MARIAN ANDRESON'S SONG

MARIAN ANDERSON

Sound has never heard itself with such sound,

Sweet with a rolling sadness in muted ages found,

Greater than glory it bows... in humble faith,

Shaking tears from the meadows of happy years,

Waking promise from the residue of unhappy tears…

By Bigdaddy Blues 

THE ART AND PHILOSOPHY OF BEING SINGLE

THE ART OF BEING SINGLE

A 21ST CENTURY BACHELLOR 

 

CHAPTER ONE: THE AWAKENING OF WHAT WE ARE…

 

I am an artist whose primary medium for the past 40 or so years has been perfecting the art of being and remaining handsomely single. I aspire to be living proof that the phenomenon of social singularity or bachelorhood when expressed as a distinctive lifestyle may be cultivated and elevated to a fine art. To that end, I am an artist at being single.

 

For me bachelorhood has been a happy state of existence during those decisive periods in my life when I was not engaged in the brief but concentrated pursuit of monogamous bliss. Monogamy seems to have been forever dangled before me like the pastel-coloured stationary toys suspended from a baby’s playpen. No sooner had I become bored by operant journey they promised did I philosophically opt-out in order to pursue the more lustrous opportunity to manufacture and explore my own notions of happiness. Comparatively, I find that I have spent the majority of my adult life as a single man and at this age I am surprised to discover a vast, growing and largely uncelebrated world of men like me. Men who have fashioned their lives to explore the unselfish freedom of singularity. Such men defy the assumption that singularity is merely a transitional state along the road to monogamy. For men who have chosen the single life bachelorhood is our r'aison d'etre.

 

Traditionally bachelors and the single lives they live are qualified against the condition of being permanently hitched. The world measures single men against our opposite condition as if the ultimate and only state of mature human existence was marriage. Marriage is a paradigm rejected by men who envisage a different form of social expression for their lives that does not tie them down with traditional roles of manhood and family.  Bachelors courageously opt-in to a more comfortable and unfettered existence where they can delve deeply into the unfathomed possibilities of manhood and humanity the way a priest excludes the secular world to explore the spiritual. The simple fact of the matter is that every man is not suited to marriage and all the better if those men identify themselves early in the game. We are proud to be self-proclaimed bachelors. Our bragging rights are the same as our married counterparts. Bachelors celebrate the anniversary of their commitment to the single life the way married men celebrate their wedding anniversaries. Should I endeavor to initiate a tradition it should be that of the bachelors ring as a celebratory icon the antithetical counterpart of the wedding ring.  I fully expect every confirmed bachelor out there who does not celebrate the anniversary of their singularity to begin on this very day. And if you do not already know the exact date that you were born again unto singularity simply invent a date or choose one because it is long overdue… beginning now you should and after reading this article you must set aside a time each year to celebrate the anniversary of your bachelorhood.

 

If I could re-live certain portions of my life I would certainly not edit away every committed relationship I ever had instead to have remained a single man In spirit and body. I count myself fortunate to have realised my true nature at an age when I still had the lustiness to explore it. I realise such a poetic editing of “amour rate” is an impossibility and am thankful to be able to have learned from those honest explorations of humanity. Any mistakes that may have been made have resulted in invaluable lessons learned and bought me full-circle to the happily single man I am today. Being a bachelor does not mean that one is critical of and disrespectful to marriage and monogamy as the two are merely options in many ways as much equal as they are opposites.

 

The best thing about being a single man in the twenty-first century is that I can be me without any need for pretense or fear of repercussion. Because of my stubbornness I can handle criticism. I am accepted both internally and externally as a bachelor and am processed and targeted for economic consumption in this modern cyclone of inexorable data like everyone else. What matters is that I have the intellectual savvy to out-wit the umbrella of lifestyle marketing combined with the intrinsic sensibility to understand who I would and should like to become as a man. I am an invention not a product. I use whatever is available at the time to manufacture a pathway to where I want to go taking time to ensure that path is ethically paved, morally roofed and walled wherever there is need of such stabilizing features. The built-in vulnerability which appears to go along with even the best-built human construct will keep me humble, focused and educated for the next challenge…

 

CHAPTER TWO: THE BACHELOR LIFE

 

In the summer of 2003, I began to contemplate again what had always been so compelling and I daresay so very alienating to me as a boy. It stood before me strangely familiar, forbidding, urgent, and intriguing. As a young child of 5 years, I expected and even dreamed of marrying a handsome, professional gentleman. At 40 I had scarcely imagined the spectre of what a “Male Spinster” might be but I began to cull references beginning from childhood that allowed me to finally define it. I remembered having eaves-dropped on my parents as a boy while they discussed a woman who was unmarried and seemingly without any of the necessary charms, interest or prospects to marry. My mother and father meant no malice by implying that she may have been a spinster. It was a common conclusion for grown folk to make in the reckoning of that time. Nonetheless, I stored the term in the backroom of my 1^st grade vocabulary where it remained until I developed the discernment to throw it away. It was a word that I had never been able to compare with others that my pre-pubescent ears overheard in conversations about mature, single men. There appeared to be no adjective that came close to describing a single man in the manner the term spinster rendered a woman although the same red flag unfurled and waved upon its utterance. Of course, that flag has ever been emblazoned with an unmarried warning sign. To that end I am living proof that children are detective time-bombs absorbing everything they hear to be processed at some undetermined time in the future. From my early listenings’ I deduced that men and women were expected to marry by a certain age although it made no difference to me whether anyone other than my parents was married or single. At that youthful time anyone older than 20 seemed inestimably old. Though the idea of a male spinster was not yet defined in my mind I continued cross-referencing those conversations about gentlemen of that ilk until I had manufactured a rather cheeky caricature to match the mood. It was to become the fateful archetype of an unfamiliar species now known as the male-spinster a character so closely resembling modern man’s dilemma with social and sexual evolution. That concept now indelibly coined as a male spinster became the embodiment of all my fears as a young man secretly struggling to escape being single, lonely, passionate and vulnerable. Unfortunately, I had completely mis-understood him by desperately trying not to become him. A true male spinster might have courageously embraced his singularity as an expression of his freedom and even perhaps as a deliberate act of civil disobedience. In fact, a true male spinster would never attach himself to that label nor allow others to do so. The entire idea of a male spinster is ridiculous, an absurdly vacuous attempt to simplify a phenomenon that deserved but had not been given proper thought. With this realization I forever discarded the spurious persona of the male spinster. He never was and could never truly exist beyond the ghostly whisp of a rapidly disintegrating mirage composed of insecurity, fear and ignorance. For me, that spectre had never so inextricably revealed itself than when I entered a gay bar for the first time observing a lugubrious row forty-some gentlemen having cocktails alone. Do not mistake my digression, I am not attempting to claim bachelorhood and singularity as a gay thing. To the contrary they are as much a part of the common human experience as life itself. My personal experiences as a gay man have shaped the way I have come to understand them, it is from that perspective that this story is being told and the realness from which it has earned its relevance. Looking through the waters between then and now I realize my failure to appreciate the phenomenon of male singularity was tied to the greater inability of society to understand the nature of bachelorhood. It like so many other blind-spots in the streaming of human progress challenges the very wit of humanity to refine and perfect itself. That stream and the momentum it will achieve once liberated from a male-defined parallax should presently expect to gaze upon its inevitable deconstruction in the holistic mindfulness of the present and future. Rest assured that that is indeed a good thing if not only because it will lead us all to contemplate and legitimately build a more intelligent understanding of that which has heretofore eluded us.

