this was a weird one

image via lots more cool art there.

I haven't posted a dream here in a long time, but this was a particularly strange one. (I still write them down as I remember them, but I rarely post them here. Dunno why.)

At any rate, I've never been dead in a dream before, I don't think, and that was definitely the sensation in this. Text follows.


Dream:
I had a dream I had died. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before. I was saddened, I suppose for my own loss, and my need to leave this world, but I also woke up with tears in my eyes for the loss of Mena. I think she had already gone on to some other realm.

I was standing on the edge of a farmhouse yard, I think, nighttime. I was with another person, a male but no one I recognized. He had died too, but somehow was more privy to the way these things worked. We gazed out over the edge of the cleared land, over a fence and dried stalks of October-dead corn blowing in the cool breeze. Beyond lay blackness, not just night but pure black, no stars, not even any ground or hills or differential between sky and land.

As we walked slowly toward the gate that opened onto the blackness, I asked once more if this was it, the only choice, if this was the way it had to be. My companion answered yes, that there were no choices any more. We stepped up to the gate, he stepped through and I began to follow. That’s when I was struck by sudden, overwhelming sadness at the loss of Mena.

I watched the other guy disappear into the gloom ahead, and took one tentative step forward, not yet through the gate but nearly there. Then I awoke.

I still miss you girlie.

angels notes II

Here's another section of notes 'From the Desk of Roy Cohn' (fictional; patent pending) from our recent production of Angels in America. (Here's the first one.)

I like this piece because it most directly addresses what's going on on the stage below where I was.

Here's the scan. Translation from Kurt-ese to English follows.



“I’m going to die.”

(Who can accept death?)
(The animal won’t allow it.)
(The Machine insists on running.)

“I’m going to die.” This is such a brave and unheard sentiment. We run our lives based on the notion that we will never die, that the world would stop spinning should it suddenly find itself deprived of our glorious presence. And of course, it’s fear of the unknown that drives this denial. It is what all religion is based on: ignorance of what comes after, and the fear of the masses who are told that someone does know.

The moment of acceptance--pre-deathbed acceptance of the fact of death, of the fact that we simply do not go on and on in this world or any other, that is the moment we become free.

RIP Teddy

There has been a lot said about Ted Kennedy by people who are better writers than me and who know more about him than I do, but one thing is inescapable: this man--despite his faults, which we all have, right?--was a brave, brave person. In a way his brothers had it easy--he endured so much more vitriol and bullshit for having lived as long as he did, and fighting the battles he did. And standing up and facing the world--especially the vicious, bloody world of politics--after suffering all the personal hardships he did (some admittedly self-inflicted) he proved to possess a fearlessness the rest of us can only admire from afar.

Not only that, he had more to lose for fighting the battles he fought. As someone from the blueblood set, someone who was taken care of for life, he had nothing at all to personally gain from his support for regular folks and their rights. He stood up to his heritage, and his neighbors, and his father's and grandfather's friends his entire career--because it was the right thing to do. Do you think that back in the late sixties anyone in Hyannisport gave a shit about the 'rights of the negro?'

Fuck no.

It's hard to imagine this kind of integrity today, when a senator like Max Baucus can sell out virtually his entire constituency for a few million in campaign funds.

While we're at it, fuck any fat-ass, bloviating pundit from either side of the aisle who thinks bravery is calling for OTHER people to go to war, or for OTHER people to forgo healthcare, or for OTHER people to suffer during economic hard times. You are small-minded, grasping trash, selfish, yet dumb enough to be bought for pennies, desperate to elevate yourself to a level you cannot possibly achieve. You will always be greedy, low-rent garbage, willing to sell your ass and your children's asses for a few bucks. You think you are of a different class than the rest of us, but the truth is you have no class whatsoever.

Unlike Ted Kennedy.

And here is another tidbit that hasn't been commented on much, not that I have seen, anyway. He knew the end was coming, he knew the end was near, and what did he do? He dragged his ass out here to Denver and gave a helluva speech last summer, and he fought as hard and long as he could for the things he believed in, but he also ACCEPTED the end. From the nytimes:

'WASHINGTON — The once-indefatigable Ted Kennedy was in a wheelchair at the end, struggling to speak and sapped of his energy. But from the time his brain cancer was diagnosed 15 months ago, he spoke of having a “good ending for myself,” in whatever time he had left, and by every account, he did.'

That sentiment, to me, is what is most desperately missing from modern American outlook. We are stark raving terrified of death. We alter our faces, our bodies and our skin through surgery, we change our diets in the hopes of staving off death for an extra year--hell, we freakin OBSESS over our diet, we slave in the gym (guilty) spending countless hours today trying to buy a few extra hours...when? When we're broken-down and near death?

We imagine ourselves so very fucking special that there is no way the world can continue without us.

To hear someone speak aloud of the coming 'end' just seems so healthy and natural and, well, sane to me. Rather than screeching about anti-oxidants and wearing helmets and elbow pads for a walk downtown, we could all learn from his example.

An aside: why is it that hardcore religious people--that is, those who presumably believe most strongly in an afterlife--seem to be the ones most terrified of death? If they truly believed in an afterlife of sunshine, candy and roses on a cloud with Jeebus, wouldn't they be rushing people to the exits rather than pulling a Schiavo whenever the opportunity crops up? Wouldn't they sing and dance and cheer whenever a loved one died?

Just a thought.

RIP Teddy. Here was a Man. He Stomped on the Terra.

more holiday thoughts

More holiday travel thoughts.

There is something that happens in my brain this time of year, when i am getting ready to leave town, wherein I feel a sense of foreboding, as if I won’t be surviving the trip -- or at least not coming back somehow.

Beyond the obvious fears about modern travel in general -- four or five days before I left for Pennsylvania a plane skidded off the runway at DIA, thank you very much -- there is something dark and ... closing-off about this time of year. The fact that the shortest day of the year is very close to the day that we celebrate the birth of Mithras -- I mean Jesus -- might have something to do with it. There is an amazingly descriptive passage in a Neil Gaiman book, ‘American Gods’ in which he describes a Celtic rite of sacrifice at the time of the winter solstice in order to bring the sun back out. A child is kept in a cage and eventually killed in order to appease the sun god who is forsaking the tribe in winter.

Now, I don’t profess to know the historical accuracy of such a story, but suffice it to say that we can be pretty certain that human sacrifice to various gods has occurred throughout history. I think we Anglo-Saxon types would prefer to believe that such practices were limited to dusky, brown people on exotic non-European continents, and that’s what makes the idea that our Celtic ancestors might have done these things especially shocking.

However, I think it is interesting that I get a feeling in my bones that death or the end of this phase of life lies right around the corner, as I get ready to leave for Xmas vacation. (I’m back now, and no harm done, but it is still curious to me that I feel this way every year.)

Maybe I was a human sacrifice in a past life. Or maybe it’s just a damn bleak and unforgiving time of year, lol. I feel better now, though, and the days are already getting longer, thank Jupiter --I mean jesus.