In which the Flaneur examines two recent stories in the news that extend close to home...
In a town in New Jersey, a police officer, a young woman, approached an unfashionably dressed individual who was walking in the rain. He wore a raincoat with his hood up and black sweat pants tucked into rubber boots.
Someone had phoned in suspicions about an individual who seemed to be prowling. He had entered the yard of a house-for-sale and looked in its window. The man who turned out to be sixty-eight years of age was asked for his name and identification.
He lacked an ID but he gave his name as Bob Dylan. The police officer later said that she had heard of this well-known name. Although she was not particularly familiar with what he looked like, she was pretty sure that this weather-beaten fellow was not him. She assumed that he was playing cute or was delusional, or both.
He told her he was in the area to play a concert. He said he was just walking around. This neighborhood was where Bruce Springsteen had been living when he wrote his first two albums of songs. It is not known whether he offered this as an explanation at the time.
The officer disregarded his claims and demanded that the police accompany him back to the concert venue where his identification would have to be produced.
This was done with no objection from the rainy night-walker. Back in his own environment Bob Dylan's passport was shown to them. The police accepted that they had been told the truth and departed. Mr. Dylan said he harbored no resentment over the incident.
He apparently had been making an effort during his down-time while touring, to visit the homes of fellow song-writers he admired. He had gone to see the childhood home of Neil Young in Ontario. In Liverpool he had joined a regular tour bus group to visit the old home of John Lennon.
Perhaps this supplies evidence of Mr Dylan's eccentricity. Some people enjoy having their smug assumptions confirmed. The sight of celebrities who have lost it is very popular--look no further than the hilarity surrounding celebrity mug-shots. Just think, there was nearly a new one of Bob Dylan. Everyone looks like such a loser in a mug-shot.
To me it says more about the bizarre conditions prevalent today in these united police states. Cops think their primary duty is to menace anyone who looks poor or alone in the world. To subject them to floating check-points, to make them feel unwelcome wherever they are, and to prevent them from finding peace and rest. Most of all to target those who complain, who don't have their ID, who exhibit any contempt for these bullies in their squad cars, those who don't bow down to "His majesty, the Policeman."
Berkeley likes to think it is different from the other more intolerant reaches of the country. That's why the slippery eel of a mayor and his cohort piped-up loudly when a study identified Berkeley as one of the ten meanest cities to the homeless. He actually defended laws targeting the homeless by unintentionally paraphrasing the old French tongue-in-cheek canard. The one that says that the State in its justice enforces the law against sleeping under bridges equally to both the rich and the poor. Meanwhile you see multiple police cars roll up to disgorge burly cops scowling at one malnourished guy sitting on a sidewalk.
On campus, they have a plaque commemorating the Free Speech Movement, but there's scant free speech these days. If you attempt to voice anything anti-establishment you will be observed by agents and cops who will slyly videotape you for future use. That is unless you are at an "Israel wants Peace" table or at a demonstration demanding regime change in Iran. If you want to demonstrate against, oh say, John Yoo's presence on campus you will be strictly monitored and regulated. And videotaped.
But cranks and crack-pots continue to turn out on Sproul plaza nevertheless. Most are paranoid enough to assume that they already are under constant surveillance anyway. I live nearby and I walk there often so I sometimes see them, and on occasion I encounter them.
So it was on a recent Summer afternoon.
I recall the cartoons of Basil Wolverton in the old Mad magazine. He specialized in drawing portraits of the ugliest gals and goofiest guys in minutely cross-hatched pen and ink. He was really a modern master of the Boschean grotesque.*
On one late afternoon as I crossed busy Sproul plaza, an individual walked toward me extending some printed matter. If Basil Wolverton was given an assignment to render his most devastating portrait of a "super-creep," it could easily look precisely like this creature.
He approached under a shadow of his own malodorous tidings, staring with a needy, beseeching look as if at a target, as if at prey. He rapidly tried to get me to take a copy his screed. I gave him my Irish cop look, fixing him in a scrutinizing glare. "What the hell do you think you are doing here?" read my unmistakable thought balloon as I ignored his gesture.
I was stirred to smite this demonic thing, like any saintly knight would do.
He pivoted away after another easier-going passerby. I watched him a little then went on in my intended direction, disturbed to a real but fading degree.
Was it two weeks later in August when word that a girl taken eighteen years ago had been recovered in the hands of her kidnapper? She had borne him two daughters while confined to a semi-concealed backyard compound in Antioch, California. Not far away.
Another cruel story of the bizarre that at least resulted in continued life and in triage for the years of psychological trauma. Yet as the story unfolded, how utterly bizarre it evidently all was. Subject to grandiose delusions, the perpetrator, Philip Garrido, was a cut-and-dried sexual criminal of long-standing well-known to the authorities. The police and probation officers had visited his home while on-duty a number of times. Yet somehow they never had been troubled to actually look around to the back of the house. To the squalid shacks and tents where the girl lived with her two daughters by the lord of the manner.
"Repeat sex-offender with a secret backyard compound, that sort of thing doesn't interest us."
The police were informed by a neighbor of his that a "psychotic with sexual addictions" lived there and had children living in tents. Even then he received only a front-door courtesy call concerning laws about inadequate housing.
Then lo and behold! The on-line version of the old Oakland-based local news ran the in-court photographs of this maestro of hill-billy grand guignol. That skull the way the upper-jaw looks balanced on a severed spine and then reanimated. That protuberant artery snaking down his temple...
Then the camera caught his eyes! It was the demoniac from Sproul!
"Phil the Creep" as he was known to his neighborhood kids. He'd been nabbed when he showed up to ask the UC cops for a permit to hold a religious recruitment event. He had apparently arrived with two little blonde home-schooled stepford children. Obviously unstable, he nonetheless agreed to come to another meeting. In the meantime they at last connected his horrendous record as a sex-offender to the reality of his current daily routine life. The next time he came in he brought his "older daughter" along too. She was in fact the twenty-nine year old mother of the two young girls. She had taken by him outside of her home near Lake Tahoe, on her way to school when she herself was an eleven-year old girl.
The children are said to have cried when they learned Garrido had been arrested.
A miscreant named Carpenter who they called the Trailside Killer, made taunting phone calls from a Telegraph avenue public phone. The Unabomber once lived on a nearby street behind the supermarket. And of course the infamous Charles Manson visited Telegraph avenue in its hey day. They all seem to come here and sometimes you pass them on the street. You are usually unaware of it when it happens. Or perhaps you may be momentarily put on guard as instinct tells you that you are in the presence of one who has given himself or herself over to evil.
*Wolverton's work evolved into a visceral, Hans Bellmer-like pop surrealism with figures said to look like atomic radiation casualties. He prefigured Zap comics in going over the top whenever possible.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
15 haiku poems Summer 2009
The Flaneur returns to his seemingly inexhaustible trove of three line poems of enigma and epiphany, of mystery and mirth.
...
Crow in a furrow
on the vacant playing field
a drink and a bath
Three police squad cars
with elaborate roof lights
on prowl for lodgers
Little cautious cat
hides on the vacant plaza
vague lightning tonight
A place in the grass
long shadows move up the hill
bells fall through the trees
That yellow hornet
looks like a catamaran
resting on water
Kites swim in place
a helicopter tours the coast
the climax species
The bottle-picker
rattles his carriage under
a pendulous moon
Angelic sunset
all those violet wings
outlined in gold
In the vast twilight
a hawk drops from a high rise
summer remains cool
The eucalyptus
at the edge of the graveyard
are like old white bones
A hummingbird drinks
from the morning glory gate
on my way outdoors
Out over the Bay
ships sit on the horizon
the terns parliament
The students moved on
left this victory garden
green onions won't wait
Geologic clouds
one stratum across the sky
jewel-bird on a wire
Over the golf course
comes a far cry from Saturn
an erratic bat
...
Monday, August 17, 2009
The Scanned Cat, a Postscript
The Flaneur concludes the science-fiction tale he began in the earlier blog entitled, "The Shiver of Original Sin." In a pulsing saga ripped from today's headlines, he survived storms of radioactivity to allow his heart to be imagined in a kind of virtual reality. In this concluding chapter he lives to see the actual virtual artifact itself.
After I was lowered from the particle laboratory again, I left without an appointment for a follow-up. When I called Cardiology the next week, they spent a good many of my phone minutes before telling me to call the general appointment number. This led to ten minutes in voice-mail limbo and a hang-up before my phone service cut-out.
So when I saw my regular doctor and she heard my dilemma, she gave me an office with it's own outside line where I could call and wait as long as it took to follow through. When the hospital appointment operator suggested a late October date, I was mildly astonished.
The CAT scan had been such a radical experience for me that to be kept so long in suspense afterward was comparable to going to the moon and being asked to wait four months to see the film clip.
The operator sensed that I sounded less like the average county hospital patient and more like staff. She switched me over to cardiology again. There followed a strange moment with the nurse saying that there was no record I had received any treatment at radiology. Again one pleads nolo contendere in such matters. One can't speak about what the records say with any authority, but one maintains one's belief in something one really thinks did take place.
She suggested that they call me back. I told her to take her time, that I was at my primary care clinic. This seems to do the trick quite well as the actual cardiologist called back. He is a big beaming avuncular fellow, German maybe Jewish, in his sixties. I certainly didn't expect himself to call.
"Your arteries are fantastic!" he declared, "really in fantastic shape." It was delightful to hear this. We talked good-naturedly a moment then he suggested I come to see him in one week for the follow-up.
