Solstice benediction

God

God

God, will You give me credit for using the name “God” in public? 

— if I use Your name to give credibility to whatever I might say, as if You are authorizing what I claim? 

— if I back it up further by attaching some words taken out of context from Hebrew or Christian scripture, will You give me credit?

What do you mean by “credit?”

By credit I mean belief, trust . I mean, maybe I could manipulate the mind of whoever hears me to believe I am telling the Truth because I believe I am speaking to God, or even For God, or even stating a prophecy? 

— and if “God” is only a word I say for rhetorical effect, spoken in vain, you might say, but effectively short-circuiting the critical faculty of the listener who fears I might actually speak for God? 

— and if I string together phonemes in utterances that sound like a foreign and ancient language, and it sounds like glossalalia will it scare you and convince you that a mere opinion shaped by prejudice and ideology and ignorance is really expressing divine will and that if you don’t believe me you risk being punished forever because you are afraid of an inscrutably angry creator whose will is different from yours and whose alien intentions cannot be understood by your finite human intellect? 

— if I use the word “God” to persuade the gullible that I must be telling the truth because no one would dare pray a lie, would you believe me?

I try chanting 

Kyrie Eleison

Kyrie Eleison 

Kyrie Eleison

My chant is drowned out by the cries of aircraft cutting through the membrane of the sky.

Dear God, we pray, I guess, this is an emergency,

have mercy.

Immigrants are dragged away from their homes and work places by lawless masked men. 

The wealth of the nation is taken from the poor to benefit the wealthy.

Lazarus dies in his own excrement alone on a subway.  The slaughter of the innocents in Gaza is cheered on by God’s people, and also Christians.

Kylie Eleison

Lord have mercy

Help me

Help us 

Help them

Help Israel listen to their Prophets’ call for justice and abandon their weapons and idols of war.

Help Palestine listen to their Prophet call for justice and abandon their weapons and their idols of war.

Help Christians lose Christianity so they can find the Galilean prophet, their rabbi Jesus.

Jesus said that if they don’t understand the prophets they won’t even believe a man who came back from the dead 

— and the prophets said very little besides calling for justice and mercy for the poor and the stranger and the bereaved

A couple of days after the Palm Sunday protest march, Jesus led the protestors to occupy the temple and stop business as usual He  publicly accused the religious establishment of exploiting the poor. 

Jesus told a story about a beggar who went to Heaven and a rich man who went to Hell

Jesus said blessed are the poor, blessed are the peacemakers.

I read Jesus’ gospel as a prophetic call for nonviolent revolution and evolution of consciousness.

But it becomes mind-numbing propaganda when appropriated by the ruling class, the nationalists, the con men, and the paranoid.

Help us Jesus to pity the Christians who want to be millionaires. 

Help us to forgive those who follow men who want to be kings. 

Help us to show nationalists how to love our neighbors.

Help us push the rich man’s Tesla through the needle’s eye. 

This is an emergency, an emergence.

I am being emptied out, thank God. 

There is a lot of ego confusion to go, and a lot of false consciousness to be burned away by reality, but I name Reality “God” and praise Reality.

Kyrie Eleison

Lord have mercy 

 

The Events of May

Mom’s birthday is next week. She was born 106 years ago. She was 88 when she died. She died on Fathers Day 2007.

My sister Betty was born in Jamestown, New York. I was born eleven years later in Kentucky. But the rest of the family came from Jamestown. We moved to Florida when I was 2 and that is where I grew up. We’d go to Jamestown to visit my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. I spent a few summers at Chautauqua. Chautauqua County is a holy land for me.

Last year I went to Jamestown to meet up with my sister. I took a bus from Port Authority to Buffalo. It was a trip down memory interstates. My niece and her husband picked me up at the Greyhound station and we drove to the Weakland Chapel where my sister was. They had driven up from Alabama. Weakland is Mom’s maiden name and the chapel is named after her sister, whose name was Betty. The Betty Weakland Chapel. Their father was a minister and evangelist. Aunt Betty was a child evangelist. I come from a family of preachers. My sister Betty and I went to the cemetery on Mom’s birthday and looked at our parents’ graves and the grave nearby where my wife’s ashes are buried and where I will also be buried. The graves are on a hill and you can see Lake Chautauqua. It was the first time I saw our grave marker with my name on it under Lori’s.

