Tag: Grateful Dead

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Rolling Thunder, by Pat Gourley

“If the thunder doesn’t get you the lightning will.”
Garcia/Hunter
Several thoughts came to mind with the topic of Rolling Thunder. I opened this piece with a short line from the Grateful Dead song called The Wheel.  One of my all-time favorite Dead tunes and its reference to thunder. Thunder, when associated with a rainstorm, is often rolling in nature and often accompanied by lightning and then a real downpour. Lightning is, of course, the cause of the thunder despite the fact that you might hear thunder and then see lightning. Things are not always what they seem.
I got to experience a rare thunder and lightning storm on my last trip to San Francisco this September. It was so spectacular and unusual for that city that it had people out in the streets trying to photograph the lightning with their phones. Coming from an area where such storms are common and a state with a high per capita number of lightning deaths I opted to stay inside.
I could use “Rolling Thunder” I suppose to characterize my longstanding and truly at times epic flatulence. Certainly, for the past several years, I have made a conscious effort to increase my fiber intake. My daily fiber goal is at least 40 grams with 25-30 often recommended but the average American gets only 15 grams. This can at times result in farts that seem to go on in a truly rolling fashion particularly at night in bed though I can produce any time of the day. Exercise seems to stimulate often-inopportune gas production, so I find myself these days seeking out little-used exercise machines off in an isolated corner of the gym or turning on one of the large fans if available. Then being able to fart to my heart’s content. The use of the fan makes it difficult for other gym goers to pin down the culprit.
Unwanted farts also seem to roll out when meditating and sitting on my Zafu. This is not an issue when home alone. However, when joining the evening Zazen at the Zen Center recently in San Francisco I would find myself discreetly farting into my cushion hoping for a silent escape of air and with the expulsion being into four inches of cushion an unnoticed event. As a matter of course though I believe if the setting is appropriate that farts should be released with gusto and this seems to enhance the volume. I suppose Roaring Thunder might be more appropriate for such occasions rather than Rolling Thunder.
So, before people start moving away from me here in group I’ll change the topic and share a couple of other “Rolling Thunder” references that came to mind for me in addressing this topic. The first being the Rolling Thunder Revue which was the name of a rock and roll tour in the mid-1970’s featuring Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and many others.  Several theories existed as to why Dylan chose that name. Some thought perhaps he was referring to the Native America Shaman named Rolling Thunder. With the Vietnam War still raw and fresh in the American Psyche maybe he was referring to the code name for the disastrous and genocidal aerial bombardment by the United States of Vietnam that took place from March of 1965 through October of 1968. When asked about the urban mythology that had sprung up around the name Dylan had a much more mundane explanation. He had been sitting on his porch one day before the tour and a storm was approaching ushering in a rolling burst of thunder that seemed to stretch across the sky: this being another small blow to those who would make Bob Dylan America’s conscience.
I have included a link here to a short piece on lightning safety from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Lightning Safety – NOAA
Lightning strikes resulting in death are rare and one erroneous assumption many people have is that they disproportionately happen to golfers, perhaps wishful thinking on the part of some people upset with our country’s current leadership (POTUS). This is however incorrect with three times as many strikes happening to fisherman in boats than golfers. Overall only 10% of lightning strikes result in death per data from NOAA.
Besides the potentially negative karmic repercussions of hoping POTUS will give up golf and take up fishing it would be much more productive to continue to pursue peaceful resistance. Never being one to shy away from a cheesy metaphor I would like to think that the progressive sweep in the recent elections was a real Rolling Thunder and harbinger of great change to come.
© 12 Nov 2017 
About the Author 
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener, and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California. 
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Anxious Moments, by Pat Gourley

