Diary for DST
The pope is gone. (My fourth.)
SATURDAY: I join Max and Rex – The Canines – at the Detroit Film Theater for Animation 2005. (I saw the 90-minutes of eight choice films on Friday, finding them so entertaining that a second helping of visual dessert was too appealing to resist.)
It's amazing what's being done with computer animation. One selection, "Rockfish" – a fantasy set on another planet – features a butch engineer/"fisherman" who sinks a plumb line cable miles beneath the rocky surface.
His "catch" drags him, his several-tons three-story vehicle, and a Golum-like pet, across terrain (the fishing cable ripping asunder the landscape). After an exhausting struggle a gigantic monster is landed, detonated, and chalked off as another score by the relieved and smiling, swaggering angler.
Nuances of gesture, facial expression, details of setting, are so lifelike that seeing truly becomes believing. (What "reality" deceits lie ahead for us? What distortions of allegiance dreamed up by Big Brother & Company?)
SUNDAY: The weather starts out drab and windy. Should I stay in bed or as planned go to Metropolitan Community Church of Detroit? Once outside I quite vocally chide snooty Miss April-Three that she needs to get on with her program. Winter is now last seasonÕs impotent lover. (Dump him, girl.)
It's Name Tag Sunday at church, a practice that simplifies getting to know good people you're too shy to introduce your wicked self to. Waiting for service I talk with Mary Ellen and Shirley sitting in front of me about Gay/Lesbian Detroit decades ago. Behind me sits LaMarr, who's doing well after recent open-heart surgery.
(LaMarr lived in San Francisco when Harvey Milk and Mayor George Mascone were assassinated, November 1978. He was there for the miles-long candlelight memorial march, the riots that followed assassin Dan White's light seven-year "Twinkie defense" sentence, and the devastating AIDS crisis of the 80/90s.)
The Sunday gospel reading concerns Doubting Thomas, and Rev. Mark Bidwell – who's a staunch non-doubting LGBT community activist – begins his homily with his characteristic humor: "A young boy asks his grandmother how old she is. She replies: 39 – and holding. Answers the kid: And how old will you be when you let go?"
Good question. (Can we ever just let go?)
Mark's message is direct: God's total acceptance. For those who have been excluded from churches for being LGBT "family," it's a message that offers strength. (For many MCC-Detroit congregant's taking open communion is both a spiritual and political act – given the theocratic menace of Fundamentalism.)
Later that afternoon I sit on a bench near a twenty-something who's fallen asleep in the sun while reading his book. I watch him thoughtfully (and discretely), take pleasure in his handsome looks, wonder about his future in our troubled world, and remember times long vanished. (If only I weren't 60 minutes older – and his type.)
Skateboarders whiz by. Dogs pull at leashes. Two women hold hands. I slip on headphones and listen to Mahler's "Song of the Earth." I feel nostalgic, content – magically young again. Someone once said, "Music does more than sermons can to justify God's ways to man." (Pax vobiscum: Daylight Saving Time.)
Today's Borrowed Thunder: "To err is human, but to really screw things up requires a computer." — Anonymous
