Rapture

Saturday afternoon the 21st of May I woke up from a short nap in glorious spring sunshine. The windows of my bedroom were open, allowing the cool and pleasantly damp spring air into the room. My soft, purring cat was nestled in the crook of my arm for warmth. The sunlight was a glorious pale yellow; I had to force myself out of bed to get ready for the evening. I got dressed and hopped on the subway, where the train clattered through the tunnels as the witching hour of 6:00 pm passed unnoticed by anything other than the red digital readout hanging from the ceiling above us. As I emerged from the subway in Manhattan the last drops of a sudden Spring shower gave way to fading twilight. I met my adorable boyfriend for dinner and then a concert of new music including three wonderful pieces played on toy pianos and kitchen mixing bowls. A reception after the concert featured chocolates and champagne, a delicious mix. We took a cab home through city streets crowded with people dressed for life's celebrations. We went to bed, and then awoke, the next day arriving on cue just like the previous one did, just as tomorrow will.

The gift of the late afternoon sunshine, warm but not yet summery hot, had filled me with a sense of well-being, a gratitude for life's small blessings. I found myself happily considering the good things in my life: the love of friends and companions, enough work to pay the bills, a comfortable home, the sounds of music filling my world, my mind creatively spinning and my body still pulsing. And I felt, well, a sense of rapture. A momentary sense of joy and peace and perfection with the world.

I'm not sorry that my world didn't end. I was pretty sure it wasn't going to. And even I, a non-Christian, know that Bible being waved around by some desperately crazy, angry and hateful people says pretty explicitly that while this life, this world, is indeed temporary, nobody can know when the end is coming. “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only. That's Matthew 24:36, by the way.

What kind of people are these doomsayers? Their fantasies of revenge, of self-righteousness, of warnings gone unheeded, of threats and and murder on a super-genocidal scale are almost pornographic in their visceral expression. The doom-filled prophecies of crazy fundamentalists aren't anything I recognize as spirituality or religion, they're just mean-spirited and hateful. These judgment-filled harangues are corrupt and ignorant; small-minded above all, revealing people utterly closed off to the reality of the world with all its unknowable beauty and wonder and even its often painful tragedy and loss. These people are afraid of living, afraid of being judged because they themselves are casting their eyes of bigotry about them reflecting outward their deep hate at their own humanity and the humanity of others.

I believe pretty firmly in God. I won't recount here the long journey that convinced me of that reality, and I'm grateful for the peace and blessings that my spiritual journey to a place of understanding has brought me. And I recognize a sort of miraculous randomness that bombs are not falling on my head or that I'm not living in a gutter or an open field. This has nothing to do with me being a better or worse person than anyone else, only a chain of cosmic accidents that could change abruptly tomorrow. While I have known or known of some very bad people over the years — heck I write about them here all the time — I have yet to see evidence for evil outside the human heart. Earthquakes and tsunamis and tornadoes and wild carnivorous animals and predatory microbes: these are just the more painful of the miracles of the living world that happen, well, for no other reason than because they have come into being.

The consciousness animating our bodies at this moment right now gets a very brief time in the world to make some choices. It's easy to make mistakes, to waste time, and sadly it's easiest of all to wind up being the victim of other bodies making very bad choices for us. I'm not trying at all to sound like a Polyanna; sometimes life is plenty rough and often short.

Everybody dies. That's just...life. And not the best part. But if you spend your life focused solely on the end of that life what you're really doing is wasting your precious moments. So to all the doom-sayers and evangelical prophets and radio preachers who have nothing better to do that waste their time spewing hate or self-righteousness I say, please leave me alone. I'm busy.

(I found the whole-lot-of-crazy art at the top of the post — entitled "True Rapture" — at the "Questions and Thoughts" blog. You simply must click on it to see it larger. I can't even begin to guess at the cray-cray symbolism involved there.)

A Song for Saturday

All the videos of this song on Youtube came with commercials, so you'll have to settle for the lyrics. I'll try to hum along...can you hear me?

"Toe to toe
Dancing very close
Barely breathing
Almost comatose
Wall to wall
People hypnotised
And they're stepping lightly
Hang each night in Rapture

Back to back
Sacrailiac
Spineless movement
And a wild attack

Face to face
Sadly solitude
And it's finger popping
Twenty-four hour shopping in Rapture...

