Five Years & Six Beginnings... Part Two

New Year's Day 2005, found me once again alone in the house on Dana Street, but this time I was most truly alone.

My aforementioned partner had moved to Mississippi late in the summer of 2004 with the plan of taking care of her father and getting a PhD in education at the same time. There was a lot of talk about our still being together, but as I look at the situation from this side of the great divide, I can see that we were both either lying, or trading on false hopes, or pretending for various reasons, or all of the above. The clear reality of our life together is that it ended back in the summer of 2004. It took another year to finally break down completely, but it was really over when she stepped on that plane headed east.

2004 had also seen my daughter graduate from college and subsequently move to London. My partners and friends in the house were three cats. Two (Hobbes and Angelica) had been in residence with me/us for a long time. George, who I was taking care of for Jen while she was in London - and who definitely did not get along with the other carts - was my only real company and friend. I was turning into a "crazy cat person."

A week earlier, coincidentally (or perhaps not) on the same day as the earthquake and tsunami in Asia, I had a small seizure while working in my office at the back of the house. I awakened from the seizure confused and disoriented with no sense of the day or date, where I was, or what had just happened. The disorientation didn't last that long, but the depth of the feeling remained. I was by myself and on my own. If something happened to me, no one would find out for days, or even weeks.

I was also finding it very difficult to get work and to keep up the mortgage for the house and the car payment for partner. My months had turned into a mad financial scramble that I couldn't sustain and that I would never have made it through without considerable help from my family. I had plans to meet partner in New Orleans over Mardi Gras, a month away, and that less than stellar reunion (ugly interactions in our lovely hotel room and arguments over brunch at The Court of Two Sisters) would clearly signal the true beginning of the end of our relationship. It was after that trip that I would decide that my place was in New Orleans. I had been working on a film about Mardi Gras Indians for quite some time and the work I put into it during Mardi Gras of 2005 convinced me that I needed a greater comittment to the task and a new way of viewing things in my life. I spent several months trying to get things in order and make plans to move. With each passing day, I found it more and more difficult to remain in California in general, and Petaluma in particular.

I missed JazzFest in April for the first time since I had begun attending, and I spent long hours listening to the music on WWOZ and watching my friends on Liuzza's web cam. When that was followed by the death of Tootie Montana in June I sat in a closet on Dana Street and sobbed for most of the day.

I was totally in the wrong place at the wrong time. My nearly 30 years in California had been reduced to an 800 square foot house, a bar stool at Dempsey's, and a few friends scattered about the world. I was as alone as I had ever been in my life.

It was time to get the hell outta Dodge.

Five Years & Six Beginnings...

Earlier today, as I was journaling thoughts and plans for the new year, it struck me - not for the first time, but certainly more deeply than before - how much my life has been transformed in the last year. Walking backwards from a year ago, I was instantly flabbergasted at the way my life has been re-set in a relatively short period of time. This despite the fact that within the process, things seemed like they were never going to end.

The last five years of my life have included some of the highest and most of the lowest experiences of my nearly 55 years on the planet.

Five years ago, I was living in Petaluma, about four blocks from where I live now, but the life I was living then and the life I am living now are as different as night and day. The joy I feel now, compared to the misery I was feeling then, is as astonishing as it is delightful.

The journey in between these two points is even more incredible, while also being rather mundane. I don't want to pretend that I have had some amazing adventure (though there are many aspects of the last five years that would certainly qualify as exactly that).

The details of the last five years add a whole new level of meaning to the concept that you cannot step into the same river twice.

The experiences I have had, the friends I have come to know and to value (along with new and deeper relationships to old friends), the ways my life has been confronted and transformed, and the love that I presently feel from the tips of my toes to the center of my soul is nothing short of miraculous to me. In my comparatively short life, I have been in a lot of places (both physically and emotionally) around the world, but the last five years in which I have moved from a little house on Dana Street to a tiny apartment on Fair Street, all within the 94952 zip code have been the most profoundly life-altering experiences (with one singularly significant exception that I will talk about later) of my life.

I began 2004 in a little living room on Dana Street, my partner of 16 years visiting her family in Mississippi as she always did at that time of the year. There was nothing terribly odd about this at the time, but what I didn't realize on that lonely night was that everything I had built my life on for the last 20 years was going to be systematically obliterated over the coming twenty months. We had come through the struggles of raising children, battling cancer, fighting back the difficulties of financial distress and the basic frustrations of our difficult personalities. We had shopped for, bought, and decorated a house together, only to find ourselves trapped inside it like doomed sailors on a becalmed sea. The times when we couldn't keep our hands off of each other had transformed into several years in the same bed when we never made love once.

The stage had been set (we had been working on our respective parts for over ten years) and most of the coming actions had already been determined.

Things were about to get crazy.

Richard Does It Again!

What might just be the best concert I saw in th last year rolled into the little Mystic Theater in Petaluma Thursday night when Richard Thompson played solo to a packed house.

One of the most amazing moments of the show was when he covered Britney Spears' "Oops I did it again." This clip is from the rendition he did during his "Thousand Years of Popular Music" tour. In one single song he revealed what an incredible story teller and musical interpreter he is. His take on the song flat out made it his own. If you had not previously heard it by Britney it would be impossible to think of it as the goofy pop song she created it to be. In Thompson's gifted hands it transforms into a dark amusement etched with playful evil.

It SOUNDS and FEELS like a Richard Thompson song!

This was just one single small element of a tasty show created by a consummate artist who is completely in command of his instrument, his song writing, and his voice.

Thompson reveals insight, darkness, playfulness, sadness and joy at each moment of the concert. He plays tennis with human light and shadow and in doing so brings to musical fruition a complete sense of what it means to be human.

This is why we live.

60 Years On...

On this anniversary of the International Declaration of Human Rights, Amnesty International's WITNESS program is asking the question , "What image opened your eyes to Human Rights?"

For me, I think it was the images from Susan Meiselas' book on the Nicaraguan revolution. I had already seen other images by that time... mostly images provided by Amnesty International, but it really came home with Nicaragua and those photos; photos of decapitated bodies lying on the side of the road, and women wearing masks to avoid detection, torture and death. They were images that moved me to work to change things in Nicaragua, to go there twice and to try and bring something of the country back with me.

Twenty years ago, it was the variety of images propagated in conjunction with the Amnesty International Concert Tour in recognition and celebration of the 40th anniversary of the DHR. Those images and ideas, contrasted with the vibrant music and immediacy of the moment (and were magnified by the fact that I was newly in love and feeling so deeply that sense of freedom that new love gives you) and in that, the call to DO SOMETHING.

With the approach of this 60th Anniversary I have been feeling driven to find a way to place myself again in the middle of this fight for all. I'm still trying to comprehend what... and how.

What image opened your eyes? What have you done about it?

You can start (or continue) by signing onto the declaration at http://www.everyhumanhasrights.org/. You'll be in good company!

Death By Shopping

In the dark hours of Friday morning, while I was sleeping off my food indulgences of the day before, in the doorway of a WalMart on Long Island, Jdimytai Damour was trampled to death by insane shoppers, desperate to beat one another to the "hottest deals of the season."

I'm working on a piece about this that I'll post on Butting Heads a little bit later, but in the meantime here are some links:

Reverend Billy's Comments

From the NY Times (which you actually have to go through an ad for)

A perspective from across the pond

And a quote from a co-worker... echoing what seems to have become the universal excuse lifted from the speeches of the Pretender In Chief for the last eight years (spoken after 9/11, after Katrina, and after the stock market crash)... “How could you know something like that would happen? No one expected something like that.”