michael hathaway, 1941-2019

In my first two years in California, i made one true friend.
A friend you know will be there. You'll always be connected.
I loved you, michael.
And in many ways, hardly knew you.
This is truer of more friendships than we realize. With michael especially, for in the year that i knew him, we spent more time in the living moment than in anecdotal sharing. Fleeting references to the past only...
It can be singularly bittersweet to learn the details of a friend's life, only after they've died. I was enabled in this by his memoir, "The Possible Happiness of Life". The last time we were together, he eagerly gave me the book. He was so happy to have finished it, after years of procrastination.
At a glance, we might have seemed unlikely companions. Me, a roaring rational empiricist. He, a new age spiritualist.
But the areas where we converged were ever more expansive than our divergences. Saving the world, finding the best in humynity, embracing the moment, sensualist exuberance...michael was one of the most huggable people you'd find.
After he died, of natural causes in a friend's chair, his unread book stared at me for months, partly because the spiritual aspects filled me with trepidation, and also because grief has its own agenda. But what a delight it turned out to be, with minimal spiritual ramblings. He approached that part of his life with joy, but perhaps understood that there are some aspects of spirituality that don't lend themselves to words, so one ought not even try (if only all spiritualists could locate such modesty). He never preached, and never stopped being genuinely curious.
The book unfolds in tales of a life...and what a life! A child of ultra-progressive parents, he attended Stanford, the Free University of Berlin, and then Harvard, before dropping out to volunteer for eugene mccarthy. After that, it was environmental activism in northern California and around the globe, an extensive retreat in Kathmandu, and sojourns on the greek island Hydra, where he renovated a 400 year-old ruin. He lived in Berlin before the Wall was completed, in a spiritual nature commune in Sonoma, and in San Francisco as a gay man during the AIDS holocaust.
Throughout, he continually manifested the ethos LIVE - CELEBRATE!
We met as housemates, in a little home in San Pablo, my first California residence. Our flatmates were a rwandan diplomatic student, and an affable fellow plagued by obsessive/compulsive bipolar disorder. At its best, it was a haven for camaraderie and curiosity. At its worst, hellish. Not a bad metaphor for life, i suppose. I became liberated before michael, and returned to help him move out (i helped him move twice his last year). After that, we got together every couple months, for companionship, cuisine, and maybe an episode of Star Trek.
Such a supportive, loving man...who had a romantic/sexual life more active than mine, even in his late seventies. Perhaps like me, he never found the great love of his life...and perhaps like me, he knew that was a silly metric by which to define a life. Yet i don't doubt that, again like me, he might have wished otherwise. At the end of his life, he was beloved by many, yet always as a presence who floated in and out of people's lives. Is he more of a possible mirror for me than i realized?
But life is what it is. All you can do is try to greet each day with integrity and hope.
Some questions, i'll now never be able to ask. Given his compassion for all life, his "zero population growth" advocacy and awareness of the environmental disaster we're visiting upon ourselves by trying to keep billions of humans eating other animals, i'm bufuddled over why he never became vegan.
I was enriched by knowing him, and diminished by his death. He lived a long life almost exactly as he wished, and at the end was as sharp and independent as ever. He died believing death was not the end.
A pretty happy life...and that's nothing at which to sneeze.
Thank you, sweet michael.
I'll always miss you.

maya the magic papaya

Maya the magic papaya
had a perspicacious pedigree
She was born on a bough, born on a bough
born on a bough of a bayberry tree
The bayberries gave her minimal approval
They circulated a petition of removal
Maya gave a blushing smile
Meditating on mean folk a while
A prickly pear named lou
shouted "What the hell are you??"
A crab apple called abu
opined "A mutant honeydew?"
A pomegranate named janet
thought maya from some far planet
A jujube named haboob
called her a redneck rube
A java plum named haversham
labeled maya a lousy bum
A muskmelon started yellin'
that maya looked a likely felon
An ackee named jacqui
said "I wanna give her a smackee"
A mangosteen named armaleen
spat at maya and caused a scene
A lychee named aneeki
said "She looks kinda sweet to me"
Maya and aneeki jumped to the ground
Soon they were rolling and playing around
They plopped in a stream and sailed to a river
Aneeki kissed maya and made her quiver
They soon met a murder of magic crows
and flew away to worlds nobody knows

