Originally uploaded by macnamband

Claire, of course

Capt. Chignell has reported these events in the Outer Sunset district in the last 24 hours:

300 block of Ashton — Missing, 39-year-old woman

1500 block of Brighton — Found, elderly icon walking on the beach

200 block of Chester — Unfounded suspicion, released on its own recognizance

First block of Granada — Apathy overdose, dragged downtown for questioning

Second block of Sevilla — 30-year-old hope, abandonned

200 block of Harold — Criminal assault on intelligence

First block of Lomita — Found in trash, 2004 promise

Second block Lomita — Unacceptably dark countenance reported

3100 block of San Jose — Fraudulent use of the word, love

700 block of Taraval — Graffiti, displayed on victim's remorse

2700 block of Taraval — Code violation of sincere apology policy

3700 block of Taraval — Blasphemer shouting at the moon

Ulloa and 27th — Kiss gone awry

First block of West Portal — Discovered, 20 pounds

300 block of West Portal — Remains of the day, cited & released

1800 block of 9th Avenue — Death/85-year-old woman (rebirth/her 50-year-old son)

1800 block of 19th Avenue — Fraud/vanity unknown

2500 block of 38th Avenue — Unleashed emotion (had to be put down)

1300 block of 43rd Avenue — Wife taken in, over husband's dead body

2400 block of 44th Avenue — Hate-radio, reported stolen

2200 block of 46th Avenue — Lost, desire (last seen under a country moon several years ago)

1500 block of 47th Avenue — Mediocre middle-aged male mind, vandalized

2200 block of 48th Avenue — Found, 13-year-old runaway ambition

Stone, I'm telling you: enough is enough.
"You want to sleep, is that it?"
I start telling him what that's like, how I imagine trying to shut down all the control levers — on a wall that extends as far as the eye can see — banks upon banks of levers, all classes of levers but particularly the large fork levers, the kind you use to throttle back a Pratt & Whitney F100, drop the landing gear, and cross into deep space; and then every specie of button and engine light, along with edge switchers, network switches, toggle switches — the kind you'd see on the mahogany dash of Uncle Ducky's 1960 Mark IV Jag — rounder switches, dials, rockers, everything clicking and whirring as the turbines wind and whine down, even as the fans go on zooming, cooling things off, subsidiary motors purring, the whole taxonomy of ever smaller devices in decline, the rackety-clack of valve lifters banging their heads ever more quietly, disks spinning down, and down, look at the spin I'm in, that old black magic, those old clocks trotting along on the grass, out the train window, screens blackening, old-fashioned flash bubs popping; the last crackles of a rotting fire.

Peet's Coffee, Opera Plaza. 8:06 a.m. ... Man in a gray flannel suit, double vents, silk tie, blue striped shirt — from the Custom Shop if that still exists — with white, French cuffs, small gold cufflinks. A three-inch silver pin across his French collar, underneath the tie knot, so the silhouette from belly to jowl is like a prow. Out the top of his shirt a bullish gray head, a prominent chin, thin lips, glistening cheeks, hair barbered not cut, and no attempt to out the gray; combed carefully but not effeminately; horn rim glasses; blue eyes; sandalwood cologne, the way Brooks Bros. used to make it, altogether, less distinguished or refined than blunt, worldly, supremely confident — even after all these years, even after all the betrayals he's seen. With The Times under his right arm, a mocha in his right hand, the alligator watch band, his left hand, the dreamer, pushing its way out the door.

A marketing man for the opera, we said. Maybe, I thought, but whatever he is now he was once a Mad Man.

And so you wish to book passage? asked Mr. C.
"I do."
But you're going in the wrong direction, said the boatman. Where were you before?
"I don't know. I have no idea."
You have no memory, said the boatman.
"Think of it as though I were on ship that sank. All hands lost."
Except you.
"Even me."
And what was she carrying, this ship of yours?
"Pure gold, exotic metals, some school boy blazers, old airplane tickets, headshots of starlets, one of a woman with her head thrown back; a Jack Kramer tennis racquet, the scent of Wainscott in summer, a Joseph Conrad novel, an Old Angler Italian leather briefcase filled with family lies and deception, and a few other odds and ends."
The boatman nodded and turned his attention to a manifest. I don't see your name, he said.
"I'm early."
Come again, said the boatman.
"A change in plans."
Well, said the boatman, looking out at the river, which was running high and black. You can do it. Sure. But you know you can't get back.
The passenger had moved away, but he did look back. That's worth noting. The problem was, he couldn't hear anything above the roar.

