a description of the amazing and exciting adventures i have here in baltimore--- and other lies.

 
For many years, each year, my parents would receive a Christmas card with a photocopy (later, computer printed) letter from my father's former buddy in college and his wife, the Cooleys. My mom hates these people. Never realizing this, they insisted on sending not only a Christmas card, but a wedding anniversary card to my parents. This especially drove my Mom bananas.

The letters were never great examples of prose, no lyrical exposes, not even a hint of exoticity. Just your run of the mill, hi-we-went-here-and-so-and-so-had-a-baby-and-we-visited-these-people-and-our-daughter/son-got-married-and/or-had-children-and-isn't-life-wonderful-thank-god-for-us-being-alive letters. I make this pledge to you, my friends, if I stoop so low as to include a letter into Christmas cards, I will definitely come up with better material. Along the lines of hi-I-sacrificed-ten-virgins-this-year-killed-a-few-babies-rewrote-the-constitution-became-king-of-siam-made-my-multibillion-company-go-public-with-employees-having-first-dibs-at-stock-options-ran-for-president-wrote-the-great-american-novel-cured-cancer-and-finally-got-laid-isn't-life-wonderful-thank-god-for-us-being-alive kinds of deals.

But my Mom never got this kind of letter from the Cooleys.
Me, being of irrepressible wit and sly inteligence, named the famed letter the
"Cooley-tros." For it was our albatros around our necks, and every year the letter would arrive, to haunt us. And, every year, my Mom would make a point of telling me
when the Cooley-tros had come, and read it (or let me read it when I would come for
the holidays) with relish. Then, she would proceed to dish on the Cooleys, their pedestrian life, how Jim Cooley may have worked for NASA, but he was sure no rocket
scientist, that the boy was an idiot and the daughter a silly fool.

My Mom ceased to send them cards, but they would send my parents cards. Two Christmases ago, we did not get a Cooley-tros. My mom greatly rejoiced, and last year noticed the lack of letter. This year, we also got nothing, but my mom made no comment. Perhaps they finally got the message we didnot care about their messages.
posted by gregorio at 7:59 PM

 
Happy Christmas, and I hope you all got good cheer.

One finds wisdom and inspiration in the most unlikely of places. For me, it was in church.
Over the course of the last few weeks, in the Archdiocese of Boston, the Catholic Churches have been praying for "the image of family and of marriage, between a man and a woman." I believe the impetus for this prayer, inserted in the petitions, is the recent decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court to allow marriages to same sex couples.
My mom is bullshit about this. She cannot believe the Church would behave so callously to its gay parishoners, of which there are quite a few in my parents' church (which just happens to be the seat of the Diocese of Springfield). These same people also happen
to be neighbors of ours, and good friends. I wondered, at times, whether I was dealing
with a short Polish woman or a short Korean woman, as I swear she was channeling
Margaret.

Hard on the heels of this, on Sunday, one of the more conservative of priests in my
parish, a very liberal parish, and muy muy muy gay friendly, gave a thoughtful sermon
on Trinity Sunday about family. The salient points are that:
-family is not blood. Family is the collection of people you gather around
you, the ones you care about the most. It is not genetics only.
-family can be very stressful, but the keys to dealing with family is to
be humble, to forgive one another, and to be patient with one another.
When one can get beyond the self, and look to the other, we can find a truly
happy family.

So there you have it. My mom is Margaret Cho, and I found wisdom in the Church. We
are truly in the end times.

posted by gregorio at 8:58 PM

 
You are always paying love forward. The trick, I guess, is learning to cope with this.
posted by gregorio at 7:53 PM

 
Cold grey winter day
The trees, nude of leaves, weeping
From rain falling down
posted by gregorio at 6:02 PM

 
When historians look back at the turn of the 21st century, they will, no doubt, liken it to the last days of Rome. There will be major differences between the two, however.
In the final days of the Roman Republic there were statesmen who feared for the direction of politics. While the wise words of Cicero were not heeded at the time, we have his words for posterity, and they are magnificent examples of oratory.

We have Howard Dean, who flubs his words trying to make a point of about the Stars-and-Bars.

Ah, Marcus Tullius, quondo tui verbi auscultabimus: nervos belli, pecuniam infinitam.

posted by gregorio at 8:53 PM

 
It was on my third tour of the Pequod. We had sailed a thousand leagues east of the Malvinas and for six months not seen a single leviathan. I met there a grizzled veteran of five voyages, two wars and three marriages, of which he insisted the last category was the most fearsome. He could drink a keg of rum for breakfast and a keg of whiskey for lunch, and drank kegs of port when he was "pacing himself." He was so grizzled he had once fought a bear holding a shark, by biting the shark and killing the bear with a toothpick and a pair of tweezers he had somehow fashioned into a gun. He claimed it was called "Greenpeace" because he had knocked out all of the other pieces, and that was the only one left. One day we hit a storm so violent, it would blanch a man from the Congo into a spectre so white as to rival snow. A night so violent as to make Achilles cry out for Thetis to save him. A night so cruel as to make Job abondon God. And, as the ship rocked the most trepiditously in an evening of sickening yaws, I turned to him and said, "Man, d'ye think we'll last the night?" He looked at me and said, with a twinkle in his eye which would make Puck shudder,
"You don't go looking for box, boy! Box, he come lookin' for you!"
Then he rolled over and fell into a sleep as peaceful as the the baby Jesus.