If you get confused just listen to the
music play
Some come to laugh their past away
Some come to make it just one more day
Whichever way your pleasure tends
If you plant ice you’re gonna harvest wind
A
few lines from Franklin’s Tower. Grateful Dead (Garcia/Hunter/ Kreutzman)
Let me just
repeat that last line for emphasis: “If
you plant ice you’re going to harvest wind”.  More on that further on.
Writing about “anxious
moments” in June of 2017 now 7 months into Donald Trump’s presidency presents
itself as a herculean task. I mean where to start? For me perhaps it is best to
start with a bit of self-examination of what may be causing my anxiety.
If my privilege allows me
to simply weather out the storm of the next four years with little or no
personal damage, and sadly that seems it might be the case, I must say that it
is very tempting to just put my head down and go about my daily routines.  That would be much less anxiety provoking I
think.
I have Medicare and not
Medicaid.  Paul Ryan and his bunch would
certainly like to get rid of both but Medicare seems a reach to far politically
even for that crowd. Medicaid on the other hand serves a much more vulnerable
and powerless group of Americans. The strong and largely elderly voting block
represented by Medicare recipients is somewhat of a bulwark against Republican
intrusions – Medicaid not so much.
I also get a small Social
Security payment and a pension from the City and County of Denver. Both of
these are fairly solvent entities that I expect to last for my remaining years.
That is perhaps delusion on my part but rather than get “anxious” about it I
prefer to just blithely skip along. I acknowledge this view may really be from looking
out on the world from my relatively privileged window. There is of course any
number of ways the whole really fragile edifice could come crashing down on all
of our heads. So I am choosing to resist
on many fronts anxiety provoking or not. 
Let me relate a very small, and perhaps even a silly way, I am
resisting.
Significant marijuana tax
revenues going to Colorado coffers are adding to the overall financial health of
the State and our City in very major ways, indirectly helping keep my City
pension solvent, a tax tide sort of floats all boats. I am choosing to do my
part by exploring marijuana edibles in earnest purchasing recreational rather
than medicinal and paying the larger tax. 
I could of course legitimately play the HIV card and get a medical
marijuana license but for now I can afford the higher tax on the recreational
herb. Taxes really are the cost of living in a civilized society and it would
only add to that civility I would think if a significant portion of us gets
stoned on occasion.
So what else, other than
getting high, am I trying to do to counter the toxic miasma of the Trump
presidency enveloping us all? Well I am trying not to ‘plant ice’ and by that I
mean I am acknowledging that nobody is wrong 100% of the time (thank you, Ken
Wilber). Well that may not apply to Trump but I am willing to give nearly
everyone else on the planet a pass.
Without getting too deep
in the weeds and stretching the metaphor to death you can simply think of the
phrase “if you plant ice you’re gonna
harvest wind” as another way of saying don’t be an asshole. That behavior often
causes anxiety for others and yourself eventually, adding however small to the
anxiety burden of the planet.
A recent personal example
of my regrettably ‘planting ice’ was when I encountered Human Rights Campaign
(HRC) solicitors out in front of the Trader Joe’s near my house. It was a warm
day and I suppose I was cranky from the heat but I decided to give these young
20-somethings a bit of crap around HRC’s early endorsement of Republican Mark Kirk
over Tammy Duckworth in the Illinois U.S. Senate race last fall.  HRC switched to Duckworth a few weeks before
the election supposedly due to nasty things Kirk had to say in a debate about
Ms. Duckworth and her family but the damage had been done in my mind.
Initially I felt mildly
righteous for sticking up for my longstanding belief that the at times too
conservative HRC was not my Radical Fairie cup of tea. By the time I got home a
couple blocks away I started to feel somewhat anxious about the interaction
though albeit it was pretty tame, no stone throwing or cursing had occurred. I
began to worry, a great hallmark of anxiety, that maybe I had not made myself
queerly obvious and they thought I was some old homophobic jerk. So I put my
groceries away and walked back down the street. After assuring the two I was
not stalking them I explained further my issues with HRC and threw in a few
other things to firmly establish my gay cred. They listened politely, nodding a
lot and I am sure hoping this crazy old queen would soon move on. I ended by
saying that I appreciated and admired their being willing to be openly and
politically queer on a public street. Not something I would have done in my
early twenties.  This proved to be one
more instance in my life where I realized if I were going to plant ice I would
soon be harvesting wind.
© 11 Jun 2017 
About
the Author 
 I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised
on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40
plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS
activist. I have currently returned to
Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
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Ghosts Are Everywhere, by Nicholas

Now, I don’t believe in ghosts. But I know that my life is full of them. I don’t mean ghosts who go around rearranging the furniture in my house or turning lights off or on. And I don’t mean ghosts that are just faint memories of past people and places. Remembering is part of it but remembering is just a mental act of recall. I mean a sense of the presence of someone or something that is not here. I mean a sense of place when you’re not in that place and haven’t been for a long, long time.

Memories can be triggers. So can sounds, especially music, and flavors and smells. The scent of patchouli always immediately takes me back to Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park in 1968. It’s a sensation, not a thought, of the past. Certain Grateful Dead songs do it, like Black Peter and Sugaree, give me more than a musical memory. Expecting to Fly by Buffalo Springfield, almost anything by the Moody Blues re-create places like funky living rooms in San Francisco flats I have lived in. I associate songs by Steve Miller with climbing Mt. Tamalpais north of San Francisco. I have no idea why. They probably ran through my mind when I was doing that.

Joni Mitchell songs are also very evocative for me. I recall walking down a street one sunny morning hearing Night in the City wafting from someone’s open window. The image has stuck with me. Sometimes when I’m in San Francisco, I walk down that same block as I did decades ago. Yes, the song is still there.

I will be in San Francisco in a few weeks. That city is full of ghosts everywhere. I am still most attached to the two cities where I know the most ghosts: Cleveland where I grew up and San Francisco where I also grew up. Denver holds few ghosts for me and the least attachments though I have lived here a long time.

Hometowns imprint themselves on your memory bank much like first impressions are said to happen with ducklings. The first things seen become the mother of all further impressions, a standard by which all experience is ranked. I guess our creative imaginations are then a blank screen ready to receive whatever pictures show up.

