To A T

I’ve a wonderful friend and soul-holder. His name is Tom and for the past few years we write occasional letters to one another, indulging ourselves in the rich rewards of bloviating and gentle alphabetical misspellings, exotic references and reminders that we have come to care for one another.

I cannot say that Tom is my best friend. I have never lived in close enough proximity to his light to actually shake his hand or hear his voice. We employ the post, postcards, emailed literary conceits and the silent recognitions of friendships from afar to communicate with one another. We’ve, thus far, eschewed the telephonic medium.

I haven’t found the least bit of concern in that. For, across the past few years I have come to hear the voice of this small god, Tom, in the confines of my heart. He remains there, enthroned as friend and companion extraordinare. He always has my gratitude for simply the fact that he is him. There can be, in my heart and mind, no better reason for a bit of worship for another human being. Their very human beingness is quite enough, thanks so very much.

Tom wrote me today. I replied. Then, somewhere about midway through my reply, I thought to cut and paste the correspondence here, so as to share it with some of you. Hopefully, you’ll smile. Perhaps, at least some of you will consider the letters as something worth the reading.

Whatever your case, mine is simply that I love Tom and appreciate, more than I do most things, having met him in any way, ever.

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Somehow we missed this series of exchanges and just re-read them since we have a new expanded email system on our Island of Escapism.  We hope you continue to be well! We do guh-no just how hard it can be up against the Philistines and the Chosen folk. Really most of them would benefit from scrabbling about on this planet as small box turtles for awhile so they might truly appreciate standing on two legs.

We have been diligently embracing our acreage, garden, and eight chickens who deliver a bounty of eggs.  Of course we spoil them with sardines, hamburger, table scraps, and wild ranging during sun up times.  We also play the talk shows loud when we’re away and this keeps (LOL) the Coons and Fox at bay – maybe?

Chickens are truly delightful pets – productive layers – and eventually great shepherd’s pie fillers.  They also provide an amazing quantity of poop mixed with straw for the garden. Why didn’t we do this earlier?  Always the best of questions.

We took Connie to Portland for her 75th B’day and indulged in some amazing lunch escapades as well slap and tickle each morning – though the thinning of membranes, the bolted neck, and the two replaced knees have reduced the sporting life to a careful study of the more exotic and manual Sutras of which we’re reasonably sure a small deity of your calibre will be aware.

We are now offishully her small god and she ours.  We hold hands a lot – and she has taken to grabbing our ass in public which we find very sweet.

Just think, we are now on the verge of 70 – yup May 25th – “Oh you’re one of those May Geminis – that explains a lot.”  Don’t you just hate that kind of astrological sophistry?  Esp. when it may coincidentally make some kind of ethereal sense?

So dear sweet lovely wonderful, and joyous Radha  – don’ be a strannnn jjjer but send us at least an update on your small deity  positions.

Love you as always, with sincerity,

Tom

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Dearest Tom and most favorite small god of a very tiny goddess,

I find that I miss you, and most other forms of communications, lately. Clients, and the sharing of a work computer with my excellent and most favored office-mate limit my writing time at work. (I really do adore her, but she and I have both had problems lately that seem to prevent our ever actually being at work to get done the thingies we need to do on the computer! Consequently, I do what I can and try to leave more time for her, but she is lately often out with a lengthy family emergency and has near run herself into the ground with her energetic care for others and running than doing her paperwork.) Thus, it’s tough to get aught written there.

Home? We shall simply say of home that adolescent homework assignments preclude use of the computer here on most days until the creative juices have dried and become a crust across the edges of my mind.

Then home, ah, home. The heart is here but the flesh of my just-turned-12-yesterday son is weak. Today a marker injudiciously hurled at another by yet another managed to hit said son in the eye. At the end of my probationary period I have missed four days of work due simply to him.

Three days were caused by a threatened suicide accompanied with something more than ideation as he inflicted scratches on his wrist. Said scratches went across and not up and down, but visible they were as an abrasion.

At least he came and spoke with his tiny goddess mother who, while attempting to find him therapeutic help, was told by the inevitable insurance rip-offs to take him to the emergency room. (Odd, no, how said insurance thieves consistently chatter away about how expensive e-rooms are and how they try to keep us out of them with their grave and steady diligence all the while shipping us to said expensive treatments as a matter of course?)

Yep, first chance they get they shunt one toward that very expensive treatment intervention where one seems to be inevitably sent to a psych ward due to some doctor who doesn’t want to admit that he’s petrified of being sued should said child go ahead with his plan and stand before a train to be dismembered and ground to bloody and offensive pulp and not to continue to live in a society that is friendly only to the demon Mammon, and becomes decidedly more inimical to any human kindness and relationship as time moves inexorably somewhere or another.

Perhaps that large Goddess, Mother, could intervene with me and show me a better way to teach others to live, at the least, with some sense of actual community, rather than the vague conglomerations of “helping communities” — in which I vote as a therapist at an inner city mental health clinic — “apartment communities” — beyond belief that we even use the term, how more alienated can anyone be than to have living around you 800 people who come and go somewhat faster than the summer leaves on the trees?