I finally decided to reach the hospital by taking BART to Lake Merritt where a free shuttle zips you up the hill. Even with a walk downtown to BART station it was really quick for a change after all my previous trips by bus. An afternoon appointment, despite the glacial slowness of the wait, meant I could just mosey-in--no early-hour stress. In the waiting room, my earplugs in place, I finished an Elmore Leonard novel that I found on campus. It was the source material for a Tarantino film and many of my present company looked like they might have stepped out of it.
Then at last my name was called. I went from the crowded room into the sparsely populated precincts to wait on in quietude. A preliminary interview with a different doctor awaited me, this time an Indian lady. They take their time with you here and I had never been more thoroughly listened to via stethoscope. Talking about myself I eventually mentioned that my elderly mother passed away this year. In our reverie on mothers, I wondered rhetorically if anyone else on earth would ever really care about me. She agreed and said even though she was married and had family she sometimes asked herself the same question. It was the human condition we concluded.
This visit I was better prepared for the moment when the patriarch himself arrived. Last time I was spaced from a long wait and a lack of refreshment. So this time I jotted-down notes ahead of time and I ate a banana at the last moment.
He immediately announced that there was nothing physically wrong with my heart, that you could drive a truck through, that you could sail a boat through my arteries. There were no signs of disease present or prior. No tobacco, very moderate drinking, exercise, and a low-salt, low-fat diet--there's no secret to it. He said I have a large and slow heart, which is good. The old notion is still true--that we are only given so many heart beats in a lifetime.
"Like a humming-bird," I riffed. I also mentioned that I'm a Leo and known to be big-hearted. General amusement at this--the first doctor hangs-out for the chat with the big doc. I ran through my questions then I finished with, "Can I see the CAT scan?"
Well, it isn't the policy...
I said that was alright, I had just thought maybe he could twiddle a few keys and it would come-up on the computer screen next to us. And what do you know? He agreed. After expressing regrets that this station didn't have all the colors of own set-up, he brought up the screens. And there was my big art pay-off.
At first the image was of my ribs swathed in red-purple muscle. "That's my breastplate," said I. "Hang on a minute," quoth the snowy-haired physician.
Then he clicked on the "remove bone" option, and the naked, sacred heart itself is revealed. The colors are all deep, intense and jewel-like. There indeed were my fantastic arteries looking like massive rivers seen from space. Then, mind-blowingly, he turned my heart in virtual space. Like a magnifying satellite we sail around the south pole of my heart and note more of my arterial splendor. I feel like I am in some meta-world sitting in front of a visionary simulacrum of my heart and mind. Both of which are encompassed by my soul which itself emanates from a universe of love.
"OK, I'm going to restore your bone. Do you want you bone back?"
"I still have to get home."
After I was lowered from the particle laboratory again, I left without an appointment for a follow-up. When I called Cardiology the next week, they spent a good many of my phone minutes before telling me to call the general appointment number. This led to ten minutes in voice-mail limbo and a hang-up before my phone service cut-out.
So when I saw my regular doctor and she heard my dilemma, she gave me an office with it's own outside line where I could call and wait as long as it took to follow through. When the hospital appointment operator suggested a late October date, I was mildly astonished.
The CAT scan had been such a radical experience for me that to be kept so long in suspense afterward was comparable to going to the moon and being asked to wait four months to see the film clip.
The operator sensed that I sounded less like the average county hospital patient and more like staff. She switched me over to cardiology again. There followed a strange moment with the nurse saying that there was no record I had received any treatment at radiology. Again one pleads nolo contendere in such matters. One can't speak about what the records say with any authority, but one maintains one's belief in something one really thinks did take place.
She suggested that they call me back. I told her to take her time, that I was at my primary care clinic. This seems to do the trick quite well as the actual cardiologist called back. He is a big beaming avuncular fellow, German maybe Jewish, in his sixties. I certainly didn't expect himself to call.
"Your arteries are fantastic!" he declared, "really in fantastic shape." It was delightful to hear this. We talked good-naturedly a moment then he suggested I come to see him in one week for the follow-up.
I finally decided to reach the hospital by taking BART to Lake Merritt where a free shuttle zips you up the hill. Even with a walk downtown to BART station it was really quick for a change after all my previous trips by bus. An afternoon appointment, despite the glacial slowness of the wait, meant I could just mosey-in--no early-hour stress. In the waiting room, my earplugs in place, I finished an Elmore Leonard novel that I found on campus. It was the source material for a Tarantino film and many of my present company looked like they might have stepped out of it.
Then at last my name was called. I went from the crowded room into the sparsely populated precincts to wait on in quietude. A preliminary interview with a different doctor awaited me, this time an Indian lady. They take their time with you here and I had never been more thoroughly listened to via stethoscope. Talking about myself I eventually mentioned that my elderly mother passed away this year. In our reverie on mothers, I wondered rhetorically if anyone else on earth would ever really care about me. She agreed and said even though she was married and had family she sometimes asked herself the same question. It was the human condition we concluded.
This visit I was better prepared for the moment when the patriarch himself arrived. Last time I was spaced from a long wait and a lack of refreshment. So this time I jotted-down notes ahead of time and I ate a banana at the last moment.
He immediately announced that there was nothing physically wrong with my heart, that you could drive a truck through, that you could sail a boat through my arteries. There were no signs of disease present or prior. No tobacco, very moderate drinking, exercise, and a low-salt, low-fat diet--there's no secret to it. He said I have a large and slow heart, which is good. The old notion is still true--that we are only given so many heart beats in a lifetime.
"Like a humming-bird," I riffed. I also mentioned that I'm a Leo and known to be big-hearted. General amusement at this--the first doctor hangs-out for the chat with the big doc. I ran through my questions then I finished with, "Can I see the CAT scan?"
Well, it isn't the policy...
I said that was alright, I had just thought maybe he could twiddle a few keys and it would come-up on the computer screen next to us. And what do you know? He agreed. After expressing regrets that this station didn't have all the colors of own set-up, he brought up the screens. And there was my big art pay-off.
At first the image was of my ribs swathed in red-purple muscle. "That's my breastplate," said I. "Hang on a minute," quoth the snowy-haired physician.
Then he clicked on the "remove bone" option, and the naked, sacred heart itself is revealed. The colors are all deep, intense and jewel-like. There indeed were my fantastic arteries looking like massive rivers seen from space. Then, mind-blowingly, he turned my heart in virtual space. Like a magnifying satellite we sail around the south pole of my heart and note more of my arterial splendor. I feel like I am in some meta-world sitting in front of a visionary simulacrum of my heart and mind. Both of which are encompassed by my soul which itself emanates from a universe of love.
"OK, I'm going to restore your bone. Do you want you bone back?"
"I still have to get home."
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Climax Mime Troupe
Berkeley lends itself to advanced people-watching on yet another mild summer afternoon. The San Francisco Mime Troupe is in Ho Chi Minh park which is now renamed Willard park after someone no one remembers. The Flaneur is there providing his eyes to a readership worldwide.
After 1 this afternoon. Wasn't there a reason to get up? The day's vague plan materialized in front of me like the room I left last night to venture off in the dream time. Just time for a bagel with almond butter and a coffee before I dash off outdoors. I'm bound for the park where today the SF Mime Troupe is putting on its yearly free show in the parks, this one entitled "Too Big to Fail." You wouldn't call it agit-prop any more. In these days of melting glaciers and an even slower thaw from Dark Side of the previous eight years--more like liberal persuasion.
Have you wondered why the investment banker crooks are getting all the money with no comprehensive work programs in sight and only a watery health bill coming down the pike? Have you asked yourself why the president doesn't want to hear about the serious crimes recently and still committed by this nation, why Cheney is still affecting US foreign policy instead of being on his way to prison, and why the corporate media continues to manufacture consent and suppress dissent?
Why is all the self-righteous anger still only on the right? The right never compromises; liberals always do.
Anyway, back to the pleasant afternoon.
Or first to last evening and my first encounter with the troupe this year. For whatever reason they didn't schedule the usual two afternoon shows at 2 PM that they always do. They were doing a Friday evening performance instead. So I was pleasurably surprised when I stumbled on the scene on the way to my post office box in the Elmwood. I was enjoyably entertained during my customary rest stop at a Willard park bench. There was the stage and there was a rehearsal with the live band. The stage is not a transformer this year but it's nevertheless a charming representation of a village presumably in North Africa. I watched for a while as a few early birds took up positions in front of the stage. To the south two young women and a guy were in a circle doing yoga asanas in the grass.
Beyond them was a more hyper-active zone where dozens of little kids were playing games. They were all running around like frolicsome gazelles amid day-glow traffic cones. I love to see them and I certainly wish them well but the situation does claim a large portion of the park for a day-care operation. This is on top of the generous fenced-off playground by the tennis-courts. It seems to me that a more suitable place with a schoolyard of it's own is located nearby right behind the Willard school. But again oddly the city seems to have leased that out to a Chinese Christian group. At the same time, yahoos play over-aggressive sports and the area of the park open to any peaceful use continues to shrink. This is the only park for miles around in a fairly densely-populated town. Add to this the arrogant cops on bikes who demand identification from anyone who lingers too long looking poor. One simply has to face the fact that the old warm-hearted Berkeley is gone.
Off in the distance over the Bay, an ominous gray mass of marine influence was heading this way. Onward. I passed the yogis picking up a move from the obvious initiate who led the others. My route takes me past the front gate of an amusingly festooned property on Hillegas.