When I go back to my hometown, I see ghosts. The city is a fraction of the size it was when I was a kid. The crowds are mostly gone and with them, the once bustling city. Rapid transit trains that I rode as rattling, noisy and packed are now brand new, quiet and rarely packed. But I see the ghosts.

And when I really want to be with the ghosts, I go to one of the grand old cemeteries that hold members of my family and my ancestors. Those ghosts aren’t going anywhere. I can count on them staying put.

Actually, ghosts don’t move around much. In San Francisco, everybody moves frequently but the ghosts stick around. At the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park there are lots of ghosts. One has only to sit still and they show up. That used to be true of other places around the city but many of those—like the Trocadero disco—are gone and have become ghosts themselves. Even Castro Street has lots of ghosts on it as baby strollers have peculiarly replaced men in plaid flannel shirts.

Ghosts are fun. My ghosts are anyway. They love to dance—many of them are crazy about ABBA and, of course, Diana Ross.

When I was a kid, my father loved to tell stories about when he was a kid and his grandfather knew a bunch of old army veterans from the Civil War. Dad sat and listened as these old guys told their war stories. More than remembering and telling, they, and my dad through them, relived those experiences at each retelling. Now, I know what he felt.

© 23 April 2017

About the Author

Nicholas grew up in Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks, does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.

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Friends, by Pat Gourley

Looking back on my 66
years I have I guess been involved with what could be called many different
“cults”.  Starting with the Catholic Church and progressing onto
the Democratic Socialist Party, Wiccan Covens, the gay community & Radical
Fairies and Buddhist Practice etc. etc. The most enduring though has been my
attachment to this little band:
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/11/05/grateful-dead-china-cat-sunflower-and-i-know-you-rider-fare-thee-well/
The twirling paradox
here if any is that this was posted on a Wall Street Journal blog. Oh well,
still a great version of these two old songs performed with love and gusto for
many thousands of devoted followers this past summer in Chicago.
© 8 Nov 2015  
About the Author  

I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
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Grief, by Pat Gourley

“By meditating on death, we paradoxically become conscious of life”.
Stephen Batchelor – from Buddhism Without Beliefs. 1997

This is one of those Story Telling Topics that really brings home to me what a lazy undisciplined writer I am. My life certainly dating from the death of my father in August of 1980 up until my most recent shift in Urgent Care, which was yesterday, has been chock-full of experience after experience of life’s impermanence and the personal grief that causes. I should be writing at least several chapters on grief if I were ever to get off my ass and write a memoir. The reality though is that the topic of Grief is going to get less than a thousand words as usual.

If I were in a really self-indulgent mood I suppose I could conjure up reams on grief around my own HIV infection and that of many, many friends and clients and their suffering and too often deaths over the past 35 years. An issue of self-exploration here for me would perhaps be how much of my own grief over the decades has really just been self-indulgent wallowing in the pool of “poor pitiful me”. How unfair that I am “forced” to face my own mortality every day when I swallow my HIV meds. And even worse how come I have witnessed so much suffering and death of others? I really need to watch this tendency in myself carefully and continually realize that no one gets out alive and many through the ages up until this minute have it so much worse than I do or ever will.

Nevertheless, that all said let me delve self-indulgently just a bit into my own grief issues, as they seem to come into focus for me especially this time of year. Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s death. The Grateful Dead were an integral part my life for decades. During the darkest years of the AIDS epidemic, from the late 1980’s until 1995 when I was not only looking down the barrel of my own infection I was also the nursing manger in the AIDS clinic at Denver Health and living with the love of my life who was dying in front of me. The music of the Grateful Dead was a great solace in those years and remains so today actually. I was at the last two shows Garcia and the Dead performed at Soldier’s Field in Chicago July. 1995.

Those shows were not particularly memorable at the time in large part because Garcia was not well but it never occurred to me that he would be gone himself in a few short weeks. The memory of hearing the news of his death on August 9th, 1995 is indelibly etched in my mind but not for the reason you may think.

Minutes after the news exploded across the world of Garcia’s death of a heart attack in a rehab center in Marin County my life partner David Woodyard, who was battling several major HIIV related issues of his own at the time, was on the phone deeply concerned about me and how I was taking the news.

This was and still is for me the real lesson on how to handle the feeling of grief in my own life. I need to always take a moment or several no matter what the circumstances and look around, outside my own little puddle and attempt to be “conscious of life’ and what an amazing trip it is to get to experience that at all, even when filled with grief.

David was teaching me that lesson right up until his own death five weeks later at 9 AM on September 17th, 1995. That was when my own real grieving began in earnest with no Grateful Dead song able to console me. Not even the beautiful lyrics of Brokedown Palace, which we played at his memorial.