Now Betty’s ashes are with her husband’s remains in North Carolina. The last time I saw her was on that trip last May. That was the tacit purpose of the trip, to see each other for the last time, and share memories and family history and tell our stories.

On the first of May this year I marched in a May Day parade to protest the policies of the Trump administration. I was with two members of our church.

On the Fourth of May of every year I remember Kent State. The events of May 1970 changed my idea of who I was and what our country is. I was 16 years old. Nixon announced he was expanding the war into Cambodia and students protested. Four of them were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State. It took a while for me to begin to comprehend all this. This crime coupled with the story of the My Lai Massacre. We went to a restaurant on Mother’s Day and I told my family— Mom and Dad and my sister — that I intended to resist the draft. I was making that decision at that moment as I was telling them and we argued about it.

That summer we took a vacation to Jamestown. On the 4th of July we watched them light the flares around the lake. They do this every year. You see the red dotted outline of the lake. Then there are fireworks. Uncle Dan told me he didn’t like fireworks because they reminded him of the war. He was wounded at Anzio. Now I know he had PTSD. He heard Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner on the the radio and didn’t like it, he said, but he understood it. Maybe the sonic fireworks bothered him. The Woodstock album had recently come out. The events of May 1970 were still being felt. We were processing it. After visiting our Jamestown family Mom and Dad and I drove to Toronto to consider it as a possible refuge should I become a refugee. Neil Young’s song Ohio was on the car radio.

In May of 1972, shortly after I registered for the draft, my sister and I and our cousin Cathy organized a peace march in West Palm Beach. We also participated in demonstrations at the Democratic and Republican conventions in Miami that summer.

Last May, as we drove around Chautauqua County looking for familiar places to stir our memories of our lives we told our stories. I don’t know if my stories meant anything to anyone but me. Last week I heard that the administration wants to call up 20,000 National Guard for its war on migrants. They haven’t been shooting student protesters yet, just denying them the rights for due process and deporting them and incarcerating them. But they haven’t started shooting, yet. The government has become lawless. Chaos incarnate sits in the Oval office.

My sister died in October. A few days later I had what they call A Big Dream. I dreamed we were all at the Weakland Chapel, about to go inside. A big crowd outside. Aunt Betty and my sister Betty look unhappy. I am carrying a microphone. The church is packed. I sit near the front and my sister is at the other end of the pew, very quiet and withdrawn. Her pocketbook and bags of stuff are on the seat between us. The congregation watches a film showing war scenes and civil unrest from the 20th century. I hold my microphone.

What will I say when I’m behind the pulpit?

Spring Skull Burst

 

Our slow steady slide

 We carry our phones with us. They are the one essential item for many of us. I know some people brag about not having a smartphone, as if they are roughing it in the urbs and suburbs like frontier people, with old fashioned wind up watches and rolled up newspapers tossed onto their lawns and televisions plugged into their walls and rotary dial phones on their desks and maybe carry one flip phone, maybe, as their one concession to the demands of the millennium.

But I carry my smartphone. I clock in to my job on my phone, when the ADP app works, and take a photo of the sunrise or yet another picture of the Statue of Liberty or a painting I just finished, and check news for updates on the empire’s slow but steady slide into chaos and oblivion.

The scandal of the week is the top secret planning for an apparently illegal act of war and the scandal isn’t that the President’s team circumvented Congress to bomb people in Yemen but that they used a relatively insecure commercial app and mistakenly invited a journalist. They compromised security by discussing a secret military operation on their smartphones and put our own pilots in danger.

The SecDef, a notorious DUI hire, complained about having to do something to secure shipping lanes for our “pathetic”, his word, European allies.

NATO is pretty much over, our former allies are beginning to suspect. Had any European asked any Native American if America could be trusted to honor a treaty they would have gotten an earful of laughter. Now we do what Putin wants, for some reason, for whatever reason Trump thinks is in his personal interest and for his personal profit. My guess is that he is in debt to Russian mobsters.

