Tag: Pat Gourley

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Don’t, by Pat Gourley

“ Do or do not. There is no try.”

The Buddha


This quotation, ostensibly from the Buddha, is on my current favorite t-shirt. This is my favorite shirt since it has a long tail and easily covers my big belly. The belly fat is due in large part to two things: my major sweet tooth that seems to primarily kick in between seven and nine PM every night and my HIV meds that rapidly accelerate the metabolic syndrome that leads to abdominal fat deposition. My protruding belly is in stark contrast to my gaunt, wasted looking face that makes even Keith Richards look good on his worst days. I won’t even address the current sorry state of my ass.

The above quote may remind some of you of a line from Star Wars spoken by Yoda. The Yoda version also goes something like this just with more dramatic punctuation: “Do. Or do not. There is no try.” The Empire Strikes Back.

Supposedly Yoda lived to be 900 years old but the Buddha still has him beat by living at least several millennia prior so I am going with Buddha as the originator of this famous line. This I suppose could be a phrase comparable to the infamous “shit or get off the pot”. No hanging out on the throne reading the paper. For god-sakes focus and commit to the task at hand or not.

At first blush with this topic I thought I want to be a ‘doer’ rather than responding to the often-harsh command: don’t! Then it quickly occurred to me that there have been many “don’t-directives” in my life that I have to say have proved helpful. A few that come to mind are: don’t play in traffic, don’t own a gun, and don’t eat lead paint chips, don’t pick-up that snake or don’t sashay into a straight bar on Bronco Sunday afternoon and ask, what ya watchin’ fellas? And the one that I saw recently on Facebook, “don’t come out of the bathroom smelling your fingers no matter how fragrant the hand soap was you just used.”

Perhaps I was overly primed to see the following based on today’s topic but in reading a nice long article on Larry Kramer in the NYT’s from last week I was particularly drawn to several quotes by Kramer using the word “don’t”. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/nyregion/larry-kramer-and-the-birth-of-aids-activism.html

I’ll get to the quotes in a bit but for those of you perhaps not familiar with Larry Kramer he first came on the national gay scene in a significant way with the publication of his prescient 1978 novel Faggots. The novel was a rather unflattering though brutally honest look at the wild sexual abandon of gay male life in the later half of the 1970’s. Kramer as a result was persona non grata in the gay world but with the onset of the AIDS nightmare a few years later Faggots took on an air of prophecy.

Kramer also has significant accomplishment’s in the worlds of film, theatre and literature but perhaps in some ways most impacting were his successful efforts around AIDS activism. He was a seminal founder of both the New York based Gay Men’s Health Crisis and a few years later of the iconic and change creating movement called Act Up. I have included a link to this NYT piece on Kramer and highly recommend it as an important historical snapshot of this great gay man and his many accomplishments. He is a consummate example of the real life advice contained in the phrase “don’t be afraid” or to again shamelessly exploit an old Buddhist bromide “leap and a net shall appear”.

Quoting Kramer from the NYT’s article: “I don’t basically have fences to mend anymore. The people I had fights with down the line, some are dead. But even when we fought, I think we were always — I love gay people, and I think that’s the overriding thing in any relationship that I have with anyone else who’s gay. Never enough to throw them out of my life. I’ve never had huge fights with anybody. Much as I hate things about the system and this country, in terms of the people I deal with, I don’t have any.”

I have been keenly aware of Larry Kramer and his many bold and often at times very controversial proclamations and actions since 1978. He has pricked my conscience on numerous occasions shaming me actually to do more than I would have without his kick in the ass but still never achieving his level of fearless integrity. I still today in many ways lamely persist with my own at times crippled activism.

It is 2017, almost 40 years since the publication of Faggots, and as Larry reminds us, at age 81, in his last quote in the article the struggle continues: “I don’t think that things are better generally,” he said. “We have people running this government who hate us, and have said they hate us. The fight’s never over.”

© May 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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My favorite childhood hero, by Pat Gourley

“…he was a queer man and would go about the village without noticing people or saying anything. In his own teepee he would joke, and when he was on the warpath with a small party, he would joke to make his warriors feel good. But around the village he hardly ever noticed anybody, except little children.”

From Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt

The quote I am opening with here is from John Neihardt’s 1932 book titled Black Elk Speaks and is a description of Crazy Horse. Crazy Horse along with the great Chiricahua, Cochise, was truly my boyhood hero. Crazy Horse though came out as one of my formative heroes and remains so to this day. I still read anything I can get my hands on about the great man and Native Americans in general.

I was initially enamored with Cochise largely because of the rather stereotypical presentation of the great Apache in the 1956-58 T.V. show called Broken Arrow. I was 7 years old when the series started and I did everything possible to be able to stay up past my 8pm bedtime to watch it. In researching this piece I found an old snippet of video from the show with Cochise and Tom Jeffords half naked in a sweat lodge. Talk about something that might indelibly imprint in a little buddy gay boy’s psyche. Cochise’s grey hair and very manly chest left poor Tom Jeffords in the dust. Awareness of the stereotypical and racist elements of this show as of course way beyond my pay grade in 1957 at age eight. Michael Ansara who played Cochise was not even Native American but a Syrian immigrant.

Unlike many of my peers in my pre-teen years my favorite heroes were not Roy Rogers, Gene Autry or the Lone Ranger. I have recently found re-runs of Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger on an obscure cable channel. Watching some of the Roy Rogers shows and seeing his over the top cowboy-drag through my 2018 eyes I have to wonder if Dale Evans wasn’t really Roy’s beard.

Cochise sparked my interest in Native Americans but as I got older I was able to put my hands on much more honest and realistic presentations of Native Americans. I was drawn to Crazy Horse and the Plains Indian wars against white genocidal encroachment, treachery and theft. Crazy Horse was a loner, a vision seeker who was dedicated to preserving the “old ways” before the white invasions. Though no evidence exists that I am aware of that he was a homosexual and certainly did not fit the bill of a Winkte, Lakota males who adapted woman’s roles and were totally incorporated with in the tribe he was certainly “different”.

I most recently ran across a description of him in a 2016 book tilted The Earth Is Weeping by Peter Cozzens:

“ His perpetually youthful appearance, pale skin, and fine hip-length hair imparted to him an androgynous quality. An Indian agent described the man at age thirty-six as a “bashful girlish looking boy”. Page 194- The Earth is Weeping.

Queer or not, and most likely not, Crazy Horse certainly had many admirable qualities that in many ways were those of someone different, an outsider. He was totally dedicated to the survival and well being of his people and their “old ways” up until the moment he took his last breath after being bayoneted in the back trying not to be put in jail on the trumped up supposition that he was about to again go to war with the white man.

In a 2012 piece by the great Chris Hedges, writing in Truthdig, he pays homage to Crazy Horse with this closing line:

“His ferocity of spirit remains a guiding light for all who seek lives of defiance.”

I hope that all my heroes have ferocity of spirit and seek lives of defiance. Though not often successful I strive to emulate these qualities and truly belief we as queer people are given a leg up with these heroic qualities.

© January 2018

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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Hooves, by Pat Gourley

“That horse has left the barn”

When I hear the word “hooves” in nearly any context I think of horses though many different mammals have hooves. My early days on the farm never involved horses so I may have made the association of hooves with horses after watching Gene Autry and Roy Rogers on 1950’s TV.

I remember that the often ridiculous and blatantly racist TV westerns seemed to distinguish between native American horse-hoof prints from those of the always white settlers, American law men and cavalry by noting whether the horses had been shod or not. Native horses had no shoes where as those of the white folk always did, a simplistic view since many native tribes were quite adept at acquiring horses from settlers and others who shod their horses. On these TV shows blacksmiths were often shown dramatically forging by fire while shaping the shoes and then nailing them onto the horses’ hooves. This really is the extent of my connection with the word hooves, though I do vaguely recall older male relatives on occasion playing “horseshoes”. That was a game though that never caught on for me personally.

Another memory of hooves was the apparent use of fake cows’ hoofs being used by moonshiners wearing them to throw off federal agents chasing them during Prohibition. Not sure exactly how this worked since cows have four feet and humans only two. However wasting time on thinking about this application of hoof-foot-wear as a means to sneak to one’s moonshine still in the woods will do little to address any real world problems these days I am afraid.

