Outside my apartment and wondering what to do

Every moment in life is a choice—to be or not to be; to do or not to do; to grasp at a shimmering straw or let the wind carry it away from you forever; to smoke the last drag of a cigarette or to throw it to the ground and move on to another task; to bask in Love and Wonder or to disappear into Wonder’s oblivion; to write this word or that; to forget to write anything at all; to break your legs or your heart in a dance which compels you, or to not be compelled to dance; to stare at the sky or to stare at the ground; to be or not to be; to do or not to do. Every indivisible moment in Eternity is Will. And yet it is at once Destiny.

Some brief thoughts on health care--more to come

If we think about it not as a health-care issue but as an insurance issue, it makes a lot more pragmatic sense for our country to have mandated health care. We pay insurance liability when we drive a car because of obvious risk associated with driving; this insurance is MANDATORY because our society is based on fairness--we aim to avoid secondary costs to those involved who were not at fault in an accident and ultimately to prevent financial dominoes that occurs when the person without insurance has to pay for hospital bills or lawsuits and then cannot pay other entities. Having insurance is like buying a share in responsibility instead of moving through a dangerous world vulnerable to every fateful occurrence and left to pay your cleanup costs and those of everyone else if there is an accident.

Why shouldn’t health care be the same? If we are a society that believes no one should be denied EMERGENCY medical treatment, isn’t it counterproductive to deny coverage (which is the job of many insurance company employees, and for good financial reason) for serious ailments and then wait until it becomes an emergency whose hospital write-off costs we ALL have to shoulder? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—speaking of which, we could do for more preventative medicine as well. As for small businesses, I think we are just so used to our status quo: “If our group insurance is good, then let’s not mess with the system.” But my boss used to pay exorbitant rates for small group insurance just because of the demographics of his company—most employees had families with more than two children. On his group insurance plan, I was once given the go-ahead for a procedure and then denied permission to proceed literally an hour before the procedure due to “pre-existing condition”. In this case it seems almost a pure exercise in power, where the necessity of the procedure is not even factored in, but only what they can get away with denying me (I’m not saying it WAS the most crucial procedure, btw). My co-workers had substantially more deducted from their paychecks because of their children. These were not isolated experiences but rather part of the constant “private bureaucracy” dedicated to bottom line. Also, how is an employee to change his insurance if he is unsatisfied? Group insurance is provided by employer and it is rational to choose this over directly-purchased insurance (in the privatized market) because costs are simply too high to do otherwise.

In the final sum this bill is aimed at fairness, and though it MIGHT have some affect on the extensiveness/cost of some plans, it should make insurance more affordable and health care more available for all, and quality won’t be considerably diminished. If health care is a right and not a privilege, this is not only an economically pragmatic decision but a utilitarian and moral one as well.

A Poem for Someone

I think of you
now and then
for moments of every minute.
Fleeting images flash
through my helpless mind
and leave my body frantically electrified
with vibrations, waves,
violent tingling aftershocks of unsummoned emotion
that leave me reeling and
high as hell in their wake.

Your shining white eyes
as they careen sidelong in my direction
and then your face follows:
A paradise of exotic features—
Perfect lips, soft and yielding
into effortless smiles and grins
and puckered small while you pensively dawdle on some thought,
head cocked.
Can these precious lips yearn for others
Or are they struck narcissistic
by their own perfection?
Your teeth must live in perpetual bliss,
ensconced in a pink Eden of flesh.
Your cheeks bare severe little mounds
made to be fondled and kissed
and loved until one discovers there lies more to be loved
in the sweet sparse forest above your shining eyes.
And if lips could explore every secret sacred crevice
of your wondrous face
then they would already have roamed
The smooth terrain of your skin,
sprinkled with whimsical splashes,
profound specks of light brown,
the canvas for this masterpiece that is your face.
Your nose is a button that longs to be pushed,
and it might squinch its approval
while your eyes mastermind the strings
to your smiling puppet-cheeks and lips,
those two chestnut storytellers
whose emotional depth is fathomless.
Then there is the matter of your hair
which to me is like the tendrils of God,
proof that all is boundless and golden
in the universe,
that chaos is indeed order,
for when I touched your hair
and am close enough to you to smell
the unbearably intoxicating scent
of your silky, shiny mane,
there are, truly, no words
that can do justice
to the infinite cocktail of chemical pleasure
and the pain of yearning
that such pleaser induces in me.
Suffice to say that your presence is
like that of a goddess.

You have danced into my twisted heart without music
and have wrung from my soul
haunting vespers of lust and magical infatuation—
jubilant smoke
that my conscious mind has not felt
in quite some time.
Energy emanates through my bones
and muscles
as if I were attached to a giant generator.
But the source of this electricity,
this dull and fatiguing love-shock,
is you, the notion of you,
the existence of you,
and the inconceivable reality that
my logic and prudence has failed me
entirely. Utterly.
When you are in my mind
(as you so often are in every minute of these recent days)
I am a child, helpless,
a fragile being,
given to fits of hysterical emotion,
without shield to stop the spears of envy
which pierce my heart,
with feet filled heavy with the lead of anxiety
and doubt,
all supported by gossamer wings of ecstasy
which set my soul alight
and carry me through every minute of the day
as if it were at the same time
my first and my last.
The day’s work has been rendered trivial,
taking lowest order
to the lugubrious daydreams
about you.
In essence, you are my drug but not of my choosing.

