Our Muses, one by one, with no excuses become faint and are swallowd up by the ether. Two by two, we see what was and what will be. Those two sets of footprints, washed away in time. Overlapping sentiments. The tired rain, cries. The memory however, like stranded leaves, just out of reach. A mom, gives birth to a brother or sister. Something else to lose.
And with the ice, the solid c0ld, and the snow, remain inert. Frosty prologues with a cutting fog, stares back at us. Fondly remembering. We cannot remember the song, but we remember the words. Like dangling participles and a candy cane on a tree. The smell of cookies and ginger bread and the twinkling lights, we pine for evergeen, under a mistletoe and stolen kisses with the taste of pink reveries. Childhood never dies in our prime, nor in the future on a bed of pillows. Make this season be, with poetic flames, spreading the best of times, the fragrance of beginnings, and the exit, with purity reestablished.
In our nascent days as people, we stood for liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We also had churches dictating the position that we could have sex. To achieve that end, government and religion would invaribly have to be voyeurs as well. It seems to me, the government has too many bigger issues to worry about, than consensual play between consulting adults.
“The onset of mania occurs when when repression is no longer able to resist the assaults of the repressed instincts.”
Karl Abraham
More importantly we do not take the time to listen, but we judge and assume too many things. Most of which, are not true. We try to find a witch to burn and are amazed when some or many, sing in acapella. About the differences from one life to another.
“Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled”
Bob Dylan
We can’t quite figure it out and rather than to leave people alone, we enact new laws that restrict people, from the right, to the pursuit of their own happiness.
In fifty years, most of us will be long gone and those laws, like their effectiveness, will serve no purpose. Agreeably, there is a need to restrict certain ‘illegal’ behaviors, but for all the billions we spend on foster children and child welfare, there are still homeless and abused children, with social workers who live comfortably, but still no safe place for said children to live.
The legislators and moralists preach restraint. One codifies the law, to enforce their causes and the other a moral platitude, that never can be met. Today, the hippies of generations past, are lawyers, judges and preachers. They tell young adults, that they can’t drink until they are 21, as if that arbitrary number actually does save lives.
Or preachers who are popping young women, driving off bridges and telling us, that God dissaproves, of what we are doing. Memo to the Elmer Gantys of the world, we know what you are doing and did do, when you were young.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
Like the BDSM community, who regulate their own, and there are those who are those people who are out there, who are true sadists, who give the lot of them, a bad name. But moreover, the doms are very compassionate of their charges and ask them (subs/slaves) what are the limits. Most really do care! They love their people and hate those who do not follow the rules of that community.
At stake is the very existence of their lifestyle, who to the outsider, does seem bizarre. But being bizarre is not a crime and the participants do volunteer and their bosses, make sure, that the verbal contract, is not breached.
Remember: this is not about you: parents and friends.
This is about the beauty of life an the indescribable joy of self-satisfaction.
The moment of awareness of sexuality comes with vistas not before imagined. Kind of like in the Wonder Years and I was about to find my own Winnie Cooper.
. But this process was painful and at times I felt like I was watching a show from behind a sound-proof glass. I was in love with a few girls and a few could see behind the two-way mirrors. Music was a way to escape and so naturally certain songs were buoyant, light-hearted and romantic in a way that fit with my own personality.
So I cringe at terms like one-hit wonders, bubble-gum music and silly love longs. Paul McCartney nailed it and even John Lenin and Yoko Ono proved that commercialized music may not be all that bad. For me it was Day After Day by Bad Finger and I pined for a cute little idealistic blond teen. I remember that we went on a date to the Paddock Room and I stammered and stumbled and was probably incoherent but it was a date and it became news around the school. One of her friends found out we went out on a date and said that I had the hots for her! And I did. I fumbled that ball a few times but years later the ball was back in my hands and I fumbled it yet again.
She basically told me one day long after High School that I already found what I was looking for. Her! I was confused and botched that badly but she still really liked me, just a bit concerned that I missed the obvious clues. It was like I found the pot of gold but just stared at it and then walked away.
