The Gates Of The City

David”s memorial service was yesterday. It was in the running for the Most Horrifying Experience Of My Life.

He died two weeks ago today, at home, with hospice people coming in to help and, I gather, people from his church coming in to pray with him, because David was always all about tracts and Trusting In The Lord and saying God Bless when he signed off on the phone. I don’t know why he never tried witnessing at me, other than to include with every year’s Christmas card one of those grisly Chick tracts with bad comic-book art of sinners writhing in the Lake Of  Fire. I may have an invisible neon sign over my head that says Don’t Tell Me About Your Relationship With Jesus. Or Krishna, Zoroaster or Sun Myung Moon, come to that.

If so, it wasn’t working yesterday, Everything started off innocuously enough; we got there late in the reception hour, which was in the distinctive key of Babtist church basements everywhere: linoleum, bulletin boards with construction-paper art and cheesy posters of that Lake Of Fire (again), a “dead spread” of prefabbed deli sandwiches and canned soda set out on one of the refectory tables. I only ever knew David’s wife Liliana and his brother Donnie, who is looking pretty rough by now and missing most of his teeth. Liliana’s short a few herself, I noticed. These are people who’ve never had much money, and I refuse to judge either David or Donnie for the years they spent soused and unemployable, a family habit I gather. In the richest country in the world basic dentistry is still a luxury, I guess.

Everyone was very nice and friendly. They didn’t look like people who spent a lot of time thinking about Lakes Of Fire.

The order of service was pretty unsurprising. Four hymns scattered through its length, a scripture reading, two people giving reminiscences of David that made it clear they barely knew the man. They should have asked me. I could have told them about the patiently sifted earth in the spring, the pride in his daughter who got the education  he never completed and became a teacher, the lovingly painted iron railings on my back porch (I would have of course left out the time he hammered all the flagstones loose on the one in front). The time that I saw him pick up Torvald, who was then a guest in the yard and not yet my cat, and kiss his head.

Nope, all anyone wanted to say about David was how he had accepted Jesus and wanted to bring the Good News to everybody. I thought my eyes were glazing over at the third reference to this. And then the preacher geared up.

I could be forgiven for thinking this was supposed to be about David. Fuck me. Apparently it was the springboard for a half-hour long infomercial about how Mr. Preacher would never say he was sure someone had gone to Heaven unless he really was sure, but about David he was sure, and David was now touching the Hand of God and breathing celestial air and living in Heaven which is a real place with the following engineering specifications. I kid you not, architectural details and square footage were provided. Because David had accepted Jeebus as his Lord and Savior, and brought his daughter to do the same, and he was now freed of pain (that much, I’m happy to say, was true, and I gather there was a lot of it). And we all had that same choice and everyone needed to make it or else end up in a place full of fire and darkness separated from God forever, because no matter what else  you did or how nice you were, accepting Jeebus was your only hope, and now turn to the passage in Revelations (the most drugged-out document ever preserved, I think) for more details on the great gates of the Heavenly City, each carved from a single pearl. It was unclear what people with perfect divine bodies would do all day in the City since supposedly after death we are freed from all fleshly appetites; personally if I were going to order up Heaven it would be someplace where the whisky was incredible and there was no male refractory period.

He kept referring to David as Dave. In twenty-two years I never heard him identify himself as Dave. No one called him that.

Finally, after insisting he wasn’t going to call anyone out or embarrass them, Mister Preacher enjoined all present to close their eyes so that anyone who wanted to receive Jeebus into their hearts right there in front of his very eyes could raise their hands without being put on the spot in front of the other congregants, and receive the benefit of a pastoral prayer for God’s blessing on them. At this point I was becoming slightly crazed and almost ready to fling myself into the aisle, black-church-style, and speak in tongues if it would just make this oily, poreless-complexioned, fairy-tale-spouting mountebank SHUT UP. I think only my fondness for Liliana stopped me.

We finished with another hymn. The people who write these fucking hymnals always insist on a high E that I don’t have if I haven’t been practicing. At least I’m still the dead accurate sight singer I always was. Let them wonder how the infidel could belt out all David’s faves.