I can though make a tangential leap from hooves by way of horses and cows to the phrase: “That horse has already left the Barn”. This implies of course to the after-the-fact reality that it is too late to do anything about whatever. If one adapts this as a world view these days there are many things that seem too late to do much about whether we want to admit that reality of not.

Climate change sadly is one reality that it may very well be too late to do much about. That horse seems to have galloped away and kicked the door shut with both of his back hooves. Still in my more optimistic moments I can’t help but think that if we were to embark on a Manhattan Project to save the planet that salvaging an at least livable, though probably less than desirable, planet might be doable.

Laughably perhaps I can hope that the recent hurricane evacuations for both Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and Rush Limbaugh’s beachfront properties in Florida might turn into teachable moments. That however does not seem likely.

My go to person around all things climate change and how this is intimately tied to capitalism specifically is Naomi Klein.

I highly recommend her two most recent works: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate and “NO is Not Enough” subtitle “Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning The World We Want”. Here is a link to these works and Naomi in general: http://www.naomiklein.org/meet-naomi

It isn’t that the Donald Trump’s and Rush Limbaugh’s of the world don’t believe in climate change, I actually expect they do. It is that they realize better than many of us that the only effective possibility for addressing this catastrophe is a direct threat to their worldview and way of life. That their greedy accumulation of goods and capital will save them from the resulting hell-scape in the end is truly delusional thinking on their part.

I feel the only viable solution being an acceptance of the socialist ethos: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

© October 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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When I Played Santa Clause, by Pat Gourley

Full disclosure right out of the box here I have never played Santa Claus. I did get to read the “Jesus lines’ in a Catholic grade school play around Easter time my 8th grade year. We were “performing” part of one of the New Testament gospels right up to the crucifixion, which was allowed to happen only off stage in people’s imaginations. I imagine there was a sibling or cousin or classmate or two who would have liked to see me actually get nailed to a cross.

Certainly for anyone who has known me over the past 50 plus years my being selected to read the Jesus lines was irony at it’s finest. As mentioned above it was an 8th grade play and that would have made me 13 or 14 and in the throws of my budding and extremely confused feelings of being somehow profoundly different from most around me.

It seems right for a Grateful Dead reference here especially since it’s been at least a few months since I have included one in my writing. These are a couple of short verses from a 1972 song written by Robert Hunter and several members of the band titled Playin’ in the Band”:

Some folks look for answers
Others look for fights
Some folks up in treetops
Just look to see the sights

But I can tell your future Well, just look what’s in your hand But I can’t stop for nothing I’m just playing in the band

Believe me when I tell you what was in my hand a disturbing amount of the time at age 14 was not the New Testament, but rather a bodily appendage that rhymes with sock.

Christmas with my family when growing up was really a pretty big deal. There was at least tons of excitement if not always a lot of money to shovel Santa’s way for presents. Being the oldest child, not just in my immediate family but also among the many cousins living within close proximity, I was the first I think to get the news that this was all a ruse and that Santa did not exist. He bit the dust along with the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny. It was a series of crushing childhood blows but amazingly I did survive even after indulging for a few years in that sort of magical thinking which certainly was soothing.

In hindsight I wish the myth debunking had extended to most of the religious indoctrination I had received in my first 14 years. Unfortunately it did not and it would take another decade to get that monkey off my back.

The harsh reality that Santa and a whole host of other magical figures and beliefs do not exist does make me long at times for a safer and sweeter time that existed for me before age 6. Though Santa Claus is certainly a specific culturally bound source of joy and solace, and according to Megyn Kelly he is white, I would hope there are similar myths for kids of other cultures, ah the innocence and bliss of early childhood. It does make me very sad though to think how we, and by that I mean the U.S.A, are destroying the wonderful early years of myth for so many in the world today.

It is, I imagine, hard to have wonderful fanciful thoughts when you are dying of cholera in Yemen or shaking in abject terror when U.S. made barrel bombs are landing in Syrian cities destroying any semblance of safety and security to say nothing of your life many times. A bit of understanding as to why we as a country participate in such atrocities in the world at large may be provided in how willingly we all to often treat one another here at home.

