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Folks, I wanted to pop by to say hello.  The firewall at work is down this morning, likely due to the virus out there.  I expect it to come flying up at any minute.  I still haven't gotten a PC at home for various reasons, so I don't expect to be a regular poster again here for some time.  But I have been able to read, even if I haven't been able to post diaries or comments.

Given that I likely have so little time, I can't comment on everything I have read.  But I do want to give shoutouts to three diarists:

Lavender:  Do not let your head sabotage you.  You are a spectacular person, and deserve all of the happiness there is to have on this planet.  Keep on truckin'.

Lucy: as you know, I have always loved your poetry.  But I would be remiss if I didn't mention how impressed I have been with the progress you have been making with your photography.  You have a great eye, and there is an empathetic tenderness that shines through your photos of people.  I can't say enough about your flowers.

ed'sperience: as usual, your posts have been fierce and brilliant.  You have forced me to re-examine my own assumptions more than once.

Well folks, I may do a quick post in a minute, but then it's back to the cyber-exile.  I wish you all well.

Hi folks.  My company's firewall came crashing down a couple of weeks ago.  I think they're fixing it right now, but I expect it to be back in full force shortly.  So, here is a quick note:

1.  Everything is fine.  When I get hooked up at home, I will be back on.

2.  Probably not often in the near term.  I have some big changes coming shortly, which will keep me very busy.

3.  I miss you all, and look forward to getting back in touch in the future.

Everyone, be well.

Many of my neighbors are aware that the Voxer shush now has written a novellette (novena? ;)) entitled honest conversation.  I have used lower case deliberately, as both the title page and the inside flap do so (shades of e.e. cummings).  I have been fortunate enough to receive a copy, and finished the book on Thanksgiving Day. 

Before I gave my impressions, I decided to pass the book onto a friend to read, for his impressions.  As some of you may be aware, I am not religious in the traditional sense of the word.  I have a belief in a Higher Power, the details of which I choose to keep to myself.  While my relationship with my Higher Power is of paramount importance to me, it does not manifest itself inside organized religion in any fashion.  Outside of the occasional wedding or funeral or ceremonial event important to a friend (or AA meetings), I never set foot in religious structures.  My friend, on the other hand, considers himself a Christian, and is a devoted churchgoer.  I would go so far as to term him a conservative Christian.  He is also the type of Christian who lives what he believes, so I thought his viewpoint would be useful to me.

Let's start with my take:

honest conversations is a passionate tale.  shush now tells the story of controversy inside of a mainstream church, which arises out of the decision of a gay male couple to join the church.  The story is told from the perspective of the associate pastor of the church, Zoe,  who is willing to put her career on the line in advocating that the church accept the gay couple.  This is not, as one might imagine, a universally admired position.  Her pastor, torn by his understanding of doctrine, and also by fears related to his own position, is skeptical that hers is the correct position.  Some of the congregants have chosen to take a position passionately in opposition to Zoe's position.  The church is in danger of being irrevocably split.  As if that weren't enough, Zoe is ambivalent about the need for a relationship in her own life, an ambivalence which is tested at the controversy unfolds. 

The book opens with a conversation between Zoe and the pastor, John.  Here is a snippet which will give you a flavor of how that goes:

John walked in and smiled at me.  I smiled back and motioned to the empty seat across the table from me.  He came and sat down, immediately opening his briefcase and smacking his Bible down on the table between us.  "You didn't bring yours," he asked.

"I know well enough to always bring a gun to a gunfight," I said.  "It's in my purse, like usual."

shush now does not take the easy path in telling this story.  While Zoe's position is the one she would have us support, she does not blithely dismiss the concerns of the other side.  In her telling, there are no perfect people.  The characters are drawn with shades of goodness and of weakness.  Even her "villain", long-time church member Tilly Halliwell, truly believes herself to be acting in the best interests of the church.  What is the church called to do?  To accept those who it believes are deliberately sinning as members, in order to minister to them, or to keep the church free of those who would deliberately sin? 