The owner adorned his mailbox and gate with first a wooden apple and snake (gone now to vandals), photos on wood of jazz singer Anita O'Day, and numerous bendable white poles with messages attached. Lots of other kookie objects and signs--Pebbles Flintstone, a ceramic jack-o-lantern, various indicia of European origin--enamel plagues with French writing etc. Looking down the driveway gives one the sense that the whole place is decked-out with fun in mind.
I took care of matters in the Elmwood including a stop for DVDs at the Claremont library on Benvenue, then by my post office box. Next I stroll College avenue to look at all the different businesses that have come in--a wine store notably. The travel place that typically features great window displays doesn't disappoint with its current offering. On the wall behind a selection of globes is a giant hand-painted banner for the 40s film, "Now Voyager." It features an iconic portrait of Bette Davis in a nautical travel outfit. Painted on heavy canvas, it could be a reproduction but it certainly looks like an original item.
Two sweet little boys come out of the toy shop with Mom. I turn down Russell and land on a bench for a moment. The mother and kids come by that way too. She stops near me for some reason and I say hi to the two little boys when we find ourselves on eye level. One--he's holding a glossy box of Star Wars toys, is so dear. He says to me "I saw you before." Oh yeah? ... I had to have a rest. I feel like the wee ones instinctively love me now that I have snow on the roof, maybe I look like their grand dad. They know that oldsters are often gentle and kind, and not the task-masters and disciplinarians parents must be.
The mother ignores me and herds them away. I cross the street to a shadier bench this one made from a redwood burl. A Chinese elder and his daughter come by soon afterward walking their little boy. They stop right by me to load the kid on Grandpa's back--he's like four years-old I'd say. He sees me smiling and says a strong "hi". Hiya...you're getting a ride now. "Yeah!" he laughs loudly, "...Bye!" So aware and full of life unlike his dour, dutiful guardians who, once again, don't acknowledge me. They seem instead to be silently reciting warnings to themselves to drill into the kid later. Talking to strangers and all.
So I follow my own bliss, revivified by the clarity and brilliance of the kids. I note all the splendid flowers evident in the moist cool summer we're having. Back at Willard park, I sit on the hula-hoop rack occasionally still used as a bench. The stage is far away but the sound is still good . The musicians are often the best part of the show and I savor the live music in such a casual atmosphere. Considerably more people have arrived. Earlier Ed Holmes and the tall black lady who can actually sing were on stage running through moves and musical notes. Now it's overture section.
A table representing a satellite installation of Food-Not-Bombs has been set-up. I am heading home for tofu vegetables and rice in black bean sauce, and I'm peckish. A snack would help me linger a moment longer, so I beat it over to the table. A nice couple of young folks man it and have pizza-bread, punch and great pickled squash available to everyone at no charge. I chat a bit then go over to the bench ring-side to back-stage and refresh. A silent gal in a mime troupe t-shirt sitting next to me reads intently over her kindle.
A fairly large tortoise is walking around near us. Ed Holmes walks past and I ask him if he saw the turtle. "Don't know what kind of crowd you people attract..." I quip. It's a great vibe and nice sunlight for the moment, but it's getting cool and I have other plans.
Just as the play begins I can be seen leaving the lower park for home. I give me best serves-you-right smile to the dog-slobs. They are forced to look on from the margins as the park they usually take-over has, for this night at least, been taken-over from them.
So it is that I find myself approaching the same scene today in somewhat warmer sunshine. Before I reach the park I pass the baseball diamond behind the school. No games there this summer as the whole place is torn up for a refurbish. I think of the strange midnight last October when I passed by and the moist earth of the field was covered in big geese.
Today clouds of dry dirt rise up around a bulldozer and several manual shovellers. This marvelous city with all it's highly-paid planners and bureaucratic aparatchiks evidently couldn't arrange for the work to stop when the adjacent park was filled with local citizens. The entire time I was there they were kicking up a lot of dirt just on the windward side of all those unprotected lungs.
I circle around back of the stage to my trusty bench. Can I squeeze-in here without making things awkward? The same kindle-reading girl from yesterday is back and gets to share the bench with me again. Then I hastily dig into my coffee and cannabis cookie, a shortbread with a blackberry jelly pool on top. Then I turn my attention to a sidelong view of the stage and the lively amplified sounds emanating from it. The high comes on like going up in a hot-air balloon as opposed to the jet-like take-off of smoking.
There's a view of a lot of the process from where I'm sitting--you see the costume changes and the characters before they enter, including actors crawling under the stage to emerge from a trap door. I spend as much time watching the audience as the stage play. Living as I do in a district of adults and young adults, I find children, so rarely sighted, completely charming to observe. The ones here with their mild and educated parents are so very sweet. Wearing hats with big sun-visors they pay rapt attention to the often slapstick antics on-stage, even the ones too young to fully understand the words. One little guy lying on his stomach with his chin resting on his fist looks so thoughtful as he rests his bare feet over a pair of rubber shoes made to look like toy cars.
Dragonflies criss-cross the air-space over the crowd seated on the lawn. A great yellow butterfly appears and almost seems to ride the music. Later, just as the play reaches its anti-capitalist crescendo, the sputtering engine of a plane dragging a Geico banner pollutes itself in circles overhead. Think you can sit in a public park and listen to free speech without being advertised to? Well, think again.
Before long I have removed my shoes, pulled-up my pants, and half-unbuttoned my shirt. Then I can no longer resist joining the others in the grass in front of the stage. At this point there is only the very front of the stage available. You really can't attend half-way from that vantage.
The play is a parable or allegory of how profit insinuates itself into human life and makes slaves of all. How people become consumers on credit and lose their freedom and prosperity.
It takes place in an ancient Middle-eastern land in a time immemorial with the profuse inclusion of tell-tale anachronisms should anyone be uncertain exactly what society it is talking about.
I depart from the stage-front to stand a while in the shade of a tree still watching, then I return to my favorite bench for the conclusion. It has a cool scene where Holmes dressed as a demon in a business suit lays-out the whole royal scam for the innocents in the play and as a sermon to the choir. Then a little mad dancing and singing and it's over for another year. The hard-working actors grab buckets and, without a pause to catch their breathe, are out among the crowd collecting donations. Clearly they like meeting this crowd too. The mutual admiration is also reflected in the rip-snorting business at the t-shirt booth. These shirts, black with a red star, are seen around the world. Young and old snatch them up.
The dirt is still billowing amid the green belt of trees below the park. I don't linger long after the show is over and the crowd slowly disperses. I take Hillegass and experience a sidewalk garden profuse with July violets in a state of suspension of ontological fixity.
On Dana I watch a young man skateboard slalom, zig-zaging along the street while holding a bouquet of flowers. I am in a smiley frame of mind and can't help but watch this big lug in a t-shirt with his incongruous nose-gay. He looks tired, bags under his eyes, and he's frowning. He notices me watching and maybe is a little embarrassed that another guy sees him with flowers. He only wants his girlfriend to see how sweet he is.
After 1 this afternoon. Wasn't there a reason to get up? The day's vague plan materialized in front of me like the room I left last night to venture off in the dream time. Just time for a bagel with almond butter and a coffee before I dash off outdoors. I'm bound for the park where today the SF Mime Troupe is putting on its yearly free show in the parks, this one entitled "Too Big to Fail." You wouldn't call it agit-prop any more. In these days of melting glaciers and an even slower thaw from Dark Side of the previous eight years--more like liberal persuasion.
Have you wondered why the investment banker crooks are getting all the money with no comprehensive work programs in sight and only a watery health bill coming down the pike? Have you asked yourself why the president doesn't want to hear about the serious crimes recently and still committed by this nation, why Cheney is still affecting US foreign policy instead of being on his way to prison, and why the corporate media continues to manufacture consent and suppress dissent?
Why is all the self-righteous anger still only on the right? The right never compromises; liberals always do.
Anyway, back to the pleasant afternoon.
Or first to last evening and my first encounter with the troupe this year. For whatever reason they didn't schedule the usual two afternoon shows at 2 PM that they always do. They were doing a Friday evening performance instead. So I was pleasurably surprised when I stumbled on the scene on the way to my post office box in the Elmwood. I was enjoyably entertained during my customary rest stop at a Willard park bench. There was the stage and there was a rehearsal with the live band. The stage is not a transformer this year but it's nevertheless a charming representation of a village presumably in North Africa. I watched for a while as a few early birds took up positions in front of the stage. To the south two young women and a guy were in a circle doing yoga asanas in the grass.
Beyond them was a more hyper-active zone where dozens of little kids were playing games. They were all running around like frolicsome gazelles amid day-glow traffic cones. I love to see them and I certainly wish them well but the situation does claim a large portion of the park for a day-care operation. This is on top of the generous fenced-off playground by the tennis-courts. It seems to me that a more suitable place with a schoolyard of it's own is located nearby right behind the Willard school. But again oddly the city seems to have leased that out to a Chinese Christian group. At the same time, yahoos play over-aggressive sports and the area of the park open to any peaceful use continues to shrink. This is the only park for miles around in a fairly densely-populated town. Add to this the arrogant cops on bikes who demand identification from anyone who lingers too long looking poor. One simply has to face the fact that the old warm-hearted Berkeley is gone.
Off in the distance over the Bay, an ominous gray mass of marine influence was heading this way. Onward. I passed the yogis picking up a move from the obvious initiate who led the others. My route takes me past the front gate of an amusingly festooned property on Hillegas.
