At Alecto's Request

Fellow blogger Alecto tagged me with this meme a while back and I've finally gotten around to doing it. The meme works like this:

Go back through your archives and post the links to your five favorite blog posts that you've written. ... but there is a catch: Link 1 must be about family. Link 2 must be about friends. Link 3 must be about yourself, who you are... what you're all about. Link 4 must be about something you love. Link 5 can be anything you choose. I think this is a great way to circulate some of the great older posts everyone had written, return to a few great places in our memories and also learn a little something about ourselves and each other that we may not know. Post your five links and then tag five other people. At least TWO of the people you tag must be *newer acquaintances so that you get to know each other better....and don't forget to read the archive posts and leave comments!


Link 1: Family
This post is about a trip I took into the New York City with my family last September. We went in to spend an afternoon with my brother Joe, his wife Janette and their son Lucas. They live in Morningside Heights, which to me is one of the most beautiful neighborhoods in Manhattan. I chose this post not for what it says in words, but what it says in pictures. I tried to select the ones that reflect most the magic of that day, but here's a link to the rest of the pics we snapped.

Link 2: Friends
This one was an easy choice. I've been playing softball with these guys for years, and despite our many life changes and challenges, we've managed to keep the team going. This year is season 9 for the Mohawks and right now, we're chasing the league with our 0-4 record. But there's a whole summer of softball to play and lots of beer to consume. We're still "...a fraternity of imperfect men who simply want to play a game for the fun of it." Indeed, we will. Play ball!

Link 3: Self
I wrote this letter to my father several years ago when I gave up on my Roman Catholicism and my belief in God. I consider this the most difficult post I'd ever published; not so much because it describes my path to atheism, but because it describes the man whose life I've tried so hard to emulate. My father's shoes are still too large for me to fill.

Link 4: Something I Love
Poetry. I've been writing in this form for as long as I've put pen to paper. While I do a great deal more narrative writing on this blog, I have countless notebooks of my poetry that would attest that this is the writing I prefer to do most. I've published 14 poems on my blog of all of which I am proud to share. The one I've linked to here is one of my favorites.

Link 5: Wildcard
It's post number 57. I couldn't choose one, so I asked Eileen, my wife, to pick a number between 1 and 125 -- the number of published posts on this blog. The post she chose contains links to performances by my brother-in-law, David Mullen, at the Triad (in NYC) on October 10, 2007. He performed two numbers from is new CD, Mahoney's Way. He's awesome, but I'm biased. Click through to the link and take a listen for yourself.


I know I'm supposed to tag five people to tag, but I can't really think of anyone at this moment. Anyone reading this post is welcome to take a crack at it. If not, then at least follow the link above to Alecto's site. She makes a mean challah bread when she's not killing her tomatoes.

And Then He Kissed Me...

Last Thursday, one my favorite bloggers in the 'sphere, The Cunning Runt, posted this brief message to homophobes, aiming his invective at The Tonight Show host, Jay Leno.

Well, as good posts do, it got me thinking about a "homophobic" experience I had way back in the Fall of 1981. I was at a party that my brother and his roommate were throwing at their place on 12th Street and Avenue A in New York City. I was out of my depth at this shindig because I was probably the only 18-year old in the room. These were mostly my brother Joe's friends, which means they were all 5 to 7 years older than me.

So there I was having the time of my life with all these "grown up" folks. I floated around in a bunch of different conversations on my way to and from the beer cooler and hors d'oeuvre table. Eventually, I ended up talking to this one guy who seemed pretty cool. As I recall, we talked about alot of things of interest to us, including music. I was really into The Beatles at the time. I became a huge fan and took up the guitar largely because of the murder of John Lennon.

Ask Señoracosa about this. I was awful. Not that I'm any good now, but back then, it took a great degree of patience and a great tolerance for pain to listen to me butcher John Lennon's "Imagine". I think it sounded something like this --



La Señora sat through more of my performances than she cared to remember. It was her encouragement that gave me the courage to play a song for the guy I was talking to.

But as I put the guitar down and looked at my friend for a reaction to the song I played, he grabbed me by the face and kissed me.

