“To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.” – Ocean Vuong, ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’

Swimming, I fight the current, wondering how much more buoyancy salt water really affords. From the dark depths of the ocean, its gaze is felt and intuited. Somewhere a shark circles. Somewhere a giant squid torpedoes through deeper darkness. Somewhere the ocean pulls from the shore, itself pulled by the moon, and somewhere I feel the sand displaced beneath my feet, the way the receding tide eventually takes us all down. 

In a summer when we are mostly bound to our homes, if we’re being safe, a different kind of wave laps at my bare feet. In the gentle ripples of the pool, a book rests by my side – the only way to reach the beach. When the sharks arrive, when the squid’s tentacles wrap their way around the water, I am not to be found. Only a swimsuit floats where once I was, eerily bobbing in ghostly fashion, the way fashion feels like such a ghost these days. 

In so many ways, it’s simply another shedding of another guise – a guise I once thought made up the most of me, but fashion, and an enduring love-there-of, was only ever a mode too. It lasted longer than so many others… The trickster shape-shifts again ~ the jester and the king become one. The summer sun casts its own spell. 

There, in the space between water and light, I cast off the frills and frivolity, and, naked, swim away to another sea, leaving behind the threads of some silkworm, floating like the plucked plumage of a water-shirking bird-of-prey. 

There is something gorgeous about being unseen, too, something gorgeous about not being hunted. That is the place where true beauty resides. 

Our first full week with the pool in effect makes it finally feel like summer, just in the nick of time. There’s a light now for nightswimming, and a fan of steps that makes entering the water so much nicer than using a ladder. It’s my new favorite hang-out. While I’m luxuriating there, and making up words here, ride this recap like a wave…

Sensing our need for a reboot and a rebloom, the Korean lilac obliged both. 

Rubber duckie wisdom.

Strange weather days.

It’s been a good year for hydrangeas.

After the storm, contemplation.

Popping summer cherries.

The thirst for hunks is real.

Just wear a mask.

My life-long love affair with Madonna hit a rough patch. 

The fable of a summer fragrance.

It was a Speedo Sunday.

Cups of sunshine.

Sunday night wisdom.

Hunks of the Day included William Jackson Harper, Deon Cole, Darin Zanyar, and Eric Bivoino.

The cup plant has been in its seasonal glory the past couple of weeks, the blooms bursting like countless orbs of sunshine against the sky, providing a feast for the bees and butterflies and a pair of hummingbirds. A group of yellow finches favors the flowerheads too, and will be here until the fall, when the seeds ripen and turn brown, hoping to fall into some remotely hospitable patch of dirt somewhere and carry on the legacy. With all of these visiting creatures, there is much activity in the garden now, and it’s a glorious sight to behold. So much of these last few months have been filled with a sense of quiet in the backyard. 

Bereft of the usual string of parties and gatherings and get-togethers, and bereft of the pool for the first half of the summer, it’s been a strange season, as this is typically when we would see our friends and family. Come fall and winter we tend to retreat from the world a little – this would normally be our chance to connect for the year, to see the people we love and make the memories that would warm the winter. 

And so I spend the days trying to soak in the sunshine and the cheer, the things that summer does best, the things that only summer can do, trying to warm the heart enough so that it will see me through another winter. 

YOU’VE BEEN SANCTIFIED
AND I’VE BEEN TRIED
GUILTY BY ASSOCIATION
YOU’VE BEEN CANONIZED
AND I’VE BEEN FRIED
GUILTY BY ASSOCIATION

First she broke my heart.

Then she got me angry.

Now, she’s silently seeking forgiveness but in silence there can be no forgiveness.

We need to talk.

She needs to talk.

Not talking is giving up.

And if she wants me to give up, I will not fight it.

Madonna recently posted that crazy video of a homophobic lunatic (and I say that because this woman believes that cysts are the result of us having sex with demons in our dreams) in which she denounced the need for masks, a video also shared by Trump. Instagram deleted it for being false information, then she re-posted it again, only to have it taken down a second time. Then there was radio silence, after which she started posted videos as if nothing had happened.

After a righteous firestorm of negative responses, Madonna has still not addressed it. That’s not good, and the fact that someone who once acted so intelligently could be so duped and then so defiant about it is a disheartening statement on how far humanity has fallen. As each hour passed in which she ignored it and pretended it never happened, I felt us fall further apart from one another.

Those hours hurt.

Those hours stung.

Those hours worked to change my life-long love of Madonna.

