Words cannot describe how horrified I am every day when I see poor Terri Schiavo’s face on the TV screen—as I’m jogging at the gym, sitting at home eating my dinner, online checking the New York Times. To see this shell of a woman encased in the TV screen like some sideshow freak, against her wishes makes me sick to my stomach. This government makes me sick to my stomach, with its covert (yet overt to thinking people) political agendas. Since when did the party that wanted to keep government out of our lives begin staking claim on the seat beside our death beds?

I mean, if she had in this state for five years, ok, maybe, but it’s been fifteen years. She is in a vegetative state, not just because you can see it on her face, but because doctors have done numerous tests and her cerebral cortex is mush. The last time I checked, medical science was not yet at the level of advancement at which it could reconstruct brain tissue and restore thinking. This is not a Philip K. Dick novel. And those parents of hers, poor, weak pathetic people, acting as if they are standing up for their daughter when really they are the living dead. If they were truly alive and truly touched by divine inspiration, they would be big enough to sacrifice their own vision of themselves (as staunchly guarding caretakers) and make a sacrifice for their daughter’s dignity and spiritual well-being. Again, if this was five years into it, I could understand. But at fifteen years into it, these people need to seek counseling for the rest of their lives and learn to let go and set their loved one free.

I consider myself a deeply spiritual person. I consider myself a watcher of sorts. I observe energy and how it moves around. I obsverve interaction. I sense vibrations. I don’t judge these sensations. I just experience them. What I experience when I see Schiavo sitting there grinning like a retarded person in her hospital bed is the feeling that the energy of her spirit is trapped, against her will. It cannot process information or rise up to face challenges that will make it a stronger spirit, an evolved spirit. It sits there in a purgatorial state, which in reality is the Hell state.

Perhaps, I am getting too emotional about this because I experienced a similar ordeal with my family prior to my uncle’s passing several weeks ago. The cosmic powers that be had mercy on us and I sense that my uncle played a part in it too. He was a vibrant, intelligent, spirited man and that is how he will always be remembered by us…he let go.

I do understand that it must be tremendously torturous to make the decision to let your loved one go. It could perhaps take years, but decades? Wouldn’t someone in Schiavo’s family be sensible and merciful enough to pull her parents aside and say, “For the love of God…” (to quote her mother in today’s press conference), do not torture the memory of your daughter, do not selfishly force her to play this part of “daughter,” so you can play “caretaker,” knowing that she is a shell, a virtual object. Surely, her spirit is still there, but it is a spirit that is being suffocated and not allowed to grow and advance in this life or move on– to another productive incarnation, or to a final state of Nirvana.

So, I say to all of you and to myself as well, write a living will. Whether you’re 25 or 75, do it NOW! This government has an agenda. You never know when something unexpected is going to happen. And if it does, and you have nothing in writing that protects your dignity, it will come after you for political life blood. It will impose its own crude idea of spirituality on you, whether you follow it or not. It will assume that there is one God, one morality, one way, one opinion. Plurality, by literal and semantic nature, is not in the best interest of an autocracy.

I’m sitting here days before the Vernal Equinox–the celestial middle of the road–with a poncho from an Indian reservation in New Mexico on my head, in my quasi-constructed office with teak floors and “Mayan Gold” colored walls that I painted myself. It’s not complete. It’s flawed. I like flaws. I’m not fond of completion. I have even more disdain for so-called perfection.

This week the bee invasion got too out of hand so some bee controllers came in and pumped the hive full of toxicity. One of them, a fourth generation LA county bee controller said, “Some people think the bees are a good omen, that they bring good luck.” I wondered then what it meant to be killing them. If I think of it as a ritual akin to Aztec or Mayan culture–the beekeeper’s outfit a sort of ceremonial garb–it seems palatable, even purposeful. I asked if I could keep the honey. The controller laughed and said it was laden with, “bird shit, insects and dirt.” What a waste.

Speaking of which, I got THE sweetest (literally) compliment of 2005 when Billy Dee Williams told me at an impromptu roundtable lunch at Pane e Vino that I was, “a taste of honey.” The suave and handsome actor who appeared in one of my favorite films of the 70’s, Mahogany, referred first with an edge of disdain to the over-the-top contrived sexuality of many women in this town, and recognized that that aesthetic had not cornered the market on sex appeal. The compliment resonated with me, and kudos to him for being a rare purveyor of subtlety (and in yours truly’s case, nerdiness).

