Winter Solstice 2020

 The official time of the solstice is 5:03 A.M. EST Monday, December 21, between Chanukkah and Christmas, normally joyous times that have been tamped down by the coronavirus and the government's reaction, or lack thereof. We had snow this week in Morgantown, then temperatures just barely above freezing. It was pretty for a few days, but now it's getting slushy. And there's hardly been any sun for days. It feels like twilight just about all day.

Lots of people I know are posting on Facebook about how depressed they are. In the US  Senate, they have been arguing about sending people $600 in relief money (it just passed today, Sunday), while big corporations and rich people rake in billions. Our Governor here in West Virginia is sitting on CARES Act money while people are at risk of being evicted or having the lights shut off. Some money is going out to high school athletic teams and a possibly shady real estate deal here in Morgantown that the city is being asked to contribute to. 

A few posts ago, I said I might not run for City Council again next month. I thought if I could find a good progressive person in this ward, I would support them. If not, I would run again. I'm past that now. A well-meaning activist of my acquaintance called me Tuesday and asked if I was running. He  and others would support me, otherwise they needed to find someone at a "West Virginia Can't Wait" meeting that night. That group encourages people with no experience or connection to government to run; they often get slaughtered. I didn't know much before I ran for Council, but I at least got on the Library Commission and attended some Council meetings. I even spoke once or twice. It's harder to do that now, but people can come to meetings online and speak; they don't. I wish my friend had begged me to run again. I wish I still had a constituency that supported and encouraged me, but I don't. So no, I won't run again.

It's hard to give up a part of one's identity, but I've killed off part of myself and been reborn several times. I thought I might give up teaching at OLLI as well, but now I think only one change at a time. 

So I guess I have my own  issues. We have food and our health (so far). I stay away from anywhere where an armed militia might show up. I fear for my country in the next month. Our Congressperson didn't sign on to the Texas lawsuit to invalidate the election. The other two in West Virginia and our Governor, Secretary of State and Attorney General did. It's unbearable that these people run West Virginia. It's hard for me to even be here.

It will get colder here in West Virginia next month, but the light will come back, and hopefully, despite everything, there will be a vaccine, and a new and better administration for our country. I hope that I and so many of the people I know find a way out of depression. As they and I know, it's not pretty.

August 1, 2020

A  mutual friend invited me on Facebook to a "coming out" party for a trans woman, also a friend. It  was today, socially distanced, at different locations and times. Joe said he would go with me. I waited until yesterday to respond and I declined. I'm just not comfortable going out anywhere at this point. Joe and I have been home with our cat for a month (I skipped out for two days in June). We usually order carry-out Saturday night, and I guess I'm in a rut. The idea of going to a party with other people, even distanced and masked, just seems foreign to me now. A few years ago, I was delighted when younger people invited me somewhere. At this party the people would have been 25-40, I'm guessing. That's a lot younger than I am, and where I used to be flattered, now I'm uncomfortable.

I've been preaching kindness online, and talked about "baseless hatred" as a cause for the destruction of the second temple, which  we commemorated at Tisha B'Av Wednesday night and Thursday. Meanwhile, a dear friend in Los Angeles has been inexplicably pushing  hydroxychloroquine as a cure  for coronavirus and touting Republican talking points. I've been shocked, and I finally told her she "needed to get help." She didn't take that well; who would? I went back and deleted that today. It's easy to say "Be kind  to everyone," but even with friends it's hard to do. I try not to have "rage" as my foremost emotion, but sometimes that is what is called for.

People are comparing this pandemic to AIDS, but then there were behaviors that could be avoided, once you passed the initial test. I spent a few years without sex before there was testing, not knowing if I was infected. Still, there is a lingering pain with me over friends who died, and I remember people saying it was worse than World War II, because there didn't seem to be an end. This pandemic is much more random than AIDS, and even more endless. There is no evidence that this virus will ever go away. At seventy, I feel that it's very likely, even if  I don't get this, that I won't live to see the end of it.

I've been keeping busy with my obsessions. I'm teaching a class about the music from The Brill Building in New York in the early 1960s, some of my favorites by The Drifters and composers like Burt Bacharach, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. I've spent an inordinate amount of time doing research and putting together strings of videos. They are on YouTube  at "Music From The Brill Building Week One" up to "Week Four" under my name.

I also have City Council where we are trying to hire a new city manager. I've tried to get a ban on evictions through, but others want to take  a "wait and see" pose, or think the Governor or the President should impose a ban (they should but they won't). We also have a homeless encampment where local agencies have worked to place people in housing. The camp keeps growing and we are torn between dealing with illegal activity at the camp, not spreading people out during a pandemic, and hearing some in the adjoining neighborhoods complaining. Anything we do will be criticized.

Joe and I get along well. We have too much in common, I fear, and I know we each have resentments against the other, but we  really have no one else, so we just give each other space. He has a sister, two brothers and friends in New York and California he talks to frequently; I have my sister. My best friends are in California, and I don't talk to them often. Last Saturday I called a close friend in California who doesn't do social media, and we spoke for a long time. Most days, it's Joe and the cat for me.

