You don’t want to live in fear
Because you are
Who you are.
That isn’t asking
All that much.
Truth be told I feel the same
But who I am
has learned to hide a little better.
I Get It
02 Thursday Jul 2020
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“Bringing The Art To You”
01 Wednesday Jul 2020
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How much should I tip the driver?
I know how much for a pizza. But art? Wait. They don’t really bring art to me or to anybody else, for that matter.
“They” is the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, more of an “it” than a they. What they do is stay open, most of the time, so I can go in and look at the art. I grew up in a time when an art museum did not need a slogan, the way GE or State Farm did.
Some of the art is sculpture and paintings by Dead White Men. But it happens to fulfill an aesthetic that defines beauty. There are standards. They express ideas, some of them related to Christianity, like Bible stories or portraits of saints.
Sometimes the secular art depicts soup cans, or horses, or pictures of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. But Hey, it’s art and I don’t want to look like a rube that has Leonardo’s Last Supper reproduced on black velvet hanging on the living room wall in my double wide.
Art is what the Museum can afford to “acquire”, which is Museumspeak for buying a work of art or borrowing a work from another museum. Let’s not forget accepting art from rich people as a gift.
Kinda creepy that within walking distance of the Museum, protesters destroyed one of the most beautiful urban boulevards in America, because it had statues of Confederate heroes . Destroying what disturbs you is what tyrants do, or the mobs hired by tyrants and plutocrats to fulfill their wishes.
Right now the mob does its destroying outside the walls of The Museum. But how long before all those religious paintings, rendered by Dead White Christian Men will need to be removed? They’re in a state-owned Museum after all. We could make room for more soup cans, or non- heteronormative art that is transpositive, ya know?
What happens when somebody decides that the art being brought to people like me is no longer acceptable? Then what ? Do we store it, sell it, or burn it? The Nazis seized, sold or destroyed the art they didn’t like. Now when aesthetics is made secondary to politics, like what Hitler and, later, Mao did, we can watch one more of our freedoms die. That particular freedom is the freedom to think for ourselves, to decide what is good or bad art. Great art has been made depicting despicable ideas. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willen (Triumph Of The Will) immediately comes to mind.
We have to find beauty and even truth in what we don’t always understand. I guess that’s what makes it art, instead of just pretty pictures.
And Now Galesburg, Illinois
30 Tuesday Jun 2020
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I have found another site to “railfan”, to sit in my recliner and watch trains. Virtual Railfan, LLC has a network of cameras on YouTube.
I started watching trains in Ashland, Virginia, near my home. The camera looks down Railroad Avenue. It is a busy site with CSX and Amtrak trains going through town all day. The activity of the town also provides diversion, entertainment, as I watch the day progress.
Recently I moved on to Ft Madison, Iowa on the banks of the Mississippi River, an awesome sight in its own right, without the added feature of trains. Ft. Madison has a swing bridge over the river with a span that pivots open to allow barge traffic on the river to pass through.
La Plata, Missouri is a stop on the BNSF tracks, more or less South of Ft Madison. If one has time to waste and knows the schedule, it is possible to see a train pass through Ft Madison, then La Plata.
This brings me to Galesburg, Illinois. It would be first in a sequrnce: Galesburg, Ft. Madison, La Plata. Right now I am watching a freight pass through Galesburg. I am pretty sure I saw this train cross the river at Ft. Madison. Now it moves through Galesburg.
This is America going about its business. The freight trains haul plywood, bulk chemicals in both solid form or liquid, in tanker cars for that. There are boxcarss, owned by leasing companies, such as GATX. Then, of course, are the cargo containers, that travel the world, carrying the manufactured products of Korea, China, Taiwan, and Malaysia ultimately to a Wal-Mart or Target near you. From time to time I will see a container bearing the Amazon Prime logo. At least I think I do. When a symbol is everywhere, I can get confused.
So the morning progresses. There is a light rain falling in Ft Madison and Galesburg. It is sunny in Ashland, I need to check La Plata, but I suspect you’re not interested.