My Norwegian friend says she is leaving the USA because she no longer feels safe here. This surprised me but I can’t reassure her.

Maybe our technology will be taken over by an artificial intelligence that is wiser than us. Our robot friends will dream new goals for us.

Or maybe a pandemic of sanity will deliver us. and maybe we will organize a democracy movement and heal our republic.

You are tripping, you say.

What do I know? I’m just another wage slave with a smart phone.

Prime time

 

My bodymind has hands and the hands have fingers and the right hand has an index finger that touches the screen of an iPad to spell words and to coordinate with my eyes to hunt and peck for meanings.

My body was pulled out of my mother’s body seventy one years ago. 

I feed my body but I have to be smarter about what I eat. My doctor said to start with vegetables. I have to think about my bones and about my heart when I choose my food.

Last week I learned I have osteopenia. I need more calcium and vitamin D. 

My body gets tired at work. By midafternoon my body struggles to stay awake. I stand behind a cash register and close my eyes and catch myself before I fall. If I sit in the chair I will go to sleep. You are no spring chicken, a coworker reminds me, as if I have forgotten. 

My body gets up several times during the night to pass water. There is a brief conflict with my self over my body’s need to sleep and it’s need to urinate complicated by the need I learned as a child to not wet the bed. Sometimes I dream about the ocean or a flood and wake up needing to go to the bathroom. Other dreams are less obvious in their messaging. My nervous system produces dreams. I don’t know if it’s just random neural noise sometimes or if part of me is telling another part of me something. 

I dream I am arguing with my father, who died seventeen years ago, and I don’t know if I was really arguing with my self. Am I arguing with my self about fatherhood itself or about my own childhood? Am I arguing with the Heavenly Father? 

A long time ago my body impregnated another person’s body. Our bodies knew how to reproduce but our minds were stupid. We went to a clinic to terminate the process. A copy of the book Our Bodies Ourselves was on the table in the waiting room and I started reading it, hoping to become less stupid. I was so stupid I was a stranger to myself despite my selfishness. 

I don’t think I am the kind of person meant to be a father but I was slow to reach that conclusion. I finally fell in love with a woman who wasn’t meant to be a mother and learned something about what it means to be a husband. 

Every morning for the past ten years I get out of bed and carry my bodymind to the couch in my studio, I brew some Bustelo and pour a mug and meditate and pray to the creator spirit Mother/Father and my mind presents its confusion to itself. Am I talking to myself? Or God talking to Godself? 

I consider that just essential awareness and the self of the consciousness united are the Mother/Father and unconditioned condition of body/mind.

Or more neural noise.

A little more clarity, a little more courage or resolve, I ask. 

Then, then I drink the coffee and the day begins. 

At least 71 is a prime number, divisible only by one and by itself. 

I’m in my prime and this is prime time.

Waiting area

 Here I am again.

I don’t know why my doctor wanted me to to do this thing. There was a list of radiology places to choose from and I made a random choice and it wasn’t until this morning I realized it was where Lori came for treatments for several years and I always came with her and now I am sitting here again.

Walking into this building again was a lot scarier than walking into the 9/11 Memorial.

Almost ten years ago what a scary difficult day. Her last petscan and then the ER and a hospital bed and then two weeks hospice at home and then death.

I don’t want to write about that day.

I feel stressed out just sitting here waiting for some kind of scan for bone density maybe to determine the extent of my white fragility I jest.

Just how brittle is the skeleton inside me? My bones are rattling from the vibrations of rumbling machinery in the building. 

Here I am again, like a forgotten survivor of an ancient disaster left buried under a million tons of invisible rubble.

There are things I should do today involving Medicare and Medicaid and things I want to do involving art, but no I don’t want to do anything at all.

A couple of days ago I went with a friend to the cancer center at Bellevue. Rode with her in the Access A Ride and pushed her wheelchair and waited like I am waiting now while they monitored the progress of her stage 4 cancer. 

And here I am again in a waiting area.

Let me describe the setting. It looks like a standard waiting area in a typical medical facility and the other people here look like they are waiting for the ultimate bad news.

