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Archive for the ‘Loss’ Category

Mothers should not outlive their children … that’s just wrong …

Posted in Children, Family, Loss, love, Music I like, My Chinese Checkered Past, tagged , on February 17, 2011| 4 Comments »

Jaren Eli Combes 17 Feb. 1971 - 2 June 2009

February 17, 1971
7:41 am
6 pounds 13 ounces of blue-eyed joy bouncing baby boy
Jaren Eli Combes

He should be 40 today, but he didn’t get enough time … not nearly enough.

Click here for a story about Jaren’s birth … and here for a bit about his death.

The only gift I can still give him I share with you now. The music was a Christmas gift to me a few years ago, a beautiful song I had played at Jaren’s funeral that seemed a fitting background then, and for these images of my beautiful son. It is actually called “Eternal Hug”, although I call it “Maternal Hug”, an apt summation of a mother’s love …

And some of his words that bang a gong loudly …

Out of Mind
© Jaren Eli Combes 2002

What if I cared, felt gravity
or had clever opinions?
What if I was close,
or easily reached?
Kill this separation.
I know you couldn’t know
you’d wake and tear me up
Never let it go — thought
you’d all had enough
And if there was a way
I’d fuck it up somehow
Dropped off all your screens
Don’t have to see me now

Got you to ignore
not worth it for me
seems it was contagious
Don’t try anymore
Best I believe
I got here on purpose
I know you couldn’t know
You’d wake and tear me up
Never let it go
thought you all had enough
If you gave me time to change
You’d have given up by now
And shallow as I am
Somehow I still drown.

And some of his music …

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.
~Edna St Vincent Millay

Yes … I miss you like hell, my boy. I miss you like hell …

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“There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.” ~Robert Nathan

Posted in Family, Loss, love, Men, My Chinese Checkered Past, tagged , , , on February 16, 2011| 10 Comments »

Scott and me

This is a week that makes it far too clear that time is not linear as my present drowns in past and future is put off for some days while I wallow.

February 16th in 1985 was a wedding day … my second, and the first as an adult and that didn’t come with a shotgun. It was a lovely, warm Sacramento Saturday, almost too warm for my gray suede wedding getup, and our living room was done up nicely for the event.

It was Scott I was marrying, and after five years of cohabitation it seemed a good idea at the time. My mother, thinking that formalizing the relationship was daft, asked me what the hell I was doing, and my son, a teen at the time, walked me down the stairs that served as aisle and “gave me away”.

The marriage carried on for nine interesting years before Scott and I went our separate ways with no animosity and continuing contact across the globe. We had been through so much together, traveled the world, expanded our horizons both personally and professionally, shared families and occasions and experiences and histories, laughed and cried and fought and loved and lived in each others’ skin as much as those together for so long can.

The well of memories including him is deep, and there’s no little of him left in my corners. I can still easily conjure his smile, the goofy way he danced, his hands on the steering wheel as he drove the “pink” Porsche way too fast, his attempts at false bravado when intimidated. I can see him in an overcoat in the snow in Hyde Park, shooting photos in a temple in Borneo, with a beer in his hand on a boat down the Sacramento River, greeting EVERYONE at Al the Wop’s and Harlow’s and slamming back oyster shooters on our way to Gleason’s Beach.

I also remember him on this day in ’85 looking gorgeous in a new tux as he promised all that stuff one promises when marrying, listening politely when his mother decided to sing along with the harpist, handing around the new video camera for my brothers to record the event (And how I wish that VHS tape hadn’t crumbled in this heat and humidity.). It was a great and hopeful day.

On the 30th of January 2008, Scott killed himself, and although we had talked often on what we’d shared I never properly thanked him for that February the 16th. I’ll do that now: Thank you, Scott.

I am a miser of my memories of you
And will not spend them.
~Witter Bynner

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The Price of a Year … or Poems by the Pound?

Posted in Friends, Island life, Loss, love, Men, My Chinese Checkered Past, Poetry, Seychelles, Writing for a living, tagged , on January 21, 2011| 6 Comments »

2010 was not a great year. It wasn’t the worst I’ve had, but certainly didn’t live up to my wish that it be a complete turnaround from the previous 365 days. Although I was extremely fortunate to get through those twelve months with no one I love dying, disappointments were rife and some great plans proved to be little but dust in the wind that often lodged in my eyes and produced prodigious tears.