The examples are legion of course but a recent one came to my attention the other day in a piece in the Huffington Post. It was the story of a 93-year-old woman in Orlando Florida who was forcibly removed from her senior housing apartment and arrested for not paying rent. Partial rent payments had been made but apparently Scrooge didn’t feel that was adequate for an old woman undoubtedly on a very fixed income. Perhaps Senator Grassley is right and she was frittering away her income on male escorts, booze and movies. After two days in jail and turning 94 she was released to a motel and a local homeless coalition is helping her find housing.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/93-year-old-woman-arrested-rent_us_5a314874e4b091ca26849ee3?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

Of course there are also legions of Americans doing right by one another every day in many ways. I can’t help but think though that Santa would say it is not enough.

In an attempt at least to be a bit upbeat at this time of the returning sun we could all engage for a day or two in the old Thick Nhat Hahn meditation. That would involve noting or keeping track of all the small human courtesies one encounters in going about our daily lives. The smiles, nodding acknowledgements, doors held open, the ‘excuse me’s and of course the hugs and kisses that come our way. These often inadvertent and spontaneous loving gestures of humanity almost always far outnumber the nasty ones. So there is hope and maybe we can make Santa proud.

© December 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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Birds, by Pat Gourley

Birds, by Pat Gourley


I attended the local Women’s March on Saturday (1/20/2018) here in Denver. It was an extremely exhilarating event. I have not felt the same empowering and invigorating feeling since some of the earlier Gay Pride demonstrations back when we called them marches and not parades. Yesterday’s Women’s March, estimated by the Denver Post to be 50,000+ strong, most probably had more openly queer folk in attendance than the Pride Marches of the late 1970’s. As discouraging as things seem to be at times today we really are winning the revolution though considerable work and diligence on our part remains so as not to lose any ground.

In keeping with the spirit of powerful women so openly on display yesterday I’d like to acknowledge the work of the great pioneering environmentalist and semi-closeted lesbian Rachel Carson. Her 1962 book Silent Spring is often credited with kick-starting the modern environmental movement. In thinking about today’s topic of Birds it was her book that first came to mind. A significant part of her silent spring would involve the die-off of songbirds, dead and gone due to exposure to chemical pesticides and herbicides.

I certainly did not read Silent Spring when it came out in 1962. I was a farm boy in northern Indiana and perhaps directly involved in spraying DDT containing pesticides on anything that moved. I do remember though reading the book and being profoundly moved by it probably though not until I reached my freshman or sophomore year in college in the late 1960’s.

Carson believed that the eggshells, particularly of large birds of prey, including the American Bald Eagle, were being softened and then collapsing unable to reach hatching maturation by exposure to ddt something so ubiquitous at the time that it was practically being sprinkled on our breakfast cereal. This onslaught from DDT continued until it was banned in 1972 with the Bald Eagle in particular at that time being in danger of extinction in the lower 48 states. The ban though resulted in a gradual increase in Bald Eagle breeding pairs per an article in Scientific American and they were removed from the endangered species list in 2007 in large part due to the pioneering work of our lesbian sister Rachel Carson.

Carson unfortunately died of complications from breast cancer in 1964 and never got to see the fruits of her dedicated labor. It was in a piece from the web site http://queerbio.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page that I learned details of her relationship with another woman. http://queerbio.com/wiki/index.php?title=Rachel_Carson

Carson started a long-term relationship with a married woman named Dorothy Freedman in 1953. The entire relationship though apparently was rather closeted and sadly resulted in Carson destroying all of her personal correspondence before her death, presumably including that with Freedman. This was of course back in the age of letter writing and decades before Facebook and Instagram

Though the two women, again according to the queerbio piece, readily acknowledged their relationship she wanted to avoid the publicity perhaps to not detract from her life’s work and therefore got rid of their correspondence. Sad but understandable, it was 1964 after all. The queerbio piece also states in describing their relationship that there was “no certainty to the extent of its sexual nature”. This observation though screams for my often-repeated Harry Hay belief that “the only thing we have in common with straight people is what we do in bed”.

