Buddha holding Lotus

That Progressively Luminous Clarity

I am a devotee of dream interpretation, a gaga-brained, cymbal-clanging, dancing-and-clapping Hare Krishna singing its praises in the streets, oblivious as to whether anyone thinks I’m a fool. If you know how to read dreams, if you track them diligently, if you learn how to interact with them, they offer a perspective into your current state of being like nothing else. And, provided you don’t have a personality disorder or other mental issue that requires professional guidance, if you do it right you can conduct your own psychotherapy right from the comfort of your bed.

RuPaul

Hate Is a Drug

I live in an area of West Hollywood that is on the hill well above the three blocks of back-to-back gay bars known as the ‘Fruit Loop’, a block below the super-straight Sunset Strip — infamous rocker lounge The Viper Room abuts my corner store. The residents make an eclectic demographic. On the corner of my street and Palm Avenue is an ugly mid-century apartment building, elderly housing for Russians. The cheap fabrics and sad bric-a-brac in the windows give it the appearance of those dwellings beloved by photojournalists who snap willfully dreary reportages of the faces of Chernobyl twenty years after the nuclear meltdown. Across from that indifferent edifice is a wee compound

Tony Soprano

Under the Influence: Why We Let Others Persuade Us

This all begins with The Sopranos. I keep saying that I’m currently ‘revisiting’ the series, but that’s because I’m too embarrassed to admit that I’d only seen maybe half an episode prior to this current marathon — I started with the pilot two weeks ago and am steadily working my way forward. By now I am so swayed by the brilliance of everything about this show, from the writing to the directing to the performances, that

Jackson Pollock Number 8

Creative Minds: The Necessary Perfection of Mistakes

I can’t remember exactly what trigger the realization I’d made such a colossal mistake, all I know is it hit me suddenly and it was unpleasant. I was on a hike a couple of days ago and my mind was enjoying itself for a change by leapfrogging playfully from topic to topic. Perhaps I was reviewing the piece I wrote the other day about breaking up with your friends, or maybe I was thinking about the principles of Sufism that I discussed in the article. Whatever led up to it, it suddenly dawned on me—no, it was more like a flood beam

Butch Cassidy Sundance Kid

When It’s Time to Break Up with a Friend

I’ve been of two minds whether to write this piece for a few weeks now. Writing about relationships of any kind is more Oprah’s purview, but a case may be made that all writing is about a relationship of one form or another. With that self-serving justification in hand, let me proceed.

What finally prompted me to examine the end of friendships—or even putting a friendship on indefinite hiatus; you can never be sure what might happen down the road no matter how final the termination feels—is a close friend of mine called it off with another close friend of his today. There have been epistolary battles via emails for some time now, a veritable bloodbath of character assassinations.

Laura Dern Enlightened

‘Enlightened’: The Dark Side of Spiritual Awakening

Before I launch into an appraisal of Enlightened—part of my on-going series about HBO dramas while we wait for cinemas to recover from the summer crap fest and play something worthy of reviewing—let me say a few words about the season finale of another show of theirs I reviewed a few weeks back, Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom.  In an ideal world—the sort of upright, conscientious world Republicans dream of and fancy they can create if, like characters in an Ayn Rand novel, they stubbornly resist the misperceived evils of liberalism for long enough, but which in reality is a world that will forever elude them if they keep up these shenanigans—the last episode would be mandatory viewing at the RNC this week.  It would be just an hour taken away from all of the tacky hoopla while conventioneers turn their sights from willfully deluding themselves that Romney is worthy of being the President and focus on what that episode has to say about who they have become as a tribe, spoken from the point of view of Republican In Name Only (RINO) Will McAvoy.

Of course, few conventioneers will watch it, and only RINOs among the GOP like David Frum will agree with the message, I hope with wistful tears of remorse for where their party has gone, although I suspect they will be more like the tears my father shed when Richard Nixon resigned.  As I commented on HuffPo today with regard to the “Jewish” Hurricane Isaac upsetting the convention: “This has gone from a traveling clown show, to a farce with duplicity as its core theme, to a classic Greek tragedy complete with Athena and Poseidon making a pact at the beginning to teach the Republicans a lesson for their crimes against reason and for denying global warming.”

Karma Cola

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

I was sent an article the other day by Rain Li’s boyfriend, Forest Liu.  I think Forest is fantastic, and hope that, if or when Rain is done with him, she’ll pass him along to me.  There aren’t many leftover dumplings I would eat from Rain Li’s dim sum brunch, but Forest is definitely one of them.

The New York Times article is about its author going to Cheyenne, Wyoming to meet his friend and former colleague, reformed gay activist Michael Glatze, now an ex-Ghey evangelical.  It’s a long piece, so I’ll let you read it here at your leisure.

Michael Glatze in more miserable times (left) with his boyfriend, and now happy as a clam with a new companion, the Bible. You'll be back, baby. You'll be back.

In a nut’s shell, because such things are completely nutty, Glatze has abandoned cock worship for Bible worship, which says everything about religion right there, in a nutshell.