Test

Test

Open gate

Open gate

Good evening

A good time for an evening out.

Test.

test

testing

very limited in what I can do
there is a "send feedback" label in my way
will have to write in shortened lines of else
I cannot read them or edit them

don't know if this work at all
will have to try

does not work

testing

another good morning

it is very early in the morning.  it is not even 1am.  I have already slept for an hour or two.  I am rethinking my alliance with ACNA or the Anglican Church in North America.  upon re-examining their declarations of belief, I find two possible objections.  one has to do with the nature of the Holy Scriptures which I take to include both the old and new testaments plus the apocrypha.  these, at least the old and new testaments, are taken to be the final authority in matters of belief.  in just exactly what sense I am inclined to ask.  in the historical sense?  because, if that is the case, the scriptures are demonstrably inaccurate and imprecise.  in the theological or moral senses?  I would like to find them so, but i do not.  I still accept them as the divinely inspired word of God, but I am not entirely sure what that now means.  I believe the God is speaking through them, but perhaps not inerrantly.  and even that I find somewhat confusing.  that I love them and read them and revere them...to that I can testify.  that I  believe in God...I most certainly do.  but I believe in a logical and consistent God, perhaps at times translogical but never overtly illogical.  that is, the truth is a discernible absolute.  it cannot at the same time assert that a proposition is both true and false, I do not think; but even there perhaps I can be wrong.  I am having a problem with this software.  at times I cannot read what I am writing.  I may have to abandon this effort for now.  I will attempt to publish and continue later.

the other problem has to do with the 39 articles of religion.   more on that later.                    

good morning

and a very good morning it is.  I have been blessed beyond my furthest expectations.  this morning I began reading ecclesiaticus, not ecclelsiastes.  I read the preface.  I think it may be the only book of the bible, excepting perhaps  luke, that has a preface.  I will take my bible and prayer book down to the dining room and read chapter one there.  it is one of my favorite books, and a long one.  we began  reading psalm 119, also a long one, last night at evening prayer.  it's an acrostic psalm.   each stanza assigned to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet.  I like the first one and the second, "how shall a young man keep  his way".  we are always young in a sense. time to get going.   I thank God for this new computer and  other unexpected support.  praise Him.

hallelujah

just got back from a church counseling session.  they gave me a new computer, free dental work and a  four months bus pass.  pretty remarkable.

Computer has died

Am surviving on my phone

a sad story

i  probably should not tell.  many years ago in another state, in what is almost a totally different country, i had a friend, not the closest friend i ever had, but a good friend.  we attended schools not far from one another.  i had had a girl friend who meant absolutely everything to me, but apparently not me to her.  we were having an affair.  it ended badly; i did not know why.  sometime later i was with my friend, staying over, spending the night. and we were in fact sharing a bed.  he knew that i was struggling with bisexual attractions. just before we went to bed he said something strange to me about trying to become a writer, and feeling the need to have different experiences, and he had been thinking that perhaps he should have a gay affair. i was not really interested and ignored the overture.  years later he admitted to me having had an affair with my girl friend from that particular summer.  that was the last time i ever saw him.   it was over forty years ago.  it sort of reminds me of david and bathsheba.  i only had that one little lamb.  judge then between me and my friend.  what would He now deserve.

3:30 A.M.:

a night on the drag.  lower end downtown fort worth.  near a project and a courthouse.  all black except some gays.  i am driving a small red  car, with Tex and  Jose, both in drag.  Need a hair cut.  Pull into D.J.'s on Saint Louis, no longer in business.  Another bar; i  know the owner.  He checks I.D.'s.  Jose does not have one.  we have to leave.  outside i go to get the car.  when I get back, they are gone.  i find them in the bar after much searching.  see people I know.  we have to leave again.  Leave in a convoy of electric wheelchairs, three of us.  go down a block to a park and the zoo. came out swinging up a path, smoking a joint.  i swallow a couple of roaches.  we are ok. .talk about dr. blanche, office down on pennsylvania, .  Her history.  Her heroism. 