 

It is no irony that our discussion of twenty-first century bachelorhood should begin with single women.  In many ways greater attention has always been paid to the situation of single women in modern, Edwardian and Victorian culture for the simple reason that it openly challenged the status quo. The genre of the “Single Woman” has had many names throughout history. In hip mid-century modern lingo, it was, “Bachelorette”.  The antique terms “Spinster” or “Old Maid were used to reference unwed Victorian/Edwardian women. Men and surprisingly women have always resented these powerful ladies who refused to marry as an act of civil disobedience. For that reason alone the term spinster should be wiped from our lips and replaced with something closer to heroine or pioneer. Prior to the sexual revolution of the 1960’s singularity in women was considered to be an oddity, a social anomaly and was either criticized or exploited by men and by women who chose to see the world only through the prejudiced lenses of men. Single women of today aren’t much different from their male counterparts save for their sex. We can no longer condemn them to a shelf of obsolescence kept for spinsters or display young, nubile bachelorettes on a chauvinist pedestal for beatific adoration. One of the first steps toward honoring single women is to stop defining them by male standards. That said it would clearly be problematic to define men by female standards. So the flawed prism of spinster realness is in the end incapable of illuminating either sex, it is a bankrupt concept altogether. Bringing this discussion full circle requires us to admit that the lives of single men have eluded our study whilst we were otherwise keenly focused on suppressing the enfranchisement of single women. We have never stopped punishing single women for being successful mothers and professionals in spite of the fact that they were unmarried. Suffrage is incontrovertibly linked to bachelorhood both symbolically and ideologically and I believe that in order understand either one we need to dig deeper utilizing the proper tools. Those tools are necessary to open the valve of understanding, to release the pressure built up by millennia of bias. Those tools bring about inclusion and tolerance and that is also what they are made of.  I find that one of the best tools is definition/clarification so the next two paragraphs will be spent making critical clarifications. Clarification is the mightiest of tools. Since we are now, (and no pun is intended), gathered together to discuss singularity and bachelorhood let us begin to define them.

 

SINGILARITY: The term “Singularity” has been poetically and strategically dispersed throughout the chapters of this article. Please do allow me to personally explain what is meant when I use it. I use the words singularity and bachelorhood interchangeably. Singularity is another one of those English words that has many different implications depending on the context to which it is being applied including the ability to have absolutely nothing in common with any established definition. One good example is when it is the product of pure artifice or invention as with slang or as poetic expression. The English language never grew so prolifically as it did during the time once called the Postmodern Era when House, Rap and Hip-Hop culture literally redefined it. With respect to the term singularity the simplest of its meanings is the state or condition of being single. After that its litany of its definitions begin to venture into a dizzying reticulation of Greek philosophy, metaphysics and other mathematical protuberances. So, in the interest of simplicity let’s say that singularity is a term I have poetically borrowed from scientists to describe the state or condition when humans do not aspire to be traditionally partnered or married. Singularity may include people who live alone and are what we call loners’ but it more typically describes those who simply do not marry. These unmarried “Singulars” may live communally with friends, family, lovers, etc. or not. The term singularity is not meant to imply a hermitic, antisocial lifestyle but I can see how it would be an infinitesimally minute subset of the collective albeit at the very extreme of the spectrum. My point is only that singularity is perfectly normal, it is common to the human experience. It is neither gay nor straight. It is my opinion that singularity is a lifestyle that lends itself to a healthy exploration of the infinite permutations of mature, human relationships.

 

As an observer of the human condition, I only bother to write about things that have been overlooked by others. One might say that I actually take my own writing seriously so if I am writing about anything it is a serious matter.  Now it may be folly to ever take oneself too seriously however, I do believe I do not cross that line. I have always believed that good writing is also entertaining. That is to say that we writers must be able to poke fun at ourselves and at our subject not to detract from it but in order to humanize it. It was once said by a very wise friend that “Human beings are nothing if not humorous and also because we are imperfect, I am sure that after god created men he quickly realized he needed a sense of humor in order to love and understand them”. In the past bachelorhood has been treated as a social pandoras box. It’s actually not that serious… the funny thing is how the hopes dreams and aspirations of single men are so similar to those of married men. I suppose it all hearkens back to some primordial instinct for self-preservation or something. In my adulthood I was finally able to quantify the missing connections between the way I was socialized to marry and the way I chose to remain single. In that moment of clarity I smiled realizing the humorous similarity between singularity and marriage is that while married men strive to protect and defend their marriage single men strive to protect and defend their singularity. Amen!

