I awoke this morning thinking about having sex. You may think that’s not unusual, though not necessarily something one mentions to potentially everybody for electronic ethereal posterity. But if you allow your eye to drift to the right side of your screen you will observe that the author of this weblog is 46, not 17. I suppose that makes it a little bit more of an accomplishment, but what you think I mean is not what I mean. I awoke this morning thinking that having sex is the most important thing a person does with his life, and then the floor beneath me disappeared and I fell into a bottomless immensity.

 

When we have sex we are participants in the act of Creation. That’s a helluva thing. That’s an awe-full thing. Each and every human life is conceived – that is, thought of - by God individually. No one is born accidentally. No one who is born is unexpected. Each and every person begins as a thought, and we call that “the breath” of life, poetically. God holds in His hand a lump of clay – inert matter – and blows into it the life that is Squabbler, the life that is TR, the life that is Sherry, n.lynn, Ron, and June, Biggie T., and everybody else who may be reading. It’s a very deliberate thing.

 

You believe that, whether you realize you believe it or not, whether you consciously believe it or not, whether you intellectually believe it or not - deep in your heart you believe it because it is the truth, and anyway, you were there when it happened. How do you know you were there when it happened? – Because you were nowhere before it happened.

 

Many people think they live more than one life. I can understand that. It can certainly seem that way. Heck, I’ve lived several lifetimes in the past ten years. It’s amazing all the stuff that happens. In my dreams I live again another way. Each and every book I have here on my shelves contains lifetimes, Eternity. Doors in the White Lodge open to times and places I could never in a billion years be finished with exploring. There is much we take for granted – imagination, creative intellect, life itself, sex…

 

Bad people are thought of this way, and with our participation, created and born.  Deformed people are thought of this way, people who will suffer terribly and live short lives of utter misery. Unwanted people are thought of this way, those who will be murdered by their mothers before they are born. They are not thought of as being bad, nor thought of as being deformed, nor thought of as being unwanted. They are thought of as being perfect. It isn’t God who thinks of the badness, the sickness, the misery. No, that isn’t His conception.

 

Well then, whose conception is it? Whose fault is it? Who creates so much badness and misery? And why does God allow it? “Oh that’s such a mystery!” one may say. Rubbish. It’s no mystery. The whole deal is explained very succinctly in Genesis. One may then say, “Well, that can’t be true so it’s still a mystery.” One may say anything he pleases – on that much I think all might agree. The truth hides in plain sight; it hides in our hearts, the one place in the world we dare not go out of sheer terror of its bottomless immensity.

 

Now here is a Genesis speaker, which is unrelated but… magnificent! I mean, just look at this baby – makes a fellow want to put on some tunes.

 

 

I am fortunate in my business partner, the inestimable White Tornado. Together we accomplish much. I have come to rely on her. I desire her participation. I respect her decisions when it comes to how my business is managed. I respect her, generally-speaking. She isn’t perfect, but neither am I. And well heck, we haven’t broken anything expensive yet. She has the run of my house. She knows The Squabbler, (and she likes to poke fun at him but he doesn’t mind.) I think everybody can understand what it is to respect a person. Yet it becomes so difficult to understand how God respects us. Wouldn’t we rather that we were not conceived to be so much like Him, that we were animals rather than people?

 

Oh yes, if only Adam and Eve were merely animals there would have been no possibility of their disobedience. Their thoughts would have been controlled by God; they would have been like puppets merely. Would that not be better for us? No. No, for then we would be like puppets ourselves, without awareness, without the ability to conceive of anything, without souls, without life. Perhaps there are people who would prefer that.

 

 

Of course, if they had it they wouldn’t know they had it. Like Mrs. Uppington here, looking at me so… humanly. She looks at me humanly because I have personified her, demonized her, given her a name. Still a dog, though. Smells like one – that’s for certain. She needs a bath.

 

So do I, come to that. I smell almost as bad as she does. I'd better go. 

I am thinking of a story about a man who entered AA in middle life. Married, with children. He stopped drinking and started attending AA meetings quite regularly – every day, anyway. He got a “sponsor,” which is the strongly recommended thing to do, and his life was beginning to get back on track over the course of a few months, but only just beginning. He felt quite confident, comfortable at last with being sober. That happens, of course. He said to his sponsor, “Gee I was thinking of maybe staying home on Sunday night rather than going to the meeting. I need to spend some time with my wife, maybe work on our relationship.”