Switching to the not so subtle…Robert Blake was let off the hook today. He looked so guilty. He looked stunned like he had been waiting for the ball to drop and then just a pin hit the floor. This, a day after I got a personal handwritten letter from my essay/article subject Bobby Beausoleil, from the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution. There is this thing, call it ‘prison lag’ that seems to cause time to operate on a whole other stratum, so I’ve heard (and marginally experienced) from friends who correspond with their friends inside. That letter he wrote is weeks behind the times which in our information era feels like months. If you were to continuously write to someone in prison, each letter would have to represent its own separate reality, for none of the letters would truly connect in linear time. It’s hard to say when the last time was that I saw someone’s actual handwriting on pages of paper directed at me. There’s something, not just old-fashioned, about handwriting, but ultra-intimate. When I see unique pen scrawlings on a page I almost feel like I shouldn’t have looked; I almost have to look a way. It’s like I’ve walked in on something. This BLOG is intimate but still, not as intimate as it might be if you saw my handwriting expressing the same words.

And alas, ladies and lasses, it’s the eve before the dreaded St. Patrick’s day. There’s a terrifying curse that’s been pursuing me like a banshee for the past three years. On two St. Patty’s days, that is to say March 17th, the respective man I was enamored with scurried, like a little girl, off into the highlands…not so much because he was green but rather, yellow. Bad jokes are accepted and expected on the day of the leprechaun, don’t you know. The real concern is not burly and bawdy men brawling in a beer-stinking pub (although that sounds kind of hot)….ahem, it’s this Vernal Equinox thing. Now that my yard is bee-less terrain, it’s time to plant seeds in my garden. It’s time to take advantage of the potency and luscious ripeness before me. It’s time to leave the middle of the road and keep on truckin’.

[And don’t forget to check out this week’s “What’s Hot This Weekend”]

I am very excited to be able to announce that my essay, exploring ex-Manson associate/convicted murderer/artist Bobby Beausoleil and reflecting on the legacy of the 60’s has finally been completed. If you have the patience for a very long piece, check out “Sympathy for the Devil.”

For future reference, the essay will remain in the “Site Exclusive” section of my Clips.

Ok, let’s start with the Pope because apparently he’s short on time. A friend and I were watching a news segment on the pope last night and couldn’t help but notice that it looked as if (from behind the scenes) someone was manoevering his arm up and down in his usual papal salute. But his eyes looked dull, glassy. My friend remarked, “He looks dead.” It suddenly occurred to us, that perhaps this was all a ruse. Recall for a moment the classic pillar of film ridiculousness and suspension of disbelief: “Weekend at Bernie’s.” And now, think for a second about the pope. Perhaps the sequel should be called “Weekend at JP’s.” Food for thought…

I attended a huge house party that my friend Josh and his buddy John Cameron Mitchell (director of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”) threw for Jonathon Caouette, director of the highly acclaimed film “Tarnation.” It was a pretty eclectic affair in terms of age and sexuality demographics. As suspected, the night was divied up into segments. I was not that into the early segment (a bunch of Hollywood industry people being so ‘cool’ that it was no fun). But much later it really got going, and as the song says, “The Freeks Come Out At Night.” Or was that, “After Midnight, We’re Going to Let it All Hang Out?”

Someone who in their faint connection to fifteen minutes of cable pop culture fame was known as “Jesse from MTV,” DJ’d the event. Unfortunately, for the mostpart all he played were terrible heavy metal b-sides from the late eighties (a MOOG afficionado’s wet dream). I asked if he had any Runaways or X. He replied enthusiastically, “I love that stuff myself and have it at home. But I was under the impression that this was a homosexual party…” I was dumbfounded, if indeed this was a homosexual party (and actually it was pretty mixed) wouldn’t he be cranking out “Ring My Bell,” Instead of “Pour Some Sugar on Me?” One aging blonde bimbo who someone said was, “In a Whitesnake video when she was young,” didn’t seem to mind. She donned dark shades and cut a rug with a Black guy with dreads in a poncho. The latter later begged me to, “Work the DJ.” He winked and gave me a lascivious look: “Come on. He’s Metro.” Wow, that was the first time I’d heard Metrosexual used as an actual true sexual affiliation (rather than just a knee-jerk style reaction to a fear of letting go of the greedy eighties). I later heard Josh refer to a guy as EMO (emotionally available?), another weird categorization…both of which I’ll pass on, thanks very much, Josh Groban.

Another sexual affiliation in the house was a representative of the foot fetishists union. My poor friend Mieke looked down to find him between her legs fondling her toes before she screamed bloody murder. Other folks present were Jack and Zack (not a couple, but amusing to refer to them together for obvious reasons) and a guy in a doctor’s outfit who was quick to tell me that he and Don Bolles (ex-Germs and 45 Grave Drummer, who does Thursdays at the Parlour and ‘molested’ me when I was 15 and he was 32) shared the same dentist as him. He smiled and flashed about five teeth.

But the apex of the night (for me) was when I got to meet counterculture acting legend Karen Black. Ms. Black was one of the cool late-stayers, very charming, friendly and open to talking to me about her role as the prostitute in Easy Rider. I drunkenly raved to her about how amazingly real the LSD scene in the graveyard was, identifying it with a couple of intense trips I’ve had. Her response seemed ambiguous yet provocative: “Well, it was real. It was very real for us.”