The owner adorned his mailbox and gate with first a wooden apple and snake (gone now to vandals), photos on wood of jazz singer Anita O'Day, and numerous bendable white poles with messages attached. Lots of other kookie objects and signs--Pebbles Flintstone, a ceramic jack-o-lantern, various indicia of European origin--enamel plagues with French writing etc. Looking down the driveway gives one the sense that the whole place is decked-out with fun in mind.
I took care of matters in the Elmwood including a stop for DVDs at the Claremont library on Benvenue, then by my post office box. Next I stroll College avenue to look at all the different businesses that have come in--a wine store notably. The travel place that typically features great window displays doesn't disappoint with its current offering. On the wall behind a selection of globes is a giant hand-painted banner for the 40s film, "Now Voyager." It features an iconic portrait of Bette Davis in a nautical travel outfit. Painted on heavy canvas, it could be a reproduction but it certainly looks like an original item.
Two sweet little boys come out of the toy shop with Mom. I turn down Russell and land on a bench for a moment. The mother and kids come by that way too. She stops near me for some reason and I say hi to the two little boys when we find ourselves on eye level. One--he's holding a glossy box of Star Wars toys, is so dear. He says to me "I saw you before." Oh yeah? ... I had to have a rest. I feel like the wee ones instinctively love me now that I have snow on the roof, maybe I look like their grand dad. They know that oldsters are often gentle and kind, and not the task-masters and disciplinarians parents must be.
The mother ignores me and herds them away. I cross the street to a shadier bench this one made from a redwood burl. A Chinese elder and his daughter come by soon afterward walking their little boy. They stop right by me to load the kid on Grandpa's back--he's like four years-old I'd say. He sees me smiling and says a strong "hi". Hiya...you're getting a ride now. "Yeah!" he laughs loudly, "...Bye!" So aware and full of life unlike his dour, dutiful guardians who, once again, don't acknowledge me. They seem instead to be silently reciting warnings to themselves to drill into the kid later. Talking to strangers and all.
So I follow my own bliss, revivified by the clarity and brilliance of the kids. I note all the splendid flowers evident in the moist cool summer we're having. Back at Willard park, I sit on the hula-hoop rack occasionally still used as a bench. The stage is far away but the sound is still good . The musicians are often the best part of the show and I savor the live music in such a casual atmosphere. Considerably more people have arrived. Earlier Ed Holmes and the tall black lady who can actually sing were on stage running through moves and musical notes. Now it's overture section.
A table representing a satellite installation of Food-Not-Bombs has been set-up. I am heading home for tofu vegetables and rice in black bean sauce, and I'm peckish. A snack would help me linger a moment longer, so I beat it over to the table. A nice couple of young folks man it and have pizza-bread, punch and great pickled squash available to everyone at no charge. I chat a bit then go over to the bench ring-side to back-stage and refresh. A silent gal in a mime troupe t-shirt sitting next to me reads intently over her kindle.
A fairly large tortoise is walking around near us. Ed Holmes walks past and I ask him if he saw the turtle. "Don't know what kind of crowd you people attract..." I quip. It's a great vibe and nice sunlight for the moment, but it's getting cool and I have other plans.
Just as the play begins I can be seen leaving the lower park for home. I give me best serves-you-right smile to the dog-slobs. They are forced to look on from the margins as the park they usually take-over has, for this night at least, been taken-over from them.
So it is that I find myself approaching the same scene today in somewhat warmer sunshine. Before I reach the park I pass the baseball diamond behind the school. No games there this summer as the whole place is torn up for a refurbish. I think of the strange midnight last October when I passed by and the moist earth of the field was covered in big geese.
Today clouds of dry dirt rise up around a bulldozer and several manual shovellers. This marvelous city with all it's highly-paid planners and bureaucratic aparatchiks evidently couldn't arrange for the work to stop when the adjacent park was filled with local citizens. The entire time I was there they were kicking up a lot of dirt just on the windward side of all those unprotected lungs.
I circle around back of the stage to my trusty bench. Can I squeeze-in here without making things awkward? The same kindle-reading girl from yesterday is back and gets to share the bench with me again. Then I hastily dig into my coffee and cannabis cookie, a shortbread with a blackberry jelly pool on top. Then I turn my attention to a sidelong view of the stage and the lively amplified sounds emanating from it. The high comes on like going up in a hot-air balloon as opposed to the jet-like take-off of smoking.
There's a view of a lot of the process from where I'm sitting--you see the costume changes and the characters before they enter, including actors crawling under the stage to emerge from a trap door. I spend as much time watching the audience as the stage play. Living as I do in a district of adults and young adults, I find children, so rarely sighted, completely charming to observe. The ones here with their mild and educated parents are so very sweet. Wearing hats with big sun-visors they pay rapt attention to the often slapstick antics on-stage, even the ones too young to fully understand the words. One little guy lying on his stomach with his chin resting on his fist looks so thoughtful as he rests his bare feet over a pair of rubber shoes made to look like toy cars.
Dragonflies criss-cross the air-space over the crowd seated on the lawn. A great yellow butterfly appears and almost seems to ride the music. Later, just as the play reaches its anti-capitalist crescendo, the sputtering engine of a plane dragging a Geico banner pollutes itself in circles overhead. Think you can sit in a public park and listen to free speech without being advertised to? Well, think again.
Before long I have removed my shoes, pulled-up my pants, and half-unbuttoned my shirt. Then I can no longer resist joining the others in the grass in front of the stage. At this point there is only the very front of the stage available. You really can't attend half-way from that vantage.
The play is a parable or allegory of how profit insinuates itself into human life and makes slaves of all. How people become consumers on credit and lose their freedom and prosperity.
It takes place in an ancient Middle-eastern land in a time immemorial with the profuse inclusion of tell-tale anachronisms should anyone be uncertain exactly what society it is talking about.
I depart from the stage-front to stand a while in the shade of a tree still watching, then I return to my favorite bench for the conclusion. It has a cool scene where Holmes dressed as a demon in a business suit lays-out the whole royal scam for the innocents in the play and as a sermon to the choir. Then a little mad dancing and singing and it's over for another year. The hard-working actors grab buckets and, without a pause to catch their breathe, are out among the crowd collecting donations. Clearly they like meeting this crowd too. The mutual admiration is also reflected in the rip-snorting business at the t-shirt booth. These shirts, black with a red star, are seen around the world. Young and old snatch them up.
The dirt is still billowing amid the green belt of trees below the park. I don't linger long after the show is over and the crowd slowly disperses. I take Hillegass and experience a sidewalk garden profuse with July violets in a state of suspension of ontological fixity.
On Dana I watch a young man skateboard slalom, zig-zaging along the street while holding a bouquet of flowers. I am in a smiley frame of mind and can't help but watch this big lug in a t-shirt with his incongruous nose-gay. He looks tired, bags under his eyes, and he's frowning. He notices me watching and maybe is a little embarrassed that another guy sees him with flowers. He only wants his girlfriend to see how sweet he is.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Poetry Now
Inspired by an friend's poetry blog, the Flaneur shakes more lines from his notebook. Apology where it apply.
...
my wind-up clock's broken
the second hand can't make it
to midnight
makes a slight noise
a moth on a window screen
the shade of a venetian horse
crosses my window shade
a young boy asleep on the waves
clinging to a carved wooden figure
some mahogany crayfish effigy
marine in his lower extremes
the part of the world now under sea
the boy feeding on his carapace of wood
...
we are the pure white people
white of hair white of skin
saint peter will wave us in
where we will all be restored
as colored people as negroes
and walk on streets of gold
morning glories send
tendrils over everything
the sun gets up too early
birds crank up the merry-go-round
dime-store on mercury
a roman noir
I contacted every known planet
looking for something legit
ended-up covering a crossword puzzle
another sad sack in scrabble town
I received periodic balloon payments
until that blew up in my face
had to dummy up and take the battery
until my shins splintered under me
I gave them all the names I had
little hamlet
envenom with his envy
a prison of poison
dies in his own too much
in dante's hell
the sinful know who they are
martin luther
appeared before the diet of worms
as sort of an appetizer
the case of the open and shut bookcase
faraway nowadays
the post-mammalian review
ash wednesday the anti-hallowe'en
code breakers of sumatra
lunar vacuity
1912-2009
mom by the heater late at night
thinking in the dark
mom sitting on her porch
surrounded by trees smiling
ghost natural
vinegaroon
the spider's missing link
baboon metaphysics
a spill on the causeway
2009
...
"Antaeus who speaks and wears no chains
He will take us to the bottom of sin"
Dante, Hell
...
He will take us to the bottom of sin"
Dante, Hell
...
my wind-up clock's broken
the second hand can't make it
to midnight
makes a slight noise
a moth on a window screen
...
the shade of a venetian horse
crosses my window shade
a young boy asleep on the waves
clinging to a carved wooden figure
some mahogany crayfish effigy
marine in his lower extremes
the part of the world now under sea
the boy feeding on his carapace of wood
...
we are the pure white people
white of hair white of skin
saint peter will wave us in
where we will all be restored
as colored people as negroes
and walk on streets of gold
...
morning glories send
tendrils over everything
the sun gets up too early
birds crank up the merry-go-round
...
dime-store on mercury
a roman noir
I contacted every known planet
looking for something legit
ended-up covering a crossword puzzle
another sad sack in scrabble town
I received periodic balloon payments
until that blew up in my face
had to dummy up and take the battery
until my shins splintered under me
I gave them all the names I had
...
little hamlet
envenom with his envy
a prison of poison
dies in his own too much
...
in dante's hell
the sinful know who they are
...
martin luther
appeared before the diet of worms
as sort of an appetizer
...
the case of the open and shut bookcase
faraway nowadays
the post-mammalian review
ash wednesday the anti-hallowe'en
code breakers of sumatra
lunar vacuity
...