I've begun researching a piece about teenagers who kill themselves. It is partly a story of mental illness and partly a story of the pressure parents put on their children to get into the best schools.

For example, there is a hairdresser in Palo Alto who trained to be a breast cancer surgeon in China. But she and her husband decided that the most important thing was to get their child into a UC school. So they found relatives and moved to America, to a neighborhood where they could get their child into The Gunn School, a public school for the children of Silicon Valley executives and Stanford University faculty. Gunn feeds many kids to Berkeley and UCLA. As far as this woman was concerned any other UC school, with the possible exception of UC San Diego, was a sign of a failed education.

This is not a new story certainly, it's just that every few years people forget. Or if they are immigrants, particularly from China, they just never thought about it. The third edition of The Hurried Child came out in 2001. But who reads that anymore?

Here is another anecdote. One day recently an 11-year-old boy comes to a local Montessori school to make a presentation to his class on the subject of the Terracotta Army soldiers of Qin Shi Huang. The boy arrives with elaborate maps showing just where the soldiers were found in Xi'an. He has photographs. He has a bullet point presentation on his computer and most amazing, he has a box filled with sand and small handmade replicas of the soldiers — so you could see just how archeologists found them....

The boy gives the presentation, which he prefaces by saying he got some help from his parents. He shows great poise. At the end there are questions and at one point he begins to cry. The teacher goes to him. What's the matter? The boy inconsolable. But this is a wonderful presentation says the teacher who has been struck by how extensive this presentation is.

The boy looks up, "I didn't do it. It's not my work." The teacher is able to calm the child but later, he falls down on the sidewalk and bangs his head on the cement.

Later, the teacher talks to the mother, who admits the role she played in putting together the presentation. She is an artist. And she agrees that she went to far, that she took away her son's expression, in part because of her own A personality desire for excellence. Nevertheless, she gets the point and promises she will pull back.

A week later the boy arrives in class with a history book. The margins of every page are filled with yellow stickies, each with several ideas and arrows pointing to the text.

What is this? asks the teacher.

"My father," says the boy. "He wanted to help me get ideas."

Mr. Sussman,

I am 61. I served in the Air Force for four years during the Vietnam war. I support an allied war against the Taliban. I am wary of both government, and corporate, intrusion into private lives. I have occasionally voted for conservatives.

Having said that I often ask my 15-year-old son, on his way back from football practice, to listen to your show. We listened the night you offered Orwell’s 1984 as a portrait of what you think America is becoming. Perhaps, you had only time for the Cliff Notes version and clearly you don’t know much about Orwell, who although difficult to categorize was committed to much that you repudiate. About 1984, he wrote:

"My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences." [CEJL vol. 4 p. 564]

But what was really stunning was that this was all the result of your time with a couple of Russian Arms dealers who are advertisers. And so a lengthy advertorial. Which without a disclaimer become the view of KSFO…. As an aside, one wonders who finances City Arms and where the arms come from. That you in effect endorse these people makes me all the more determined to fight for a fairness doctrine, which I never thought I would say, much less support.

Incidentally, City Arms urges customers to resist state legislation, AB962, which among other things would demand….

1. Registration and finger printing of handgun Ammo Purchasers
2. Mandatory storage / Display requirements for Ammo Dealers
3. Ban on the Sale of Handgun Ammo through the Internet or mail Order

This has nothing to do with hunting… animals. Or target shooting. Or the Second Amendment. By not supporting this legislation you are endorsing neighborhood gangs and the likes of the Zeta drug cartel. How on earth could one justify handgun ammunition through the mail?

That’s stupidity and that’s dangerous. And it’s dangerous that you endorse violence among your listeners, as you did the night a man called to say that in a post-abortion age women who get abortions should be executed. ‘Good call,’ was the essence of your response. And it’s dangerous — not the way you encourage opposition to Barack Obama, I have no argument — but the way you give credibility and intellectual succor to people who would do him harm.

I think the president will be harmed. I think it’s come to that. And if that happens you personally need to be held responsible, among others. And KSFO, which endoreses your behavior. You are the local Fr. Coughlin, and a man who makes a good living by trashing others for no good reason, by encouraging ignorance and hatred, who has no ideas of his own, who builds nothing, who has only false humility, and is becoming part of the undoing of this country. It’s nothing to do with Left or Right, it has to do with the need for simple human decency. Ironically, you are now the enemy of a free society. You are the one saying there’s a fire in the theater when you know perfectly well there is no fire…. The fire is your ignorance.

At the least my son now understands it. He gets it. Knowledge and moral will are everything. You are the best argument for an elite education I’ve heard.

