City of Legends

Have word from a few friends overseas (and a few hardy souls who stayed up late enough last night to make it into this morning) of their exploits for Guerrilla Poetry Day.  Bravo and Brava, all around.

I headed out this morning, having made some last minute changes to my itinerary and splitting it into two "waves".

Read "couplet/passion" to the order-taker at the McDonalds in Sterling, Virginia.  I think she was confused.

Did "goblins in my attic" and "My Electric Lady" in front of the American Psychological Association building in Washington, DC.  A street person yelled at me, something about Jesus.

Then, made a ride up to Embassy Row to do "Queen Protea" in front of the South African Embassy.

Later today, more madness.  Madness?  This is Poetry!

I am about to head back to DC (normally a big whoop, but I made a promise to keep Candy informed when I took trips, and will dutifully record when I arrive).

On that topic.

Candy is without a doubt in my mind one of the most talented, brilliant and loving people I will ever have the pleasure to accept into my life. Do not interpret any expression of my own frustration over her complexity (she describes herself openly as "difficult") as a criticism of her or an indication that my love for her has flagged a hairsbreadth.

I have studied her poetry (even those pieces not about me), spoken hundreds of hours with her and had the honor of reading her yet-unreleased book Losing People, which I can only hope she would allow me to write a jacket blurb for. I have said before that there will come a time when she is regarded as South Africa’s greatest cultural export, and I stand on that. I have told her things out of me that no other human being has ever heard me express, and she is without a doubt the most important person in my life.

I think her decision to give me equal footing on her marvelous blog, InsideCandy, was wrong-minded, and I told her so, and I have made no attempt to limit or eliminate her right to post and comment upon my blog to her heart’s content.

To use her own expression, stolen from Moonstruck, I love her awful.

It is the first Saturday in February, and the long road of the year still stretches out before me. Miles to go before I sleep, miles to go before I sleep.

The year has already taken me by surprise. A year ago I was living two hundred miles from where I am writing this and unattached (a pledge by me to remain faithful to my vows from my second marriage, out of respect for her and to prove to myself that, despite the legends, I can keep it zipped, just became a habit and I found myself promising to make sure I would "take no pretender, again, to my bed").

Now I am where I am, wishing I was 8,132 miles ESE of where I am, blissfully involved with a woman for whom, for years, I felt unworthy to get the attention of. We are making plans. That is a very gentle way to put it. There’s an old saying that love is just your neuroses finding somone else’s neuroses attractive. We both have our frayed edges, dings and cracks, but it seems to have made us both stronger, and more suited for a life with each other than we would have been five, ten years ago.

I have a lot of work ahead of me, having allowed some things to slip over the last few years, but I am making the adjustments…not to be a different person, there’s a world of difference between shining one’s shoes and throwing them out to buy another pair, but to put the edge back on the knife, the shine back on the mirror and recalibrate some things I let slip in the face of my own doubts and penance.

Next month I am the a judge or judge and MC (they are still debating on whether or not to turn me loose on a crowd of high school students, no wonder West Virginia has a bad rap in educational statistics, nationally, they are so afraid of their own shadow they stunt the students by pretending the world is Disneyland) for the West Virginia state finals of the Poetry Out Loud contest. I have a few miracles left…not many (I laughed aloud at the anonymous commentor who accused me of having a Messiah complex or Narcissism, obviously they have been spending too much time with their head up their ass to move beyond such simplistic and misapplied generalities…Salieri lives!) but enough.

Not miracles of divine intervention. But if you take a reasonably well filled brain pan (is it narcisstic to know one’s own IQ score?) and give it a vector and a shove, you can take down mountains and reroute rivers. Then all the people who never got off their fat asses will accuse you of thinking you are better than them, and it gets ugly because, while they are farming the new fields and irrigating with the rerouted river, they are busy trying to hang you as a witch.

I actually find it terribly amusing. C.S. Lewis was very right when he pointed out that Democracies have an issue with excellence (take a look at our President, the triumph of mediocrity. We elected a man I wouldn’t hire to fix my car because of questions of competence and integrity and gave him the power of life and death to send my nephew and thousands of other people’s fathers and mothers and sons and daughters and nephews and nieces into harm’s way).

We need to stop this whole entitlement mindset that hampers and pampers us such that we become a nation of couch potatoes grunting at faux celebrities on television. You know why I might would not vote for Barack Obama for President? Because Oprah Winfrey has so little social conscience that, to make a quick buck, she’d shill her jury consultant, a Dr. Phil McGraw, to the American viewing public as a competent and representative mental health professional, causing untold harm to people and relationships (but she gets her licensing fees from syndication). So I wonder if she’ll put her prestige behind a train wreck of a snake oil salesman like Dr. Phil, do I want to trust her with telling me whom I should have deciding who lives and dies and what Federal programs get funded?

Maybe we should just skip the step and run Dr. Phil. The terrifying thing is, he’d get a lot of votes. Just not from Britney Spears.

I would heartily recommend anyone who is interested in good, clever and sharp writing in the blogosphere (and anyone with a morbid curiosity about my life-mate) to check out the newly re-launched blog by the remarkable Candy,

Inside Candy.

Yes, she does mention me.  Or, at least, used to…

some people have different definitions of forever.