1912-2009
mom by the heater late at night
thinking in the dark
mom sitting on her porch
surrounded by trees smiling
...
ghost natural
vinegaroon
the spider's missing link
baboon metaphysics
a spill on the causeway
...
Bromides
My skull holes feel like an old bowling ball.
People stretch their faces over their emotions.
Light bulbs turn my fingertips into paper.
I can see my hand with my eyes closed.
We slip into the unworld slowly.
Bromides
My skull holes feel like an old bowling ball.
People stretch their faces over their emotions.
Light bulbs turn my fingertips into paper.
I can see my hand with my eyes closed.
We slip into the unworld slowly.
...
2009
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
The Shiver of Original Sin
In which the Flaneur suggests his age by telling of himself as a 20th Century man in a 21st Century scenario in medical technology.
Like most days in general I began by walking away from my abode. As on the two days previous, I was bound for the nearby stop for the #1 Rapid bus for a long ride-- to the Fruitvale section of Oakland.
This early morning like the others, I was proceeding to an appointment at Highland Hospital. What I thought would be a one-day affair had stretched to three. Today was to be the Fourth-of-July fireworks finale--a CAT scan of my heart.
The Rapid makes fairly good time, at times exceeding comfortable speeds for the unforgiving seats. But no one complains--we're making time. The longest stretch is the ride nearly the full length of Telegraph Avenue. I am hypnotized easily when roused at this hour and the familiar decaying landmarks and other newer developments put me into a right trance.
There are the curios, a little windmill and a tiny log cabin, remnants of the roadside stands of quainter times. There's the liquor store with its art brute "Okla-hickory" mural. The 'Lectric Washhouse laundromat sails past... Roots Hobby Hut's old oblique sign is now draws a blank. Nails, skin, and beauty are serviced and supplied regularly hereabouts. Casper's hot-dog island is long defunct as is the huge old spaghetti barn across the way. But there are similar anachronisms still around, hold-outs kept alive by sugar-teeth-- Hooper's chocolates, Neldam's bakery. Other more stately buildings of a gone culture serve new purposes. Some are like the ornate wooden church painted the color of wine--obviously a valuable historic building but who comes around here to attend this church these days?
Then there are the Afro-centric Ethiopian blocks where business looks rather thin. Following this, one travels past cafes and ramshackle galleries, the kind of scenes I used to make back in the youthful day. The bus turns at the old Emporium now half-lit as a Sears, then turns again on Broadway. There, as the buildings climb toward the dead center of town, I note Oaksterdam University with a warm feeling of a change is gonna come. Named for this section of Oakland which was one of the leaders in the struggle to have medical marijuana become a normal part of life. I joined the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Club at a place near here when I first received a doctor's letter of recommendation back in 2005.
Next, the bus heads out around Lake Merritt which is actually a salt water estuary of the San Francisco bay. The bus is really traveling here as it plunges into a tunnel near the Oakland museum's Babylonian gardens. There's the Oakland auditorium where I went to see shows by the Patti Smith Group, Bunny Wailer and Blondie way back when. Don't think it is used as a concert venue often these days.
Years ago my ex-wife and I came out of an event there--a Catholic event with music --and walked smack into the Bishop and two other members of the ecclesiastic elite in full ceremonial attire. They held onto their mitres as their impressive chasibules snapped in the gusty wind from the harbor while a Mariachi band played full throttle behind them. As we giggled at this scene almost second-hand from a Bunuel film, it was apparent that they wanted us to talk. First question, what parish are you from? I was still lapsed at the time and Lucy was a Catholic-admirer but not a baptized Christian. "Saint Augustine's" we fibbed--after all, it was the closest church to us, the parish we lived in. Naturally it was also the parish that Bishop had led for years, did we know? You really can only dig yourself in deeper in these sort of situations. Yet, it concluded with smiles all around as the sombrero-wearing musicians cranked it up a notch.
Today I craned out the other way across the lake to see the sweeping lines of the new Cathedral. It was built at the opposite end of the lake and finished within the last year. The Cathedral looks silvery in the distance with arcs converging at the high point. I haven't been to it yet, but if I do run into the Bishop again I'll be charming and all ears.
Next, International avenue which I was introduced to when it was called East Fourteenth. It begins in a little Vietnam district then gradually becomes more and more Mexican in character. I notice a small place whose large sign reads:
There are always children on the bus through here and many more on the sidewalks. A lot of the medical places we pass are geared toward maternity. It's a fast breeding populace many of whom live on small incomes. The Mexican kids seem particularly obedient and affectionate toward their silent Mothers. They remind me of a way of life from what seems like long-ago.
With every time I take the trip, it seems not quite as distant and remote. At Fruitvale I dash down through a little shopping center to hop another bus which winds up though the hilly neighborhoods to the hospital. Before it heads up, the bus passes blocks where Mexican day workers loiter in hope of jobs. Later in the morning I respectfully note their resignation as the day's chances grow thinner. I try to feel encouraged by people's struggles to get over another day. I find my mild amusement looking at the kids on a grassy ball field, some Victorian houses, and some bee-flower trees in bloom lining side streets in my slow summer time passage.
Then the bus stops on a steep hill top and it's all go. Down the ramp where smokers, often in hospital gowns, ignore signs warning of stiff penalties for violations. They must know how the enforcement, if any, works and roll the dice on but one more risk of smoking.
I headed straight for radiology and resumed sitting as soon as the reception staff got over the scantness of my paper-work and other undone administrative matters behind-the-scenes.
In a waiting room yesterday I endured a brief exposure to a popular television show on which disagreeable women raise their voices at each other between even louder commercials. Today it's considerable more time in a different crowded waiting room while a program on which audience members were encouraged to applaud or jeer at a young couple "dealing with commitment issues." The volume made it impossible to escape despite my earplugs. At other local clinics I have encountered TVs playing health advice between incessant pharmaceutical promotions. My regular clinic used to play low-brow movies which can help pass the time. But this is the most obtrusive I've ever seen TVs in a hospital setting-- playing hyped-up TV shows between ads for food products. They have an interesting therapeutic rationale no doubt.
Eventually, all things must pass and I hear my name called. A jovial black lady with a flowery cap leads me into a prep-room. Yolanda, I'll use her name, got me in a gown and stuck a number foam disks on my chest. Each bore a red heart symbol and that's what we were aiming to make, a high-definition, three dimensional color digital image of--my still beating heart.
Next came the IV stent in my arm. She voiced concern that I hadn't taken my regular beta blocker since midnight--that my heartbeat might be too fast for optimal imaging. She thought she would have to give me additional medication. Then a machine began to read my beat and soon beeped to indicate that, on its own, my heart beat was below 50 bpm.
"I'm a yogi, baby" I had to confess. Left alone in a comfortable setting I am a very calm being. I was also not letting the possible hospital anxieties get a grip on me there that day.
Next I climbed down into a wheel chair, my jacket and boots were bagged-up on my lap, and we started out to another location. Before I knew what was happening I was outside in the sunshine in my gown being wheeled past all sorts of people. Some seemed to sneak little morbidly curious glances at the sick cat--here but for fortune go all you who are able-bodied and free. I remark on a beautiful headscarf worn by a Muslim girl playing.
We go up a ramp parallel to the entrance and stop on an elevator platform under a canopy. She talks to Rueben inside the trailer over a speaker phone. The whole structure seems metallic and radio-active as we vibrate upwards. Up we go to the time tunnel tube. I am laid on a movable bed and given last minute instructions. At some point I will be injected with iodine and will feel heat from it immediately. Otherwise pay attention to breathing instructions you will hear as you are moved back and forth in a series of scans.
The process begins. If you have ever wondered what it might feel like to be "beamed-up", molecularly scrambled and reassembled, or just generally tele-ported I think I now have an analog in my experience. A spiral whirring noise envelopes you as you travel short distances in and out of the tube--another analog springs to mind for this movement. In and out like fiddler's elbow? Um, something slower, more overwhelming than music, that leaves you wiped-out and exhausted.
Meanwhile the staff hides behind a lead wall and watches it on computer screens as the charged particles ping around the space I'm in. The robotic female control voice, familiar from tawdry science fiction utopias, comes from no discernible direction and says, "Take a breathe and hold it now .................................................you may breath normally." I recall a woman's voice but I also seem to recall a male voice giving instructions too. I don't mean the old Chinese technician, whiskered and thin, who came up behind me at one point and asked how much I weighed. He was like someone from Through the Looking Glass. I glimpsed him in my peripheral vision; I don't believe I was hallucinating, but freely admit that I had entered an altered state of consciousness.
Then just when I wondered what happened to the threatened injection, Rueben was back askant with it. I felt the aforementioned heat, mainly in my groin and nether regions. When he came back I told him it felt like I wet the bed."...Hey, maybe I did wet the bed, " I added to scare him.
Afterwards, it's over. Yolanda reappears when I start to writhe--the urge to urinate is an imperative I can't ignore. She says I did very well the images look fantastic. There is a poster nearby showing spooky organs like realistic sci-fi animation digital images. I ask if they look like that. "Pretty close." Kind of scary is all I can say.
There is the unmistakable frisson of being on the cusp of what is human and natural and what is super-human and preternatural. Mankind demands ever more powers once thought to be god-like, in this case to see so vividly inside a living body. Another small technological miracle in a march to decipher the genome of the tree of knowledge. Yet so rarely do we demand that wisdom and benefit for all be the guiding philosophy when we expend vast amounts of the energy and the other resources of the one and only living world.
