258 candles-one more day

258 candles-6 days

Yes, I know, I won't feed Pedigree to my dogs either. And I know I'm just perpetuating the notion that a commercial maker of substandard kibble really cares about the political atmosphere rather than raking in a few million more shekels from rubes who say, "But look, a dog!" But look, a dog. Political animal though I am, some things are truer than politics. What unites us is more important than what divides us.

258 candles-one week and one day

As we are coming to the end of waiting for our opportunity to decide this election, and for the wild conjecture and nastiness to be, if not over, then perhaps lessened, we should be looking further both inward and outward to others. This is a wonderful memory by an administrator, someone who most of us are inclined to think of as a bloodless bean-counter, about three victims of shooting violence that focuses on who they were in her life. We should all have such an effect on others.

258 candles-days16-14

 Rabbinic wisdom holds that we were created so God could talk to himself. Another take is that God wanted us to learn compassion so a plethora of us were made. Someone else also said God wanted people to love and care for others so dogs were created. If all that is so this woman squares the circle. "Taking care of dogs is my religion."

258 candles-days 20-17

This is purely a personal joy. I never identified with goths or with new wave, but I love the music of that period. And this tarot deck is just wonderful. It has been many years since I've regularly shuffled tarot but I am often drawn to the beauty of designed decks. This one is no different. It is gorgeous.

258 candles-day 21

Sometimes you need to see nothing more than the sheer joy someone takes in the work he or she does to be heartened by humanity.

258 candles-days 30-22

When I was much younger I stayed in an apartment where there were often people sleeping on the couch, on the floor, in chairs. We found one drunk guy curled around the toilet. We weren't always drunk or stoned there, but it helped. We called it "The Home for Wayward Transients."

I'm reminded of that place when I read this story about volunteers who collect and repair and display discarded deities. It's a belief in many Asian nations that a business or families prosperity is improved by the presence of shrines and icons to the local gods or to the family's faith. I've made a game for myself of stepping into Asian stores and finding the shrine. (Hint: It's often near the door.) This is no different than the Christian practice of votives; indeed, it's no different than most Christian practices. What's a cross or a crucifix but an icon? But individuals feel drawn to the ceramic and cheap plastic and plaster deities enough to care for them, not out of a religious duty, but because destroying them "goes against the conscience." This is heartening and a sign that there is such a thing as an interior sense of reverence. 

258 candles-days 36-31

In the same way religious liberals decry that all faiths have their share of fundamentalist thinking and actions, so we must celebrate that all faiths also have a deeply progressive strain that often runs counter to that. These Pakistani clerics deserve to be recognized as pioneers.

258 candles-days 40-37

It's been many years since I've explored that aspect of my sexuality, but I keep track of many things in the gay community, One of them, of course, has been the number of deaths in it, especially the largest recent massacre of Americans by an individual in Orlando, Florida. And while I might be late to the party when it comes to this video, I think it's both an exhilerating way of celebrating men loving one another and a unique way of supporting the families victimized by Omar Mateen. I light two candles, one for the video and the other in memory of the victims.

258 candles-days 48-41

When I was a kid, I knew two things (well, I knew a lot more, but I knew two things about the New York Post): They had the best selections of comic strips (two full pages!); and they were pretty reactionary in their outlook on the City. Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the paper in the mid-70s solidified that outlook and codified the neo-conservative view.

As I grew up I discovered that a lot of good writers also wrote for the Post: Pete Hamill, Murray Kempton whose work I'd come to admire in The New York Review of Books, and Drew Pearson whose book Washington Merry-Go-Round I found long after his death.

The point is that as a result it comes as a surprise to me that the Post published a feel-good, touchy-feely, "That smile made it all worthwhile" human experience like the following. But it's a good surprise.

258 candles-day 47

I am floored by the love shown by people in front of the dying, who are helpless, vulnerable, and in some cases unable even to acknowledge they are in the room. Perhaps it's because I do similar work that I think I understand what motivates them. It feels really good when we're thanked, but that doesn't always happen, and at times we are the unknown workers behind the curtain who are simply finishing what someone else started. But somehow that counts for something too. My singing voice is worn and off-key and I can't hear what I sound like at all. But I have sung out some people, usually with my favorite hymn "Spirit of Life," and I have relaxed them with my speaking voice, sometimes reading, sometimes just talking. There's a quality to being human, as one person here says, that makes us givers. And there's a need to being human that wants others with us in our frightened periods. It's located in seeing death, as one woman says, "not as an event, but as a process." Without locating it in a religion, this is God's work, a direct result of that theology that wrestles with how to account for little children dying painfully.

258 candles-days 57-48

I have been necessarily absent, as I first prepared for my vacation and then drove back to the thick to spend time with my dad. As a result, I'm behind on posting.

But this is an excellent article that makes the pertinent point on a subject whose scab seems never allowed to heal before it's torn off again. In the words of Simone Leigh, "We need to step up the care to.match the stress."

258 candles-58 days

Is hope possible to find in the interminable pain of intimate loss? As a hospice chaplain, I've been asked some variation on this question many times, and the best answer I have is that for some there can be, while for some there will never be. I have always heard the submerged wail of hope in the creak of Nick Cave's voice. Like Lou Reed, it's that undercurrent that it can be better than this that touches me and keeps me listening. As Pete Seeger taught us, "When friends by shame are undefiled, how can I keep from singing?"

My intro to Nick and the Bad Seeds came, like for many of my generation, through the lens of punk, and in my case their appearance in Wings of Desire. I've rewound and rewatched that scene so often those inches on my VHS tape show grey. (And there is no question in my mind why both Nick and Lou appear in Faraway, So Close, Wim Wenders' sequal.) But, unlike Lou's case, I have never been such a fan that I keep track of his life and what happens in it.

