The Hearts of Men

Continuing my experiment with color, I now have achieved "root beer," as well as a number of other subtle shades. As I look around this flat, there's evidence that this is a serious obsession.

My seaglass, thousands of pieces in blue, green, brown, white, turquoise, lime green, orange, pink, and red. My blog about seaglass doesn't update as frequently as this one, because I rarely get to the beach anymore, but I promise to do so soon and to gather a whole new pile of these colorful, smooth shards, each one a part of a greater whole, now lost and shattered into these tiny fragments by the action of saltwater, waves, sand, and sun.

These photos, and the occasional story reside at Seaglass .

Then, there are the watercolors stashed here and there around my apartment. I like to think of my style as Primitive American, because it sure as hell isn't sophisticated. But it is colorful, in a watery pastel kind of way.

The containers holding my coins are stacked -- purple (pennies), green (dimes and nickels) and blue (quarters). The paintings and photos on my walls emphasize colors.

Finally, my imagination is in a range of color. Tonight I am fixated on the deep orange of that lava through a hole on the Big Island that I glimpsed in July 2005. At that point in my life, I thought I had a love life the heat of lava. The intensity of that molten earth flowing toward its death in the mighty Pacific, which transformed it into enormous clouds of blue-white smoke lighting the black night sky that seemed to me, at that point, to reflect our sexual life.

But, within months, all of that turned to the coldness of illusions lost.

***

Men hurt differently than women. Today a friend and I were talking about Jimmy, and his memorial, and what we took away from it. She mentioned that she suddenly realized how vulnerable we all are, i.e., that appearances can be deceiving in Middle Class America.

I mentioned how money worries seem to have preyed on Jimmie's mind.

There is a terrible pressure on men, she replied, that seems very different from that on women. She said her husband worries much more than she does about their family's finances.

I replied that there has not been a day of my adult life (defined as the day I turned 21), that I have not been consumed with worry about how to generate enough money to support myself and my ever-growing list of dependents. I've always felt responsible for everyone in my life, to the best of my ability.

That means my kids, first and foremost, my wives, my girlfriends, my parents (when they were living) and some friends when they became especially vulnerable. Last on my list are strangers.

So I have not been especially generous to the homeless or the beggars that surround us. I don 't blame them for their situation, but I've always feared (perhaps unreasonably) that I could one day join them.

My older kids remember our joke that I might end up, one day, on Sixth Street, bearded, ragged, a lost soul. Since I've made it to 60 in reasonable health, employed, trying to sock as much as possible into my various IRAs, I suppose if all trends remain positive I may be a pretty stable 70-year-old when my youngest turns 18 in the year 2017.

My biggest fantasy is just this: To be able to live out my years in a simple way, in a house with some land, growing food and flowers, playing music, eating modestly, locally, seasonally, and organically. Growing some of my own food. Teaching, writing, editing, but on my own time. Everyone I love able to visit me from time to time.

And the many stories still locked up inside me able to find their way out.

If this doesn't come to pass, the words drifting across this blog like drops of moisture on the incoming wind may have to suffice. I may not get to my goal, as there are nights (like tonight) when my body feels so weak that I cannot imagine making it to a much older age.

If by chance I don't, I hope those who love me understand that I have been pouring my heart out here, just in case. If I live to 90, which Dylan said he expects me to do, there will be so much of this stuff as to render my current concerns maudlin at best.

It matters not. I'll worry until the day I die or until the day I become rich (hah!) whether I have truly provided what I should have for those I love. How much is enough in a society like this one?

When will the burdens be over, so my last act can begin? I suspect we lost Jimmy over these kinds of worries. But do not worry; you won't lose me that way. I worry about money but I worry much, much more about global warming, about poverty, about inequality, and injustice.

These are the things that will render all of us meaningless, rich or poor, men or women, familied or alone. We bond together for this great battle, or we fall divided into clans.