What else to say?
Well, now there is nothing
but yearning in my soul.
Can I hope for but a moment
where the clouds recede
and allow me to love you
the way my body and mind desire?
The way you deserve to be loved?
Fully and with appreciation of your beauty,
inner and outer,
of your mesmerizing face and body and presence,
and to your deep and serene mind,
your genuineness, your grace, your kindness,
your humor and laughter,
the gentle urgency of your faith
which, though on the surface is in contrast to my own,
I somehow love as though it WERE my own;
of your concordant humility and confidence,
both of which you betray little
yet exude in rainbows.

I cannot explain the things in my life
which I would most like to explain.
The most important Truths
escape my vocabulary,
befuddle my thoughts,
and penetrate the ambivalent
depths of my weary soul.
But it is these Truths, such as Love,
as affinity and the belief in transcendent beauty,
that drive me to write poems
when I have usually no cause to do so.
It is such with all ballads,
Which are paeans to Life,
worship of the most basic beauties
in all reality.

But I give myself pause to reflect
And protect my heart
From the hurt it could be dealt,
has been dealt before
by incalculable attractions
of the heart and head—
by my caprice
and passion
disaster has in the past
shattered the hopes
of some hopeful lovers—
our tragedy has been the greatest,
owing to the lamentable fact
that you haven’t been my love.
And shall it be with all the unrequited.

For it is not possible I think
to tell you
the impact of your first touch
upon my skin, my hand,
that burned me and sealed my fate to you,
so that now I write a rambling love poem
that may or may not be sent at the right or wrong time,
that may ruin my chance to be with you
in the way I want,
in the way I feel I need to be.
I sacrifice my sanity and sabotage my chances
just so that I might tell you
how much I think of you now.

Moment to moment.
You are in my mind.

Permission to Rant?

*This long overdue post is dedicated to Gabrielle (because I'm a man of my word...from now on)

There’s a saying somewhere that goes “To fight and fail is to have lived; but to miss chances, to cower in the corner when opportunity knocks, though having ample chance and choice to do otherwise, this is akin to dying in the womb.”

Okay, there’s really no saying that goes like that. This has been completely made up on this page. I’m sure there are great and valiant words etched in stone somewhere, some of them present here. Words about brave men and women who charged against death, who created new worlds of possibility, who foresaw the future ripeness of their labors—such words usually precede the heroes for whom they have been written. In fact, one wonders if and if so how humankind ever summoned the courage to conquer its fears, especially the fear of inadequacy, of failure. Is there a greater dread for someone who cares about life than to fail at it utterly? Well, if my new quote holds any truth, the answer is “no”; however, the only way to fail here is to hesitate in the face of fear. So—deep breath—now is always the moment to proceed somewhere, anywhere, if but cautiously.

Perhaps this is a lame first topic for an essay series: the author shouldn’t have to justify why he is in the act of writing in the first place. Or should he? What if most of the writing in the world is done purely for the pleasure of the writer? Or, worse yet, what if it’s done out of boredom, like masturbation—the writer deriving no real lasting pleasure from the act, merely gratifying himself through the release. Well, so what? In the end it isn’t about the writer but the message. And here and now the message is the need to write. But what about? Does it make any sense to conjure up motivations for writing? Isn’t the point of writing—like masturbation—to get something out that NEEDS to be gotten out? An artist who employs mental motivation exercises is pathetic and useless—like a long-distance runner who really just wants to get where he’s going but doesn’t like the journey. “Anathema!” I shout.

Perhaps writing should be conceived thus: “a solitary activity, an amassing of pensive moments, and a large lump of material content to mold and sculpt into a meaningful output.” I think my fear and that of so many apprehensive writers is that our content is unwieldy or to monumental, that our tools of insight and zeal will not do justice or add anything of value to the areas we attempt to illuminate. Spaces have been filled by hundreds of thousands of writers throughout history, filling millions of books—where do we belong? And the result of this self-doubt is indefinite paralysis, failing to live up to our potential in many ways.

It is self-doubt, the doubting of our worthiness to add anything to the Edifice, which causes this paralyzing fear. And if this is true perhaps what we need is a kind of affirmation that will give us the encouragement to continue and to produce our desired fruits of labor. But what kind of affirmation will give us this courage? I think we first need to be aware of a few truths about the world around us before we can say anything about our abilities:

First, let us acknowledge that the whole of society that we live in is comprised of flesh, blood and minds, and of these things alone. Whatever resources we use and materials we fabricate are not compositions of our society, but products of it. It seems that many of us forget this in our obsession with objects, even mistaking our gadgets for friends (in a sense). For example, a car is a nice thing to have, but it is certainly not a member of any society, nor is a cell phone or a pair of jeans or a house or an airplane. None of these things can think or do for themselves. But even our household pets and farms animals have the ability to move and eat, to play and suffer. This kind of being can be considered a member of a society, but if and only if humans recognize them to have these characteristics. The moment we forget that cats and dogs can feel misery is the moment they cease to belong to our society. Also, we did not create these abilities in them, so they cannot be products of our society. In addition, few people would consider the earth and its resources to actually be “part of society”, though they are essential to every society on the planet. Let us thus construe society in the broad sense as containing only those elements which are living and capable of suffering.