It's hard  to complain when money is not a problem, we have affordable housing (although it needs lots of repairs) and two cars. We almost never use both cars now. I'm not uncomfortable being home so much, and even that is scary. Why don't I want to be somewhere else?

I feel like the United States is over as a country. What will happen with the election, I don't know, maybe it will be good. As a teen in very racist suburban Baltimore, I knew that everyone wouldn't just get along because a civil rights bill was passed. And if Trump is defeated, the people still mourning the Confederacy or carrying Nazi flags will still be here. I know too much history not to be frightened for the future.

That's enough ranting for now. I'm still working on being kinder, gentler and happier. I wish that  for you who read this as well.

The Writers' Conference

The West Virginia Writers' Workshop has been going on for twenty years. Since we moved here, just five years ago,I've been meaning to go. Two years ago, I signed up for one of the four days of the conference; this year I managed get them a check in time to be a full participant.

I signed up for "non-fiction." They asked me to send ten pages to go over in our workshop, where others would make notes. I had to go back into the archives to find things to send. They got ten pages, but from four different pieces.

When I stopped working full time in 2004, at my fifty-fifth birthday, I signed up for writing classes at UCLA Extension. I would get up in the morning, take a bus from Fairfax Avenue in Park LaBrea to UCLA, then have lunch at Falafel King in Westwood, before catching the bus home.  Looking through the stuff I wrote then, I found a piece  about my life in New Orleans, written at the time of Hurricane Katrina, and  a short story I had forgotten, about a Mexican-American high school student who lived in North Hollywood with her mother, who ran a Spanish CD store, and her grandmother. I thought both of these pieces were great. I didn't use them because they were more than ten years old, and I wanted to submit something newer.

The highlight of the conference was meeting people who actually write and teach writing for a living. I try not to express my emotions; it's how I was raised. I saw people who could talk about their passion for language. If they weren't already attractive (most of them were) speaking with passion made them even more interesting.

I saw a few people I knew there, and made some new friends. There was a woman who lives in New Orleans at the conference. She is a nurse with more advanced degrees and has written award-winning articles for medical journals. I was pleased that she agreed to read my piece about the city, and she thought I captured it with my feelings about my life then, and my grief about Katrina.

One of the instructors was David Haslick, who talked about opening your heart instead of letting it break. He couldn't write well until, at age forty, he faced a trauma from his early life.

The people in our non-fiction group had fascinating stories. One woman shared her history of abusive parents and an abusive spouse, another woman visited Southeast Asia for the first time to meet her mother's family, and a young man from Africa, who learned English as a second language, wrote beautifully about life in a West African village..

I tried to figure why my writing is not as good as it was ten years ago, and why it seems flat to me now. I think part of it was the trauma of my heart attack and mother's death in 2003, which inflamed all of my emotions. I'm older now, and married. Things are calmer than they were (but stay tuned for fireworks from City Council). Writing mostly on this blog, I write something, check it for errors and post it without a lot of revising, or even thinking too much.

It occurs to me that maybe I don't think hard enough. I asked myself during the workshop what I'm hiding. Mark Brazaitis, a fellow Morgantown city councilor and writing professor, wrote a book of stories about depression, which I bought two years ago at the conference. I put it down after the first story, frightened to my core. Now I think maybe I need to face my own issues about depression. I also noted that everyone's work had interesting characters, except mine. My stuff is all about me. I know I write partly so I can have my say without being interrupted.

In 2005, I started to write stories about the unique time and place where I grew up. Some of the stories are humorous enough, but I stopped after maybe three of them, because I realized I had never mentioned my parents. That scared me.

I started a novel, several times, about my life in Miami from 1978 to 1984, a fascinating time and place, and a big part of my history. I took pieces of it to a novel class at UCLA. Only the teacher knew the story was autobiographical. A typical comment was "Your lead character is so unlikable. Does he grow over the course of the novel?" The Jewish grandmother was praised as a brilliant character study. "Pure gold," one woman said. I couldn't take it, and I was less than generous in my evaluation of the work of others.

I got some ideas from this conference about what I need to do. First, I need to spend more time sitting down and writing, even if it is just this narcissistic blog.

Then I need to really open my heart and not continue to let it break. I need to deal with depression, a family history that's only normal on the surface, and what I really think and feel, always a frightening proposition.

And craft. I could learn better ways to express myself. I need characters that have a full life apart from mine. I've said that i can't write poetry, but I have, and I could.

I got a lot from this workshop. Making friends with unexpected people, learning about poetry, about healing, about opening up and letting the words flow. I have work to do now.

The Beach Boys - Light And Dark

Like most people my age (66 next week) I love The Beach Boys. They were an important part of our youth. They spoke to our culture, even if we didn't own a car or live near a beach, or have much experience with girls. Musically, although we would never admit it, they were a bridge between our parents' love of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals and our love of Chuck Berry-early Elvis rock and roll.