My reaction to the kiss was as immediate as it was tense. I remember thinking that I wanted to kill that motherfucker and it took my brother and a few of his friends to restrain me from getting at him. I was born in Manhattan, but was very much the homophobic Queens boy (save the snark for later). Guys just didn't do that kind of shit to each other where I came from. No fucking way.

Eventually, I ended up out on the street. Joe had walked out with me along with my brother George. Did I mention that my brother George was at the party, too? He was. But he was no where near me when the kiss went down. He was having way too much fun to care about what was going on. But as Joe bodily pinned me against a parked car, to keep me from running back inside to kick the kisser's ass, it was George who set me straight.

Yes, that George; the one I describe in the Fairy Princess. For the record, he was very out about his homosexuality, which many people found intimidating and scary. As a little kid, I didn't know any better and enjoyed his antics in a linen sheet. As a teenager, not so much. In fact, while I never disavowed that George was my brother, I tried really hard to keep separate his world from mine back then.

But on that one Autumn night in 1981, our worlds collided and mine was forever changed. The first thing George said to me was to cut out the macho, Queens bullshit. It's an act that doesn't play well in Manhattan and if I persisted in my behavior, he would have personally escorted me to the "A" train back to Lefferts Boulevard.

I protested because I felt that I was the aggrieved. After all, I was just hanging out, trying to have a good time, and some guy I was talking to kisses me.

That's when George clued me in on a very "adult" understanding of homosexuality. He let me know regardless of whether one is gay or straight, if you pay enough attention that person at a party, that person will find you attractive.

This was all news to me. And as George rattled on about what an ass I'd been at the party, I realized I had no idea how naive I'd been about people in general let alone the gay community.

Gay men have feelings? Who knew? Gay men like to get laid? What? Gay men make inadvertent assumptions about sexual orientation? Whoa.

I can help but think back at how fortunate I was to have experienced the whole event. Yes, it was very 'icky" moment for me to have been kissed by another man, and I imagine that it would still be now...

unless, of course, it was this man doing the kissing.










But still I am not a gay man, and man-crushes notwithstanding, I never will be a gay man.

What's more is that I have no issue with or resentment for anyone's sexual orientation because I am comfortable living in this skin as a heterosexual.

In a world where there is so much more to fear, like war, disease, and climate change, the least of my worries is a gay man who inadvertently makes a pass at me. Sadly, there are too many people -- particularly people in positions of power -- who seem to think that homosexuality is something to be cured or eradicated. Sadly, there are people like Jay Leno who use poor humor as a weapon to demonize and demoralize the gay community.

Sadly, there are way too many people like me whose misunderstanding and lack of compassion pushes them to abject violence against gay men and women. Again, I consider myself fortunate because someone stepped in and prevented me from hitting the kisser, pointing me instead to better way of dealing with this type of situation.

So, thanks Cunning Runt for reminding me of this moment in my personal history, and for reinforcing the lesson that the measure of a person is not only defined by his or her accomplishments, but also by how well or poorly that person engages the wider world around. Let's face it. Anyone can be a dick regardless of their sexual orientation. On that fateful night in the Fall of 1981, that dick was me.

Beyond The Ken

I love words. I'm good at the English ones. I'm getting better at the Spanish ones. I know a bit of Mandarin, as in "Nǐ hǎo ma" or "hello". I think. I have a friend of mine on the train who is trying to teach me Italian. Every morning when I catch the 6:17AM to Penn Station from Lindenhurst, there she is greeting all of her train friends --including me -- with a cheerful "Buon giorno!" I even know a bit of Thai -- that land where almost everyone's name has a "porn" suffix, as in Phanporn. (Man that always makes me snicker in humor.) But Thailand is one of the most beautiful lands I've ever laid eyes on, so it always gives me great pleasure when I can join my palms, bow, and greet a local with a sawat-dee-kaa (for female) or a sawat-dee-khrab (for males ...this one also makes me snicker because it sounds like "crap" when you hear it).

Lately, though, one word has been tripping me up time and again. It's the word ken. This also happens to be the name of someone for whom I reserve no cheer, which may explain why I keep lacerating my linguistic knees and elbows every time that word comes to mind. But he's not the topic of this post. Still there's the tripping.


So, I dusted myself off bandaged the wound, and went out to get myself a definition. Here's what I found from dictionary.com:


ken /kɛn/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[ken] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation noun, verb, kenned or kent, ken·ning. –noun

1.	knowledge, understanding, or cognizance; mental perception: an idea beyond one's ken.

