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Change the Record, Change Your Life

July 24, 2019 in Age Matters, City Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, Past Matters, Queer Matters, Sabboytical, Spirit Matters, Weather Matters

I woke wanting to listen to Aretha. No big surprise there, though I haven’t been listening to my queen lately; it’s still too painful. What I really wanted to hear was new music by her, but this is no small feat when you’ve been obsessed with a now-deceased singer since you were a child.

It was a desire sparked by seeing Malcolm X at BAM last Saturday. It’d been so swampy that weekend, and R and I had been casting about for something to do that would diffuse the intense awkwardness of feeling like strangers after having been lovers for years and then not speaking for years after that. So it wasn’t just the prospect of seeing the Spike Lee biopic on a big screen that had dragged us three neighborhoods from our own as temperatures climbed into the 100s. We’d had to balance the prospect of sitting in pools of our drying sweat against the promise of a hefty distraction, and the latter had won.

The joint was packed, and not just because of that AC. Everyone in attendance was agog over the choreography and catharsis and craftsmanship and charisma and certitude. This was a 3.5-hour film, yet there was none of that BS chatter and smartphone-checking you find these days at a public screening. In the last 10 minutes, the late, great Ossie Davis delivered his eulogy for Malcolm, and all around me people sat silent except for the occasional nose-honking.

Over the credits sailed an Aretha recording I’d never heard before: “Someday We’ll All Be Free.”

Until the last credit R and I sat still. At the beginning of the film he’d reached for my hand and I’d been stiff, like a child afraid to disappoint a needy elder. Always sensitive to rejection, he’d dropped it after a bit and I’d forced myself not to soothe his ruffled feathers by reaching back. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t initiate any physical contact I didn’t desire. He’d done that enough for us both. Continue Reading →

Camel Toes the Line

July 8, 2019 in Age Matters, Astro Matters, Book Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Spirit Matters

Tracks

This is a dream; feel free to read no further. But I was so intrigued by its details that I’m sharing what I can remember. It contains new imagery for me. Gone are the communal spaces where in past dreams I’ve been forced to camp; gone too are the panic dreams in which I don’t graduate from high school because I failed math. (Yes, my father has a PhD in higher mathematics.) In the last of that ilk, I barreled through a forest of literal red tape and nabbed a diploma anyway.

This dream confronts new fears and offers new hope.

I inherit a camel as a pet. I’m not sure how the camel comes my way and certainly do not receive instruction in responsible camel-caretaking. Totally over my head, I feed it leftover steak with spinach and ask it politely to join me on the subway. With rheumy eyes and a resigned but kindly manner, Camel obliges and as the train emerges onto an elevated line slinking through Midtown, it turns into a Snowpiercer-style disaster. We pass a tundra that used to be 57th street with about 50 frozen human corpses hanging from a cable strung between two skyscrapers. Snow and ice shimmer in the air, fatally beautiful, though we passengers are still wearing summer gear. Camel and I can’t exit the subway, none of us can. It’s making no stops–just hurtling forward–and we’re in danger of losing electricity and dying on the tracks, suspended above the polar tundra of the city. Off the train we’ll die, too.

I hold onto Camel’s matted amber fur for comfort and he–I think he’s a he, I’m not attached to him being a he–receives my touch. He is impassive but also comforting. There’s a solidarity and trust beaming between us, and when I scavenge food from a shrieking woman’s purse (vintage Gucci, even in that context I admire it) I duck under a bench to share the booty with now-friend and family member Camel. The end is nigh–maybe. Maybe not.

We munch on Swedish meatballs encased in a proper silver tin.

I have never given camels serious consideration before, but believe they refer to conservation–a theme that also emerges when we fear the train will lose juice. Now that I am soundly middle-aged, I think about conservation a lot. Also since my income drastically plummeted. Also since the environment started more rapidly declining.

With a transportation disaster at its core, this is a Mercury Retrograde nightmare if ever there were one–especially since conservation is a major theme of Cancer, where the Sun and Mercury live this month. And of course this is a real American Horror Story, since there’s not a thinking American alive who doesn’t fret that the end is nigh. Such extreme, apocalyptic weather is right around the corner.

But there’s something beautiful in this dream’s ambiguous ending, something hopeful. For camels also are symbols of endurance, of surviving unyielding, harsh circumstances.

All year I’ve been stuck in a desert that I fear I won’t survive–creatively, financially, romantically, geopolitically. Yet in this dream I am fumbling through, unsure of how to take care of myself and Camel but doing it anyway. With his mute, trusting presence, Camel is supporting me too. I think of the Strength card in Tarot–of the artist taming the lion (untapped raw creativity) while the lion also tames her.

But camels are more practical, less dramatic creatures. The know how to brighten up and also hunker down. They have strong personalities, proclivities, passions, but express them only when they can afford the resources.

Camel and I aren’t trying to tame each other. We’ve weathered a lot already–more than we’ll ever understand or know about the other. We may not have much time together, and we may never offer each other more than creature comfort and an innate sense of shared goals. But from here til the better end, we’re in on it together.

Grown-up love is coming.

Mercury retrograde is all about missives from the divine unconscious so expect powerful dreams of your own this month. Feel free to share them.

Notes on Pride, Luck, Lasses with Glasses

June 30, 2019 in City Matters, Essays, Queer Matters, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters

It will surprise no one who reads me that after finishing a film lecture upstate today I couldn’t bring myself to rush back to the city for Pride. Not because I don’t love my LGBTQ+ community but because I am incapable of abandoning a quiet green place for a crowded concrete one–at least before saying hi to every tree and bird in a two-mile radius.

So I sat by a lake and thought about luck once again. How unlucky we are to be living in the last few years of an environment that can functionally feed and hydrate and shelter us–or maybe how lucky we are to still have it today, given our abuse. How unlucky we are to be living under an administration that so brutally upholds capitalismcolonialismcockocracy–or maybe how lucky we’re finally forced to confront our country’s core of capitalismcolonialismcockocracy. How unlucky we are that so many queer community members–especially the gender-nonconforming–face mortal danger but how lucky that so many young people feel free to claim their sexuality given that when my generation was coming up, teachers were fired just for being gay.

And then there’s the personal stuff. How just yesterday I’d run into that stranger called my life for the first time in years only a few days after we’d messaged for the first time in years. And how a friend of K’s–a guy who helped me this dreadful spring for no reason except his general kindness–took suddenly, gravely ill.

The list goes on and on and woven into each item is our connecting karma, the Indra’s Net cradling each of us in its spidery, silvery arms.

I meditated on this for a while, sending everybody, and I do mean everybody, bright white light. Then, no joke, a gull came along and took a white bright dump on my blanket. It was the classic luck, schmuck conclusion, and I had to laugh.

But upon standing I saw a pair of glasses in the grass alongside me. Technically the abandoned lenses must have been there all along but of course I only noticed as I was feeling like I’d figured itall out. I only noticed the second pair–a half pair, really–on the curb as I returned to my car.

It’s like James Brown had hurdled back onto the planet in big preacherly robes hollering DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT? DO YOU SEE THE LIGHT? while Jake and Ellwood did sloppy somersaults and a very young Chaka Khan squirmed in ecstasy. Because, YES I SEE THE LIGHT AND THANKS FOR THE CORRECTIVE LENSES but also maybe I’M STILL NOT SEEING EVERYTHING I SHOULD!?

Gods and goddesses, send as many visions as you can.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy