to the dire situations in the world. That we should have special forces in Iraq, but not in Zimbabwe, overthrowing Mugabe, or in the Congo, protecting women from a culture of mass rape--this is wrong. I know that we are confronting terrific crises as a country, but we must remember that even the poorest of the poor in the United States do not have to squat by passing trucks in the hope of capturing a few kernels of corn for the only "meal" they've eaten in days, washing it down with cholera-infected water.

I have the sure knowledge that Obama reacts to these scenes with the same revulsion and concern as I do, and will somehow act. To know we will soon have a leader who will not lock himself in a bubble, protected from any information not designed to promote an indeological agenda, this a great holiday blessing for me.

I'm watchin Ben-Hur right now. The scene where Jesus gives him some water in the desert. Talk about what it's all about.

MCO 2008

All About Christmas Eve

2008-12-24T14:25:00.000-08:00

You just never know when I'm going to pop you with a Hy-Art, do ya? This is Bruyn mixed with Dali.

Well, it's Christmas Eve and David has left for San Francisco with the car. He wanted me to come, but faced with arranging dog care and finding myself playing sober wingman in the S.F. bars, only to be kept up half the night by his snoring, I chose staying home. I'm going to the theater with a friend tonight, church tomorrow, and then a friend's dinner party tomorrow night.

I am all aflutter because I got my first real date from Facebook, on Friday. Someone I've had my eye on forever, but didn't know he was also intrigued until I posted some hairy chest photos and he registered his approval. He's a lot younger than me, which is why I'd never actually flirted (I've seen him around town many times, and then followed his creative and funny postings). When gay men hit their 40s (straight men don't seem to suffer from this fear,) we often become fearful of coming off as the leering older guy. But, thank Heavens, there's a huge subculture of younger gay men who are not ageist like I was at their age, who actually find us sexier. Who am I to argue?

Of course I have to watch the tendency to go places in my head that haven't been entered into evidence. Note that I say "watch" and not "stop." It's too much fun, especially when the object of your potential affection is A1 adorable and I ain't kidding. But it makes a difference when you own your fantasies as such instead of thinking them a form of preality (pre-reality)

Plus I was lamenting that Facebook seemed to be making it easier to make friends across the globe than turn perfectly cool guys you already know into potential dates, and I'm glad that at the very least, he shown me it can be done.

It's funny though, when I reread yesterday's entry, I realized I hadn't even addressed the man question. 2008 was the year I felt really ready for something to occur, but by December 23rd was completely in acceptance that this was not meant to be this year. Wouldn't it be a kick in the pants if something that occurred on December 24th ended up being the ultimate dark horse? I wouldn't bet on it, of course, but the idea has a definite literary/karmic appeal, like God was waiting for me to let it go before she threw me a bone.

Of course, I wish you all a Merry Christmas Eve. I'll be seeing Sheria soon, she's visiting nearby for a week. In fact, we'll be spening New Year's Eve together. That's exciting!
MCO 2008

Four

2008-12-23T10:13:00.000-08:00

So, 4 years ago today, I had my last drink.
4 has always been my favorite number, perhaps because from a very young age, I realized Presidential elections happened every 4 years, and the Olympics. So to have this anniversary in the year of Obama and Phelps does feel particuarly signficant.

This year I wrote a screenplay that I'm proud of, and started a novella. I attended around 300 12-step meetings at which I must have exchanged thousands of hugs. I wrote about 360 blog entries, created scores of Hy-Arts, and contributed several hundred dollars to charity. I picked up about 1000 bags of trash and made 283 "fnends" on Facebook. I was about 1/3 responsible for getting my mother moved to California.

Mostly, I didn't drink or drug 1 day at a time.

The list of what I didn't do is long and depressing, so let's not go there. You can go crazy staring at the half-full part of the glass, especially if it's a really big glass. It's an ongoing battle to live a spiritual life, grounded in acceptance. I will probably never live in Barcelona, appear on a talk show, or write a bestseller. But I can always make a new friend, make an old one laugh, treat those around me with a sense that we both walk in grace. The most important things in life are truly available to me on a daily basis, and for that I am extraordinarily grateful.

Since this is the closest I will probably come to getting Oscar, I'd like to thank everyone who ever took a phone call, wrote an email or made a comment, and double thank everyone in the rooms who listened and shared their experience strength and hope.

