Archive for the ‘My life’ Category
June 30, 2026
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger to bring June to a close, anticipating the hot summer rabbits of July
In the days of the Arnold and Isaac Seminars on Belief that have animated my Ramona St. condo in recent months — Isaac’s a deeply pious fundamentalist Fijian Christian and I’m an amiable non-believer, with an excellent early life in mainstream, socially progressive American Lutheran and Episcopal churches — every so often we hit a note that resonates deeply for both of us. In my 6/24 posting “Jesus pyjamas, and a sweatshirt”, we discovered that we both found the parable of the lost sheep (told in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke) particularly moving.
A bit before this, I astounded Isaac by being able to (still) reel off great chunks of the Nicene Creed from memory, but broke up at one point in an excess of emotion over two words. And discovered that Isaac thought those two words were in fact the point of the creed, a distillation of transcendent faith in unseen marvels. Underlined in the extract below (there are variations in the text, so this might not be exactly as you remember it; and remember that this is a translation into English):
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June 30, 2026
Difficult night last night. Slept uneasily from 6:30 only to 2:10, and with a substantial break in the middle. Took a levothyroxine tab, then needed to wait an hour before eating breakfast. Fresh news: results of the blood test for TB — an absolute legal requirement for admission to a living community — had come in, negative as expected, so everything can go forward. Meanwhile, I spent the time marking still more things (like wastebaskets and power cords) as to be moved and others as not to be. (It’s hard to look at familiar things with fresh eyes; familiar things become background, unremarked.)
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June 28, 2026
Things rush on. The move from my Palo Alto condo (which Jacques and I moved into almost 40 years ago) to an independent living suite at The Avant of Palo Alto is scheduled to start at 8:30 am on Wednesday July 8th. Very complex preparations: what gets moved (a small select amount); versus what stays (a monumental pile of stuff), to be disposed of by the family phalanx over some period of time. This is not your standard moving experience.
I have been more clearly marking the two sets of things, which is tedious and (despite the fact that I’ve been getting rid of most of my possessions for roughly a year now — an experience that wounds me emotionally, afresh, every day) continues to bring me low. All I can say is that the end of this period is in sight, to be replaced by the shocks and confusions of the new.
(Thanks to my labors, I have totally missed the celebrations of Stonewall Day. All I can say is that events have brought me lots of Michelle and Barack Obama, who represent the best of us and the best in us and continue to provide hope in some truly dark times.)
Posted in My life | 3 Comments »
June 27, 2026
Briefly noted. From my posting yesterday (6/26) “Enjoy your night in Tunisia”, in response to Lise Menn, a comment about:
the music; I wanted to open up “A Night in Tunisia”, encourage people to discover the early [Dizzy] Gillespie-[Charlie] Parker collaborations, maybe to go on to discover that words got added to it [more than once, in fact] and it was eventually performed and recorded by almost every jazz or just jazzy vocalist(s) there is (Ella did it, Manhattan Transfer did it) and that most of that is in fact fabulous, genuinely a precious part of our cultural heritage
As it happens, this has been a dire day for my spirit, filled with such intense anxiety about the worth of my work that I was reduced to reading through old postings, looking for examples of things I wrote that might have been of value to at least a few of my readers. The triggers for this despair were multiple, but it turned out that sleep deprivation was high on the list; life is considerably better after three one-hour naps.
Then I went back to Ella Fitzgerald, a deep pleasure since I saw her perform live back in the 1960s.
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June 23, 2026
From Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky (my daughter) on 6/20, completely out of the blue:
Re: Assessment Thursday 10:30: The assessment visit is at the Avant [“a WellQuest Living Community”, offering independent living for seniors in Palo Alto]. All their departments meet you to make sure you’re a fit. I think it takes about an hour. Somebody will take you.
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Posted in Books, My life | 7 Comments »
June 21, 2026
(about the holiday, and masculinity, and enough man-on-man sex to make this posting out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)
First take: the long pan. From my 6/16/19 posting “On this day in 2019”:
(US) Fathers Day. For some of us, this is a day to remember our fathers with affection. I’m one of the lucky ones; I’ve written about mine several times, most extensively in my 1/30/11 posting “It Gets Better / Wonderful dad”.
It’s also an American commercial holiday that might better be labeled Masculinity Day, aimed at selling things stereotypically associated with high masculinity in either the upper middle class or the working class; elaboration on this point in my 6/10/18 posting “Gearing up for Fathers Day”. [AZ: I am largely alienated from American normative masculinity, have been as long as I can remember, so have gone my own way, on a path of homomasculinity, where both my sociocultural affiliations and my sexual desires take me off the broad highway and into the steamy jungle underbrush]
And then through its role as Masculinity Day and through complex associations involving gay men and fathers, Fathers Day is also a high holiday for gay porn, with at least three different themes: sex between father and son; Daddy-Boy relationships; and sex involving older men — called daddies — especially, very muscular ones. [AZ: of the three themes, only Daddy / Boy works for me, and that’s a recent discovery: in this world of sexual fantasy, despite my advanced age, I turn out to be, as we say there, a very good Boy; there is, apparently, always space for pleasant surprises]
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Posted in Events and occasions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language of sex, Masculinity, My life | Leave a Comment »
June 17, 2026
(Significant amounts of sexual crudity, so not for the eyes and ears of kids or the sexually modest)
Niall Maher’s New Yorker daily cartoon for 6/15/26:
(#1) To make any sense of this wonderful cartoon, you need to have detailed knowledge of two different events: from 5/19/1962 (I was just a month away from graduating from Princeton); and from 6/14/2026 (essentially, now), with a glance forward to 7/4 — events celebrating the birthdays of two different US Presidents (John F. Kennedy then, our overlord Grabpussy now), through two different renditions of the song “Happy Birthday”: in 1962, in a potent haze of female sexual desire and sexual desirability (by Marilyn Monroe, in as close to naked as she should get while being in principle fully and elaborately clothed), but in this week’s cartoon, by a muscular machine of male aggression (who doesn’t look at all ready to deliver an adoring serenade to this particular President)
And now: backstory, tons of backstory.
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Posted in Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Understanding comics, Vaginality | Leave a Comment »
June 15, 2026
(fairly quickly detours into phenomenally raunchy free verse and then swivels again — but in there’s some stuff that’s way out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)
I was roused from my pastoral torpor this morning by a Facebook ad from the Tastefully Simple® website offering basic preparation directions for Key Lime Cheese Ball Mix. And I immediately fell into a Zippyesque seizure of onomatomania, moved to chanting Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball. Then, being the sort of person that I am, I entertained a delightful reverie of citrus-juice-sharp, aged-cheese-ripe testicles and on from there, culminating in that unseemly verse. Then from there I speculated some on why some forms of sensuous pleasure have become particularly poignant for me these days.
Now to spool through all of this. Beginning with the ad.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Poetry | 2 Comments »
June 12, 2026
A busy two days, with an avalanche of fresh things to post about, but all of it overshadowed by the hot news that I have found a place to live in. For complex reasons, it’s not technically an assisted living facility, but an independent living facility (think: retirement community); and for even more complex reasons, it’s a 2-bedroom (and 2-bath) unit for the same price as a 1-bedroom (so that fitting the crucial books I need into the place is now trivially easy, and I can also swing the finances, which would have been daunting). And it’s in a neighborhood just south of Stanford (and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, where all my doctors are), one I’m familiar with. Gigantic piles of financial and business transactions for my daughter Elizabeth to negotiate now. But I’m all a-quiver.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, My life | 7 Comments »