 

BACHELOR: The term bachelor has many nuances but its foundation is and has always been defined as an unmarried man who has elected to remain single and who has cultivated a distinct lifestyle around his singularity. Bachelors include all races and ethnicities all religions. Bachelors come in all shapes and sizes so the one thing which unifies them is that they have chosen a singular life. A bachelor can be a young or mature man but I believe that the bachelor lifestyle is especially well suited for a gentleman of any age.

 

Modernity has ushered in a new social order that that has pleasantly updated the very nature of gentility. The result is that a man from any socioeconomic echelon can become a gentleman. The art of gentlemanliness is not a dying art, it is an evolving one. Bachelorhood can be a crown on the head of a gentleman or any man who aspires to be gentlemen. I like to believe that it is our gentility which fuels mankind’s evolution toward a more civilized species.

 

Singularity and Bachelorhood can be as simple or complex as you make them. Hopefully there is an underlying reason why a man decides to live a single life beyond mere circumstance. If not, there is still plenty of room for understanding in this great world of ours. What really matters is that a man is happy with his choice and that his choice is accepted and supported by others. It is important that single men do not allow themselves to be placed in an ivory tower they should be comfortable at ground level with their lifestyle and must assert themselves with dignity to establish their niche in modern society. Bachelors have led quiet lives over the centuries so there is so much that is unknown about them. It may be that a conservative existence is the secret of their success but one wonders how long the quiet will last as their numbers continue to grow.

 

Why is the number of single men growing? Does it represent the breakdown of family values or does it mark their evolution? Are bachelors’ men who simply failed at becoming husbands?  Are single men single because they are fundamentally unattractive or lack some essential element required to establish and cultivate a monogamous relationship or a family?  Are bachelors’ sex-crazed maniacs adopting a lifestyle that allows unbridled pursuit of their decadent sexual appetites? The answer is of course no. Americans are legendarily adept at cooking their fears and ignorance into a generalized pot and then calling out the stew of their imagination as evil. Singularity should not be treated as the erosion of family values it is merely one of its permutations. Dismantling our fear of singularity builds positive change such as the reversal of centuries of institutionalized racism against Black Americans. In my opinion there is a general fear associated with an increase in the number of single men and women and with it comes a distinct prejudice that extends into every spectrum of their lives. Prejudices against single persons exists in our tax structure, financing of residential and other investments, retail, hotel and eating/drinking establishment accommodations. Single men and women have generally accepted these improprieties as if it is okay for them to be penalized for being single. Contemporary American culture is hard-wired in favor of monogamy and its ultimate consummation… marriage. There are many factors contributing to the increase in single men and now more than ever it raises the question of whether the economic and human contributions of single American citizens are as important as those made by married citizens. What is most important is that the growing number of single men understand their responsibility to ensure their rights are supported in every aspect of American public and private life and by its hallowed institutions.

 

Modern men are exploring the freedoms of the sexual revolution that release them from the expectation to marry and parent children. These men are opting to refocus energies once devoted to the traditional pursuit and maintenance of spouses, children and family life in new directions but that does not mean they are exempt from contributing to a healthy and functional reorganization of family and community. America is challenged with the problem of creating good incentives to shepherd this change. Singularity is a private choice it must not be punished by prejudice as an attempt to discourage it. At the end of the day its all about respecting freedom of choice from a respectable distance! Modern Americans are slow to evolve that higher-order of maturity and gentility allowing other civilized cultures to observe, understand and respect privacy from a distance…

 

Modern men who elect a lifestyle of singularity are not freaks or failures they are simply people who have thoughtfully chosen not to opt-in to a traditional monogamous life. I do not believe that any judgement or prejudice can effectively diminish the power of a man’s choice to pursue a life of singularity when it has been purposefully made. That is to say that singularity is not the consolation prize for secular happiness and success. For those who pursue singularity happiness and success are its goal and objective. Men may enter a life of singularity due to innumerable circumstances but even if singularity is not a man’s first choice if it represents where he is and therefore it must be respected. No matter how he enters singularity once a man understands where he is and decides he would like to remain single most of the hard work has been done. Since the movement toward regimented family values during the 1980’s single people have lost whatever gains they may have made in the 60’s and 70’s. Today single men have to work hard to update institutions that fail to cater to their unique needs.

 

Strip away the playboy image of bachelor-hedonist, remove the odd-couple image suggesting social anomaly and replace it with the updated brand of a single man with purpose. Bachelorhood is the science and art of masculine self-expression. It bears social weight including ethical responsibility to community and humanity. Bachelors, singular by nature share common characteristics with the world. Once America gets on-board with this unstoppable movement it will glean true progress. The principles of singularity as it relates specifically to unmarried men are no different from those of married men or men with families. The new single man must own his responsibility to uphold and shepherd those aspects of civilized life that unify and move us forward as human beings. If bachelorhood can be idealized it would be personified by the modern gentleman bachelor. American culture must evolve to embrace and support singularity.

 

Thank you for taking time to participate in the second of an ongoing series of articles that I intend to share with you. Many of the topics briefly touched-on will be fully explored in upcoming chapters. I hope you have enjoyed our time and please do look out for the next chapter.       

 

Written By:

BIGDADDY BLUES

DING! DONG! THE WITCH IS DEAD!

DING! DONG! THE WITCH IS DEAD!

A Renewd Optomism In The American Way Of Life...

Let's compare Trump’s political defeat to the virtual demise of the wicked witch of the east or west! The parallel is clear in spite of the artificially clueless and deliberately murky manner of twenty-first century American culture. Notwithstanding, so many Americans and dreamers mark November 6, 2020 as the first time in four years they could stop living in fear of an omnipresent evil. To these good people a new optimism emerged when the Trump administration died due to causes of the popular and electoral vote… 

When The Wizard of Oz premiered 81 years ago on August 25, 1939 its messages of safety and danger ran concurrently with the rise fascism.  The Nazi party was rising in Germany. The evil regimes of Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain spearheaded the expansion of fascism in Europe. Millions of people would die in a second world war in order to set humankind back on a path to freedom. In comparative contrast Trumps presidency shows an incontrovertible likeness to the popular rise of Hitler and the deadly, fascist regimes of his time.  Many believe that Trump has wittingly spirited into life the likes of an old American evil not seen since the heyday of the Klu Klux Klan… his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again" is encrypted with divisive and hate-mongering allusions to racial superiority, systemic disenfranchisement and oppression.