This time I get to don shades and shirt and boots for the return trip outdoors. By this point we're old friends and she's telling me about her kid. After a respectful hush on the elevator I get up from the chair to dive into the first men's room we come to. She leaves and I have to wander through the featureless corridors of radiology until I find her room again.
After a brief recovery, I finish getting dressed and get gone.
Like most days in general I began by walking away from my abode. As on the two days previous, I was bound for the nearby stop for the #1 Rapid bus for a long ride-- to the Fruitvale section of Oakland.
This early morning like the others, I was proceeding to an appointment at Highland Hospital. What I thought would be a one-day affair had stretched to three. Today was to be the Fourth-of-July fireworks finale--a CAT scan of my heart.
The Rapid makes fairly good time, at times exceeding comfortable speeds for the unforgiving seats. But no one complains--we're making time. The longest stretch is the ride nearly the full length of Telegraph Avenue. I am hypnotized easily when roused at this hour and the familiar decaying landmarks and other newer developments put me into a right trance.
There are the curios, a little windmill and a tiny log cabin, remnants of the roadside stands of quainter times. There's the liquor store with its art brute "Okla-hickory" mural. The 'Lectric Washhouse laundromat sails past... Roots Hobby Hut's old oblique sign is now draws a blank. Nails, skin, and beauty are serviced and supplied regularly hereabouts. Casper's hot-dog island is long defunct as is the huge old spaghetti barn across the way. But there are similar anachronisms still around, hold-outs kept alive by sugar-teeth-- Hooper's chocolates, Neldam's bakery. Other more stately buildings of a gone culture serve new purposes. Some are like the ornate wooden church painted the color of wine--obviously a valuable historic building but who comes around here to attend this church these days?
Then there are the Afro-centric Ethiopian blocks where business looks rather thin. Following this, one travels past cafes and ramshackle galleries, the kind of scenes I used to make back in the youthful day. The bus turns at the old Emporium now half-lit as a Sears, then turns again on Broadway. There, as the buildings climb toward the dead center of town, I note Oaksterdam University with a warm feeling of a change is gonna come. Named for this section of Oakland which was one of the leaders in the struggle to have medical marijuana become a normal part of life. I joined the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Club at a place near here when I first received a doctor's letter of recommendation back in 2005.
Next, the bus heads out around Lake Merritt which is actually a salt water estuary of the San Francisco bay. The bus is really traveling here as it plunges into a tunnel near the Oakland museum's Babylonian gardens. There's the Oakland auditorium where I went to see shows by the Patti Smith Group, Bunny Wailer and Blondie way back when. Don't think it is used as a concert venue often these days.
Years ago my ex-wife and I came out of an event there--a Catholic event with music --and walked smack into the Bishop and two other members of the ecclesiastic elite in full ceremonial attire. They held onto their mitres as their impressive chasibules snapped in the gusty wind from the harbor while a Mariachi band played full throttle behind them. As we giggled at this scene almost second-hand from a Bunuel film, it was apparent that they wanted us to talk. First question, what parish are you from? I was still lapsed at the time and Lucy was a Catholic-admirer but not a baptized Christian. "Saint Augustine's" we fibbed--after all, it was the closest church to us, the parish we lived in. Naturally it was also the parish that Bishop had led for years, did we know? You really can only dig yourself in deeper in these sort of situations. Yet, it concluded with smiles all around as the sombrero-wearing musicians cranked it up a notch.
Today I craned out the other way across the lake to see the sweeping lines of the new Cathedral. It was built at the opposite end of the lake and finished within the last year. The Cathedral looks silvery in the distance with arcs converging at the high point. I haven't been to it yet, but if I do run into the Bishop again I'll be charming and all ears.
Next, International avenue which I was introduced to when it was called East Fourteenth. It begins in a little Vietnam district then gradually becomes more and more Mexican in character. I notice a small place whose large sign reads:
El Gato
Negro Bar
It looks like its a time-traveling segregated bar at first glance.Negro Bar
There are always children on the bus through here and many more on the sidewalks. A lot of the medical places we pass are geared toward maternity. It's a fast breeding populace many of whom live on small incomes. The Mexican kids seem particularly obedient and affectionate toward their silent Mothers. They remind me of a way of life from what seems like long-ago.
With every time I take the trip, it seems not quite as distant and remote. At Fruitvale I dash down through a little shopping center to hop another bus which winds up though the hilly neighborhoods to the hospital. Before it heads up, the bus passes blocks where Mexican day workers loiter in hope of jobs. Later in the morning I respectfully note their resignation as the day's chances grow thinner. I try to feel encouraged by people's struggles to get over another day. I find my mild amusement looking at the kids on a grassy ball field, some Victorian houses, and some bee-flower trees in bloom lining side streets in my slow summer time passage.
Then the bus stops on a steep hill top and it's all go. Down the ramp where smokers, often in hospital gowns, ignore signs warning of stiff penalties for violations. They must know how the enforcement, if any, works and roll the dice on but one more risk of smoking.
I headed straight for radiology and resumed sitting as soon as the reception staff got over the scantness of my paper-work and other undone administrative matters behind-the-scenes.
In a waiting room yesterday I endured a brief exposure to a popular television show on which disagreeable women raise their voices at each other between even louder commercials. Today it's considerable more time in a different crowded waiting room while a program on which audience members were encouraged to applaud or jeer at a young couple "dealing with commitment issues." The volume made it impossible to escape despite my earplugs. At other local clinics I have encountered TVs playing health advice between incessant pharmaceutical promotions. My regular clinic used to play low-brow movies which can help pass the time. But this is the most obtrusive I've ever seen TVs in a hospital setting-- playing hyped-up TV shows between ads for food products. They have an interesting therapeutic rationale no doubt.
Eventually, all things must pass and I hear my name called. A jovial black lady with a flowery cap leads me into a prep-room. Yolanda, I'll use her name, got me in a gown and stuck a number foam disks on my chest. Each bore a red heart symbol and that's what we were aiming to make, a high-definition, three dimensional color digital image of--my still beating heart.
Next came the IV stent in my arm. She voiced concern that I hadn't taken my regular beta blocker since midnight--that my heartbeat might be too fast for optimal imaging. She thought she would have to give me additional medication. Then a machine began to read my beat and soon beeped to indicate that, on its own, my heart beat was below 50 bpm.
"I'm a yogi, baby" I had to confess. Left alone in a comfortable setting I am a very calm being. I was also not letting the possible hospital anxieties get a grip on me there that day.
Next I climbed down into a wheel chair, my jacket and boots were bagged-up on my lap, and we started out to another location. Before I knew what was happening I was outside in the sunshine in my gown being wheeled past all sorts of people. Some seemed to sneak little morbidly curious glances at the sick cat--here but for fortune go all you who are able-bodied and free. I remark on a beautiful headscarf worn by a Muslim girl playing.
We go up a ramp parallel to the entrance and stop on an elevator platform under a canopy. She talks to Rueben inside the trailer over a speaker phone. The whole structure seems metallic and radio-active as we vibrate upwards. Up we go to the time tunnel tube. I am laid on a movable bed and given last minute instructions. At some point I will be injected with iodine and will feel heat from it immediately. Otherwise pay attention to breathing instructions you will hear as you are moved back and forth in a series of scans.
The process begins. If you have ever wondered what it might feel like to be "beamed-up", molecularly scrambled and reassembled, or just generally tele-ported I think I now have an analog in my experience. A spiral whirring noise envelopes you as you travel short distances in and out of the tube--another analog springs to mind for this movement. In and out like fiddler's elbow? Um, something slower, more overwhelming than music, that leaves you wiped-out and exhausted.
Meanwhile the staff hides behind a lead wall and watches it on computer screens as the charged particles ping around the space I'm in. The robotic female control voice, familiar from tawdry science fiction utopias, comes from no discernible direction and says, "Take a breathe and hold it now .................................................you may breath normally." I recall a woman's voice but I also seem to recall a male voice giving instructions too. I don't mean the old Chinese technician, whiskered and thin, who came up behind me at one point and asked how much I weighed. He was like someone from Through the Looking Glass. I glimpsed him in my peripheral vision; I don't believe I was hallucinating, but freely admit that I had entered an altered state of consciousness.
Then just when I wondered what happened to the threatened injection, Rueben was back askant with it. I felt the aforementioned heat, mainly in my groin and nether regions. When he came back I told him it felt like I wet the bed."...Hey, maybe I did wet the bed, " I added to scare him.
Afterwards, it's over. Yolanda reappears when I start to writhe--the urge to urinate is an imperative I can't ignore. She says I did very well the images look fantastic. There is a poster nearby showing spooky organs like realistic sci-fi animation digital images. I ask if they look like that. "Pretty close." Kind of scary is all I can say.
There is the unmistakable frisson of being on the cusp of what is human and natural and what is super-human and preternatural. Mankind demands ever more powers once thought to be god-like, in this case to see so vividly inside a living body. Another small technological miracle in a march to decipher the genome of the tree of knowledge. Yet so rarely do we demand that wisdom and benefit for all be the guiding philosophy when we expend vast amounts of the energy and the other resources of the one and only living world.
This time I get to don shades and shirt and boots for the return trip outdoors. By this point we're old friends and she's telling me about her kid. After a respectful hush on the elevator I get up from the chair to dive into the first men's room we come to. She leaves and I have to wander through the featureless corridors of radiology until I find her room again.
After a brief recovery, I finish getting dressed and get gone.