The old High School was a special place where we would play basketball on a court that had a shallow ceiling so you had to shoot a somewhat flat shot. Oddly enough they used to play Varsity Basketball games on that cozy little court. The place had the old building scent which wafted through it’s halls and hinted at love and life and where in the gutters floated love notes and old trees cried out.
One night Mom drove me to the old school and there she was in the crowd still yet coming into focus. She was pretty as a Blue Jay and wobbly as a colt, I saw her skating across the ice when she suddenly saw me and smiled. It was a soft invitation and I took advantage of that opportunity to say “Hi” to her. I was a terrible skater and was very skilled at falling down. Noticing that she grabbed my hands and steadied me. I was in heaven. The warmth of her body and the prospects of something more filled my mind with curious and yet predictable emotions.
As a side note, I did have a first love. The kind where you smile at each other meant you were going steady…LOL
I did have a sixth grade girlfriend named Cheryl and during the fall festival and play I was a paper-machete pumpkin with a green hat that looked like a stem. Sitting inert on the stage until my cue, I was rather inspicuous. Afterwards I dressed in a suit and tie we danced and for some reason it seemed that all the parents with little girls was smitten by me and I had serious game in spite of my shyness. I had ton of pictures taken by parents and this was more fun than square dancing in gym class.
Next year I was in upstate NY in a very strange place, where the community was named after our family Ellistown in Barton, NY outside of Waverly and on Ellistown Road. We moved to the old Brink’s Greenhouse and their fading history replete with a caretaker’s house that become home to hundreds of wasps and other incendiary insects. My parents found Rhubarb though I had never heard of that before.
On my first day in homeroom class the teacher accosted poor Ann R. with a comment about the contraband in her mouth. (gum). I think we were more perplexed about the word (contraband) and I was pondering Ann’s abject humiliation and embarrassment…..
Even at that point were the Freudian connection with her plight and my trying to remain as anonymous as possible. Things were a bit discomfiting as I was elected to the Student Council for our homeroom. An honor that I was both proud of and embarrassed by. I got the feeling the election was more of a joke than an honor.
So the music does play a role in the development of our higher needs. Merely dismissing out of hand any song because of what some people consider to be corny or not deep is ridiculous. These songs do get overplayed but that isn’t the artist fault and sometimes the DJ’s either. From Seasons In The Sun to Sugar Sugar by the Archies, these iconic pops songs transcended the Rock N Roll critics scorn and embedded themselves in the psyche of our frontal lobes. These radio voices were our muses and they live forever and a day.
I think it is funny when the rock jocks, those middle-aged men dressed in black whine about superficial pop songs while wailing on a Fender Stratocaster as their own aging bodies and receding hairlines and pony tails are stuck in a past to be forgotten like an old Class Yearbook and High Times Magazine. Between have Lava Lamps, Mood Rings and Chia Pets there are far worse diversions than a Bobby Goldsboro song like Honey. It is too sappy but Two Live Crew exploits carnal depravity. Dude, where’s My Viagra and remote.
Back in 1974, I was a kid, only 18 years and probably was witness in some way to a date rape. It sure felt like it because as I was leaving out the dorm that night, guys were pulling a train on a teen girl and some guy asked me if I wanted to have ‘some.’ I said, “no.” And besides, the choice of words haunts me too as well as the whimpering that went along with her disorientation.
I was so naive but a part of my soul has been tortured to this very day. If I knew then what I know now, I might have gone postal because I cannot imagine a crime worse than that. You see, she was drunk and whimpering. Damnit. That really pisses me off. No girl asks for ‘it.’ Not for that.
But date rape characterizations are nothing new and for the longest time just generally accepted. In the movie ‘Animal House’ the guy was contemplating having sex with a passed out underage girl. Did she ask for it? NO! Does it happen? Hell ya! Is it any wonder so many women want to spread the pain around.
Going a few years into my adult life, I had a girl friend and she was given a roofie. The net effect according to her, was she never felt the same about anything! Date-raped by her boss at the mall. She and I went through hell afterwards and my anger @ jerkoffs intensifies. My girlfriend was only pieces of ceramic, like Humpty-Dumpty, those pieces can’t always be fixed.
