scapegoat

I will be your scapegoat.

I will clean your dishes and do your laundry.

I will do your shopping and pay your bills.

I will be a mirror you can break.

I will raise your babies and bury your dead.

I will write your papers and formulate your agenda.

I will apply your makeup.

I will file your tax return.

I will cook you something when you want something to eat.

I will plant your garden and weed it as needed.

I will be your therapist and your general practitioner.

I will mend your clothes and give you the most flattering fit.

I will invest your meager savings wisely.

I will massage your back.

I will give you my left eye when yours goes blind.

I will talk about the stars, but only if you want me to.

I will guide you through foreign towns.

I will highlight the appropriate passages.

I will be your scapegoat, but I will not save you. 

--6/30/15 

holding pattern

You asked me what took my breath away. 
A porn star with "we are all stardust" tattooed on her left inner thigh,
I told you. 
And it was true.
It did take my breath away.
From silicone to stardust, perhaps there is hope yet. 
I was tense even though you smiled at my answer.
Honestly, I didn't know how you would take it.
I offered to get you coffee but you shook your head no.
I would have offered to tend the fire but
             we have no stove. 
It's just as well. 
I held my breath, waiting. 
How different holding your breath is as opposed
             to having it taken away. 
Finally you got up from the couch
             and went to take a shower or build an observatory. 
I exhaled, thinking of black ink and a pale thigh.


--6/23/15

under the milky way

Wish I knew what you were looking for
Might've known what you would find
And it's something quite peculiar
Something shimmering and white
Leads you here despite your destination
Under the Milky Way tonight

There are days that those lines above are pretty much my favorite song lyrics ever. Days? Moments? Time measurement is a strange thing. In my youth I was often fond of saying "time is a human invention" while having no idea what I meant. But when you are young, high, insecure and narcissistic, you sometimes fancy yourself a philosopher. Fuck it, I'm sure I stole it. I think it's true though. And it's better than the crap I uttered when I fancied myself some kind of shaman in those days. Bad poetry, man, bad poetry...

I'm in my early forties. There's a good chance my life is half over, or close to it. I think of that a little more than I'd care to admit. I don't believe in a midlife crisis, but I am beginning to understand why such things happen and why some people just blow up their lives and try to recapture something they've lost. That's the thing though...you can't recapture days gone by (yeah, I'm a fountain of cliches this evening. Apologies in advance. This is going to be an odd post.)

Strangely, I felt actual nostalgia more when I was younger. What I feel now, sometimes, is a yearning for a certain purity of emotion. That's the thing they don't tell you about wisdom--it tempers everything, as it should. I'll never have that falling in love feeling again, or that feeling when I first held my daughters, or that feeling when I lost my mind temporarily and ended up in the hospital (that one I don't miss.) I'm good with all that. Because I experience a different kind of emotion now, feelings tempered with that knowledge of "this, too, shall pass" be it wonderful or agonizing or somewhere in between. This emotion may not be deeper than the youthful emotions, yet it often feels that way. Calibrated to where I'm at on the human lifespan, perhaps. 

But. There has to be a but, right? Yeah, always. Some days I feel that too much emotion is blocked off in the daily noise of life and its responsibilities. It's not that I want to take drugs and paint all day. But I do wish I could just lay with my lover sometimes and not have the demands of the world direct our time. Or that I could talk again of my dreams, that kind of late night conversation with people close to you that bonds you on the deepest level. Such things came much easier as a youth. Today they are near impossible to come by, sometimes due to circumstance and responsibility, sometimes because it's harder to get out of your own way.

Youth is wasted on the young. But I don't want to go back there.

Yeah, I'm older. I was never a looker but I'm harder on the eyes now. There's a bit of beer gut. I've learned that some of my dreams are truly out of my reach. I get sucked down by ennui. I don't know where I'm going or what I'm looking for.

But you know what? I'm older. I've got experiences of different colors and learnings from those experiences under my belt--and that's a waistline expansion that need not stop. My candle doesn't burn at both ends because I am more emotionally mature and I've got a few tricks for dealing with my various demons. I treasure the moments I have instead of desperately reaching for the next one. I don't know where I'm going or what I'm looking for.

