Since the folks who toted up the years back in medieval times made an error of about 7 years in the calendar, we are about at the end of the Second Millennium Anno Domini this season. You heard it here first! May humankind now entering the Third see also the dawning of the Fourth in peace and love and joy, an Earth restored! Seattle is at its liquid best outside as I write this of a December evening in this first year of Clinton. While Bill and I have our disagreements, it's sure nice not to have one's blood pressure rise with each and every every new dispatch from the Capitol!
With the external world in at least competent hands, this has been a year of high introspection for me and, this last month excepted, more time spent closer to home. Two vacation weeks were spiritual retreats, one very social and group-therapeutic, circling with other spiritually oriented gay men at Wolf Creek, Oregon, the other a week of sublime solitude in the Glacier Peak Wilderness near Holden Village, Lake Chelan, Washington. In the group work, I got yet another layer of defenses peeled away, and felt loved and desired in a way that has been rare in my life up to now. I went to the wilderness hoping to recharge my batteries, and lo! I got struck by lightning (spiritual, that is). Nature is inordinately bountiful! Both retreats were successful in their own terms, and I'm still assimilating the lessons.
Spiritual inspiration has its chemical aspects, as anyone who lived through the Sixties will surely remember, and besides meditation, I have been greatly helped by antidepressant medicines this fall and winter. It is now clear that many emotional difficulties are due at least as much to genetic and environmental chemistry as to early childhood stuff. As the sources of our discontents are manifold, so are the remedies! Watch this space next year to see if a new found freedom from inhibition and rejection anxiety finds me in happy relationship: body, mind, and soul! Too much to hope for? Maybe, but hey, hope is hope, and well worth having.
And I have had music! Two nights from now I sing for the fifth concert with Seattle Pro Musica and their new chambe r chorus "Madrigalia." It is enormous fun, and I always know when I am singing, that there can be no better use for my time and energy. I also got to see two operas this year, and seeing is the right word, for in both cases the big draw was the stage design Ñ Dale Chihuly's Pelleas and Melissande in Seattle and David Hockney's Turandot in S.F. Also so Chanticleer on their roa d show in Seattle, from whence comes the first sentence in this paragraph. Yes, I am getting self-referential!
Love, Godot-like, keeps me waiting yet another year. New correspondents keep my daily writing more hopeful than previously, and I have known some good, friendly, comfortable company in my slowly developing network of friends in Seattle.
O.G. Whottasnozzle [the original Popeye character was spelled Watasnozzle according to my POG cartoon] , the dear Persian cat with the runny nose, alas is departed this world, feline leukemia having gotten the better of him last September. But his replacements were not long in coming. On 5 November, I adopted two 13-week-old kittens, now named Akbar and Jeff, after their tendency to pounce upon one another and levitate vertically two feet in so doing! The "balamootas level" (a sort of entropy first discovered in Subcarpathian Ruthenia) has now risen to about 110 cm. above the floor, and my breakables are making a steady migration ceilingward, out of harm and kittens' way!
What with the New World Order on its way in (same as the Old World Order: those with wealth and greed call the shots, running roughshod over the rest of us), I can only hope that I'm still employed and in the black a year hence, and not competing with slave labor from Malaysia and Mexico. Sorry Clinton, I part company with you on George Bush's NAFTA: more anti-labor you could not have been! Was it those $multimillion contributions from Wall Street? Shame!
Hmm... Looking at last year's letter, I can see that I didn't get all my wishes, so lets have at it again: No more CIA, no more "religious" right wing, no more violent TV, no more clear-cutting of publically-owned forests and mining of taxpayers' lands for private profit. No more "civil forfeitures:" unconstitutional and un-American! Empowerment to the down-trodden (that's us!), enlightenment to the morally challenged in government, and ennoblement of daily life. May the new year be good to you, and to me as well. We deserve a break!
Your Friendly Neighborhood
Kiss-Blowing Grunge-Loving
Radical Faerie Anarchist,
David Kerlick