As the news that Biden had been declared President-Elect broadcast over the innumerable streams of social media I heard a solid hour of urban revelry in the streets… fireworks, singing, shouting, horn-blowing, dancing, cheering and the like. I quickly summoned my friends to join me for a long awaited cocktail party and we Cheersed-In the historic occasion in my garden on the unseasonably warm night of November 6, 2020…

Reveling that night we borrowed a familiar tune from The Wizard Of Oz making it our theme.  We felt safer in the moment but each of us understood that certain danger lay ahead and as we had done with our votes committed to face and challenge our fears head on. That an evil so profound could have grown to power right before our eyes was a bitter wake up call. That evil I'd put in check for the moment. In the ensuing months and years we understood that we would be called upon to rise up to defeat that challenge! But in the moment…  it was ever so fulfilling to sing the words…

 “DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD!”.

BY BIDADDY BLUES

LIFE O'ER COCKTAILS: An Examination Of Resilience And Courage In The Face Of The Unknown...

18th Century Microscope

LIFE O'ER COCKTAILS

Sunday brunch found me reveling o'er the handsome libations of the moment. Those sacred sips spirited our conversant mood during that hallowed celebration dutifully spicing the sensory effects of a well-earned buzz… but that heady euphoria had been jealously competing with the sobering perspective of the weekdays ahead. Clearly the former won! That we brunched at all became so sinfully tinctured with the lustiness of blind-determination I easily permitted myself to succumb to the rapture of irrevocably dalliant optimism. I could not help but call it a scandalous flirt and encouraged it to more decadent heights... I applauded our willingness to challenge the depressingly hermetic range of options yawning before us. For they all appeared fundamentally sensible but ultimately lost the comparative test between what men call practical and what artists call sublime! I recall its magic personified as a day about town ever-refreshed by a handsomely plentiful spill of well-crafted and chilled cocktails! O' and that was certainly the first thing upon which we agreed. The second was that we enjoyed being free to be out amidst other human beings whether or not they were as equally cocktailed as us. The preferred combination of drink and circus gave us all inspiration to do the good thing. And we did. As a matter of fact my friends let us all pause and raise a glass to “drinking with the masses" as opposed to self-medicating at home and alone!

CHEERS!

Microscope and Case Circa 1750

Understand me… I get my fair share of quiet and contemplative time… but a city-boy like me needs to get his regular dose of public frolic and romp in! To me it’s all circus! To me the world is a disco and I just want to get in an occasional Latin hustle! Like John Travolta stepping his way through the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever I proclaim my passion to go forth living, loving and dreaming without fear of what unforeseen fate may lay ahead!

In the previous paragraphs I’ve managed merely to allude to the very thing which actually inspired this discussion. Those of you who’ve concluded the subject to be cocktails should take penance. Hopefully my metaphoric suppression of its identity has been unsuccessful at concealing that this entire article is a commentary on the social effects of COVID-19 and not the effects of alcohol. I could but will not qualify the mention of a mere virus as ineffable as if this were a gothic melodrama. As a thoroughly modern man I acknowledge the necessity that I invoke the harsh banality of life as a naked truth. Although I now struggle to compare what the naked truth might be as compared to a fully-clothed version. Naked immediately sounds more appealing… The truth is that this pandemic could shake humanity to its knees… it has no sense of who we are. COVID-19 is a thing without any intelligence it does not know what it is… it cannot love or hate it is a dispassionate, inanimate, diminutive mass. It can be likened to a corrupted computer program acting out its instructions with dumb but lethal precision. As is our custom humans need to ascribe some tangible personality to abstract things that move us emotionally. So, it is a smart therapeutic exercise to humanize our fears, dressing them up for combat in armor that shows weaknesses giving them the appearance of vulnerability. It is only after we define our fears that we can attack them head on.

However poetic I have attempted to create a platform… a vantage point… a parallax from and through which to critique an otherwise invisible phenomenon. In my estimate COVID-19 is the very antithesis of life as perceived from the circus of a discotheque, (home-base and vantage point),… as viewed through the lens of a discophile, (the parallax). I am that discophile visualizing the entire enterprise from a happy place… the discotheque. Poised from the vantage of the dance floor I expect there is virtually nothing I cannot accomplish whilst sheathed in the  spangled armour of a disco ball… Y'all. To do so successfully I’ll need to set a more detailed atmosphere.

Every successful video game has a lavishly detailed landscape recreating the mood for mortal combat. Oddly enough there are no trendy cocktails that sufficiently capture COVID-19 ‘s ominous energy. No hot pulsing beats or piercing lyrics fierce enough to weave the equivalent of a virtual ligature around the neck of human society. No party-favors recalcitrant or stealthy enough to imitate its sudden and captivating explosion within the context of global culture. Perhaps the discotheque was not such a good setting or perhaps I was correct by noting COVID-19 is an almost alien phenomenon so far beyond the reckoning of what has been the human experience. It is a phenomenon that demands a new realness!

Its signature style is a reflection of humanities reaction to it.  It is become a tacky pret a porter video clip bewildering the runway with the likes of hospital masks and latex gloves… hardly the handsome hallmarks of an impeccably-dressed gentleman. But should there exist more fashionable ways to experience COVID-19 on the disco floor I fear I should still cancel the date! There are no redeeming qualities in COVID-19. But the question we must ask is should we fear this diminutive villain at all or brush it off as nothing more than a sadly-dressed charlatan?