So let me be absolutely clear, unequivocal, about where I stand. I love my family beyond words. I love humanity even more. Your family is my family, and mine is yours, and until we all recognize that, our truest dreams will never be realized and our flesh, as it falls from our bones, will have failed to achieve what we might have achieved, collectively, if only we'd perceived this truth in time.

That would be the saddest of legacies -- the species that collectively committed suicide, when an alternative guaranteeing a future (living sustainably, fairly, and in balance with all other life forms) was so easily within our grasp.

Why did we not grab at the chance? Will that be our last gasp? Some of my offspring may live into the era that these questions find answers. I will be hoping, in my spirit life, that we choose love and sharing over greed and violence.

Truthfully, though, it is hard to be hopeful.

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Just another day in paradise

Sweet peas and dyed eggs this sunny, breezy morning. You know how rare it is that something works out just in time for a kid, like by magic? Today was one of those days. It was Julia's final soccer game of the season, a season in which she has improved but still normally is not aggressive enough to make much of a difference to the outcome of her game.



Today, her team had been shut out up until the final moments of the first half, when Julia and a teammate charged the opposing goal with the ball. Her colleague, a superb ball handler, drew the defenders to him, then slid a perfect pass across the goal box to Julia, who was open.

She kicked. She scored. Her first goal ever!

Hours later, after the traditional, season-ending pizza party, and our return home, which always immediately leads to her changing clothes, she is still wearing her medal.

***

Driving through this city lately, I've become acutely aware of how much drug dealing is occurring around San Francisco. Today, in the Inner Sunset, a saw an Asian man in an expensive car pull up to a double-park next to a park, where one guy among a group of Latinos and blacks men emerged to speak into the man's open window.

"Cocaine?"

Outside a comics shop a few blocks away, a street woman, her nose all but obliterated from falls or beatings or both, her dirty blond hair tied in a ragged mule's tail, her pants unsnapped, her shirt ragged, was holding her heavily scarred arms out as she accosted passersby, demanding money.

"Heroin," she explained in a rare moment of sanity before shuddering all over and beginning her verbal assault all over again, screaming ever louder as pedestrians shrank away from her, glancing back only to make sure she wasn't trailing them.

A white woman in a white car pulls up in front off an apartment in the Mission, honks a couple times, and a heavyset, Latino man who always wears his baseball cap backwards, hustles down the steps to hand a bag through her window in return for her rolled up greenbacks.

Further down the same block, a black man with his baseball cap sideways, paces, his cell phone glued to one ear. Suddenly a car whirls around the corner; its windows are all darkened so that one cannot glimpse the race or gender of the driver. The man runs to the driver's window; they make their exchange, and the darkened vehicle speeds away.

Down at 24th street, an enormously fat Asian man stands with some other men at a corner store. His cell phone rings; he rounds a corner into Balmy Alley, where a skinny Latino man openly hands him cash in return for a small plastic bag. The fat dealer doesn't even make a pretense of hiding his role in the community. As he waddles back to his corner spot, he openly counts the 100-dollar bills for all to see.

Into a retail electronics store walks a man of undetermined age or ethnicity, dressed in raggedly clothes, not the sort of customer you would expect to running up a credit card bill by buying a bunch of fancy equipment. The security guard eyes him as he scoops up several items, then joins the checkout line, shaking perceptibly.

When it comes his turn to pay, he pulls out not a credit card, but an enormous roll of bills. He counts out several hundred in twenties, then places his purchases in his backpack and returns to the streets. The security guard pays him no heed because he's already eyeing a group of four or five black teenagers, wearing gangbanger accoutrements who are scooping up several large, expensive boxed appliances.

The biggest and fattest of the boys, a fellow who weighs easily 450 pounds, pulls out a ludicrous roll of crisp 100-dollar bills to pay for this booty, and the rest of the kids lug their stuff out of the store. The security guard checks their recipt against the goods, then watches to make sure none of them circle back into the store after they exit. He shrugs his shoulders as he catches my eye.

He waves me out without checking my receipt, either. (I had paid for my modest purchases by credit card.) "Have a nice day," he said, kindly, the first words he'd spoken in a while.