We are sitting on an island in their kitchen, the classic California kitchen, which bleeds into all other rooms. The husband is in his late 60s, tall, hair dyed shoe-polish black; his wife just turning 50, her hair cut short. In the last 10 months she has begun to feel cute again. She was born in Beirut, and would have you believe she was a starlet. She appeared in a Fellini movie as a child, but you have to stop the movie to see her.

He was born down the peninsula, went to Harvard and Stanford and has underachieved ever since. He was once a well known architect, but then something happened, no one knows, but he left the profession. Then he began dabbling at being an "artist". He and his wife own rental properties, which is their real income. He had a stroke some time ago and has limited mobility, and limited stamina. And now he's in a downward spiral. He says he wants to get back to riding a motorcycle and a horse and playing tennis. It will never happen, but conceivably it could if he had the will to pull himself up and out of his chair and to start walking. He can walk but it's difficult. He could even walk to a nearby store but he says the grade is too steep. What about a cane? "No, it wouldn't be strong enough." You could take a walker. "No, that would never work, I couldn't lift it. What if it fell over?"

"You could try... "

No, you don't understand. I couldn't."

No, he would rather dream, he would rather jail himself. Frankly, the man is spoiled and his pessimism is contagious. I would never have agreed to go have dinner at all but my wife insisted. She is always trying to save people. And what about his wife? lately strange things have been happening. Three times in the last months he's called 911 to have police come over and "save" him.

The couple has three daughters; two are in college in New England. A third is 15 and lives at home. She's unusually bright and stars in Physics. She's also very direct. I have never seen her be devious. She is usually shy but lately she seems much more outspoken. She has a very pretty smile, and permanent. But as you look at her you realize the smile has different meanings.

So here's what's happening to this man and his family. One afternoon the police arrive and this father says that his 15-year-old daughter refuses to open a bottle of wine for him, which he can't do himself because his left hand is so gnarled. The police are puzzled: the man is not drunk. He seems absolutely sincere. They call social services. A week later he calls again and says his daughter won't help him get downstairs, which everyone knows he can do himself, although with effort. He tells the police it's a case of elder abuse. Two weeks later he calls still again, this time because his daughter has left him alone for several hours. Why didn't he make the charge about his wife, you wonder. Eventually, a representative of social services arrives. A week after that his daughter overhears him making plans to hire a prostitute.

So here we are on an island in their kitchen. Here is the father sitting in his customary chair, his wife is slicing onions with a 14-inch cutting knife. She cuts slowly and carefully, even sensuously. Her husband is talking about his therapy.

"You like that one, don't you," his wife says, referring to one of the women who gives him a massage.

"Actually, there are two of them," he says.

His wife smiles. She never takes her eyes off the onions. "Two, even better."

Her husband is encouraged. "Yes," he says, "she reminds me of my first girl friend. Very beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful woman I've ever known. She was Brazilian." He went on to talk about how he met this woman, how she was a twin, how he used to go bike riding with her in Rio.

This marriage is over, but he doesn't see it. In that sense he is pitiful.

"I'll never have that again," he says and orders his daughter to get him the wine bottle at the other end of the counter. She does it.

"So what you are going to do," asks his wife.

"You'd like it if I killed myself, wouldn't you?"

"There's a gun upstairs," says the daughter, with her permanent smile.

His wife stops cutting and looks at her guests. Everyone is smiling, even the father.

What is one to make of all these suicides at France Telecom, a company of 100,000. 23 suicides in the last 18 months, 29 in 2001, 30 in 2000. The average per 100,000 in France, is 15. A woman, a manager, threw herself out of a fourth floor window. A man killed himself in his home. Another man stabbed himself in a meeting; whether he survived is not clear from the news report.

And you are telling me there is no God, no divine intelligence. You are insisting on that?

What has been a sideshow until now — boviators on parade and now the Host Wars — is serious business. Glenn Beck has two kills on his holster in the last three days. More scalps to come. And now this terrible scandal in the ACORN office in Baltimore, at which two conservatives, posing as pimp and prostitute showed up and got tax advice on how to start a prostitution ring, with under-aged girls. Can you imagine how Rush will play this?

Keith Obermann licked his lips at the thought of revenge then decided otherwise. Still, you can see how this is going to turn into American Sunni and Shia, and how this will transform old time McCarthyism to a new art form.

There are extremists on all sides but it's the Reaganissimos, above all. There's no getting around it. It's those folks still listening to the aw-shucks patter of a 20-mule team Borax commercial, to the ghost in the attic of Ronnie MacBeth watching 12 O'Clock High, imagining he and Robert Stack had flown their B-17s right off the back lot and were suddenly over Germany, and later they would be among the first to break open the concentration camps.