The answer could be life-changing. We not only struggle to imagine life with this potentially virulent spectre but even more difficult is our capacity to envisage life after it. This is largely because the virus remains ever so distant and threatening to so many people. The climate it has brewed is so similar to the advent of AIDS. Ultimately, we wonder who will be marked by this silent horror as it begins to move-in unseen among us? Has it whisped by us innumerable times before after a random breath, sneeze or cough? How many such times shall we elude its poison mist! How long will its sojourn be and shall we ultimately survive it? Pandemics humble humanity because they defy our personal sense of strength and confidence. Our education, popularity, sexual prowess, piety or compassion are factors which have no power against a virus! This phenomenon will take Americans to places they have not been in the twenty-first century. That is why rather than stocking-up on canned food, water and toilet paper I’ve opted for whiskey and cigars! I recall hearing someone say, “There’s alcohol in alcohol!", and I smiled thinking they were certainly correct bless them because there is plenty of alcohol in liqour… but better to be tasted than used as a hand-wash. Actually I plan to stock up on liqour and cigars they are first on my list! Next upon my list of quarantine necessities is amazing sex!

It occurred to me that… should quarantines be imposed upon the cities of this country I should like to be sequestered with someone with whom I could enjoy cosmic sex! Interstellar-quality sex would certainly help pass the time like nothing else interspersed with great whiskey and excellent cigars!

If I ever feared that COVID-19 may have affected the way humans feel about sex I was right but who’d have known that it would send the human libido into overdrive? More sex is a manageable if not self-prescribed penance. I’ve not had so many sext-vitations in years! So that is the one redeeming quality of COVID-19… it may go down in history as having scared us humans into having better and more frequent sex!

One thing is certain… while we manage the mental and physical dynamics of COVID-19 the simple but essential comforts such as good food, conversation, libations, smoke and sex will sustain us. That is essentially why rather than living a life of fear I choose a lustier life o'er cocktails…

CHEERS!

WRITTEN BY BIGDADDY BLUES

WHEN A GENTLEMAN OPINES ON COFFEE

Antique Coffee Grinder Circa 1900

A GENTLEMAN OPINES ON COFFEE AS SERVED IN THE MAN-CAVE: 

A Taste For Bitter Rethinks A Sweet-Coffee Culture…

Antique Cigar Vending Machine Cica 1890

Whilst enjoying the morning and my coffee the serenity of my garden and the heady smoke of my cigar whirling about me moved me to contemplate the gentlemanly virtues of coffee. And having to ask myself what exactly that might mean how I might quantify and embody each manly ground became its own self-prophesized answer. So I ran with it enjoying how handsomely  the flora, the coffee and the cigar welcomed me into the new day… it was kismet. I listened as is my habit while the morning waxed… the industrial bustle which quickly began to overrun the outside-world was still buffered by my quiet little street and of course by my little garden. The only clamour was that of the many animals and insects awakening all around me. By these I mean the bees, the birds, the crickets and grasshoppers, the spiders,  mantises and the ants… all of them getting it in early as is their custom... In my garden little else goes on save the incessant weeding, raking and pruning, planting and such including the pollinating, feeding, playing and mating of the thousands of critters populating every corner. The garden finite as it is… remains quite a realm of its own. The insects, animals and I have learned to quietly share its small boundaries.  They tolerate me in our little garden unaware perhaps of how I have slowly designed and built its handsomely-vegetated world just for them. It is a home to all of us… and a refuge too... My coffee and cigar are but incidental ornaments in the landscape… transient modifiers of my own garden-self… seasoning the lens through which I experience it at different times of the night and day... Likewise, my garden and its inhabitants creatures and plants alike who remain there in my absence must surely wonder at my comings and goings and I wonder if they remark of my prudent pufferations! The term “pufferation” is the most gentlemanly coinage of a locally famous cigar aficionado by the name of Van Landingham. It immediately struck me as the personification of the entire experience of inhaling, exhaling and the olfactory enjoyment of a fine cigars bouquet and smoke-aroma.

Antique Coffee/Spice Grinder Circa 1790

You might say I created a garden for critters, coffee and cigars but it was not originally conceived that way. That is how things turned out. I built the garden as a meditative space. It was intended to force the eye to look inward excluding the outside. So I moved forward evolving it as an ornamental garden intended to evoke the soul as a contemplative place, somewhere to escape the rat-race of the world… someplace to relax. Fewer twenty-first century men have or seek such places and many who do underutilize them. So I’ve kept my garden as an active landscape year round… no less full of color and life in winter than in summer. It is intended to be a place for contemplative resolve.

Antique Mahogany Cigar Vending Machine Late 1800's 

I only drink coffee and smoke my cigar or tobacco pipe when I have time to relax. These pastimes define a special place in my day and psyche. Over the course of time my garden included places where I could enjoy coffee and cigars. Both have an earthy bitterness… (my coffee and my cigar ), and a manliness that makes my DNA whistle and humm because it is an extension of what you might call “man-cave realness”. That is to say when a gentleman such as me takes his coffee the experience speaks from the depths of his manhood. So I  opine on coffee this morning hoping to convey something of solid relevance to the men who read my writings. It is not such a tall glass to fill and I intend to flood the entire vessel. The whole point is to celebrate manhood by exploring its many rivers. By mapping them right down to the smallest water molecule and pebble. I welcome you to travel with me along this small rivulet so feel free to light up your cigar, pour a coffee, a draught of whiskey… a spirit of choice and let us gentlemen proceed…

