Venables

I just walked down Commercial buying an Rembrandt pattern umbrella for myself and a cow handled umbrella for Laura.  In the Britannia square a mother from the forensic youth service was with her daughter selling masks. I confess, I bought several as gifts.  I loved the fabric designs, sci fi, animals, fish.  They were selling them for $10 or 3 for $25. I’d almost bought one in a store but balked when she told me the price was $17.  This exchange was all very community market and more fun.

I’m still waiting for my Vespa and annoyed at Covid. I have twice walked down Commercial past the excellent tattoo parlours and been unable to book a ‘walk in’.  By appointment only.  Half the sailors would never have had tattoos if they had time to sober up. I’ve been wanting a simple little navigator compass for over a year.  My Chamorrhan navigator tattoo took me a couple of years to get from the time I was encouraged too. 

When my ‘trick ankle’ wouldn’t seem to heal after the awkward motorcycle stop I had the barbed wire tattoo superstitiously warding off evil spirits. Anything to stop the recurrent twisting collapse.  It worked, personal placebo therapy at it’s finest.  The only trouble is Dr. Graeme Cunningham, seeing me at a conference, asked if I’d taken up pole dancing as a side gig. He’s a great wit. I didn’t tell him I’d turned down a pole dancing gig at a gay club in London in the early 70’s.  I just worried I might need to escape and there I’d be running naked through a foreign city.  Today I worry enough about getting a deer I shoot out of the woods without having to consider how my back would handle a pole.  I tried the Pussy doll work out and was humbled to find my ‘booty” doesn’t shake.  I can’t hoopla hoop either.  For a former champion athlete and dancer I am acutely aware of aging but thankful for all the capacity that remains. 

Walking today Clarke to Commercial and now back is a real treat. I love walking.  The real joy of travelling has been walking about cities. I loved doing this with Laura in Dublin, New York and Rome. I so enjoy seeing my friend Barb’s pictures of her walking tours of foreign cities. With Covid I’m thankful to enjoy Vancouver. Commercial Drive’s “Little Italy” is as close as I can get now. When Covid is over and the world is no longer at war I long to return to Italy, Ireland and Scotland. The beautiful and brilliant, Brazilian and Chilean women I know have so often waxed poetic about their homeland I long to travel there too. This is especially after Don posted his pictures of his travels in South America last year. Right now he’s in Lake Louise living the life with her RV and Harley. 

It was great seeing Jackie on Commercial. I forget that I’ve lived in Vancouver so long and been involved in the community that there is this added pleasure of the city, the people. In foreign cities there’s little likelihood of meeting people you’ve known for decades.  I’m blessed to know a whole range of folk with the best and sometimes the naughtiest of humor.

I reflect on spirituality a lot. My God has a great sense of humor. Thanks to Carolyn I’m reading the Ethical Slut, a therapists take on polyamory and a libertarian approach to sexuality. Anthropologists describe North America as serial monogamy. I just read a book on culture and DNA with the lessons of ancient history. The ideal of the original Asian and African cultures was the Big Chief and the Harem. That changed of course over the centuries but it was noted that ‘monogamy’ originated in the ‘indo european’ Caucasian cultures in the area of present day Persia.  Without consideration of what’s better or worse, the variety of sexual arrangements of humans has been as great as that of birds who learned their proclivities from the dinosaurs.  

Children love stability and the monogamy of the Bible was the family that proved such a threat to the STate and was the backbone of modern civilizations.  The whole issue of jealousy and envy and the legal industry of divorce and hate is a whole separate issue.  Divorce is thousands of years old but the children have not been subjected as they are today to the vagaries of a self serving patriarchal legalistic entity fundamentally abusive of family. Marx and Engles hated the family and rather liked the female unit as an available sex objcct. In the Marxist LBGT community the term ‘breeder’ is used rather nastily in reference to the ‘mother’ which remains most celebrated in Christianity.

I like the ‘ethics’ in this book.  If you succeeded in having family and monogamy, what I believe is an ideal then I truly believe we should reward and celebrate those people. However I’m single and childless and there’s many like me so what are the options. The Ethical Slut certainly discusses them all.  Having been punished despicably for marriage, my friends who refused to involve the ‘state’ in their affairs, men and women, by contrast rewarded, I don’t see marriage as a likely future.  I can’t say. It’s a possibility but singly I’ve seen marriage as an institution for ‘children’ and ‘family’.  When I was in a childless marriage I observed that our life was closer to that of gay couples than it was to that of families.  Today I live with a dog and have a very special friend.  More and more I see older people having similiar relationships that are reminiscent of the adolescence.

Given viagra and cialis sales and the fortunes made in skin products there’s a sense that some of increasingly ‘beating a dead’ horse. I’m feeling like the others of my age surprisingly young and alive and unencumbered by a need to define or think in terms of lifetimes. I’m happy to wake each day alive and then set out to have as good a life as I can serving God, my fellows, and myself.  

Now I’m going to walk back to Vespametro and hope my darling little ride is ready for new adventures.