As we fled left the church — which had a multicolored LED marquee in front — Mister Preacher slunk silently out of the basement (I don’t know how he got down there from the pulpit so fast) and mooched up beside us with palm extended. I shook his hand and thanked him; I have plenty of soap at home.

“Funny,” remarked the Engineer over dinner, “I’m pretty sure that in Revelations, it says the gates of the city are always open so that anyone can come in. He must have missed that part.”

I am all but morally certain that David’s daughter told him she had accepted Jesus because he was fucking dying in horrible pain and afraid he wouldn’t see her in heaven otherwise. I can see myself doing  something like that. But I assume at least some of the people in that congregation believe all this shit, and these are people who have licenses to drive and the right to vote. It scares me.

All Some Kind Of Dream

We weren’t, of course, always as good as we wanted to believe — just not so screamingly bad as we are now.

In the first year after I certified I worked for a salon owner, an Iranian woman of Russian extraction, who had fled after the Shah fell and blond “foreigners” were no longer so safe. In a weird, surreal convolution of circumstances, the society gynecologist who had been the choice of her wealthy friends in Tehran, since transplanted to Los Angeles, was the second opinion on my first surgery. Long story.

When she came through Immigration, she told me — during a mild bitch session anent “men! can’t live with em can’t live without em” — about the INS drone who interviewed her in his office. He was looming, in charge, radiating his ability to decide her fate. At a certain point, she said, he simply unzipped his trousers and got his pud out.

She fell quiet at that point. I didn’t press her.

Families were separated at Ellis Island — a husband would be found healthy and acceptable, his wife would be judged ill and contagious. The border has always been difficult and marijuana laws got on the books mainly as a way of criminalizing  immigrants from Mexico. Lynching was a way of life in post-Civil-War southern America, and don’t let me start on my maternal South Georgia relatives and their uneducated, racist, sexist, MAGA-before-MAGA-was-a-thing snickers and snorts. It was the vengeance of the Lord, let me tell you, when my first cousin, the first college graduate in that family, who played the organ at church and at family gatherings riffed on “Moon River” — substituting the words “Black N—-r” — threw up on top of the Washington Monument. Um, but I digress.

It was about the song. About how we had a history that arced toward justice, and an ideal we at least pretended to live up to.

If some chilluns are not old enough to remember the protest songs of the Sixties, I am. For my sins, in high school I dated a colossal asshole who happened to have inherited his father’s collection of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Peter/Paul/Mary LPs. Who else remembers Guthrie’s guitar, engrossed with the motto “This Machine Kills Fascists”?

I think we need a bit more of this kind of thing:

Night Songs

I think it is being out of pain that gives me interesting dreams. Nice ones, actually. I have experienced on more than one recent morning a desire to go live in the dream I just woke up from.

This one was especially vivid. About a week ago I was one of the first donors to a political candidate for a nearby Senate district in my state lege. I have been following this Qasim Rashid fella on Twitter for a while, because he’s articulate and handles assholes with more grace than I could ever muster. In the dream, he and one of his fellow social media activists had arranged a piano concert at a nearby conservatory showcasing two young Muslim music students, and along with some standard repertory, which the boys were running through when I arrived at the dress rehearsal, they were going to take turns playing accompaniment while I premiered a set of my own vocal compositions. We were really at the eleventh hour and hadn’t practiced together whatsoever, and I was on edge, but when I arrived it was hard to feel anxious because the very beautiful, rather intimate venue was soothing merely to exist in. The two pianos were on an only slightly raised parquet dais, and there was a glass wall around about a quarter of the high-ceilinged polygonal hall, admitting late-afternoon light from a wooded area innocent of buildings and providing a direct underwater view into the first two or three feet of a large pond, into which the building extended. Fish and other critters were swimming around, frogs were sunning on boulders outside the glass, watching us curiously, and large butterflies were living dangerously by flying in close to them.

