All over town

1900’s. Baseball everywhere.
We understand the game’s presence,
Remembering graffiti in the eighties,
How it made us tense.

Capitol park

A great place for a pool.
Lined with orange trees.
Capitol in background.
Maxfield Parrish beauties distant as the sun.

Summer evening at the capitol

Compelled to linger,
Admire beauty,
Marvel at inspiring architecture,

One realizes one has to go, but everything’s closed.

So you leave.
Unfree.
Full of pee.

Stepping up to the Capitol

Big beautiful doors fill you with awe.
Like you’re visiting a king or queen, or lover.
Touch one.
Run your hand along its’ wood.
Smell it.
Then gently push.
Entering like royalty or an expected lover.

Olive tree dying

With tortured bladders and tangled minds
We hurried past you to pee.
Then returned
Admiring your twisted peaceful beauty.

A place in the sun

When poets believe in beauty
They will sit on one of these benches looking at the capitol
Asking for forgiveness for having idolized absolute profanity and absolute perversion
For rejecting absolute truth and absolute justice

They will repent
Vowing to be absolutely good
As a poet and a person

Removing their sunglasses
They will cry over the glaring perfection of the capitol
Their maturity for now loving it
And the disgrace they once proudly made of poetry

Courage to shine

In this age of fear,
Rise to the occasion.
Smile at strangers.
Put terror in the hearts of fascists who hate to see you loose, free, trusting, fearless.

Incite those who hate good will.
Say If you don’t smile at me, don’t lust for strangers’ eyes – you ain’t free. Do not destroy my shine.

You don’t shine Sacramento.
The great flag above our glorious capitol flies in vain.
You fear yourself, your neighbor, everyone, everything.

All the monuments in this park Sacramento. You disgrace them.
Those guys didn’t die so you could cower.

Get pissed off.
Say you are ill from having everything beautiful in you destroyed.
Say you realize the damage you do to the hearts of your fellow citizens when you fear them,
When you let them know their freedom and good will is not welcome.

Think about it Sactoh!
We destroy each others’s hearts.
It’s all on film –
Secure little you walking through huge solid doors at the capitol.
Little men, little women failing to attain greatness,
Eagerly saying oh yes we can’t be too scrutinized,
Afraid to say this is neither a great nation, a great state, a great city, or a great people.

What do you dream about?
I’ve never heard anyone say freedom is more important than money.
I’ve never seen anyone on the west steps in the sun reading Whitman, vowing to be godlike.
I’ve never heard anyone updating Thomas Paine saying
It’s unnatural to have security cameras everywhere. They must come down.
Those who put them up must be deposed. Are you with me!

You are filed with shame but for the wrong reasons.
You are meant to be beautiful America!
Sacramento! With your weather, your rivers, this grand capitol, these inspiring grounds
You should lead this nation on its’ path to being beautiful and free,
Of having the greatest men and greatest women that ever walked the earth.

We are an extraordinarily ugly people.
I dare you to be free.
Walk around the park.

Salivate over oranges and tangerines golden and sweet, with no edges.
Isn’t that a combination to strive for?

Sit on a bench under these magnolias, lusting over their sensuous roots,
Going mad with passion,
Promising to restore everything that’s been lost when you get home.

You need help. Go to Father Serra. Kneel. Confess your cowardice, your selfishness,
Your refusal to be true to America. Ask father to bless you,
So you dare to risk yourself to be free like he risked himself for others’ salvation.

Stop at the bathroom. Smell the disgusting homeless. Look at how ugly they are.
They personify the hearts of the people who run this country,
The people who love to see you weak and fearful. When you piss,
Tell yourself you’re releasing all the fear that makes you a little man.

After peeing, stop at the olive tree. It used to be the greatest tree in the park;
Just like we used to be the greatest nation and the greatest state.

See the bamboo. Watch its’ soothing light. Imagine how beautiful the jungle is.
How magnificent a jungle night must sound with crickets and all its’ tropical birds.

