Bernie

Bernie
I will miss you my friend, your jokes, your advice, that vision of yours from it’s greenest, lushest, blue-sky landscapes and also from the dirtiest and most squalid circumstances of the ancient tales you tell; Phoenix emerging from the black ashes to span the heavens gloriously once again in your come-of-age sobriety. A vision of pain and suffering that vanishes, healed, in an ephemeral smile, that capacity to cause all those around you to laugh uproariously with a single word, a gesture or a look. That’s you, friend of my soul, that always made me see the folly of insisting on my own suffering by confronting me, fully, intentionally, with those so clear images of a pain so more real and profound than mine and to do it with such absolute simplicity, at once warm and loving but also mocking and gleeful that irresistibly made me reconsider time and time again.

Fare thee well friend of my heart. May Dylan and Richards, Harrison and Clapton and all the rest make way for you and accompany you toward that other garden. My best memories of these last few years go with you and bind me to you. I do not lose you. Those memories will make way forward for me, they will guide me, they will illuminate my path and they will always be a source of certitude and joy.

Rule by Divine right

On August 11 this year, I posted this quote from Ursula K. LeGuin on Facebook,

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. But then so did the divine right of kings.”

Now, we are living with a President of the United States that believes he has been chosen by God, and many of those who support him believe that too, and that therefore the things he does are “God’s work”. If you watch the news, you have seen him personally saying “I am the chosen one” and his supporters saying similar things. And there is a very interesting series on Netflix called THE FAMILY that addresses why and how this has come about, There is a growing group of people who believe that if something is happening, it’s happening because God has ordained it. They believe God cares more about the Elite, those in power, that He does about ordinary folks and that the proof of that is that they have the power.

Yes, their logic is circular. It is backed up only by itself. But scarier than that, those that adhere to these belief reinforce each other. They tell each other “You don’t need the Bible”, but that instead they should base their beliefs on a book simply titled JESUS, put together by members of their non-organization, THE FAMILY, that quotes only the parts of The Bible that support their belief.

But wait, didn’t Jesus go into the temple and overturn the tables of the money changers? By THE FAMILY’s logic, the money changers are appointed and endorsed by God Himself and Jesus would be wrong to overturn their tables. And further, by THE FAMILY’s logic, Pontius Pilate is also God’s “imperfect instrument” and his work, condemning Jesus to suffer on the cross (and kickstart Christianity in the process) is also a “perfect call” and ordained by God Himself. Didn’t Jesus go around feeding the poor and healing the sick? Or did he praise and offer obeisance to Pharaoh and Cesar?

This is the fatal flaw in their thinking. The second of the Ten Commandments says “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” In fact in the deepest tradition of the Old Testament, this is taken to mean that you can’t even say His name out loud, much less proclaim to be chosen by Him. There is no such prohibition, however, to saying the name of Satan. But the anti-Christ himself is prophesied to come, claiming to be the true God.

I am not a Christian believer, by the way, but these guys claim that they are. I just say “Judge for yourself!” And remember, modern democracy, the British Parliamentary Monarchy founded on the Magna Carta, the American Republic, the U.S.A., born through the Revolutionary War and the U.S. Constitution—against King George II of England—have given us the freedoms we have come to expect as our birthright, through extraordinary sacrifice, hardship and loss of life and limb. So beware, we have not fully escaped rule by “Divine Right”.

Juanito

Tengo una veladora prendida para ti.

Johnny A.

We were best friends when we were little growing up in Mexico City. I was Johnny, he was Juanito, or Johnny A. to my Johnny C.
His parents and mine were friends and visited back and forth. Juanito and I often spent the night at each other’s house and played with the chemistry sets we both had, made magic tricks out of matchboxes decorated with tissue paper, or rummaged in his father’s “cobacha”, the cupboard underneath a staircase where his father kept his climbing gear. We dreamed and fantasized about climbing together. Perhaps even Everest one day. It was the fifties and Edmund Hillary and Tenzin Norgay had just succeeded in climbing the worlds highest mountain for the first time ever.

Later on we shared an interest in drumming, and, of course, dating, comparing notes on our exciting first encounters with girls. About that time I went away to the U.S. for highschool and for years we hardly ever saw each other. But eventually, we did look each other up and though we lived quite far from each other we began to plan to visit and do activities which, curiously, we had both gotten into over the years, including scuba diving, rock climbing and mountaineering. That’s when it got interesting.