 

His sponsor, (whom I am told was a great one for sticking his finger in your chest), said: “I’ve talked to your wife. You don’t have a relationship. Go to the meeting.”

 

Well, it’s nearly thirty years later. He’s still married to her.

 

 

By the way, there’s nothing sadder than an empty dumpster. The mystery is solved. This container, which appeared on my back lawn mysteriously a few days ago, was placed here to empty a basement of another property on the other side of town. In that place there was apparently no level area to put the container.

 

I just love to completely saturate these photos with color. I know it’s lazy. Isn’t the world colorful enough? No. I wear internal “rose colored glasses.” I need color after that gray and white winter we have just endured.

 

Well, off to work for me. Please have a most colorful day.

  

What happened? I gained two pounds. That’s weird. It must have been that dream yak and cheese sandwich…

 

I think I have said everything I needed to say in comments this morning. A quick job down the block took me away for a few minutes. Mrs. Uppington tells me it’s cold and damp and she’d rather not stay out too long. Oh goodness – her owner won’t be back until May 12 now. That’s cutting it a bit close. There’s a big blue dumpster on my back lawn. I didn’t order it. Perhaps my waste disposal guy needed someplace to park it. All the wee little doggie wants to do is sniff it.

 

Well, Elizabeth tells me she’s taking in thousands of dollars from scrap metal sales. She has the Hubbell Hollow gang cleaning off the property. Let’s see – the house is over 200 years old, and the property must have been farmed in its first century. The trees in the forest are all under 100 years old, as are most trees around here, (although we do seem to have an awful lot of them,) so I reckon at least 50 years of accumulated implements, vehicles, and so on, are making their way by flat bed in stages to the wrecker’s yard just outside the grubby little city to the south.

 

Is this a post about waste management? Get a grip, Squabbler. Say something provocative. Like what? I’m in a funny mood. Son #2 has a dental appointment today. He said that he hopes he will not need a root canal. I said, “Why on earth would you need a root canal?” Pretty busy, otherwise. I shall upload tonight’s Fibber and Molly program right now, while I’m thinking of it. It’s tagged “Salmon Dinner.” I don’t know if I’ve ever heard it.

 

Oh but the rain is depressing! Everybody’s saying, “We need it.” I don’t need it. You can have it. OK, so Chateau Creekside has a shallow well. She needs it. But what do I need? I need a nice all-over tan, baby.

 

The lilacs are in leaf. Yes, and birds are visiting my feeder. No squirrels, oddly enough. I put it in a new place. I’m going to do some plantings there, set up a little seating arrangement. Why? I may have time this season to use such a thing once. I suppose the real question is When?

 

Wait a minute – uploading a picture, the usual. Select a genre? Rubbish. I click something at random. Hip Hop. There is no OTR category, not even the normally ubiquitous “other.” I saw a documentary movie in Grammar School featuring a little person trying to make do in a world that was designed for regular-sized people. Can’t we all identify, even if only slightly? We do a lot of improvising. We don’t even realize how much improvising we do, how much jury rigging is involved in our day-to-day lives. But the world is designed for a person who does not actually exist. That non-existent person is a perfect fit.

 

 

Here, I’m listening to the program now. I won’t have time to post tonight. I’ll just sneak this in. Music in the meantime. Who on earth has a voice like Harlow Wilcox? Nobody. It’s so – I dunno – nurturing. Doesn’t it just make you want to use Johnson’s Wax products? Windex – that’s made by Johnson’s. It makes me think of something good cooking.

 

Oh – Otis Cadwalader has come up in conversation. Otis Cadwalader was Molly’s boyfriend before she married Fibber. Of course, he’s a millionaire now, and a better fisherman than Fibber, despite the latter’s tall tales. He is apparently sending Fibber and Molly a big salmon, and they will have it for their dinner. Inviting the neighborhood, of course.