And now Ronnie's kids, hanging on for dear life, are having an identity crisis. 'Where's Pappi?' They want to know because they're feeling powerlessness and the scoreboard says, political defeat. Plus all the economic uncertainty and paranoia, and above all, there's a nigger who got uppity and smart and who the fuck is he to tell us what to do. Boy! And now Ronnie's runnions have tripped the wire. Now they've done it.

It's been happening for months. There's breadcrumbs going back for years, actually. "Obama is a racist." "Poison Nancy Pelosi." Just that stuff in the last 45 days. And now all these little acts of defiance — it's no longer a matter of being civil — and just now this new form of personal destruction. Not to mention, murder. John Von Unn's shooting the Holocaust museum guard is one of several incidents in which deranged minds found refuge in right wing monologues. It's all coming to a head.

And there will be more killings. And the killer, or killers, whether from the Right of the Left, will imagine themselves as martyrs. One act will lead to another. And it will spread. Less the violence than the recrimination. What seemed like small polarities will become large. Barack will be in ever greater danger, just as that woman in the Bay View told me nearly a year ago.

And how did this happen? We all know. People said, "You're A Great American". And they meant it. Otherwise, technology, mostly. The death of Walter Chonkites, the end of newspapers, the extreme nature of meritocracy in private schools, just the end of things, the lack of personal filters, the free-for-all quality of public discourse. The comfort of political camps. The delirious quality of carelessness, itself.

What's needed is a clunker program for egos.

And all the while we indulge ourselves in expression without intellectual representation.... Expression without imagining an effect. I have done it myself.

What's needed is a great sleep, laughing gas from the Le Petit Prince's asteroid, which puts everybody to sleep for 30 days. After that, lost ability to utter a sound for six months. Quiet things down. Communicate by other means.

It happened last Friday night, around ten minutes before 11. A 13-year-old girl left her home.

This was in Palo Alto, the home of the Stanford Cardinal. The Cambridge, Mass and the Cambridge, UK of California. If California has the 8th largest economy in the world, roughly speaking, Palo Alto is the cowling on the intellectual engine that drives it. It is the cradle of Internet startup civilization.

It is also the center of the known world for many kids looking not merely for higher education but the highest education. And for a moment we will put aside East Palo Alto, which is the dark side of the moon, which is the chaos next to the order.

And so this young girl leaves her home — the details are not clear still — and walks past or near her school, and then on to the tracks that hold the commuter trains that run up and down the peninsula, between San Jose and San Francisco, at 60-70 miles an hour....

Her school is Gunn High. A public school but for all intents and purposes and despite the good feeling liberal parents may derive, private.... This is one of those places where your daughter may be in 3 AP sections and be completely distraught because her friends are in 5. This is one of those schools where you get into NYU and your life is over. This is one of cookers where you are the best and the brightest by definition but if you are not the best and brightest you have failed, you have betrayed the trust, you have not climbed to the summit after all. That you may have EQ to match is no consolation. That your life will unfold like the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz does not matter.

So this girl goes to the tracks and when she sees the train coming she steps over the rail — is she facing toward the train or away? I don't know. Is she sitting or standing? I don't know. All I know is that she is in the darkness, alone, recklessly, courageously, confidently, feeling the leading edge of smithereens, the engineer's horn, the roaring, the wind, and then the meteorite itself.

(to be continued)

The following is an edited excerpt from several letters, in effect a compression, explaining to a former dean at the school why we took our son out of the San Francisco Waldorf High School this year.....

...In essence, we are paying a great sum of money, by our standard, for what? If you look at the colleges that SFWS seniors went to this year, I would argue the tuition is too high. If you look at what our son learned this last year, the tuition is too high. If you look at what the school is offering against comparable schools, the tuition is too high.

Or this. It says much about this school that there was such prolonged discussion among parents, a small number of parents, about acquiring a temporary gym but not much about asking teachers to take less salary. Does anyone seriously think Rudolf Steiner would put a gym before teachers?

I realize that’s a little unfair because the monies for the gym are separate from the school's operating budget. Still, if you were trying to find $1 million to pay teachers more not less, and create new courses we would be with you. But don’t you see that’s the identity problem I’ve tried to express so many times. What is it we're staying with? Those who would like a traditional school want a gym. Those who want an alternative school prefer the best teachers money can buy. And this is always the issue, for me: Is this a traditional school or an alternative school, and what do these terms mean? And what really is the Waldorf High School-offering?