Don't move too slow, 'cause the man from Mars
Is through with cars, he's eatin' bars
Yeah, wall to wall, door to door, hall to hall
He's gonna eat 'em all
Rapture, be pure
Take a tour, through the sewer
Don't strain your brain, paint a train
You'll be singin' in the rain
I said don't stop, do punk rock

Well now you see what you wanna be
Just have your party on TV
'Cause the man from Mars won't eat up bars when the TV's on
And now he's gone back up to space
Where he won't have a hassle with the human race
And you hip-hop, and you don't stop
Just blast off, sure shot
'Cause the man from Mars stopped eatin' cars and eatin' bars
And now he only eats guitars, get up!"

—"Rapture," Blondie, 1981

That's right, the Rapture is set for Saturday, May 21! (Though I'm sure I will be seeing most of you on Sunday, May 22.) Blast off, sure shot!

(The art above is a painting entitled "Prairie Dog Rapture." I found it on a blogpost noting Bart Centre's business enterprise "Earth-Bound Pets USA." For $135, payable now in advance, Mr. Centre — an atheist — will guarantee to care for your pets if you leave them behind in the Rapture, since everyone knows the Rapture is just for people. On his own website Mr. Center notes he's had to increase his rates due to the increased demand this Spring.)

(Take a deep breath)

What a crappy week for news. So on the advice of a loyal reader, here's a brief pause from nuclear meltdowns, repression, republicans, wars, and everything else. I can take no credit for this: a friend found it on a site entitled simply "The Best Picture on the Internet." It's really quite hard to argue with that assessment.

What it means, I have no clue. It seems to be a gothic tail, er, tale. Wilted roses. A matching bag and dress. A cloudy full moon. The visage of a sage elder. Granny glasses. A fish on wheels. And of course, cats. The story kind of writes itself.

"It had been a dark and stormy night. Fluffy wasn't certain what she'd find as she paused by the vase of flowers that Tom had given her only a few short nights before. Oh the howling and caterwauling had been awful. Such a scene. But as she gazed over the threshhold she knew she had no choice. She remembered the wise words of her grandfather, Mr. Whiskers. "The untold want by life and land ne'er granted, Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find. Meooooowwww." She grasped her fishy's leash and didn't look back...."

We have Al Jazeera in my neighborhood...

The Al Jazeera news network is providing indispensable coverage of the events in the Middle East with voices and perspectives quite different than the American media. Not surprisingly, Al Jazeera TV is not offered by American cable or satellite distributors. I've been reading that Al Jazeera is hopeful that the current events might motivate American cable to carry them, which would be a great thing.

I stepped over this flyer on the sidewalk yesterday on my way to work; it caught my eye and I thought...WOW, Al Jazeera is coming to my neighborhood! Then I actually read the flyer. God bless multicultural Sunset Park. That would be the Al Jazeera Vivero, where you can get cute little bunnies for $2.49 a pound, and have their, um, heads chopped off for tasty stew meat! Plus guinea hens, chickens, goats and, um, bulls. Fresh!

20, El Pajaro

I've been staring at this picture here in January and thinking about birds and when I would see one that I could write about. There's a wonderful world of birds in the back yard in summer, jays and cardinals and sparrows and teeny birds I don't know what they are. I'm sure the community of feral cats that lives in the center of our block enjoys these birds even more than I do. But it's winter. Not waking up to birdsong lately.

Walking to the subway in the snow this morning I saw a mottled black and white pigeon hopping up some steps. Maybe it was just looking for something to peck, or frustrated at the snow in the sky, or maybe it was sick, I dunno, but I realized once again I like pigeons. More of my friends than not have called them "rats with wings," but I'm not a pigeon h8er. Actually I saw a rat in the subway yesterday that I thought was cute so maybe I'm just having a weird winter reaction to urban vermin, er, fauna, but that's another story.

When I was a kid my mom took me to Venice. In St. Marks Plaza for a few lira (this was 1970, pre-Euro) you could buy a sheet of newspaper rolled into a cone filled with corn and feed the massive pigeon population that rivalled the massive American hippie population lying about the sidewalk. I remember being happily swarmed with appreciative pigeons, and I'm pretty sure I hadn't yet seen what happened to Tipi Hedren and Suzanne Pleshette in Hitchcock's version of that situation so I was fearless. They landed on my head and outstretched arms and it was awesome.

My boyfriend of the early 1990s lived in a wretched tiny little apartment in the Village. His apartment had a window opening up onto one of those unique features of NYC tenements, the airspace. This airspace was teeny, maybe five foot square, and it was infested with pigeons. He hated them -- the feathers and pigeon poop was a bit much to take, I accept -- so he kept that window closed and covered, defeating the alleged health-giving benefits of the airspace in the tenement architect's intent. But in his apartment you could always hear this cooing sound through the darkened window. Oh it probably drove him crazy but I found it comforting somehow. The super in my Brooklyn apartment building at the time kept pigeons in the basement, though special ring-necked ones, beautiful and sleek. I don't know if he raced them or what, but they made the same beautiful cooing and it made a trip to the laundry room like a trip to the performance of some strange avian choir.