Because I am who I am and I do what I do, the fallout also produced words, some of which rhymed or scanned, and in an effort to produce something to show for the year I’ve put them together in an eBook.

Some of the work included has been seen here on the blog, some hasn’t, and all in the book come with images, so even if some may have seen the words before, they’ve not seen them quite like this.

Titled, “It’s Gets Verse”, the book is dedicated to those who touched me in one way or another over the course of last year:

If you’ve made me laugh,
this book’s for you.
If you’ve caused me tears,
it’s for you, too.
Each hasn’t depth
without reversal,
and life, we know,
is no rehearsal.
For all who’ve had me
feel so much …
the good, the bad …
I’ve loved your touch.

In an effort to establish some value in my own mind for the collecting of all the bits of soot and ash from 2010’s burnt offering, I’m offering my offering for all of $5 a download. (PayPal works — sandra.splash@gmail.com — or cash through the post.)

I’ll be well pleased if I find that all the shit I went through last year was worth fifty bucks or so …

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Shoes That Get Around … Dammit!

Posted in Family, Loss, love, Men, News, Older women, Sex, tagged , , , on January 12, 2011| 8 Comments »

I heard a story the other day about a woman who recently found herself standing in a pair of my three-year-old shoes … shoes that were feeling very comfortable until the day they sliced my feet off and left me to hobble on bloody stumps.

Members of the confab gathering around … apparently a lot of us wear the same sized slippers … have asked for my thoughts. They tell me she’s around my age and had been thinking herself well-married, happy, safe only to learn that her devoted husband had shifted his devotion from her to someone else.

She was blindsided … a very nasty way to take a blow … completely unprepared for the drastic change to life, and in the man she’d considered for many years a life partner.

“Who is this guy, and what did he do with my husband?” is the question she’s asking now, and with good reason since “this guy” is nothing like that guy. Or is he? Can you really miss that much in someone you’ve been sleeping beside night after night for decades? Apparently, yes.

With interesting timing, this article came across my radar this morning. Titled “He’s the One Who Cheated and Left; So Why is He So Angry At You?”, if nothing else, it proves that those old shoes sure get around.

I couldn’t understand why my ex never expressed remorse for what he’d done to me, just regret at what our daughter suffered. He’d always been extremely concerned about me while we were married, worried about my health, mental and physical. He’d always apologized every time he blew up at me. I was stunned at his coldness. He did say to me on various occasions that he felt “guilty” but he never apologized or showed any empathy for my suffering.

Sound familiar?

I don’t know the newly-dumped woman, so am in no position to give a hug and add to the chorus now teaching her the words to “I Will Survive” and encouraging her to sing at the top of her voice.

Not that she’s there yet. It takes time to move from “alone and petrified” to “savin’ all my lovin’ for someone who’s lovin’ me” … a LOT of time.

Unfaithful husbands–even husbands who have always been loving– can be inexplicably brutal. The incongruence between you makes it all worse. He’s already found a new partner, and doesn’t feel the loss of the marriage. You, on the other hand, are shattered, terrified of the future and collapsing on friends and relatives. His happiness is the unkindest cut of all. He’s already detached from you, or is in the process of detaching, which makes him excruciatingly insensitive.

Apparently, there are reasons for the excruciating insensitivity … not that it’s any excuse for it:

“Infidelity is harder on women, who are more vulnerable to feelings while men are a law unto themselves,” explains psychoanalyst Simone Sternberg. “Men don’t allow themselves to empathize with women’s suffering. It’s too threatening. Also underneath male supposed indifference or even hostility is self-hate which they project onto the wife. They can’t afford to empathize or they’ll have to experience the full force of that emotion.”

Well, whoopiefuckingdoo …

Oops. Sorry. Okay. Not sorry … and still pissed off when I allow myself to dwell, but, hey, I’m entitled to my feelings, too. There is, after all, such a thing as consequences, as William Congreve noted way back in the 1600s:

“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

Being burned leaves scars that can itch and tug and it’s not in any furious, scorned woman’s mandate to forgive or forget, only to get on with it.

