Happy Birthday, Grandson #1!

Hard to believe it's been six years since James joined our family. Now he can put together a Lego set all by himself. he also can let one of his little brothers pose with him with teh finished product.

I'd write more but I'm exhausted after a long drive back from Sacramento in the rain, and a long search for a parking place.

The teens worked hard to make the birthday party a success -- last night decorating and today running games for the many kids on hand.

That's family.

-30-

All right, then, welcome to a new year

As the supposedly momentous turn of the year completes its gradual cycle, given that many people are not working or re-attending school until next Monday, I'm finding each day to be a blur, much like the day before, and no doubt the day after.

Yet there are moments. My friend J, now living in NOLA, returned for a brief visit and yesterday came by. The best part is she and the kids got to reconnect for the first time (in the boys' case) in seven years.

With no steady partner the past decade, I love it when my friends and exes get to see the teenagers now. They are all tall, lovely and articulate; funny, smart and kind. She was good and natural with them, and as she left, paid my youngest a complement: "You are a beautiful young woman."

That beautiful young woman and I then proceeded to fight traffic across town to Kaiser, where she was due for a checkup. Her doctor, a lovely young Asian woman, told me she is now at the 84th percentile in height (nationally) for her age, which came as no surprise, and that she has grown almost three inches taller over the past year.

Thank God for hummus!

Dinner with two dear friends on a cold night. Writers and intellectuals who care about ideas, mourn the loss of opportunity for those of us who continue to do so, but have not given up hope yet.

Back home to the silence of my flat. Sometimes this silence is comforting. Last night it was. I had too many conflicted feelings and hopes swishing around in my brain.

Today I started sorting it all out. Do I wish to be connected, intimately, with another adult in what time I have left or not?

Will I try to write the story of my life or not?

Should I add up the numbers, and realize how dire my own financial future may or may not be or not?

Or shall I just live in the moment, forgetting all of these momentous issues, and write whatever foolishness comes into my brain.

If you've read this far, you certainly recognize that the choice has already been made.

Welcome to 2013. Who knows where it will take us?

-30-

Me and Biggie

The cat my kids adopted, Biggie, has two lives.

One is when he is with me, alone in this flat. In that life he is shy, usually hiding in corners or other safe places.

The other is when my teens are here, when he comes out and moves up next to them on the couches or beds, lets them pet him and even occasionally purrs.

But when it's just him and me, I never try to force him to change his patterns; I figure that over time he will figure out I am also a harmless, shy creature, not really all that good at social interactions, at least not when I have to initiate them.

So I suppose I get where he is coming from, and maybe he is gradually getting to know my shyness as well.

Quite honestly, I do not know how to handle another creature living here with me. The only others who have stayed here with me, besides my kids, have been human females.

Now, I am much more comfortable living with females than males -- humans or animals. Who knows why or who even wants to know why.

But since no female I know of wants to live here with me, or is likely to take the action necessary to make that a reality, I guess I am stuck with Biggie.

It's just him and me, two awkward males without a clue.

Sometimes that's how life turns out, in the end...Strange roommates.

I do wish he would pay his part of the rent.

-30-

Rosemary, Mint & Year's End

As we prepare for a likely fall over the fiscal cliff, the doomsday warnings remind me of December 31, 1999 and the y2k theory. I remember filling our car up with gas in Maryland, where we lived at the time, before traveling around the Beltway to my sister's house in Virginia that New Year's Eve.

Predicted disaster did not ensue that time around.

This time it is not a technology issue but a political one. Competing theories of government's role in a capitalist economy have come forehead to forehead, with neither side inclined to blink. Watching CNN tonight, I can see that the rhetoric chosen by Democrats and Republicans is still aimed at nothing more than public relations, as whatever backroom deal they may be negotiating succeeds or fails to pass the House, in the only vote that matters.

The Senate has had the votes to pass a reasonable compromise all along. Inside the Beltway, it is known as the house of Congress where the "adults" work, as opposed to the other chamber.

Be that as it may, the House is theoretically more representative of the nation, since every state, large or small, has two Senators, regardless of population. The House, by contrast, has 435 members allocated by the population distribution -- thus California has the largest delegation in that chamber, followed by other populous states.

From my time in Washington, covering the political system up close, what I remember most vividly is how image-oriented all the politicians I met were. There was the occasional policy wonk, who cared more about what would actually change things for the better, but most seemed far more concerned about looking good, raising money for their next election cycle, and cutting down their opposition.

During the brief time my roommate was a U.S. Senator, I learned just how much of his time had to be devoted to raising money and/or talking to donors. Basically, it was every available hour outside of actually meeting with his caucus or with the Senate as a whole.

Nothing I saw in D.C. increased my confidence in our federal government. Don't even get me started about our state government in Sacramento, which I've also witnessed up close.

I actually have more faith in local government, which despite many problems, remains most closely in touch with citizens and their concerns.

Not that it necessarily does a good job of addressing those concerns much of the time. But we have a fairly responsive government here in the city of San Francisco. Come to think of it, I must find someone at City Hall to discuss the mess DPT has made along my route from here to Bernal.