When you get to the Vietnam Memorial, think of young men screaming in quick sand,
reaching for their buddies hand; all so you could satisfy every selfish desire,
And give unquestioning assent to more cops and more jails.
Are you embarrassed? Ashamed? Have you ever told a young person patriotism is horseshit,
That if he can go to another country to murder,
He can’t complain when someone rapes his mother or girlfriend?

Peace. This is your greatest challenge! There are soothing black benches in this oasis from glory.
Feel their curve as fountain’s water soothes you and the overwhelming capitol imposes itself on you.
Make peace with yourself. Invite your former friends, telling them you apologize;
Begging them to apologize. Invite your friends. Tell them to ponder the noble white capitol,
The beauty and peace of these roses. Look at them.
Tell them you plan to make yourself free and beautiful,
To inspire other people to pull themselves and the nation out of darkness.
Tell them you love America, but this is no country for lovers and it kills you.
Smell roses with them. Ask them if they cry more as they get older.

As you wander to your next station, stop and look at the hydrangeas on 14th.
A great place to read in seclusion,
Arming yourself with courage to face the onslaught of conformity that makes America shameful.

Now you’re at the Korean War Memorial; the most profound of our monuments;
The cracked obelisk symbolizing the crack that began America’s decline.
But instead of photographs of the soldiers, imagine photographs of America’s prisons and prisoners,
Our lobbies filled with security guards, malls filled with bored kids,
Scared women hurrying white-faced to their car,
You looking at the ground because you fear to look at people because they worry you’re a
criminal, a rapist, and a pervert.
America hates crime but loves to live in fear.
You haven’t done a thing but you feel like shit don’t you?
All the space that this monument takes up used to be beautiful.

While you’re here and since it’s winter, look toward L Street.
You’ve got a clear view of the firefighter’s monument,
Our heroes who would hose you down the street if you questioned the Patriot Act.

Good thing there’s a God. Across the street is the Presbyterian church. Sit on the lawn.
Look at the palm trees. Ask yourself what God thinks of you.
All God wants is for you to feel free or godly or to suffer trying to be one or the other.
You suffer but you aren’t noble.

Look at those pigeons on the roof of the church. You feel peace when they whoosh away.
Wouldn’t you love to instill the same feeling in others as you move along the street
reflecting God’s beauty?

Be proud and humble. Stroll to the shiny white capitol.
Let yourself be stunned by its’ unembarrassed glorification of perfection.

Have the courage Socrates and Jesus did to believe in perfection; to be godly at work,
At home, and with strangers.

Kneel again. Ask God to help you be as great as your talent allows; so when you die,
You rise to heaven on grand clouds above the capitol, escorted by pigeons.

For now, walk to the west steps, your knees muddy. Take off your shoes,
Walk on the concrete. When your colleagues pass,
Force them to look at you after they turned away.
Tell them you never knew the burden of freedom that it means to be an American until today.
When they scoff, allow yourself to cry.
Think of how many times Socrates and Jesus cried over the corruption of their nation’s principles.

You’re almost finished. Go to 10th Street. Turn around. Look at the capitol in silence.
Now go to 9th Street and look at it. In front of you is a huge fountain.
On each side is a proud building.
One building has an inscription – Into the highlands of the mind let me go.
The other inscription reads – Send me men to match my mountains.

Put your shoes on.

It’s time to shine.

Even if it kills you.

Friday, April 27

Dear Jim,

I’m writing to you using one of my new pencils I bought at an art supply store. This one is a 3B. I also bought a 2B.

I got tired of having to sharpen my cheap shit pencils from the discount store all the time. I’d sharpen them and the lead would keep falling out. Then the sharpener would get dull and a piece of lead would break off and stick against the blade so I could not use the sharpener anymore.

Now I’m happy. I’ll use the erasers on the pencils I used to write with, then throw the pencils away. Buying the new ones was a great idea. It’s funny how long it takes to do something I should have done a long time ago.