Antique Cigar Humidor Circa 1850

Thankfully there are still men who quietly understand and enjoy being men and who continue to cultivate the gentlemanly arts. It is healthy to define ones manhood as “other than" womanhood. All the more reason why men need time to just do man-stuff, to think and say man-things, to inflect their entire psychical experience and explicate it in the vernacular of manliness. Gentlemen of these times will be challenged to rethink the culture of masculinity on every level and that may be a very good thing indeed because I am certain it is long overdue topic to be rethought. I like to periodically  cut away the fluff and get down to the nitty-gritty. Manhood can be obscured by a plethora of decorative themes. A gentleman understands where manhood truly begins and ends. He does not parade mahood as a symbolic statement… but exudes it as a comfortably intrinsic energy… what we see (or imagine that we see) is flux. For those men who like myself truly enjoy the art of being a man nothing about manhood can be too deep or taboo to explore. This means that nothing is too sacred to be revised or discarded. After all being proper gentlemen is what we do so it must be correct! Interestingly the evolving culture of cigars and even coffee have radically redefined long-established mores and folkways associated with manliness. Twenty-first century men who cultivate the gentlemanly arts must contemplate them however arbitrary or trite they may appear. There will always be some cultural backlash  from men poised to resist natural change. But let us ask if it is ethical to perpetuate a genuinely obsolete version of gender-specific culture. And let us consider the wisdom and prudence of resistance in todays obsessively paranoid and myopic world? There are those happy and care-free times when men may socialize alone and with the blessings of our womenfolk. O' the hythe of the gentleman’s coffee and cigar lounge which may never be his alone! Indeed, I believe there is judicial tolerance for the man cave. We gentlemen have a unique and civilised set of folkways with which to smoke our tobacco pipes, take coffee, smoke cigars, converse, etc., and there is certainly room enough in this wide world to celebrate those traditions amidst those of our kind... that is the menfolk…

Antique Wall-Mounted Coffee Grinder Circa 1890

Coffee is an ancient libation the root traditions of which have spread from Ethiopia to every corner of the planet. However, in the late twentieth-century many American men have orphaned coffee taken black or with plain cream adopting a heavily marketed litter of artificially sweetened and  modified designer coffees. It could be argued that the gentrification of coffee was in fact a feminization of whatever manly virtues it may have been believed to possess but that argument is not for me to undertake. I should be remiss to ignore it. I just like strong, bitter coffee and that is what I intend to discuss. Gone are the days of the clear, watery stuff found lurking in an institutional pyrex beaker… or the thick, black acidic brew of the espresso machine. America has re-invented those primeval draughts I lovingly called coffee and I think with no semblance to its former self save in name. But what exactly did and does this mean within the context of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century American culture and more specifically how might it have impacted the gentlemanly arts? Coffee has become nothing  less than an entire social movement and it seems that I had reached that conclusion some 30 years ago. Looking back now and forward again I find clear confirmation. I can say with complete confidence that I prefer coffee as it was; simple, clean, rustically manly and uncomplicated.

Antique Coffee Grinder 

Having planted that seed I digress now because I must… because every great storyteller does so in order to give his story something of a soul…

Antique Tobacco Pipe

Three decades ago I was just beginning to seriously explore traditional southern Black American cuisine. It was a bittersweet revelation. Ironically while soul food evolved as a direct product of oppression its reprise has always been its undeniably good taste. Soul Food fueled the hearts of folk who learned to cook with what little they were given combined with what the earth freely afforded, what others did not want, or did not want to know about… That was the culinary science I sought to master. I learned that real soul food  was not vegan, not gluten free and not militantly vegetarian, anti-pork and anti-beef. It was none of those things.  Soul food was about survival! It taught the lesson that something intended or expected to be distasteful, (actually and ideologically), could be made good… I discovered a culinary tradition that many modern Black Americans increasingly frowned upon rather than preserve as a sacred rite of passage. The point being that as with soul food in order to truly understand the nature of coffee I had to divest of its politicizations and prettifications going directly to its source.

Antique Coffee Bean Roaster

Coffee will probably never be the same as it was because it is no longer just about the redeeming qualities of a burnt and boiled bean. Americans did not know in the late 1990’s that they were watching the last essence of twentieth-century culture evanesce… it was the end of an era of rustic coffee and perhaps of soul food too…

Antique Tobacco Pipe

I watched the transmogrification of coffee from a bitter but practical, morning or late-night concoction to a frothy, sugary libation scarcely resembling the thing it had been. It was the victim of the infamous postmodern genre, “The Makeover”!. Had I known I should have emerged therewith as the self-proclaimed high priest and savior of the venerable brew. My followers would cultivate the arts of coffeeism elevating it to a gentlemanly art form adapted to cure the manic pace of modernity. Coffee served at the altar of my virtually-conceived  chapel of earthly culinary delights would be dark, heavy, bitter, pleasantly nutty and marvelously acidic. Votaries of the coffee bean coffeeists practicing coffeeism would either consume it in its raw visceral form perhaps with chicory or cleverly cut with a rich, decadent dose of heavy dairy cream. My followers and I should have then saved the rustic manliness of coffee from an unseemly decoration.  For to sweeten the masculine earthiness of a strong, aromatic brew (other than with half a cube of sugar) is in my opinion…. sheer culinary villainy! I say this without malice, with an understanding towards change but a fealty to simplicity.

Antique Cigar Humidor Circa 1840

 

I have always imagined coffee as a distinctly manly drink. Its dark-woodsy colour, its intensely aggressive flavour, and its density do not at all suggest anything but a truly masculine libation nearly tantamount to a beefy-dark beer save for the alcohol. I acknowledge that my attachment of masculine characteristics to a mere drink is unscientific, fanciful, completely arbitrary… an artistic interpretation licensed thereby… its intent being to explore its aesthetic attributes from a masculine persuasion…

Antique Coffee Grinder

So this article might as easily be entitled, “Serving Coffee In The Man-Cave". As a matter of fact this will be its subtitle. We gentlemen do have our own etiquette now and to redefine where lines have blurred it let it serve as a creative threshold not as a bible…

Coffee Grinder Circa 1700's

For that reason I have always aspired to perfect a coffee that is markedly over-burnt having been reduced from multiple  brewing’s for a patently robust flavour and aroma. Yes… this manly etiquette for making coffee preempts the mere consumption of coffee- flavored water or o’er-sweetened confections all of which effectively neutralize the manly taste I crave…

Antique Tobacco Pipe

Burning the bean adds a distinct  smokiness as when food is grilled over an open fire or like a good full-bodied cigar. One must not be afraid to scorch the bean a second, third or sixth time as it brews for this amplifies its bitterness. In many cultures there are foods and drink beloved for their inherent bitterness and coffee happens to be one of them. If one’s point at taking coffee is to be awakened then why not shock ones consciousness into sublime wakefulness through sippings of an ancient and bitter brew.