I don’t remember which of my songs we were going to do. I composed a handful in my twenties, including settings of Donne’s “Lecture Upon The Shadow,” a pair of cantrips from Peter S. Beagle’s “Last Unicorn,” and the entirety of T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” for literally vindictive reasons which are too silly to go into. I still have the pipes but I’m glad the dream provided the pianists. I couldn’t stumble through the keyboard part now if you had a beanshooter to my head.

Just Leaving This Here

We are now at Day 8 of rehab, if you count the promenades I did around the hospital, and an unfortunate side effect is that I spend way way too much time scrolling through Twitter on my phone, resulting in a barrage of the daily news that is probably socially responsible but goddam exhausting.

This gem, surfed up by the Engineer, encapsulates my state of mind. Impressive upper range, too, even if he needs a little work on containing the tone of the high notes.

I Needed This On A Monday

This man gives me life. That is all.

The English Bach

This is not actually a post about music.

What happened was, Sebastian, my faithful handbuilt desktop of ten years (my Engineer spec-d it out, I passed screwdrivers and told him what I needed it to do) started crashing a couple of weeks ago. Repeatedly. The mail program, the browser, the whole damn OS. It accelerated over a period of 48 hours to the point I would have been frantic without a laptop in the house. A client who gets paid to understand computers all day (and very probably emulate Russian hackers as a security geek, for the military) said it sounded like a hard drive problem to him, with an explanation that matched the observed gyrations.

(I named him Sebastian because the case is a Bach VX, even though I lean more to late Romantic than Baroque. It seemed only natural.)

So we tottered out to Micro Center and bought a new hard drive, even though the old one was not even two years old — I’ve had a defective hard drive before — and the Windows 10 OS for the heck of it, since one thing Sebastian had apparently not been able to do for months was update Windows 7. Some of this is chargeable against tax. This is the excuse I use.

A few hours later, we had everything installed, restored, activated and updated, and I set to work. It was nice. Windows 10 was fast and so was the new drive. I used it through Monday, annoyed only to note that every time the computer slept, it woke up thinking it was September. All those site certificates out of date. I got really tired of resetting the clock.

Then Thunderbird started crashing again. Then everything. Three blue screens in a row. I haven’t seen a blue screen since Windows XP.

“I think it’s the motherboard,” I said, pointing out the clock issues. We reflected that the motherboard was ten years old.

Newegg ships in a day if you pay a modest fee. We got a new motherboard and a power supply, considering there were possible power issues in some of the crap we saw.

Everything went together fairly well, and because I am anal-retentive about things like this, we had all the manuals for the remaining hardware, and it powered up and today we loaded everything back on it. It was so new by this time that I named it after Sebastian Bach’s son, Johann Christian, also known as the “English Bach” from his main stomping grounds (he is buried in England, and the royal family endowed his widow). I decided to start this post by searching up a music video of one of his concertos, which Mozart admired.

The audio burred. The browser crashed. The system blue-screened.

1. The audio card may be poorly seated.
2. The MEMORY_MANAGEMENT crash makes me wonder about the RAM. The memory sticks are one of the few pieces of hardware not updated so far.
3. If it is about a couple of sticks of RAM, despite the fact I love the new OS and zippy startup, that percussive sound you hear will be me rhythmically and repeatedly slamming my forehead into the especially stout and unyielding plaster walls of my 1940’s-built residence.

In the meanwhile, enjoy some music.

America

It’s the Fourth of July and I can’t, I just can’t. My neighbor across the street, who two elections ago had a big orange “DEFEAT OBAMA” sign in his shrubbery, and during the last election interestingly displayed no sign at all, has a honking big American flag hanging in his porch entry, as sort of a flyscreen I guess. I ought to tell him it doesn’t work that way.

My country is taking kids away from their parents and giving them back, if they’re given back, broken, and I can’t do a lot more about it than write kiddygarten postcards to voters begging people to vote for anyone who will act to stop this insanity. I don’t even like kids, but you don’t do this. You don’t.

There’s a link there at the word “broken.” Read as much as you can stand. Goddammit.