If it was just me and a case of vodka on a desert island, I'd be doomed.
MCO 2008

Crushes not Crusher

2008-12-22T07:06:00.000-08:00

Well, despite the fact that I went to the movies and to dinner at a friends Saturday night, had a long (3 hour) lunch with my friend Andrea and a 90-minute coffee with my nephew Keir, caught a meeting Saturday morning and then physical therapy, blogged twice and watched Tony's nephew quarterback in the New Orleans Bowl (Troy lost, by a field goal, in OT), and of course, walked Gaza and picked up trash several times each day, the overwhelming feeling I have of the weekend is that I spent it entirely on Facebook.
It wasn't till a square-jawed studmuffin from Ontario, Canada, told me I was extremely handsome that I could finally return the compliment and get some writing done. A whole page. I could have written a chapter, but no, I needed a complete stranger to validate my presence on this planet.
I feel like the characters on the episode of Star Trek, when they all get obsessed by that game except for Wesley Crusher.
David is the Wesley of this story. Except for some looky-looky Craig's List binges, he's never had patience to learn the wiley ways of computer social networking. He met his current beau-tox in the gym, the one who has allowed himself to be wined and dined for three dates but seems to be keeping David at a distance in that way that churns the stomach with unreturned texts, all forgiven with the explanation of "I was really busy."
Watching him, suddenly a flirtation with someone(s) living across a continent or a hemisphere doesn't seem like such a bad idea at all. But I've got to find a way to turn it off and leave it off.
(I did give my script, Valley of Deception, to three different people this weekend. It just feels like I ran in place.)
MCO 2008

Though I Hope They're Throwing Saddle Shoes

2008-12-21T12:29:00.000-08:00

I often pass this lobby while walking the dog. It's to an apartment building, not the entrance to a convent or rectory.

It's hard to imagine how this was built. The bulding looks early 60s in style, perhaps it was a formerly a residence for friars or nuns. It's the sort of detail we who walk dogs get to notice in a city of too much travel by car.

I'm watching my favorite Sunday show on French TV: "Jour de Rugby." If you want to know why, image-google "Dan Carter."

Where I'm not is at the Saddleback Church protesting Rick Warren. I am truly torn about this. On the one hand, I have contempt for the man and all those who use religion to justify marginalizing anyone. On the other hand, the Christian right is not equivalent to the southern white right of the sixties. When the freedom riders and sit-inners and marchers of that era protested throughout the south, they were met with such hostility that those watching on TVs across America were horrified by the hate and vitriol of the racists and police attacking them. This is what turned the tide in the favor of Civil Rights.

We are angry, righteously so. But I fear our anger feeds into a cleverly distorted narrative propagated by the Christianists that they are the ones being persecuted for what they believe. It's ridiculous, of course, but this is a war of perception. The middle 10% who voted for Prop 8 but wondered if they did the right thing--that's the population that needs to be reached. Rick Warren is a savvy enough to have produced the sound bite that "I love straights AND gays" yesterday. Ours is "Debate, Don't Hate." While I heartily agree with our sound bite, we are not acknowledging that the other side simply does not perceive themselves as "haters," and vehemently reject being characterized that way.

In the 60s, you could get many a racist to proudly say, on camera: "I hate n_______s." The right has wised up. No one except a few skinheads admits to any such sentiment, often even to themselves. The Warrenists honestly don't believe they hate or fear gays, they believe they are simply following what they perceive to be God's law.

I say we need to keep plugging away at the contradictions in the Bible. They're enough to drive a truck through. We need to sow doubt in their certainty, particularly by pointing out, for example, that slavery is an unchallenged institution throughout the Bible.

I'm also not protesting because, as is well known to any regular reader, I am really becoming a radical on the institution of marriage itself. I don't think the state has any business recognizing relationships between consenting adults, and that includes straight marriage. To the fundies, I say, Jesus didn't get married, so shut up. To everyone else, I say you've been seduced by a very seductive idea. We all want to find a soul mate, and to have everyone, including the government, recognize your declaration feels like the cement or glue or protective varnish--choose your metaphor. I get it.

But that's an illusion. Gays have proven for centuries that we create long term unions that endure without the benefit of marriage, and when they don't, we (mostly) become friends with our exes. Why are we making straight marriage the model when our way of doing thing is the one that should be modeled?

Obviously, I'm way more radical on this than almost everybody. I don't think at the protest they'd appreciate my "Ban Marriage, Period" sign. (Besides, David took the car. He needs to bury his sorrows over the man he doesn't think he will marry. I take some comfort in his travails. I don't feel so bad that my periodic paramour doesn't want to take it further either. The sex is great, the conversation is great, what's the frigging problem? I wonder what's wrong with me, and I see David wondering the same. And I don't think there's anything wrong with David, so maybe that means there's nothing wrong with me either.)
MCO 2008