It’s amazing to be alive. I surprise myself in a random moment when I reflect on past darkness, near death experiences, illness, fears of the impossible and yet here I am today, still alive. I thought that everyone over thirty was impossibly old when I was 20. I thought them wrong too.
I read recently that the last commune from the sixties still exists but that everyone guards their property from the takers and public works get no support. We were so idealistic when we were young. We didn’t need history. The old had nothing to teach us. We had each other. There were so many of us too. I walked through San Francisco with flowers in my hair and finger painting on my face.
The drugs came and took so many of us. The satanic drug dealers akin to the boards of tobacco factories, acid dealers, pot dealers and later coke and heroin hustlers. Money. The basest materialists moved among us like bed bugs and lice, the lowest of lizards. Our friends fell. I remember the first to go, the prettiest girl from my high school. We heard she’d been hospitalized. A few years later she was in the safety of a born again church. She’d seen the Abyss and didn’t want to return. Surrounded by protectors her beauty was still translucent but looking closer one could see the opaque in her eyes. The young and the beautiful were always too soft for the old and ugly. Alone they perished. She survived, somehow.
I remember in the early 70’s the missing girls pictures all over Morocco and the blood stain of the murdered American on our rented penthouse floor. I later laughed that Maggie Trudeau wrote it was so safe for her there like all women who overlook the companionship of the Australian rugby team. The ruling class depends on the strong but doesn’t wish to acknowledge them fearing they will one day usurp their fragile rule.
Heady days. Such youth. I will never forget dancing all night to London jazz with the eternally beautiful.
I thought that love would never end. This glorious love between man and woman so rewarded with sanctified lust was the answer to everything until divorce upon divorce. A trinity of divorce. And each divorce leaving scars on the heart like stab wounds mostly self inflicted until the abortions cut the soul.
Projection. Always they blamed you even when you were not there. Miles away the blame was always on you especially when you were never even there. Hearing gossip later. The redactions and rewriting of history.
But tragedy was real and thankfully the comedy.
Now I am still alive. I was so wrong. I thought I’d be dead by 30. If I had died then I’d have been a hero. I was so impressive when I was young, athletic, handsome, intelligent, rebellious in an era of rebellion, surrounded by rebels. Hip slick and cool.
Now I am old. Body parts don’t work as they once did. I have left behind the drunken all night parties and the orgies of all night studies. I’m still doing all night call duties but I ‘ve not been called out of bed in years, the telephone sufficient for the external world. I’m there to reassure and guide. I don’t need to lead. I’ve spent decades ahead of the crowds looking back over my shoulder at the masses and revelling in my sacred loneliness. Now I’m overtaken by others, my skill only in hanging on. I’m congratulated not by my great accomplishment but merely for living.
“Good to see you still alive ”. Friends congratulate each other. Once I was congratulated on my awards and pieces of wall paper.
Today living is the award.
I am thankful to see the young but wonder how they can seem so very very young. When I was their age I thought I was an old man but now looking at them I cannot believe my youthful arrogance. My father’s advice and my mother’s advice and their lives seem so much more as I pass each of the milestones they passed. I read history and so little changes. I read the Bible and it’s words are wise today. I thought everything I thought once was new to me. It was but it’s all part of an amazing interconnected tapestry. I see the relationships today where once I only saw the objects.
It is another Christmas too. It’s coming up fast. I am astounded at the nearing year end. With all the doomsaying and dire predictions of the earth ending and great ostentatious Paris Summit and global warming and rising water I’m convinced I got caught up in the herd fear like I did when the number 1999 changed to 2000 and I thought my computer implode. Mass terror is marketed by the media who sells fear and disease and death like dirty pornographic pictures. Suburbanites and academics love to be voyeurs. Those who have known the horrors steer clear. A sunny day and a picnic are enough.
I love to walk with my dog. His back was nearly broken in a fall. I am so aware of individual fragility. Each injury of mine with flying vehicles hurts on certain days of climate change, the real one, not the propaganda one. I know the climate changes in a joint that today is reminding me of a particularly ignominious motorcycle crash.
I met another shooter and lamented our decreased hearing in our right ears thinking it would have been good if we’d used hearing protection earlier or moved further away from the speakers at the concerts.
Now I thank God I am alive. I am so thankful for light and live to see the days lengthening. I rejoice for my friends that ski this season but helplessly think back to how much I enjoyed flying south to scuba dive, jumping the winter ship of Canada like so many others do. But there was a time when I snow shoed, ice fished and built quizzies and igloos. Winter camping was so much fun when I was young. Now I realize youth is foolish and I’m trying unsuccessfully to appear sane as so many of my friends are being carted off with dementia and the government is threatening us all with physician assisted suicide.
Here I am glad to be alive and thankful there was no physician assisted suicide when I was younger and begged to die to relieve myself of the pain that eventually left me better and stronger and wiser.
Thank you Lord Jesus. Thank you God for incarnating in your creation so you can see what a muck up it is and suffer with us. I feel sorry for others with religions where the God is high on top , the mighty landlord who doesn’t actually live in his kingdom so never knows how his people survive. Jesus is my guy. He’s one of us. As Neitze the lover of the superman, complained, Jesus is a god for slaves. I am enslaved in this body and life. I long for moksha. I want resurrection. I wake up pissed some mornings and I’m sure it’s sufficiently because the Aliens didn’t abduct me.
Now Star wars is on and I’m hoping to get to the theatre regretting missing Mel Gibson’s Crucifixion at the movie theatre and experiencing it only later when it was in the second or third wave of DVD release. I want to be at the head of a cultural moment. I want to crawl over the fat ass body of a Kardashiansand be the first to see Star Wars. But my friends have always been there. When I was young I was early to Rocky Horror Picture Show but here I am wondering if I want to dress and get to the line ups that are the crowds that I revelled in when I was young but now abhor.
A man was knifed beside me at a bar and bled out while no one noticed. I fear the very crowds I was drawn to when I was young.
Jesus was born. Hallelujah!
Jesus , God, lived and died.
The very people who attended the Paris Summit, the UN leaders, the Putin, Obama, House Said, China’s Communist Committee, France’s President, England’s Prime Minister and Justin Trudeau would be the ones who killed Jesus today. He’d not be crucified but rather put in a psychiatric ward to be silenced. He’d be electrocuted perhaps. As Christians we’d all wear little electrocution chairs about our necks instead of crosses. He’d be a God who was killed before he could end the war. Trillions spent on weapons and myths would not be given to medicine and education because he was killed and silenced again and again. Jesus the healer and teacher would be killed by all those who profit from war.
I would be there stabbing too. Everyone on earth who is not a child would have the blood of Jesus on his hands. This is a planet of war and killing. All the adults are equally responsible. There is no us and them. Except perhaps the children or the very old and the sick and dying. And the old and sick and dying had their turns. But the children under 8 , maybe 6, those young enough that no one trusts them with a gun or a bomb even though their parents might use them as sex trades and suicide bombers and human shields, they are the only innocents. Not the women ,not the men, not the boys , not the girls, perhaps only the infants.
Like Jesus whose birth in innocence is celebrated at Christmas. God thank you for joining us. Infant Jesus. Hallelujah!
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