Answering a Robot

From: Guy Kettelhack
Date: May 26, 2020 at 4:40:47 PM EDT
To: Guy Kettelhack
Subject: Answering a Robot

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https://youtu.be/lwqWJ06P20k
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This is fascinating. I have a packed profile full of more information than most such things on this site with lots of pics available which give you all but chapter & verse of numerous aspects from sexual to emotional to what I do creatively in contrast to you offering absolutely nothing beyond an inscrutable martin1320 all of which bears the clawmarks of robotic spam in which your next observation will almost certainly run along the lines of you looking for a meaningful relationship full of respect and affection and the assumption that this robotic attempt at seduction will break through my defenses against it & warm my heart & otherwise dupe me into thinking that maybe through almost religious experience I will have found in you & you will have found against insuperable odds on me the mate we have long yearned for and now miraculously have been granted the invitation to embrace so that we can rush across the country into each others’ arms and lives and enjoy a long and loving association which will afford us all the fulfillment of happiness we never dared imagine could be ours but now by a strange wonderful lightning bolt of nearly divine love promises to become exactly that gorgeous union which is made possible only to the purest and least selfish and most loving souls who have been granted the blessing of being able to recognize true love when it is offered and respond to the gift not only with open arms but with an open heart and a wide-ranging curious mind bent on making the inward journey both into ourselves and into each other which because of the purity of our intentions and the assiduity with which we each separately have been successful in plumbing our own depths and our own most secret yearnings has readied us at last for a meeting of body and soul in concert with the steadfast determination to make our joined love a testament to the power and joy open to those, such as we find ourselves to be, who have already made a thoroughgoing investigation of our deepest wants and desires which we now finally can begin to entertain might be turned to advantage, not just our own individual advantage, but with a mission using our love as a basis of reaching out to our communities to foster in those something of the capacity you and I will have found together to widen the hearts of strangers, to invite them to undergo the same introspective honest self-appraisals that you and I will clearly have demonstrated to each other are not only possible and necessary but full of the seeds of love which very rapidly and through our example can teach others to encourage a new irrepressible rush of growth of the capacity for such love which is inherent in every human heart and which we, through discourse of this sort, will use to engage every new soul with whom we inevitably will add to our embrace. I feel I have only touched on what needs to be said but which by now surely has convinced both of us to carry on our shared mission to aid and abet any obfuscatory mind so that we might enter with them yet new realms of understanding. Please feel free to pass this on to anyone whom you think suitable for this mission.
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I expect you to write me just as voluminously as I have just done and am indeed sure that the prospect of connecting verbally and intellectually and emotionally with stories and evidence of the growth of both spiritual and sexual and intellectual and existential and less articulable exigencies and velleities as well as those perhaps occasionally intransigent blocks to understanding and/or other resistances to those occasions of consciousness and of assessing them that have defeated finer and more patient minds even than what we can more than suppose are the prodigiously capacious phenomena of our own collective intellectual fortitudes and desires to breach gaps beyond which may lie in however distantly approachable incarnate form those prospects and promises of future endeavors requiring concentration of a new order of intensity while requiting our ferocious appetites for the experience of such requisite and as yet unknown ideals and ideational creations of such complexity and intricately esthetic appeal as we daren’t even begin to imagine we could with our untested capacities to apprehend what will surely at first seem to us to be such nth degree extremities of super subtle answers in forms of response currently far beyond our untried and indeed so far unsuspected means of apprehending their articulation beyond which however our eternallly ever-actualizing potential to grow as it were to a size albeit not literally measurable since it occurs in dimensions which our incarnate senses are helpless to detect but which through new ranges of apperception to which in fact we do have accesss we can at least as it were sidle up as if we hadn’t the least notion we were doing so to begin through an oblique angle exert a kind of consciousness of what we must now be reduced to calling ‘essence’ in our inevitably jejeune attempts to conceive of an ultimate generator of existence sometimes fallaciously thought of as divine but will as we persist in the obliquely approached vicissitudes of this unexampled manner of applying Consciousness to the strands and amplitudes of what we naively until now believed to be reality turns out to be a sort of exoskeleton of an apparatus of creation than which there is no better source of what might be called the butter of our dreams and our thoughts and our love which throughout all of our arcane exhibatorial explorations we shall find still luxuriantly on every surface of our material immateriality. This I think we must agree is the answer to the great question we will have had no inkling we were asking - that single maddening three letter word we will have until this moment of revelation not understood could ever be posited without appending to it the open-ended punctuational symbol of a question mark but which at this deep point of understanding we now know to be an unnecessary adornment to the entire autonomy of its perfection as the only directive we need ever consult, that until now peskily elusive invitation to infinity: the three letter word we know as why.

Covid19 Court Sentence

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Covid19 Court Sentence

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ystFdKosVs

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A swab got poked up my nose, I said Ow!