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Sweet Drugs and Sour

Sweet peas and dyed eggs this sunny, breezy morning. You know how rare it is that something works out just in time for a kid, like by magic? Today was one of those days. It was Julia's final soccer game of the season, a season in which she has improved but still normally is not aggressive enough to make much of a difference to the outcome of her game.



Today, her team had been shut out up until the final moments of the first half, when Julia and a teammate charged the opposing goal with the ball. Her colleague, a superb ball handler, drew the defenders to him, then slid a perfect pass across the goal box to Julia, who was open.

She kicked. She scored. Her first goal ever!

Hours later, after a season-ending pizza party, and our return home, which almost always leads her to change her clothes, she is still wearing her medal.

***

Driving through this city lately, I've become acutely aware of how much drug-dealing is occurring around San Francisco. Today, in the Inner Sunset, a saw an Asian man in an expensive car pull up to a double-park next to a park, where from a group of Latino and black men one guy emerged to speak into his open window.

"Cocaine?"

Outside a comics shop a few blocks away, a street woman, her nose all but obliterated from falls or beatings or both, her dirty blond hair tied in a ragged mule's tail, her pants unsnapped, her shirt ragged, was holding her heavily scarred arms out as she accosted passersby, demanding money.

"Heroin," she explained in a rare moment of sanity before shuddering all over and beginning her verbal assault all over again, screaming ever louder as pedestrians shrank away from her, glancing back only to make sure she wasn't trailing them.

A white woman in a white car pulls up in front off an apartment in the Mission, honks a couple times, and a heavyset, Latino man who always wears his baseball cap backwards, hustles down the steps to hand a bag through her window in return for her rolled up greenbacks.

Further down the same block, a black man with his baseball cap sideways, paces, his cellphone glued to one ear. Suddenly a car whirls around the corner; its windows are all darkened so that one cannot glimpse the race or gender of the driver. The man runs to the driver's window; they make their exchange, and the darkened vehicle speeds away.

Down at 24th street, an enormously fat Asian man stands with some other men at a corner store. His cellphone rings; he rounds a corner into Balmy Alley, where a skinny Latino man openly hands him cash in return for a small plastic bag. The fat dealer doesn't even make a pretense of hiding his role in the community. As he waddles back to his corner spot, he openly counts the 100-dollar bills for all to see.

Into a retail electronics store walks a man in raggedly clothes, not the sort you would expect to running up a credit card bill by buying a bunch of fancy equipment. The security guard eyes him as he scoops up several items, then joins the checkout line.

When it comes his turn to pay, he pulls out not a credit card, but an enormous roll of bills. He counts out several hundred in twenties, then places his purchases in his backpack and returns to the streets. the security guard doesn't bother checking his purchases with his receipt at the door. He's always eying a group of four or five black teenagers, wearing gang-banger apparel and scooping up several large, expensive appliances.

The biggest, fattest of the boys pulls out a ludicrous roll of crisp 100-dollar bills to pay for this booty, and the kids lug their stuff out of the store. The security guard watches to make sure none of them have anything else up their sleeves.

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Fava & Bay

Maybe the reason my flat is so crowded with stuff is I seem to bring a little something home with me from wherever places I visit. Last night, I rediscovered a basket of coins from all over -- Australia, Tahiti, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, India, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Bermuda, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Britain, Norway, Canada, Mexico, for starters.

(Remind me to scan copies of the D-Marks my Dad brought back from Nazi Germany at the end WW2.)

Returning from Farm School, I avoided the temptation of loading up on manzanita this time, and carried out only a few edibles -- fava beans fresh off the vine and bay leaves fresh off the tree down by the pond. Just boiled, then sautéed in olive oil lightly with the cracked bay, these beans emerge with a light green cover that opens to yield a deep green inner treat that one savors slowly, sweetly. The bay adds a spicy after taste.

My jobs at Farm School were to teach a poetry class, help cook dinner, and help clean up camp, which involved taking down tents and other camping material.

