Sober Gay Poz Ex-Con

I can already hear the Republican attack machine preparing the ads and the email campaigns with various attempts to portray Obama's assertion of global citizenship as some kind of knife in the back of the good old U.S.A.  To them may I pose the question:  What planet are you a citizen of?  Or to put it in a way you'll understand, when the evil aliens come and place giants saucers over every continent, do you think when you shout out "But we're Americans!" they'll politely retract their zappers and move on?

Thank God we might have a President who actually knows that giving the German chancellor a neck massage at the dais might be a tad inappropriate.  Thank God we might have a president who understands that no country with 3% of the world population has some sort of divine right to 28% of the world's resources. A President who could fill a blank map of the world with all of its countries and only get a few wrong. (Yeah, I'd have a little trouble with Ghana, the Ivory Coast and Guinea myself.)

The reason so many Limbaugh-listening xenophobes love to hate Europe is because, for all their bluster, they feel inadequate in the face of their own ignorance. They either couldn't learn a foreign language or more likely, didn't really try. I've seen them in Europe, (many more never have even gone there, like our dear Cowboy-in-Chief pre-2000)  they usually speak broken English extra loud, and then get offended at the weary impatience with which they are greeted. (Whoopee. Another American who thinks all he needs to speak is money to get slathered with affection by the natives. )

What kills me is that these are the same people who hold immigrants to the United States in contempt for not learning English or speaking it poorly. Immigrants who come here to work, precisely because they aren't doing so well in their own country.  (The Statue of Liberty says "Give me your tired and your poor" -- not "Send me your successful and educated.")    And yet, if Rush went to Mexico, all he could say is  "Tiene Oxycontin?"

Granted, I had the luck to have a foreign mother who raised me fairly bilingually, and I love languages. You didn't have to push me into Spanish, Italian and German classes. I even took some Rumanian and made Brazilian boyriends talk to me in Portuguese. It doesn't make me better than anyone, but it does give me a slighter biggger sense of how other people think around the world, and that's a good thing I would wish on anybody, 

All I ask is that you don't defend your ignorance as some sort of mark of cultural superiority, and that you don't attack Obama's understanding of different languages, cultures and mindsets as some kind of further proof of a lack of patriotism.

What the hell is so terrible, anyway, about a continent where almost everyone has health insurance and speaks at least one other language, usually English? ( Obama didn't even need his speech interpreted.) As for McCain's assertion that he'd like to speak to Germans too, but only as President, OH PLEASE.  He'd go in a flash if he thought 200,000 people would show up to see him.

MCO 2008

That provocative lady is via Balthus, on a boat of Monet's. I like to think this takes place on a lake in Berlin because our naked lady is desperately trying to get Obama's attention!

Yesterday was a good news/bad news kind of day.  The good news was that I got a big subtitle-editing job in my inbox yesterday, the bad news is that is has a very tight turnaround, and I had to cancel my trip up north to see my sister and her kids. (I''ll miss the play they're in.)  I just can't afford not to take every job I can get and do it quickly and promptly. I can't say part of me wonders if this also wasn't the God of Travel and Safety intervening. I haven't been making it until noon without a nap, and that drive on the 5 gets very, very boring. Oh well, as soon as David and I get the house, the kids and the mom get have a SoCal vacation spot.

Speaking of which, that's the other gn/bn. The good news was that we saw a very nice mortgage broker, the bad news was that he called me yesterday and it was impossible not to clear up some items on my credit report without telling the broker about my past, and told him I'd actually done time over some of it.  He turned out to be incredibly nice and understanding--I think he had a few stories about a rocky decade of his own he could have told. He thinks he can work around it.

I am hoping that working with Steven and Mike (still inside) might somehow be burning off enough of that old bad karma. I actually have a pretty elegant plan for what to do when I've made as much money legally as I did illegally.  But I'd rather do it, then talk about it, then talk about it, and not do it. (In any event, it's nothing that'll happen right away.)

MCO 2008 

I love the way this Boldini diva fits so perfectly against this Turner landscape. When I get to the Afterlife for Artists, I will either be surrounded by hugs for all the homage or stoned for the most egregious run of unapologetic plagiarism ever devised.  I like to think that that the Hy-Art serves to redeem all those hours at the computer learned how to use Photoshop while high, some of it in the service of forgery. 

I have a confession. I secretly love natural disasters.  When they show that hurricane tracking across the Gulf Coast, I get a thrill.  I ache for another earthquake. Tornados turn me on.  I can't help it, it's the grandest theater on the planet, Mother Nature putting on a production that puts all the extravaganzas of Broadway to shame.  And here's the thing: I know you do too. I know we all get a frisson of excitement when we see "Stormwatch" across the screen. I'm not the only one who watch "MegaDisasters." 

Oddly though,  you can't get me on a rollercoaster. What's that about?