Nonetheless, I’m an American — not a Brit, though I almost did that once (and they have their own problems), not a Canadian or anything else. When I was born Eisenhower, aka the Last Honest Republican, was President. My father played in the Army Band, Pershing’s Own, and I learned first hand how full of shit the rah-rah-red-white-and-blue could be, but still, here I am. I have to find something that I can still love.

I reverted to Arthur Foote. A Unitarian kapellmeister, who studied in Europe and channeled Dvorak, Brahms and Mendelssohn, he is the only American composer I can entirely embrace. Fuck your folksy Aaron Copland first grade orchestral settings and your Charles Ives cacophony. Here is a beating heart.

Unitarianism is an interesting faith, if it is one. I don’t really understand it much. I think it basically follows the rubric “be a good person.” We could use that.

Here is the Foote piece that I always come back to. Tell me if the world isn’t redeemed at about 1:24 when the B section kicks in, or if not there when the melody comes back dancing on the roof of Creation at 7:35. An American did that. So we’re not all damned to the outer dark.

Sorry, but those are the thoughts I think these days.

The World Sucks And Yet

This was a very depressing week to be an American. There are people, of a rather Ralph Naderish persuasion (purportedly he never broke for rest and relaxation and slept on a cot in his office) who suggest that if you’re not using the Internet for anything but organizing to fight back,  you are part of the problem.

Well we all know how it worked out with Ralph Nader.

So I must share the thing that helped get me through this weekend: vintage Sondheim with Simon Russell Beale,  Daniel Evans, and Julian Ovenden plus, wait for it, the operatic bad boy of my heart-throb dreams, Bryn Terfel. Just blundered across it. Totally incorrect in these days of #Metoo but I would tidy up the dishes for Bryn any time, if he would sing.

Nadia

This was a weird one. A little while back I resumed using a thing called Sleep Wizard which is a speedball of nutriceuticals that accelerates your progress into deep stage sleep. I’d used it for years, then tried some other things that kinda sorta did the trick but seemed to leave me with an unrelieved calendar of anxiety/futility dreams, the kind where you’re trying to dial a phone but it doesn’t work, or you can’t find a restroom anywhere that isn’t too disgusting to even exist. Fortuitously, the company that sells the Sleep Wizard got its operation smoothed out, one of the reasons I’d looked elsewhere. It’s been about a month. I have interesting dreams.  Some of them are almost good.

Last night, I was at some sort of public performance or event, a fairly informal one that seemed to be taking place in a big open room or sheltered outdoor venue, with no seats, just people on the floor. Maybe blankets. Not sure. I am not even sure what music was being performed, but at a pause, famous people in attendance were to be brought forward.

The emcee produced a slender, ethereal woman, clearly old but not hag-like — in fact her features were hard to distinguish, her hair and eyes seemed dark — wrapped in a sort of sari or swaddling so closely you could not really discern arms and legs, and introduced her as Nadia Boulanger. For those who aren’t classical buffs, Boulanger was one of the Grey Eminences of twentieth-century music, composing little in her later life but teaching and directing copiously, mentoring most of the “modern” composers you possibly have heard of: Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Virgil Thomson, to name a few. When I was young and trying to channel all my mental energy (including melodies that hit me at all hours of the day and night) I asked my father, the hornplayer, if women had ever been composers — you wouldn’t know it from the playlists of the time. He brought up Nadia Boulanger. As far as I know, that’s the only conversation I ever had about her.

But in the dream I was stunned to discover that she was, though aged, still alive (she actually died in 1979), and appearing in public for unclear reasons, other than that it was a musical occasion, at least in part. And suddenly I stood up from my place on the blanket at stepped forward and sank to one knee in front of her, welling over with reverence and joy.

I have no idea what this means. Should I start practicing the piano again? The guitar? Terrifying the cats with my singing? Or found a religion?

Ear Defenders

I have been bitching for years about the universal plague of the earbud, the solipsistic me-world accessory that isolates other gym members in their own little music bubble and makes them impervious to things like friendly conversation or requests to “work in” on the machine they’ve been hogging for three sets without getting off in between. Well, you can talk to them, but you have to cause an international incident by raising your voice and waving your hand in front of their faces and repeating yourself when they fork the gross wax-glazed bud out of their ear and say “Huh?” like an old deefer in a retirement home.