108

108 beads in the buddhist prayer mala
108 surviving upanishads
108, my apartment number at whisperwind apartments in the 1990's
pointed out to me by doug o. pedersen, artist and teacher (early 2000's)

katherine anne porter's "ship of fools"

i watched the movie "ship of fools" last night, based on katherine anne porter's one published novel.  i had read the novel as an  undergraduate and seen the movie, i feel fairly sure; but i did not remember much of either experience.   it was a good black and white film from the mid-sixties, directed by stanley kubrick, i think,  who also directed "clockwork orange" and "2001: a space odyssey", if i am not mistaken.  it was fairly stark, and something of a grotesque.  the cast included oscar werner, a young  george segal, vivian leigh, simone signoret, and lee marvin.  it was a little torturous but entertaining.  set on a  cruise ship sailing from mexico to europe in the early 1930's, the impending nazi theme is dominant with the anti-jewish sentiment beginning to be in full evidence.  oh yes, jose greco was featured as the head of a remarkable flamenco troup that blended in with the rest of the variously disordered passengers.  george segal played an aspiring artist involved in an unsatisfactory romantic relationship.  oskar werner had the lead role as the ship's doctor who becomes involved with simone signoret as an aristocratic countess under house arrest for assisting in an insurrection among a  group of migrant spanish sugar plantation workers.  the theme of social unrest is prominent, and to some extent from a marxist point of view.  in steerage are several hundred workers being transported back to europe after a failed sugar harvest due to price collapse.  the elegant upper class passengers have little contact with the peasants in steerage.  it made me think of eugene o'neil's "the hairy ape", another marxist work.  the cynical approach to the social situation is largely unrelieved.  there is a religious sidelight in one of the characters, a christian fanatic; but it is not presented to be taken seriously.   in the end the movie is a dark criticism of the economic injustices and distorted personalities in evidence on a number of levels.  this atmosphere is largely unrelieved.  i watched the movie on my laptop computer, ordering it on-line from youtube.  it was my first time to order a movie like this, spending about $3.00.  the process was simple and painless.  i will be watching more movies like this from time to time.  it was a good experience.  addendum: the movie caused me to think of the paintings of heironymous bosch, the renaissance flemish artist so well represented in spanish collections.  his nightmare satire is relevant.  i may have seen bosch' own "ship of fools" in europe, perhaps at the prado, but i am not sure.  bosch' first name suggests a play on words to me of "the higher animus", a philosophical  concept that might provide some resolution to the dark circumstances of this comedy..

some of the best

reading there is

assorted (sordid)
poetry

an onamatapoeia
an avocada kia

put your ass in
(jurassic) park

emily brontesaurus

withering heist du

be a trix potter

almost marlowe
almost donne

loneliness
creeps in at night
i see it almost
everywhere

jam wishes
jam witches

the rabbit would
like some food
perhaps a bite
of my sandwich

major day

three schedules

agenda
budget
timetable

indian paint brush
pink and yellow
among bluebonnets
paint the hills

what was it like,
hiking up from
guatemala?
it can't have been
very nice.
it isn't all that
nice you're here,
is it now...
alone, detained

jerry mathers
the beaver
gerry mandered

manderlay

"all quiet on the
western front"

rabbit hour
the wild rabbit

welsh

rare bit

sent peter stine
a poem wonder
if he has
got it yet

it must be
nine o'clock

will have to shower
fairly soon
perhaps tonight

 there goes jodee
out to smoke
"honi soit que
mal y pense"

a little snack
food provided
otherwise you're
on your own

they don't think
about us late
at night, do they?

