Since I was a teen, I thought having a summer birthday was the coolest. Looking forward to a midsummer party that included music, dancing and a hint of romance kept me going for the entire month of July. As an adult, the July 29s that marked the decades are the ones I most vividly recall.

At age 40, I was still married, lived in a condo in Rohnert Park, and the party happened poolside. Photo documentation shows I wore black lace, had a hairstyle very short at the neck and curly on top, and served champagne to my crushes of the moment—my Rolfer (hurts so good) and my karate teacher.

At age 50, I was freshly divorced, my parents had just passed away, and I had published a new book of my poems from which I read at the party. This half-century marker was catered by a local celebrity chef with live music provided by the Dave MacNab trio. My brother and sister-in-law were visiting from Chicago, I think it may have been their only visit to me here in California. A friend had allowed me to use her Sebastopol home (large deck, large living room) for the occasion. I repaid her the next day by dumping charcoal that was not quite doused… and burned up her garden shed before an alert neighbor called the fire department.

At age 55, my at-home party was progressing pleasantly to cake cutting when I spilled boiling water from an unstable coffee filter onto the front of my body, causing a second-degree burn on my belly (scar visible to this day). Photos show me lying on the floor, my midsection covered with ice from the party drink chest. I felt fine but friends insisted I go to the emergency room; all the guests departed, too quickly and most without cake. I sadly and reluctantly (nothing hurt) allowed Peter to drive me to Petaluma Valley Hospital where I got salve, a bandage, and pain killers I never took. Medical personnel complimented us on the quick application of ice.

“Sexy Sixty” birthday was a grand affair, with a top-notch party committee and enough money spent to cover a modest wedding. It was held at a local synagogue that was a dance hall when I first moved to Sonoma County, and we made it a dance hall again, with my Argentine tango friends making a positive contribution.  My birthday performance, documented by then-primitive video, was a tango valse with friend Maurice as my teacher-partner. One of my oldest friends, Ashbolt Stewart visiting from Portland, gathered musicians to play rock and roll. Many of my gifts were entertainments provided by those in attendance, including a lap dance from Catherine Rose which I enjoyed thoroughly.

Five years ago, I celebrated the beginning of my “Spectacular Seventy” decade as a combo of birthday and first-time home ownership. We were blessed with great weather and my daughter helped host so I was able to relax and visit with the dozens of folks who blessed the property by showing up with love. Best present was a salsa lesson from Rafael and Isa, and subsequent bootie shaking on the cement patio dance floor.

And now approaches the “diamond anniversary” of my birth. No trip to Italy as I had envisioned. No party grandly produced. Despite the many good things on which I focus, namely being alive and healthy as many of my generation are not, there is exhaustion. With years of Trump disaster and disgrace turning into Trumpism running rampant through the body politic, and vaccine resistance that threatens to erase all our sacrifice and gains of the past 16 months, I am feeling tense and sleepless. I want to be upbeat, and I’m finding it more difficult than I had anticipated.

For the fourth year in a row, my dear Bethrenae is taking me to the beach for a long walk to inhale ocean air. I am anticipating a feeling of appreciation and solace, hoping for a sense of inner peace. At this moment, it’s the birthday gift I want most.

“Testosterone Posse” is the term I’ve coined for male friends who serve as my support system and do some of those things that a male life partner might have done—or I could do for myself if I didn’t crave some yang to balance my yin.

The Posse was vital during the 15 months of coronavirus shutdown. Now that California is on the verge of fully reopening, it’s the right time to give props to some of these special guys.

First there is Kelly Kline, my hair stylist since the early eighties, and always a friend. (I may have tried another salon once or twice but was never happy with the results.) Kelly has listened like a therapist through my divorce and job losses and gains. In the years he was creating outdoor metal sculpture, I attended his exhibits and display one of his pieces in my front yard. He was also the real estate agent who helped me navigate my first home purchase. A renaissance man!

Kelly and I used to talk a lot about sex in the early years of our cut-and-color sessions, excavating topics like stylists whose expertise is shaving pubic hair. From him I learned the word “merkin” which, according to the Urban Dictionary, was a toupee for the pubic area (from a time when hair loss on the genitals was a side effect from using mercury to treat syphilis). That kind of conversation between us has calmed down as we have aged, and now we mostly converse about politics and the state of the world.

The year I bought my house, Kelly introduced me to Gordon Smith. A jack-of-all-trades, Gordon has been mostly at my beck and call for handyman chores for the past five years. Recently described by my tenant as “a tall white guy with a big belly,” he has a heavy New Jersey accent and greets me with “Hi Beautiful,” and “Honey I’m home” when he comes over to work.