And “business communities” — what utter bullshite!

The very idea that any of those porkers are looking for anything but the main chance to shiv another and remove all the other’s worldly goods to the their own bank balances stands to unreason as far as the mind of man runneth not to the contrary! Instead, perhaps there might be some way to understand among both washed and unwashed that the Ayn-Randian capitalist ideal of a serial killer kind of greatness where the strong, socially abhorring and stout sociopathic I-N-D-I-V-I-D-U-A-L, man-alone, man-needing-no-one-but-himself-for-anything can be seen instead as man-the soft-and-malleable, man-the-weak-and-totally-in-thrall-to-others-because-he-is-man-THE-SOCIAL-ANIMAL-who-cannot-clean-even-his-own-ass-nor-feed-himself-the-most-squishy-tasteless-and-viscuous-pablum-at-birth-and-for-long-after-without-the-aid-of-at-least-someone-else-and-who-even-in-his-brawny-Alan-Greenspan/Tom-DeLay-Lloyd-Blankfein-John-Boehner-Glenn-Beck-obese-Rush-Limbaugh-state still requires interaction with others to offer him water, meals, whiteboards, votes, under-the-table contributions, electoral strength, gas, for his car (not for his insufferable babble about standing strong alone and needful of nothing but marks to bleed dry and then discard,) fuck bunnies: to saté his enormous appetite for anyone but himself to play with, visions of the grandest grandeur as himself striding the world, colossus of colossal and epic proportions in “the world” safely limited to the delusions he feeds himself so that his meager and weak ego can find the strength to actually come out and bully others while regaling himself with doing god’s own work is the height of inestimable regard in our society, regardless the platitudes the most expensive whores spout at us.

I wonder at the moronic ineptitude that takes balding and pathetically suited, lavender-tied hubris to a level that it cannot be imagined that even the baroque Louis XIV or the screaming and petulant Achilles or daughter-raping Agamemnon reached in anything but their most wildly erotic and hallucinogenic dreams.

Sad, but true, luv, I am so angry that I’m not even angry anymore. Instead I would wish that my laughter might ring like Mother’s voice in the ears of those pathetically limp-dicked monstrosities of human beings until the last vestiges of already tattered and decrepit ego explode inside their shriveled and base hearts. Five minutes of goddessly laughter in their idiot heads would be enough, I reckon, to rid us of the entire slope-headed, little-boy daydreaming greatness and super-strength bullshit they pump themselves with. In a poof it would burn to molecules unseen like the flimsiest flash-paper.

O wad Her Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us! More so, to see what they really think and want to do to our preening self-absorbed American insanity, I imagine the blanching lasting for a while.

That would be a task best left to the fawning and mincing pens and microphones of “journalists” who serve the pleasure of those larded-assed idiots while being paid ultimate whores-wages by the simpering and ruddy-faced simpletonian platitudes of the Rupert Murdochs of the world. Ah, but they are comfortable in their various prostitutions and prolly one would wait centuries till even one of their insipid voices were raised against their johns’ wishes.

Ah, dearest friend and worshipper/worshipped small god, I envy you your chickens and your shepherd’s pies (although, methinks, that they’d be best termed cooper-pies or some such, unless you replace the avian meat with the flesh of fleecy lambs whose throats sometimes undergo the steel blade of a knife and a swift cutting and trimming so that the meat baked into the pie would be coherent with the title of the finished dish.) Do you suppose that cowboys or gauchos make pies of beef?

At any rate I had to leave behind the job I love today to attend to the silly pre-teen wounding of my son whose eye appears to have abruptly halted the flight of a whiteboard marker hurled by a second boy at a third. *sigh* I’m sure the thrower will be dreaming of following in the footsteps of the above-mentioned Glenn Beck someday. Hopefully, the poor child will choose a higher calling, at least that of rag-picker in some Philly slum like Kensington and not pursuing the extremely demeaning and prostitutional calling of a Glenn Beck.

I wonder at the efficacy of the teaching of the masters of this small god realm in which we live, dearest Tom. When I went to school in this age they attempted to impart to us Civics lessons. Now the impartures seem to be how best to grind one’s brain to a consistent mush and one’s soul into particle board for the tables laid with meaningless and often lying reports of financial doings at places that formerly existed – Lehman Brothers, to wit. Why does it come as no surprise, I ask this tiny goddess self, that the thieves thieve and become liars to cover the thieving? O, yes, I do know the answer to that! America has no soul worth the labelling of that high name.

Working, as I have, for a very long time among people whose mental balance has been deemed unbalanced in an east coast inner city I find that I have seen such scenarios played out on sidewalks, by dumpsters, and even, ’tis true, in the halls of my workplaces. No need to go to the palatial glass and steel vaulting penis buildings along Wall Street or in other boringly-the-same towering cathedrals of evil to see that the business of capitalism is theft: the bigger, the better, and more to be gloried in and about. Our Puritan ancestry taught us well that a sucker is born minutely and that gods are on the side of the most audacious and irredeemable thieves and liars in a society that prides itself on upright and pious facades.