The poetry class consisted of sitting quietly by the pond and listening to the birds around us, observing their flights, absorbing their songs, and imagining their lives.

I read some poetry out loud written by adults imagining the life of birds, mostly in metaphor. The kids then spread out to sit alone on rocks or logs or grassy meadows to construct their own poems. The results, when they read them, were stunning in the way children's art can be.

Each child employed a different strategy with words -- one likening the act of flight to "pushing off" (or through) a difficult challenge. Others imagined the lives of birds; one sang the song of a Peregrine Falcon swooping down on its prey, then returning to feed its brood.

All the poems had psychological aspects, story-telling elements, and vivid imagery.

One of the beauties of escaping the city for the countryside is we seem almost immediately to begin to sense new possibilities for ourselves. Vineyards surround this “farm,” which sits high on a ridge above Dry Creek in Sonoma. The owners, who also were among the founders of the school the kids attend, have planted a grove of olive trees, which will be yielding olive oil -- so delightfully peppery when it is harvested.

They also have gardens of beans, peas, gourds, other vegetables and flowers. And fruit trees of many varieties. The kids come back up here for "Harvest Day" in the fall, bringing back pumpkins for their Halloweens.

There are many classes at Farm School that exploit the immediate environment for its instructional value. Kids make toys out of wood, cornhusks, and feathers; they become better swimmers in the pond; they draw patterns in the sunlight; hike wordlessly to a nearby summit after dark, guided by the galaxies overhead. They study Botany; and perhaps best of all, they cook meals for the adults.

There are some spiritual rituals, largely based on Native American beliefs, as well as an underlying Buddhist sensibility of inter-connectedness. You'd think, by my advanced age, I would not have been surprised to return home transformed, yet I was. The city has its way of seducing us anew with its pleasures, which are so plentiful.

The simpler, harder life on the land, sleeping out under the stars, and walking up and down hills so regularly that your initial breathlessness eventually yields to a new sense of physical strength and freedom -- these more complex and deeper pleasures of the country lead to the feeling that a day has been well-lived.

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Jimmy set to music

Here, courtesy of the brilliant Tom Sicurella, is another view of Jimmy Thompson's life. He truly was a shooting star, gone way too soon.

Jimmy .

This is such a beautiful rendition of one man's life that it brings tears to my eyes. Jimmy loved Barbie and Kenny as much as any man can love his wife and his son. How vulnerble we all are! How vulnerable he was.

He committed suicide, with a gun, at a low moment. I cannot think of any better reason for stringent gun control that Jimmy's story. If you don't have a gun, you can't die by that gun.

The emotional life of every artist is chaotic, with ups and downs so extreme as to frighten a "normal" man. Yes, artists feel too much, according to our conventional wisdom, i.e., they just don't have thick enough skin.

In defense of the artists I have known, including Jimmy, let me say that a skin so thick that it does not let in the universal human pain is a skin that needs to be peeled.

Forget rational explanations, and surrender to art.

You'll never regret it.

For every leaf, a breeze *

Words will follow, but for tonight, I wanted you to see what a group of 11-year-olds did in the Sonoma countryside this week, at "Farm School." If we, and our planet, have a future, these children and others like them will be the custodians who save life as we know it on this fragile lava ball spinning through space toward a fate none of us clinging to its surface (courtesy of gravity) can possibly comprehend.

* - old Japanese Haiku

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Ode to a fallen artist

Today was the opportunity for friends and family of the quirky and wonderful Jimmy Thompson to say good-bye to him at a small church in Noe Valley in what was a secular service that went on some two-and-a-half hours, yet never became boring.

The reason was pure Jimmy; as a person he was the diametric opposite of boring. I cannot even begin to describe his life because I never got to know him that well. But the many people there today who did know him intimately painted a loving portrait of a big man (6'4" tall) whose outsized passions seem to have strained the known world's capacity to contain him.

And, in the end, the world failed. A week ago yesterday, early in the morning, his wife and his father found him in the yard out back. His exceedingly bright star had burned out. His inner pain remains unknown, and now, essentially unknowable.