Now, the answer is clear to me.  I don't even think that homosexuality is a sin.  But this book is intended for an audience which struggles with that question, not for me.  It was here that my friend came in handy.  I asked him for his take.  He told me not only did the controversy ring true, but that his own congregation has suffered from it.  A lesbian couple came to the church, which raised all sorts of ruckus.  After two weeks, the couple stopped coming.  shush now looks at how church actions like this can damage devout Christians who find themselves to be gay.  Here is Kyle, the member of the gay couple raised as a Christian, describing his torment which had driven him from the church before:

"And then I couldn't take it anymore.  I couldn't stand hating myself.  I couldn't stand trying to win myself back into God's graces.  I couldn't stand being in a church every Sunday where I knew that all the other parishioners thought I was going to burn in Hell for a sin I wasn't aware of having committed.  They treated me like the plague, because if I was attracted to other boys that meant God had cursed me.  And you know what?"

"What?" Evan and I said in unison.

"Every time I read the Bible the only people I see God cursing are the hypocrites."  Kyle choked back tears again, "and I wasn't a hypocrite.  I was a scared little kid that only wanted to please everyone else and never even thought of what he wanted, until I wanted Milo.  And if I had to choose between a God that cursed me and a boy that looked like a god, well, what do you think a sixteen year old boy would choose?"

shush now raises some important issues in this book.  Should homosexuality be considered in a different class from other sins?  If church members gossip, drink to excess, if a heterosexual couple not yet married wishes to join, are these people somehow different or better than homosexuals called to church?  My Christian friend found that point to be the most compelling.  shush now also asks whether we are called to love first or to judge first.  I know my answer to that question.  Love first, last, and always.  The cornerstone of her argument comes from 1st John 4:

We love because he first loved us.  If anyone says "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar.  For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.  And he has given us this command: whoever loves God must also love his brother. 

This book is shot through with love in all its forms, inherently inconvenient and messy.  Husbands and wives, parishioners and church, parents and children, lovers, even those who aren't looking for it. are touched.  And above all, God's love and presence.  One of my favorite passages in the book is related to the latter:

It is a proven fact that major events in life are never spaced at reasonable intervals.  Life tends to go on in long meandering phases of banality after banality, followed by seasons of shear[sic] insanity where so much happens you feel it could fill up years of your life.  Sometimes it's good somethings piled on one another, more often it's bad.  This is God's way of reminding you that he is God and you are mortal and you depend on him to not become a drooling idiot.

There are also moments where bad is layered on bad layered on bad with an icing of Good, which is God being merciful and reminding you that even though he's in charge and you desperately need him, he wants you to be happy.

I won't reveal too much more about what shush now has written.  The ending is not an ending per se.  All the loose ends are not neatly tied up.  More of the story is yet to be told.  Such is life.  The greater question is whether there is an audience for this message.  I say yes.  Some churches do not need to be told to accept gay members.  Other churches will remain adamant against it.  But there is a large number of churches who struggle between love and fear, faith and doubt, doctrine and message.  Devoted Christians who are unsure.  This book takes a position on that struggle, and it is well worth reading.  Drop shush now a line, if you belong to one of those churches.  Spend a little time and money to explore this struggle with her.  You will not regret it.

Famed folk singer Odetta passed away last night.  Hers was the voice of my childhood.  When I was 5 years old, my parents bought the Odetta album One Grain of Sand.  I wore the grooves on that record out, replaying over and over again songs like Sail Away Ladies, Moses Moses, Midnight Special and She Moved Through the Fair, to name a few.  Here is a You-Tube video which pays tribute to Odetta, to the music of Midnight Special.

Which 5 words would your best friend use to describe you?
Submitted by Ross.

As if I would ask.

Show us your favorite landmark in your current hometown.

