Sunset at Auchwitz

Drive Defensively – blind drivers abound

Desire

Desire is the only thing standing between you and true freedom. But freedom is a desire. If you are lucky enough to be free of desire then you are free and can lose that freedom. If you desire not only attaining a state of freedom but also the continuation of that state, you are back where you started: with a desire. The desire to not feel desire. Luckily, I do not desire to feel no desire, therefore I can enjoy the freedom of no desire without the desire for it to continue indefinitely. Desire or no desire, it’s all the same to me, because I do not see a connection between desire and it’s attainment. Just as I have ceased to see a link between hope and possibility, fear and safety, prayer and a miracle.

The Reigned in Rich.

They live behind sculpted shrubbery plantings and faux distressed fencing but they are always in our face. Why? They have, until now, been able to get away with it. They insist on isolating themselves from the rest of us and yet, if we walk our dog without a leash in a near-by park, or piss on the sidewalk in front of their moat, they call the authorities. Until now, the authorities responded because the authorities were afraid of the rich.  Now, the authorities could give a shit. Mr. and Mrs. Bosworth no longer have clout. They are now avoided and ridiculed for their shrubbery sculptors and pig-like lifestyles. It is much like pre-French Revolution days– when the people finally figured out that Mr. and Mrs. Bosworth and their high winded demands could be erradicated with a blunt knife. Who would have thought that the day would come when a person wearing a Rolex would be looked upon as a jerk instead of a success? It has happened almost overnight. The rich are deflated. They hunker down as they drive their BMW Mini-Vans to the mall…. they are finally ashamed of themselves, being caught in action: the action of inaction. Good God. I saw a specimen today, near a lovely waterfront park. This pig lived on park-side in an ivy-crawling mini mansion with her two poodles. The park has a big sign that says, No Dogs. I was walking my dog in front of her house. Without a leash. As were many others. Apparently, in earlier days, the pig would call the cops on park walkers with dogs. After all, a law is a law, a rule a rule. After all, she and her fellow piglets insisted on these laws, the laws of exclusion. So- I was walking my dog without a leash, and Mrs. Bosworth was watching me as she walked towards her Mercedes Mini-Van.  A year ago, Mrs. Bosworth would have made a face, or  I would have felt fearful. Instead it was Mrs. Bosworth who was fearful.  “Isn’t it a lovely day?” She sang. “What an adorable pooch you have there!” Why thank you! I replied. Please don’t cut my throat, thought Mrs. Bosworth.  I won’t, now that you are being civil, I thought. Keep it up and  I might let you live. I strongly suggest you never again call the authorities.

If you Are Crying, You are on the Wrong Track.

This photo was taken during a call from a jazz club, firing me for a reason they could not comprehend themselves. 100 thrilled audience members, 1 asshole.  One asshole trumps a crowd, so I suggest you become an asshole if you hunger for power. It was time, long ago, for me to separate myself from businesses dependent on total acceptability from the masses. And yet, there is the promise of the steady 100 bucks, a weeks groceries. Is it worth it? I want you to consider this question as it relates to your own inner or outer sobbing manifestations. This photo was taken in 2002, in Sarasota, Florida, while I was living and caring for my mother in that swamp land of escapism. I just found the picture at a friend’s house, the friend who took the picture. He knew that someday I would appreciate the photo. It would teach me something. And it does. How ridiculous to weep over the loss of a negative. It takes many slaps in the face to wake us up. I am happy to have this photo as a reminder that a happy deep sleep in the bosom of the mediocre is not my destiny.

The State of Performance Art and Music in Providence

Why Can’t We Have Fun Again?

Winter, 2002, Davio’s in The Biltmore. Buddy and his constituents holding court, heavy handed drinks, people with an easy laugh, money in their pockets, a scam in the works. It seemed like everybody was getting laid and actually enjoying it. Brown University Professeurs, seeking tenure but completely confident of their future sipped champagne cocktails in the love seats and requested songs with suggestive lyrics. The Davio’s management, happy with the flow of money into their cash register, let the evening unfold without comment. The gays and straights and rich and bohemian and uptights and East sider and West siders crushed together in a frenzy of freedom from the Same Old. It was a true Cabaret room where all castes congregated, sharing bad jokes, sing-a-longs and lousy nachos. The young and beautiful students. the Brown intellectuals, the tourists, groups staying at the hotel for a conference — Turf Masters of America, a Mortician Convention — dull herds of men from Milwaukee and Baltimore pressing against the local Madonna-Wanna tarts of North Providence, and Voila, it’s Christmas week and Davio’s has decorated the front windows with fake mistletoe and an electric Santa and Mrs. Santa, who girate randomly until I readjust them for slow dancing and suddenly, Mr and Mrs. Santa are fornicating on the stage. The crowd absorbs the peculiarity and is amused. Nobody makes a move to separate the electric Christmas couple. The night heats up with more jazz swing tunes, heaps of snow pile up against the windows behind the stage, cars in the street are stranded in sleet. They double park and come into the room for a drink, welcomed with cheers, handed half empty beer mugs.