Steven had a great first day of freedom--you can read about it on Prison's a Bitch.

Tomorrow I drive up to Chico to see my sister and little niece and nephew in a play. Yes, that's "drive up."  Once I committed to the bus, David saw that it made little sense for me to add 3+ hours both way and told me to use the car.

I'll borrow Sam Harris' sign off: "Do something wonderful for someone today."

MCO 2008 

First and foremost, it is impossible for me not to be hyperaware that today, after a decade, Steven gets out of prison. This is like the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. For him, walking in them, for me, watching them. He's probably just now getting on a bus to a halfway house in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Wow.

Like many of us, I am entranced by Obama's trip abroad, thrilled by how well it's going. I loved the cheers of the troops as he sunk that three-pointer--I'm sure Dick Cheney had to adjust his pacemaker to "apoplectic" that Bush-friendly troops were not pre-chosen to guarantee a stony instead of an obviously warm reception to the other "O." (Who'd have thought she'd have competition?) I loved loved loved when McCain, the supposed one with foreign policy expertise, talked about the non-existent "Iraq/Pakistan" border (they are 750 miles apart, separated by Iran), especially as I imagined Dumbya being told by Condi that McCain had made a mistake, because he still can't find Afghanistan on a map.

I am of course dismayed by the continued tenacity of the "radical muslim" perception that seems firmly entrenched in the minds of the the under and miseducated. I have a theory about that, particularly when it comes to the elderly.

One of the reasons it was so nice to be an American in the 40s and 50s was that it wasn't an illusion that we were "the good guys."  The Fascist ideologies we fought really were evil, and we really were liberators who could be trusted not to torture. By the 60s, things got a bit more ambiguous, but it was still relatively easy to feel like whatever our flaws, the Russians were worse--as any Hungarian, Czech or Ukrainian who got out from under the Soviet boot could tell you.  If you'd made it into your 60s or 70s, you were used to 4 decades of good guyism, but probably just a tad disoriented by century's end that there was no clear, monolithic enemy to reinforce your sense of contrast.

Then comes 9/11.   A tragedy to be sure, but there's the comfortable feeling of certainty you had after Pearl Harbor that you are the wounded and righteous party. But these bad guys, who are they? Senators couldn't tell the difference between Sunni and Shia--or is it Shiite? Oh, it was Saddam Hussein? Well, there you go. Oh but it wasn't?  Finally, you throw up you hands, settling on the idea that our enemy are Radical Muslim Extremists.  True, Bush is not Einstein, but at least when you look at him, he seems to be without any doubt as to the basic certainty that we are the good guys. You need to believe that about your country, about yourself. Children can turn against you, spouses can die, businesses can go belly up, life can be cruel and uncertain. But if America isn't the good guy, what does that make you?

Barack Obama represents a nuanced view of the world that makes you uncomfortable. He asks America to take responsiblity for its foreign policy mistakes, to understand that if so many hate us it may be related to how we operate in the world.  If you agree with that, then you may have to question whether you have something to do with why your daugher never visits, why your husband or wife divorced you, why you have to live on $1800 a month even though you worked non-stop since the depression.  (The equivalent scenario can be painted with working class whites whose patriotism also gets all tied up with compensating for poor self-esteem.)

Casting Obama as a muslim extremist, as ridiculous as that is, represents a need for a clear and defined bad guy, like the good old days of the Nazis and the Russians. Killing Saddam didn't fix terrorism, and who can keep all these Arabs straight? McCain is 72, an ex- POW, unambigous.  Obama is mixed race, his middle name is Hussein, he even looks like an Arab. Most of all, he's unfamiliar in a time where familiarity is craved.

They fear Obama, because he represents a new world where being American is not an automatic grant of moral superiority, in which the survival of the world may actually depend on some hard long stocktaking in the mirror. To them, Obama's a Pandora's Box of guilt and self-questioning that must not be opened. Better to slap a simplistic label on him and play some mah-jong.

MCO 2008 

P.S. The Hy-Art is Reni/Fidler. Can't say it's much related to the blog entry, but it's what created itself last night.

The Japanese are via Utamaro, the dark-eyed women from Christian Schad.

It's a pretty good illustration of how my weekend is feeling. Juggling all these points of view, including my own.

We're all trying to be there the best we can for my Mom. My sisters, my Aunt, myself, and her best friends are all trying to figure out how much and when to visit, how much to encourage her to engage with the world while balancing it again her increasing tendency to feel disoriented by unfamilar situations and too much stimulation.  Sometimes it feels like we're trying to hold back the tide. At least she never forgets I'm her adoring son, even if the content of yesterday's conversation seems to evaporate overnight. I only half-joke that this is her best opportunity to live in the present.

