DiSCoVeRy

I'm so determined this year.
There's so much that I need to do... there's a strong desire in me to make my resolutions (for I do have resolutions) stick- not treat them with the natural slipperiness with which they're endowed. This year, 2012, can't be about bullshit.
I don't want Dec 31, 2012 to meet me with my head spinning, wondering where all the time has gone.
Each minute is one I won't get back, so I have to spend them profitably.
In the waning weeks of 2011, I wrote myself something of a manifesto.
It was so long I wondered if I could stick to it all. Then I saw it as everyone else did. A series of imperatives to which you're not held accountable.
And why? I have no idea if this year will be my last, after all, so I ought to live each day like it was priceless, shoudn't I?
Who knew I'd find God at the bottom of two Judith Krantz novels?? Revelation after revelation in what is for all intents and purposes silly junk.
I discovered I don't breathe. Literally. I hold my breath and don't take it all the way, I'm that tense.
I discovered that I have to re-internalize discipline, one of my country's National Watchwords. (Does America have National Watchwords??) With discipline, I will conquer my debt, lose weight and buy a house.
I also noted that my writing should be templated on the Judith Krantz superstructure.
She never made any pretense to great literature; however, her books are unputdownable without being embarrassingly light.
I can conquer my dependence on meds. I hate this junk in my body and I'm determined to quit it.
I can stop thinking of myself as disposable or interchangeable. The idea that someone would want me enough to pursue me, avidly, is not ridiculous, but I discovered that this is the way I see relationships. I am the Rudolf Valentino, the pursuer, the seducer. And while there's a certain fairy glamour in that, I need to see that I'm worth some work on someone else's part.
Life is fun: I'm going to try it. It's ok to fall down. It might be a bit embarrassing, but I won't die of embarrassment. I can't spend days, nights, excruciating, agonizing minutes, worrying. I've done enough of that. Worry never makes any situation better or clearer. It just digs a deeper whole for more crap.
I'm really, really strong. I've come so far. I'm not going to worry about maturity or wisdom any more. When I need it, I'll have it.
And always: tout ca va s'arranger.
Everything always works out.

I know That GOD iS trYing to tell me SomEthiNg

and it's:

"are you there, cybele? it's me, God".

ToDaY wAs THe DAY

I woke up this morning, a Saturday morning, in response to the special alarm ring on my smartphone, the one that is entitled: "Go get the Newspaper!"