So what? Bring it.

Bring it for each moment I'm still fortunate enough to breathe. For each moment I get impossibly sad or ecstatically happy. For every moment between those poles of emotion and all the other emotions. Bring it for the loss and the wisdom. Bring it as my body changes, the aches pile up and old dogs learn new tricks. Bring it for letting go of all that baggage that weighed my youth down. Bring it on the days I can't handle it and on the days that I can. Bring it for every joke, every laugh and everything I forget. Bring it for the ghosts and the cats and the kids and the wife and the friends and the words and the songs. Bring it for Indy saying "It's not the years, it's the miles." Bring it for creativity. Bring it for gazing into the night sky and being awestruck and wordless at the vastness, the beauty of this universe as much now as at 10, 20, 30, 40.

Bring it, bring it, bring it!

Lord Summerisle

Like many, I am today mourning the loss of the incomparable Christopher Lee. Many articles have already been written about what a unique actor he was, and how we’ll never see his like again (but isn’t that always true of the real, genuine originals?) Here’s one of the best. I’m not going to attempt to do this; others will do so much more eloquently. But I do want to talk, just a little, about one of the films he made, which is one of the most important of all films to me personally, and definitely in my all-time favorites list.

I’m talking, of course, of The Wicker Man.

The Wicker Man is a legendary film now, but you have to understand that for a long time it was well-neigh impossible to see; one of the films far more frequently discussed than viewed. I had heard of it long before I finally saw it in the early 90s; it would be years before it was readily available for any who might be curious. These circumstances lent it a mystique, and as grateful as I am that even the worst of the worst films are so readily available these days, it’s hard not get a little nostalgic about for a time when you really had to work to see this stuff. To connect the threads. The Wicker Man, though, had plenty of power regardless of any preconceptions.

On its surface, The Wicker Man is a classic old vs. new tale, modern vs. primitive, Christian vs. Pagan. It’s not a perfect film and it would be a shame if it were, because if there is one thing I truly believe, it’s that flawed masterpieces are the only true masterpieces. A core tenet of humankind is failure and the striving for knowledge and skill to overcome that failure. Christopher Lee’s performance as Lord Summerisle captures the elegance and mystery of knowing that we do not know.

The Wicker Man was a gateway experience for me, one of the first and certainly the most powerful visual works of art to lead me towards a deep curiosity in paganism and its symbols. It was marketed as a horror movie, and I suppose in a superficial sense you could say it is, but I’ve met any number of people moved by the film and that’s rarely the context in which they discuss it. As I’ve stated elsewhere, my education as a youth was limited. The Wicker Man opened me up to the idea of paganism—to a desire to understand it as more than a vague counterpoint in a horror tale. As well, I’d left Christianity well behind by then, but I still yearned for the idea of ritual that had meaning. It’s not that The Wicker Man is an accurate portrayal of pagan ritual (which is a pretty broad category.) Yet it connected the dots between nature, sexuality, ancient longing and the awesome magnificence and indifference of the universe in a way few works of arts have.

The movie would not exist without Christopher Lee. And it wasn’t the only movie I enjoyed him in (I dig a good Hammer film, and any other number of his films are worth your time.) But it was the one that I can honestly say changed me, and has stuck with me through the ages.  Thank you, Mr. Lee. I think Andrew O’Hehir’s article linked to above says it best:

Lord Summerisle understands that the moral order represented by Edward Woodward’s increasingly hapless and tormented mainland policeman is a fragile construction set atop primal, animal realities, and inadequate to contain them. Does he believe in the old gods of his islanders? It’s not the right question. In his joyous amorality, Summerisle is Dracula set free from his box of Transylvanian dirt, Saruman set free from his labored parable of sin and damnation. He is the distillation of the mysterious and incalculable gift of Christopher Lee, expressed over and over again across an acting career that resembles no one else’s, and built on the profound understanding that we do not understand the world anywhere near as much as we think.

Tonight I listen to Agalloch’s The White EP, a gorgeous album deeply influenced by The Wicker Man as I sit in front of my tiny altar—my tiny tribute to a legendary man.