It still feels wrong to listen to her music. I still have a sour taste in my mouth after everything, and so I haven’t heard anything by her in days – which is rather an unprecedented development. By aligning herself with conspiracy theorists and wacky doctors, not to mention the evil of something like Trump, all the joy I once felt in hearing her songs suddenly drained from the experience. (Thank God for Taylor Swift’s ‘Folklore’ right now.)

I’m working through it.

Working to reconcile how to find that joy in her music again despite her personal failings and faults. I believe in forgiveness, but I need her to say she’s sorry.

She wrote a fucking song about it – it shouldn’t be that difficult.

She’s fucked up before.

But she owned it then.

This feels different.

And that makes it sadder.

2020 takes and takes and takes, degrading and destroying everything we once considered stable and unbreakable, every last thing on which we thought we could always count and rely.

I was originally going to post Madonna and Joe Henry’s version of ‘Guilty By Association’ because that’s such a fitting song, but that feels wrong. And so I take her voice out of the equation, giving you the original writer’s version of it, silencing Madonna’s foolish nonsense and misinformation, her dangerous stubbornness, her death-defying lunacy.

For now, I mourn the mistake. I mourn the madness. I mourn the disgust I feel at it, and the level of my reaction, wondering if it’s all too much. Mostly, though, I mourn the fact that right now I cannot locate the joy in her music – the joy and celebration I’ve always felt, from her saddest songs to her most silly and exuberant. That joy has slipped away. And though my opinion makes no difference to her, if a lifelong fan like me is this disillusioned, I don’t see this faring well for her future or her legacy, and that’s a fucking shame.

Even if wearing a mask helps me reduce the chance of transmitting a virus by 5%, that’s worth it for me to put one on. I don’t get the people who don’t. These memes offer some perspective. 

Glistening in a stainless steel colander, these fresh cherries are a feast for the eyes and the tongue, a dazzling duo that doesn’t always come to fruition. It’s easy to do one or the other quite well at any given point – mastering the double whammy is a skill best left to Mother Nature. Mothers always know best. 

Fresh seasonal fruit is one of the fleeting joys of living in the world. Even if it’s a chance-grab at some mulberries from a street tree, there always seems to be something sweet lurking around every summer corner. 

Yesterday was my day in the office, so the constant rain wasn’t the killjoy it might have been had the pool been literally waving to me outside the window. As it was, we needed the rain, badly, and it relieved the daily watering we’ve had to do this summer. There were hints of tornadoes on the airwaves, and in the air, lending a tension to all of the clouds and wind. References rife with Dorothy were scattered throughout the conversation of the office, and for lunch I didn’t make my usual walkabout downtown. 

The tension that has come to personify 2020 won’t be letting up for a while, and yesterday’s volatile weather was emblematic of that underlying strain. We’re all feeling it. We’re all a little exhausted from it. But that too came to an end. With the end of the storms came a surge of cool air. A crispness and clarity suddenly appeared, where once there had only been haziness and relentless heat. The blue sky was finally revealed as the clouds rolled away, then slowly turned dark to let the world go to bed with the sweet relief of all the absent humidity. 

August, and its requisite ups and downs, dipped and rose.

It floats on the surface, bobbing with the little waves, occasionally upending itself with the wind. It echoes the visitors from earlier this year, in happier and hardier and more colorful form. Best of all, it gives cheer and amusement to those who gaze upon it. 

This is our Rubber Duckie, a larger version fit for a pool versus a bath. I once used it to obscure my privates in an otherwise-naked pool shoot. (I’m not going to make it easy for you to find those shots – peruse the archives and type some words into the search engine and see if you can locate them. It’s easier than the quest for Carmen Sandiego – has she even been found yet?)

As for its wisdom, return to the first paragraph. Everything you need to know about life, and navigating its perilous waters, is contained there. This duck floats on the surface – it doesn’t go deep, doesn’t make waves, doesn’t cause trouble. It keeps things light and flexible, bobbing with the waves instead of fighting them, going with the flow instead of against the current, finding the easy way through rather than seeking out unnecessary challenges. It also upends itself from time to time, turning over on its side, or even going completely upside down. It doesn’t always keep itself perfectly upright. It doesn’t keep itself perfect at all. It allows the wind to wreck it a little, to fall down, sometimes face down, because it knows it can right itself again.

Where was this ducky when I was growing up? Where was it when I needed the lesson? Maybe it knew not to arrive until this year, when the student was finally ready for the teacher.