I first noticed a certain behavior and attitude on a diving trip to Cozumel. The trip was his idea and mostly his plan. But as I gradually figured out, he didn’t really have enough money to pay his own way through this adventure. We would go out for dinner and a beer but when it came time to pay the bill he would excuse himself and go to the bathroom. A few months later, I went to visit him in Seattle to go climbing. He had an attractive girlfriend, rather younger than he, at the time. Going to lunch one day at a fast food restaurant the three of us stood in line to order. Juan timed his move perfectly, and when there were just two or three people left ahead of us, he told his girlfriend and me what he wanted us to order for him, then excused himself and went to the bathroom. His girlfriend turned to me with a quizzical look and asked what I though about it. He was my lifelong friend and she nearly a stranger, but I have never been able to tolerate what I perceive as injustice. I responded by telling her about my experience when Juan and I had been on our diving trip to Cozumel. Needless to say, she didn’t remain his girlfriend much longer. But he was my lifelong friend and I really did want to share diving and climbing adventures with him, so I decided that it was a price (literally) that I was willing to pay. Anyway, during that same trip he proposed a plan to climb a particular mountain. He offered to put me up in his own bed/room, he would find somewhere else to sleep. I took him up on it and a few weeks later, I was there, eager to do the climb. But no, there was some complication/reason that he couldn’t give me his bedroom to sleep in and he announced that, by the way, he would be charging me a guiding fee to do the climb. I was indignant. I said “you ‘invite’ me to go climbing, I make the trip, then you tell me you’re charging me a guiding fee? No way!” We got past that little incident and did the climb. I did not pay. Then as I was packing to leave, he said he was short of money and offered to sell me a framed photo he had taken. I liked the photo and agreed to buy it, even gave him the money, but it didn’t fit in my luggage so I asked him to keep it for me until the next time. Then, after still another climbing trip, I said “OK, I’ll take my photo now.” “Sorry” he replied, “that picture is gone… I sold it.” “What about my money?” I asked. “It’s gone too.” was his reply. I never saw that money again.

And there are other stories, like the time he ‘borrowed” money for a business, printing t-shirts with his photos and selling them. We wrote up an informal one-page contract. The due date for the loan came and went but I never saw that money again either. Another time he, urgently, had to go to his Landmark Forum session, parked his car in a tow zone and left it there all day. It was towed. But lucky for him I was in town. After he repeatedly promised “this time I’m really going to pay you back… right away.” I got him his car out of hawk. But did I ever get that money back? I’ll let you guess.

In the end the result was predictable and inevitable. We no longer see each other or even speak. It’s a sad story no matter how you look at it, we were best friends! We really cared about each other. And I miss him.

Now, I hear, he has cancer and is going to die.

(Editing entry Tuesday, December 3, 2019) It’s been over a week now, maybe two weeks, that I heard that Juan has passed away. It’s hard to believe, and it’s hard to take. It was a shock to me when my mother died. My father had gone a few years before and I realized I was now the ‘older’ generation. There was no longer one ahead of me. Now my friends and other people near me, of my generation, are starting to go. It’s an odd feeling, a mixed feeling, that I’m one of the healthy ones surviving while others, less lucky, and some younger than myself, move on. And it’s clear it will be more and more the case. I pray now that this may be a motivation. My mind says “I must live now! I must love now!”. Will I? Only time will tell.

The Grail is Lost

The Grail is lost
We have riches, wealth and knowledge to excess
Possessions pretty and magical
Some petty and some perturbing.
Mass creation and destruction at a touch
Blind and deaf from light and music that forever
From little toxic boxes flow
And steel carcasses surround us
Bending time and space on endless tarmac tendrils
Or floating—roaring—amidst the clouds
But the Grail is lost

Percival and Mordred
The white hat on the high road
The black hat on the low
Search and find these endless riches
Drunk with power and success
Percival’s forgotten what he seeks
Blind with righteousness and anger
Mordred betrays his quest
And though each his legions follow
Neither finds the Grail

So woe to us
Children of Eden
We have eaten from the tree
And sick from Hubris poison
And the great trompe l’oeil of wealth
We languish in confusion
In the rush to climate chaos
Like Lemmings from a cliff
And nuclear annihilation looms
Which implacable like Hydra
Has just grown another head

