Land of the Phoenix
I used to say I loved our country’s central values of social justice and equality, that we just needed to heal our old wounds. But with concentration camps caging children on our stolen, poisoned soil–soil first tilled by people brought here in chains–there’s no faking the funk this year. It’s time to admit America has a broken, bloody core.
Even at its inception, U.S. independence was won for a select few at the great expense of many others. Today, a fascist in the White House celebrates that event by parading for a select few at the great expense of many others. Born under the sign of Cancer, these allegedly United States are functioning like a cancer, with greed, capitalism, and unfounded entitlement destroying basic human rights, not to mention the air we breathe. Fuck firecrackers, I’m thinking pyres.
Notes on Pride, Luck, Lasses with Glasses
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.
Dispatch from the Bench
I love best the people who love what is unlike themselves.* I love the small woman being tugged down the street by her huge wilderbeest of a dog, the two men walking hand-in-hand whom you wouldn’t have placed in the same multiverse, the mother embracing her anomaly of a child. Always the friendships of Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart, Mark Twain and Helen Keller, Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell. That 
Marilyn loved Ella, that Joni loved Prince and Prince loved Joni, that everyone loves the glorious alien Tilda Swinton.
I love those who love who others are, rather than how they reflect themselves. I love the love that says I see your spark and am honored to keep it ignited. Like may seek like, but love in its purest form seeks no mirror and carries no conditions. It simply shines.
*Does this mean such people are unlike me? I’m ill-prepared for such a philosophical conundrum except to say I love everyone from the periphery of the madding crowd.