Later, folks
Sleep Deprivation To Sex Rant
29 Monday Jun 2020
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I think I want to sleep. I need to sleep, I tell myself. I can’t really write, without my heart becoming noticeable in my chest, my eyelids heavy.
I want to sleep, yet when I take the plunge and climb back into bed, I lie there, with my mind still racing. I sit, my mind racing a little less, thinking about J and why I just don’t take her, when I need to take her.
That’s it. I run around putting a fine point on everything. Is she or is she not my wife? Being used sexually is part of the deal. It’s how we keep our sanity, by admitting this urge exists. You think with all that’s been said and written about sex in the last 150 years, we would have figured that out, the two of us, I mean.
Apparently not.
Rough Patch
29 Monday Jun 2020
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It did not take long for me to start feeling down and negatively toward things. Slightly paranoid, planning my escape from America. I know. It’s completely delusional thinking.
I don’t know. I lay in bed, began to experience some back pain, and the negativity just started to well up from inside of me.
I will sit, see what happens
Sunday’s End
29 Monday Jun 2020
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J and I shared an entree at Carrabba’s, the Fettuccine Carrabba,. It is the usual absurd entree a restaurant serves to make sure a hypothetical guest feels *full”.. Gotta love Americans and their appetites.
We mailed an anniversary card to J’s brother and sister-in-law. They are nice people, together for 48 years. Had I stayed married to wife #1, we would have been married for 48 years. Kinda bittersweet. I didn’t know it then, but she is crazier than I am, if you measure crazy by relationships and marriages gone into the tank.
More often than not, I feel like a survivor. I think I found a way to be in a relationship where we love and support each other. There are no drugs or alcohol around here. That matters. I have to go looking for things outside of my marriage to get angry. I’m frustrated here, lonely, but not angry.
The little things I do for J, she appreciates. I gave her watermelon in little balls as part of her fruit snack tomorrow.
She is upstairs. I am down. I’m hoping Train #97 comes by soon. Amtrak says there is a service disruption. Heaven only knows what that is.
Bedtime.
More Sunday, But With Newer Day Dreams.
28 Sunday Jun 2020
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Such a glorious Sunday it turned out to be. A vacuumed carpet and the waste paper and magazines consigned to recycling, a shower taken, teeth brushed, cheeks and neck shaved. I sit in clean clothes with a plastic tumbler of iced Earl Grey tea on the table to my right.
As a change of scenery I am watching BNSF tracks in Fort Madison, Iowa. The tracks handle a lot of freight. The tracks flank the Mississippi River, then cross the river on a bridge and into Illinois, near Nauvoo, where Joseph Smith, Prophet of the Latter Day Saints met his demise, if memory serves me.
Speaking of memory, I recall the story, learned I know not where, of how Thomas Jonathon Jackson earned his sobriquet.
“There stands Jackson like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginian!” Commanded South Carolina’s General Bee at the Battle of First Manassas.
Funny how the tangible can be desttoyed, but the idea, the legend, the memory and the dream live on, undaunted by the tattooed cowards of the night who afflict our city like those other nocturnal denizens, the rats.
Memory conserves so much. Some memories live on in the brain, others in the muscle, some even in the cock, to be recalled in tumescence for time to time.
Anger seems so distant now, as I gaze upon the tracks, park, and river on this idyllic afternoon.
Reading Durrell To Make Way For Reverie.
28 Sunday Jun 2020
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I’ve been reading The Black Book by Lawrence Durrell, famous for his Alexandria Quartet.
The Black Book takes place on the island of Corfu, where Durrell lived for a time. This is very dense and intense prose, compelling and yet daunting as the story demands more and more of my attention, more perhaps than my brain, recovering from a relapse of depression, can afford to give.
My head aches now. I don’t know why. Maybe I need more sleep. I read a few angry sentences of a fellow blogger, whose indignant rants some will mistake for truth. Satan spends a lot of time telling us that both he and The Triune God don’t exist. That is all I can think of when I consider this blogger and their work.