That’s about my only advice to anyone finding their feet now bound in those old shoes … get on with it. There’s nothing else you can do. Suck on the bitter pill … it won’t choke you … remember the flavor, and try to avoid the queue that forms in front of those dispensing another dose.

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A New Trial of Time

Posted in Hopeful thoughts, Loss, love, On getting older, Poetry, tagged on January 1, 2011| 6 Comments »

And ye, who have met with Adversity’s blast,
And been bow’d to the earth by its fury;
To whom the Twelve Months, that have recently pass’d
Were as harsh as a prejudiced jury –
Still, fill to the Future! and join in our chime,
The regrets of remembrance to cozen,
And having obtained a New Trial of Time,
Shout in hopes of a kindlier dozen.
~Thomas Hood

Although an arbitrary demarcation of something quantum physics says doesn’t exist, there’s no denying the impact of the turn of the year on the fragile psyche of frail humans … okay, on the fragile psyche of this frail human — new years freak me out!

New Year’s eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights. ~Hamilton Wright Mabie

There’s something more than unnerving in the idea that one year has just gone by in an eye-blink, that a whole bunch of stuff happened in those twelve months, much of which deserves rumination, and this morning I teeter on the cliff edge of yet another that will pass as fast and present as much … or more … I’ll have incorporated into my history this time next year.

Yikes!

I have great hopes for 2011, even some plans, and this morning a determination to make this one great year. Of course, those are precisely the thoughts I had on New Year’s Day 2010.

For the third year running, life is in tumult with so much out of my control that simply hanging on is about the best I can manage. Sure, I’ll plod along day-by-day doing the things that need doing, avoiding pitfalls I can see or sense and spend no little energy visualizing the desired path, but after the last couple of years know only too well that at any moment I could hear that brief scream that signals incoming.

I’d like to think I’ve learned enough to trust only the trustworthy, love only those who deserve my love, chose only the best options available … as Tennyson said:

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Amen, Alfred. And I’ll be greeting true with open arms if I recognize the fucking thing.

If all goes well, 2011 should be a year of change … big, positive change seeing me having wrestled back some control, moved house, simplified things considerably and set up comfortable circumstances for me and the kids that will provide enough security to allow stepping back from the dance on the rim of the precipice and a chance to gather strength rather than squander it in anxiety and the depleting efforts of fighting for every fucking step.

Of course, the reality is that we only have so many of these new beginnings, and there’s always the chance the last one was the last one. That would be quite disappointing. I very much hope there’s time to reap rewards for hard work, that my last love was not my LAST love, that seeds sown come to fruition. Conversely, however, another year like the last few … well … I’m not so hot on that.

Today, there’s no way to know if it’s “a kindlier dozen” ahead, more of the same or something even more diabolical. Experience tells me thoughts of “it can’t get any worse” are utter nonsense and there is no guaranteed swing of the pendulum shifting from crap to contentment, but there is hope.

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
~T.S. Eliot

So, the old year is over, the new has begun … it will bring what it brings and be dealt with as it unfolds. I will do what I always do — plod and write — and January will turn to February and Cj will be six in April and Sam will be nine in November and another year will be added to the outbox. I will seek out joy, love my kids, treasure my friends, embrace adventures and hope and hope and hope.

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day. ~Edith Lovejoy Pierce

My sincere wish to all that 2011 fills your book with joy, love, kindness and peace …

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A right good-will draught …

Posted in Friends, History, Loss, love, Men, Music I like, On getting older, tagged , on December 31, 2010| 8 Comments »

Christmas 2010 is history and we’re now at New Year’s Eve … the traditional day for making lists and checking them often, adding, subtracting, watching hopes multiply and dividing the wheat from the chaff.

MMX was not a great year, but since death didn’t intrude into my immediate world, it wasn’t terrible, either. It was what it was, and it’s over.

Before flinging my arms wide in welcome to 2011, I’ll say goodbye to the old year and dance with its ghosts for a while.

Although I love Burns’ Scots version, a translation into modern English helps make the point:

Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and old lang syne ?