I wouldn't choose what I am going to choose were it not for this:

I grew up in Marin County, California.  The photo above is of Muir Woods, a redwood forest in a canyon on the road to Stinson Beach.  I went there many times as a kid, for hikes, school trips and so on.  Very pretty, awesome in its stillness and majesty.  But I never thought twice about it.  It was just Muir Woods.  That is until the day I went there with my girlfriend Mary.

Mary was from Shrewsbury, MA, not too far from Boston.  One year while we were together, my parents invited her out to California with me for a holiday.  (Her family hosted me a number of times for Christmas).  Mary had never been to California, so I borrowed the car for some sightseeing.  Naturally, when visitors came to Marin, one would take them to various places, like Sausalito, Stinson Beach, and of course a quick stop at Muir Woods.  We had already gone to Stinson, had stopped at the Pelican Inn for lunch, and I figured a quick stroll in Muir Woods was in order.

So, we parked, walked to the entrance, and started walking through the grove closest to to entrance, down the path you see in the photo above.  I was chatting along, when I noticed that Mary was not replying, which was unusual.  I glanced over; there were tears streaming silently down her face.  I asked What's wrong Mary?  She looked at me, and replied I've dreamed of seeing this my whole life.  It was only at that point that I truly understood how special Muir Woods was.

So, in that vein, instead of choosing a landmark which I personally find special for me, allow me to show you the landmark that people dream of seeing their whole life:

Independence Hall

This is a photo of Independence Hall, here in Philadelphia.  On the left side of the doorway is the room in which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were hammered out.  On the right side of the doorway is the room which was home to the United States Supreme Court from 1791 to 1800.

Philadelphians have the same kind of relationship with Independence Hall as I used to have with Muir Woods.  It's a big deal, but most haven't been there since a school trip as kids, or only go there with visitors from out of town.  I have seen the same type of reaction from visitors that I saw from Mary at Muir Woods.  Awestruck reverence.  There is a park square behind the Hall, where I sometimes go to sit with my boy.  Based on the number of Chinese tourists I see taking photos of each other outside the Hall, I believe that it is only a matter of time before that country shifts its style of governing.  (I suspect some will consider me naive for that view.)

I took my son in his stroller the first day it was open after September 11th.  The crowd was hushed as the ranger told the story of the history of the hall.  I got a bit annoyed as he paused pointedly whenever my son, in his two-year-old (shortly to be diagnosed autistic) exhuberance would cry out.  And as they restricted access and armed rangers, I got more annoyed.  As with most other things, the US government as it has been constituted in recent years cares more about ephemeral security than it does about actual independence.  In the words of Philadelphia's founding father:  Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.

  It was in this building that modern liberty was born.  Stunted, distorted, not yet fully formed.  Not even yet.  But within these walls resides the historical promise of liberty for all.  Of the people, by the people, for the people.

I know, I know.  I already posted something with "Thanksgiving" in the title.  But that was just a hook to get folks to look at some websites that might direct money to charity.  Generic stuff.  True meaning of the holiday blah blah blah...

Then there was the whole cutesy Vox Hunt ironic crap post.

Which brings me to the real post, starting now:

Those of you who are my friends, or who have read my blog on a regular basis, know that I don't drink alcohol.  Indeed, I would go so far as to say that I am an alcoholic.  Alcohol is poison for me.

I think that it's important to say that I have no moral opinion about alcohol.  After all, it is nothing more than fermented plant matter.  Alcohol is not bad.  And there are plenty of people who are able to enjoy a drink or two, or an occasional blow-out, without any serious impact on their lives.  I am not one of those people.  Now, when I started drinking, when I was in my early teens, I was.  Not to say that I drank just a little bit.  I always drank for effect, even when I was stealing bottles out of my dad's wine cellar and acting like a snob.  I'm just saying that the way I drank did not appear to be having any serious negative impact on my life.  I had good grades, I had lots of friends, I was athletic, I was involved in serious relationships, I was one of the Kool Kids.  I also was basically decent, honest and compassionate.  Just a normal Joe.

