Tomorrow the 23rd of June is a birthdate for 3 principal people in my life - unrelated by race, creed or age - though each had a telling influence at critical junctures in my life. The 1st would be M______ whom i have described elsewhere in these chronicles - My first memory of M_____ was from the back of a Dodge station wagon parked at a swank hotel in Berkeley, CA. My elder sister had been deemed best suited as envoy from our distant branch of our common tree - all i could remember is a tallish slender young lady holding court with my “Medusa” sister with composure and kindness. I’d long grown accustomed to illogical disconnects - like why K_____ could get out of the car and meet this vision, while i remained sequestered; made one wonder then, but no longer. Later M____ and i enjoyed a tryst that failed due to a lack of patience and imagination on both our parts - but mostly my own. The universe in its inimitable wisdom was simply preparing the ground to drive a point home · whatever that elusive point might be.
M_____ taught me much, which is small surprise, for her father, my distant relative was a professor of Shakespeare at a major University in the depths of the “Midwest.” My romance karma with his daughter is not from a lack of sincerity, but from confusion with shifts in the fabric of the universe. Just as i was growing into an awareness of M______ as a human and the complications of a 900+ mile long distance romance, J______, who was to become my 2nd wife and her 18 month-old baby J_____ joined my corporate softball team - “Ma’s Marauders - ‘Ma Spring’um Bail Bonds · was our corporate sponsor”. Baby J_____’s dad was allegedly rank and only proved himself more so the further down the path we all traveled together - so ya’ know, Baby J_____’s birthday was also June 23rd. 7 years later and a divorce from mother J______ whose reply when i asked her, “why did you marry me?” was, “at the time i didn’t think i could do any better, now i do.” Baby J_____ is now 36, and i pray often that my wayward ways in her world at a difficult time for her and us all, have not scarred her by my ignorance or the learning of lessons i faced at that time.
Enter entirely a self-centered wounded me 10 years or so later struggling to make sense physically, emotionally and existentially of a life that resembled more the landscape of an Hieronymus Bosch than the well-ordered execution of life by the child of an educated progressive instructor from the “greatest generation” in post WWII euphoric, and as it happens largely mythological U.S. of A. The downside is expectation about what can or can’t be accomplished from this heady time of freedom and victory over an authoritarian regime that rather than be vanquished, simply leaked back under the rocks of dishonesty to to wait for a more opportune time to re-emerge and “assume facts not in evidence” about royalty and the history of monarchs in the development of human wellbeing, and Voila we have America does _rumpf.
It is of little use to point the finger at a ruler who has outmaneuvered you, for all you accomplish by that surrender is to increase that ruler’s contempt for your will. If you want to live, and you wish a life for your children - you must own your desires, your mistakes and your future. Every other avenue is closed to you; you may not accommodate the presence of an economy that serves you not - to hanker after objects you don’t need and cannot afford is an insult to every sacrifice any ancestor in your life made to your wellbeing and to do anything but to work tirelessly for the ecological safety of your children and you children’s children is a cowardice i’d prefer to be far from. So go - away from me and my heretical notions that saving humanity is worthwhile and your pursuits of egotistical chimeras is a laughable affront to all that is noble in our noble but tenuous human history.
And now to the last birthday for June 23rd as it pertains to this chronicle. P____ reigned over a massage parlor on Hollywood Blvd at a time my body was more than broken, more like mangled. During this time i sought comfort from this 2nd Story enclave of Thai body workers in downtown Hollywood, i endured the surgical repair of an inguinal hernia post Laparoscopic Appendectomy - a softball size contusion on my left elbow after slipping on a rain slickened terrazo sidewalk of the Avenue of the Stars, prior to the Academy awards - call it luck of the draw, i call it a miracle that P_____ P_____ managed to squeeze a 12 fl oz of blood from my elbow into my lymph system - that weeks later she honored the last weeks of my father’s complicated history with a Thai rubdown i know he carried with him as a part of the blessings of life. I have little contact with any of the three women i’ve just discussed and that is your loss to have missed an opportunity to spend any moments with them as i have - for i am better for simply trying to describe each of their kindnesses to the world.
jts 22/06/2020
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