My sister asked me up to Northern California to see my niece and nephew in a play next weekend, and that brings up a whole lot of other points of view with David about use of the car  Which really isn't about use of the car. It's about what kind of relationship we have. Peridoically this netherworld of unmarriage gets a little murky. I think I may just take the bus.

I'm watching the Harvey Girls, which is free on Video on Demand this month. That Judy Garland. What a perfect talent.

MCO 2008

So, last night my friend Michael and I went to see Mamma Mia! What glorious and total fun.  The Greek Islands were to DIE for, the story is inspired silliness, the songs are defiantly hummable, and the actors commit to their parts like their lives depended on it. Pierce Brosnan, for example, is no singer, but he acts like he is, so what comes out of his mouth is totally listenable.  And Meryl Streep--good for you girl. She has so much fun up there it's infectious, and she can sing.

So then I get home, and after walking the dog, decided to check out the first two episodes of "Cranford," which I'd missed on its first run on Masterpiece Theater because it competed with Desperate Housewives and Brothers and Sisters. What an idiot I was for that.  The most extraordinary ensemble of Brit talent I can think of, bar none, and a story that's engrossing while deceptively simple. One half an hour was more memorable than a whole season of either of the other shows. 

When I went to bed, humming the tunes to one movie while thinking about the artistry of the other, I wondered how such disparate entertainments could feel like bookends to me. Except for the fact that both were put together and acted by consummate professionals, you couldn't find two more dissimilar plots or styles.  It finally occured to me that while both sets of characters, like any human beings, chased contentment, in Mamma Mia the pursuit exists in the veritable absense of any social conventions--everything goes, basically. In Cranford, the search is conducted within the confines of the most rigid social conventions imaginable.  Propriety, correctness, what is done and not done, these form the rules and regulations that few of the characters even question, much less test. They were two sides of the very same coin.

But within the atmospheres of complete, uninhibited freedom, and of practically none at all, the questions posed are exactly the same. How do I choose to live? What is fun? What is service?  How far do I go to get what I want while remaining a person who respects who he or she sees in the mirror? Who do I love? How do I love them? 

Caughtup in these stories, I had the wonderful sense that when life is viewed through the prism of these questions, whether you live here or there, now or then, under this system or that, our interior experience remains much the same as human beings.  Ask almost anyone on his deathbed what his  life was most about, and if he's honest the answers will almost always revolve around how much love he was able to give or to receive.

MCO 2008

So yesterday, David and I went house-hunting.

I've told you what a particular friendship I have with David. There has been nothing romantic or sexual between us for 15 years. After we were together in the early 90s, he had a lover for a decade, as I spun out of control.  In 2005, when I was a year sober, his lover died. David didn't walk away empty-handed, but it was hardly what had been verbally promised.  Had gay marriage been legal, this is the perfect example of a wrong that would have been prevented.

Anyway, no matter what affairs of the heart (or parts lower) either of us have, 9 days out of 10, we spend most evenings having dinner and watching TV.  We never say anything "nice" to each other, but we laugh at each others jokes and that stands in quite well for affectionate banter. We never fight.  We trust each other. I don't judge his nightly cocktail and he accepts (grudgingly) that I can't join him.  All in all, I believe there are a lot of people who would give their left eyetooth for the kind of "marriage" we have, thought it's taken both of us a while to accept that that's probably a more accurate term for what we have than anything else.

Between his good credit and income, and my access to a low-interest loan, we are in a position to take advantage of the downturn in the housing market, which has brought prices in certain areas of L.A. down from stratospheric to merely unreasonable. (People lament the housing crisis, but I have to note this considerable upside.) 

With our absolutely fabulous agent, Paula, we went to a slew of houses yesterday, mostly around Echo Park. Some of the fixer-uppers were really need-to-be-torn-downers, frankly, and some of the sweet finds were also so tucked away as to make going out for a quart of milk a pain-in-the-ass. But one place we could only see from the outside for now was in a neighborhood that was both adorable and perfectly located (David wants to be close to downtown, where he works, I want to be close to my favorite meeting). It is in Angeleno Heights, one of the only neighborhoods in LA where you find several blocksfull of restored Victorians from the turn of the century.   (Our house would not be, it's a modest duplex, but just to walk the dog there! Heaven!)

Sobriety isn't about cash and prizes, it never has been. But it's beyond doubt that one of the costs of addicition is that you don't make healthy economic decisions. I had some windfalls in the past, and buying a house was never seriously on any agenda. Yesterday, for me, was definitely one of the results of being clean and living like a responsible adult.

The odd thing is that last night, I had such a severe using dream that it took me a good 10 minutes upon waking to really get that I had not, in fact, slipped.  The disease of alcoholism, one discovers, takes increasingly desperate last stands the longer you stay sober. It penetrates the subconcious because it one of the last places it can find traction.  

Luckily, no nightmare is about to rain on my parade. I'm gonna get me a slice of the American dream.

MCO 2008