So lay down your pen my friend
Cease arguing the humble path
The world is your children’s
And they must find their own way
For the Grail remains hidden
And so the way is obscured
With luck they’ll wake tomorrow
And find the planet cured
Of this us her cosmic illness
Although it seems absurd

Ms. Solidarity

When we were six years old we held hands and told the grown-ups we were going to marry when we grew up. Later, in our youth, she became a good friend’s girlfriend, much to my chagrin. I would have loved it if she had chosen me, though I was too shy to do much to encourage her. Then we each went away to separate and distant boarding schools, though I don’t think I ever knew where she’d gone til much later. In adulthood, we lived an ocean apart, until her father’s imminent demise brought us back in contact. It was then the flame was rekindled. And also then that she reached out to me pleading for help. Her chosen lifestyle had made her an undesirable tenant, leaseholder or borrower and she needed help finding a place to live. The apartment she had lived in for years was going to be sold and she would be evicted. I stepped up to the plate and offered to provide a solution. She suggested we form a company to buy the apartment, she acting as partner and manager of the company and I as major stockholder. We went ahead.

Now, nine years later, we don’t speak. After being maligned, badmouthed and insulted in the most violent of terms by her and all her relatives and friends, after many months of negotiation, after she signed an agreement and then tried to renege (and the judge said “In all my years on the bench I’ve never seen the likes of this”), I had to buy my way out of the deal. She now lives in a smaller place, courtesy of yours truly, further from the center, but she owns it outright and, actually, it’s worth the equivalent of millions MXN. And yet, in her eyes, and as far as I can tell in the eyes of all her kith and kin, I’m the bad guy, the dirty, cold-stone-hearted, money grubbing capitalist.

And all for trying to be a friend and lend a helping hand. Is it any wonder my “faith in mankind” is shaky at best? Or that I have become mildly bitter and melancholy?

P.S. Curiously, the only time in my life that I’ve been invited and then later uninvited, was to lunch (with her whole extended family) at her cousins house.

A Cancer on Gaia

For years I’ve talked about how if you think of the planet, Earth, as a living being, and all the different species of plants and animals on the Earth as the differentiated ‘cells’ that make up that living organism, then what do you call a type of cell that reproduces without anything to keep it in check and creates great scabs of concrete, glass and steel on the skin of the living Earth that exude poisonous fumes and extend long tendrils of concrete and asphalt endlessly out from scab to scab? In my mind it would be fair to describe it as cancer.

But this analogy is not perfect. It fails in two ways. The first is that if indeed we, the human species, are a cancer on the living planet, we are different from cancers in ourselves in that we are simultaneously capable of being this cancer and of being aware of ourselves as such and therefore potentially capable of doing something about it. In other words, we have a choice, to continue being this cancer or not.

The other difference is that in the case of a cancer in us, if even with all our high tech medicine we are unable to cure ourselves of this cancer, then we, the host, will die. In the case of the planet, on the other hand, if we don’t succeed in ‘curing’ ourselves of this cancerous attitude, then the victim of the disease will eventually be us, the human species. And the planet will not miss us. She will go happily on spinning around herself and around the sun, repopulate herself with newly evolved species and quickly, given a cosmic scale of time, reach a new balance.

So, we had better get it right and do it soon. Not like the ‘heads of state’ that gather for worldwide environmental conferences who in spite of giving lip service to the problem, rather than really striving for a solution spend their time jockeying for position in order to take advantage of the situation for the ‘sake’ of the countries they represent or possibly even for their own personal career gain. For this reason, it is no surprise when they fail to come to any agreement, and when they do, fail to meet the goals they ‘commit’ to. And so we continue in our headlong rush, like lemmings over the cliff, to self extinction.

The Way of Money Leads Straight to Hell

How does the Way of Money lead straight to Hell?

Essay due Monday

So here we are, humanity, the only species ever to evolve on this planet with the ability to destroy itself (and many others along with it) on the verge of doing exactly that. And watching ourselves do it, commenting on it and debating it. But will we change our self-destructive ways in time to survive the disaster we are in the midst of creating? That’s your homework! Six hundred word essay due monday.

Peace and Tranquility

For the moment, this page is dedicated to peace and tranquility. Glad you got here. Hope you enjoy it. The picture above is of Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl the volcanoes that used to dominate the view toward the east from Mexico City, now almost always obscured by the smog. It was taken from the window of an airliner on the way from Mexico City to Puerto Vallarta. Artifacts produced by imperfections in the airliners’ triple windows were removed using Photoshop.