Politifest is the Voice of San Diego’s annual festival that focuses on the San Diego Community and the future of the area.  With a secure place in the future of San Diego, the Museum of Photographic Arts was well represented at the event.  Later in the afternoon I went for a walk in the woods along Highway 52 between Interstate 5 and Interstate 105.  I’ve always wanted to go in there for a close-up look at the sycamore and oak trees I've seen from the highway.  San Diego is a city of neighborhoods and parks, and some of the parks are wild places.

I got word this week that a gentle teacher colleague and friend, Mike Brayer, died this week escaping finally a vicious entrapment by Alzheimer’s Disease. Words don’t do much to fill a void left by a friend gone from the earth; but my memories of Mike are particularly strong, so what he left behind has substance for me and for another couple of friends and colleagues.   Fourteen years ago, the year I was sixty-five, Mike, Don Wood, Alan Thomas and I rode our bicycles across America from Florence on the Pacific Ocean of Oregon to the Chesapeake Bay inlet of the Atlantic Ocean at Annapolis, Maryland. What a trip!  I’ll always remember seeing Mike ahead of me sometimes and behind me some of the time.  The important fragment of the memory is his being there… his being.

Thinking about Michael Alan Brayer I am reminded that effective teachers are the ones who respect the questions more than the books full of answers. Good teachers respect the questions and the questioners. The best teachers are not afraid to say, “I don’t know.” They understand that ridicule is not an appropriate response to not knowing.

Especially in matters of politics, religion, and ethics I reject the notion that the best answers to the great questions have already been found.  To hide behind creedal statements asserting that God has provided the answers to all questions is to commit intellectual suicide.  I hope my students knew that I wanted them to be skeptical.

THIS 'N THAT ON A VERY GOOD DAY

Libby

With Education Staff at MOPA... Kevin, Paolo, Lori

Balboa Park... Plaza de Panama

The Prado Umbrellas 

The Prado Day Lily

Sunflower for Marilyn

Bottle Brush for Margaret

Rough Draft Brewing Company

Separating from a spouse or partner or friend or from a religious affiliation or from a political party after years of commitment, membership and registration can be earth shatteringly hard to manage. To people, even friends and family, who watch the process of separation someone else is experiencing, the change may not seem to be such a big deal.  It is a big deal. To some extent people are known by their associations, so a radical change in affiliations sends ripples out through families and communities.

Some changes take more courage than a person can muster to make them happen, to go through with the process, to take the step; so sticking it out, leaving things the way they’ve always been may seem tolerable.  Sometimes when irreconcilable differences in personal relationships are just barely tolerable, status quo must be maintained for financial or social reasons.  

In politics and religion irreconcilable differences quickly become intolerable. A longtime valued intelligent friend who happens to be Republican told me in a quiet conversation this morning that that he is embarrassed to be identified politically with Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz.  He likes John McCain and Lindsay Graham.  He confided that he thinks the vote by Republicans in the House of Representatives to sue the President for not doing his job is totally without merit and that it is a particularly illogical move because the House of Representatives with its Republican majority has not attempted to get the people’s business done for the six years Barack Obama has been President. He also quietly confided that he couldn’t possibly become a Democrat because the people in his family have always been Republicans. He said, “It’s who we are.” He asked me if I am ever embarrassed by Democrats.  I didn’t have to make a list for him.  With a shrug I said the name Bob Filner. He said, “I see what you mean.”  

Friends help each other keep things in perspective.  My Oregon friend Jerome Garger sent me a reminder today that the earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Take a look at the video.  You’ll see what I mean.

https://www.youtube.com/v/923jxZY2NPI

Looking back to a time when I was younger…  I found in a folder of “stuff” I wrote a quarter of a century ago; and thumbing through it, I found a poem I wrote dated Monday, September 16, 1991.  That date was four days after my fifty-sixth birthday.  

No Warranty

The rudest shock of middle age

might have been anticipated

if I had been paying more attention, 

especially when Daddy died

after rotting from the inside with cancer,

and Grannie’s heart stopped one day,

and they were just part of the evidence.

What could I have been thinking

when I looked into Viola’s casket

to see lying there the cold remains

of hot shared adolescent beauty...

or when I read in the paper

about Richard Powel’s not surviving,

the boy who had the gym locker

next to mine all through high school,

even long enough to go to college.

These assembled parts,

this collection of bones and sinew,

blood and other assorted fluids,

this whole complete thing that I am,

this machine that thinks and feels

slipped into general use with no warranty.

Satisfaction is possible

but not guaranteed.

THIS BLOG POST IS DEFINITELY A RANT

…so if you prefer not to read something “devout” Christians, Muslims, Jews or fundamentalist of any religious sect will probably find offensive, skip this one.

Because I’m male, in Turkey I’d be allowed to laugh at the international news report that Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arinç gave advice to women on what he and God expect women not to do when they are in a public place and find something funny.  He began by saying, “Where are our girls, who slightly blush, lower their heads and turn their eyes away when we look at their face, becoming the symbol of chastity?”  He went on to say that a woman “will not laugh in public.  She will not be inviting in her attitudes and will protect her chasteness.”  The response of many Turkish women and the majority of women in America has been to laugh out loud. Some have sent “selfies” of themselves laughing to the Deputy Prime Minister.

