The Walker

Friday Mood Who are you two?

Friday Mood: Who are you two?

Really cool clothes are designed for kids. Of course, they don’t make them in my size. Sometimes clothes are not tailored for you; they’re simply something you’re not supposed to buy…

I was in the M&Ms store at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota recently, after another Covid-19 Booster shot.   In the window display of the store, a very cool T-shirt with twisting rainbows. It was awesome; I wanted it.

I walked into the store the “welcome man” greeted me. I pointed to the cool shirt in the window and asked where I could find it.  His response took my breath away.

I stepped back. Halitosis overwhelmed: broccoli-left-far-too-long-in-the-fridge mixed with something else: “Rotting Flesh?” I thought. “Vomit?”  What is that?   I know Jeffrey Dahmer is trending by my God, what did this man eat?

After olfactory stopped panicking, I remembered what he said...  “This shirt is only for females.”   He really pushed out the “F” sound in female: too much wind; sent me scurrying out of the store.

And then I thought about it. Why only for females? That’s so odd. Why didn’t I simply buy it?   I should have. Strange that I stopped. But hey, I stop many things when I can’t inhale.

My mind roamed over the tread-ever-so-lightly topic of gender. Yes, I am not a female, but the T-shirt looked unisex. So, what?  And if I wanted to buy it, why did Drano, Dragon Dung man stop me? He should have encouraged me to buy it regardless of my gender. Capitalism, right? Sales, right?

As if on cue, a transgender couple walked in front of me, and entered the M&M store.  They were an interesting couple, morphed arm-in-arm they went, interconnected in their “indecipherableness.” Pleasant people out shopping. What would M&M greeter say if they’d asked him the same question I’d asked…

My mind drifted to Laverne Cox, Christine Jorgensen, Marsha P. Johnson, and many more who put their real selves in the world.

To me, Transgender people are symbols of freedom, and they have a prominent letter “T” in the LGBT acronym. There are many letters after “T” in LGBT, but God, I simply can’t keep up. I wish all the letters of the alphabet a very happy life.

There is a difference between people who are Cisgender (that’s a word I recently learned which basically means people who identify with the gender they are born with) and those who are Transgender.   The difference, I think, is Cisgender people don’t spend too much time thinking about their gender identity as a thing; transgender people, on the other hand, probably spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about it. Questioning one’s gender must take up a lot of headspace. Cause let’s face it; gender identity plays a big role in life. “Please sign the form with your gender (M/F).”   How daunting if you don’t want to be assigned. Or if you hate the letter “M" or “F”.

My neighbor related a story about how his friend married a woman who brought to the marriage a transgender child, from a previous marriage.  He casually says the wrong gender pronoun about the child, from time to time, and is excoriated for it. He feels bad about it, but he’s trying.

“It’s real hard for him” my neighbor says.   “It’s hard for all of us…”

There are many out there who find different-gendered people a threat to society; a representation of a world changing too fast, morals and a ‘common ground’ changing to a point they don’t recognize the world anymore. “Why can’t people just be how they’re born?”   My colleague has a child coming to terms with gender. My colleague confided in me fears of parents in this situation and told me he’d met people with very different views, all leading to his confusion and angst.

“On one side you have a group of people who are fierce and vigilant, but incredibly off-putting. ‘You must call me by my correct name and my correct pronoun and only use language I approve of if you’d like to speak to me, etc.’  And on the other side you have ignoramuses who don’t care about the rainbow of gender identities and simply want to pigeonhole people into binary roles. It can be maddening…and exhausting.”

So deep, so encompassing. Gender. And 1000% polarizing. Sad to see politicians use transgender people as fodder for fear machines. Why? Cause fear works, sadly.

Imagine a world where Karl becomes Kate with ease, and no one bats an eye. Where laws protect people from blatant discrimination because they simply can’t “place them” due to non-binary bigotry. Haters gonna hate, so instead of creating a non-binary bathrooms, create one for Haters and one for Non-Haters.