Gordon has completed jobs little and big, from sealing unused cat doors to replacing the sink in my back house and miscellaneous repairs in my rental. He power-washed and stained my front deck and helped remove the wood stove in my living room, which required breaking up the stone slab it rested on, pulling the stovepipe up through the roof and sealing the chimney. This Spring, he installed kitchen fixtures and rebuilt two rotted out garden beds. Most embarrassing, and telling, I suppose, was his stopping by to assist when I telephoned an SOS as I struggled with the seemingly simple task of changing a vacuum cleaner bag! He set me straight with a laugh and then was off.

I suspect Gordon and I might not see eye to eye on some things, but my affection for him, and his for me, make me believe that bipartisanship is possible.

A third indispensable cohort is Geo Howard, a friend since the early 1990s when he was a guitarist/percussionist in my ex-husband’s spoken word band. Geo is a fine songwriter, dedicated musician and works as the operations and IT manager for Santa Rosa’s Community Matters, a safe-schools and anti-bullying advocacy and training nonprofit.

Geo was the first person I allowed to enter my house, albeit masked, in March 2020, to help me update my iMac’s operating system and coach me in the new world of Zoom meetings and other technical necessities—all this has made viable my freelance career as a “well-fed writer.” I so appreciate his unending patience when things take longer than expected, his help in formatting my new laptop, his troubleshooting and problem-solving expertise, his many, many hours spent (I must thank his partner, Margie, for her tolerance of his absence on weekend afternoons) and his calm response to the panicked texts I send when my computer stops working.

Geo has also been a long-time supporter of my poetry-performing career, acting as a sound man at the release party for my book, Poetry, Politics and Passion, and being a non-stop booster when I’ve felt my creativity flagging.
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The Testosterone Posse has expanded and contracted as good, kind men have passed through and enriched my life for short or longer periods of time. My dance instructors (Zach Crawford, Nate Anderson, Rafael Candelas, Jasper Oudemans, Mark Novak and John Ross) are special individuals whose unique talents changed me for the better. Will Wade, who lived in my granny unit for only six weeks and helped me believe I could succeed as a landlord, christened me “Wonder Woman” for my s/heroic efforts to make the yard and garden beautiful.

Now that I’ve written this overdue acknowledgement, it seems the list of eligible gentlemen is endless!

With apologies to my writing teacher and mental health ally Dan Cochnear, as well as the multi-talented “wrecking ball with heart” David Brownstein, following are four Honorable Mentions — unwitting members of Jennie’s Testosterone Posse who supported my well-being during Covid-19.

Johnny Jones, built my new front yard fence and made many a trip to the dump to help me clear out the last of the debris at the back of my property. He also bravely crawled through my attic to complete the stovepipe removal process and plastered the ceiling to conceal its scar. He was there to rescue me when I had a car radiator breakdown in Oliver’s parking lot and teases me with promises to ride in his new boat when there is enough water in our lakes to float it.

Chris Young, of Christopher Young Financial Services, secured the loan for my first home in 2016, helped me re-finance in 2021, and “loves” my 1991 Honda Accord Wagon.

Dr. Les Shipley has kept my eyes healthy, my contact lenses clear, and provided fashion-forward (and necessary) sunglasses for me since 1980.

Dr. James O’Neal, my chiropractor for 23 years with whom I have an easy rapport, never fails to comment on any interesting socks I wear. I have deep appreciation for his healing skills and caring attitude.

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Females are not absent from my support community, but my sisters are not so much “other” as part of my own body and soul. To thank them would be like thanking my breath, my blood, my eyes and ears. A catalogue of women who influenced me, living and the dead, would take many pages.

I have followed the story of Israel’s colonization of Palestine and subsequent apartheid since I was a freshman at the College of Saint Teresa in the mid 1960s. At an international education conference, I met Palestinian students who filled me in on their history after the formation of the state of Israel. (I find Phyllis Bennis’s book, “Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer,” extremely helpful background.) This is not “an ancient animosity.” It had a good start when indigenous people were expelled and their villages destroyed, creating generations of Palestinian refugees.

In the early 2000’s, I hosted Peace Potlucks with video screening at my home on the subject of settlements, the “apartheid wall” and the non-stop demolishing of Palestinian homes. I watched again (the last time was 2014, and before that 2008) when my tax money was used for unrelenting Israeli Defense Forces bombing the occupied Gaza strip, seeing then, as now, huge high rise apartment buildings collapsing. As of today’s count, 40,000 Gaza residents have been made homeless, nearly 200 dead, including 60 children.

Now the mainstream media speaks of “de-escalation on both sides” as if the sides were equal. This the most famous false equivalency in politics. Headlines also refer to Israel vs. Hamas. Israel is a country. Hamas is an elected political party. The two entities in conflict are a country and an occupied people.