© January 2018

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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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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Clearly, by Pat Gourley

So clearly is an adverb that means without doubt or obviously. With that definition in mind it is a word I should “clearly” be very cautious in using. It should be admonition enough against using this word that the main school of Korean Zen I have followed for years preaches, “don’t know mind”. In a jacket blurb for Richard Shrobe’s 2004 book Don’t Know Mind author Jane Dobisz defines Don’t Know Mind as “our enlightened mind before ideas, opinions, or concepts arise to create suffering”.  Well, I guess that might explain why despite my privileged white male existence I feel I suffer so much.
Let me cast caution to the wind and most likely prove my Zen teachers right by sharing examples of where I at least quietly in my own head use the word clearly.  Multiple times a day I most often say silently to myself: clearly, you are an idiot. Or clearly, your driver’s license should be permanently revoked. When seeing the current White House Press Secretary at her daily briefs and saying out loud to the T.V. clearly a blind monkey did your makeup. And most frequently these days clearly the words ‘President Trump’ must just be part of a bad dream and I’ll wake up soon.
Putting the many ideas, concepts, and opinions aside that I so often attach the word clearly so there are somethings in my life that are fact and the use of clearly or its synonyms ‘without doubt’ or ‘obviously’ are quite appropriate. Without a doubt, my HIV meds are keeping me alive. It was quite obvious that the early symptoms of HIV infection and T-cells below 200 I was experiencing in the mid to late 1990’s were clearly related to poor viral control due to inadequate medications.
Without doubt, I have diabetes with my most recent HbA1c being 7.6. Clearly, this needs to be addressed or the ravages of high blood sugars will come home to roost sooner than later. Since I already take a butt load of pills every day the thought of adding diabetes’s medicines is in my mind something to be avoided if at all possible. Despite what I think is the obvious solution to a low fat whole-foods-plant-based diet and daily exercise I find this regime to be quite the challenge.
At times I clearly try to rationalize the recent HbA1c of 7.6 by blaming my HIV meds, which are certainly a contributor, but not something I can do without. My recent 6 weeks in San Francisco also proved to be a dietary challenge but the reality is there are plenty of grains, fruits, and vegetables for sale all over that City, really more readily accessible than here in Denver. Just because I spent my mornings fixing breakfast for B&B guests and serving them cholesterol bombs in the form of buttered toast and eggs along with that delicious class one carcinogen, bacon, I clearly did not need to sample the leftovers. Serving steel cut oats, almond milk and fruit for breakfast to most B&B guests would not result in many positive online reviews I suspect.
It is easy to say but for me hard at times to resist. The smell and taste of bacon must surely be the work of the devil, if I believed in the devil: clearly here nothing to blame but my own lack of self-control.
Another fact-based use of the word for me would be: clearly I am one lazy-ass writer. Though participation in this group has been valuable in many ways I am also confronted with my slothful writing habits on a weekly basis, merely coasting on residual grammar habits instilled by years with the Holy Cross nuns. The prompt of a word or two as impetus for writing about my life has for me in some ways been quite ingenious and on occasion productive. It does get me to put fingers to keyboard though most often just a few hours before group.
The lazy part comes for me in that I almost always have many ideas on a subject that would without a doubt require much more thought, energy and research than I am usually willing to devote to it. The excuse I most often use is to keep my word count less than 800 and I do find it a worthwhile challenge to get the point across in as few words as possible. A more honest reflection here might bring into question my need to use valuable time watching all 16 Dead and Company shows, each at least three hours long, on their current fall tour or my near-daily masturbatory dedication to online adult entertainment, many hours clearly thrown into that void. That would be the adult entertainment into the void and not the Dead, who are playing superbly this go around by the way.
So despite my shortfalls here the discipline of writing at least several times a month has clearly been beneficial. Thank you all!
© 20 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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Hooves, by Pat Gourley

