Category: Personal

I switch over.

In honor of the dead, the wars, the storms, the lost, and walking wounded.

Bulgarian voices

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

We’ve been watching this for a week, and today it happened: the Seattle Post Intelligencer, after 146 years of publication, has silenced its presses.  There will be some sort of online effort; Hearst is a big company, and MBAs will no doubt be called in to poke at the corpse and apply the art of marketing galvanics to the still limbs; but the PI, the paper I grew up with, is gone.

It’s been nearly a year since I have been blogging here regularly. For those of you that know me, and those just meeting me, last summer my husband and I decided to sent me off to Italy to find a country house we could live in during the summer months. We were advised to do this because I have Acute PTSD from a highly traumatic near fatal car accident 3 years ago and my doctors have all prescribed a less stress filled life as the best medicine to recovery (along with therapy). I went. Found us a home. Came back. And while showing pictures of what I found was handed a formal agreement to dissolve our marriage. The trip to Italy was a sham, a way to get me out of town so that he could reorganize his life with me not a part of it. But it gets much worse.

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

To be completely honest, when I began, I never expected that over the course of the next seven years I would write more than 200 essays about ending state killing in America.  But today I noticed– I usually miss the date– that March 18, 2009, is the seventh Anniversary of my starting a listserv about ending the death penalty.  And I see that I’ve written more than 200 essays about the topic.

When I started the listserv I described it like this:

The views and opinions of an experienced criminal defense lawyer who is also a buddhist. About pending executions, legal developments, the media, the abolition movement, contemplation, prayer, and engaged, nonviolent activism. Sent sporadically. Only for those who value all lives and are opposed to the death penalty. Not for debate.

Please make the jump.

UPDATED…. she’s gone. see my last comment below.

My friend Barb is dying as I write.  I come here for vigil, shelter, a safe harbor. Barb has always been one of my “Go To” girls. She gently offered shelter in the calmest of ways, often without much more than a “come on in, hey, how bout some coffee?” A truly gracious lady. I’m going to miss her. A lot.

Bob Dylan, Shelter From the Storm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

Three, maybe four weeks ago, she was walking  and talking. She was fine. Some random unexplained aches and pains maybe, I hear she dismissed them, they’ve been going on for months apparently. But she downplayed it and managed because she had no other choice. She has no insurance.

Saxophonist extraordinaire Ornette Coleman dropped off the face of the earth in 1963.  He had tremendous success with two trailblazing albums, The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959), and Change of the Century (1959).  But for reasons that he’d never fully explain, but which you might intuit, he decided to go to the woodshed to re-tool himself, to update, to refresh, to experiment, to practice.  And he stayed gone from the music scene for two years before he re-emerged.

I always admired Ornette, and I loved Ornette’s mustic.  I loved his plastic saxophones.  I loved that “free jazz” was, in fact, partially written.  I loved the incessant repetitions of Dancing in Your Head (1976).  I loved that later in his career his son played drums for him.  But most of all, I admired his knowing that he’d benefit from pulling the plug in 1963 and his going to the woodshed without any fuss.  For a while.  Not forever. With the intention to return.  Just for then.  Just to attend to what he wanted to attend to.  In 1963 I was in high school.  The idea that a premiere musician and one of my favorites could just leave struck me.  To me, it was as if Coleman were Henry David Thoreau, and the woodshed was Walden Pond.  And I thought only good things could come from that.

I’ve toyed with leaving la blogosfera for the woodshed before. This past December, I tried to get myself banned from dKos.  It didn’t work.  In fact, it seemed to be some kind of lunatic performance art.  All that happened was I lost my trusted user status briefly.  I didn’t really go anywhere.  I returned to write diaries despite my intentions to break free.

I’ve previously declared that I was on hiatus elsewhere.  In September, 2005, I put my email group, dedicated to fighting state killing, on hiatus.  That didn’t last very long. In less than 2 months, there were enormous injustices I felt compelled to talk about.  The hiatus ended unceremoniously with the 1,000th execution in the US and California’s killing Tookie Williams.  