I’m selfish.  The more transgender people in the world, the less reluctance to sell clothes to those, like me, who simply want to buy something beautiful, regardless of M or F.

The picture here is around the corner from my house: a bunch of gas cans trying to be pumpkins. I think they are fabulous, whatever they want to be.   

Friday Mood Good People

Friday Mood: Good People

Some weeks, too many thoughts flood the mind; it becomes cluttered; no amount of meditation, yoga, alcohol, or drugs can quiet the mind, racing, it is. Trailing thoughts of Armageddon linger…

After sitting in front of a computer all day, I relax by riding my bike around the lake. Often times I diverge from the bike trail and take a different route home. I did this today. I rode up the hill to Fremont street – the place with all the big houses and bigger yards.  I was riding when a big car – one of those super big, gas guzzling Cadillac Escalades – approached me and stopped next to me, drivers side facing me.   The man in the driver’s seat turned to me and smiled wide. I smiled back and nodded.   He’d stopped to let his kids out in front of their McMansion. He waved as he left. All I could think of: “He’s a good man.”      

Weird, that thought. I pulled over to the curb to reflect. Something about this man told me he was good. I know it sounds corny, but when I meet good people, I get good vibes; it reminds me the world is full of good; and a world of good comforts me.

I think I can spot a good person a mile away.  That’s what I tell myself:  my gut tells me.

I’d like to think I’m one of them. Good.

The picture here is Marilyn Monroe. Why?   Top-of-Mind.  On Fridays, specifically after difficult weeks, I do something rare: I turn on Netflix and pick a random film to watch.

I chose the movie “Blonde.”  https://youtu.be/aIsFywuZPoQ

Mistake.

It was long and bloody awful. I watched with moments of disgust, horror, and resignation.  This was porn: exploitation porn (and I know that is a weird word combo: porn is already a form of exploitation, etc.).  This was character assassination: “person as permanent victim.”  It was unfair; it was cruel, devoid of anything relative.  The only thing good about the film was the actress: Ana de Armas: freaking astonishing. Wow. Mind blowing.   

One thing solidified in my mind, whilst watching: I was reminded of a TED talk: when a child doesn’t have a good childhood; a good foundation, consequences are heavy negatives later in life. This is the TED talk https://youtu.be/95ovIJ3dsNk. I was lucky in my life to have solid, stable parents leading. I was given a rock; a foundation to make mistakes, knowing the foundation was solid. This luxury I profoundly respect and give thanks later in life.

Norma Jeane Mortenson didn’t have good people in her early life: no foundation; the floor always shifting. But look what she did.  Look how high she flew. Of course she had demons. Who doesn’t?   But she turned her torment into stardom and became an American Icon.

I look at some of the examples from her life:  https://www.biography.com/news/marilyn-monroe-ella-fitzgerald-friendship and I feel she was good people.

Go to the good, before they’re gone. Cherish and cultivate while you can.

Friday Mood Borderline

Friday Mood Borderline

“Borderline. Feels like I'm going to lose my mind.” (Madonna, 1984)

Picture: The Superior Hiking Trail, Duluth, Minnesota.

My partner meandered by the pier, enjoying maritime life. I chose to stay seated, on the bench, at ease, eyeing ships, and shoreline, soaking up sun, all peachy pleasant.

They sat in front of me. I didn’t search them out.

Behind sunglasses, I observed: actors on a stage. To them, I was nearly invisible.   

I studied them, watching a picture emerge.

A dark dynamic unfolded.   “Boy”, on the far right, wanted out.

Too young to have a baby, but here’s baby, in the stroller (or pram, or whatever those things are called).

His girlfriend (or wife, where’s the ring?) dotted on the baby: cajoling, cooing, coddling; all things babies; warm and fuzzy feels to make crying stop.