But it is difficult to describe to someone who hasn't had the feelings what it was like to drink the way I drank.  There was nothing about alcohol that I didn't love.  I loved the smell of it, the taste of it, the tingling feeling on the roof of my mouth, the numbing of my tongue, the heat as it passed down my throat, the warmth growing in my belly and spreading up to my head, the way I felt more relaxed and confident.  And especially the way it made those voices in my head shut up.  I spent most nights of high school downing hard liquor after my parents went to sleep, and listening to classical music.  It was bliss.

And it opened me to new experiences.  All of a sudden, I wasn't so shy.  That girl who had seemed so unapproachable was there for the taking.  I knew more and better than all of my friends.  I was a raconteur, an intellectual, a bon vivant, a lothario. 

That all passed over time.  I didn't drink more; I had started out drinking a lot.  What happened was that my world got smaller.  By the end, it was me alone in the dark, with inner shakes and the sweats, sleeping with a kitchen knife under my pillow, because I thought the folks having a party next door were plotting to scale the tree outside my window, in order to climb in through the window and kill me.

But I didn't believe that I had a drinking problem.  All evidence to the contrary, it didn't occur to me that the catalyst for my daily hell poured out of a bottle.  I use the word "catalyst", because the booze wasn't what caused the hell.  As a matter of fact, it was alcohol which had taken me out of my personal hell in the first place, in the beginning, when it quieted those voices whispering in my ears as a young teenager.  But as the years had gone along, alcohol ceased to muffle those voices.  As a matter of fact, it became an amplifier.

On a typical evening, I would get home from work intending to run to the supermarket, or maybe to the laundromat.  But I would say to myself I'll just have one drink first.  And all bets would be off.  I would rinse out the same underwear and shirt and socks I had worn to work that day in the bathroom sink, and hang them to dry on the shower rod.  I would work my way through the bottle, usually of whiskey.  At some point in the evening, I would stagger into the bathroom, kneel down, and stick my finger down my throat, so that I could vomit to overcome my nausea, so I could drink some more.  As I washed my hands and face in the sink, I would look at myself in the mirror, and think Who is this animal? 

I'll save the story of how I came to realize that I had a drinking problem and decided to go to rehab, and my experience in rehab for another time.  This is a Thanksgiving story.  And how, might you ask, could what I have shared have anything to do with Thanksgiving?  I left rehab on Thanksgiving morning, 1987.

It was a cold dank overcast morning in Wernersville, right outside Reading, Pennsylvania.  I stood outside the main hall of the rehab waiting for the van to come.  My group members, and some of the other patients I had become friendly with shook my hand, or hugged me, depending on their personality.  The van came; I climbed in.  The driver took me down to the local bus station and dropped me off. 

I stood outside with my ticket, looking at the other passengers, using my alcohol radar to guess who else might be an alcoholic.  (This was a freshly acquired skill).  I picked out one fellow as appearing a likely prospect.  Wouldn't you know it?  When it came time to board the bus, this guy decided randomly to sit next to me.  I have found over the years that busses are some of the most likely conveyances in which to find oneself in unsolicited conversation.  This time was no exception.  It didn't take long for me to discover that my instincts had been right.  My new friend was on his way to the New Jersey shore to have Thanksgiving with his brother.  He had recently lost his job and his marriage.  I didn't mention that I had just gotten out of rehab.

The bus pulled into Philadelphia, and I got off holding my shabby suitcase.  The words of one of the counselors at one of the full rehab meetings resonated in my head.  He said Look around you.  Four out of five of the patients here will be drunk or high within a month of getting out of rehab.  It's probably going to be you.  Unless you take this seriously.