Today was a great day. It was sunny, cold, and breezy with a few clouds when I got up. It reminded me of the East Bay in Spring or Candlestick in the evening before the fog rolled in.

Then I took a bus to the South Area. It wasn’t as sunny as my neighborhood and there were a lot of high clouds. It reminded me of the Midwest. I kept looking out the window of the bus at the clouds.

When I got to the strip mall I felt as if I was in another world as I took the long walk from the bus stop across the parking lot gawking at the sky. It was so cool and windy I had to put my ski cap on.

All day I had the hee bee gee beez. I wanted to spend a few hours outside sitting, writing to you, and reading, but I would not have been able to write in the wind and I was worried that I would catch a cold.

I took advantage of the cool day to clean the shower and refrigerator. I hadn’t planned to use the computer, but since the weather was so cool, I knew I didn’t have to worry about the computer making the apartment warmer. So I turned it on.

What gave me the hee bee gee beez was that I kept thinking of San Francisco: North Beach on a Summer evening, the tulip gardens at the windmills in Golden Gate Park, being in our cool room downstairs looking out at the trees blowing in the wind.

It’s the magical San Francisco light that shook me up today. I wasn’t physically able to immerse myself in it – to really enjoy myself. I wasn’t socially able to glory in it because I have few friends and am not in a good frame of mind.

It would have been great to stand in the wind talking with someone I like. Even if they were oblivious to the light , I would have been chomping at the bit lusting for more light and magic.

When I wrote to you about the beauty of San Francisco and all the drinking there, I said that San Franciscans drank too much because their marriage and career weren’t close to having the beauty San Francisco has. It’s a double whammy. Their marriage and career didn’t have the magic that San Francisco’s light has.

All those beautiful views. All that magical light. All those broken hearts. Bartender!

What troubled me today was thinking of memories people have of each other on a day with magical light. They recall their spouse or their kid or their grandparent or brother. ”It was a day like today. I was so happy for him.” Then his life went to hell.

I thought of the look on mom’s and dad’s faces when my life fell apart. My magic and beauty were gone and after all they went through with you.

On magical days with beautiful views, it must have killed mom and dad to be with me.

That’s it for now Jim.

Love,

Dave

Sunday, April 15

Dear Jim,

There’s sure been a lot of wind lately. I’ve been inside all day. At least it’s nice not to wear shoes.

Last night my neighbor and I went to dinner. We hadn’t been in at least two weeks.

Instead of going to the Chinese place like we used to, we went to a Mexican place over where I lived for eleven years. It was the first time in the thirty-eight years that I’ve lived here that I went. I used to pass it all the time no matter where I lived.

I liked the food and I enjoyed the company of my friend, but I did not like being in my old neighborhood. Living there was the most unhappy period of my life. It aged me.

My friend was telling me how much he loves the houses in that neighborhood. They are beautiful – built in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s with a ton of trees on the street. He hopes he wins the lottery so he can buy one. I hope so too. I wonder if I’d see him again.

Remember your house? I didn’t like it or your neighborhood. I know you didn’t like your neighborhood. Did you like the house? I loved my house but didn’t like the neighborhood. Too suburban.

The important thing for me isn’t whether I live in a house or an apartment, but whether or not there is a lot of light, a lot of windows, especially on the south. I’m becoming more and more light deprived. Part of it is fluorescent lights, but an increasing part is that aging eyes receive 40% less light than the eyes of a young person.

I’m going to get a new tablet before winter. It will not have bad lighting built in like the one I have now. I’m also going to get a tall lamp with healthy bulbs.

One of the things I read is that you need healthy light coming down on you like the sun, not up to you like a desk lamp. And I don’t know if you can do this in an apartment, but there are tubes that can be hooked up to a device outside that will bring natural light over your work area.

I’m supposed to go to the eye doctor this month, but I’m thinking of changing doctors. I love the office though. It feels great to be in.

