Today is dear Juliet's birthday. happy birthday my forever friend. it is getting hotter in New York. everyday, a bit hotter, and more humid. People complain. But I find it hilarious coming from Miami. where it is so much hotter and so much more humid. This is nothing. Here it is mid-July and you can walk to the subway without breaking a sweat but perhaps on your brow. In Miami you wake up with your whole body sweating and you remain that way all day. even in air conditioning. And that's in December! July forget about it. what a dreadful place South Florida was. here in New York the summer really has been delightful so far. I notice that in the back of everyone’s mind is the anticipation of the next winter... so people are trying to get as much as out of the summer as possible right now. there is such a sense of joy and happiness and renewal in the streets and the parks of the great city. everyone is smiling and cheery and eager to small talk.

New York is like Sesame Street, if you remember that show; at least the upper east side is. its everything you could want in neighborhood living. Just like you always dreamed of if you grew up in the sprawling suburbs and always dreamed of real city neighborhood living as I did. A lot of the good, and a little of the bad. People always stopping on the street to talk to one another or make a comment or two about this or that. people waving to one another, people rollerblading or biking or walking or jogging by. Everything you could ever want is right there on your block, from every kind of restaurant in the world to the movies to newsstands drycleaners flowers delis little grocery stores drug stores book stores seamstresses hair salons hardware store... goes on and on. its just great. people are friendlier here than anywhere I've ever been. [o.k. well Atlanta people are pretty friendly for sure, but everyone’s in a car so you don't get that neighborhood vibe.] yep, New York has it all. [people are always so surprised that I like the upper east side so much. ‘you look like a downtown guy,’ they always say. Yeah I know I do. but to me its not worth the trade off. Downtown is so busy and noisy and grungy. Love to visit the village and soho and all that, but to me its worth the quiet and cleanliness of up town living in trade for not being around the ‘cool’ all the time. you can always get the cool a few subway stops away and then go back to the peace and quiet and clean of the upper east side. I know that doesn’t sound too rock and roll, but life is about knowing who you are and not succumbing to who you think you should be.]

There is such magic to the seasonal changes of the earth. I will never again live in a place where this does not unfold each year, where it is not revealed each year. in places like Florida and California and anywhere in the South, you just don't see or feel the seasons – we study them in school of course, we see pictures of what the fall and winter and spring look like in books, but we never experience it, just one long summer, its all just word and picture lessons, and I think that there is a certain something missing for us as humans in that. there is something very visceral about the seasonal experience. Something we can relate to as organic matter ourselves, something about it that touches not just our bodies but our souls as well.

Today was church. New member classes still. I never would have believed it of course if you would have predicted a year ago or even six months ago, that I would be sitting in a great hall with a group of rather normal mainstream folk taking new member classes of a Christian church of any kind in order to officially join their congregation. I would laughed at you or with you and made some sarcastic joke about it. and that would have been that. but things change. We change. Let us never forget that. we change. We are capable of change. If we are wise, we are like bamboo, not oak.

Last week the reverend had us all pray for our soldiers in Iraq, AND the people of Iraq who are dying. Contrast that with my recent experience at a nearby Baptist church where the reverend just had the congregation pray for the American soldiers and made no mention of the Iraqi people. made me run out of there sick and resentful feeling about the fundamentalist Christians of the earth and their short-sighted ethnocentricity. But this reverend is a yale graduate. A very educated man who is well spoken, well thought out, well mannered. What a difference. I believe in God now. I know that may come as a shock to many. But I can honestly say that I have a real understanding now not of anything concrete or detailed about this force that we call God, but an understanding of Its existence. And I dare say that I believe that he guided me to that church. He/she/it knew that it would serve me here/now. and I am so grateful for that. I hope and pray that I can reciprocate. I am getting a lot out of it.

Today in class the reverend spoke of the bible and I felt my heart and limbs tighten up. anytime any alleged holy book of humankind is mentioned I feel anger and cynicism and resentment swell up within me. I must say that I detest the supposed holy books of humankind. To me books like conversations with God or living deliberately are a lot closer to a “truth” than the bible or the Koran will ever be. But my agitation was quickly assuaged when he explained that there were two ways to look at the bible and other religious books of humanity, the fundamentalist or literal view, and a way of looking for deeper truths with an understanding that these books are poetry; they are not to be taken literally. And he confessed to us that he prefers to read these books through the eyes of the latter method. I was impressed, relieved, and inspired. again. glad to be there. again reminded that I was in the right place at the right time for me now. for there is very little in the Christian faith, or any religious faith for that matter, that I believe in, as far as the actual details or dogma are concerned. Again, I'm there for the spiritual community. For the opportunity to explore the ideals of service and of goodness, of honesty and integrity, of good cheer, and loving your neighbor, of good spiritual living, of renewal and rejuvenation of the spirit, and the exploration of the great force of creation and sustenance that we currently label as “God.” but for me that's about it.

In the service today they made mention of heaven and I was again reminded of one of the many reasons why I feel so separate from humankind’s old religions. Having given up any real belief in the concept of heaven over a decade ago, along with the ideas of the devil or hell or any of that other seemingly silly old-world stuff. But today I made a note in my little notepad after hearing the word heaven spoken: ‘what if heaven was a sort of spiritual weigh station so to speak. A temporary meeting place for consciousness to gather together to regroup and regenerate in between lifetimes... more of a scientific or physics way of looking at this concept. After all, our souls, our consciousness must go somewhere when it passes out of these bodies before we enter new ones. And since we seem born with some kind of an inherent belief in a higher power it would be nice to believe that once each lifetime we get a chance to reconnect with that higher force for a little while. to sit and chat and rejuvenate our faith in ourselves and the whole process of life and death and being alive. Each of us little seedlings, little particles of a larger wholeness that ultimately stem from this one force that creates and sustains all that is. Why not agree to the idea that we can call this gathering place ‘heaven’ for lack of a better label. At least for now.


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Watching the third man go through the huge piles of garbage and recycling in front of our townhouse today in order to look for aluminum cans, as they do every Sunday, I thought about how much a big bag of cans is, the value. It can’t be much. I thought to myself, if only they thought it through. If you're going to go through life collecting things to resell for their value wouldn’t it make sense to choose the most expensive items there are. instead of a bag of cans, what has more value? Platinum? Gold? Palladium? Even silver... yes, from an entrepreneurial viewpoint this would be much smarter. Better use of time and energy. The effort would be the same. you would just have to work a bit smarter.

But people are where they are, aren't they?




Tuesday tells me at lunch today that the subway is starting to make her so angry that she feels homicidal. I know the feeling. ‘you aren't using your iPod are you,’ I ask her. ‘you know you have to use your ipod. It’s the only way you can avoid that feeling of anger and going nuts on the subway everyday. Thank God for the ipod. It’s a lifesaver.’