Second, let us acknowledge that the evolvement of our society is important in who we are as actors. Certain societal systems can limit our freedom and our capacity to create and to investigate the world. But let us not fall into thinking that there is some measurable “progress” that has been achieved in our modern society with regard to the centrality of the value of personal creation within societies—importance must be somewhat relative. What do I mean by this? Just that in both ancient kingdoms and modern democracies, in Communist states and feudal hierarchies, creative products—be they writings, oral stories, artifacts, music—have played equally relevant and integral roles. Of course they have played extremely different roles in each kind of society in every era of history. Technology and infrastructural development have always shifted the ease of creation and the motivations for creating: In Ancient Egypt, the few that could write and create art were the Scribes; in Rome this honor was extended to the politicians, poets and record-keepers; in Renaissance Europe it was the upper-echelon of society and those artists who had patrons; more and more the resources dictated who could create, usually out of simple availability of supplies—the laws of supply and demand. On the other hand, throughout human history the freedom to create was deliberately stolen from members of society by those in power in order to stay in power.

As much as we have been shaped by our society, we must admit that our creative role as individuals in any place at any time whatsoever throughout history is always equal, always transient, and always pregnant with possibility. We can always add to that great edifice of ideas that humanity has built throughout history, although the availability of resources has increased (statistically) our opportunities immeasurably. Whether it was in the days of the Pharaohs when an elite scribe etched into the face of an obelisk his own slight augmentation of a story about the annual wheat harvest, or today as some lower-income shlub hovers over his PC in the middle of the night critiquing the latest independent film—itself a masterpiece of felicity and Will—on his blogsite, a dark and complex genius at work beneath the figurative citadels of power. He has faith in himself and knows that his efforts amount to something meaningful because of their inherent value: their artistic merits, the timeless forms that have been thrown into the work—the precise, the painting, the palimpsest.

What has been considered incidental is in fact profoundly important—the Truth of the work. What had seemed meaningful and rightly authoritative has been denuded as vulgar pretense—that endless stream of so much safe and marketable pap, the citadels. The cities of Power and control of creation that tower on top of that lowly mad scientist need not necessarily be ugly and artless; but they reek of self-importance and assumed permanence, as if the moment of all moments in the history of creativity were always and at once to be determined by their next fiat. This arrogance should be reserved for something truly eternal, not transitory. And because all societies and moments of great historical import are felicitous and transitory, we should hold this notion of permanence to be, thankfully, wrong.

Ahhhhhhhh…To return to the affirmation we need to eliminate fear of worthlessness, to get off our asses and create…I suppose a brief illustration would work best. If we imagine in the world all the writers working on basement computers, all the studio [apartment] artists holed up in their offices/living spaces, all the budding rock stars laying down riffs on pirated software in their parents’ houses, the sum of all independent creative output, contained in a single bell jar within the walls of an exurban industrial office complex—how would the fusion of this erstwhile constellation of ideas impact the future of art and thought? Would these felicitous moments that have given us such a rich history still occur? Is it even fathomable that a Jimi Hendrix or Tennessee Williams or Lao Tsu could be birthed by such a monoculture, a national or international “School of Thought”? Of course it is not. And the idea of such a commune is absurd. But then this should help us to appreciate the position of the free-agent artist. And it should tell us that not only is it okay and useful to lob your ideas and art into the public sphere, but that it is essential that many people with creative insights do this in order to move our society in meaningful human directions. Creative bursts and brilliant acts of faith are the stuff of history and our current state of society affords us just as much opportunity to take these actions. Despite the seeming saturation of the market, regardless of the fact that everyone and their dog is a blogger or vlogger, and not to mention that most people in this 3-second download culture are too busy screaming and browsing to listen to anything but the competing screams and beaming browsed banner ads of others, talking to themselves on the street and in their cars and on buses and subways, spitting out incessant vacuous vague straws of meaning called “Tweets” into overpopulated social networking glory-hole gossip parties while pornographic pop-ups shatter our already fractured focus!….(whew)—despite this chaotic reality, unreality, surreality that the many-most of us subject ourselves to on a daily and nightly basis, we can take solace in the existence of our shlub. Because even if the genius shlub is indistinguishable from the babbling incoherent shlub population, his Work isn’t. And all it takes is time and effort before the shlub produces an oeuvre worthy of notice—even if that oeuvre is a blog.

This might be a little long for a daily affirmation, but in felicity it has been written.