Thunderheads & Crashing Waves

A strange couple of days, weather-wise, warm and muggy, altocumulus and altostratus clouds in the sky, with thunderheads billowing over the mountains. It feels like fire weather, like the day the Painted Cave fire broke out, when the air was heavy and still. To escape the heat of the apartment, we take the kids to East Beach. There are tourists on the sand and sailboats in the water, a group of kids splashing in the shore breakers. The tide inches up the sand, washing away castles and filling holes dug earlier. "Don't get soaked," we tell the kids, but of course that is precisely what they proceed to do. Watching them race around together I am caught up in their joy and tears fill my eyes. This is the essence of Summer, and we are fortunate to live so near the ocean. Miranda takes off her dress and runs around in her princess underwear; caught with his back to the surf, Gabriel gets soaked. I take photographs, trying to capture and freeze the moment. My heart is full, ready to burst; up the beach a ways I see a grandfather wading into the surf with his grandchild clinging to his shoulders, a beautiful ritual, one foot in the past and the other in the future.

Man Child and the Supremes

As a citizen-activist I'm supposed to care about President Bush's supreme court nominee, John G. Roberts, but I could not bring myself to watch W make his little statement on TV. It occured to me that it's a sad day when a citizen would rather watch a rerun of Seinfeld than his president, but that is the spot I find myself in. When I see W's goofy face a red light flashes in my brain and a shrieking warning siren sounds; my fists ball up and every muscle in my body tightens.

Of course the nomination of Judge Roberts is momentous -- for women's reproductive freedom, for the environment, for labor laws, for privacy rights -- and I'll have to get back in the game and read about this man, study his record, and hope he's not just another of Bush's ideologues. For Roberts is young, only fifty, and has the potential to be around for a very long time.

Bush cited Roberts' record of "fairness and civility," which struck me funny since W's reign has been anything but fair or civil. Bush and his boys have exacerbated problems at home and abroad, dividing our country and making the world a decidedly more dangerous place.

So, while W was jabbering on, I watched Seinfeld, the episode where George pretends he's a marine biologist and saves a whale by pulling a golf ball from its blowhole. "The sea was angry that day my friends," George said.

I know what you mean, Costanza, I know what you mean.

On A Cool Foggy Morning

I love summer mornings when the city is covered by a blanket of marine fog. The air is cool and the noise of the day has yet to begin. A crow squawks and wrens and finches twitter, but man-made noise is still absent. By noon, the marine layer will burn off and the warm sun will caress the red tile roofs and white stucco walls that make this town famous and desirable. Everybody wants a piece of Paradise; the sun will caress the tourists wandering up and down State Street, and the tourists on the beach. Enough money is spent to keep the great wheel turning. But there is a different feel to all this for someone born and raised here, memories tied to certain streets, certain roads, certain houses. The kid working the counter at Sears probably has no idea that once there was a working dairy on the very spot on which he is standing. We need people to remember how then differs from now; how what was gave way to what is.

After fifteen years together, light still dances in my lady's soft brown eyes. There is joy when the heart of a man opens and he lets his secret thoughts spill out, one by one, a few beautiful and transcendent, a few ugly and mean, but taken together they make the man, give a picture of who he is and what he's all about. Maybe not for others, but for me it has been a long struggle to become comfortable in this skin of mine, and I know it's a work unfinished, that no matter how far I've come, there are still miles to go. But this I know: without her constant love and giving, I'd be stuck not far from where I started.

So, on this cool foggy morning, there is peace in my soul, my angels sing and dance while my demons slumber.

The key to achieving happiness is knowing when you are happy.

THE CTM CHRONICLES - GUAM

Chuck didn’t last long at Yokota. He got off on the wrong foot with Captain Lesley Madison, commander of the Armed Forces Radio & Television Service, and compounded his troubles when he got involved with Wendy Sawaski, the base commander’s underage daughter. It was common knowledge to everyone but Chuck that Wendy Sawaski was a first-rate cock tease. Three weeks after our adventure on Bar Row, Chuck was gone, transferred to Andersen AFB, Guam. I received the following letter – one of only a handful Chuck has ever written me – about ten days later.

(Scrawled in pencil on Hilton Hotel stationery) Greetings from Andersen AFB, Guam. I’m wiped tonight man, stuck on this slab of rock out here in the middle of the ocean. The Fascists fixed me good, and all because of that little tramp, Wendy Sawaski. I don’t know what you heard, but I didn’t fuck her; I got as far as unsnapping her bra before the curtain came down. Had I fucked her, this shithole situation might be tolerable, but as it is, I can only imagine what she might have been like in the horizontal position. No fifteen-year-old should have a body like that.

Women will kill me, no doubt about it.

Pussy is a scarce commodity down here. Most of the local ladies are lard-ass fat and surly; the ranks of the dependent population are thin. In my previous incarnation I must have been a real asshole because I sure am paying for it now. What’s ironic is that the local tourist spot, Tumon Bay, is crawling with Japanese chicks. I met a pair of birds yesterday afternoon on the beach by the Pacific Star Hotel, Tomoko and Hiroko from Osaka – or at least I think that’s where they said they were from. Tomoko was the better looking of the two, but a lousy, uninspiring fuck. We ditched Hiroko in the gift shop and went up to their room. It took a lot of work before I finally got it in, and then the chick hardly twitched. I dumped her in the lobby and tried my luck with Hiroko; I’m pleased to report that I fucked her properly without a lot of preliminary antics. She blew me, and even fingered my bunghole, which I thought was adventurous of her. I may see her again before she boogies back to the Land O the Rising Sun. I have half a mind to see if I can get Tomoko and Hiroko involved in a three-way. The idea has some interesting possibilities.

One of these days I’ll grow up and treat women like human beings instead of pleasure objects, but for now I’m still a satyr, constantly on the lookout for the next harbor in which to park my dick.

Well, man, that’s about it from this atoll. What the fuck am I doing here, 5,000 plus miles from home? How was I supposed to know that Wendy was only fifteen? Whyohwhyohwhy! I hear a B-52 accelerating at the end of the runway. When one of these lumbering beasts flies over the barracks the windows rattle and the water in the toilet sloshes around. It’s not the end of the world, it just sounds like it. I’m beat up and bruised and my pride is wounded, but I’m hanging in against Uncle Sam’s Air Force, still coming off my corner stool to throw combinations. What was it Hemingway said, “Man can be defeated but never destroyed.”?