I put my short green wellies on, still in my PJs, and walked out to the front stoop.
What a gorgeous morning.
The overnight rain seemed to have washed away the stifling humidity of the latter part of the week, leaving the earth fresh and clean, the air sweet.
I made my usual, glamourous sweep down to the bottom step to pick up the New York Times, which I now have delivered, darling.
I feel so delightfully English-country pile-chatelaine as I perform this act, because it demonstrates how far I have come.
From all the grunt jobs that marked my arrival to New York, determined to make it my own, I have painstakingly become someone whose business card bears "Director of..." just after my name.
I no longer sleep on a cheap futon, under a bare bulb. My kitchen's dominant feature is not two rusted, crooked old metal cabinets, but rows of neat white shelves, peopled by vintage china.
Furniture from off the sidewalk has been replaced by bonafide things. Things that cost a bit and are scrupulously made.
It's been a hard road and I am in a lovely place.
I returned to the living room, turned on the television and threw open the windows, surveying my yard and the leafy green height of my "beanstalk" and the bench I made last fall, upcycled from a slab of old wood and the ancient bricks that lie haphazardly about.
Crosslegged, laptop open, the Today Show began.
With the news that we'd done it.
That gay people could now be married in my beloved, beloved New York.
I started to scream and clap. My mother, still reeling from my coming out 3 years ago, started to protest but thought better of it and left it at a shake of her head.
It bothered me, as did the conscientious objections of those who quoted scripture and harried the Facebook pages of the 2 Senators who'd turned the tide with their historic, resounding "YES", Mssrs. Grisanti & Saland.
I guess I also had to examine what I was feeling.
I never expected to be this deliriously happy.
I've known I was gay since I was 15. I kept my secret from my family for another 36 years.
I've ignored my sexuality, had relationships with men, as both cover and hopeful cure.
I've prayed for release.
I've feared for my soul.
But within 2 years of living here, I ventured first to a dance party dominated by gays and lesbians, called Body & Soul, then to my first lesbian party at Gloss, on the Lower East Side.
Gradually, like my career, I restored my love and respect for myself. I kind of felt that was enough, I suppose: the freedom I felt here, the easy acceptance of colleagues and friends, the ability to congregate at places created for gay men, gay women, that don't require a password and secret entrance and are blessedly free from bat- bearing thugs.
But today was the day that I realized, with a bit of a shock, that all those things, good and pleasant as they were, were, apparently, not enough.
Today I am someone who can marry, marry, with all the bells, whistles, hoo- ha and legal protections that force-fielded over all the straight friends whose vows I've witnessed.
The anxious discussions my ex and I had about how to safeguard our property and children are moot.
There are there, automatically, without the additional lawyers and the attendant, massive cash outlay.
If my wife (my wife!! now true by intention, action AND law) is ill, I can navigate her care. I can be on her health insurance at work, and not at the benevolence of a forward- thinking firm.
It's like there was a weight I never knew I had and now that it's gone, the lightness of my load is a thrilling, ahh- inducing surprise.
I am grateful.
So incredibly grateful, to God, to a Governor, Mr. Cuomo, who made it his business to do what he said he would do when he took office at the start of the year. (Wow, a politician who is a man of his word?!?)
And to Senator Grisanti and Senator Saland, who went against the common grain and supported us.
But my happiness has been marred by the vitriol of others, even people I thought friends.. like Michael, who on the one hand, congratulated me, then wondered why a civil union was not enough. Would a civil union have been enough for you? Would it have meant more than the solemn churching at the family's decades old house of worship and the happy, in-the-open, congratulatory, raise-the-roof party afterward? Would you have felt as married if your only option was a trip to the sterile precincts of City Hall and a machine- like recitation by a civil servant on the clock??
Finally, I decisively deleted the comments of him and his friends. I've endured more bad vibes and hate speech over the course of my life than any average human should be forced to endure.
And I have had enough. I've paid my due and I am OVER IT.
They were far outweighed, anyhow, by the beauty and poignancy of the appreciation of tons and tons of us, one after another, after another, on the Governor and Senators' Facebook pages.
The showers of gratitude, the unrelenting bowers of love.
This will never be my most eloquent post.
But I never want to forget this day and this is my clumsy attempt to record it forever.
I Love New York.

CaN'T gEt thIs OuT of My heAD

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7ltelq5rC8

?

How did I ever get here, where I have to live without you?

PaPA

Miss you. Wish you were here. With much love, your eldest.

dO sHEep DrEam of EleCTrIc ANdrOiDs?

I swear, when the mothership arrives, I’m going to have the most blasé look 

on my face while everyone writhes around sobbing all about me.

For real:- 99.9% of my dreams are nightmares- mostly evil aliens with a smattering of apocalyptic fare.

Take last night, for instance. The usual: the aliens came, took over etc. But what I found interesting was that arriving alongside the poker-faced overlords were these smartmen, as we say in Trinidad… con artists, hustling their protective aura to fleeing humans in exchange for cash. The human skins they’d donned over their alien forms were ill- fitting: I could see their gills or whatever substructure their real forms were composed of moving around restlessly underneath.

Apparently, the invasion started while I was in the subway (a place completely different from the New York City subway configuration I know and love) going to a party (!!!! had to be a dream LOL) when the train stopped and we were all asked to exit. Amongst my slew of friends (!!!!!) was Jake Weber, the husband from “Medium”... and on and on, fact mixed with fiction. 

I am always running, but it's like running in place... I'm always waiting for someone or some item I desperately need and this always takes so long that I never get on the road and so ruin draws ever nigh. 

Like the other night, it was me and my mother and brothers trying to get on the road. 

The car was pretty much packed but one or other of us kept running back inside to retrieve something. Meanwhile, the sky got darker and darker and ominous "booms" filled the air.

I guess I've had so much happen, have experienced so much dread (almost, but not quite, touching the hand of death) in real life that it'll take a while for my brain to be able to process anything else. 

REM as muscle memory.. go figure.

Consacres a Mort

Cela en bas est dedie aux victimes d'Auschwitz, 

qui sont maintenant entoures par les bras du Bon Dieu.

1. Entering Darkness

2. Fear

3. With an Eye Toward Heaven

4.  Couronee

5. Direct Thine Gaze

6. I Will Be Thy Rock

7. And Now I See

8. Not Long Now

9. Extase

(images captured from the films "The Passion of Joan of Arc" & "Metropolis")

MaDlY dEEpLy

It may sound silly, but the last episode of Mad Men’s 4^th season felt unbearably poignant to me.