This summer, the Brian Wilson bio-pic Love and Mercy came out. Joe and I saw it around July 4 in Columbia, Maryland, on the way back to my sister's house from a day in Baltimore while we were on vacation. Like most arty movies, it never played in Morgantown. The movie was both exhilarating and depressing. I loved seeing recreations of the early Beach Boys, and the recording sessions for Pet Sounds, one of the most acclaimed albums in history. The rivalries within the group, the bickering, and Brian's descent into craziness was hard to watch.

I thought I would add to my résumé of classes at OLLI, the "school" for people over fifty, by teaching a class about The Beach Boys. I've already taught about the Brill Building, Motown, and the British invasion from 1964-1969. Today, October 15, I'm teaching the albums from late 1967 to 1973. Hard times for the group.

Most of the Beach Boys albums I bought new were after the group's peak popularity. Two of these, Surf's Up, from 1971, and Holland, from 1973, are among my favorites. Yet these did not sell well when they were new. People were listening to Elton John and Carole King, Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack in those days.

I've been researching as much as I can about The Beach Boys. I've gone back and listened to the albums, read one book about the group and one specifically about Brian Wilson, watched dozens of YouTube videos, and read countless Wikipedia articles.

The Beach Boys really were America's post-war band. they grew up in a boring suburb and had parents who gave them everything at a tremendous psychological price. They were immensely talented but only their junky stuff is what people like ("Barbara Ann" for instance). As a singer, I appreciate that they were always in tune with each other, even when performing live. They sang harmony as well as the great vocal groups of the 50s that Brian so admires. I saw them twice at the Baltimore Civic Center when I was a teen, once in their red-striped shirts, and once with beards and hippie clothes.

Like many of us, they made bad choices about drugs and sex in the sixties and seventies, lost control of their money and their lives, and yet still keep going.

In their later years, they are doing what they can, even if they don't speak to their own family members, nursing hurts and recriminations that are decades old.  The Beach Boys will appear in Zanesville, Ohio, next week. The ads point out that the group consists of Mike Love (who won the right to the group name in court) with Bruce Johnston, who has been with the group since 1965. Brian Wilson is still recording music. He was interviewed in Rolling Stone about the harrowing movie about his life. When asked if things were that bad, he says they were worse.

In Love and Mercy, Brian is under the care of psychologist Eugene Landy, who controls Brian's entire life. This is my Hollywood one degree of separation story.

I took a class at UCLA Extension in 1985 called "The Career Exploration Seminar." At the time, less than a year after my move from Miami to Los Angeles, I was working as a supervisor in the SSI program at the Watts Social Security office. The managers hated me, I still believe because I wouldn't work Saturday overtime, and because I directed my United Way donation to The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Community Center. I knew I was going to leave there. After some research, directed by the teacher, I thought I would like to be an actor, a cliché about newbies in L.A. There was a gorgeous woman in the class named Alexandra Morgan, an actress. She wanted a new career because, being past thirty-five, no one would hire her. Having never met such a beautiful woman, I was shocked. She encouraged me to give acting a shot. At the last class, we exchanged addresses. She lived on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, where the movie stars live. I asked her about that and she said "I live with my boyfriend."

 We all went out to a restaurant and the boyfriend came. I sat next to him. He looked a little crazy, sort of like Jack Nicholson playing a crazy person. He was older, maybe fifty, in good shape, and with a diamond stud earring. I asked him what he did for a living. He told me he was a psychologist, and when I said he must do well out there in Malibu, he said "Actually, I only have one patient." I never saw him or Alexandra again. He was Dr. Eugene Landy, Brian Wilson's doctor.  I found out three years later, when Brian came out with an allbum, and on the liner notes, thanked Dr. Landy. Some of the songs listed Alexandra Morgan as lyricist. I don't know if Dr. Landy was as bad as he is portrayed in the movie. He was better looking, for sure.

Everyone has their troubles and grief. We are all under appreciated in some way. A friend now is gravely ill. Her family members, who rarely speak to her, are coming to Morgantown today to see her. Joe is spending much of the day at the hospital. He has written a beautiful prayer asking God for healing when things look desperate. Two women at The League of Women Voters meeting last night told me about their terrible diagnoses and the trials of chemotherapy. I'm just recovering from angioplasty, and I'm lucky to still be alive.

Brian Wilson has lost his two brothers and is estranged from his cousin who helped found The Beach Boys. I know that for many years he didn't see his children from his first marriage. In the Rolling Stone article, he talks openly about being old, about his patterns of behavior and how he copes with his mental health issues.

I cry when I hear Beach Boys songs like "When I Grow Up To Be  A Man," written when they were young and wondering, like all of us, what their lives would be like. Now we know, and even if we are happy, as I would say I am, it's heartbreaking to look back at all that has happened.

The Beach Boys, at least the ones we remember from the early 1960s, are still popular. We think about the pretty girls, the handsome young men (HYMs) we were or wanted, the powerful impractical cars of the era, and the optimism of the times.In my class, we're going forward into a darker era. It should be interesting.