No one has even been able to explain that fully and coherently… For me, the offering will always be in the ideas of Henry Barnes who explained to me once the need to teach, to imbue young people with a moral instinct, which, along with the most refined ability to reason and think critically, could help them approach the most difficult problems of our time — scientific problems, political problems, economic issues that demand not just a 'solution' but a solution with a moral dimension.... To get there you need to be able to first imagine something, an approach that may not exist, which may have to be created. Hence the endless emphasis on imagination and creativity.....

But how do you do that? And how do you manage the requirement for the most basic skills?

For my wife the decision to reconsider Waldorf came when she gave our son an impromptu summer writing course and found that after 9th grade he could not spell very well, nor could he write a simple comparative essay. He didn’t have a clear sense of the difference between an inductive essay and a deductive essay. He didn’t know what a topic sentence was. In sum, he did not know how to begin with an idea and develop it. All things that Barbara felt he should have known. All things that I for one had learned in 8th grade.

Another related issue was the design of the block system, in which students read several significant works but with no time to get below the surface. Another issue was poor communication between teachers and parents. Another issue was that several good people were leaving the school. Another issue was the matter of having parents sign a series of protocols designed to protect children from parents who, it was feared, might not guard the liquor cabinet or bedrooms. This was a parent-generated idea. Other schools do it. But it was not thought through. It's fear based. There was no effort to address these issues with students,who are after all the one who need to accept moral resonsibility.

Moreover, I don't agree with the premise. Rather than relying on signatures, I would rather rely on knowing the parents hosting the evening. And more than that I would rather rely on my trust of my son.....

Having said all that, the school has many wonderful teachers. Dr. Carini and Ms. Alba are great teachers, the best. There are none better.

But here’s the abstraction I'm trying to establish. The curriculum, and indeed the whole tone of the school, is not about thinking critically. It’s not about deconstructing. It’s not about questioning. The Socratic dialogue is weak. It’s about going along, acquiescing, harmonizing with… Not such a bad thing, I suppose, and you may well disagree, maybe I’ve shaded this too much. But from my perspective the school is finally built on a hierarchical model that you either agree with or don’t agree with. As any good school is. But what is this model? It’s not clear, nothing is clear, but whatever the model it’s built around a 'college'. In effect, it’s committee rule with the weight given to long time members of the community. Not always but generally speaking they seem unwilling to incorporate ideas from other schools. And by doing that, whether true or not, they further the notion that the Waldorf education is finally the expression of a cult. I don't think that's necessarily true. It depends on the Waldorf school you're talking about. And there are good cults and bad. The problem here is that the school has not done much to market itself properly and so the notion of a 'cult' education lingers.

Recently, the school has tried to present itself in a more traditional light, but without establishing a clear and an agreed upon identity. Agreed upon by faculty, administrators and parents. You can say you're 'traditional' all you like, however you define the word, but then you have to do substantive things to be that. Having a temporary gym in the parking lot is not enough. And I would argue the mistake is try to compete with so-called 'traditional' schools in this city. Better to work from a core strength, which is finally alternative and make that work. But how do you do that? The answer begins with working out a clear identity, which is made difficult because the further you get away from primary education the harder it is to find direction from Rudolf Steiner.

Ironically, the Head, Hands, Heart mantra, which should be the motto of Waldorf has been taken by Lick-Wilmerding, which is, I would argue, the finest school in the city. For many reasons.

But even a committee directing the Waldorf high school wouldn't be so bad if there was a consensus. But there isn't and no one has risen up who can lead the school on its way. This problem of direction is partly in the nature of Waldorf schools. From my experience over the last nearly 20 years... There is something about the personality of Waldorf parents, some call it a passive-aggressive quality (in my own case it's simply aggressive), which may suggest things are being worked out on the ethereal plain, but not on the physical plain. I don't know how else to describe it. Passivity and utter calm at one end of the spectrum; repressed anger and neurosis on the other end. I don't exclude myself.

The real problem is that there is much pressure to go along, to be loyal to the school, to suppress criticism. And once you become an outsider, as I did, then you have no say. At the last parent meeting of the year I volunteered to serve this coming year but as I looked around the room I realized that beyond being the bull in the china shop, I was not the conciliator that was required. I was never going to be in a position to change things, even as I came to realize how many parents agreed with me. And there are many. Many more than the administration might imagine. I would never be trusted by the people on the inside….

And so where does that leave us? In a school — and you may be surprised to hear this, a school that I dearly love — which I am forever at odds with, am forever frustrated with because it is finally not the high energy, courageous experiment that it could be. It’s low energy, careful, conservative, quiet, highly controlled, and becoming more and more traditional. And how can that be? Because after all it is the legacy of a mind at war with, among other things, the most dramatic evil of the 20th Century.