You know how the media talks about how depressed old people are in rest homes? One of the reasons is the fluorescent lights. Another is the bad light from all the TV’s and the third is the inability of old eyes to absorb natural light like they used to.

A long time ago I looked up lighting in rest homes. There was a guy who designed rest homes so that the rooms receive a lot of natural light and, I assume, use light bulbs that make rooms feel good to be in.

I will not be able to afford to live in such a place. I won’t be able to afford to live in even a gloomy rest home. If I did live in one of those lousy places with fluorescent lights and TV’s on all day, I would lose my mind. Remember the movie about the insane asylum where at the end the Indian breaks the window to escape from the place? That’s what I think I would do in a rest home.

I remember one time that you said ”Television is the killer of the soul.” I say television is a weapon parents and the staff in rest homes use to kill the souls of children and old people.

If I won the lottery like my neighbor hopes he does, I wouldn’t buy a house. I would make arrangements to move into one of those well-lit rest homes as soon as I turned sixty-five or seventy, whatever age I thought I would begin to need assistance. It would be great to be an old man in a place that feels good to be in, basking in the peaceful glow of natural light, listening to birds instead of television.

What we do to old people is horrible. What we’ve done to dad is terrible. Dad is defeated.

I feel defeated too. I have to force myself to pray. That’s scary.

I’ve heard on religious radio stations that faith is something you sometimes have to work at. Sometimes you have to ask God to keep you in faith. You have to keep praying even when you’ve lost your faith because eventually you will regain it.

I think dad has lost a lot of his faith. He hardly prays. What means the world to him I think is when we hang up he says, ”Be careful. I love you. God bless you.” He may have lost hope for himself, but he hopes everything works out for me.

Sometimes when I don’t feel like saying a prayer for dad, I’ll ask God to let him right into heaven when he dies. He just can’t believe what’s happened to himself.

There’s that priest from Miami I think I told you about. He has a radio show for two hours every night. At the end of the show, after he’s done listening to the troubles of some people and bantering with others, it’s prayer time.

A listener will call. The priest says, ”Por su doloroso pasión.” The caller says, ”Ten misericordia de nosotros y el mundo entero.”

They say it ten times. What reverence and humbleness. Do you think it’s beautiful? It reminds me of dad.

Love,

Dave

Friday, March 2

Dear Jim,

March came in like a lion. It rained from midnight to 9 am yesterday and the wind blew like hell. When I woke up there was a puddle on the window sill and water on the floor.

I knew it was going to rain after I got to work, so I put a rug and thick towel on the floor beneath the sill. Then I put some buckets to catch the water below the leaking points. Then I took a heavy classy new bath towel that Sis II gave me and that I hadn’t used yet on the sill to absorb the water.

That was a brilliant move. When I got home from work there was no water in the buckets or on the towels on the floor, but the towel on the window sill was soaked.

It’s been a stressful week, more because of the weather than anything else. It’s been very cold and windy. I itched like crazy, but I was pretty good about not scratching. The rain has made me itch less.

This morning I went downtown to a quarterly staff meeting. It was boring. The organization is so full of positive horseshit it makes me ill. I felt like retiring.

Downtown is as ugly and lifeless as ever. I used to think beautiful architecture made cities great, but I don’t think so any more.

A city is great when there are lots of people walking who are too busy to be afraid, or when people are not afraid and so they come out to walk leisurely. Sacramento could build buildings and design neighborhoods to my aesthetic satisfaction, but people would continue to be afraid and lifeless and Sacramento would continue to be soulless.

The other night I listened to a Bishop Sheen program from World War II. I stumbled across his rebroadcasts a few years ago on Catholic Radio.

Mom and aunty always listened to him. Dad remembers him. Do you? Did you listen to him? At the seminary did they make you guys listen to him?

I was impressed by his sense of authority. He definitely was not positive. The current pope is, but I wish he spoke with authority about what is wrong with the West.