trickle trickle

I deliver furniture in the swankier parts of the Bay
Roaming the retreats of the rich most every day
Mountain lairs, architectural wonders
Mundane monstrosities, tasteless blunders
We went to Atherton to pick up a bed
Some simple reupholstery is what they said
for a venerated rapper and his vapid songbird bride
Their pool house had chandeliers inside
Fame he'd found as a poet of the mean streets
Now his guest bed has 2000 thread count sheets
We started disassembling, and to our dismay
the headboard was nine feet tall, i'd say
The cloth pristine, but they'd wearied of the color
They wanted something a bit less duller
Their personal assistant said with a cluck
"It weighs 400 lbs, please trot it out to your truck"
My partner and i heaved this monstrous load
Our parking space half a mile down the road
Then the diva bride gave a gasp and cry
"I've turned my ankle", she said with a sigh
The assistants fanned her and fluttered about
as the rapper released a stressed-out shout
"Lay her on the headboard!", he cried with a shriek
"The platinum golf cart don't arrive 'til next week!"
"Take her to the main house!", he roared like a lord
The assistants eased her up and called the switchboard
We struggled on our way, with neck veins popping
We requested a rest, but they'd have no stopping
We unloaded at the infirmary, then they shooed us on
When we got to our truck, everyone was gone
Now i'm not greedy, i don't like to whine
but perhaps some little tip was in line?
I've seen the rich with insider's eyes
though this moral might not be a surprise
Old rich and new rich seem much the same to me
They've all got the urologists's view of a trickle-down economy

dami

Never before, nevermore
No lover shall you stand before
Unbounded in what lies in store...
Your sanctuary to slide inside
A space to play, laugh, and hide
No desire or dream we'll deride...

Never before, nevermore
will you get back all you give
No negotiation, stipulation, calculation
Never before have i known how to live
Zero protection, zero pretense
Kneeling naked, kneeling negated
Any guile, every defense
erased, irrelevant, eradicated

Am i just clowning
or more likely drowning
Frozen from a world so cold
Where nothing is given
and everything needs forgiven
Every child's tear bought and sold

Never before, nevermore
A crystalline crash on your shore
Coalesced from the mist of time
Some pre-history when vulnerability wasn't a crime
Transcending modernity's barbaric game
This battered heart pulsing your name

skipping-touchstone ripples

(a follow-up to https://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2020/04/touchstones-of-not-mined.html)
To deeper delve into the impregnation fantasies touched upon in "Touchstones"...they exist alongside more rational impulses, like the wish to find a womyn who is serenely assured that having children is no part of her future. To meet such a one, and have her desire me for a season or always...that's a beautiful dream, too. Probably one infinitely more sensible than fertility fantasies. I suspect it's not specifically a baby that is the embodiment of my primal desire. I think it's rather the moment of being inside a fecund (and feral) womyn who wants my seed with every fiber of her being...to be in that moment and claim it with purest exultation...
That must be so, because one of my mental wanderings the past year has been the thought that i might be infertile, as  i've never gotten a womyn pregnant. Which could mean nothing, as i've never tried, yet it's an interesting possibility, one that would have mortified me once, but now i think i could fully embrace it. Low motility/count? Partay!
Which is not to say there's no babylust left. It's always been there, in a hazy, remorseful way, and it seems to be simmering ever more searingly, for biological-clock reasons.
I suppose there's a nugget of perverse truth in the Idiocracy-aphorism that the people who shouldn't, do, and the people who should, don't.
So much feeling squelched in this culture of alienation. So many desires blunted, connections denied, tears uncried...you can see it in the eyes, all the half-lives we live...
Find me, oh sensible womyn peacefully past the prospect of parentage. Save me!

coronadating

Since corona, i've been dating muslim wimyn like crazy. It's great! With the faces, and the fabric, and the...

listless

When you are breathless, then shall i breathe again
When you are mindless, then shall i become sane
When you are fearless, then shall i be unafraid
When you are helpless, then shall no more games be played
When you are rudderless, then shall i wrap you 'round my till
When you are guileless, then shall i at long last be still
When you are remorseless, then shall i kneel at your feet
When you are nameless, then shall we finally meet