Women In Art

Fr. Floyd often spoke of himself in the third person. "Fr. Floyd knows his responsibility to the poor," he would say, "Fr. Floyd also knows the grace of God."

In the beginning, Floyd had an outrageous desire to be graced by the media as well, which is how I met him, more than 20 years ago. Then, he was a dashing Franciscan priest, in his brown robe and proud piety, or else his Giant's warm-up jacket and matching cap.

Next to God he loved celebrities. "Did I tell you I met Obama?" he said to me a few months ago. "A good man. I was impressed. And I was very direct. I asked him, 'what are you going to do about the poor.' He looked me right in the eye, I liked that, he looked me right in the eye and I think it caught him a little, but you know how Fr. Floyd is, and he said it was going to be a real priority.' No, I think he's going to be a great president. I was very impressed. He makes me think of Rooseveldt."

Fr. Floyd could never have worked with the poor had he not had equal access to the rich. For years he had a patron, a Nob Hill matron, a stocky, sexy blonde if I remember, who invited him to dinner and introduced him to the hoity-toity. And they would turn to him at dinner and as much as pat him on the head for his work with St. Anthony's diningroom and living down next to St. Boniface as he did, and then later out in the Mission District. "What is that like, working those people?" they would ask. "How do you do it?"

In fact, he did it very well, although I didn't accept that until the last time I saw him. I took him to a Thai restaurant over behind the Hall of Justice. A few months earlier we'd had dinner and he was off his game. He looked terrified. He had nothing to say.

Today, was his funeral and he would have been happy to see a full house and of course the archbishop, who was separated at birth from Dick Cheney, and a handful of friars, who looked as though they'd been separated at birth from reality, not to mention a comb or a wash cloth, they looked like a disheveled bunch of night afters, folks still on the Bataan death march, and ne'er do wells, not that you have to be a brill cream man to be a friar, but the look of kempt and some projection of hopefullness and well being would have helped, and there was also the Speaker of the House's husband, and various cops and people Floyd worked with at the foundation and people who just came in off the street to see what all the music was about. The whole service was like a musical, as the woman standing next to me said.

They wheeled in the casket and you'd thought he was being buried in Afghanistan; the coffin was that simple. A lot of people got up and said what they could, which wasn't much in most cases. Fr. Finian gave the eulogy and it would have made Floyd weep. No one knew him better than Finian who is the real lineage in the order. What's left of it. Looking at the friars you wondered whether the effort was about over. All of them over middle age, save a few who looked distinctly gay. Fr. Floyd said they were nearly all gay and he was worried about that.

As the incense was pitched to the four corners and sallow-skinned church bureaucrats presided over the mass and the parishonners got their transsubstantiation and people wept, because it was sad, no question, and while police horses pawed at the cement outside and two traffic cops gabbed in the middle of the street, and some kid came up to the side door with his boombox on high, and after Paul Pelosi got up and talked about how wonderful it was that Fr. Floyd had been able to work with 'those people', he actually said that, and you thought, 'Paul, you're not at the Gettys now, you're actually talking to 'those people,' ' but the speaker's husband didn't care, it's just never occurred to him — he had a mustard-colored kerchief in his breast pocket and stood stiffly like a mannikin in a store window — he was just here to say, on Nancy's behalf, what a great loss this is, and thank you to the foundation for all you've done, that was his real thrust, and then Dick Cheney's twin, the archbishop, got up and said he had the last word, and first he had a joke to tell about how Floyd wore a Dodger's shirt under his Giant's jacket, and then he rattled on about Matthew 24 and 34 and you wanted to yell out, "hike," and afterwards he ended with the fearsome promise that God has the last word and there was something in the way he said that left you with the impression that his God does not take personal phone calls and will be out of the office all this week.

"I think Fr. Floyd was well represented here, don't you think?" Floyd would have said to me after the service, and then he would have relished the details, the nuances, the back stories and he would have wondered how the TV stations would play it, because at least two stations were there, and he would have wanted to insure the press releases went out and he would have been miffed that his death was not better played the day after he died, and he would have wept to hear his sister's rememberances...

At that last dinner we had, he didn't speak in the third person. The affectation was gone. The fear in his eyes was gone. Resignation but not fear. Even his loneliness was over. He was face to face. He said, "I don't really believe in it anymore." What's that, I said. "The church, I don't believe in the institution. I love the people but I don't think..." He let the point go.

Later, I dropped him off and I had to help get him in the door, moving between sleeping homeless, and he seemed genuinely happy to be home.