Antique Cigar Vending Machine

Multiple brewing’s of a strong, regional cache of exquisite coffee beans enriches the flavor, by thickening its texture and amplifying its intensity. For that reason I re-brew my coffee at least 6 times using an antique percolator thereby releasing every drop of the essential oils and minerals locked into the crushed beans.

Antique Wall Mounted Coffee Grinder Late 1800's

Concentrating the essential oils of the coffee bean releases its emboldened olfaction. I cannot describe the heady sensation I get whilst inhaling that heavy, cloud of flavour that fills any room in which a proper pot of coffee is being brewed.

I raise my bitter cup of coffee to you gentlemen encouraging a revival of the ancient ways. Next time take your coffee black or with fresh, heavy dairy cream… relish each manly  draught and be redeemed!

Antique Tobacco Pipe

Written by Bigdaddy Blues

Antique Coffee Grinder

THE BETTER LESSON OF SOCIAL MEDIA IS A HUMAN JOURNEY TO REALITY

THE BETTER LESSON OF SOCIAL MEDIA

When I was a young collegian I was blessed with one of the most remarkable critics. I was in my first year of architectural studio and he was a seasoned, gifted architect and communicator who transformed the tedium of my freshman curriculum into a pleasurable and by virtue of this reminiscence, fondly-memorable experience. His secret was that he used vignettes of his marital trysts and trials as a metaphorical structure for comparative analysis softening the learning process with humor everyone could relate to. I wonder now how the banalities of married life and sex could have been compatible with building design and answering myself realize that life like architecture is all about solving problems. Whether his stories were real mattered less than their effectiveness as a teaching-tool… the moral being that people pay more attention to sex than anything else. Hence, we live in a culture that uses sex to convey most of its messages and as sexual entities we are none the worse for wear…

I am certain that were my old professor alive today he would not have the freedom to teach the way he did then. The intrusions and unjustified implications of a world driven by social media would crush the colorful personality of such a magnificent man… sign of the times I guess…

I was a late-comer to dating and ironically to the world of social media. Like my contemporaries I learned about the human dimension of socialization the old-fashioned way, by meeting face to face. In many ways my delayed romance with virtual reality equipped me with the ability to filter and thereby manage its innately intrusive and cryptic nature. For what it is worth I prefer the old way and like many others have discovered that both virtual and real socialization have similar dynamics. Social media has the ability to expand the ocean of possibilities and for captains of sound vessels this is wonderful news. I do not have to say that a word of caution is in order as in every situation for there are decidedly treacherous waters within the deeps and shallows of social media. It is my purpose to navigate the good waters and I believe that is the better part of social media… Like it or not men will set sail and enter this watery realm of strange and unexpected virtuality. Let us pray they will land on hospitable shores with their objectivity intact… and if prayer alone will not suffice let us employ elixirs and libations to celebrate all mankind redivivus.

Oftentimes a mans privacy is his virginity. Most men prefer keeping their private life private. Whether an instrument of control or a sanctimonious mirage it nonetheless speaks to an aspiration for virtuosity… Men are more secretive about their emotions more hesitant to explore anything intimate beyond pure and noncommittal pleasure. That being said I shall revise my statement to declare that social media has more metaphorical verisimilitude to a virtual acquaintance rather than a date and it most definitely does not approach the status of a virtual romance whatever that might be. I feel as-if a footnote should follow to explicate the suggestion poised by the last breath of the last sentence. To repeat the phase, “a virtual romance whatever that might be". My opinion of virtual dating definitely leans toward a cool subjectivity, biased in aura and decidedly suspicious. Of course, a virtual romance is precisely what it is... and there is no moral weight tipping it toward either the sacred or profane… nor any particularly neutral force balancing it in the middle. Wisely I have always imagined that I have maintained a safe-distance from the hypnotic virtuality of social media attributing my philosophical hermitage to the singular fact that fundamentally I am a realist.

Realists like me do not appreciate too much speculative uncertainty. We like to know and examine what we are dealing with the goal being to better understand our prospects for compatibility with our understanding of expected outcomes.

I might risk defining virtuality as a quality nearer to fantasy but only because virtuality possesses some of the magic of the unseen. Electricity was the great magic of the 19^th and 20^th century but today it is little more than a mis-understood service. How many that use it know how it works? I believe that the spirit upon which the internet phenomenon of the twentieth century owes itself was the brainchild of Tesla who first envisaged a virtual community (both local and cosmological) of energetic interconnectivity but in very in practical, tangible terms. Input, output, synthesis and all the glorious array of happily intermingling and attractive electrons, protons and neutrons sing his praises as an awakening force on the advent of human freedom. Cheers to Tesla who certainly would have marveled at social media for its fluid electro-magnificence! But we must also ask ourselves if he would have lugubriously sighed… well chaps there is only one fix for that so Bottums-UP!

It would be a short argument to debate the difference between virtual and real especially when it comes down to sex. Sex again? I guess it is unavoidable after all when discussing social media, so I shall chalk it up as a necessary and integral force of attraction mirroring life. How else should I hold my readers captive save with thinly-veiled, carefully placed allusions to sex? I  wonder that mundane documents such as legal papers, technical manuals and physics texts are not liberally inundated with nude, lude and lascivious pin-ups of all sexes and sexual persuasions to keep those heavy eyelids lifted.

Virtual sex can only really exist in the mind. It is a raw, conceptual bundle of possibility whilst real sex is both mental and physical. It is the bridge that separates physicality from imagination that cultivates the virtual landscape of social media preventing it from ever becoming real even though it may be experienced in real-time… the fantasy-value of social media lay in this technological anomaly. Social media in real time is truly the last human barrier to the time-space problem that caused Einstein to envisage his theory of relativity. Only when time and space can bend so that they can connect over vastitudes of existence will the fantasy of social media become reality. Now that is certainly a lid-lifter of a thought.