Fare you well my honey
Fare you well my only true one
All the birds that were singing
Have flown except you alone

Going to leave this broke-down palace
On my hands and my knees I will roll roll roll
Make myself a bed by the waterside
In my time, in my time, I will roll roll roll
In a bed, in a bed


By the waterside I will lay my head
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul
River gonna take me

Sing me sweet and sleepy
Sing me sweet and sleepy
All the way back home

It’s a far-gone lullaby
Sung many years ago
Mama, Mama, many worlds I’ve come
Since I first left home


Going home, going home
By the waterside I will rest my bones
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Going to plant a weeping willow
On the banks green edge it will grow grow grow
Sing a lullaby beside the water


Lovers come and go, the river roll roll roll
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs

To rock my soul

Songwriters: GARCIA, JERRY / HUNTER, ROBERT

Brokedown Palace lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., Universal Music Publishing Group

© August 2015

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
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Angels by Pat Gourley

Angels, specifically my own Guardian Angel, were certainly
part of the mythology foisted on my innocent little head in the early years of
Catholic Grade School. The mythology being laid on us actually reached at times
the absurd when we were asked by our nuns in the very early grades to please
scoot over in our desk seats so we could make room for our guardian angels to
sit down. I don’t remember this injunction much beyond the second grade. Perhaps
that was because of a realization on the part of our teachers that with the
existence of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy going out the window for many of
us it might have been a bit much to keep pushing the idea of guardian angels needing
a break and plopping down next to you.
Catholic teaching, perhaps not the most sophisticated strain
of it even back in the mid-1950’s, taught that all souls get an Angel assigned
to protect and be your guardian if you will. Since I was well on my way to
being a little apostate at the age of eight I always thought the nuns were just
trying to get us to not keep our books next to us on our seats, which we would
frequently push off the seat and crash to the floor.  And of course in today’s age of significant
childhood obesity there would be many kids who couldn’t make room for any Angel’s
butt with their own barely fitting in the seat.
If anyone seriously presented me with the possibility of my
having a guardian angel today I might ask about the 1200 kids under 5 years of
age who die of malaria daily and where the fuck are their Guardian Angels. It
would seem like those angels are being quite the slackers and probably should
be fired. And there are other countless examples of various forms of hideous human
suffering that bring the whole concept of guardian angels into serious
question.
Belief in angels for me personally of course brings into
question all sorts of other queries about the spiritual and ending of course
with the real big one ‘what the hell does happen once we die’. If I play my
cards right will I be escorted into heaven by my own angel or much more likely,
if you buy this horse-pucky at all, will I be given a GPS map straight to hell
with my own guardian angel sadly saying ‘well I tried to save your sorry ass’
and waving good-bye, forever.
Most days I wake up pretty much a dyed in the wool atheist
and thankful for the daily Facebook posts by Richard Dawkins. I do though admit
to recently being drawn back to the writings and recordings of the great
philosopher Ken Wilber, who lives here in Denver by the way.
Wilber is no fan of the new atheists, Harris, Dawkins
Hitchens etc. but he does have a bit more sophisticated take on the possibility
of an afterlife than angelic escorts to the great beyond. I most recently have
listened and am re-listening to a series of over seven hours of CD interviews
with Wilber on the Future of Spirituality
conducted by Tami Simon in 2013, the wonderful lesbian woman who owns Sounds
True in Boulder.
When talking about the possibility of God existing it has
been difficult for me, and I think for Tami also, to pin Ken down on this. He
certainly implies a ‘spiritual’ force moving the evolutionary reality of our
Universe along its way. One of my favorite Ken takes on this is that it seems
highly unlikely that it has been simple chance that has led “from dirt to
Shakespeare”. Though I am still not completely buying this I am back listening
to him and we’ll see where it ends up.
For now I am left with the stark belief and extremely
non-momentous reality of my own impending demise and that that most likely will
be the end of me with no angel involvement happening. At our current state of
evolution it its so very difficult for us to imagine anything else going on
after we are gone. This is such a freaky thing for us to ponder that we have
conjured up Angels and a whole host of other deities and after-life myths since
we left the trees of the African Savannah.
The raw reality of it all is summed up nicely in these few
lines from of course a Grateful Dead song called Black Peter. It is a tune
about a guy dying of something nasty and coming to the following realization
about his own demise:
See here how everything
Lead up to this day
And it’s just like any other day
That’s ever been
Sun going up and then
The sun going down
Shine through my window.
Lyrics by Robert Hunter
I don’t mean to be a big buzz-kill here so if Angels blow
your skirt up by all means just scoot over and invite them to have a seat.
©
December 2014 
About the Author 
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California. 
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Dreams by Pat Gourley