Which is why it was over a year after it happened that I heard about his son's accidental death. And I have only heard now in reading a, rather touching, article about his new album about, not his son's death, but about Nick and his family's grief. It may seem ironic, bitterly so, that a poet of suffering and death should have such an intimate experience of both, but why not? Death comes to us all, and sometimes it happens to our loved ones before it happens for us. When it happens to someone as thoughtful about it as Nick Cave, or to a lesser degree, a hospice chaplain, individuals seen as being, in some ways, celebrants or even friends with death, it doesn't negate our profound grief. Cave's The Skeleton Tree, of which I've only heard the three cuts included here, strikes me as an attempt to convey the odd way optimism struggles to dig itself free after burial in the ashes of grief. As Nick sings gently in the final moments of the album, "It's all right now."

258 candles-days 159-Whatever

Somehow I've lost track of the days. My election countdown clock tells me there are 60 days left before the election, which seems right. But then that means I ought to be on day 198, and I don't see how that might be. So, while I'll continue to call this project 258 Candles, I won't pretend to count down any longer. Or maybe I'll start counting up. Let's see what tomorrow brings.

Meanwhile, I remember stories people told in the 60s and 70s of traveling cross-country with no more than a dollar or two and the clothes on their backs, hitching and relying on the kindnesses of strangers to feed and clothe them. Maybe not all those stories were true, or maybe they shaded some of the less friendly parts, but in the main I think the takeaway, that most people are good and given the chance will willingly help another person, is true. I don't think this story proves that sentiment: at best, it proves that the people this man met at this time were good. But I know when I need help from strangers it's available in some way. And I know that when strangers need help from me, I also provide it in some way. Perhaps the help coming isn't in the form it was asked for--food instead of money--but help is nonetheless provided, openly and without expectation. This is the basis of politics, the way we act in the city. We help one another because, while our homes are thousands of miles apart, we are neighbors.

258 candles-days 157-158

The days when I had many friends who rode this horse are long behind me. But I remain glad of any help in keeping other people like them alive. To argue, as Maine's governor Paul LaPage does, that providing access to Naloxone provides abusers an out that simply leaves them free to shoot up again is not only, like Alexander Walley says, like arguing "that seatbelts encourage riskier driving," but suggests that some lives are more worth saving than others. Arguing that is not a moral choice but a moral failing. After all, no one would say that alcoholics shouldn't have AA available to them because it only gives them the chance to make their next binge sweeter. No one abuses a drug in order to make her life more exciting, only to make it seem that way. The reality is very, very boring. While a lot of people shooting up want to continue, a lot more don't, and they should be given every chance to eventually make that decision. Every chance. As Jesus said, forgiving another type of abuse, "seventy times seven."

258 candles-day 156

I belong to a Facebook page devoted to current and past Barnes and Noble booksellers and this afternoon a member from the Anchorage, Alaska, store posted that a woman came in and bought every coloring book in "the vestibule"--the large display near the cash registers--to donate to local schools. It is this sort of selfless action that makes me proud to be human.

258 candles-days 159-165

It may seem a little difficult, shoehorning this reflection by Brian Feldman into my intent to post positive stories during this stultifyingly divisive election, but bear with me. In noting that it celebrates both the best and the worst of the World Wide Web, Feldman tips into a truth about nearly everything, that no matter what the experience might be, it can be seen both in a positive and negative light (sometimes by the same person nearly simultaneously). While it is obviously a negative for Semisonic, which in this case loses credit, at least for people who fall for this delusion, it is not only a positive for Green Day (or potentially so; as a punk-sympathizer, if I were Billy Joe Armstrong I would be offended at the notion I sang such inoffensive tripe in such a louche way), but for the recognition that this is how history works. It's the way we attribute the writing of the Bible to various individual writers or The Iliad and Odyssey to the fictional blind poet Homer, even the various misattributions of quotes, real and made up, to long-dead speakers. They become the future "truth" for those works. Some future generation might venerate Green Day's seminal crossover hit "Closing Time" as the moment when postpunk and pop were tethered together, forming some future clumped musical form, like the moment in 1973 when DJ Kool Herc spun one of two turntables repeatedly back to the break, initiating the melange that would become hip hop.

258 candles-days 156-158

Really, I haven't anything to say about this beyond its being what sports, especially team sports, is all about. Admittedly, an Olympic women's 5000 meter heat is not a team sport. Which makes this gesture all the greater. It makes my heart sing.

258 candles-days 261-264

I had nearly forgotten this local (to the hub) feel-good story about a husband's devotion to his wife's love for sunflowers. But it goes beyond the brevity of what's suggested by that phrase "feel-good" because it also reflects the willingness of the man to share his love with strangers who will never know why someone did it. Ultimately, that's the point of doing things like this, to allow others to contribute their own explanation for why it happened and what it means.

258 candles-days 158-160

An important element of the American experiment is our dedication to the contributions by immigrants and our celebration of the diversity they bring to the melange of American society. Back in the hub where I used to live, there's been a battle for the opportunity to represent a Minneapolis district in the state legislature. The incumbent, Phyllis Khan, has been in office since 1972. Two challengers, Mohamud Noor and Ilhan Omar, were given little chance at replacing her. However, in the August 8 primary, Ilhan Omar won.

This is significant, not only for Omar and her potential constituents, but for what it means to America. She will not be the first former refugee to become a legislator or the first Muslim, but if she wins she will be the first Somali to serve in a legislative role in American politics, and in a landscape where we ask  whether we have a responsibility to, say, Syrian asylum-seekers or whether the so-called War on Terror is a euphemism for a War on Islam, that is an important voice. This is what makes American culture not only a fascinating experiment but one that's worthwhile as well.