I suffer too, knowing that seedy men with seditious desires lay in wait, like Jack The Ripper or the Boston Strangler. In these instances the pain is far worse than death. It is a slow blood-letting of one’s spirit and sense of control. We had great times and every once in awhile we would talk.
From her bosses abuse of her, of us really, she went on a self-destructive binge with an older guy who was a criminal. Arrested for a crack ball and spending time in prison, he seemed to like finding young victims. Her sister said he liked to read magazines like ‘Barely Legal’ and ’18’. Yeah one of those! One day her sister gave me a journal she had written and she had talked to her sister about the parasite she was with and how she missed me and my steady decisions and what would I do in a particular situation. She said I am the guy that returns the shopping cart. For awhile I was miffed by that but then got the gist of what she was trying to express. She also got a disease from this miscreant, Herpes!
(She fell in love in the first place)))
For some reason these words tick me off. An otherwise innocent girl and not perfect by any means, paid the price for both of you and you both should be ashamed. And I harbor guilt for not being able to protect her from the smarmy underbelly of the beast that lurks with a touch of wind and a wiff of illicit drugs.
If her mom had not been a prostitute and subjected her to so much, she might have been able to cry on her shoulders. She could have told her Mom what he said and did and your Mom would turn away. Flushed with anger and disappointment, words she heard once upon a time. Now reverberating like a song that plays over and over on a music box. The ballerina fell suddenly and her porcelain dreams laid like a million shards of what ifs.
So let’s examine some of the dubious comments made by men and boys and mostly they are one and the same. Your high school heroes and high society icons flickered as capriciously as the stories of high school football players and date rapes. The bottom-line being the reputation of the boys and a girl who was allegedly asking for it. She was collateral damage in the game of cat and mouse.
He gave you wine or drugs and told you it was okay. He promised you everything to dance in the sheets and tomorrow he denies that he even knew you or the things you said, you couldn’t have meant, if you did say them….
Their friends and influences probably had mixed emotions about the destruction, from the boss to the drug abusing narcissist whose real romance is a synthetic cesspool of misery. Both now share in a common malady with excuses and no care for the damage they were doing.
What once was a fairy tale happiness transmogrified into a hellish world of missed chances. Where lightning does strike over and over again(in the same place) and the pain still flows, if even now to more or less a trickle. In the video above Boy Meets Girl they dance and sing with a love that we all want and yet finally, even they play a requiem to a love gone strange. To me, as I worked in the media in Tampa, the song was a fresh time. A promise. Together with Paula Abdul’s ‘Straight up’, it seemed life had spectacular promise, even after a lost preemie and the mother who ran off for a decade and a half with our daughter.
But life has second chances even if those chances require some modifications to retrofit them to make them work. I do remember what my daughter said about her 16th birthday and how much she loved me. That that was her best birthday ever. This after being lost to me from her early post natal days to about fifteen years later. Still, I would NOT change things too much because what if we never rediscovered that and that is why the blog about ‘Ten Years a Single Mother’ and her kids love for her touches my heart. Kids get the connections and their love is pure if they are loved.
The theme of this entire post is what are we going to do. Rather than just complain about the pain, how can we fix a thing? You, I and many others have lived on both sides of the track and nothing…… nothing gets fixed by complaining. We need to put people first because a warm place and a hot dinner matters.
To the abuse of women, children and the vulnerable, you and I can change the world. I have a few things going now. One is to get Emotional Support Animals and Service Pets for people who need them. Let’s teach men and society in general how to treat a lady and your kids. We need to focus on identifying potential abuse and treat the family not a case number but take care of it as a village. With compassion. No tolerance policies does not heal a family. Making rules is what politicians do. Why do we punish people like Aileen Wuornos the way we do? Why not find out where at-risk people are and help? That gives us all a better chance of surviving the obstacles in life.
From murderers to offenders of all kinds, punishment is the easy part, preventing tragedies can happen and should happen. That takes more than a Breathalyzer and seeing if you can walk a straight line. How much better will this world be with solutions and not grandstanding politicians and other nabobs using the moment for personal gain.
Education is the key to everything. Not just laws but helping people be better people. Not projecting how good we are, but how good we can all be, if we just try. Ghettos are going nowhere and neither are the homeless, the drug users and other kinds of abusers. Let’s get this done and stop maligning others. The old speck and the log thing.
