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Going on a trip to Los Angeles the place I was born and spent half my life and now I am about there to having spent more of my life away than there. It is always a strange experience to revisit ones home town when you haven't lived there for years, all that T. Wolfe stuff about never going home again and all that. I have these funny dreams from time to time that have me driving or walking through various neighborhoods that seem to be from my growing up in Los Angeles but the little bits I do remember are from what I can gather recollections of all the places I have lived. I do relish the fun of driving  a little bit, being a kid from LA meant that driving was part of ones rites of passage into adulthood and adventures usually started with driving somewhere. Adventures, losing ones virginity all that good stuff. I didn't lose my virginity in a car but a road trip was the beginning of that episode in my life. And some of the more interesting adventures I went on with my late cousin had to do with driving. Oddly I just learned that one of my age peers a fellow I knew from high school just recently passed away, the last time I saw him was at my cousins funeral which is also the last time I was in Los Angeles and is also the basis for some angst about the trip. There are still emotional reverberations from that time. I would not be me if were not the case.

I am also thinking about the next stage of my life, retirement, though I still have a few years to go, not that many as I would like to think. The question of where to live and what to do and what friends I really have, a question that bothers me as I don't really have that many close friends that I hang with. I have always been a solitary individual who was surprised to even be married. I am social enough and a friendly person but lack some quality that leads to bonding with people in ways that I leave me wondering about myself. I enjoy the relationships I have on-line, and am not a hermit just existing on-line bereft of any human company beside my wife but I do come close. The sad neurotic story of my life.

I guess that is one of the things that really bothers me about my losing my cousin as we were close but not close as I wish we had been, I wish I had been able to be there for him in more ways in the last phase of his life, I miss the opportunities I gave away to get to know him better or to share more time and life with him. We had so much history together throughout our lives, I was there during various important moments of his life, new wife, new houses, kids and even to some extent I did participate in the ending of his life but still I feel lacking. But it doesn't change my facile ways, I am no closer nor do I seek out anymore closeness or bonding than before. The human condition as a series of circumstances and happenstances as we lurch from moment to moment defining our lives. I am ever dissatisfied, forever on the verge of disappointment even as I feel great gratification with my minor triumphs. That is part of defining who I am and this is partly prompted by going back to the city of my origins.

I am in a melancholy mood, no matter.

ta ta for now

After returning home from my trip to Los Angeles it has been suggested to me that I look for a grief counselor or group to deal with the death of my cousin and my friend about a year and half ago. Although I have been grieving both of them I have to admit that in fact I do find myself being very negative and feeling as if I am in a down portion of my long term depression cycle. Not something that I am unfamiliar with, as this is my lot in life. The cycles used to come faster and the bottom was deeper and seemed to last longer, I now have many more emotional tools to deal with this condition but right now or for awhile I have been somewhat unhinged or off balance. Part of it is the situation for me at work which was very positive for a moment and then the rug was pulled out and the situation went down quite rapidly and now we are being moved to new offices and I am going to be in an internal office with no windows in a room with a former friend who I can't stand now and the feeling is quite mutual. So I am not a happy camper, but that is beside the point, it is the fundamental issue of my loss that probably has been at the bottom of my current malaise. The feeling of lack of control which the death of my cousin and friend and the feeling of no power at work too is very frustrating and disturbing to me. I feel pushed along on the wheel of life with the passage of time and the approaching finality to life of others in my life and the positioning of me on that road trip to oblivion. I am of the school "do not go gently into the night", I hate the idea of my own demise and non being and the fear of no legacy scares me as I am frightened of being forgotten and unmourned. Having no kids with no continuity into the future bothers me a lot now as I get older. While I enjoy my art work it sets no mark in the world, it changes nothing and brings me no closer to some mythical greatness that would make some impression on the now and possibly into the future so someone will remember who I am or who I was as if this is monumental to the world, It is to me, and that my cousin who was six months younger than me and my friend who was my age are both gone scares the bejeesus out of me and disturbs me greatly and I feel at the same time the mournful loss of both of them. I missed out on my cousins life near the end, only to be shocked by the physical changes his illness wrought upon his body and the vulnerability of his condition. I got a little time before I took him to the emergency room to the hospital where his life ended. This was my previous real trip home, the next trip was to his funeral. My friend at least came to new york to visit the hospital so I could share his changes and share his life for that short time and his passing was also very difficult. The most painful part is as much as I could do for both of them, it all seemed so inadequate and I feel so pained and forlorn.

ta ta for now

Lest you the reader think that I am simply doing a self absorbed spiel on my sorrows I want to share a small bit of the measure of my cousin Danny. http://blog-omotives.blogspot.com/2007/01/artistprankster-danny-finegood-loses.html