FUN FACT OF THE DAY

75% of this nation’s elderly poor are women.

L’Elizabeth’s Ignorant Waiter Causes Undue Hardship

U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division Disability Rights Section

Americans with Disabilities Act

ADA Business BRIEF: Service Animals

Service animals are animals that are individually trained to perform tasks for people with disabilities such as guiding people who are blind, alerting people who are deaf, pulling wheelchairs, alerting and protecting a person who is having a seizure, or performing other special tasks. Service animals are working animals, not pets.

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), businesses and organizations that serve the public must allow people with disabilities to bring their service animals into all areas of the facility where customers are normally allowed to go. This federal law applies to all businesses open to the public, including restaurants, hotels, taxis and shuttles, grocery and department stores, hospitals and medical offices, theaters, health clubs, parks, and zoos.

Caption: Businesses that serve the public must allow people with disabilities to enter with their service animal.

• Businesses may ask if an animal is a service animal or ask what tasks the animal has been trained to perform, but cannot require special ID cards for the animal or ask about the person’s disability.

• People with disabilities who use service animals cannot be charged extra fees, isolated from other patrons, or treated less favorably than other patrons. However, if a business such as a hotel normally charges guests for damage that they cause, a customer with a disability may be charged for damage caused by his or her service animal.

• A person with a disability cannot be asked to remove his service animal from the premises unless: (1) the animal is out of control and the animal’s owner does not take effective action to control it (for example, a dog that barks repeatedly during a movie) or (2) the animal poses a direct threat to the health or safety of others.

• In these cases, the business should give the person with the disability the option to obtain goods and services without having the animal on the premises.
  
• Businesses that sell or prepare food must allow service animals in public areas even if state or local health codes prohibit animals on the premises.

• A business is not required to provide care or food for a service animal or provide a special location for it to relieve itself.
  

• Allergies and fear of animals are generally not valid reasons for denying access or refusing service to people with service animals.

• Violators of the ADA can be required to pay money damages and penalties.
  

Caption: Service animals are individually trained to perform tasks for people with disabilities.

If you have additional questions concerning the ADA and service animals, please call the Department’s ADA Information Line at (800) 514-0301 (voice) or (800) 514-0383 (TTY) or visit the ADA Business Connection at ada.gov.

Duplication is encouraged. April 2002

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last update April 26, 2002

I Want to change my Life

It isn’t a place, or person, or job. It isn’t a mindset, attitude, outlook. It isn’t unhappiness, frustration, anger, sadness, boredom. It isn’t the weather, lack of vitamins, unruly hair. All the previous may have some effect on my desire to change my life, but not completely. It may be more that I am aging, slowing down a bit, and realize that my rocking chair isn’t suitable for a long term rock towards death. But even that is not the whole story. As I’ve mentioned before, I have died several times during my life, recently when my mother passed away, and then I return, half heartedly, to continue on what I know to be the wrong path, with no idea of how to set it right. It’s that life of quiet desperation mentioned by Thoreau, a life I was determined to avoid, and now I find myself in the middle of it, lost again.

These are good times for road trips, but at our age we know the road trip takes us to the same place in a different state or country. Youth adds and subtracts easily, moves through, under, and around the unpleasant, buoyed by hope fueled with innocense. I am no longer innocent, but I think I’m still dumb enough to make mistakes that won’t lead me to either an early grave or a jail cell. When one is young, there is nothing to lose because there is so much to gain. When one is older, there is again nothing to lose, for there is little to gain. The young and old share that freedom from over-earnest choices fraught with conditions and heavy consequence. Maybe that’s why I am feeling something other than a mid-life crisis. The standard crisis, in my mind, includes the sketch of an old dream gone sour and the determination to give it another try.

My present crisis is not rooted in the past or even the future. It does not contain a plan or a dream, a hope or a direction. It is just an internal dis-ease with the way my life has invented itself over the years, and the wrongness in the nowness of it. It is PRESENTLY, very presently, wrong.

It helps not to answer the telephone, but even that is an active choice to continue with the wrongness of the telephone. Of course, there is nothing wrong with a telephone per se, but in the context of choosing to answer or not answer it, it becomes a repository for questions regarding the people who exist, presently, in my life, and want to talk to me about something that I have no interest in discussing. My present interests are shifting so rapidly and haphazardly that they are impossible to acknowledge, let alone enjoy.

Instead, I am fascinated with the shift itself, in this nowness, every moment, of every day, this interior shake-up. It is a dream-like state, where everything is intensified. My blue curtains are very blue, the walk I took in the park, a very very walk in a park. The sweet potato for dinner, quite a potato, the only one in the world. So orange.

Now you’d think I was drunk, writing in this way, but no, it’s just a very now afternoon wherein I have erased all of the past and future and ideas and opinions and plans, in order to make the inner shift necessary for my sanity. The shift away from this life that I want to change.

It is a busy time. The business of a leaking life, spurting out and making a mess – the business of cleaning it up and plugging the holes, as I await the shift. The muscles in my body seem poised and ready for a heavy climb. There is a sense of the ominous and the sacred. Something’s up.