Pigeons are everywhere in New York City. You see them lazily riding the Staten Island Ferry crossing the harbor and sometimes in some elevated subway trains. They walk around in the Port Authority Bus Station imitating rushing commuters. In neighborhoods like mine there are organized flights of kept pigeons swirling over the rooftops in summer. And I remember the corner near my old apartment where the poorly designed lampost that hung over the sidewalk in an unusual way made waiting for the light to change particularly dicey. When the pigeons who always perched there had to go, they had to go. Do pigeons laugh? I know these pigeons were enjoying themselves and their target practice.

Most pigeons are not beautiful birds. Like the one I saw this morning they can look like doves who passed an exploding inkwell. Or the dark gray ones with the shimmering green and pink metallic feathers about their necks: there's something greasy and insect-like about those colors. But momma pigeons love their pigeon babies no matter what they look like. (Where the heck ARE those baby pigeons anyway?) Urban people look different than suburban and country people, so it's only fitting that urban birds would have a toughness about them.

They could fly off to warmer climes, but they don't. They stick around, braving winters like the one we're having now. They like the hum of the city beneath them; the grit, the hustle and bustle. And they're social beings. Bobbing around, being pigeons together. I give them credit.

20. The Bird.

(This is part of a continuing series of meditations of the Loteria Deck; a Mexican bingo game with archetypal images that resonate like Tarot cards. Click here for more Loteria stories.)

54, La Rana

I'm too old for Kermit! Yesterday I noticed several facebook friends marked the 41st birthday of the seminal children's television program Sesame Street. Of course I know who Kermit is, who Bert and Ernie are, who Miss Piggy is. But I was already almost 11 when Sesame Street came out, and frankly I don't think I noticed. That was for little kids. I do remember loving The Electric Company, a PBS franchise that must have tapped my age group more appropriately, but if I have some sentimentality for the teevee of my childhood and youth, I have none at all for Sesame Street. Zilch.

We didn't have a television when I was very young, even though my father worked in the advertising business (very Mad Men, actually). I think it was a form of rebellion on his part. I think we got one about 1963, because I'm pretty sure I remember seeing at least the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination on it. We didn't get a color teevee until way into the 1970s.

There was children's programming that felt mind-numbing and false: Romper Room, Captain Kangaroo, Bozo the Clown. The time I got to actually attend a taping of Bozo the Clown disillusioned me for years: the studio audience sat practically in another room and we had to pretend we could see what was being taped and clap enthusiastically when asked; it was torturously unpleasant, but a useful lesson for life. I loved Saturday morning cartoons: Astro Boy and all that other weird out-of-synch puppetry and animation so mysteriously from Japan. Underdog was a favorite; so droll and witty.

And while I know that Kermit is legendary, and "It's Not Easy Being Green" is a great song (look for the Lena Horne version!), he doesn't move me. A coworker at my old job gave me stuffed Bert and Ernie dolls to decorate a shelf in my office; you could tell this was a significant "remember these eternal icons of childhood fun?" moment for her. I can hear the Bert and Ernie voices in my head, but it's a memory of an adult time not a treasured echo of being a kid. Many times in my adulthood I've tried to track down some childhood experience to try to recapture a flash of remembered magic, sometimes quite successfully. But sorry, Bert, Ernie, I'm glad you've become gay icons, but you don't mean anything to me either! And I've never seen "The Muppet Movie."

Back in the pond, giant green frog.

Anti-American Art: Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of War

Sadistic American soldiers sic their dogs on a bloodied crowd of unarmed Korean civilians in another painting from the Sinchon American War Crimes Museum in North Korea.

According to the US War Dogs Association (!): "Before the outbreak of hostilities in Korea the Army was using dogs in Seoul for sentry duty around warehouses and storage areas. More than one hundred dogs were stationed there and their work proved extremely beneficial in reducing theft and pilferage. One regimental commander remarked that after using a dog for a while patrols did not want to go out without them." The USWDA does not mention if the dogs were used aggressively against civilians.

How to peel a squirrel

From Irma Rombauer's original "Joy of Cooking" cookbook. "Gray squirrels are the preferred ones; red squirrels are small and quite gamey in flavor. There are, proverbially, many ways to skin a squirrel, but some hunters claim the following one is the quickest and cleanest. It needs a sharp knife...Season the gravy with walnut catsup and serve with polenta."