 

Food, family, home, floor wax, friends… “The world’s my oyster soup kitchen floor wax museum,” goes a King Crimson song. C’mon over, everybody. I’ll cook us something. I’m thinking of the Talking Heads too: “Do I smell?... I smell home cooking/ It’s only the river, It’s only the river…” The kind of entertainment provided by the Fibber and Molly show just doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Why do I love it so much? I’m such a sentimentalist, yes?

 

 

I’m improvising in a world in which I’m not a perfect fit. But no one is.

 

Good day to you.

 

  

Who were we, the expelled? In those days they called us nerds. My son informs me the term is now brainiac. We were permitted to skip gym class, not officially, but we always skipped, and we always came up with “A’s” in gym. I think it was assumed that whatever we were doing it was the thing we should be doing. More than once what we should have been doing was lying on the grass, looking at the sky.

 

Here is a grotto. Ours was less grand but just as verdant. Magdalen in the Grotto by Jules LeFebvre, 1876 closes out the post.

 

 

Yesterday my caterer friend said this about the things that sometimes come out of my mouth: “I’ve seen smiles turn into looks of horror.”

 

Elizabeth puts it succinctly: “Crazy people need to stick with crazy people.”

 

She calls herself one of the crazy people. It doesn’t mean she understands what I am saying, but just that she doesn’t mind me saying it. Writing is a thought catcher, a bird catcher, pulling them in.

 

Now I must go do more painting at Chateau Creekside. I am often told that I am a good painter, neat and meticulous, but not nearly often enough to begin believing it. I have heard “You missed your calling” several times and in several cases. Once or twice: “You were meant to be a writer. What are you doing?” It’s a funny world.

 

I’m doing the next right thing – whatever it seems to be – acknowledging a built-in propensity for wrongness.

 

Tomorrow is a big house clean-out. The builder tells me to be prepared for anything. This is at last the coda of The Amazing Monkey Girl and The Third Tower symphony begun so many months ago. A few of you may recall.

 

Tonight, another tale well calculated to keep you in Suspense!  Peter Lorre’s guest appearance last week is the first of many appearances by movie actors. The program began to attract Hollywood’s faces and names – er, voices – and eventually became known as a vehicle for actors who wanted to do radio and comedians who may always have wished to be cast against type, as dastardly villains.

 

 

As promised, here is a picture of my Christmas tree. I’m sorry I left it so late.

 

Well, it appears I left it too late.

 

My waking thought this clean morning? The Grotto, rain washed, thirty years ago, where Our Mother watched benevolently as we burned one before Bowling League. She stood there in her niche in the stone wall, gathering ivy, under the pines. The brick wall of the old school hid us from any other eyes. We were the future rulers of the world, the High Honors kids. Exams were games. The dreaded state mandated standardized test had come and gone, and it had turned out to be so preposterously easy. We scored in the upper percentiles and laughed in the ozone layer at the struggling creatures below. Even my bowling average was pretty good – competitive even – and I didn’t have much of a head for Sport. Silent prayer and marijuana calmed the voices. Nothing but promise lurked ‘round every echoing corridor.

 

A large black coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts – that was new, having the power to purchase and consume. It was a new thing - prosperity, and donut shops where there had been nothing but forsythia bushes and trees. It was a time of emerging, a time of climbing down – tentatively at first – to set foot on the savannah, our promised hunting grounds. Were we yet men? Yes, and only just. We ventured forth, but never too far from the Grotto. I thought I was at last becoming free.

 

Thirty years later, on exactly the same kind of morning, I think of Mother Mary in Her stony niche, and it occurs to me that while I was doing those things a seventeen year-old is apt to do my own mother’s invisible tentacles of love still held me. And today it is the same. There is no death, only the Assumption. Freedom is a thing to be desired, not a thing to be achieved. One never escapes the benevolent gaze that throws love across the gulf that yawns between the living here on Earth and the eternally alive there in Heaven. In the Grotto this truth was told to me in a code that I would later decipher, later when desire at last returned me to the shelter of the trees.

 

Though the exams were easy, life wasn’t so.

 

The song of a peculiar bird calls me back to the Present, and a little dog here by the door, looking at me so patiently. This particular wash of rain, with its smell of ozone, was made to renew the faith of ghosts. It isn’t time to learn new things. It’s time to learn all the many things I know already, things locked up in memory, things straining shoulders against the doors.

 

OK, I’m done. Good day to you.