Only I seem to have joined them. No, I don’t stick things in my ears. Never have, never will; it’s disgusting, and TOO GODDAM LOUD. I don’t need my music inside my bodily orifices; I really don’t need it in the gym at all. Which is sort of the reason. Gold’s was bad enough — they had their own disgusting radio station peppered with repetitions of the same ads every fifteen minutes,, for teeth whitener or Spandex leggings or what not. Back at Planet Fitness, where I reluctantly retreated after the millionth commercial and one too many rude assholes and a paucity of warmup bikes — they pick a Sirius station, and on Sundays I can stand the classic rock, which sort of takes me back to my roots at the biker gym that was my home in the 80s. The current top forty, however, can take a hike. It either sounds like a bad case of fleas or someone banging his head on a wall for eternity, and one of the current songs features a talentless female vocalist ascending to a dramatic peak note — practically in whistle register and grotesquely flat. I was raised on real music, goddammit — Mozart and Bruckner and Schumann and Brahms. I don’t know why people need to fray their nerves with this amateurish shit all day. No wonder society is in a mess.

So what happened was, I was reading the Twitter feed of Steven Silberman, who wrote the book, literally, about autistic people finding their place in human culture, and one of his autistic tweeps posted about wearing his Ear Defenders in the subway and meeting a gradeschool-age autistic kid who was excited at the sight because he wore them too.

I perked up. I have always gravitated toward people on the spectrum, though I didn’t usually know it because “on the spectrum” hasn’t been a term for most of my life. But forex, my first decent boyfriend (my “transgender ex,” as it turned out) ticked all the boxes for Aspie whiz kid with tics and quirks — could play reams of Bach and Beethoven by heart, chess maniac, used to make weird rolling movements with his hands and hum to himself, wore clothes until they were in tatters because they were familiar and soft. The Congressional protest candidate that I worked for in the oughts used to routinely stim while driving the car, holding his hand over the air vents and waving it continually at the wrist; couldn’t remember a face for five minutes; couldn’t shut up once he started talking, did statistics for a living, handled carefully planned public speaking with grace but had genuine meltdowns when there was too much unscripted interaction. (I earned some kind of an award for stage-managing his candidacy.) He had had a ham radio call sign since his teens — a hobby that was home to autistic people before the digital age gave them a larger playground. I was always sorry that I couldn’t coax him, a man born long before adult autism diagnosis was a “thing,” into getting evaluated, but like neurotypicals (that’s me and pro’lly you) of his generation, could only hear me suggesting that he had an awful defect instead of alternative wiring.

The common ground is that I get the characteristic low threshold that autistic people have for sensory input. I get a violent headache and throw up if I view 3-D movies or even the vivid animations that often precede a feature film. I cannot be near anything like a disco or party and, lacking any desire to attend a rock concert, can detect (and be crazed by) a loud stereo two houses away that the Engineer can’t even hear. This is a “thing,” too, though it is kind of mortifying that it is termed “high sensitivity,” which sounds like I am trying to align with a cohort of tender weepers who swoon if you say “fuck.” Whatever. It makes me a good bodyworker and ruthless lifter who says “fuck” a lot in the presence of excess commotion. Maybe that is its own neurotribe.

I stuck “Ear Defender” into the search bar.

A few days later this wonderful pair of orange things showed up.

They look like the headphones that a lot of gym peeps wear, they’re just not connected to anything. No one else has to know that. They muffle 37 decibels, are considered adequate for driving monster trucks or light shooting, and I can attest that while they do not obliterate the vile noise that pours from the gym speakers, they move it way up the road. Also, I don’t have to overhear screamingly banal conversation from the schlubby housewives and shuffling pudgy men who use the machines backward and operate the bikes on zero resistance in slo-mo just so they can tell their doctors they “work out.” I miss the days when only goons and buff gay men (and me) hung out in gyms.

Now I get to be the one saying “Hm?” What the hell. It’s nice and quiet in here.