J worked another full day, while I did a lot a sleeping this morning. And I truly miss her this Sunday.
More coffee is in order. Maybe it’s time to watch Buena Vista Social Club again. For the music, for the poignant charm of Old Havana languishing in Castro’s imposed decay. Mostly it’s time to dream of the love evoked by the music, deep and passionate. Some patchouli incense may help with the mood. I will imagine my lover grinding her buttocks back into me, as I raise the hem of her dress. She wears no knickers as if she wants no fabric of impediment. And I feel the wetness of her cleft, hearing the moan two fingers thrusting in her cunt will draw from her throat..
The headache lessens. The ache is the pain that begs release in the erotic words I let escape.
The readers whom I love know who they are.
Her Name Revealed
27 Saturday Jun 2020
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This is a start to a memoir I need to write. It is more fiction than anything else. I don’t really know how everybody thought. I just looked at their world and my place in it.
I believe I shall call my deceased ex-wife by the name she was known by, not the pseudonymous initial A. Her name was Ayer; that was her middle name actually. She was of New England stock, an improper Bostonian, influenced by the anarchistic Sixties, where the children of Old Money embraced Marxism, drugs, fornication, contraception, and if need demanded it, abortion. There was always altruism to camouflage their selfishness. Then again I guess we all practice such a concealment.
I thought of her this morning, while sitting on the porch in the early cool of the summer’s day. We often spent summer mornings outside. She would smoke her cigarettes, Benson and Hedges Ultralight 100’s. I would be smoking a pipe from time to time. We would be drinking coffee. More than likely, we would be hung over, especially if we were on vacation. We talked about what? Politics, art, music, gardening, food? In retrospect, I think we were both looking for things we had in common, besides our love for sex. Food, I guess, won out. We both liked to cook. I liked to eat. Gluttony is the respectable vice of the Protestant South.
There was to those summer mornings, a timelessness and a pointlessness. We fancied ourselves as serious people, sitting there as change shook that world apart. I don’t think we ever really grasped what was going on. There were still factories in America. It was during this time that the executives and financiers were planning the removal of manufacturing and its jobs, all with good reason, that reason being profit, expressed as dividends in the trust funds. Thus the summer days at the shore could last another season. The Bloody Marys and the gin & tonics would continue to be mixed. The sailing and the accompanying and endless chores would give the men a sense of feeling useful. The boat would be the evidence of where the money went. They could look with pride at their excess.
It was a time to be White, without the guilt.That vote for a Democrat would be their penance. Affirmative Action, Busing, Nuclear Disarmament, Birth Control. There was a plan to fix the world. And these patricians would do the planning and the fixing. Woodrow Wilson would live on forever.
Gertrude, Alice, Josephine To The Rescue.
27 Saturday Jun 2020
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Working through this depression isn’t easy. It takes work, persistence, and the knowledge that my immediate perception isn’t the reality. I need to maintain my focus on how I feel.. Am I angry, fearful, lonely tired? Do I need to eat something, like fruit and yogurt that will maintain my blood sugar levels? Do I need to decrease my caffeine intake? Right now, at 10:45 PM, herb tea sounds like a good idea.
I need to stop the Great War documentary I’m watching. At this point it is dealing with the run up to hostilities. I switched to Paris Was A Woman, a documentary about women artists and writers in Paris in the interwar years 1919-1940. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas are my spiritual friends.. Gertrude is telling me to stop trying to figure everything out. Some things just need to be experienced and comprehended with some faculty other than logic.. Alice is sitting there patiently, taking it all in, suggesting I do the same.
Now Josephine Baker is on the screen. Black Genius, beyond dispute, with the compassionate heart of a humanitarian, she is the inspiration we all need now.
(As an aside, don’t destroy art that you don’t like or what offends you).
These wonderful wise women, speaking from their experience, are comforting this tired man, who, in the presence of their wisdom, is more boy than man, more 16 than 69.
Later, I will break the ice covering my reservoir of Love, and pray for those so keen on destruction, self-destruction especially.
Dispatches From Dystopia 