“That horse has left the barn”
When I hear the word “hooves” in nearly any context I think of horses though many different mammals have hooves. My early days on the farm never involved horses so I may have made the association of hooves with horses after watching Gene Autry and Roy Rogers on 1950’s TV.
 I remember that the often ridiculous and blatantly racist TV westerns seemed to distinguish between native American horse-hoof prints from those of the always white settlers, American lawmen and cavalry by noting whether the horses had been shod or not. Native horses had no shoes whereas those of the white folk always did, a simplistic view since many native tribes were quite adept at acquiring horses from settlers and others who shod their horses. On these TV shows, blacksmiths were often shown dramatically forging by a fire while shaping the shoes and then nailing them onto the horse’s hooves. This really is the extent of my connection with the word “hooves”, though I do vaguely recall older male relatives on occasion playing “horseshoes”. That was a game though that never caught on for me personally.
Another memory of hooves was the apparent use of fake cows hoofs being used by moonshiners wearing them to throw off federal agents chasing them during Prohibition. Not sure exactly how this worked since cows have four feet and humans only two. However, wasting time on thinking about this application of hoof-foot-wear as a means to sneak to one’s moonshine still in the woods will do little to address any real-world problems these days I am afraid.
I can though make a tangential leap from hooves by way of horses and cows to the phrase: “That horse has already left the barn”. This implies of course to the after-the-fact reality that it is too late to do anything about whatever. If one adapts this as a worldview these days there are many things that seem too late to do much about whether we want to admit that reality or not.
Climate change sadly is one reality that it may very well be too late to do much about. That horse seems to have galloped away and kicked the door shut with both of his back hooves. Still, in my more optimistic moments I can’t help but think that if we were to embark on a Manhattan Project to save the planet that salvaging an at least livable, though probably less than desirable, planet might be doable.
Laughably perhaps I can hope that the recent hurricane evacuations for both Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and Rush Limbaugh’s beachfront properties in Florida might turn into teachable moments. That however does not seem likely.
My go-to person around all things climate change and how this is intimately tied to capitalism specifically is Naomi Klein.
I highly recommend her two most recent works: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate and “NO is Not Enough” subtitle “Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning The World We Want”. Here is a link to these works and Naomi in general:
http://www.naomiklein.org/meet-naomi
It isn’t that the Donald Trumps and Rush Limbaugh’s of the world don’t believe in climate change, I actually expect they do. It is that they realize better than many of us that the only effective possibility for addressing this catastrophe is a direct threat to their worldview and way of life. That their greedy accumulation of goods and capital will save them from the resulting hell-scape, in the end, is truly delusional thinking on their part.
I feel the only viable solution being an acceptance of the socialist ethos:  From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
© 19 Oct 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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Tears, by Pat Gourley

“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government, I can not remain silent.” 
April 4th, 1967. Martin Luther King

More often than not these days when trying to write something for this group I am stumped with little coming to mind. Perhaps in part this is due to my having exhausted my “story”. And to be sure these days at my age I find myself doing many fewer things that might be worthy of repeating to anyone.

However, with this topic as I have pondered it over the past week I am struck with how many things actually do come to mind to write about. This may be related to the fact that through cable news, the Internet and social media in particular all manner of bad crap from the world over is continually barraging us and much of it is tear inducing.

I am a believer though that we live in the best of times and the worst of times. Not falling for a false romanticizing of ages gone by I do believe that for most of Earth’s people things were much worse in the not so distant past. Much work of course remains to be done however. I hope for worldwide Democratic Socialism and the death of Capitalism. That will require great effort, much more than just a Resist t-shirt, the occasional demonstration or a bumper sticker. To quote Oscar Wilde on the difficulty of the individual effort involved in creating change: “Socialism is great but it takes up too many evenings”.

Thinking about my own tears I am aware that it seems much easier for me to cry these days than it did several decades ago. For me the years 1985-1995 in particular were filled with so much death and suffering that perhaps I had become numb and immune to it and stopped being able to muster any tears. The death of my partner David in 1995 from AIDS related issues did however break the dam open and the tears began to flow again. Are the most genuine tears always personal?

Now it seems I can cry around a whole variety of issues. Things I see on TV often trigger tears. Rescues of abandoned pets or animal shelter adoptions that go well that are dutifully recorded on video and most often posted to Facebook prompt the waterworks.

Seeing people return to their burned out homes in California is particularly tear inducing. Also footage of refugees in boats is almost always a trigger for tears. The cholera epidemic in Yemen fueled in no small part by U.S. support of the Saudi inflicted violence raining down on that country is a very sad case in point and speaks directly to King’s statement above.