CHORUS:
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And surely you’ll buy your pint cup !
and surely I’ll buy mine !
And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We two have run about the slopes,
and picked the daisies fine ;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
since auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine† ;
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand my trusty friend !
And give us a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

To all dear friends, to those I love and who love me, to the casual reader who pops in on occasion, to everyone who wandered through my world over the past 365 days … although seas between us braid hae roar’d, I offer gratitude, my hand and a right good-will draught o’ kindness.

Adios 2010 …

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Things get worse, so here’s some verse …

Posted in Cambodia, Children, Loss, My Chinese Checkered Past, Poetry, tagged , on December 14, 2010| 2 Comments »

Wrapping my head around the holidays … looking happy about it … dwelling is not an option … cleaning out corners is …

My dog and stuff

My dog is called Mitzy
she’s ditzy
My cat is Diego,
hasta luego
The tortoise is Helmut
… the shell, mate …
I do with my critters,
their litter,
and fritter
away many minutes
with little else in it
My kids
are Sam, Cj and Jenn
and Jaren, of course,
although he’s now a “been”
I’ve a mother,
three brothers,
Larry, Tom and …
oh … Jim …
and, very thankfully,
a whole raft of friends.
There’s Andy and Gay
who both make every day
a tolerable passing of
whatever may
come hell or high water
show up when my daughter
the grown one (I miss her)
is beyond where I aughter
while I’m with her sister.
It’s life on this rock
that keeps me in hock
always missing someone
even as I keep stock
of those coming and going
I love them all, knowing
time passes so fast
What’s it mean? I could ask
my dog who’s called Mitzy

Cambodia in Seventeen Syllables
Always conflicted,
smiling through horror
Poison on the top shelf waits

X-mas

It’s ghosts I hang
on the Christmas tree
shades of all that
couldn’t be
Another year has
come and gone,
another season
thrust upon
all tinsel, balls and
shiny fluff
and meant to be
diverting stuff
but serving only to remind
of all that has been left behind

Leftovers

How does one finish with
stuff that’s not done
like a bird in the oven
still bleeding?

Can’t very well eat things
still moving now
can we? Not while it still keeps
its beating

It has stewed, it has baked
but no matter,
stlll kicking this thing’s not
completing

the process of dying
takes time and may
nevertheless bear
repeating

Hunger can’t rush it,
wishing won’t work,
but no worries.
We’re feeding

on scraps of leftovers
savouring each
it seems we are
still needing.

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I ain’t afraid of no Ghost of Christmas Past

Posted in Children, Family, Island life, Loss, love, Men, My Chinese Checkered Past, On getting older, Seychelles, tagged , on December 13, 2010| 9 Comments »

Jaren kissing me goodbye on his way to a Christmas Party

No, he doesn’t look a bit like the kindly grandfather-like figure in the 1951 movie version of “A Christmas Carol”, probably because I never had a grandfather. My Ghost of Christmas Past is a nebulous shape-shifter morphing around as he drags me from scene to scene. Since this isn’t about the guide, but the journey, it matters little since he does employ that cool fade technique.

Fade in:

Christmas morning. Suburban living room. 1950s.

An oval braided rug echos forest green drapes and the dark brown of a skirted sofa framed by blond wood side tables. Tree in one corner lit with bulbs the size of thumbs, some glowing white through scrapes and scratches in their paint and reflecting on massive amounts of tinsel. The sound and smell of percolating coffee invades from the kitchen. My maternal grandmother sits and smokes as we wait for Christmas to start.

Dissolve to:

Same day, different year, same house.

My brothers and I wear new flannel pajamas our mom made. A sewing basket sits beside the sofa. A sock with a light bulb stuffed in the toe awaits darning.

A walnut table has been added to the room. Intricately carved legs are my duty to dust. It had been in Grandma’s house before she died, now it is my mother’s.

A bicycle! What a beauty! Blue and white with a basket attached to the handlebars. Ribbons and bows.

Dissolve to:

Same day, different year, different house, different town.

Oak floors polished by some guy sliding my brothers and me around on towels to buff the wax. Much bigger tree, same strings of lights with more scratches. Dad promised French pancakes for breakfast. Christmas Eve dinner had been at the hotel with us running in and out of the kitchen and getting festive with the cooks and waitresses that worked for our dad.