I have always had a very active “dream-life”. It is hard to
actually measure this for sure but it seems that at least half of my sleep is
dreaming. These would be the dreams that I am aware of or can remember in the
morning. The dream recollection process is not something I often bother to do
and I do not keep dream journals and probably never will. I take the same stance
toward my dreams that the Grateful Dead took with their music. The reason they
allowed even encouraged people to tape their shows was the attitude “we are
done with it and you can do whatever you want with it”. An attitude greatly
facilitated by a huge repertoire of tunes often performed with unique
improvisation with each rendition. I view my dreams the same way – well that
was interesting but it is over and I need to get on with the day and besides I
have to really pee.
Though I have always spent a good part of my night from back
to early childhood dreaming a lot these nocturnal adventures seem to be in
sharper focus than ever these days. Perhaps that is due to the recurrent
interruption of my REM sleep with the need to get up and urinate mid-dream.
Usually I am able to go back to sleep easily and it seems I swear that the
dream picks up where it left off. I often think, usually in a dense fog or semi-dream-state,
how exhausting is this to revisit the same idiotic situation, aren’t we done
yet?
 My personal bias is
that most pharmaceutical sleep aides are bad for you certainly if used
frequently and particularly those that actually create an amnesiac state are
not good for a healthy and vibrant dream life and may, at least in a transient
fashion, contribute to waking memory loss issues. I try to live by the old
Buddhist axiom that if you wake up and can’t get back to sleep it is actually a
call to the cushion. Nothing like trying to meditate late at night in the dark
to make you start to nod off in a hurry and for me it can be as effective as
Ambien. The only time I have taken Ambien was on a transatlantic flight to
Paris, which essentially resulted in me waking up in Paris feeling dopey,
anything but rested, wondering at first how the hell I got here and second why
no one was speaking English.
In poking around the ether a bit before writing this I was
looking for a current theory on dreaming and I happened on an article from
Scientific American from a few years back. A few sentences from that piece
seemed at least somewhat applicable to my own dream life:
Dreams seem to help us process emotions by
encoding and constructing memories of them. What we see and experience in our
dreams might not necessarily be real, but the emotions attached to these
experiences certainly are. Our dream stories essentially try to strip the
emotion out of a certain experience by creating a memory of it. This way, the
emotion itself is no longer active.  This mechanism fulfills an important
role because when we don’t process our emotions, especially negative ones, this
increases personal worry and anxiety. In fact, severe REM sleep-deprivation is
increasingly correlated to the development of mental disorders. In short,
dreams help regulate traffic on that fragile bridge which connects our
experiences with our emotions and memories.
Scientific American:
July 26, 2011. Sander van der Linden
It seems to me that there is some heavy-duty
Zen implications implied in this explanation that I will not ruminate too much
on but just say we can’t always control the shit that happens to us but we can
usually choose how we react emotionally to it. Apparently dreaming may be a
great and safe way to address all sorts of unfinished waking business.
Let me relate a few of the general
dream themes I have personally and you are all free to psychoanalyze them or
not. I most often tend to pay them little heed. The closest I come to a nightmare
these days is a recurrent dream I will have about getting to the airport on
time, needless to say I am frustrated at every turn and never do make the
flight.
A dream I had repeatedly, now several
decades in the past, was that I was going to be called on to fill in and play rhythm
guitar for the Rolling Stones because Keith Richards was not able to make the
show or perhaps was passed out back stage with a needle in his arm. I would
awake from this in quite an agitated state just as Mick looked at me to bring
the opening cords of Sympathy for the Devil or Tumbling Dice. Why this always
involved the Rolling Stones and not the Grateful Dead is a bit of a mystery to
me. Oh and by the way I can’t play a single cord on any type of guitar.
The only nasty type of childhood dream
I really remember having involved being chased down a long hallway by some
demon or the other and getting to a door that was always very big and
inaccessible to me. The door of course required a key I did not have. This
would seem to go on forever and never ended well.
The most vivid and intense dreams of
my life followed the death of my partner David in 1995. These dreams reoccurred
periodically for more than a year after his death and always had to do with my giving
away his stuff and that dear old queen left me with a lot of stuff.  I actually was slowly giving his things away
to friends or charity so I suppose I had those dreams coming. He was never
happy with the choices I was making in dispersing his estate.
I would say that overall my dreams these
days are extremely mundane and boring and rarely ever a source of consternation
while occurring or upon awaking. Often they involve very mundane things about
work, like did I give the right drug to the right patient or did I wind up
killing someone. Something that has apparently never happened since I still
have a job. I suppose I should examine for a minute a why my dreams about filling
in for Keith Richards were more disconcerting to me when they were occurring
than making a medication error at work and killing someone.
The closest dreams ever come these
days to exciting are the rare sexual ones. Ironically these always end in a
very frustrating manner with the much anticipated happy ending always just
outside of my reach.  And the age-old
phenomenon of a nocturnal emission never happens. But I guess a guy can dream
can’t he?
© November 2014 
 About the Author  
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
Posted on

