reflecting on a graceless age of hypocrisy

Eerie dream last night...one of those so real you have to lay there for a few minutes, letting reality reassert itself, to make certain of what is or isn't real (and, alas, it had nothing to do with a nubile poetry groupie...I think I am forgetting what they're like, which would be a terrible loss for the literary world as a whole...I must get out of Morgantown).

I dreamt a lawyer called and was making extortive threats involving a former lover, demanding a certain percentage (35% as I recall) of my revenues from any and all public appearances and book sales in which any of the works she inspired were referenced. I laughed her off, figuring she was an agent not for the titian-haired goddess I presumed to have sent her, but her cuckolded husband. I bantered and blocked. I danced and mocked. My lawyer has said I should have been a litigator, sometimes I agree with him.

Then I realized we were not talking about Brigit but the Leopard. Silly me. Brigit has never asked for a penny, she has only asked I keep her real identity quiet (and I have) to avoid upheaval in her personal life.

The Leopard? eh. I have enough legal armour and ammunition on against her she'd need to hire a hit man. Once that point of the dream passed I was no longer empathetically bemused, but a little torqued. That is not to say that this is something she or her agents would do, but indulge me - owing to the framework of the dream.

I am tired of people making their bones on other people's work, talent and money. I give to whom I please what I please (ask my sons, ask the Faerie, ask the Leopard even) and never ask for anything in return. That is what quitessential love is about, a generosity, a charity of spirit. If you want a barter, it isn't real.

If I won the lottery tomorrow, or one of my books took off like a rocket in sales, I'd make sure everyone got their slice, with relish. But killing the goose that will undoubtably one day lay the golden egg is stupid. Not only is my estate wrapped well to defend against tampering but sixty days after I quit seeing to it, my memoirs go global. With names, dates, events, even receipts I took the liberty of scanning that prove me to be not quite the monster some would paint me to be. That I have protected many undeserving of my sanctuary is undeniable. That there are those who either do not know what I have done and see in me a monster, or are angry that the gravy train ended or slowed its progress is no statement of my character, but of theirs.

Incompetent sometimes? Absolutely.

Slave to my own passion and passions? Yes.

Willing to confess those sins that I can as long as they do not do harm to the innocent? Totally.

A fool? No. I have continued my charity towards some long after they had burned their purpose in my heart, knowing they were undeserving, but still concerned for them. Would my darkest assassins come to me for a kidney transplant, they know they'd get it. Somehow I think that infuriates them even more.

An evil man? No. Evil has a requisite of pride. I take no pride in the mistakes I have made through the years.

I am glad, in the end, that it was a dream. But also sorrowful to be reminded, if only by my own preconscious, as to what a graceless age we live in.

Truths are spun and considered "relative". We mock those who really try to follow their faiths. The leadership of many of our governmental and religious organizations have no regard for the principles on which they are, were and should be based. And these very leaders point fingers and scream their Jeremiads. It is both ironic and a metaphor that Representative Mark Foley, a man assigned to the leadership of a key committee overseeing the safety of our young people has truend out to be a sexual predator.

When Time magazine declares as the "next Billy Graham" a man who brags on his fleet of expensive cars. When a "devoutly Christian man" orders us to war. When the only nation in the world to ever use nuclear weapons against another one claims a position of moral imperative in blocking another nation from gaining that technology and even threatens to use force to make it so, we have an issue of hypocrisy.

And it is an artist's duty to make straight the ways.