When she turned to “boy,” she was ice:  Lake Superior Winter Queen to his servant “boy.” You could feel proverbial frost; he was lost in her kingdom. Mirror, mirror on the wall, she certainly wasn’t the fairest of them all, snagged him at Wisconsin’s State Fair; drunken fling behind the podium, going for gold behind goats. Smells like teen spirit.

He woke up smashed.  Now this.

Captured prisoner in ice, he cannot escape.  His family won’t let him. He’s on the border, mentally maintaining; ready to bolt, ready to scream at any moment. Ennis Del Mar.

For me, a different border came into view. Just across the water, to my right: Wisconsin. I’d forgotten about this border, geography such a sweet thing, carved like hard candy in random places.

Borders are funny. On one side, one thing happens.  On another side, something completely different.  This is normal for most countries, but in the U.S.A., there’s not supposed to be huge differences when crossing state lines: small things, maybe, not big things. Fill out the form to swear you don’t bring fruit flies, wear a helmet on motorcycles optional, etc., speed limits.

But something’s changing, something big and fundamental and life altering for many people.

In Wisconsin, they’ve effectively removed access to abortion. In Minnesota, they’ve just completed yet another large Planned Parenthood construction in the Twin Cities: two states going in opposite directions.   One state cherishes the unborn, the other those already born.

How a woman feels when she’s not able to exercise her right to an abortion in her home state must be very strange.  What if she must flee to a neighboring “safe harbor” state, some forlorn refugee? Does she feel like a pariah, hunted?    How will she look at her own state after this experience? Will she want to return?  If she does return, does bitterness grow?   Does she become fonder of the state that offered sanctuary for her needs?  The United States begins to look like and feel like the Divided States.

People think of abortion rights in terms of women, but there’s another angle: the “boy.” 

What if “boy” lived in a state which didn’t allow a woman to choose to get an abortion? What if he and Snow Queen agreed, after the goat jump, to “do something about it?”  Mutual.   But then couldn’t; needing to “flee” to another state.   What thoughts run through his mind about his own state - which didn’t allow him to make that mutual choice with a woman he barely knew?

Baseline: the right to abortion is not only a woman’s right. It is a human right.

I left the bench and walked over to my partner. “How was it in the sun?” he asked. 

“Just fine. The sun was nice.”   I looked up and saw a huge cloud swallow the sun; darkness descends across the border in Wisconsin. Suddenly, I felt a chill.

Friday Mood Corrected

Friday Mood: Corrected  

      

Finally!  After spending many a nights in the Ole South of the 1860s, I’d finished the book.

“Gone with the Wind” – a whooper at 959 pages – I felt accomplished.

Whilst working full-time, one must carve time to read for pleasure.  I carved: I read one, maybe two, pages per night. It took a while to finish.

I’d seen the movie, long ago. I didn’t think much of it, except a bit overdramatic; a classic, but over the top. I thought it more fluff than anything.

Margaret Mitchell’s take on the Old South, with all the flourishes of historical moments and passings, made me, once again, ponder the mentality of many white people of the “South.” 

Caveat: I am from California. The entire North/South thing was never a ‘thing’ for me growing up. It didn’t register other than pages in American history books.

For my friends outside the U.S.A., the “South” is a region of the USA which, for a few years (February 8, 1861, to May 9, 1865), was its own country.  Imagine that. Many in the U.S.A. don’t know much about it, except if you are from the South. My Aunt, from California was taken aback, years ago, when I talked to her about the Civil War “You mean we fought each other?”   Ah, the bliss of the ignorant. She’s not alone.

Twenty years ago, I got a shock entry to the world of the “South.”  A guy I worked with, from Virginia touted himself as a “real” Southerner.  Together, we toured Gettysburg - a stopover on the way to visit a business partner.  