All of which brings me to my decision to give myself a break.  I’ve previously explained that if I left, I would just go.  But that seems to me too abrupt, and also, I’m not really leaving.  It’s not a GBCW.  It’s not permanent in any way. I just wanted to say that I’m now taking a break from dd and GOS.  I’ll continue to post at The Dream Antilles.  And I’ll be back after I finish with the woodshed.

Before I left, I wanted to thank you all for being here, for reading, for carrying on.

Oh, and I will read the comments.  And perhaps reply.  And then I’m off.

Hasta pronto.

I was quite young when I had my first sexual experience.  It began at 9:45 am and ended rather abruptly, but relatively successfully at 9:49 am.  Central Standard Time.  On the morning of December 25, 1969.  The bringer of that brief but memorable Christmas morning gift was a covertly adventurous “older woman” of 18 who lived next door, and was admired by mothers in the neighborhood as a “nice girl” who had no interest in “that hippie music” so many of their daughters listened to when they weren’t busy “sassing their parents”.    

Unlike many first timers back then, who discovered paradise by the dashboard lights, I discovered paradise by the Christmas tree lights.  I was concerned that my parents would come home earlier than expected from exchanging gifts at my aunt and uncle’s and catch us, but the version of paradise I was experiencing would at least have enabled me to wag my finger at them and say “I did not have sex with that woman.”      

I wasn’t concerned about my parents returning early for very long though, my attention focused rather quickly on the gifts being exchanged where I was, not where they were. Since that Christmas morning in 1969, I’ve found love and lost it, found it again and lost it again, but losing love the first time is so heartbreaking.  Breathing the fire of rejection is no fun at all, but we get used to it.  We have no choice.  This world is filled with dark and lonely backstreets, where no one cares, where people just use each other, where love is all too often filled with defeat.  But love is always worth seeking.  It’s worth seeking no matter how elusive it is, no matter how many years have come and gone, no matter how many times you’ve had to overcome defeat . . .        

Crossposted–with minor edits–from Street Prophets, in the belief that this extraordinary ‘ordinary man’ deserves wider recognition, and in the hope that my brief and incomplete account of his life will prove to be of interest.

He wasn’t wealthy, or powerful, or famous. (Though he did leave his mark on one city’s landscape; more on that below). He was merely an exemplar of that ‘Greatest Generation’ we’ve learned to revere and respect. And he was my father.

Born in Bismarck, North Dakota in 1922, he was a true son of the West. His father was a jack-of-all-trades: mechanic, fireman, cowboy, lumberjack (a man who left his parents’ home–and their harsh evangelical faith–as a teenager, never setting foot in a church again–though he carried a pocket New Testament with him for the rest of his life). His mother was the daughter of immigrants who left the German empire as that country became increasingly rigid and militaristic under the second Wilhelm.

The family wandered throughout several western states before finally landing on the Oregon Coast at the beginning of the hard years of the Depression. At one point they lived on a houseboat and were so poor that the only food they had was what they could catch off the side of the boat.

Dad graduated from high school, joined the Air Force in 1942, and served in the South Pacific; like many veterans, he spoke little of his wartime experiences, except to say that ‘we did the right thing.’

Finally, someone spoke for me. You know how it is, if you’re at all a news junkie. Face after face, article after article, and yeah, you agree, or no, you don’t. That’s mostly true, gee I wish more people got it. And on one goes. And then, you’re tripping along, and something just…gets you.

Bishop Eugene Robinson’s pre-inaugural invocation got me. He said some things I wanted to hear someone else say. Which make me feel less like the fat kid at the wall, watching everyone dance. Now…just for context. If you asked me if there is a god, I’d tell you, flat out, no freakin’ way. If I go to a ceremony or a ritual, it is probably wiccan, and reclaiming wiccan, at that: I don’t think I have to believe in any of it to know there are parts of ourselves which are connected, which express and experience faith at levels which don’t have much to do with absolute fact. But…even so, I’d say that an invocation beginning with “god of our many understandings” was off on both number and gender, since to the extent I entertain religion, it is in a polytheistic and wiccan frame.