Postscript
The Scanned Cat
The Scanned Cat
After I was lowered from the particle laboratory again, I left without an appointment for a follow-up. When I called Cardiology the next week, they spent a good many of my phone minutes before telling me to call the general appointment number. This led to ten minutes in voice-mail limbo and a hang-up before my phone service cut-out.
So when I saw my regular doctor and she heard my dilemma, she gave me an office with it's own outside line where I could call and wait as long as it took to follow through. When the hospital appointment operator suggested a late October date, I was mildly astonished.
The CAT scan had been such a radical experience for me that to be kept so long in suspense afterward was comparable to going to the moon and being asked to wait four months to see the film clip.
The operator sensed that I sounded less like the average county hospital patient and more like staff. She switched me over to cardiology again. There followed a strange moment with the nurse saying that there was no record I had received any treatment at radiology. Again one pleads nolo contendere in such matters. One can't speak about what the records say with any authority, but one maintains one's belief in something one really thinks did take place.
She suggested that they call me back. I told her to take her time, that I was at my primary care clinic. This seems to do the trick quite well as the actual cardiologist called back. He is a big beaming avuncular fellow, German maybe Jewish, in his sixties. I certainly didn't expect himself to call.
"Your arteries are fantastic!" he declared, "really in fantastic shape." It was delightful to hear this. We talked good-naturedly a moment then he suggested I come to see him in one week for the follow-up.
I finally decided to reach the hospital by taking BART to Lake Merritt where a free shuttle zips you up the hill. Even with a walk downtown to BART station it was really quick for a change after all my previous trips by bus. An afternoon appointment, despite the glacial slowness of the wait, meant I could just mosey-in--no early-hour stress. In the waiting room, my earplugs in place, I finished an Elmore Leonard novel that I found on campus. It was the source material for a Tarantino film and many of my present company looked like they might have stepped out of it.
Then at last my name was called. I went from the crowded room into the sparsely populated precincts to wait on in quietude. A preliminary interview with a different doctor awaited me, this time an Indian lady. They take their time with you here and I had never been more thoroughly listened to via stethoscope. Talking about myself I eventually mentioned that my elderly mother passed away this year. In our reverie on mothers, I wondered rhetorically if anyone else on earth would ever really care about me. She agreed and said even though she was married and had family she sometimes asked herself the same question. It was the human condition we concluded.
This visit I was better prepared for the moment when the patriarch himself arrived. Last time I was spaced from a long wait and a lack of refreshment. So this time I jotted-down notes ahead of time and I ate a banana at the last moment.
He immediately announced that there was nothing physically wrong with my heart, that you could drive a truck through, that you could sail a boat through my arteries. There were no signs of disease present or prior. No tobacco, very moderate drinking, exercise, and a low-salt, low-fat diet--there's no secret to it. He said I have a large and slow heart, which is good. The old notion is still true--that we are only given so many heart beats in a lifetime.
"Like a humming-bird," I riffed. I also mentioned that I'm a Leo and known to be big-hearted. General amusement at this--the first doctor hangs-out for the chat with the big doc. I ran through my questions then I finished with, "Can I see the CAT scan?"
Well, it isn't the policy...
I said that was alright, I had just thought maybe he could twiddle a few keys and it would come-up on the computer screen next to us. And what do you know? He agreed. After expressing regrets that this station didn't have all the colors of own set-up, he brought up the screens. And there was my big art pay-off.
At first the image was of my ribs swathed in red-purple muscle. "That's my breastplate," said I. "Hang on a minute," quoth the snowy-haired physician.
Then he clicked on the "remove bone" option, and the naked, sacred heart itself is revealed. The colors are all deep, intense and jewel-like. There indeed were my fantastic arteries looking like massive rivers seen from space. Then, mind-blowingly, he turned my heart in virtual space. Like a magnifying satellite we sail around the south pole of my heart and note more of my arterial splendor. I feel like I am in some meta-world sitting in front of a visionary simulacrum of my heart and mind. Both of which are encompassed by my soul which itself emanates from a universe of love.
So when I saw my regular doctor and she heard my dilemma, she gave me an office with it's own outside line where I could call and wait as long as it took to follow through. When the hospital appointment operator suggested a late October date, I was mildly astonished.
The CAT scan had been such a radical experience for me that to be kept so long in suspense afterward was comparable to going to the moon and being asked to wait four months to see the film clip.
The operator sensed that I sounded less like the average county hospital patient and more like staff. She switched me over to cardiology again. There followed a strange moment with the nurse saying that there was no record I had received any treatment at radiology. Again one pleads nolo contendere in such matters. One can't speak about what the records say with any authority, but one maintains one's belief in something one really thinks did take place.
She suggested that they call me back. I told her to take her time, that I was at my primary care clinic. This seems to do the trick quite well as the actual cardiologist called back. He is a big beaming avuncular fellow, German maybe Jewish, in his sixties. I certainly didn't expect himself to call.
"Your arteries are fantastic!" he declared, "really in fantastic shape." It was delightful to hear this. We talked good-naturedly a moment then he suggested I come to see him in one week for the follow-up.
I finally decided to reach the hospital by taking BART to Lake Merritt where a free shuttle zips you up the hill. Even with a walk downtown to BART station it was really quick for a change after all my previous trips by bus. An afternoon appointment, despite the glacial slowness of the wait, meant I could just mosey-in--no early-hour stress. In the waiting room, my earplugs in place, I finished an Elmore Leonard novel that I found on campus. It was the source material for a Tarantino film and many of my present company looked like they might have stepped out of it.
Then at last my name was called. I went from the crowded room into the sparsely populated precincts to wait on in quietude. A preliminary interview with a different doctor awaited me, this time an Indian lady. They take their time with you here and I had never been more thoroughly listened to via stethoscope. Talking about myself I eventually mentioned that my elderly mother passed away this year. In our reverie on mothers, I wondered rhetorically if anyone else on earth would ever really care about me. She agreed and said even though she was married and had family she sometimes asked herself the same question. It was the human condition we concluded.
This visit I was better prepared for the moment when the patriarch himself arrived. Last time I was spaced from a long wait and a lack of refreshment. So this time I jotted-down notes ahead of time and I ate a banana at the last moment.
He immediately announced that there was nothing physically wrong with my heart, that you could drive a truck through, that you could sail a boat through my arteries. There were no signs of disease present or prior. No tobacco, very moderate drinking, exercise, and a low-salt, low-fat diet--there's no secret to it. He said I have a large and slow heart, which is good. The old notion is still true--that we are only given so many heart beats in a lifetime.
"Like a humming-bird," I riffed. I also mentioned that I'm a Leo and known to be big-hearted. General amusement at this--the first doctor hangs-out for the chat with the big doc. I ran through my questions then I finished with, "Can I see the CAT scan?"
Well, it isn't the policy...
I said that was alright, I had just thought maybe he could twiddle a few keys and it would come-up on the computer screen next to us. And what do you know? He agreed. After expressing regrets that this station didn't have all the colors of own set-up, he brought up the screens. And there was my big art pay-off.
At first the image was of my ribs swathed in red-purple muscle. "That's my breastplate," said I. "Hang on a minute," quoth the snowy-haired physician.
Then he clicked on the "remove bone" option, and the naked, sacred heart itself is revealed. The colors are all deep, intense and jewel-like. There indeed were my fantastic arteries looking like massive rivers seen from space. Then, mind-blowingly, he turned my heart in virtual space. Like a magnifying satellite we sail around the south pole of my heart and note more of my arterial splendor. I feel like I am in some meta-world sitting in front of a visionary simulacrum of my heart and mind. Both of which are encompassed by my soul which itself emanates from a universe of love.
"OK, I'm going to restore your bone. Do you want you bone back?"
"I still have to get home."
"I still have to get home."
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Requiem and Reckoning
The Flaneur strays from his usual localized musings to comment on a recent passing...
"Jacko Lantern" mail art, postmark August 2009
When I look at a photo of the so-called King of Pop dangling with one arm a little baby over a balcony, I believe I am looking at an image of one of the most decadent individuals on earth.
His face had been bleached and carved into a severe mask-- an androgynous, Caucasian Disney cartoon. And it's obvious now that the three children are seen without the suffocating disguises, that they show no outward sign of sharing any of his African-American genes. Apparently he snatched the middle-child out of the hospital where she was born, before the hired surrogate wife could even see her. A bombed-out superstar and his muscle rushing off with a still unwashed new-born its placenta still attached--it's quite a picture.
An employee of his who was present during the baby-dangling has since stated that Michael was completely "doped-out" at the time. This was "Blanket" a baby to whom he neither contributed genes, nor as much as met his Mother, nor even ever legally adopted.
Like all corporations, he had long been permitted to function above the laws that apply to those less wealthy. He made his decadence a normal way of life. In paranoiac seclusion he consistently asked his public to sympathize with him for having had a cruel father and a childhood lost to fame. He asked them to buy into a fantasy that he was more than harmless, a saint and a free spirit regressed back to the pre-sexual state of a twelve-year-old.
So when the keeping of other people's children became a problem for him, he simply procured some of his own. He proceeded to share bed and bedroom with them subject to no-one's prying questions. This private life was perhaps made easier by living in a place like Bahrain where a very wealthy person in modest women's attire is very rarely a source of any concern--even if he did make them nervous when he used a restroom for women.
