Perspectives On American Dream

To John Roth, Holocaust Scholar

He recognizes the melancholy
settled in his mind, his life.
The cost of bearing witness to
horror-filled lapses of humanity.
A life’s pursuit,
an effort to thwart denial, eliminate
the next generation of bystanders.
Does he know, though,
what we see, his students?
That his metamorphosis is not unlike
an actor preparing for stage.
An endless play wears him:
silvering hair shorn tight
thin frame bending inward--
an attempt to blunt despair,
before it sets in our marrow,
before we accept that holocaust to us
is a defective genetic code.
Professor, museum scholar, author,
philosopher, husband, father, mentor,
student of genocide,
his voice, melodic incantations,
invoke hope beyond the melancholy,
beyond the despair.

Grandfather's Home

My grandfather was born at the turn of the century. He was the son of an Irish immigrant, a fisherman who died at sea, and grew up in a Boston Brownstown with his widowed mother and the uncles--3 Boston bachelors. He attended BU, became an accountant and worked himself to the bone, during the depression, amazingly eking out a nice middle class life for his wife, my grandmother, and his two children, my mother and my uncle, in Marblehead. I've been told he was brilliant, with numbers, that he could add two columns of numbers concurrently, one with each hand.

At some point around 1948, right before my mother graduated from high school, he had a nervous breakdown, was institutionalized and became a ward of the state. My grandmother took on a job as a cook in a nursing home, having never worked outside of the home; and, when she graduated from high school, my mother obtained a job in advertising and display for Filene's in Boston. She lived with her mother to reconstruct their lives having had their loved one claimed by mental illness and the associated barbaric treatments that were standard practice at that time (they fried the shit out of his brain) and their family assets claimed by the state. On Sundays, she made the trip to Danvers to bring her father home for dinner and then back to the asylum that was his home for the next 30 years.

Beware of strange camera phones

You leave your phone in a taxi on the way to your freind Eileen's apartment in Brooklyn after a night out in the city. You stop at the corner market for some late night snack food and more wine and then you realize your mistake shortly after closing the door to her apartment. So your phone has been travelling in god knows what direction for a good 15 minutes. You desperately ask your partner to use her phone to call your phone only to find out that her phone is missing too. So you grab Eileen's phone, which doesn't work in her apartment and race back out to the street, tracing your steps back to the market and desperately dialing and redialing your number. Finally someone picks up. She's got your phone. She's in a taxi, on her way from Brooklyn to the city. She's just getting out at a bar and tells you which one. It's on the upper west side. So, you run back upstairs, grab your partner, run back downstairs and grab a taxi. In the meantime, your partner desperately dials her cell # to see if she too can track down her phone. The taxi takes you to a bar and you hunt left right and center to finally find hippie wanna be chick in flowing green skirt who has your phone. You get your phone, buy a round of drinks for her and her friends and on you way out, she tellls you that she hopes you don't mind that they took some pictures.

Barting to Judgment

We find out tonight if Transcendence has been accepted to the Sundance Film Festival. Four years of work for a dinner at Anchor Oyster Bar and the five of us huddled around Todd’s computer, waiting for what, we are not sure…a press release on the Sundance Institute website?? an email?? 10 PM PST. Are we stupid? Have they already let the submitted films know via email or are they really announcing the selections all at once? If they told the filmmakers before they announced to the public, everything would leak out so they keep it all under wraps. Right? That’s what we are telling ourselves anyway. I feel like I am on my way to take a final exam, actually worse because I have less control, more like waiting for the test results to come through when you aren’t really sure how well you did. Cruel and unusual punishment for the Monday night after a long weekend away from work!

polojones

polo--noun, sometimes verb: def. slang for water polo. in use: (n) I know him from polo; (v) I polo.
I actually do not polo right now, suffering from a bum shoulder, currently engaging in land sports, but that's really beside the point.

jones--noun, conjugates as a verb; proper name, or sometimes, both: 1) def. intense craving. in use: I had a jones/was jonesing to play polo. Or, 2) def. short for Mr. Jones. in use: Hey Jones. OR 3) def. intense craving for Mr. Jones.











Mr. Jones, my 'onsie bones
RIP April 13, 2005

Turkey Hunt

Priscilla and Bob came to SF for Thanksgiving and look what happened in the kitchen. Priscilla claims that this turkey is her 46th...but I think the time she forgot to remove the giblet bag really shouldn't count. Make that 45 and keep on roasting Priscilla.

Now where in the world, you might ask, did she find such a fine bird in the PETA capital of the world???

Well, as the fable goes, "a carnivorous dyke went a hunting"......











And when she found a turkey with just the right plumage, she called in the vegetarians who brandished their clubs and brought that turkey home!