The story arc was all about the lead character, Don Draper, tumbling headfirst into love.

First of all, it transcended the tired old adage of executive marries secretary, or rather, 

as most people parse it, secretary traps rich family man.

The point was firmly made that she did her job efficiently and well:- there’s that thing about good assistants: they have to be all at once a formidable gatekeeper, an astute diplomat and a borderline parent.

The woman, Agnes (double points for being from Montreal and speaking the most lovely French and dressing like an exotic, way hotter Doris Day) was just so smart and eager and engaging, you couldn’t (obviously he couldn’t) help but be drawn in.

One night, working late, they had sex. 

Now, this had happened with one of Don’s previous secretaries and she made the very female mistake of thinking they’d become a couple (please don’t stone me and trust that I know whereof I speak… when a woman tells you she doesn’t want anything serious, RUN.) and causing an embarrassing scene once she realized no trip to Cartier was forthcoming.

So Don’s initial reluctance was conquered by the following:

1. She made him to understand that she was a big, hardback woman, and that

2. Tomorrow she would know her place and morph into a secretary again, and further to besides,

3. SHE really wanted this, all for herself, that trapping was neither intended nor implied. She was merely a woman freely and happily indulging in her carnal.

But then evil ex-wife Betty granted fate a boon: she fired their long-time housekeeper/ nanny of donkey years for an asinine reason: the housekeeper had let the neighbor kid, fat and with no discernible antecedents, talk to her daughter. And so, brittle Bets, who needs to be medicated stat, took the ultimate, petty revenge.

Agnes, of necessity, stepped in: Don was going to California on business but bringing along the kids and she went along to help. 

For me, the moment that stays with me, that caused me the most emotional havoc, was when he walked into the hotel restaurant one morning.

Agnes was already there, with the kids. 

He stood, from afar, and watched them. 

And I could so clearly see on his face the awakening, like, “this here, this is a real family, and it's MY family..”

Further compounded by how she handled a spill at the table. Calmly, with no heated blowup at childish ineptitude.

His response was amazement: again, I could see him going through the inescapable motion of enfolding this woman into himself, comparing her with Betty and what her reaction might have been.

His face, brimming with these thousand calculations his mind was making all at once without saying a single word, was my face, then.

My face in the face of my own love.

My face as she couldn’t see it when I slid my arms tight tight around her waist and pulled her to me and grazed her neck making her shiver as she finished dinner.

My face as I made love to her in our bed shrouded in the silent cherished Brooklyn night, then ran my hand over her belly, fraught with/ full of/ emotion as I imagined my child there.

Forgive me.

I know I’m blathering on and on, but you have to understand that in the last scene of a television show, for crap’s sake, I saw myself as I once lived.

Just a made-for-tv drama, pure fiction, but what I really saw, saw with my own two eyes, on that day, on that screen, was someone standing in to show me, live and in glorious color, the moment in my life 

when the earth shifted 

and the most beautiful part of me 

was born.

Tv ART

Lately I've taken to shooting photographs with my iPhone as I watch a movie.
It's a bit curious, right? But somehow, (as pretentious as this may sound) there's always a tiny moment when something unfolding draws me in and I see beauty in it.

I absolutely adored the film "Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky", so much so that I've left it in my Netflix cue. It was so beautifully shot and art directed, like the whole thing was just one long painting. I took many photographs of the actress who played the composer's wife, whose name was Masha. There was so much poignancy in that face: rounded and very Russian with its peaks and wide valleys, red cheeks and full lips, that immediately recall whirling dancers and intricate embroidery and cakelike palaces and savage mounted men in tall fur hats.
Beauty, Violence and Fairytale.

What'S iN a nAme?

How does the naming process proceed in the face of a new child?

Found myself thinking hard about this today- like: what would I do? I've always been a proponent of the original name, the luxuriant, exotic name, the name that allows the bearer to carve her own identity.
But events of the last year have brought me to the side of those who give their kids (or traces, as a famous singer in my country once described them to me... that they were traces of himself) a grandmother's name, or a family surname that went dark eons ago, or the name of someone unknown personally but regarded as heroic in the world. So I'm starting to feel like any little ones coming into our family should have at least one ancestral name.
After all they went through, after all that has been given, I've come to the conclusion that it's not only important, but necessary. It's like "I want to knit this little being, from jump, into the framework of how I want them to grow. I want them to see, in a very real way, the pattern to follow."

I'm also starting to think, for the first time, about leaving my own trace.