Dianna Ross had it right, but we struggle against the obvious. The same reality that life is a transient soul a waiting place for something else. Like I cannot prove to you anything that you are unwilling to accept and the only certainty is deduced from what I believeI know. I am not seeking approval but at an ear. To hear my passionate regard for most everyone who has an honest take. Not the cogitations of mindless babbles trying to sell a book but the real crisis that is every day life.
In the abstracts our dreams provide a kind of nexus, to examine our world. The only deducible result is that we better pay heed to the needs of others. This idea that we are somehow original is funny because everything we have imagined, has been thought about before. It is kind of like salad dressing and choosing between French or Ranch. We have people who would place their soul on the line just to prove to you that their choice is somehow unique. None of us are, exceptionally original. That is the pride of the status quo. That some equal would tell us what we already know. Elucidating on a variable that was somehow hidden.
The brutal reality is that we are created to create. Our effervescence can be misconstrued as divine intervention but I am sure that a sovereign god does not need endorsements. Like saying that we know something that God wouldn’t. OMG Larry, I never knew that! ok, sure!
And how do we know the answer when we do not know the question? Last night I dream t that some bad individual was going to take my life. I hid beneath the ATM drawer, half suspecting that my location was known. That person knew I was not in support of him and I think he respected that, given the circumstances.
As things unfolded I spared my own life. For anyone familiar with ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’ is aware of my conundrum. For anyone still in doubt it was my sense of fairplay that gave me street cred. I was able to parlay a take into resolution, both preserving dignity while saving my life.
I would like to believe myself being in the final and most basic sense as Freudian and as classical and pragmatic as Socrates. I hate mean people and even if I disagree with a lifestyle, I would fight for it as saying to bullies, “Bugger off”.
So what does this mean? Well I see far too many people pretending that the Emperor’s pecker is not exposed and willing to attest that his rainment is fine and original. Joan of Arc had nothing to lose but everything and any soldier of any country who is not diabolic, sees the intrinsic value of a single soul.
Men would say a ‘penis’ is of the devil but a labiA is not the objective. They ARE wrong on both accounts. The demon is in the details and a patriarchal take on decency. My heart breaks at the lonely soul with no place to live and the idea that others look down on them. I look down on those who look down on them. I realize they had no more of a choice than the man in the moon and just maybe that man may know something we don’t. Afterall, he loves the Moon and that is his reality and ours but a nuisance to be discarded.
If I sound like a rambling idiot, your perception may be right, All I know is that suffering goes on unabated. The teeth of death spares no one but divinity and I am not even sure if that is true. I believe God respects the questioning soul because I believe he rather tires of obsequious fools. Letting a witch die was as much a lack of their own virility as the perverse notion as that young women peeing as she dies hung on a hickory stick. If you want to locate evil, it is not Harry Potter or that name who cannot be mentioned but our own infidelity to our own most passionate values.
People who say sex does not matter are abject liars. Everyone wants to believe that there is some quintessential probity to a random collection of meteoric imaginations. Fallacious conclusions are less battle worthy than dandelions in an EF-5 Tornado. And politicians like rock stars find their quarry in the missionary position and that their rewards in intimacy is beyond the ken of ordinary people.
Like the ill-fated garden in LA to the guard in the Wizard of Oz are the implacable assertions of a slave owner on the 4th of July. In too many occasions women are pussy on a stick. A most sumptuous carrot of all. A viking grabs her by the hair and conquers her while oppressing that same valley with an air of the King’s English and the voluptuous boob jobs on a modern day Barbie Doll. Misogyny in a mask of velour and beheading the soul of exposure. Your member truly does depict you and women see the depth of the valley and the intercourse of fairness.
My next excursion will be the scent of papaya that wafts from the nature of nature and not the moralistic reverberations of hypocrisy.
I would rather have a woman a lot like me. Sexually inclined and not afraid to be a women and not afraid for me to be a man. The others are trying to protect something that is not real.
The honest man acquiesces to the notion that the eyes are that flame. That transcends time and understands her more than any player could hope to.
Floyd, Times Are Changin 