Then the children got to grow up in seclusion and close intimacy with a heavy-drug-using parent. They joined him in his paranoid evasion of private scrutiny while he maintained his publicity as a commodity in the marketplace. The children are said to have have been allowed no long term relations with other kids. They do and say as told with the great sense of importance and remoteness that narcissistic pop-stars with bodyguards bathe in. Moreover in recent years he seems to have been enveloped in a relation with the Nation of Islam. Secrecy self-importance, and a quick-draw on the race card seem to come with that territory.
And so despite all those years of suspicion, evidence, pay-offs, charges, acquittal and admitted addiction, he never seems to have had to face his pedophilia or drug abuse. Certainly he didn't in any clinical psychiatric setting. Otherwise he wouldn't still have talked such fairytale-innocence nonsense while holding hands and nuzzling with a dreamy little bed-mate on TV. This was the one who later charged him with sexual improprieties. Was this a surprise to anyone coming as did from the man who had built an entire amusement park to groom and select children for sleep-overs in the magic bunkhouse in Neverland?
As those huge Disney-esque eyes began to sag with age and with an inevitable pharmaceutical toll, they became as much a mask as the rest of his face. He was rarely seen without the dark glasses of the opiate eater. At the last press conference he finally given up the breathy drag queen whisper and he looked like an animatronic skeleton version of himself. He had cast a lingering look at his chances for a last lucrative spectacle and agreed to some wildly implausible number of concerts. "This is It" was presented as a closing gesture to his grandiose career.
Yet, fifty is fifty after all. Some may be able to dance feverishly after fifty, and some may be able to survive as heavy-drug users after fifty, but few are able to do both. Within a week of his death a film of his last rehearsal was available all over. It almost appears to be a posthumous marketing campaign--like he knew that they would film the best he had left in him.
Then he would be free to inject some ending to himself after which he could be packaged and sold. The sub-conscious death-wish attached to his use of what were apparently very heavy drugs is inarguable. The one that may have snuffed him is a sedative so powerful it can only safely be used with an anesthesiologist and oxygen. Called "Milk of Amnesia" it vacuums away all psychic and physical pain and induces a deep sleep with pronounced sexual dreams in males.
Sounds made to order for someone in certain imagined outer realms.
Deepak Chopra, an acquaintance of Mr. Jackson, has said since his death that it was reckless to have stockpiled opiates without having the obvious drugs for opiate over-dose on hand.
From the corny but cute Jackson Five, with their version of familiar Motown showmanship to the heavily-produced hits and the glittery, morphed-but-still-attractive character that dominated the Reagan eighties, I have generally enjoyed his music and performance. He was never a lot more than that for me. James Brown worked his wonders for me, or Sly and the Family Stone when I saw them as a teen-ager. Jackson's hey-days didn't coincide with my interest in either teen-pop or sexy dating music.
Even though they may have turned into trade-mark tics and gimmicks to some extent, his talents were impressive. At one moment in time he had it, the glittering zeitgeist. Even so, he was ultimately a performer and singer, a musician of limited invention, a pasticheur. Increasingly the music itself stalled out while the creepy show-biz royalty recluse took over the whole story. In all his contrived artificiality, the mask the actor wore became his face and eventually his facade. Recall the cover of his "Dangerous" album: his eyes peer out from a sickly ornate facade over fun-house tunnel from which a little boy in underpants emerges. What could he have had in mind? The thrilling suggestion of molestation to polymorphously perverse under-age fans?
If I note some of the mountains of evidence of his decadence it is in part to counter the usual refusal of the corporate press to call a spade, a spade. (Forgive the usage viz a viz Jackson's whitened negritude.) I refer to reports of Jackson camp excuses that are so incredible as to be insulting. I refer to the right-wing radio host notorious for his own opiate addiction. This radio blow-hard came to Jackson's defense on the issue of over-lavish medication, luxury drugs provided by personal physicians.
If I see the burden and wages of sin in his life, the apparent lostness, it's hopefully in order to have sympathy and kindness for Mr. Jackson. "As you judge others so shall you be judged." This I do believe, I and try not to judge. Yet I do think there is a lesson there for any of us with an unmoored desire to be rich and famous and to have the world at our bidding.
"Jacko Lantern" mail art, postmark August 2009When I look at a photo of the so-called King of Pop dangling with one arm a little baby over a balcony, I believe I am looking at an image of one of the most decadent individuals on earth.
His face had been bleached and carved into a severe mask-- an androgynous, Caucasian Disney cartoon. And it's obvious now that the three children are seen without the suffocating disguises, that they show no outward sign of sharing any of his African-American genes. Apparently he snatched the middle-child out of the hospital where she was born, before the hired surrogate wife could even see her. A bombed-out superstar and his muscle rushing off with a still unwashed new-born its placenta still attached--it's quite a picture.
An employee of his who was present during the baby-dangling has since stated that Michael was completely "doped-out" at the time. This was "Blanket" a baby to whom he neither contributed genes, nor as much as met his Mother, nor even ever legally adopted.
Like all corporations, he had long been permitted to function above the laws that apply to those less wealthy. He made his decadence a normal way of life. In paranoiac seclusion he consistently asked his public to sympathize with him for having had a cruel father and a childhood lost to fame. He asked them to buy into a fantasy that he was more than harmless, a saint and a free spirit regressed back to the pre-sexual state of a twelve-year-old.
So when the keeping of other people's children became a problem for him, he simply procured some of his own. He proceeded to share bed and bedroom with them subject to no-one's prying questions. This private life was perhaps made easier by living in a place like Bahrain where a very wealthy person in modest women's attire is very rarely a source of any concern--even if he did make them nervous when he used a restroom for women.
Then the children got to grow up in seclusion and close intimacy with a heavy-drug-using parent. They joined him in his paranoid evasion of private scrutiny while he maintained his publicity as a commodity in the marketplace. The children are said to have have been allowed no long term relations with other kids. They do and say as told with the great sense of importance and remoteness that narcissistic pop-stars with bodyguards bathe in. Moreover in recent years he seems to have been enveloped in a relation with the Nation of Islam. Secrecy self-importance, and a quick-draw on the race card seem to come with that territory.
And so despite all those years of suspicion, evidence, pay-offs, charges, acquittal and admitted addiction, he never seems to have had to face his pedophilia or drug abuse. Certainly he didn't in any clinical psychiatric setting. Otherwise he wouldn't still have talked such fairytale-innocence nonsense while holding hands and nuzzling with a dreamy little bed-mate on TV. This was the one who later charged him with sexual improprieties. Was this a surprise to anyone coming as did from the man who had built an entire amusement park to groom and select children for sleep-overs in the magic bunkhouse in Neverland?
As those huge Disney-esque eyes began to sag with age and with an inevitable pharmaceutical toll, they became as much a mask as the rest of his face. He was rarely seen without the dark glasses of the opiate eater. At the last press conference he finally given up the breathy drag queen whisper and he looked like an animatronic skeleton version of himself. He had cast a lingering look at his chances for a last lucrative spectacle and agreed to some wildly implausible number of concerts. "This is It" was presented as a closing gesture to his grandiose career.
Yet, fifty is fifty after all. Some may be able to dance feverishly after fifty, and some may be able to survive as heavy-drug users after fifty, but few are able to do both. Within a week of his death a film of his last rehearsal was available all over. It almost appears to be a posthumous marketing campaign--like he knew that they would film the best he had left in him.
Then he would be free to inject some ending to himself after which he could be packaged and sold. The sub-conscious death-wish attached to his use of what were apparently very heavy drugs is inarguable. The one that may have snuffed him is a sedative so powerful it can only safely be used with an anesthesiologist and oxygen. Called "Milk of Amnesia" it vacuums away all psychic and physical pain and induces a deep sleep with pronounced sexual dreams in males.
Sounds made to order for someone in certain imagined outer realms.
Deepak Chopra, an acquaintance of Mr. Jackson, has said since his death that it was reckless to have stockpiled opiates without having the obvious drugs for opiate over-dose on hand.
From the corny but cute Jackson Five, with their version of familiar Motown showmanship to the heavily-produced hits and the glittery, morphed-but-still-attractive character that dominated the Reagan eighties, I have generally enjoyed his music and performance. He was never a lot more than that for me. James Brown worked his wonders for me, or Sly and the Family Stone when I saw them as a teen-ager. Jackson's hey-days didn't coincide with my interest in either teen-pop or sexy dating music.
Even though they may have turned into trade-mark tics and gimmicks to some extent, his talents were impressive. At one moment in time he had it, the glittering zeitgeist. Even so, he was ultimately a performer and singer, a musician of limited invention, a pasticheur. Increasingly the music itself stalled out while the creepy show-biz royalty recluse took over the whole story. In all his contrived artificiality, the mask the actor wore became his face and eventually his facade. Recall the cover of his "Dangerous" album: his eyes peer out from a sickly ornate facade over fun-house tunnel from which a little boy in underpants emerges. What could he have had in mind? The thrilling suggestion of molestation to polymorphously perverse under-age fans?
If I note some of the mountains of evidence of his decadence it is in part to counter the usual refusal of the corporate press to call a spade, a spade. (Forgive the usage viz a viz Jackson's whitened negritude.) I refer to reports of Jackson camp excuses that are so incredible as to be insulting. I refer to the right-wing radio host notorious for his own opiate addiction. This radio blow-hard came to Jackson's defense on the issue of over-lavish medication, luxury drugs provided by personal physicians.
If I see the burden and wages of sin in his life, the apparent lostness, it's hopefully in order to have sympathy and kindness for Mr. Jackson. "As you judge others so shall you be judged." This I do believe, I and try not to judge. Yet I do think there is a lesson there for any of us with an unmoored desire to be rich and famous and to have the world at our bidding.
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