‘Tis most awesome, though, how well we imbibe such pablum-mixing conduct (most of all) through the agencies of our various and proud monotheistic, materially-centric religious institutions: The Church in Rome, The Southern Baptist Conventicle, Melodious Methodists and Preening Presbyterians, Lurid Lutherans, and the hydra-headed and regenerating as though Leporidean, Evangelicals of way too many names to gather them all in one essay.

Their Hell is reserved for those who have sex (most especially those who do so out of the bonds of some priest/minister-inducted Droit de Seigneur celebration where the bride has been used and abused by the various officials or perhaps, usually, ’twas the groom so abused and used) for the simple love of another, though it sometimes be but briefly, while when one has it with a child or a man or woman they have taken in thrall to their vested power it becomes somehow worthy and to be hidden proudly if not openly praised openly. The wink-wink, nod-nod paean to bad conduct is their most effective teaching tool: “We never knew; and are truly sorry. Please, send more money, quickly so we might continue our very needful work of stealing from those who have little to steal!”

There is an insipid mundaneity about the entire mass of preachers, priests, salesmen and saleswomen, shills and barkers after paper fortune that simply infuriates one when she contemplates how fatuously unheroic and abject they all are. A plague on their houses would be incredibly overblown as punishment. A seeping pustule on their asses would be more appropriate: pustules for the pustules.

Both, bride and groom, so-indoctrinated, are then commended to the “father” god for safe-keeping while being made into the most abject shills whose sexual desire is forbidden them except in cases where they desire to breed a few more morsels of young flesh for the pleasure of said officiators who can, thus, begin again the “work of god.”

Forbid it that showing even the basest modicum of care or compassion not deeply immured within the confines of pious platitude and know-nothing and moronic showmanship be taught our children in this lush desert of anything worth actually having, save one another. Thus, my son spent a week in the hospital while others attended to his perfectly sane wish to slay himself at the thought of growing to adulthood in this living hell we manage to jokingly refer to as a society.

The longer I work in mental health the more convinced I become that the British shrink, R.D. Laing, was indubitably correct when he opined that it seemed to him that schizophrenia was a perfectly reasonable way for one to adjust herself to a perfectly insane social order and society. One would evoke the powers of some Grand God of Sociopathy (could a god be named Lloyd?) to grant one the ability to play and screw unfeelingly and unstintingly every one with whom one comes into contact. Is it a wonder that Charlie Colson became a minister after averring that he’d walk over his grandmother for Richard Nixon? Somehow in the Age of the Sociopath the evil of Colson merely appears laughable and cute these days.

It’s enough, dearest Tom, to chivvy one’s self toward the pleasures of the most Lethe-like narcotics and alcohol washes. Despair never seems far from the door. Yet, I suspect that a flock of chickens, or a flock of lambs, gambolling or clucking outside one’s door while she tends a garden of chickpeas and lentils, tomatoes, spuds, lettuces, carrots, radishes, cucumbers, onions, peppers and tall pampas grasses might go far to pleasantly isolate one’s self from the grating insincerity and indescribable hubris of our most-modern and effluent societal norms.

Alas, the tiny goddess but shakes the dust off her feet and the curdled soil off her garden-trowel and drops seeds into the earth. In her work time she attempts to drop other seeds, those of community and well-being, into the hearts of her charges, who offer her better companionship and society than could ever be found anywhere, but on the heating grates, along Wall Street. I’d rather trust the kindness of those bereft of hope than the riches of those whose stink rises into the great akasha between here and Ouranos.

I do not know if you’ve deigned to avail yourself of the various links I seem to always post these days on that damnable Facebook account (there’s a certain folly, no, in attempting community from 3000 miles away?) But I’d recommend the cultured and suave scribblings of someone who recalls to me my latest upbringing in the wilds of eastern Tennessee. He was apparently raised and lives for around six months a year in the northern edges of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, the other six in some expatriate enclave in Ajijic, Mexico. Yet, even from the distance I find myself sometimes ensorcelled by his words. Joe Bageant is well worth the read if one wishes to see a jaundiced but good-hearted view of the state of America. He has the value of being down-home and genteel, yet erudite in a sort of backwoods farmer kinda way. The essays are somewhat reminiscent of a hillbilly Dorothy Parker or a southern H.L. Mencken. They contain much wisdom and a good deal of laughter and recognition.

The tiny goddess needs must leave off this letter to you, my very dear friend. She has an errand to run to the doctor’s with a child whose eye was struck unexpectedly with a whiteboard marker missile.

You are ever in my heart, Tom. As always give my very best and a hug for me to Connie. I understand that only the best of human stock can long-endure the hearts of we miniscule deities. I shouldn’t wish it to be a thankless task, so give her my thanks that she’s held you for long enough that I have come to know, revere, and appreciate, most delicately, thee.

Radha