hungry, wandering
and alone

we had our sandwich
four hours ago

breakfast is
a world away

the bougainvilla
in a hanging basket
in full flower
dancing in the breeze

the chirping murmer
of crickets, cicadas

still and sultry
summer air

i miss seeing
frederika
reading in the
other room

james was just
getting a cup of
ice water

did not speak to me

lightening, thunder?
the sounds of traffic
motor cars

i think i hear
someone coming
it  could be
dillingham

i forget
james has cigars

so sue me
i meant no harm

peter rabbit

peter rabbit was in the garden this evening...
not a foot long when all stretched out,
nibbling on the moss rose or portulaca.
he had a good set of rabbit ears,
twitching maybe an extra inch high
as he picked up on even the slightest alarm.
he would dart back and forth in between
the parking lot and garden plants,
coming within a few yards of me,
sitting in one of the garden chairs.
it was the two connies who first spied peter.
connie d. put out some lettuce and apple.,
and then i noticed by one of the chairs,
a small pink pot with peter rabbit
blazoned and glazed across its sculpted face.
it was as if we somehow had invoked
the rabbit's presence by special invitation.
gary, the gardener, will be very excited
to hear of peter's sly appearance.
even dillingham was here, eating  peanuts;
and the beesley sisters called tonight,
our first contact in forty years...
a gay omen of good times to come,
even in the heat, in this late june.

the morning toast

a reference to the refuse and offal that flowed in the gutters of London on eighteenth century mornings

emancipation day

it's sort of like the day they announced that the sodomy laws had been struck down in texas.  i was  sitting on the patio of the corral bar on hemphill street in fort worth.  i spoke up and said, "now, i suppose we will all have to eat watermelon".   i think it was the  middle of july.

why swisher sweets always make me think of sir walter raleigh

once when sir walter was at table with his son at a banquet, his son spoke up and told this story:

sir walter was walking in the queen's gardens when he spied a lady in waiting sitting underneath a tree.  as he approached her, she said, what, sir walter, will you undo me!  shortly thereafter she was up against the tree and exclaimed, o sweet sir walter.  o sweet sir walter.  the last thing she was heard to utter was "o swisher swatter!  swisher swatter!"  that's why swisher sweets always make me think of sir walter raleigh.

from a book of conversations published in seventeenth century

the three musketeers

when i was young, very young, my brothers and i, especially me and my older brother patrick. often went to the kid's matinee at the tcu theater here in fort worth.  i particularly remember seeing "the three musketeers" and coming out into the bright sunlight imagining myself as a knight in arms, swashbuckling, perhaps with a stick, half blind with the searing sun.  i think perhaps my favorite candy bar at the time was a "three musketeers" which i  think perhaps it still is today.  also about that time the mickey mouse club became popular with it's cast of "mousketeers".  today when i read evening or morning prayer on-line i access it through a portal on my phone called "legereme" which in my mind morphs into lay gereme or lake aramie and then aramis which was the name of one of the three musketeers.  i had to look that one up on google.  i don't know what version of the movie we may have seen in the mid-1950's, but i know there have been several since then, and i may have seen some of them.  i think i will look for one on youtube. it is a perpetual romance.  like fighting battles in the alley behind the house with wooden swords and a trash can lid for a shield.  it was a simpler, more innocent time.  i miss those days, but they are gone.

second good morning

under a canopy of trees
i sit  drinking coffee.  a gentle breeze
on this mild morning stirs about me.
i am at peace; so may the world well be.

the trains pass, the birds chirp.
the squirrels are still asleep.
only one of my neighbors is already up
as far as i know.  it's the first of the week.

good morning

was a terrible night.  thought i might be having a health episode myself.  steve stanley is having open heart surgery this morning.  will be wheeling into the operating room shortly.  God be with him.  am worn out from my quarrel with peter stine.  been going on for years.  gets ugly at times.  am dressed and ready for breakfast.  have had my early morning coffee...outside.  the weather seems mild.  desperately need a shower and clean up.  have it scheduled after my nap after breakfast, before lunch.  am reading kenner's eliot book, along with ellmann's yeats.  both largely over  my head.  kenner is a brilliant writer, but i can't always understand what he means.  i do better with the ellmann, but then i have read both books before in college.  can hardly remember it. feel sure i did not understand or appreciate them properly at the time.  time to take medicine and pray.  feel on track.  good morning.  hoping to hear back from  marga soon.  was very surprised by her call two nights ago.  things are good with jerelene.  hope to see her shortly.  she's buying five of my big books.

photo

steve stanley. scheduled for surgery in the morning.  pray for success.

coincidental reminiscenses

At one time, in the mid 1970’s, I lived in a small apartment on Herschel Avenue in the Oak Lawn section of Dallas, Texas.  I shared the apartment with a somewhat younger man, Rob Adair, whom I had met in Day Hospital at Timberlawn Psychiatric Hospital in East Dallas.  Timberlawn was the largest, and perhaps the most respected, psychiatric hospital in Dallas at the time.  It has recently (it is now 2018) been shut down by the State as being unsafe from the point of view of unprevented sexual attack.  Rob and I were friends for a number of years, but particularly for the period immediately following our voluntary semi-confinement.  We last spoke on the phone quite a few years ago, and I could probably not locate him now if I wanted to.

