Friday(good)3 April 2o26
Easter has many echoes through the chambers of my heart - Ma more than Pa, had mysterious relationships with ‘holydays’ often attaching a mysterious significance quite articulated, more distinguished by valence of emotion and flurries of activity. Once when young, she’d herded Pop, and the ‘whole famdamly +1kidofftheblock’ into the used conveyance du-jour and continued her herding, all the way to Grand Central Market in downtown Los Angeles, for “cultural immersion”, and back. Much later as her 2nd husband Leo, lay dying in their desert paradise; she’d conceived it appropriate i and my professional painter Belgian Papermaker spouse come and spruce up corners of their ‘pyramid ranch’ high-ceilinged living room, it being given to dust and all, being located in the desert. My wife and i were nursing the dregs of an unhappy marriage, and gave orders better without me to take them, so i went to amuse myself stacking rocks on the low retainer driveway wall. Yet being Easter time too, Ma required the drama of a rupture and came to tell me how rocks ought to stack; yeah it didn’t end well. Truth be told; she - ma was never able to break the loving bond i carried throughout my life protecting somehow the fragility her ‘mania’ manifested in my own peculiar intensity.
The elder brother, who i cannot claim to understand, save the tactical awareness required to survive those who throw their weight around from a broken will. Turned up MIA one particular Easter when he was still dabbling in our family’s proclivity for Alcoholism; the Sunday morning the plan was for the SoCal tribe to rendezvous at the Beverly Hills pied-à-terre; i was living in a hand-me-down shared-home remnant from the ‘suburb domestic collapse plague’ of the 70’s, and it was sweet - Grand Piano, cement floors, my room was lime green, the roommate: a ’Canuck’ Country Western, OC Tavern-busker / Tony Robbins Acolyte (nascent MAGA-mindset); she, La Dueña: old-money Pasadena, even blend of Aunty Mame, Morticia Addams, and Mrs Robinson and insanely smart, along with a dense and equally incongruous mix of academics, aerospace ‘players’, and personalities passing in and out of the permeable membrane of this ‘cultural shipwreck’ within a bastion of OC Aristocracy. In telephone confabs with distraught mother, stepfather’s sister, resigned sister-in-law Beverly Hills was officially cancelled by noon, and the wheels began the inexorable grind the ‘Sacred’.
Who, what, when, where and how - all fair questions: ‘The Lair’ with its magic magnetic appeal to the ‘unmoored’ answered 1 and 4, leaving 2, 3 and 5 to rise from the ashes of the conventional to transform a ‘dead loss’ into an as yet unknown miracle. And like all narratives the need to drag the corpse of past miracles into the fusion-melding torment of contemporary struggle is what makes story telling fun’ not a little like the ‘muting’ habit formed from living under an airport runway, to ‘blocking’ instinct which makes living next to loud neighbors possible. Item 2 on the list was simple: food, which?, no time for turkey being closer to one o’clock than 12, roast/lamb were out: fowl¿ I had some few frozen pheasant, but not nearly enough for an unknown number of spiritual warriors, already returning calls for an answer to 4. DUCK ¡ and just like that, off i dashed to the “Market Basket, cum Tokyo Central,” within 1/2 hour i was back in the kitchen immersing two rugby ball sized carcasses in hot water, hoping against hope - thawing, physics and broiling would intersect in a reasonable amount of time - “reasonable” being the operative expression for answering the open number 4, along with the evolving 2 and 5.
Here’s a clue how myopic this topic is; on the very outside chance you’ve shoehorned time from far more sophisticated “a iEye” fare, the possibility you find a scintillating rehashing of obscure events 30 years old curious enough to focus over your neighbor’s insistence you appreciate her/his music selection rather than pan for useful nuggets of wisdom is to quote Bob D. - “Love minus Zero,” and yet i persist, inexplicably; are we dialing in on the deeper meaning of Easter ¿ persistence ¿ Back to the ‘nowhere near’ last supper - Wo/man¡!i was that house was humming that Easter: had to have been sometime 1990s, prior to my 2nd marriage, for i’d just finished the granite DNA strand, and yet to commence the Granite Femur wife number 3 would bestow on my ‘Best Friend,’ just before she bailed 1 week after my ‘emergency appendectomy’ - hard to believe, i know, it’s hard to believe and i’m the one writing; at the very least, what i write is not “a iEye” blather. The house on Country Club was filling, nearly the same rate the Ducks were thawing; the gifted pheasants were fortuitous experiments on ‘Fowl Dressing’, me favoring the citrus influence of countless bbq’s, but smart enough to collaborate because my ‘fragile male ego’ was yet to be eviscerated by __________fill in the blank, coming down the pike; nor convinced the ‘light at the end of the tunnel is not still a train,’ coming this way. What did get served that memorable Pasqua, was a lesson on the durability and utility of a persistent portion of ‘goodwill,’ a lesson reinforced over time and most recently from the writings of Benito Juarez, the first indigenous president of Mexico: “Una voluntad firme y constante de hacer el bien superará las más graves dificultades”.
And so i keep trying; i.e., concomitant with this excursion down ‘memory lane’, a man i barely know lay dying as close to me as 3rd base to home-plate; there is fuck all i can say, think or do to alter that fact. Only from members of his clan do i know, as much as any refugee can know about hosts: - he is kind, given to all the frailties and strengths our species has or is learning. Paradoxically a sister, i also barely know, lay dying on the other side of our shared continent. Sadly the greater likelihood this vignette will affect our species is through the greed and stupidity of the “Epstein Class” whose intellectual wraiths troll the ‘information super-highway’ for what their combined business acumen is unable to generate - content containing · affect, an oversight akin to the destruction of “Chavez Ravine” for a baseball stadium of the ages, but lacking water fountains to quench the thirst of its fans. As an artist/writer i take pleasure in drawing parallels of the implausible and inchoate - like, for example the possibility that Jesus was just another bloke looking for a drink of water, “But what do i know”¿ - Michel de Montaigne ·
solidarność
(˚ㄥ _˚)
3 April 2o26
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