September 6, 2024

More muscle gardening in the bamboo island. Transplanted peonies, put in St John’s wort, wondered why I took so long getting to a task which is not, after all, THAT demanding. 

Avl GMC is NOT invited to sing at Pride. We’ve sung at every Pride march from the first on; it is an absurdity for us NOT to sing at an event we helped to establish. Our performer’s application got misplaced or mishandled in some mysterious way, and we are replaced by the Community Chorus. The Pride Committee is now all lesbians, and the byzantine political strategies of lesbians are in full, and incomprehensible, application. I get through this life trusting that the people who rail against the patriarchy do so with full, if covert, understanding that there is a much, much worse alternative. 

Another mass shooting in Georgia. After every murder of children and teachers there’s an outcry to “harden” the schools and make psychological counseling available. That’s up there with “thoughts and prayers” as futile and hypocritical gestures. There is one simple solution– everybody knows it-- and everybody who does not spin his compass instantly to it should be removed from public responsibility. Remove the guns. No guns, no mass shootings. It really is that simple. Grumpy or alienated or infuriated people will just have to grow out of it or sublimate like the rest of us, and not lay to waste a generation– all too easy with an assault weapon ticking away in the closet. The saddest and most twisted mind in the world will not cause harm if there’s no weapon in its hand. Make mayhem exert a little effort. No one has a need or a right to possess assault weapons: this includes the police. Maybe there were second amendment concerns at one point, but constant abuse has worn that away. Abuse a right, lose a right, especially one not by any stretch of the imagination “unalienable.” Maybe we will have to fight the government or the police one day, but their firepower will perpetually overwhelm our own so that only the ballot box will be our viable weapon. I LOVE the idea of standing behind a barricade fighting against tyranny, but I know I’d lose. Move on to another way. We’re not concerned that children are being murdered. Not enough to stop it. We simply don’t care. This is not a canard but a truth repeatedly established. If you do not advocate reasonable gun control, you countenance the continued murder of innocents. If there were another solution, it would have appeared. We want it to stop by some magical operation when enough blood has been shed. We’re running through a munitions factory with lighted torches in our hands crying about safety. The solution is known, immediate, simple, inevitable. The last hundred school shootings have not been accidents. 

*

From Sidney in NYC:

SJB:

I am clearing out a decade of Emails.

This one has made my day, dear David.

It is Bitter Sweet (Noel Coward's spelling) as I am think of our deceased designers, Michael Hottop and Carrie Robbins. They were with us 100%.

SJB2ND

On Friday, June 7, 2013 at 01:50:31 PM EDT, <davehopes@aol.com> wrote:

Just wanted to say that I think your directing for LML is bold and visionary. The parts that strike me particularly include the bed scene, which you have taken further than I feared we might, and justified the appellation of "gay play," It shows more of their relationship than the words could. The dancing scene between L and J, is touching and beautiful. You have taken the extremes of emotion (when people howl and cry) exactly to the limit, but never over, so it is cutting and agonizing. I am very happy and very grateful. See you tonight.

I remember writing this because I was infuriated by the over-acting, the edges blurred and the borders crossed. It was a way of exorcising my disappointment before we met again face-to-face

 September 5, 2024

Tremendous gardening, digging & clearing. Ms Turkey and her (now huge) babies came by and watched me, carrying out their routine without much regard for me thundering around in the garden ten feet away. I killed a ring snake with my shovel the first time I penetrated the iris garden. I was upset, but could think of nothing to do about it. Total harmlessness would mean not moving at all. But I mention my poor reptile friend so that its existence is noted. Cleaned out the end of the bamboo garden that I had told myself I was keeping as a wild space, when in fact I was just too idle to clear it and put in a purple buddleia, as I did this morning, mulching between it and the extant rhododendron. Dug up cobblestones and old bottles, some of them unbroken. More work to do there, but fortunately eager (and fit) to do so. Given key lime pie for my birthday after choir rehearsal. Talked with K at my mailbox, met her new dog. Her friend had her chicken coop and most of her chickens destroyed by a bear. Cut swamp hydrangea seed pods for B, then we both fussed in the church yard to free a spider that had got into the bag. 

Labor Day

September 2, 2024

Productive Labor Day. Moderate gardening– dead-heading, weeding. Almost stepped on my rabbit under the pink front rose. Saw him again sitting on the garden’s edge at twilight, gave him a wide berth so I wouldn’t startle him twice in one day. Sat on the front porch for a time, and a blue-tailed skink foraged his way across the bricks, touching my foot with his nose twice. No reaction. I might as well have been a stone. 

Smiled thinking of a dirty song TD and I shared long ago. Our estrangement is so pointless and so complete it must have been ordained by the gods.  

74

 

September 1, 2024

Posted a photo from my first birthday in the apartment on Pondview. The chair to my right, already then an antique from my great-grandmother’s house, now sits in my bathroom.

Her husband writes that my beautiful Syracuse roommate Sue Shane died last night.

Enough birthday greetings on Facebook to satisfy my insecurities. 

Distant Thunder

 

August 31, 2024

Rain finally came, accompanied by what seemed like endless thunder from the west and south. Blessed. After the rain came stillness so absolute you began to be afraid, longing for the least breeze to trouble the smallest leaf. 

The team goes off to Edisto today. I’d decided that I would be in London for my birthday this year, but I am not in London.

Realizing I’m a dualist. Soul is soul and matter and matter, though the matter we’re given as our portion can be energized by soul, as soul can be calmed and refocused by matter. I believe in a transcendent body wherein these two elements are reconciled and alloyed. I will not see it in this life. 

Feeling the burden, the isolation, the confusion. I weep ten times a day. I think of those I’ve loved, and the futility, at the end, of loving them. I pick up an invisible cat; I reach back to a face lost thirty years ago. I kept my feet faithfully on the path and managed to be lost beyond all redress. 

 

August 30, 2024

An incredibly fine and diaphanous insect got into the house last night. I saw it only when it passed in front of the TV, but a couple of times it brushed against my face, cool and slight as floating hair, difficult to credit as a living thing. 

I went to sit on the back porch tonight, but changed plans because Madame Turkey and her two offspring were already there, displayed in attitudes of royal ease. 

Agitated over social issues, over disappointments and opportunities, interpreting comments, judging glances, reading subtle attitudes, trying to be sure of where I fit in. It’s like being in high school again. I thought there was a point when all that was left behind. 

Drove my Josh Stein for Governor sign into the ground. How long will it last? 

 

August 28, 2024

Start-back of Symphony Chorus. Sharing music causes agony in my arthritis-y hands. Plus, I get to sit beside the guy who never knows where we are. The universe arranges that to teach me patience. Renewal of my conviction that if you have to explain the same point too many times, you are wrong. 

Video on Facebook of our rehearsal of “All Good People” in Minneapolis. I couldn’t find myself, then realized that I was the guy who I thought was too handsome to be me. A nice moment. The basses were solid. 

Docenting, very few people, could write within the lulls. Never wrote in the Cathedral before. The great-grandfather of one woman (Susan) was a worker on the Biltmore project beginning n 1894. We convinced ourselves he had been in that very room. One couple came from an RV colony in Florida called The Great Outdoors. He asked me to pray with him for his niece, who, as an alcoholic, had fallen and hit her head so many times her brain bleeds and she’s now near death. What he asked me to pray for was that she come to know her Lord and Savior before she dies.