Our apartment was across the street from the Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross where I had been active for a short time earlier.  Father Gene Blankenship was the rector of Holy Cross at the time, a very devout man who was generous and helpful with me, and is now passed away after moving to a small parish in East Texas.  Rob and I smoked a fair amount of marijuana and drank beer, and Father B. offered to let me teach Sunday School if I would give up the former.  That was not likely at the time, although I have now been smoke free for fifteen years.

It is of some interest to me that we lived on Herschel Avenue because that street is right up next to the border between Oak Lawn and Highland Park, one of the Park Cities surrounded by Dallas, and a very prestigious address where my Mother grew up in the 1930’s.  Her parents lived at 4511 Livingston in a nice house they had built during the Depression.  They had a yardman named Herschel who had two young sons who assisted him.  That is why I mention the situation.

 Herschel Avenue runs into Oak Lawn Boulevard just east of Lemon Avenue.  There was a Greek restaurant in a retail strip near that intersection called The Torch.  It was a smaller version of a larger restaurant southwest of downtown Dallas in the Oak Cliff section, near a large highway intersection.  The Torch restaurants were very successful, and I went to work at the little Torch as a busboy even though I had an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley.  I had been something of a washout as an English teacher in recent years.   One of the specialties at the Torch was a lemon soup the name of which I cannot recall much less spell.

Also at that Intersection was a wine tavern called J. Alfred’s, named after the T. S. Eliot poem “The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock” which I was reading earlier this evening.  I hung out at J. Alfred’s from time to time, hardly ever met anyone there but enjoyed the music, the crowd and the wine.   There was also a real estate office in the neighborhood called Prufrock Realty.  I would assume that they were related.

Just before that time I had been working as an office clerk for a life insurance salesman named Pat Houren who was a friend of my father’s.  Pat and his wife Carol and I became great friends and remained so for many years, but they are both now deceased.  It was the Hourens who introduced me to Father Blankenship and Holy Cross.  I once went to a cocktail party at their home in North Dallas where Father B. was present; and when I walked in Carol was curled up on a sofa rather regally, and there was a copy of the Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot on the coffee table.

Those are some of the coincidences that peppered my adventures in Dallas in the mid-1970’s.  My grandmother still lived in East Dallas at that time.  I spent a lot of time with her and sometimes drove her old 49 Ford, once to a Tibetan meditation group related to the teaching of Chogyam Trungpa whose writings I knew from California and New Mexico.

 It was a good time all things considered.  I was in psychotherapy with Dr. Robert Glen on White Rock Lake.  I was recovering from drug addiction and mental illness.  I never did have much of a career, but somehow I survived into old age, outliving my parents and younger brother.  Life is good now.  I live in a comfortable retirement center, and am free to write these memoirs and create collage.

I think I should mention that my former girl friend, the poet Jeanne Lance, came to visit me about that time from California.  We went camping in the Ouachita  mountain wilderness in southwestern Oklahoma.  Jeanne met my family, and the Hourens.  Soon after she returned to California she married Peter Holland.   Jeanne and I are still in touch.

statement

a political conservative who is not a committed christian does not have two legs to stand on.

support the republican national committee.

it is still the best choice we have, politically.

i also support the anglican church in north america.

that makes the most sense to me.

cold today

it feels cold in here. i don't know if it's cold outside.  i thought it was fairly warm.  i so rarely go outside.  i guess i'll turn up the heat a few degrees.  i turn it up and down.  but i was chilled as i napped after lunch.  i dreamed wayne had ordered yellow bedspreads, chenille, for all of us.  maybe because i was cold.  it seems like a good time to blog.  i'm not publishing anywhere else except my new book  i have tenor eleven offerings at lulu.com now.  my latest is a collected selected poems...246 pages.  looking outside the window.  there is connie d. just back from somewhere, perhaps with steve.   lunch was good.  i feel ok, but a little bit lost and listless.  perhaps i will get some mail.