Dear Auntie Cynthia

Well, here we are.

The day before the dread day. Actually, the day before the second dread day.
The first is the day a loved one dies.
I remember the day Papa died. I mean, that day was an odyssey in itself- and therefore quite shattering- but it's the shock and awe day.
The awful grandeur of death. The deep and abiding surprise of it, although birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. The questions that plague one's mind: but he was here this morning?!? He spoke to me... he admonished Peter and I for fighting, from his bed as he lay gasping for air. Surely if a parent can still perform his agreed - upon task, he'll recover, won't he? He won't die an hour or two later..

But this is the nature of life.
You, last summer, in my newly- renovated kitchen, arranging flowers.
Then a few months later, sick with a brain tumor, in hospice.
And then finally, last week, flying away.

And so here we are, on the eve of that other dreaded event that is the lot of the living when the dead do their thing.

The funeral.

Sometimes I think the Muslims have figured it out best. Bury the dead within 24 hours. Send them on their way, rejoicing, as my Aunt Ermine was so prone to saying, and let the living get on with the business of living.

I truly hope that heaven is as we envision it, and not some Sci-Fi channel black hole, where light or air don't penetrate, a miles- wide expanse of nothingness. For I just want to envision you as heaven's go- to floral artist, the envy of the cherubim and seraphim. I feel happy thinking of you rekindling old relationships, having those great, long, boozy catch-up sessions. I feel excited about you meeting the ancestors you've heard about and the ones you had no idea of.

When someone dies, I always, always think of the words of that old stickfighting song, full of bravado, conviction, release:

"When meh body lay down in the grave, then meh soul goin' shout for joy".

You, free from the pain of this mortal coil, whirling like a dervish in fields of sunlit roses, laughing, laughing, laughing.

1st DIBS iDiOcy

For your viewing pleasure, a few more choice items "sale- priced" at the generally (have to give 'em they props) posh antique/ vintage site, 1st Dibs. The stuff below, however, were given the seal of approval by the crack- addicted curator they can't seem to get rid of.

Large, foogly statue of a woman, probably sculpted just as she entered the bedroom door and saw her husband hittin' another chick, or based on her image in the mirror when her Buttfuck, Anywhere stylist did the big reveal on her new hairdo. One thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars gets this on the mantel at home. Or thrown at your soul-sucking, money- grabbing, ass- wipe of an ex.

No, they aren't earrings. They're candleholders, though what size candle would fit, as well as how the heck you'd make it stand without burning down your entire crib, is a matter for debate. One thousand, seven hundred sixteen dollars and this firetrap is all yours.

Now, the round brown thing above is a beehive. I know, I'm scratching my head as well. What place does a beehive, lacking any sort of artistic merit, in fact resembling your 7 year old's first attempt at pottery, (the one you put on top of the 'fridge in juuuust the right spot so that it oops! falls and breaks at any sudden movement) have in your home? And are unused/ re- purposed beehives still attractive to bees??
I wouldn't take the chance, especially for a whopping twenty- eight hundred dollars.

Last but by no means least is this wonder of crafting and bedazzlement, made by one Frédérique Lombard Morel, who is also the genius behind the above- mentioned candleholder. If I was a nasty, catty person, I would immediately label this "effort" Tom Binns manqué: wannabe, but can't quite make it there. Frédérique, I sure do hope you are a sterling piece of French ass, because there is no way you'll be able to sell this pile of crap at two thousand, one hundred forty-five dollars except by bewitching some gaga young banker who wishes to get into your pants.
But hey, that perfume counter gig at Galerie Lafayette will always be there!

AUdiO fIle

I wonder if there is anyone out there who gets as addlepated about bad sound as I do... I just rushed down to Office Max to get what I thought was a deal on a Phillips speaker system with subwoofer to replace the speaker systems ( two, but who's counting) that my rabbit, Bathsheba, ate her way through.
I booked through town to get to the store before it closed at 9pm, only to come home and set it up and hear my precious tunes coming through transistor- radio style. I was so pissed: there's nothing worse than music not being given the respect it's due. The luscious Adele as heard through an echoing toilet bowl?? Utterly inappropriate.

Rich, weighty sound with a highly discernible bass backbeat is my drug of choice.
I'm taking the crap back where it belongs tomorrow first thing and those Office Max chuckleheads better have a solution, 'cause I'm tight about the whole situation. I mean, damn- I literally ran all the way there. I was out of breath and sweating and I HATE sweating.
Someone's gotta PAY.