Another bright sunny September morn in Chinatown, but I can hear the foghorn from the Golden Gate Bridge. It is five miles away, but when that horn blows, you think it's in your living room. Very Daschiell Hammett.
Speaking of which, one of the things you have to work through when you've spent a lot of time with an ex- lover is that his "fingerprints" so to speak, are on so many things. The cafe where we first met is half a block from my house. Or Take Hammett. When B and I first went out together, I mean actually went out on the town rather than meeting in our homes, he took me to a downstairs French restaurant for my birthday and then when we were back up on the street, showed me the plaque high up on the wall outside about The Maltese Falcon. I have a vast hoard of these memories (the jewels that can turn to shrapnel), so in a lot of ways, even though I have not spoken to him in almost a month, I keep bumping into B all over town.
With my coffee this morning, I am in the mood to think what a tragic wasted opportunity we were. So much possibility turned down. That's what friend Bill keeps say, "Such a sad waste of love." I sometimes think B really had no conception of what I was experiencing, being with him. I wish I didn't have such a trove of such happy memories. Part of me will never understand it. Although I'd bet large money that what happened to us is as common as dust. Hey, it keeps the music industry alive!
Speaking of industries, I thought the other day of the irony of journalists, moviemakers and professors who love to go on and on about corporate iniquity. The media, Hollywood, academia: these are not corporations? And iniquitous, to boot! Reminds me of the format you see so often nowadays of actors or other media performers being interviewed by a silent off-camera mystery interviewer. (Ty Pennington, the Extreme Makeover guy, is the king of this game.) But it's simply a scripted commercial in the form a faux interview. So much for the moral outrage of the aforementioned iniquitous types.
On FB, a friend of a friend, a theological type, had some good critical things to say about queer hermeneutics which wind up trying to show that Jesus was in favor of same-sex marriage. Good luck with that. But at the end, he, a straight man, wondered if any kind of sexuality at all was redeemable, including his own, such a mess the whole thing was. Well, in my current state it would be easy to take on that kind of attitude. But the fault is not in our genitals, dear Brutus, but in ourselves. I recognize the volcanic and highly ambiguous nature of sex. I am no naive hippy about it. But, as my sister says, it is what it is and we have to deal with it. Certainly in my own life, Eros has made a fool of me more than once or twice, but, hey, he's just doing his job. If you are going to swear off sex as the great source of evil, then you'd better start asking yourself about power and money and status and...well, everything we underlings do. Because a thing (or a man) is imperfect does not make it worthless. Conservatism is all about loving and protecting the imperfect...cause it's all we got.
I've always thought of sex as a sponge, protean in a way. It can be a vehicle for so much. Although it is not divine, but a creature sharing in the beautiful flaws of this creation, I believe it can be sacramental. It can also be a ton of other things, some not so helpful, of course. Like I said, it keeps the music industry alive.
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