one good friend

nora kornell said to me one time, about tom parkinson, the berkeley professor: he's lucky if he has one good friend.  that's about all nora had at the time...one good friend among her peers, a woman her age who worked in the university library.  they met for coffee and sometimes went to an intelligent movie at the university art museum.  tom, i'm not sure about tom.  he had had a lot of friends, but i'm not sure about at the end.  perhaps he just had his family.   i know that i don't have many friends anymore.  i talk to my brother but he lives far away.  mother has been gone for over a year.  today would have been her 97th birthday.  peter stine is very distant.  tom bruner has lost his phone again.  i don't know what has happened to steve stanley.  father pool is gone.  it's a fairly lonely life.  no one here where i live i feel especially close to, maybe connie d., maybe not.  dudley is gone and the people  from christ the  king.  i really have no one but God and He has been so good to me.  in a sense it is the end of my time.  i'm fairly old, it won't be long.  it's just another day to me. 

three men named martin

often here in the home where i live i speak in passing to our former director, martin armanderez, who still lives here in retirement.  martin always says hello, and in response i usually say hi, martin; and then i think back some sixty years ago when, here in fort worth, we had two episcopal clergyman named martin.  one was mr. martin, who was the rector of saint andrew's episcopal church in downtown fort worth.  saint andrew's is what used to be referred to as low church.  that is, it was somewhat more protestant and less obviously ceremonial than the more catholic episcopal churches, a division that goes back not just to pioneer times, but to divisions in the nineteenth century church of england which is the mother church of the episcopal.  at any rate, mr. martin preferred not to be called father martin, but mister.  at about the same time, the rector of saint luke's in the meadow episcopal church in east fort worth was a father martin who was rather high church, as was st. luke's at that time.  it has been said that one day mr. martin encountered father martin on the streets of downtown fort worth where they greeted one another, one saying, "hi, martin", and the other responding "'lo, martin".  it is just a coincidence that our former director here in east fort worth is named martin, but is it entirely a coincidence that the personification of the anglican church in jonathan swift's "a tale of a tub" is called martin also, perhaps in deference to martin luther, the initiating figurehead of the protestant reformation, although not necessarily of classical anglicanism.  it might be worth noting however that the american episcopal church maintains very close relations to american lutheranism.  that's one more martin for the story. 

american christianity

according to wikipedia, in 2015, 75% of americans professed some form of christian belief.  that is just three years ago.   admittedly, many of  those are radical revisionists who have rejected the moral authority of large portions of the holy scriptures. nonetheless, it may not be an exaggeration to think that a  majority of those believers hold the Holy Bible in high and special esteem. therefore, i do not  find it at all surprising that their should be a political upheaval and revolution in american society against the prevailing or apparently dominant atheistic and agnostic teaching of most of our institutions of higher learning.  to some extent this explains the current political dilemma.  there are those that pay lip service to the Christian religion, but their hearts are far from it.  my only serious complaint about president trump is that he is often crude and uncouth and out of harmony with any realistic assessment of the claims of Christ.  nonetheless he is serving a purpose, a purpose much larger and broader than his personal idiosyncracies.  there are two essential earmarks of authentic christian morality in my opinion.  one is the protection of innocent human life whether born or unborn.  the other is the sanctity and necessity of holy matrimony as the standard for all human sexual behavior.  these are bedrock christian issues.  the anti-intellectual rebellion that we are witnessing today may well be a clarion call for a return to Biblical authority and morality.  the new testament standard is very high.  we are all called to holiness.  is it too much to expect the same from our leaders where it is often now in evidence but not universal by any means.  as for human charity, that should go without saying.  we hope and pray that every human being will have an opportunity to achieve his ultimate destiny of freedom from constant anxiety and worry, a senseless chase after the things of the flesh, and a hopeless denial of the life of spirit.