The “Summoned Life”

If you missed the David Brooks op/ed in Thursday’s Sarasota Herald Tribune, you might want to check it out online at “Two Ways of Looking at Life.”

This is the kind of writing I like to see and read in a newspaper. Provocative. Not appealing to the lowest common denominators, the trigger-pullers of sex, sensationalism, slamming, and sordidness, that far too often populate the ever-decreasing pages given to opinion and editorial writing.

Here’s an outtake:

Life isn’t a project to be completed; it is an unknowable landscape to be explored.

Wow. Lovely writing, and for someone like me — who lives by a to-do list and who rather stupidly takes very little time to enjoy life because “oh, I’ve got too much to do!” — well, this sentence stood out like a big blinking neon sign.

I wonder what would happen to my life if instead of waking every morning and saying “What can I accomplish today?”, I asked, “What can I explore today?”

Read Brooks’ column today — seriously. It’s worth your time.

My date with Nimrod

As I reported last week, I went up to St. Pete to watch the Yankees lose 2-3 against the Rays. What I didn’t tell you was that, while I was supposed to be on a date with the man sitting next to me — yup, that one, the one who’d paid for the tickets, brought hand-made sandwiches and martinis in a giant thermos, yes, that kind-hearted, thoughtful soul, — I was really on a date with A-Rod, aka Alex Rodriguez, aka #13 for the Yankees.

Or at least it must have seemed that way to my “real” date. Because, all I did whenever Nimrod was up to bat, was snap photos of him — trying to capture him hitting his 600th home run. (more…)

Tampa Bay Rays Can’t Win for Losing

Last night, I went on a very fun date up to St. Pete to see the Yankees play against the Tampa Bay Rays. Yes, I was wearing my Yankees cap, and yes, my date was a Rays fan. But we still managed to have fun.

The Yankees may have been outmatched in last night’s particular game, but they by far outclass the Rays when it comes to one particular thing.

The Tampa Bay Rays, formerly known as the Devil Rays, changed their name in 2007 — and the brand changed from being about “manta rays” to being “a ray of sunlight” that radiates across all of Florida. They developed a new logo to match this change in sensibility.

Um, too bad, they didn’t develop a new conscience to go along with all the show-me-the-money new branding. (more…)

Helen Mirren Dear’n

I’ve waxed rhapsodic about Helen Mirren before. I’ve gone on record as saying she’s kind of what I’d like to be like as I get older.

Photographs by Juergen Teller.

So, it was with pleasure that I heard she was going to be in New York magazine (a weekly pub that I subscribe to). I was a bit shocked, though, by seeing Dame Mirren in nearly the full Monty. (Well, okay, only half a Monty, but still). (more…)

Cappuccino chez MC

One of the best things I’ve done for myself lately is when I shelled out $125 bucks for a cappuccino maker. Now, in the world of capp makers I know a sawbuck+ is not a lot of money. But for me, actually, it is. Still, I broke my little piggy bank and splurged because I wanted to begin my days with more sense … and in the long run, more cents.

You see, for years, ever since leaving the North End of Boston, I’ve been drinking (and I know how lame this is, believe me), either a bottled Starbucks cold coffee (with a staggering 32 grams of sugar if I recall correctly), or I’ve been actually walking or driving to a local Starbucks and shelling out three to five dollars at a time for coffee that wasn’t all that great and which, the purchase of, was actually contrary to all that I believe in.

So you see, every day, I was starting off — beginning my day — with activities that weren’t really at all in alignment with my philosophies and/or the way I want to live and/or in ways that treat my body and my wallet and my planet well.

Driving a car to get a cup of coffee? Could there be anything more self-indulgent? (more…)

Show & Tell — give “don’t ask/don’t tell” the bum’s rush

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is such a dumbo, lowest-kind-of-thinking (or rather unthinking) policy, there are, literally, no depths to plumb on the issue.

I mean, I’m sure I don’t really have to say this … BUT if you’d let a gay guy save your life in the hospital emergency room (yes, gays perform surgery!) or if you’ll let a gay woman pilot that next flight to Detroit — taking your life in her very hands — then why would you stop at letting gays put their lives on the line for this country? And, anyway, WHO CARES WHAT CONSENTING ADULTS DO IN THE BEDROOM?! (more…)

O, Oprah, say it ain’t so — what’s the intention of her reality?

I’ve watched Oprah plenty of times. I’ve read her magazines. For the most part, I dig her sensibilities if not always her interviewing techniques.

So, when I heard she was quitting her show, launching her OWN network, and giving regular Joe’s and Josie’s a chance to have their own television talk show — I thought, hey, I’m going to try for that. I’d heard that you had to upload a three-minute video to her website to audition and I was in the process of pulling it all together when I realized that the video-tape is a prelude audition to a reality show contest, the winner of which will get a television talk show. (more…)

“Stand-In” Dads helped me make my life

The Sarasota Herald Tribune published one of my columns today — “Stand-In Fathers Show What Makes a “Real” Dad”

It’s on Page A18 of today’s paper, or you can read it online by clicking the hyperlinked text above.

Happy Father’s Day to all fathers — the biological ones as well as the ones who nurture young people whether they were their “real” Dads or not.

Beethoven rocks my world

I wish Beethoven could be my lover. I’m sure he smelled bad, had yellow teeth, and was probably a difficult man, but still … he gets me. Or at least his music does … and it’s certainly spent enough time playing in my bedroom.

While I’ve written in the past about being in bed with the Bard, I have to say, if I had to choose, I’d choose the other bad boy of the arts and make my lover Ludwig von Beethoven.

In fact, I did quite a long time ago, (more…)

Remains of the day

What happens when our lives are not quite what we expected? When the moment arrives that we see not just what we have become but regrettably, we see, with a glaring, growing, discomfort, what we might have been and now most assuredly are not?

What do we do then, when we’ve reached the moment where future intercepts present and past is just that — in the past? Is it better to remember the days of believing, recall that naivete, reach back with a slightly clawing hand toward the effortless sexual, sensual, emotional, inundation of days gone by?

Is there an alternative?

The thing is — you must, whether you want to or not — remember that time when touching the skin along your lover’s back … running your thumb down the back of the one you thought you loved was in itself a kind of worship at the altar of, yes, of course, a kind of eroticism, but more than that, a kind of exclamation of alive-ness, a cri de coeur for feeling, of feeling, of being felt.

Just the thumb. Against the skin. Slowly running with an irresistible pressure, trailing lackadaisically along the spine, and erotically in every other perspective, heading south with no particular hurry. The luxury of time we had in those moments would have made a mockery of the experience — if we’d had had even the slightest inclination of the paucity of time to come.

That thumb. That skin. All that stillness and moving. All without pretense. All without illusion and/or remembrance of other things past. All without a wish desiring to be fulfilled in some future moment 30 seconds or 30 days forward. All done, all felt, all wordlessly acknowledged without an acknowledgment of the hour, or of the lateness of the day.

Just that twilight moment from day to night; when all that existed was that weighty, weightless, dizzily exquisite feeling of someone’s hand moving along your spine and coming to rest on the small of your back. With no word. No comment or question; no expectation of what comes next; no acute awareness of what does not.

Those — and all the other moments of mundane and super-fabulous and silly and sophisticated moments of loving and working and living and breathing without question— are the remains of the day.

And I want them back.

“A butler of any quality must be seen to inhabit his role, utterly and fully; he cannot be seen casting it aside one moment simply to don it again the next as though it were nothing more than a pantomime costume.” from the novel, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and if you haven’t read it, I can’t imagine what you are waiting for.