I was determined to be part of the 20%.  I was also afraid to go back to that same apartment I drank in to be alone on Thanksgiving Day.  So I grabbed a cab, and took it to a local AA "clubhouse", which I had discovered while in rehab was less than two blocks from my home.  (I had passed the building nearly every morning on the way to the subway.  I could never figure out if it was a fraternity or a drug house.)  The taxi dropped me off outside, and I walked up the stairs, across the porch, and into the clubhouse.  There was an AA meeting going on.  I sat down in a chair, and listened through the rest of the meeting.  When the meeting was over, I noticed that they had put out some food for Thanksgiving. So, I grabbed myself a plate, and loaded it up with turkey and stuffing and sweet potatoes and OBrien salad and pie.  I ate my first sober Thanksgiving meal as an adult that day, sitting on a shaky folding chair among strangers.

After I finished eating, I started going around to the other folks, and started to ask for phone numbers.  (The rehab had suggested this.)  Most of them people I asked declined.  Just one guy, who seemed pretty crazy, offered his number.  I took it while promising myself that I would never call him.  At the time, I thought that the reason nobody would give their number to me was because I was white, and they were black.  I have come to understand that I wasn't the only one in pain that day, that perhaps the people who said no didn't feel they had anything to offer me.  Alcoholic thinking can be like that. At the time, it led me to conclude that perhaps the clubhouse was not a place around which I should center my efforts to stay sober.  But I felt OK.  I had gotten through first day out sober, and had even eaten a Thanksgiving meal.  I felt good enough to walk home and fall into a dreamless sleep.

The next day, I went to another AA meeting.  Two guys came up to me after the meeting, and offered me their phone numbers.  Both eventually became friends, and one of them became my AA "sponsor".  I have not had a drink of alcohol since.

Because of the circumstances of that first Thanksgiving Day, the holiday always has centered around sobriety for me.  The first couple of years, I went back to the rehab on Thanksgiving, and sat with the patients as they ate their holiday meal.  Then I made it a point to go to detoxes where people were locked up for the holiday, and shared the joy of being freed from bondage to alcohol.  As time went along, I got back into the "normal" pattern of sharing Thanksgiving with friends and family.  Last year, I had fifteen people over, including my sister and my best friend.  But no matter what, every year, I go to an AA meeting to share my gratitude.

Thanksgiving is the quintessential AA holiday.  A  secular (or at least non-denominational) holiday centered around gratitude.  This year, my sister is going elsewhere, and I don't feel like cooking all day.  So, I'm going down to a local AA group for breakfast and a meeting, and returning in the afternoon for Thanksgiving dinner and a meeting.  I will see a lot of friends there.  Certainly, all of my homeless friends will be there.  (We make it a point to be sure that the local homeless community knows about the event.)  We'll go through at least a dozen turkeys, along with side dishes by the truckload, and tons of desserts.  And coffee, lots of coffee.  The AA kind, that can also be used to strip walls.  I can't wait.

On the off chance that any of you reading this will be doing the same thing, I will be with you in spirit if not in fact.  And if anyone out there can identify with the pain I described earlier, knows what if feels like, and is willing to believe that my experience is not unique, that alcohol need not rule your universe any longer, drop me a line.  I won't answer until Friday my time, at the earliest.  But I will answer.  You are not alone.  You never have to feel the pain of drinking again.  And I love you.  No questions asked.

In honor of tomorrow's Thanksgiving feast, show us a turkey.

Came across the following today.  I don't use Yahoo search too often myself, but perhaps I can allocate a portion of my searches there to support this effort.

While you're at it, check out this related site.  If you were planning to purchase anything from one of the retailers listed, why not use this site, and give money to a charity of your choice?

Thanksgiving in the United States is a holiday commemorating a meal offered in gratitude by a small band of newcomers, to the community which had helped them survive early beginnings.  What better way to offer gratitude than to pass along something to those in need of assistance?

Show us your Thanksgiving grocery list.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Yep, That's it.  Nada.  My sister is going to West Virginia, so I told my flatmate that I'm not cooking this year.  A local AA group is doing meetings all day.  They'll serve breakfast at 10, and dinner at 4.  I'm there.