This article was one of dozens about him and the one of the marks he made on the world. I don't necessarily think it was the most important but it was the most visible. He changed the iconic Hollywood sign to spell Hollyweed and changed it on a few other occasions. Danny was an artist and person interested in the world about him, he combined the two to make his comment on current events in a way that was interesting and evocative. I loved Danny like a brother, I was the youngest of 4 sons and Danny was six months younger than me and we grew up together. Danny was something that I definitely did not see myself as, he was "cool" in so many ways. He also had the life that I felt was golden and I was quite envious of him, his relative prosperity, his ease with people, his travels and his seeming constant sense of success in his life. Marriage, home, family business these all seem to flow to him. But I was not jealous as he never had that "self entitlement" that you find with so many of the scummy yuppies in New York or elsewhere. He was always generous and kind in a modest way and was always very nice to me and made me feel good about me. I never understood his thinking that I was anything special but I treasured that about him. I know after people die there is a tendency to forget their faults and elevate all their positive attributes but with Danny, his faults were of the truly forgivable sort and his inner decency just overwhelmed the other stuff. So it was a tremendous shock to me to find out about his illness late in its progression and when I sped out to Los Angeles to see him, his physical condition left me stunned and in tears. The final big moment I had with him was to rush him with his wife to the same hospital where my father had passed away. I was not happy about that but we had no choice and I understand the place was much better than before, but the emotional reverberations were killing me. And the last time I saw him, he had remarked that he had trouble dealing with the random nature of events that were happening to him in that place. I did get to say goodbye but it seems that I am not healing as I would have thought.

Danny was special to me and I discovered to so many others and they knew him in ways and times I never had and got to see sides to him I will never get to. As I said before, family is important to me and Danny was very close family.

I don't really know why I am writing this, I am not saying it is to share, I guess in some ways it is about putting my thoughts down in way to confront them. I have said these things before to other people and the spiral of feelings is still spinning my core into some other place.

ta ta for now

I looked over my last bit of writing and have been thinking on the subject on how much we can know people or how much we should know them. One of the things that bothered me at Danny's funeral was people who went to me and asked about stories from when Danny and I were younger. Now I know that I was under a great deal of stress but for the life of me I felt like I had no real memories of Danny even though our lives were so parallel and we spent a great deal of time together. My stories and memories goes back to being under 7 years old and times the family went off to the emergency room for those typical boy type things boys do that get us into trouble. Danny tried to be superman from a couch to a top of a step and missed enough to cut through his lower lip or the time I was pushing him on a tricycle and ended up pushing him through a giant glass pane that miraculously missed hurting him or anyone else. We were the flag boys who were at elementary school to raise the flag in the morning and to lower it at the end of the day. We had adventures together, lost our virginity around the same time and just lived lives that crossed and crossed again. Yet I felt that I barely knew him. I guess it bothered me most that other people had insight to him and his life that I never knew. Stories I didn't know and for some neurotic reason I felt left out. The truth of the matter there are limits to how much we know anyone, and I believe there are healthy reasons for this. But in the throes of grieving I felt left out and missing something important. And of course I couldn't help but compare him to me a dangerous path to depression. I am not really a petty person but my depression reduces me to a form of self indulgent pettiness that I don't think I would find very attractive in anyone else. So I have to take this by the horns and accept the reality of the situation. While this writing is about me, but in the real world this is about Danny and the end of his life and the effects of his passing on the world. I have been very close to his family, his wife and I also went to school together and we were friends as well. I was around for the birth and major passages of his kids and I care deeply about them all. But now there is very little I can do for any of them but be there in some nebulous form as support and this frustrates me to no end. But I think too it is a deep neurotic need to be too much in their lives, beyond the proper boundaries, as if my involvement gives some validation to me. And that just isn't right. And it isn't something I will do but still have the feelings. Still I wish I could do more.

I hope you look up Danny's obits and check out a bit of his art. He was an interesting guy with great taste in art and a great eye for things on the horizon. His collection of neon is amazing and probably one of the finest private collections in Los Angeles. Even how he accumulated some of the pieces are great stories in of themselves.

As much as I have written there is so much more and should be as I can barely scratch the surface of someone as complex and complete as Danny was. And I am glad I am taking the time to do a little writing about him now.

ta ta for now

Well I am actually feeling much better about all the issues I have raised about the passing of my cousin. I think it was the trip home that spurred all this introspection and aroused some unfinished business for me. As I was told in an email, Danny lived a rich and full life and I think he left a wonderful legacy of both what he did and who he was. I am not necessarily done thinking about these things but for now I am taking a break. There is life to be lived, art to think about and things to do. Thank you teejaybee for your kind thoughts and I am glad I wrote what I wrote. I am not a big fan of confessional writing or over-sharing and I don't feel like I did something cathartic but put down my thoughts in writing helped me sort out a lot and just admit a lot of what was floating around in my head.

I do want to share about my friend Steve who should also be honored and celebrated. Both these guys were exceptional people who I am so glad were in my life.

ta ta for now