I was though most recently brought to tears reading a piece by Glenn Greenwald he had posted to the Intercept (the intercept.com): https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missing-piglets-animal-rights-glenn-greenwald/

It is a multilayered and long story that is a very difficult read because of the content and the numerous photos of pigs being horribly abused in a factory farm in Utah. It is the story of two rescued piglets named Lilly and Lizzie and the draconian measures carried out by the FBI at the behest I assume of the factory farm in Utah that breeds and slaughters over a million pigs a year.

The piglets were rescued by an animal rights group called Direct Action Everywhere: https://www.directactioneverywhere.com

The FBI was enlisted to track down the piglets since animal rights activists on occasion have been designated as terrorists and numerous states now have AG-GAG laws which criminalize whistleblowers photographing and exposing the horrors of America’s factory farms. Good news on this front is that Utah’s AG-GAG law was recently ruled unconstitutional based on the First Amendment by a Federal judge. Stay tuned however since the First Amendment is under attack from many corners these days, very possibly including the Supreme Court.

So your tax dollars were at work when a caravan of FBI agents accompanying a veterinarian descended on an animal sanctuary in Erie Colorado to collect DNA samples from the suspected escapees Lilly and Lizzie even though the sanctuary itself had nothing to do with the piglets’ liberation. As of this writing Lilly and Lizzie are thought to be safe and both have recovered nicely from their horrific beginnings.

So for me I guess my tears are often painful but cathartic. But is crying about anything ever enough?

I don’t want to end on a preachy note but oh well what the hell. Addressing the carnage in Yemen will require many necessary evenings of activism, sorry Oscar, but helping Lilly and Lizzie and their millions of kin is much easier: just quit putting so much animal product in your mouth.

© October 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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Hooves, by Pat Gourley

“That horse has left the barn”

When I hear the word “hooves” in nearly any context I think of horses though many different mammals have hooves. My early days on the farm never involved horses so I may have made the association of hooves with horses after watching Gene Autry and Roy Rogers on 1950’s TV.

I remember that the often ridiculous and blatantly racist TV westerns seemed to distinguish between native American horse-hoof prints from those of the always white settlers, American law men and cavalry by noting whether the horses had been shod or not. Native horses had no shoes where as those of the white folk always did, a simplistic view since many native tribes were quite adept at acquiring horses from settlers and others who shod their horses. On these TV shows blacksmiths were often shown dramatically forging by fire while shaping the shoes and then nailing them onto the horses’ hooves. This really is the extent of my connection with the word hooves, though I do vaguely recall older male relatives on occasion playing “horseshoes”. That was a game though that never caught on for me personally.

Another memory of hooves was the apparent use of fake cows’ hoofs being used by moonshiners wearing them to throw off federal agents chasing them during Prohibition. Not sure exactly how this worked since cows have four feet and humans only two. However wasting time on thinking about this application of hoof-foot-wear as a means to sneak to one’s moonshine still in the woods will do little to address any real world problems these days I am afraid.

I can though make a tangential leap from hooves by way of horses and cows to the phrase: “That horse has already left the Barn”. This implies of course to the after-the-fact reality that it is too late to do anything about whatever. If one adapts this as a world view these days there are many things that seem too late to do much about whether we want to admit that reality of not.

Climate change sadly is one reality that it may very well be too late to do much about. That horse seems to have galloped away and kicked the door shut with both of his back hooves. Still in my more optimistic moments I can’t help but think that if we were to embark on a Manhattan Project to save the planet that salvaging an at least livable, though probably less than desirable, planet might be doable.

Laughably perhaps I can hope that the recent hurricane evacuations for both Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and Rush Limbaugh’s beachfront properties in Florida might turn into teachable moments. That however does not seem likely.

My go to person around all things climate change and how this is intimately tied to capitalism specifically is Naomi Klein.

I highly recommend her two most recent works: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate and “NO is Not Enough” subtitle “Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning The World We Want”. Here is a link to these works and Naomi in general: http://www.naomiklein.org/meet-naomi

It isn’t that the Donald Trump’s and Rush Limbaugh’s of the world don’t believe in climate change, I actually expect they do. It is that they realize better than many of us that the only effective possibility for addressing this catastrophe is a direct threat to their worldview and way of life. That their greedy accumulation of goods and capital will save them from the resulting hell-scape in the end is truly delusional thinking on their part.

I feel the only viable solution being an acceptance of the socialist ethos: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

© October 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.