The church was lit up by Jimmy's inventions, the amazing TIX clock, other blinking gizmos, and a lovely piece of circuitry that constantly changes shape as you watch it, sort of an acid trip fueled by that psychedelic known as electricity.

His obituary, written by his sister, appears at sfgate.com under "obituaries." Search for his by name. People have been signing his online Guest Book, and there you can begin to sense the spirit of this amazing human being, gone all too soon, at age 52.

Please follow that link before reading what else I have to say.

***

Tonight, I have decided to start a list of my passions. This is not about me, but about you, because I hope to convince you to do the same. Let me start. (Let's face it, you don't really have any choice.)

* I love to eat.
* I love to drink.
* I love to make love.
* I love to hug.
* I love to laugh.
* I love to make other people laugh.
* I love people who know how to laugh.
* I love flowers, bushes, trees and everything green.
* I love animals.
* I love water, and mountains, and forests, and especially beaches.
* I love people, all sorts of people.
* I love art, the art of people...music, paintings, sculpture, literature, performances of all types, and the quiet creations of children.
* I love children.
* I love sports, especially baseball.
* I love numbers.
* I love color.
* I love language.
* I love to learn about other cultures, other languages.
* I love the terrible pleasure and pain of being in love.
* I hate death.
* I hate greed.
* I hate power.
* I hate entitlement.
* I love modesty.

Okay, this is getting ridiculous, but I hope you get my point(s). There are so many wonderful little things about being alive, and a few big things that really suck. But in our low moments, the sucky things loom larger than they truly are. You have to believe we can affect this world of ours to maintain enough sanity to even participate.

I surprised myself, in college, when I answered (anonymously) a survey by some psych major trying to gather data on our view of suicide. At that age, I knew a few kids who had considered or even tried to kill themselves. They were, to me, among the most brilliant kids in my universe.

I found myself defending the right of a person to kill him or herself. These many years later, I'm still puzzled about the certainty of my position. I had never been suicidal myself; in fact, I was a model of optimism, idealism, and hope.

If only I didn't know now what I didn't know then.

Do you know who wrote that?

As I have grown older, and watched many of the brightest stars in my universe burn out, often by suicide (the fast method or the slower ones), I realize how many among us cannot continue to exist in a whole way in this greedy, isolated, alienated, disconnected world our capitalistic empire has created.

The brightest lights among us continue to extinguish themselves before we have even heard their message.

Let that be a warning to humanity. Protect your artists; don't let them escape prematurely. Otherwise, the human race will lose its collective ability to imagine a future that sustains us as who we are -- a collection of extremely fragile and vulnerable spirits.

This world is a much poorer place without Jimmy Thompson. He just couldn't last here. And that is something that should give all of us pause. The creeps and the egotists, the mean-spirited and the assholes continue to rise in this society of ours. The artists continue to chose to exit the scene.

No society I wish to be part of sustains itself in this way. If anyone is going to kill himself, let it be Wolfowitz, Cheney, Bush, i.e., the war criminals. These are the people we need to march onto the court of world justice. The bad people who have wasted a precious eight years in power not trying to limit the damage of climate change or forging global alliances, but to secure control of oil reserves and muscle around what they thought were weaker countries unwilling to play by their rules.

Listen to the poets. The answers are in their words:

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted as if I should ever come back...

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Tuesday, Tuesday

Since I'm not all that familiar with the far reaches of the blogosphere, I have no idea how this blog ranks, as far as consistency is concerned. Although I have never had a very large audience, on occasion it seems (according to Stat Counter) to reach into the 100s on a good day. And then there are days where I am lucky if 12 people show up. Not a problem, from my point of view. I'm still doing this mainly for me, and if I am so lucky as to have an audience, I can only thank the power of the Internet, a newly global communication system that can help each of us connect with others of like interests, if only we reach out.