We go to Mass. I’m in the fifth grade at St. Joseph’s and Sister Mary Stanislaus would not be happy if I didn’t put in an appearance. My father refuses to go through the motions … no genuflecting, no standing, no kneeling … and although I’m embarrassed by the idea that he doesn’t know what’s expected, he impresses me with scoffing. The music was nice, though, and I like to sing.

Dissolve to:

Same day, different year, different house, back to the first town, different family.

Crowded suburban house with a step-mother and five step-sibs in addition to me and two brothers. My mother sends fudge and a Barbie doll that looks like her. My brothers and I don’t share the fudge with the others.

Dissolve to:

Same day, different year, different town, apartment next to the freeway so new it smells like paint and plaster, just us again.

Tiny tree on a table in a small living room. Y.A. Tittle gives my little brother a football uniform. All our gifts are from someone famous. None say they are really from Dad, but we get the joke.

Dissolve to:

Same day, different year, different town, another new apartment.

Christmas dinner at a restaurant that makes great hot turkey sandwiches.

Dissolve to:

Same day, different year, different town, different family.

Chinese food with a new step-family.

Dissolve to:

Same day, different year, different town, different family.

Mom’s house in Small Town USA. Moronic step-father reads the paper upside-down … or might as well. Jenn and Jaren are little and my brothers wear out the batteries in their Star Trek communicators before Christmas Eve is over. I get a TV from Mom. A brother gets an ID bracelet.

A turkey neck simmers on a back burner, the grinder comes out from the bottom drawer and a turkey is stuffed with Grandma’s recipe. Green jello. Stuffed celery. Pumpkin pies on the washing machine.

Fade to: Calendar flipping through years …

Fade in:

Christmas Day, huge Victorian house in mid-town California city.

A tree stands fourteen-feet tall in the doorway, lights reflected in the oak floors. Burgundy walls and green rugs add a festive feel.

Husband once again has coerced me into letting him open one gift on Christmas Eve. As always, he chooses the BIG box with the fancy wrapping paper. As he does every year, he falls for the socks. Jenn is home from college. Jaren is living in the basement apartment. Brothers are there with girlfriends. Dad has written a poem and we give him a computer. Step-sisters come with Chinese food and their families. The guys play basketball in the living room once the mayhem of gift opening is cleared.

Dissolve to:

Same day, different, different house, different country, different husband.

Doors wide open to catch the morning breeze as the plastic tree rotates. Cj crawls around wearing Rudolf antlers. Sam waits for Christmas to start as the kettle boils. The mess from the annual Christmas Eve party has been cleared away. We open our gifts, smile, play with the kids and their new toys, then dress and head to Gay’s for Christmas lunch.

Dissolve to:

Same day, different year, same house, no husband.

Friends spend Christmas Eve with us and are still around in the morning to help open gifts and spread cheer. Fiance is on Skype from Mexico watching and commenting and hopes are expressed that the next year won’t see us so far flung. Kids play with their new stuff.

Fade to black.

If life is to follow Victorian fiction, these scenes should dovetail into a viz from a Ghost of Christmas Present where I learn yet more about the true meaning of this holiday.

Hm.

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Jingle Blahs …

Posted in Children, Family, Friends, Island life, Loss, My Chinese Checkered Past, Seychelles, tagged on December 11, 2010| 15 Comments »

I have something I need to get off my chest, and I need to do that now if it’s going to be out of my system by Monday. If you’re not in the mood to listen to me whine and watch me wallow, click here now and come back in a few days when I’ve managed to pull myself out of my own ass long enough to write about something interesting.

If you decide to stay for the train wreck, it starts with:

I HATE CHRISTMAS !!!!

The kids come home after a week with their dad day after tomorrow … that will be the 13th of December, more commonly referred to as 11 days before Christmas … and before they rush in all excited and ready to put up the tree I must exorcise the ghosts of Christmases past, work off my Grinchy Scrooginess, or Scroogie Grinchishness … whatevahhhhh … and be ready to put on some semblance of a show of festive cheer.

Oh, goodie.

Pathetic, aren’t I? And what a crap mom.