We visited part of the battlefield called Little Round Top; he put his hand on one of the boulders and began to sob. I thought it the weirdest thing ever. He said “this place means so much to me. This is where it all fell apart.”   I studied it: Little Round Top was (according to Wikipedia) the site of an unsuccessful assault by Confederate troops against the Union left flank on July 2, 1863, the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg. It was the beginning of the end for the Confederacy.

You can check out pictures from my visit to this battlefield here. https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.980283015328312&type=3

Margaret Mitchell was a conveyor of her times’ Jim Crow racism.

“Gone with the Wind” is about victimhood: white Southerners as true ‘victims’ of the Civil War.

Slavery seen as a “good” - something to be cherished; slaves better cared for under the Southern System. Scarlett O’Hara liked slaves and slavery.  Margaret Mitchell glorified a time when African slaves were subjected to a wide range of oppression; glorified the slave-holding South, and was deeply loved for it by her Southern compatriots. She made Southern white people feel good and smug in their racism; portraying ‘darkies’ as dim-witted, lacking basic human intellect.

The premier of Gone with the Wind - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIBz-5QQOso - attests to Southerners love for her story.

Six degrees of separation: my friend, Laura Pauli, a fantastic chef, once cooked a meal for Olivia de Havilland at her Paris apartment.   Miss de Havilland was the actress who played Melanie Wilkes in the movie Gone with the Wind, and attended the premier of the movie on December 15^th, 1939, in Atlanta, Georgia. At the premier Miss de Havilland met some of the last surviving Confederate soldiers. I shake the hand of my friend Laura who shook the hand of Olivia de Havilland who shook the hands of soldiers from the Civil War.  History is only a handshake away.  

I’d always thought Gone with the Wind was fluff. I stand corrected. This novel is hard core stuff: propagation of a myth about the “olden days” - for white Southerners – as somehow “better.”  For the slave owning class, it probably was, built upon the backs of the enslaved.  

Margaret Mitchell was a great storyteller, no question. She simply told the story of the oppressors, over generations, with little concern for the evil they committed on the oppressed.  She presented white people with an “out”: much like the modern MAGA Republican movement portraying themselves as victims to some “liberal elite.” Both narratives are lies, but the propaganda pays dividends to those who make the “victims” feel better about themselves (i.e. Fox News).

This picture, taken in my walk in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2009, shows a proud mama and her son, about to go to church. What would Miss Mitchell think of these two “darkies?”

Putting it all in perspective, please read a bit about the premier of Gone with the Wind here: http://www.awb.com/dailydose/?p=747

Note the final paragraph: “TIME (Magazine) neglected to mention that, owing to the “Jim Crow” laws in force at the time, Hattie McDaniel (Mammy) and Butterfly McQueen (Prissy) were not welcome at the premiere.”

Time Magazine, like the rest of us, corrected.  

Fiddle-de-dee!

Friday Mood: Corrected

Friday Mood: Corrected        

I’d finished the book, Gone with the Wind – a whooper at 895 pages – and felt unnerved.

I’d seen the movie, long ago, and didn’t think much of it, except a bit overdramatic. 

Reading the book, Margaret Mitchell’s take on the Old South, with all the flourishes of historical moments and passings, made me, for the first time, understand the mentality of many white people of the “South.” 

For my friends outside the U.S.A., the “South” is a region of the country which, for a few years, was its own country.  But you probably already know that.  Many in the U.S.A. don’t know much about it, except if you are from the South. My Aunt, from California was taken aback, years ago, when I talked to her about the Civil War “You mean we fought each other?”   Ah, the bliss of the ignorant.

I was unnerved as I don’t know if the author of the book was simply a conveyor of the times’ racism, or was she a racist: simply overlaying her own opinions. Either way the end result is this: the entire Gone with the Wind story is about victimhood, of white people: white Southerners as real ‘victims’ of the Civil War.   Slavery was seen as a ‘good’ to be cherished; the slaves better cared for under the Southern System, according to the novel.