I don’t have to look far to find laughable advice to women (and men) from individuals, institutions, and businesses in my own culture that offer advice which they claim to be based on beliefs as staggeringly ignorant as the Turkish Deputy Prime Minister’s notions about laughing women.  It’s not the Deputy Prime Minister’s ignorance about women that should alarm us but his ridiculous notion that there is a god somewhere who takes a personal interest in what women find amusing and cares where they laugh. I pay attention to billboards and television advertisements… can’t help myself.  That billboard with the picture of a jalapeño burger starts my salivary juices pumping.  I want one.  I’m going to get one soon and see if it’s as good as that photograph promises it will be... But if the fast food company selling the jalapeño burger tried to promote it by saying God wants me to buy it instead of a burger from another fast food chain, I’d quickly lose my appetite for it and… and I’d lose my respect for anybody who’d fall for such an ignorant idea.  Just before dinner tonight I sat down to watch the evening news on T.V. and a slick commercial slithered across the screen for a short minute with just a hint of sanctimony playing on the sound tract, and the visual message of a lovely woman and a handsome man  standing intimately close looking lovingly into each other eyes while a reverential male voice suggested that a commercial enterprise called ChristianMingle can find God’s match for me. 

You’d think a sales pitch as crass and blatantly phony as that wouldn’t be very effective, but you’d be wrong.  I learned that Spark Networks, Inc., a publicly traded company (NYSE Amex: LOV) is doing very well.  The company has been in business since 1997 when it launched the Jewish dating site, JDate. ChristianMingle was a natural.  Christians are apparently even easier to fool than Jews, and there are more of them.  1,800,000 people per month use ChristianMingle, and visit the site a total of 11,000,000 times. 

God isn’t finding a way for Palestinians and Israelites to live together in peace, or for Shites and Sunnis to settle their differences, or for Catholics and Protestants… and the list of god-related groups that can’t reconcile grows; but 1,800,000 people per month use ChristianMingle to find God’s choice of a mate for them???  Boggles the mind. 

Michael graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz this spring.

  

Our celebration of that accomplishment was delayed until today, so this Blog Post is his. The occasion gave me another good opportunity to explore what the Sony cameras, QX100 and RX100, can do with portraits and group pictures. I couldn’t resist fooling around with black and white for one of the portraits of Michael… and it worked especially well for the picture of Jeremy and his Dad… The portrait of Orange Cat is a bonus.

I like these pictures I found in a parking lot today because they remind me of a Greek idea of being separated from exactness, from precisely what is thought of as truth,  from the reality of whatever exists beyond the lines, the forms, the confusion of images…

Remember the picture of the day lilies last week?  Here they are just one week later.

LOOSE GRAVEL

Remembering a time when I had the world by the tail and a downhill pull… age eleven, I think, maybe ten… riding my bicycle downhill on a dirt road between Glenwood and Roseboro, Arkansas… giving two younger cousins a ride… I was standing pumping, Dwayne was on the seat behind me and Grady was on the passenger platform behind the seat… The world was wonderful and green, the road stretching out before us eternally… a war had been raging in Europe and in Asia… I guess I knew people had been dying...were dying, but I don’t remember “feeling” anything about the dying of people somewhere in a world I didn’t know yet.  The war was over and everybody who wasn’t a kid talked constantly about “our boys” coming home, and we knew they weren’t boys but men who were making their way back from what seemed to us a fog of exciting horror coming back to mysterious joys that we didn’t know how even to imagine… Death at a distance wasn’t real the way my Grandpa’s dying had been real because I had seen him on the morning of the day he died. He smiled and even laughed in spite of the war with his three sons in it, two in Europe and one in Texas… he ate breakfast and lunch and talked as if nothing would ever change.  He didn’t see death coming later in the day to zap him as surely as bullets on that same day killed people in the war…he had slept at our house the night before and had eaten breakfast at our table, joking and laughing and teasing the way he always did before going back home to where Granny expected him to live forever… he gave no sign that he saw death coming, crumpled, wilted like a spent day lily in his place across the dinner table from my Grandmother and that was the end of it… by the time we got to Pine Ridge the undertaker had removed him from the light and life of his house into a long black car which drove away as soon as we got there as if admitting that’s it… it’s finished… time to go get him ready for whatever happens after living is finished…but Grand Dad died in the middle of the time of war and the bicycle ride down the hill on the gravel road was sometime after the war ended… and the reason I got myself into this little bit of rambled writing is that just this week one of our neighbors and best friends had an unexpected, some would say “freak” accident a few days ago, and although she’s a very healthy, very strong person, she’s going to be laid up for a awhile recovering instead of going about doing things the way she has always done them; and thinking about that interruption for her, although there was no dirt or sand or gravel on the pavement where she fell, the thought that came into my head was that she has hit a patch of gravel, which is what happened on that bicycle ride a very long time ago that laid me up for a whole summer when I got to the bottom of that hill on the dirt road with my cousins behind me on the bike we hit a patch of loose sand and gravel and the front wheels of the bike went completely out of control and the next thing I knew we were skidding through dirt and sand and gravel with the bike on top of me and Dwayne on top of the bike and Grady on top of Dwayne with my head down face first and because it was summer I wasn’t wearing much in the way of clothes so I was scraped raw and my right knee cap was laid almost bare to an extent that just about everything that I had thought I’d be doing all summer couldn’t be done, so you can see why when I heard about my good neighbor’s falling interruption of summer plans I remembered that morning and the unexpected loose gravel that laid me up…

View from the tenth floor of Scripps Mercy Hospital... UCSD Hospital in the background...

SOMETIMES A DAY GOES BY
goes all the way to the end of it
so you wind up the next morning
looking back at it trying to find
some coherence in yesterday and
you remember that haystacks
don't all have needles in them
it wasn't a requirement for Monet
He made pictures anyway