If I'd given the eulogy I would have said how Floyd might have once thought of the poor as 'those people' but at the end he was saying to himself, and believing it for once that, "we are all 'the poor', we are all naked and strangers, we really are no different, and there is no duality and God will grant us His grace and that's all we can believe in but it's enough...."

I know what you saying: "but all these stories sound the same. It must be the same couple over and over. Why do you find such people interesting? Who cares?"

But it's not the same couple over and over. It's that the circumstance is so pervasive. If you ask me to tell a happy marriage story, I can't do it. Which is not to say there aren't any happy stories, it's just I haven't heard any. I don't know those people. What I hear is this: a woman talking about her marriage who says, "I am grieving, I am in a state of grief." Or the woman, at wit's end, who says to her husband, "as soon as she goes away to college (referring to their daughter) I am leaving you."

Or the woman at the next table in a Noe Street restaurant, a very sincere and dignified woman describing the moment last week when her husband, in the middle of the night, after a tumultuous dinner with a one time neighbor, in the middle of the night grabbed her hand, stuffed her fingers in his mouth and bit them. Not hard enough to cause great damage, but hard enough to hurt onr finger badly, bad enough to be struck dead at the shock and the bizarness of it, badenough to be shaking her head for days afterward and not a little fearful of her husband. "I don't know what we've come to," she told her friend.

Still another woman, blonde, in her 60s but looking 40, confided to a friend, "I am not playing by the rules anymore. Enough is enough. I just won't. I've paid my dues."

And so it's as though this city had turned into a 19th Century French novel, as though all your friends, and their friends, had come down with mal-de-siecle. If only Chateaubriand were here. If only Flaubert could see this.

Go to dinner at anyone's home and at some point the conversation always turns to mal. Old and new mal at the same time — and on the surface rooted in lost jobs or the effect of lost jobs, lost properties, lost inheritances, lost social status, lost ambition, higher tuitions. The prospect of never being able to retire. For women, of a certain age, say between 45 and 60, the mal is about fading marriages and the urgency of finding a lover, of either sex, or keeping a lover in need of repair himself, or else finding someone to help them with their much older husband. What seemed to her so far off and possible is now suddenly here and impossible. It was supposed to be life in a DH Lawrence novel, life by a crackling hearth. That was the picture when the man was 55 and the woman was 40. But now he is 70 and she is 55. And he is not Robert Redford at 70, he is either obsessively introspective or ill, or dangerously unaware, or else a Republican, which is the same thing. Meanwhile, she is just coming into still another bloom, rich with sensuality and bravado.

But that's the surface. There is something else. Ennui is not the word for it. Rage is more the word and all its corollaries: resentment, denial, lethargy, mindlessness, lack of confidence, childish yearnings, outrageous sentimentality — along with strange illnesses, fantastic nightmares, sexual listlessness and yet spiritual hope, but with no real desire for enlightenment. As though you'd woken up in a burning house and were too drunk or drugged, or just too worn out to crawl out the door.

Would you come to dinner? the husband asks. It'll be boys night out.

The next day we arrive at the top of a hill, climb up Victorian stairs, the front door opens, the husband steps back. The livingroom is a wealth of glass and, above a small, carefully flowered backyard, there is all the city, at 7:30 on a summer evening, fog slopping over Twin Peaks, all of downtown in photoshop and craquelure.

Drinks, nuts, more drinks, dinner, 'will you have another?', 'I will,' and then more life stories, still more anecdotes about children, about schools and summer houses, names dropped and picked up, the whole IT of establishing a perspective by which to accept each other. And everything is fine. The animals in the wall paintings, the carefully picked jazz, the faces of young boys at the table, the food itself, everything is safe and sound.

Later and later his wife arrives. Pretty, sensuously European, dark hair, with the gray just arriving, in cashmere and soft wool, layers of browns and deep reds, and very quiet at first. Small, watching eyes. Altogether like a French garden, like her garden, everything at a sharp angle and carefully laid out. She's been out for the evening, a married woman out for the evening by herself, which in her case seemed immediately dangerous, not that she might be harmed physically but that she might become lost emotionally.

In passing, she leaves the word, Landmark.

You mean...

Yes, I think it was called EST. Yes?

Her husband knows very well: The old Werner, now in Indonesia, isn't he, and weren't there charges of financial impropriety and something else. A scandal. No one can remember.

Well how is Landmark? we ask.

It's actually very helpful. I have no baggage but it's interesting to hear others share.