I’m only here for a routine test but 

what would I do if I got bad news and I could only expect to live a few months longer?

What would make me feel good?

What fun thing could I do?

I would buy a chain saw and fix every Tesla I could find until they shot me.

I will be able to see the results of the scan online tomorrow,

I will get a barbecue sandwich tonight. And ice cream.

I’m depressed but I’m not really worried about my bones. They feel like they must have the density of lead when I pick up my body and carry it home. 

the jury

 

Wake up!

Wake up!

What?

Wake up!

OK, I’m awake. Why are you waking me up?

Get up! Get out of bed! Go to work!

Where am I going?

This isn’t the time for questions. This is the time for action!

Ok Ok. What am I doing?

No questions! This isn’t the time for navel gazing. Get outside and go to work before it’s too late!

Let me get dressed!

No time! 

But I’m naked! 

No time! You shouldn’t sleep in the nude. You shouldn’t sleep at all! You should be watching and ready at your post! GO!

I’m outside. I’m naked. I don’t know where I am. The world changed overnight. Maybe — how long was I asleep? Hello? Who told me to wake up? Where are they now?

A sudden loud roar of an engine. I slip and fall face down on the icy concrete as a giant bulldozer rolls by nearly missing me. There are many more bulldozers nearby flattening people, cars, trees, houses, Flattening everything. There is no stopping them and I’m stuck to the pavement like a forgotten Kool Pop in back of a freezer.

I don’t know what happened. The Higher Power scraped me off the ground with a holy pancake turner and tossed me back into the reality of a J train headed to Broad Street and I went to work, of course.

The Statue still stands on her little island. Liberty Enlightening the World. Any day now the South African cybernazi or his little friend who sits at The Resolute Desk will have the Army Corps of Engineers move her to an underground cell on Riker’s Island and charged with disseminating DEI. Emma Lazarus’s poem will be declared a thought crime. A hardbound edition of the US Constitution is a popular item at our store and pilgrim tourists from all over the world buy copies. The Constitution is loaded with DEI, though, and will no longer be available. Ellis Island will also have to be shuttered.

Everyday the world gets stranger and more menacing. Bombs and bulldozers drive people from their homeland to make way for real estate schemes of condos and golf courses and casinos on the renamed American Strip. The decaying of the empire is well underway. America stinks.

Oligarchs and cybernazis crawling on the world like roaches on the kitchen floor. I have no tolerance left and wish I could pick up a broom and sweep them away. 

I am having difficulty tolerating anything. I’m on edge.

Today I had an altercation with a pigeon. The pigeons have been a problem at the store. They can get in through the doors of the cafe next door. The cafe can’t keep them all from getting through their doors. I saw a man on their staff chasing some out with a broom but he can’t stand guard all day. The store’s space is divided from the cafe’s by various display fixtures over which the pigeons fly back and forth. Lately a gang of them has been hanging out. They sit in their balcony seating along the shade of the lighting fixture. The spectators are backlit by flourescent lights dramatically casting a greenish glow on the ceiling behind them. Twelve silhouettes of seated pigeons were watching over us like a grand jury. They sit and wait and take turns raiding the cafe, flying over the merchandise displays to the bus trays and dropped crumbs and returning to the balcony. In the morning when we come in there is bird shit everywhere. So we were covering the books and boardgames and Junior Ranger hats and hoodies with plastic sheets. Finally someone from the gift store put up a decorative barrier that effectively kept the pigeons out until today when one walked in through a gap in the barricade, sauntering in and looking all entitled and shit like we are the intruders and I didn’t care for his attitude. I recognized him as the one we called Joe. He has two little white feathers sticking out of his head and seemed to be the gang leader. I uttered a profanity and we made hostile gestures at each other, me waving my hands and Joe flapping his wings, and diving toward my head and I was ready to grab a broom and take a swing at him and kill him. I wanted to kill Joe the pigeon. 

I’m sure I’d be in trouble with the National Park Service.

When Joe left his balcony and walked to the cafe for another pizza crumb run we covered the gap so he couldn’t come back.

The little jerk.