Some blood drawn and taken away,

No evidence I have the virus now

and no record of its prior stay.

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News I report to counter the fears

of friends who assumed I would sicken.

But don’t stop assuming the worst, my dears,

We learn more about love when it’s stricken.

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On Becoming 69

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https://youtu.be/JbpHnoiHLp8

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Every birthday is Earth day, a Mirth Day! –
A Let Them Eat Cake but be Mindful of Girth day!
A yowza reminder of Everyone’s Worth Day!
A jeezus! I wish I could spend it in Perth day!
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At last I’ve decided it’s fine
To reveal to the masses I’m now sixty-nine,
And with luck from the gods in the heavenly
realms and the ones down below that bedevil me --
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who knows, I might live to be seventy. But ach! I’m
now surely prey to the terrible crime
of my having committed an inexact rhyme.
But you know what? Tuff noogies!

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Unconsidered Chaos

                                                                                                      

       

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Unconsidered Chaos

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https://youtu.be/SiuyL_Y2W0Q

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for John-Frederick Williams

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Unconsidered chaos likes to make a bliss
of mess, exposing all its unsuspected charm.
Although it’s true in my first take on this,
the claim repelled, a cause more for alarm
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than praise, a trope equivalently visual for fart –

squalid and contemptuous – bad Dada.
At first I labored to elaborate against its “art” –
until a fire rose in me, an uprising, an intifada
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countering the truer source of my disgust,
the festering idea that polished surfaces,
eradications of the very thought of dust,
amount to shoring up the stifling  purposes
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against which my most precious vision warred;
the seeming random ease of Sargent’s paint
had led me long past it to know what I adored:
outlying provinces of funk and sweat that taint
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the soul to give it interest. But what a bore
when I implore my kitchen to appeal esthetically.
I need to throw the trash out, sweep the floor.
Then I can lavishly hold forth I live heretically.
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One fights to keep an iridescent vision of oneself
that will entice, sequestered safe in Shadowland,

retrievable on cue, to make believable the fiction

that the shelf one lives upon is paradise.
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Pork Rinds

In furtive rhythms of uneasy breezes,

an abandoned shiny bag once filled with

fried pork rinds now flutters, drags in little

seizures down the schisms of a sidewalk.

Shuttered, locked up tight as any vault,

New York’s gestalt has stuttered to a halt.

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I’ve bought and liked that snack of crispy

salted pig fat. Now I’m queasy at the thought.

I dream they virally attack: they kill. Not like

New York would care. It wouldn’t. But now

it wouldn’t care because it couldn’t. I sit

for days convinced the city’s not just still.

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It’s no longer there.

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Here’s to Us!

(my opening gambit to a Facebook group of gay men over 60)
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Since I’m facing my 69th birthday on May 7 it occurred to me it might be nice to clock in with the group while I could still call myself 60-something; sort of one last public gasp from this decade before I trundle on into the next (assuming I do). But reflecting on our ages and the decades we’re conscious of having lived through also makes me curious about what any of the numbers associated with them really mean - and how those meanings change as we get older.
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They don’t mean nothing. Anyone in his 60s born in this country is by definition a baby boomer. And my experience of what this means is that our generation never got the memo that we were supposed to grow up. Think of any of the Micky & Judy movies in the late 30s and early 40s: from high school age on, you dressed up like adults. For the males that meant doublebreasted suits and ties and fedoras. Our generation came of age in the late 60s through early 70s which meant we pretty much received and held onto a view of ourselves as people to whom received categories of style and behavior and allegiances were irrelevant.
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On the whole I count this as a terrific condition of being. I don’t see myself as a product of age as much as influenced by stages of life. Those stages did and do have meaning. They chart our journey from sexual and social selfrealization to finding out what we could do in the world to discovering in what relation to others we felt most comfortable - from solo to coupled, from free-ranging to married with families. Nothing was offlimits - which meant that we arguably had more agency in choosing the contours and substance of our lives than any previous generation had had in recorded history. These conditions are boons to being human.
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I can’t not think as I enter my 70th year that what has most blessed my evolution as a gay male human being is the sheer dumb luck of having been born in 1951 to a middle class American family within hailing distance of New York City - this last fact (for me) as important as any other. New York is as much my savior as the moment of time I’ve been fortunate by chance to inhabit.
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Did this mean there were no ‘bad’ or difficult times? In a way, yes. There certainly were monstrously exacerbating struggles all over my life’s map but what did they or any other ‘better’ or easier experience amount to but life? Life turns out to be an amazing mystical absorbency: it offers an infinity of feeling and engagement and love and terror and confinement and release. Who would want to turn that down? We need dark to know light.
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Our generation as gay men seems to me to have been wonderfully positioned to enjoy the hell out of it and the chance to build a heaven into it. So, raising a glass of whatever you like, and with a nod to Jerry Herman, “here’s to us!”