When things are at their darkest, I remember this, and it lifts me to glory.
posted by gregorio at 4:29 PM

 
When I was younger, I loved to watch science fiction shows. I would sneak Star Trek whenever I could, I loved Planet of the Apes (even though I would not understand the underlining message until many years later) and I thought Battlestar Galactica was super. I had a lot of the action figures for these shows, and Star Wars, and Space 1999.

However, Phantom Menace, Atack of the Clones, POTA re-done with Markie Mark, and some of the Trek movies ("What does God need with a Starship?") have made me jaded against any re-make of my beloved childhood classics. SciFi network has done a lot to cement the oldies in my head, as they played Galactica and Trek alot, and even played the abomninable Galactica 1980, which was as painful to watch as I thought it would be, and a lot stupider than I remember.

With that said, the remake of Battlestar Galactica is far more thoughtful and far less
cheesy than I expected it to be. I have not read any other blog concerning this matter,
at least as of yet, and I will not go looking for it. I cannot tolerate fanboys and their
nonsense for too terribly long, and have lost patience with any and all LOTR freaks
who make it their life's work to find picayune mistakes in the movie adaptations of
Tolkien's books. The remake of BA is fairly thoughtful, and it seems to address some
of the issues of today, e.g., the tensions between military and civilian in a crisis, the
issue of women in command of executive office, the larger fear of technology abused
by humans coming back to haunt us. In the original series, the Cylons were a
reptillian race who traded skin for metal and became cybornetic organisms. In the new
version, the robots are created by us and then subsequently abused by humans.
They exact their revenge in terms of war, and after costly losses for both sides, come
to detante. This is where we have the tension, of man vs. the machine he created, akin
to your Frankenstein's monster or golem more than Terminator.

But the miniseries hints that we reap what we sow. I have to watch tonight to see the
resolution to the crisis. More analysis tomorrow.

However, the actual point I wanted to make was that pop continues to eat itself, but
it is not always bad. I will talk more about this in the next installment, but, as we read
in Ecclesiates:“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” (1:1-3)
So let pop eat itself; we didn't start the fire.




posted by gregorio at 8:26 PM

 
This year has been full of people I know who have gotten married or engaged. Most of these marriages are those
of convenience, rather than love. Of my two cousins, one married for love, the other just to be married. Of the friends I know, they have all married someone who asked them to get married, and I believe they all agreed because they feel that everyone else they know is hitched,so they should be too. The latest friend to get engaged falls in this category as well.
My parents have given up on me getting married. I have too, because I donot wish to make the same "settlement of the heart" that these other people have. I believe I may be eternally single, but, let's face it, I have not exactly met a lot of winners. I would rather be on my own than stuck with a life full of resentment and hate. Which is why I ask all my homosexual friends, "do you really want matrimony in your life?" People who get
married change, even those who tie the knot after having shacked-up for years. So, have the wedding. Go out, buy the streamers and napkins. Will that be a substitute when they do nothing you like, and you are no longer attracted to them? Divorce is costly, my friends. Denying the marriage bond to gay couples may be the best gift we breeders can give you after all.
posted by gregorio at 6:52 PM

 
I have been playing around with Friendster lately, and, try as I may, I have yet to have more than five degrees of separation between me and the 86,997 people with whom I am now currently connected. Go ahead, try and see; if you can do it, I want to see the link.

Perhaps, at some point, there will only be four degrees of separation, as we Friendsters become more and more incestuous.
posted by gregorio at 5:21 PM

 
The course of this morning gave me great pause, and the questions posed while living it still remain unanswered. As I walked into the video store, the employees were unpacking movie posters for Lord of the Rings. Not the cheap ones, the kind they make for a penny yet for which charge $15, and you still have to mount them, but the real posters sent to the theaters. They had scored quite a few, as part of a promotion which they are joining with the City paper to raffle off tickets to the movie. I got my flicks, and the manager asked me if I would like a poster or two. They ended up giving me five. Why this bounty? Because, according to K., the manager, "this gentleman is one of the only consistantly nice customers we have."

What gave me to wonder is, I don't think myself exceptional. I walk in Video Americain, I make chit-chat, I give correct change when I can, I say please and thank you. I even wait my turn patiently. In other words, I donot do anything I would consider extraordinary; indeed, I am only being simply courteous and polite. But, I am afraid, politesse is a lost art these days.

I thanked them, and went home. One of the videos I rented is Bruce Almighty, which is worth a watch. Indeed, while watching it, I became rather guilty. One of the messages of the film, missed by all the evangelical types, is that it is not easy being God. Especially when dealing with us humans. Bruce initially does right only by himself, which, if you watch carefully, causes havok in other peoples' lives. He learns in the end how difficult a job it is to be omnipotent, but handcuffed by we people having free will. Finally, we learn, what have you done for anyone lately.

Now, this is where it gets tricky: having been rewarded for simply being nice, and then being asked, "what have you done lately to deserve any munificence?"( the answer being, of course, "not much."),
leads me to wonder how being nice can be enough?

It can't be that. Can the simple fact that we smile at a stranger, or make a person we don't know laugh, or even not make someone we do know cry make us worhty of any bounty, either on the temporal or
spiritual plane? And, why do I feel so guilty? Maybe this latter is the real question.
posted by gregorio at 9:38 PM