They've messed up the intersection of Bryant and 24th. I know this is TMI for most of you but as I drive this route a thousand times every year, it really matters to me. More than the fiscal cliff, if you want to know.

I don't earn enough money to pay taxes and I don't rely on any publicly funded services, other than Medicare, so if they go over the cliff, I doubt it will matter much to me personally. On the other hand, like most Americans, I'm thinking of my country as a whole, and wondering whether it really cam be a world leader much longer with such a dysfunctional political standoff, led not by leaders but elected officials reluctant to lead.

Happy New Year?

Merry Christmas

Magical Thinking

I think that those of us raised by European Christians often have a tendency to hope for some magic to happen in our lives. I'm not sure whether it is embedded in the religion, because I have not participated in any religion fully at any point in my life. It probably has more to do with the myth of Santa Claus, which in our childhoods, exceeded all other forms of magical thinking.

In truth, I liked Santa a hell of a lot more than my notion of God, so as soon as I was old enough, I stopped going to church altogether, although I've never felt any hostility toward those who attend services of any kind in churches, mosques, or synagogues.

I do, however, suspect they do so not so much out of faith but out of the need to be part of a community plus out of respect for family traditions. And those are both good things.

This time of year, with Hanukkah & Christmas, people deeply or even loosely still involved with their faiths are attending services, while people like me cast around for alternative experiences.

Last night, as my daughter sang seasonal songs in her school choir, I felt a warmth remembering the past with my family in Michigan, gathering around the piano and singing Christmas carols.

Those old songs evoke memories and feelings that often feel remote in my present life, living here alone in a flat in the Mission with a cat that wouldn't know the difference between a Christmas carol and a rap song.

A few hours after she performed in the last such holiday concert at her school (she graduates next summer), I dropped my youngest and her brothers with their Mom at the airport, where they caught planes way across this land, ultimately arriving at a lovely tropical island off the coast of southwest Florida -- the place that probably is my favorite spot in the entire world.

I have a long history on that island, starting some 44 years ago, but also one that ended, for all intents and purposes, over a decade ago.

The only part of me that remains is a legacy -- some books and other items inside an ancient cottage called Morning Glories in the historical village on the island. The rich people who bought it and replaced it with a mansion agreed to pay to move it there as a condition of the sale, when my first wife and I sold it to them in the late 1990s.

***

Today, I checked the mail but there is no word yet whether my daughter has been invited to audiition at School of the Arts. She texted me from Florida whether there was news; I answered there is none yet.

An ex-cousin-in-law called from Florida about a new recording he has created with multiple types of music. He is going to mail that to me.

It's been raining all day here. Near the end of the daylight, a strange light appeared, just a ray or two of sun, so I went outside hoping to glimpse a rainbow.

If there was one to be seen, it culd not be glimpsed from down here, between buildings and trees, this time around.

So, as the day closes, I'm not sure any magic happened. As a skeptic, professionally, I'm not sure magic ever actually happens.

As I told my ex-cousin-in-law, I'm more persuaded we become good at tings not through genius but through hard work. I'm an advocate of Macolm Gladwell's thesis in Outliers.

That said, I do wish for some magic sometimes. Especially around this time of year.

-30-

The Silence That Looms

It sounds as if Obama is going to step up in the wake of last Friday's slaughter and use his position as leader of the nation to promote new preventative measures, though I admit to skepticism about what he, or anyone, can do about reducing gun violence here in America.

If there were one group with the power to effect positive change it would be the NRA, the powerful pro-gun lobby.

As I've noted in the past, I'm pro-gun myself, in the sense I hunted as a boy and still own an ancient 16-gauge shotgun, though I don't possess any shells for it.

My three sons have always loved guns, especially BB guns.

I get it.

But weapons that are meant for no other purpose than mass killings of other human beings are beyond my comprehension. I do not understand why anyone, except a delusional paranoid preparing for the apocalypse, could possibly wish to own those types of guns.

That said, I agree with the pro-gun people who say more government regulation of guns isn't going to prevent tragedies like what happened in Connecticut, sadly.

At least it would be a start, however.

Beyond that we have the paucity of resources available for mental health diagnosis and treatment, a critical failure in this society.

Do you know that in order for someone to remain the care of a professional for mental health problems, and for that professional to get reimbursed by most insurance companies, that person has to be declared to be in a critical state?

Anyone who has ever dealt first hand with mental health recovery knows it is a gradual process, that when the patient proceeds from critical to relatively stable, he remains at risk of relapse if not properly attended.

Yet our private insurance companies force providers to jump through so many hoops at this stage of recovery that many are lost from the system, revert to their former ways, and once again are on the streets posing potential risks to themselves and the rest of us.

We do not have a civilized mental health system in this country.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of this problem overall is the great social disease of dislocation, alienation, and loneliness. Although no one much wants to admit it, we live in world where many of us are speeding away from each other like stars in the universe, ever more distant, silent, and disconnected.

This is our greatest problem of all.

And unless we can find a solution to that, not only will the slaughter of innocents continue, the tragic alienation of many of the rest of us will be an inevitability as well.