Reputation by Pat Gourley

It has been some months at least since I have quoted Grateful
Dead lyrics in one of my written pieces here so I think it’s about time. A line
from one of their classic songs, Uncle
John’s Band – a tune by the way covered by the Indigo Girls, states “all I really want to know is are you kind”.
If I address “reputation” from a personal perspective I would most want to be
known and remembered for being kind.
While watching a 60 Minutes piece last night that featured a
few of the Dallas nurses who cared for Mr. Duncan the first Ebola patient in
the U.S. I was actually moved to tears by their genuine empathy and kindness
toward this man who was dying a horrifying death while at the same time at
considerable risk of infection themselves. As a nurse myself I can attest to
the fact that while we are not necessarily immune to the sight of human
suffering we are not often easily shocked either. This disease apparently is an
exception to that rule. Large amounts of human secretions are often part of the
game with nursing in certain settings. Ebola though seems to take that to a
whole new level most often in the form of voluminous amounts of vomit and
diarrhea. In the end stages of the disease even small droplets of these
secretions are teaming with literally millions and millions of viral particles
and it only takes one to pass it on.
They interviewed four nurses and all four seemed to exude
genuine kindness but I was most impressed with an African American woman and a
portly man with a definite and beautiful fey-air about him. Though not the case
anymore gay men were at one time a preponderance of the male nursing population
and we are still quite well represented. I will remember these nurses not so
much for their bravery but their dignified and uncompromising acts of human
kindness, wiping his tears and holding his hand albeit through multiple layers
of protective gear among many such acts in his last days. I would like to have the
epithet “he was a kind queen” attached to my tombstone or rather an urn full of
my ashes before they get scattered in San Francisco bay.
I suppose there was a time in my distant past when I did not
want the rather large “queer’ part of my being to be sullying my reputation in
anyway. I do think though I was lucky and got over that one quickly. One sort
of throws caution to the wind in that regard when you enter certain health care
professions and nursing in particular as a male in the 1970’s. I was probably
at my most flamboyant professionally in the 1970’s and I am sure had the
“reputation” as being the flaming homo nurse. Only once though in 40 years of nursing,
when working ICU, did a patient openly verbalize that he didn’t want the
“queer” touching him. My co-workers were much more upset about this than I was
at the time and it’s probably safe to say that the amount of kindness directed
this man’s way may have been severely curtailed during his intensive care stay.
Efficient and appropriate medical care does not necessitate kindness but it
sure goes down a lot easier with that in the mix.
As I alluded to I was quite out of the closet during both
nursing school and on the job in the 1970’s. I think my ‘homosexual-reputation’
if you will was solidly cemented one night in the ICU at University Hospital when
I had just returned from recovering from a bout of hepatitis. Hepatitis was
being discussed by a group of us including some docs and folks were speculating
whether or not I may have gotten the hepatitis on the job, something not
uncommon for nurses in those days before the advent of “universal precautions”
and good hepatitis vaccines. As I recall without missing a beat I quite
flippantly said that it was much more likely I was infected at the Empire
Bathes with my legs in the air. That was the end of that discussion.
As Andy Warhol so famously said everyone gets at least 15
minutes of fame, which I suppose you could say, then becomes a significant part
of his or her reputation. For me personally though I certainly hope that is not
the case. In early 2000 a writer with Westword came to Denver Health wanting to
do a piece on the current state of the AIDS epidemic. I had always shunned the
press wanting to do AIDS pieces because they so seldom got it right and what
could be worse for one’s ‘reputation” than to be grossly misquoted. The
reporter, a fellow named Steve Jackson, was a frequent freelance contributor to
the paper often doing long feature pieces. He apparently became bored with the
usual AIDS talking heads, mostly docs, at Public Health and was steered in my
direction by someone in the building.  He
and I actually hit it off having some sort of Grateful Dead connection as I
seem to recall and I spent quite a few hours telling him my story.
A long story short I became the entire focus of the piece and
wound up on the cover of the next issue. My own fifteen minutes of fame if you
will. The piece was insufferably long as it appeared in print and I was still
the case after the editor, Patty Calhoun, had cut a full third of it before
publication. I have never posted it to my web site in part because I found it
to be embarrassing, not because it affected my reputation at all but it really
seemed to focus on my own personal drama in a very over the top fashion. If any
good came out of it though I hoped it might have persuaded some folks at risk
to finally get tested and get on meds. I was, as was graphically laid out in
the piece, probably twenty years into my own HIV infection and still walking,
talking, working full-time and posing for Westword cover stories.
One might think, and I suppose I did too, that such exposure
would have major repercussions but it actually had virtually none. For one
thing it was too long for most folks to get through and secondly I attribute
this lack of fallout to the strength of coming out. If all your secrets are
already out their in your personal and work circles and most folks are already
bored with the old queen’s story and simply adding a few thousand more Westword
readers to that mix doesn’t much effect one’s life or reputation and it did
not.
In fact the response at least that blew back to me was quite
muted. Oh a few mostly gay positive men came up to me in person and were very
supportive but most responses ranged from “oh is he still alive” to my personal
favorite “I thought they only put convicted felons on the cover of Westword”.
The lesson for me seems quite obvious. One’s reputation
hopefully is not in anyway significantly influenced by any particular 15
minutes of fame but rather by a lifetime of being kind or at least trying to be
to all you encounter. In that respect I am great believer in Karma and what
goes around eventually, despite frequent bumps in the road, comes around.
© October
2014 

