Category: Personal

Oh my goodness.  On August 7, 2010, my little blog, the Dream Antilles will be five years old.  Time flies on the web.  Blogging is probably passe now.  There are probably millions upon millions of abandoned blogs strewn across the Internet like beer cans on an Alabama roadside.  Today’s was the 794th post.

I have no idea how many people may have seen my blog.  Or who read it.  I admit that I’m defensive about all of that..  I disconnected all the counters (they didn’t work anyway) and took the position that it didn’t matter how many readers there were.  Also, that small was good.  That the writing is an exercise you do, like breathing, because it’s what you do.  If you stop, you’re dead.

Join me below.

It begins as helplessness.  Nothing more, nothing less.  I watch as oil spews from BP’s well into the Gulf of Mexico, killing sea life, destroying the ocean, ruining the breeding grounds near the shore.  The Gulf of Mexico is becoming a vast petroleum gumbo garnished with oil soaked sea birds and drowned turtles.  I watch this.  I wish that all of the wise men and women of the world could find a solution, could stop the flow.  But as the time elapses, and the 48 hour periods to know whether the flow can be stemmed mount up, it should be obvious to me.  There may be no solution.  At least not for the foreseeable future.  And by then, by then what even BP is calling a “catastrophe” will be that much more enormous.  That much more irremediable.  The leak will have killed much of the Gulf of Mexico, and unchecked, it will continue to kill.

Keith Olbermann thinks that Obama should show more anger about this.  That, he thinks, will show people that Obama is with them.  Or something.  Personally, I have more than enough unproductive anger about BP.  I don’t need it to be mirrored.  Or extended.  No.  What I want is internal.  I want to understand what BP is doing and has done to my interior landscape.  I want to come to terms with that.  And to comprehend it in this way, I use what I know: I look at the mythic, and I look at myself.  It’s Shamanism 101.

Please join me on this voyage.  

Forgive me for doing something a bit different today.  A steady diet of teh serious often gets burdensome.  

The late 90’s to early 2000’s MTV animated series Daria was finally released yesterday on DVD in totality.  I’m not sure a more perfect encapsulation of my adolescence could have ever been created.  Born in an era where content on MTV still could be seen as edgy and daring, instantly creating a kind of seductively rebellious authenticity with a younger audience, the series served as a lifeline to lonely, isolated, insecure teens like myself.  I myself related so much to many of the characters.  Daria and her best friend Jane were a kind of wise-cracking vaudeville act, lampooning the contradictions and hypocrisies of the world around them with their own private repertoire.  I also knew many in my own life who reminded me of Jane’s ne’er do well brother, Trent, a chronic slacker whose dreams of rock ‘n roll stardom are always frustrated by his limited proficiency as a songwriter and guitarist.  Sometimes I still encounter the Trents of the world, particularly when it comes time for me to once again take my guitar in hand, sit, and play before an audience.

Until yesterday, the subject of distracted drivers and their role in pedestrian accidents was merely an abstract annoyance.  When I moved to DC, I quite willingly gave up my car and resorted largely to my own two legs to get me where I needed to be.  Periodically one hears a horror story here about how about a jogger, walker, cyclist, or all around fellow human gets mowed down by an inattentive driver.  Recently, there have been a handful of similar incidents where people were seriously hurt.  I suppose I may have been remiss to not use that information and apply it to my life, but I always justified my inaction by feeling certain that such a thing would never happened to me.  Well, never happened yesterday.

Crossposted at Orange

On a few occasions in recent years, I’ve written about my mother’s death, the horrific relationship I had with my brother, and commented in various diaries about the status of healthcare, the financial meltdown, the state of the economy, etc.  In all of this, one common thread linking this has been my heartfelt relief that my mother died before the crash, before we had to rely on the sale of devaluing assets to care for her.  But she was not the only sick member of the family.  

The recent news of the SEC’s fraud case against Goldman Sachs coincided with other news of a much more personal nature.  The bank she invested in was taken over by the FDIC this past Friday, April 16, 2010.  Today, my estranged brother died of lung cancer.  He was 59, a longtime smoker.  

An internet advice column responded to the question of a man who was uncomfortable with the idea that, assuming the two of them would marry, his girlfriend would not agree to take his last name.  The columnist deftly turns his original question around in her reply, suggesting that perhaps he should agree to take her name or that the two of them could form a new surname unique to the both of them.  Inherent in the whole of the reply is the assertion that the soon-to-be husband in question isn’t nearly as open and accepting of a woman’s right to individual choice as he thinks he is.  The major issues expressed in the column are an articulation that men who place demands upon women, especially in situations like these are speaking from a place of privilege and in so doing need to rethink their attitudes.  When politically problematic and personal choice butt heads, the two almost always clash.  

A particularly popular line of thinking states that, should a woman make a conscious decision to participate in what would at its face be a restrictive, oppressive custom, she should be allowed to do so without being criticized as somehow violating the aims of women’s rights.  Up to a point, I think this statement is justified but if one expands the application, it becomes more and more problematic.  It should be noted that not all oppressions are the same, but in an earlier post this week, I tried to draw a parallel between all systematic injustices.  If, for example, an African-American chooses consciously to dress in blackface and to participate a minstrel show, offensive and demeaning though it is, is the practice any less evil and reprehensible if it is justified by deliberate personal choice?

My friend died on Sunday. She was 71. Had she been one of the wealthiest she would have lived longer. She was the mother of my Godmother, and I will miss her.

I share this with you for a reason. I loved her, my godfamily mourns her today, the funeral is tomorrow. Our family loved her, and her family worked hard for what they have in the world and did all they could for her, but it was not enough. Had they been a wealthier family my friend would have lived longer but she could not afford the best care in the world, and in America for far too many and for far too long there is often what you can’t afford and nothing at all to choose from. My late friend was 71. She was the grandmother of some of my best friends. She used to call me “Gig” and I tear up as I laugh in her honest hearted way at the fact that I never, ever knew why she used to call me “Gig”?

Sometimes laughter helps ease the pain.

More below the fold.

I’ve been lucky or blessed maybe. My encounters with death or loss have been extremely few and far between. I lost my parents … pretty much the way it should be… to old age, well into my own adulthood. Blessed be.

When I was young, I hated it when people would accuse me of leading a “sheltered life” but, truth is, I did.  Pretty much. As a result I was rather ill equipped to deal with a lot of life’s little slings and arrows. But… you live and learn. “Tomorrow’s another day” my Mom would always say.