Bishop Sheen wasn’t cool. The current pope is. I liked Benedict because he wasn’t cool and didn’t try to be. He was full of love and respect for others, even those he felt were destroying the West.

What I like about the current pope is he loves the great poet from his homeland – José Hernández. Hernández wrote an epic poem through the eyes of the narrator, Martin Fierro. I read the first book in Spanish as best I could. It was incredible.

Fierro is a cowboy on the pampas – Argentina’s Great Plains. He talks of his struggles there, the land, the Indians. Someday I will buy the book, and the Spanish equivalent of the OED, then take my time to gain a better understanding of it.

Anyway. Sheen was speaking about godless modern man. Sheen said that man wants Eternal Life, Truth, and Eternal Love and seeks these as God; therefore God is man’s ultimate end.

He said that the reason ”Christianity does not speak to modern man is because modern man is only part man, a disconnected man.” I agree. People today want to live forever and expect to live until they are ninety. but they are not interested in a transcendent God to live with when they die.

People don’t want Truth to guide them through life. They want facts to build a career, get the prize, and become rich. People want to be able to fuck into their eighties, but they don’t want to feel or cultivate God’s eternal love or eternal mercy.

Sheen is intense. I’ll try to listen to one broadcast a week, but I don’t know if I will be able to. Nobody talks like that anymore.

Or I should say, Catholics don’t talk like that anymore. A lot of times when I am tired of listening to Radio Católica or the Mexican station from The City, I turn the FM dial all the way to the left than back to the right to tune in to public stations.

Every time, the first station I get is a fundamentalist Christian station from Oakland. I’ve always hated the pompous tone of the guy either reading from The Bible or giving a lecture. I’ve said, ”Oh please!” or ”Fuck you asshole!”, then changed the station.

But last week the narrator sounded authoritative to me, not pompous. I listened. He read from Malachi. Here’s the quote I like: ”The burden of the word of the Lord to Israel.”

Yes. Truth is a burden. Honoring God is a burden. Obeying the Ten Commandments is a burden. Loving God every second of every day is a burden, especially nowadays when God is hated every second of every day.

Listening to that guy read in an authoritative tone fit the authoritative tone of The Bible. If a positive reader read that passage, the listener would not feel the seriousness of God’s message and would not feel the heaviness and fear that Jews felt when they heard the word of the Lord to them, God’s chosen and burdened people. Now I understand what professors meant when they said you have to read the classics from the point of view of the Jews, Greeks, or whatever.

For three days I listened to that station and went to its’ website. On the website is a list of songs sung on the station. One of the titles caught me: When I Survey This Wondrous Cross.

It got me thinking of the cross and the crucifix. Which is better? When the Protestants broke from the Catholics, did they reject the crucifix? Is the crucifix too negative, too bloody?

I think with the crucifix the focus is on Jesus’ suffering. With the cross things are more abstract. We are at a crossroads. We have a burden to carry. There is hope. What exactly does one focus on?

So I got to thinking about the cross as something to see from a distance – sitting in the parking lot looking at the cross on the steeple. Or being on a hill in San Francisco seeing the cross on top of a church far away.

The cross is a beacon, a symbol of God’s suffering and our redemption. A crucifix makes Jesus’ suffering real. What did he go through for us?

Remember Mt. Davidson? I wonder how many people have surveyed that wondrous cross. I know liberals hate it. Maybe Catholics hate it too.

I like it. I’ve never meditated on it. But I’m glad it is there saying fuck you to all the godless juvenile artists. The left never sees the cross as a symbol of God’s infinite mercy, but only Western arrogance.

I don’t think you liked it, but we never discussed it. Maybe you thought I didn’t like it, which I didn’t until twenty years ago. I wonder if an artist or progressive ever buys a home because of it’s view of Mt. Davidson.

It’s funny that in a city that so many people come to with so much hope, the great symbol of hope is far removed from the neighborhoods they move to. They think it’s BS anyway.

That’s it for now Jim.

Love,

Dave