About the Author 

I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
Posted on

Where Was I by Nicholas

          In the early 1960s,
I was in high school studying French, struggling with chemistry, hating algebra
and the jerk who taught it, but loving English Lit and the teacher who taught
that. High school was nothing until my senior year and then I learned to party
and enjoy myself. The promise of just getting out of high school was enough to
liberate my spirit. It was the great age of liberation with the civil rights
movement and its innumerable clashes on the nightly news every day.

          Liberation for me came in
drive down Interstate 71 from Cleveland to Columbus where I joined 45,000 other
students at Ohio State University. New people, new studies, new challenges and
suddenly I got to make my own decisions. OSU is where I took part in my first
political demonstrations, volunteered to work in a community development
project in Columbus, first doubted my Catholic faith, and first voiced
opposition to the Viet Nam War. It was also where I had my first disastrous
love affair that I didn’t even realize was a love affair until many years
later.  

          And then I
came out—to California, that is. Experiences in San Francisco and elsewhere in
California are what I associate with “what did you do in the 60s?” When the
‘60s began and ended is a matter of interpretation or maybe just mood. Like
many of the drug-induced experiences back then, the decade tends to wiggle and
undulate on and off the calendar. It is not contained in a simple ten year span
of time.
My political activism, however, was
short lived. I stayed on the fringe looking in. I was on the edge of the crowd
trying to escape the tear gas and bullets that summer day on Telegraph Avenue
in Berkeley, not in the thick of it getting beaten up by police. I was in the
back of the throng at the Altamont concert, kind of wishing I wasn’t there at
all, but thankfully not crushed in front of the stage and amidst some lethal
violence. I was stunned one day to see a friend appear in the bright California
sunshine when he ventured out of his heavily curtained, smoky sanctuary/den,
looking like a cadaver. But I wasn’t that drugged out cadaver and wasn’t headed
in that direction.
I would work for a few months and
then take off for a while, go hitchhiking, spend days climbing Mt. Tamalpais
and watching the ocean from a sunny meadow. I came to think that this is how
life ought to be. I would grow up, that is, settle down, commit to something,
have a career, later, I kept thinking. There was plenty of time for that.
My project then was to stay out of
the war and out of the army, a commitment based both on principle and downright
fear. The fear was as realistic as the principle was laudable. I was against
that war and couldn’t see myself joining in any war and when drafted to do so,
said, no.
The motivation for my and others’
actions did not stem entirely from a sense that we were acting out grand laws
of history as earlier revolutionaries might have but we came from a very
personal sense of what was at stake for us. Beyond mere egoism and
self-indulgence, it was an ethical standard based on me.
And there was music, always there was
the music. Rock music took on an artistry ranging from the Beatles’ tunes and
the poetry of Jim Morrison and the Doors to the blues of the Grateful Dead with
the exquisite guitar of Jerry Garcia and the hard rocking of the Rolling Stones.
From them I learned about Chicago blues, electric blues, hard and fast urban
blues.
So, where was I in the 60s. I was in
the city hearing black people tell their stories. I was on the all-night bus to
New York City for the first huge anti-war march. I was hiking through Point
Reyes on the Pacific Coast. I was filing appeal after appeal with my draft
board. I was discovering yoga and quiet and meditation. I was discovering brown
rice. I learned to bake bread. I was dodging cops to avoid getting arrested. I
was bouncing around Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park probably hearing the
Grateful Dead or Janis Joplin or Quicksilver Messenger Service. I was growing
up and life was good.

© 2 June
2014  

About the Author  

Nicholas grew up in
Cleveland, then grew up in San Francisco, and is now growing up in Denver. He
retired from work with non-profits in 2009 and now bicycles, gardens, cooks,
does yoga, writes stories, and loves to go out for coffee.


Posted on

My Favorite Fantasy by Pat Gourley

I suppose some might say my fantasy life is sorely lacking in imagination and creativity and my opening lines to this piece might just reinforce that since it begins with yet again another Grateful Dead reference. The phrase that might be thrown at me here would be along the lines of “get a life”. Sort of like the bumper sticker that appeared shortly after Jerry Garcia died in 1995: Jerry is dead, Phish stink, Get a job. Despite the validity of this self-criticism here I go again. The topic of fantasy was brought to my mind as the result of the current four night run by Furthur at Red Rocks and their opening the second set on the 3rd, Saturday night, with the old Traffic tune Dear Mr. Fantasy.