For the sake of intellectualism I will digress upon an Einsteinian towpath delving into the mystique of quantum physics whilst maintaining a firm grip on my glass of whiskey… (another version of the quintessential lid-lifter). In my minds-eye I have this opportunity to bedazzle my readers with a metaphysical presentation that is both sexy and heavy… if you would refresh your libation I feel as if this journey might be significantly more entertaining. So, lets immerse ourselves into the wet-world of quasi-reality contemplating a hypothetical phenomenon originally based only in the dry...

Two lovers who have been separated for seven month's kiss one another while video-chatting.  By this I mean that they begin to actually kiss the screens of their laptops so great is their longing for tactile gratification. The lovers live on different continents in real time but not in same-pace. If space, the physical element separating them could bend itself upon itself bringing them to the same place, in the same time by fusing their coordinates in time through time and space so they would be in the same physical place then they could taste each others lips and feel the heat, texture and pressure of each others embrace. The virtual-displacement of their experience of their existence, their location would be superseded bringing them together in a real-time event. It would be like throwing a crushed-paper ball from Washington, D.C. to Lagos, Nigeria in nanoseconds… Such a phenomena when it becomes possible will revolutionize the way people live and communicate on every level. For now it is just an intellectual vignette intended to titillate the imagination… much the same as sex… For the intellectual imaginative creativity is the virtual surrogate of sex.

Which is ultimately more gratifying, real or virtual sex? To answer that switch tracks to the mundane. Which is most gratifying real or virtual chocolate cake?

Is it necessary to delve into the myriad of pattern-similarities between phenomena originating in a virtual context expanding into the real by virtue of a fundamental human tendency to graduate from fantasizing virtual chocolate cake and setting out to experience a real slice?

While this theory would seem to explain the implosion of human civilisation in the twentieth century it merely matches identical scenarios sampled from every century, every era of human existence… it is one of those seemingly brilliant things which once uttered becomes vanquished by, (get a load of this image), a glamorous and husky-voiced socialite poised to slay the banter of o'er-cocktailed dilettantes. She, the femme fatale-virtual speaks in a richly calculated lilt as if talking through a mouthful of foire-gras whilst holding her billowing gold cigarette holder in the air saying in a heavy French accent,” Surely you don’t believe that nonsense dolling!” rolling her bejeweled head and neck back like a swan as she motions to the barman to fill her champagne glass held expectantly in the other hand…. as if it should have been refilled hours ago though she just swallowed the last drop…

Let us drink with her and toast to her brilliant and beguiling vituality.

At its best social media is a helpful tool possessing the innate ability to empower people on a global scale. At its worst social media mimics the most corrosive and puerile characteristics of its inventors… mankind…

In layman’s terms this means that social media can be a good date or a bad date… and from a realist's perspective the comparison pivots between a fond or unfortunate acquaintance...it’s only redeeming quality is also a haunting one rendering the phenomenon known as social media a mysteriously intangible phenomenon poised to follow and contradict human nature.  It is but really isn’t there, can you touch it or see it? It can appear or disappear in an instant, it is a totally blank canvas allowing us and everyone we think we know to become a masquerade.

This is precisely why I choose to remain grounded in the real world. The extent to which virtuality is pure fantasy is relative to context. At every turn each virtual party is forced to verify themselves against uncertain faiths. Now if you add faith and religiosity to our comparative analysis of social media and to the concept of a virtual landscape, acquaintance, date, lover, husband, wife, savior, etc. we find the possible suggestion of a virtual marriage. But a marriage to what? I suggest that social media forces a shotgun marriage to the unknown the un-verifiable. For many men this would trigger our desire for privacy and anonymity it would repel and attract us. The nonentity of social media would allow us to flirt, court, entice and consummate even to marry without any real ties, investments or consequences. The fantasy of social media appears to be a complete virtual package like a bag of chips but containing only air.

Another analogy might compare the virtual nature of social media to a popular video program where people, families and communities may be virtually manufactured only to be discarded at the end of the game. It is a uniquely modern mindset. The creativity and fragility of such a world view must demand that we carefully map our progress into the future of human social evolution…

Prior to the virtual age the nuclear age aroused mankind’s awareness of his proximity to disaster based on his misunderstanding of the nature of a divine cosmological creation. It is the idea that matters most. Evil is an unstoppable idea. The arrogance of men who play at virtual creation and decimation is way over my pay-grade… one hopes that with time mankind’s awareness of the power of the virtual will arm him with ability to replace ego with compassion. True to form, he will certainly rely on sex in order to sell the new brand of virtual humanitarianism.

Sex, marriage, consumerism and their antithesis anti-culture and anarchy all haunt the virtual landscape of social media and they are the cumulative mind-fucks of a world that is no longer grounded in reality. Social media is not evil, it is actually a marvelous invention. The iceberg of human culture we have built over the past 100,000 years far surpasses the novelty of mankind’s newest toy, social media. As such social media should be a mirror of healthy human culture inspiring men to aspire to new heights. Though I openly laugh at such optimism I also rejoice at its prospect. Life afer 56 years has taught me to shoot for the moon in order to reach the stars!

If social media were a citadel everyone would have a key or only some would have keys that worked. Who would have the working keys and how they would get them is purely a matter of consequence.

The first key to the proper use of social media is understanding and demonstrating respect for privacy and the second is demonstrating respect for human life and dignity. At the end of the day the better lesson of social media is that no matter how a man defines what is real or fantasy he can find a place where men can escape the harsh and banal circumstances of life to explore positive and fulfilling experiences from which they may bring back with them greater hopefulness for and confidence in tomorrow. This confidence is optimized by their ability to connect with other people in places meant to celebrate beauty of the human experience…

FIN

CHEERS!

Written By: BIGDADDY BLUES