2.	range of sight or vision.

–verb (used with object)

3.	Chiefly Scot. a. to know, have knowledge of or about, or be acquainted with (a person or thing). b. to understand or perceive (an idea or situation).

4.	Scots Law. to acknowledge as heir; recognize by a judicial act.

5.	Archaic. to see; descry; recognize.

6.	British Dialect Archaic. a. to declare, acknowledge, or confess (something). b. to teach, direct, or guide (someone).

–verb (used without object)

7.	British Dialect. a. to have knowledge of something. b. to understand.

Once I read this, it hit me. There is just so much shit I don't understand about this world. Language aside, there are some concepts that simply escape me. To use ken in a sentence, there are some things in this world, that are beyond my ken.

Religion is one of them. I was once a practicing Catholic, so I think I know a thing or two about faith and believing and living for an afterlife in heaven. Conceptually, I get what Catholicism is all about, but even as a Catholic it never failed to stump me, why so many Catholics get hot and bothered by people who don't believe the same way. Take for example this story in Long Island Newsday in which a local retired fireworks company executive living in Patchogue, NY has made it his business to fight the "secularization" of Christmas. To wit, "We are bringing Christmas back to Long Island," says M. Philip Butler. I ask, aren't there better things to do with one's time in retirement than worry about the fate of a holiday co-opted from the Druids? Like many "downtowns" across the U.S., Patchogue's is hurting, and all this wingnut can think of is how his dear holiday was stolen. Way above my ken.

Consumer debt is another. When I was a kid, my parents were quite "frugal" with household finances. As the parents of seven, hungry growing kids stuffed into three-bedroom Manhattan housing project apartment, I could see now why my mother would tell me, "Oh, it's just a small hole. Keep wearing them," when I showed her how worn the bottom of my Pro-Keds were. They managed quite nicely because they based their purchases on need. Moreover, they did what few people do these days, they prioritized those needs so that a pair of new sneakers didn't keep us from going hungry. Let's face it folks. We are not any richer than our parents were in the 1970s, 1960s or 1950s. In fact, we're probably poorer now when you consider how devalued the dollar has become. What I don't understand is that if we are sooo fucking poor, why do we accept being chastised and negatively "scored" by credit rating agencies for not carrying some kind of debt; as if paying cash for something were some form of scarlet letter. As more and more people default on jumbo mortgages they had no business taking in the first place, and with the holiday, "Christmas" season approaching, it perplexes me how these Visa commercials are still on the air. Is carrying mounds of unaffordable debt just to move quickly through a convenience store the apogee of out existence? I don't get it. I have no ken for this one.

Finally, there's this gem from the sands of Saudi Arabia, where the authorities there jailed and whipped a 19-year old woman for being a rape victim -- you can read about it here. When she and her lawyer complained about the injustice of the charge and sentence, the Saudi courts "upped" the sentence. This woman was gang-raped by seven men, and because she broke some Islamic law about hanging out with men not her brother or husband, she gets tossed into the klink, too. The worst part in all this is our own government's reaction in which they "expressed astonishment" though not directly to the Saudi government. And don't kid yourself into thinking that a Democratic President would react in the same way. Sure, Hillary Clinton talks a good game in debates and on the campaign trail, but if she's elected President, her administration will be sucking at the Saudi oil teat just like every other one has since the 1950s. What perplexes me is not so much the inhumanity and barbarity of the sentence, but the hubris of the Saudi government to defend the actions of their courts. I know it's a "cultural" thing in Saudi Arabia, but so is female genital circumcision in parts of Africa. Calling it a tenet of culture does not make it right. Yet, it persists. This is so beyond the ken for me.

There is so much more in this world that I simply do not understand. Someday, I'll write about them here. For now, I suppose I should just shut the fuck up and listen more to what people are trying to tell me -- at home, at work, or wherever I may find myself . But there's this nagging little thing inside me called a conscience and sometimes it needs to speak up before it gets kenned by subjective insights. Sometimes, I have this need to call it like I see it. Sometimes, I need to say, "Ken, you're full of khrab."

Wǎnshàng hǎo my friends. Buona sera!