Because, she goes on, I have no one to talk to. And not a coroner's trace of humor. He, she says, looking at her husband: he, doesn't like to communicate. He can't, it's beyond him. He smiles, responds. She, he says. And suddenly there's a triangulation, the guests have become unwitting therapists. He has a last word and did he say, 'well, all you can think about is sex.' Was that what he said? It could not have been. You wouldn't say such a thing in front of children, or in front of guests you hardly know. He could not have said that, it's what the guests heard, it's some problem, some association, they have.

People share things, she goes on, about themselves, it's often about their parents. But it's very brave. These people are really saying things....

The husband looks at us, rolling his eyes. She looks at us, rolling the wine in her glass. Everyone on quicksand, everyone about to be pulled under.

Originally uploaded by macnamband

Photo by Jacobovitz (http://jacobovitz.smugmug.com/)

You haven't gone for a walk in a week but tonight you walk. The moon is imperfectly full and shrouded. You walk north along 47th Avenue to the park. At the corner of Kirkam Street you stop for a car. The car is black and blacked out. As it passes, at a creep, the passenger in the back seat and the passenger in the front seat both reach out and arms unraveling like Frog tongues they slowly give you the finger. These shadows make no sound. The car makes no sound. And still they keep holding out their fuck-yous.

The car passes and you cross the street. Two blocks further on you glance at the dancing school on Irving where the dark-haired Lithuanian woman dances, sometimes by herself, sometimes with clients. The building is dark. Across the street, the Pacific Catch Restaurant is closing. Customers are filing out, saying their good-nights.

What time is it? You cannot see your watch in the dark. You keep walking until finally you can see hands. They're joined at midnight.

You come to Lincoln. There is no traffic. To the left, you can see the blue and red 76 sign above the neighborhood gas station. You cross the street diagonally, to the park entrance. There are no street lights. Three men stand in the shadows by the entrance. They're not blocking the path but you need to pass close to them to go on. The men are in their 20s. One is wearing a hair net, the way gangstas do. Another hops up and down. The third keeps lighting his cigarette. They're talking about one of their friends, how he's gonna get fucked up if he keeps acting stupid.

You pass them by and disappear into the black. There is only enough light to imagine the path, as it winds up and around. Eventually, you see a street light far ahead. The light at the end of the tunnel comes to mind.

Meanwhile, you imagine the contents of the dark. You hear a stick snapping, a voice in the bushes. You tune yourself for flight or fight.

But nothing happens, and now you've come to the light at the end of the tunnel. You can see your surroundings. You are inside the park with the Polo fields a quarter mile to the east, to your right. In the other direction, toward the south windmill, the ocean. If you stop you can hear it. You cross a road and continue walking north toward the other side of the park. You pass the entrance to the soccer fields. Just before the north windmill you see the path that cuts down in behind Beach Chalet. You turn in. There is no light. The path is narrow, like a hiker's path. It runs over a bridge. Someone could set upon you but they don't. Then you round a corner and there's the bar in back of Beach Chalet. You watch the people for a moment, listen to the music, and go on.

Now you walk south, toward home, but instead of going out to the lighted way that runs along the park edge, with the car lights and traffic lights if nothing else, you take the path that runs close by the soccer fields. There is no light, save the day-for-night light from a shorted moon. This used to be a wooded closet where gay men trysted, but the park service has cleared out the underbrush. In the day, no one comes here anymore, but at night, once again, it's a haunt for men who prefer the nuances of shadow to the bulb swinging slowly in a club bathroom.

As you walk along the path, wide enough for a narrow car, you see the tips of lighted cigarettes in among the bushes and trees. Figures move out of the shadows. Occasionally, out of nowhere a figure stands in the middle of the path. It moves aside as you pass. It says nothing. You are in someone's nightgiest, you are in a palace of extreme anonymity. And for that reason, you are more safe than you might imagine. But there's something else. Something else that is appealing about this place. It conveys, however theatrically, a vision of after life, as if you had suddenly passed over into deathtown. You might think of it as a practice area, to train your fear away.

But just when you have found a comfort, even a justification for being in such a place, you are nearly shot dead with fear — from a howling, a horribly piercing howling, so animal-like and so close that for a moment you think there is an animal right there in front of you. It bring you to a crouch.

But it's not an animal, it's another figure-spirit, standing in the middle of the path. Now suddenly he's coming toward you still howling. You brace yourself for destruction. You say something by way of shield, 'what do you want?' It wants nothing. It passes. It has a knapsack. It speaks Spanish under its breath. It's a jin, an angry, nutty jin, a creature from the inferno, but for that instant it had you, it drew you over, over and into a bardo where they work with live ammunition.