Guilt is only one ornament dangling from the just-slightly-too-green branches of the fake tree I’ll be un-boxing (Thankfully, the tree spins, so is tacky enough to be mildly amusing.), although its multifacets do make it impressive. From one angle it looks like memories and regrets over past Christmases, those occasions when Jenn and Jaren were small. From another, it’s Christmas present, this one right here, right now … the one Sam and Cj and I were supposed to be in Mexico for, but instead will find us opening gifts on the morning, then … who knows? Then there’s the future angle that will have me writing a summation of the year on Christmas night to go in the box when I take the tree down just in case this is the last one I’m around for.

Loneliness is another decoration pulled out for this fucking holiday, reminding me Christmas Eve will see me putting the gifts out, turning out the lights and sleeping alone … again.

Isolation, that dull, lead lump I’ll stick on a bottom branch, brings to mind the fact that all of my family but Sam and Cj and everyone I shared my life with before moving to this rock is thousands of miles away.

Worry is a particularly unattractive bit of fluff, but comes along with gift buying and the realization that the next Christmas will come around faster than a kettle boils.

Annoyance is bright and shiny and made in China. It hangs everywhere making shops here look like the aftermath of an attack of vomiting elves. What is it about this holiday that has people thinking astoundingly ugly sparkly shit all of a sudden has esthetic appeal? And what’s with that fucking music?

Yeah, yeah … I know how lucky I am. I have a roof over my head, wonderful children, amazing friends. I can walk and talk and write and drive. We’re not hungry. We don’t live in a war zone and aren’t likely to find ourselves forced into refugee status. I live in a beautiful place. And if I just focused on all that instead of the negative crap … if I quit indulging in self-pity … if I embraced the holiday … if I pulled myself out of my own ass and aimed my energy at Sam and Cj and at making this a joyful, happy time they will incorporate into their memories of a happy childhood … if I did all that stuff … this just might end up being a not-too-bad Christmas with some fun to be had with hugs and love and laughs going around.

But first I needed to get this out of my system. By Monday I’ll be ho-ho-fucking-hoing. In the meantime, please excuse me from the festivities.

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John Lennon: What could the world be now?

Posted in Celebrities, History, Hopeful thoughts, Loss, love, Music I like, News, Poetry, Writers, tagged , on December 8, 2010| 12 Comments »

Yesterday I wrote about infamous dates, an appropriate topic on Pearl Harbor Day.

Today is another one of those. Although not on the same scale of lives lost or immediate consequence, December 8, 1980 saw a moment that defines a generation, and world, thirty years after the fact of an act of murder.

The death of John Lennon put paid to an era born in the sixties and dying with John.

It could be the timing was coincidental … another decade had closed and the 80’s loomed large and voracious. Flower-power was giving way to the darker, disenchanted tones of Goth, Ronald Reagan was White House-bound and the 80s stretched before us like a ladder to be climbed one pricey rung after the other.

Could it be, however, it was the event that instigated at least some of the changes?

The violent death of a gentle musician and poet at the hand of a publicity-seeking nutjob seems a demarcation point.

Perhaps my rearview mirror has fogged over the past 30 years, but I recall the decades before Dec. 8, 1980 as hopeful … angst-ridden, yes, but that angst flowed from frustration that the world wasn’t moving quite quickly enough toward the peaceful garden we could still imagine at the time.

We’d seen our share of horrors, but felt we’d learned stuff … important stuff that could and would matter. We felt it was possible to actually give peace a chance.

Greed started driving the bus in the 80s and angst turned to the stone of cynicism. As communism fell by the wayside, that perceived specter morphed into the solid form of expanding markets, multiple debt crises, famine and a whole bunch of wars.

Hippies turned into Yuppies, Porsche became the new VW van and conspicuous consumption took over where conscientious objection left off.

Even the drugs got meaner as coke and crack took the place of acid and weed and ad copy became a viable outlet for poets since the pay was so much better.

I’m guessing those who missed the world John Lennon lived and influenced will consider this a geezer ramble … revisionist history not appreciative of the wonders of the past three decades, or not appreciative enough.

Could be. Could be.

But I can’t help but wonder how different the last thirty years might have been if that fuckwad Mark Chapman had not decided to stake his claim to fame by blowing holes through one of the world’s most important proponents of thoughtful consideration and hope.

The music, alone, we’ve been robbed of has left us poorer.

So … on this day, as every 8th of December, I celebrate the life and rue the death of John Lennon, wonder and imagine …

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