Six degrees of separation: my friend, Laura Pauli, a fantastic chef, once cooked a meal for Olivia de Havilland at her Paris apartment.   Miss de Havilland played Melanie Wilkes in the movie Gone with the Wind, and attended the premier of the movie on December 15^th, 1939, in Atlanta, Georgia. At the premier Miss de Havilland met some of the surviving Confederate soldiers. I kiss the cheek of my friend Laura who shook the hand of Olivia de Havilland who shook the hands of soldiers from the Civil War.  History is only a handshake away.

Margaret Mitchell glorified a time and place where an entire group of people were subjected to a whole range of oppression.  She glorifies the slave-holding South, and was deeply loved for it by her Southern compatriots.

The premier of Gone with the Wind - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIBz-5QQOso - attests to Southerners love for her story.

Margaret Mitchell made Southern white people feel good about themselves, smug in their racism. She portrayed, in her novel, ‘darkies’ as dim-witted, lacking basic human intellect.

I’d always thought Gone with the Wind was fluff. I stand corrected. This novel is hard core stuff: propagation of a myth the ‘olden days’ for white southerners was somehow better.  For the slave owning class, it probably was, built upon the backs of the enslaved.   

Margaret Mitchell was a great storyteller, no question. She simply told the story of the oppressors, with little concern for the evil they committed for generations.

Putting it all in perspective, please read a bit about the premier of the movie here: http://www.awb.com/dailydose/?p=747 Note the final paragraph:  “TIME (Magazine) neglected to mention that, owing the “Jim Crow” laws in force at the time, Hattie McDaniel (Mammy) and Butterfly McQueen (Prissy) were not welcome at the premiere.”

Time Magazine, like the rest of us.  Corrected.

Friday Mood: That's Rich

Friday Mood: That’s Rich

“It's a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that you lack.”
― Germany Kent

Remember the pandemic? That event occurring between 2020 and 2022?  Remember how things were perceived ‘scarce’; people bought whatever they could of the scarce item(s)?   How could we forget?

A side effect of the pandemic is an increasing gap between rich, not-so-rich, and poor. The gap became a chasm. Those who could work from home were often handsomely rewarded. Those who could not either lost their jobs or their health or both.

It’s over now. The pandemic. Right?  

Right?

One of the benefits of corporate life is – if you are good and lucky - you get to experience the joys of a corporate love fest on some tropical island, and mingle with people who can afford $900+ per night hotel rooms.

For a short period of time, you become part of an exclusive club of the ‘rich’ where smiles are wide and sometimes genuine. You get the wink and the nod that you can be in the same place with others whose bank accounts are able to sustain whatever life throws at them. 

It’s weird to talk about money.  It is so entwined with pre-conceived notions about people.  We have certain attributes to all aspects of money: poverty and privilege; opposite sides of the wealth coin. You have it or you don’t.

I’ve seen fights over money destroy a family: my partner’s extended family.

I’ve seen outward perception of wealth so craved; you borrow from family for things everyone expects you can afford: my uncle.  

I’ve seen how money forces people to work in careers they hate simply to justify keeping up appearances: my coworker. 

My perception: wealth bestows peace and calm to those who have it: a focus free from mere survival.

This week I was invited to a house in Honolulu. A friend of my partner – a former student to my partners’ flight instructor – invited us for dinner.   The house is on a side of Diamond Head in a very expensive neighborhood. The house, amazing. Aromatherapy, open layout, exclusive architecture, the ‘feels’ of being in a place where money is not a concern. A special kind of calm comes knowing nothing will ‘rock the boat’ of this family, this house.

The picture here is of the Hermes store in Waikiki, frequented by mostly Asian travelers looking to purchase ‘things’ with money to make them look wealthy.

For two years the pandemic changed perceptions of almost everyone, about almost everything, including money. 

For those who lived through the pandemic, you will get this reference:  I know I am by far the richest person in my neighborhood. Why?  I have the most toilet paper.