Dear Mister Fantasy play us a tune
Something to make us all happy
Do anything take us out of this gloom
Sing a song, play guitar
Make it snappy
You are the one who can make us all laugh
But doing that you break out in tears
Please don’t be sad if it was a straight mind you had
We wouldn’t have known you all these years

Traffic – Winwood, Capaldi & Wood, 1967.

These are lyrics from a song made popular by Traffic in 1967. Their music was certainly within my sphere of listening influence if not when it actually was released certainly a few years later. This tune though made no lasting impression on me until the Grateful Dead resurrected it in the mid- 1980’s. The tune was brought to the band for then keyboardist Brent Mydland, who was one of a string of key board players for the Grateful Dead over thirty years. Several of them met untimely deaths, Brent included, who did himself in with a speedball in 1990. I suppose shooting a combination of cocaine and heroin is one way to attempt creation of a fantasy or perhaps facilitate fanciful escape. Several other much better known celebrities, based on an Internet search, have blasted out of this life with speedballs most notable perhaps were SNL greats Chris Farley and John Belushi.

What is music but one way to make us all happy and to take us out of our gloom? I am going to veer away from music as facilitator of fantasy though and take fantasy into the realm of Queerdom. Particularly the role fantasy plays in the lives of gay men. The proposition here will be that the creation of fantasy worlds is one of our special powers, one of our great gifts to the larger society and ourselves. We hone our skills at fantasy often in our early masturbatory and sexual daydreams, which we often have to create on our own since the dominant society, provides us with very little sanctioned sexual guidance.

                             

Our fanciful thumbprints are all over many facets of societal escape well beyond the sexual realm from personal grooming, art, film, classical music, show tunes and theatre to fashion and drag of all sorts to name but a few. I am not meaning to say that lesbians, bisexuals and trans folks are not also fanciful just that gay men seem to have really cornered the market on escapism. Fantasy I suppose has a downside as well as its many up sides, especially the social safety valve it provides. An example of the downside, and I am making this up pretty much as I write, is that our desire for escape often goes beyond harmless fantasies and too often gets goosed along with drugs and alcohol. Jerry Garcia once said people do drugs because they make them feel good. Going back to the Traffic lyrics again many of us gay men have certainly used substances to take us out of our gloom.

In order to fulfill many of our adolescent and pre-adolescent fantasies of being swept off our feet by Mister Right and then sexually ravaged until we nearly explode, drugs and alcohol are often used to help us to get over the initial and very powerful societal taboos involved. There has been some speculation over the years that gay men are perhaps more prone biologically to an over use of tobacco, drugs of all sorts and alcohol. I would argue that we are more prone biologically to fantasy.

Certainly not every gay man is into getting fucked though it is something most at some time or the other do fantasize about. This has got to be first explored in the realm of fantasy. Nobody wakes up one morning and out of the blue says ‘gee I think I’ll get some dude to fuck me today’. Any form of physical and emotional intimacy with another man is still so taboo that this remains a real test of character to get over it and move into the realms of positive gay intimacy despite the current minimal societal sanctioning of gay marriage.

There is much more run up psychologically, emotionally and physically to letting a man screw you than for a straight guy to have his first sexual encounter with a woman. The sexual signs posts are everywhere in our society for heterosexuals but don’t exist for gay men outside the realm of fantasy often times. Our sexual fantasies these days are and for decades really have been supported by gay male porn. Inadequate access even in 2013 to peers knowledgeable about the ins and outs of gay sex make the often totally fanciful world of gay male porn very attractive. Gay male sex education even in the world of the relatively tolerant Public Health environment rarely goes beyond the vapid message of “play safe –use a condom.”

In answer to the original question what is my favorite fantasy I am left at a bit of a loss on how to pick one. I sometimes think my entire life is a fantasy or perhaps worse a total illusion. I do think though that one’s favorite fantasy should be something that gets the blood running. I suppose I do also at times confuse my dreams with fantasy or maybe my dreams are pure fantasy. I dream of a socialist utopia where everyone is treated equally, has adequate food, clothing and shelter, the planet is healthy and the whole world is infused with a queer sensibility.

Well enough with taking the high road around my favorite fantasy. Being brutally honest I am going to base my favorite fantasy simply on how often I engage in it. That hands down would be my nearly daily masturbatory fantasies. These are often ignited with a bit of Internet porn but usually reach fruition by recalling a past sexual encounter that ends in my imagination the way I would have hoped rather than how it actually did. I must say though that most days that works just fine.

In closing I’d like to say that in doing these writings for this group I occasionally stumble on a thought that I think deserves much more exploration than I give it. For example the whole idea that the nonsexual fantasy worlds of gay men are actually great safety valves for society in general. I don’t think many would argue that without show tunes the world would be just a bit sadder place. Being the lazy fuck that I am though I rarely delve deeper but too often of an afternoon get distracted into the fantasies at hand.

©
October 2013

Photos from Author

About
the Author


I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.