So that is what I have been doing, for a year and a month. And I am producing entries at the rate of nearly 1.5 per day. I love writing these posts, but I admit this also is my work -- writing -- and it take a lot out of me.

My main hope is that I can shed some light on our time, in real time, and that I can create a digital archive of what it is like to be alive now, early in the 21st Century, that those who follow us may find useful later. I also have a secondary goal, and that is to offer comfort to the broken-hearted, who, like me, have seen their dreams not come true, their creativity trapped, their idealism squelched.

***

Today was one of those rare magical days when I got to connect two people who never before had met: Ben Bagdikian, the legendary media critic who is now a very young 87, and Louis Borders, the co-founder of Borders Books and Music, the first superstore.

We had lunch at the Hayes Street Grill, one of this city's very best restaurants. And, I lucked out by ordering soft shell crabs from the Chesapeake Bay, which just arrived here today. The best crab cakes I have ever eaten were those cooked by my brother-in-law, Tom Walko.

His only son, Andrew, is shipping out to Iraq in about a week, and I will be worrying about him along with his dad, and his mom, my youngest sister, Carole. Andrew's commitment to serve our nation presents me with a dilemma.

I believe the invasion of Iraq was one of the worst foreign policy mistakes in the history of this country. Yet, for a young man like Andrew, these geopolitical maneuvers by old men like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are not really transparent enough that he could possibly make an independent decision.

He is a good man. He loves his family, and none of my young kids have a more loving or attentive cousin. I feel proud that he will be doing his best to protect what he perceives to be our country's best interests.

But he is too young yet to understand that our country has been led unwisely in exactly the wrong direction.

I do not want to lose my precious nephew. I hope Nancy Pelosi, and the other Democratic leaders in Congress will figure out how to restrain this administration's "Masters of War," (Bob Dylan's phrase.)

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More artifacts

What jumped out of my closet tonight were a few of my family's old photos, from the '40s and '50s. This is my Mom (R) and Dad and a friend, in San Antonio in 1943.



My Canadian aunt and uncle sent this telegram after I was born. (You have to click on these photos to see them properly.)



According to my baby book, I spoke my first word at 7 months: "Dada." A few months later, I appear to have been rather confident on my feet.

By 1951, my girlfriend Susie and I were capable of condescending to our neighbor across the street, Billy. He had a pretty big head. (You really have to click on this one.)



Here's how Mom and Dad and their generation turned out by the '60s, when we lived in Bay City, Michigan. (I call it 60 b.c.) I do not mean this in a mean way. After all, we are all prisoners of our time.



Meantime, true to my generation, I became a radical, an activist, and finally, a writer. In 1991, on its 125th anniversary, The Nation asked me and a lot of others to write something about the theme, "Patriotism."

So, here's how we turned out -- my kids and me, late in '98. All six of them.

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Mothering Day

This is an ancient holiday in Britain and in certain other cultures. I miss my own mother, gone now these four-and-a-half years. Internet accounts being what they are, 1-800-Flowers still prompts me to remember my Mom at Mother's Day, as if I needed their help. But the time for sending flowers has long since passed; now all I can do is remember her, and be grateful for our long, loving relationship.

I had a wonderful mother. She died on her own mother's birthday when she was 87. I was at her side and I spoke to her as she left this life and then I kissed her goodbye.

***


The renewal of life is all around us this springtime. Here is my youngest daughter. That's one of her coaches in the background. That's the ever-present Unknown Jogger in the way background.



This is Stow Lake as photographed by Julia this afternoon.



There were turtles and ducks and geese and fish. There were boaters and walkers, old people, young people, babies in strollers and an old, old man pushing his walker.



The kids were asking, "What do women do if they have no kids on Mother's Day?"



We encountered a rare sight, according to our resident pigeon expert, Dylan. It was a lakeside tree, where many pigeons felt comfortable enough to perch.



Circling the lake, we saw many blooming plants and many animals.



The baby Canadian Geese tore up grasses voraciously.



I snapped this Mother's Day shot of youngest three and their Mom. Happy Mother's Day, Connie!

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