Are the Palestinians occupying the state of Israel? No. Israel is occupying the land it acquired by war and controls the Palestinians in all ways, controlling their borders and their freedom of movement.

Is the United State government supporting a Palestinian state with 3.8 billion dollars of military aid each year? No. First, there is no Palestinian state. The U.S. attacks and prevents recognition even of “the territories” in the United Nations. Second, even humanitarian aid to the Palestinians was cut off by Trump.

Biden spouts the cliché, Israel has a right to defend itself.” Do the Palestinians have a right to defend themselves from occupation, oppression, illegal settlements that steal farmland and water (West Bank) and blockade (Gaza). Israel has prevented flotillas of aid from many nations from reaching Gaza, even killing those who attempted (In 2010, 9 Greek and Turkish activists killed by Israeli forces boarding their boat).

Do the Palestinians have a fleet of bombers and high-tech weapons, including a so-called “Iron Dome” missile shield to protect their civilians? No. In just the last 20 years, if you take a tally of Palestinian women and children killed by Israeli forces compared to Jewish women and children killed there is no comparison. This is the first week I’ve heard of any Jewish children killed by rockets…

Do the Palestinians have thousands of Israeli men, women and teens in their prisons? No.

Do Palestinians come into Israeli homes and take up residence? If they can’t take over, do they bulldoze the homes? No. Land is constantly being appropriated by settlement building and the horribly high “security wall” (Have you seen photos of it? Even worse than Trump’s border wall), and just this week, you can see viral videos of occupiers from Brooklyn going into Palestinian homes claiming residence.

Do the Palestinians cut off electricity to Jewish homes for hours a day? Create roads that only Palestinians can travel on? Practice collective punishment on families of Jewish soldiers and assassinate their politicians? No. No. And No.

False equivalency. Which brings me to language. IDF members are soldiers. Palestinian fighters are militants and terrorists. Just in this current war, what happened first, the rockets fired at Israel or IDF firing rubber bullets and teargas into the Al-Aqsa mosque during prayers?

Several analysts have noted that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—under indictment for corruption, and like Trump, is fighting to keep himself in office to avoid going to jail—has undertaken these attacks to increase support for his right wing governance with no regard for what the international community has to say. There are even demonstrations within Israel against their government’s handling of the pandemic and the erosion of democracy (they are now having a fourth election to try to get stability).

Resolution after resolution in the United Nations on Israel’s building of settlements on occupied Palestinian land (totally illegal) have condemned this abuse, yet it continues. This week, the U.S. has prevented the UN Security Council from issuing any statement on the current situation, as it has always done. The U.S. has been the outlier supporting Israel, even when every other country has voted the other way.

I have been trying to write this for days, so must stop and post. I know my distress is tiny compared to what is being suffered by Palestinians right now.

Below are some of my sources in addition to the Facebook posts taken from Democracy Now.

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-palestine-reign-of-terror/

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-ilhan-omar-palestine-israel/

I’ve been waiting too long to write commentary of my own, thus my blog languished. I’m determined to be better, even though this is my first entry in 2021. I’ve used a lot of my energy not lapsing into loneliness and frustration, but I’ll save feeling sorry for myself for another post.

Here I want to share an op ed by Leonard Pitts, Jr. a columnist for the Miami Herald whom I admire. This dovetails with watching last night, a Frontline documentary “A Thousand Cuts” about how democracy is being eroded in the Philippines under the Trump-like Rodrigo Duterte. That crude, murderous president has succeeded where his counterpart in the USA did not (barely). You can see the film online here. Then also check out  “Truth Matters: The State of Democracy and Press Freedom” a web event that was live early this morning with Maria Ressa and the mostly female Rappler reporters.

With that introduction, here is “When facts don’t matter, consequences won’t either”  by Leonard Pitts Jr.

“My brother-in-law died of hogwash.

“Another brother-in-law, a sister-in-law, two daughters-in-law, two cousins and several grandchildren are all recovering from hogwash. My wife spent a week in the hospital with hogwash. I tested positive for hogwash, but had few symptoms.

” ‘Hogwash,’ you may recall, was the word a grocery-store owner in Naples, Florida, used last month in dismissing the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic. This, after a viral video showing his patrons and employees going about their business without facial coverings, as if they had time-traveled here from 2019.

” ‘I know that the masks don’t work,’ Alfie Oakes told NBC News with the serene confidence of the profoundly ignorant.

“As we observe our first — and, Lord willing, our last — anniversary of life in a pandemic, many of us are taking stock of the various ways we have been affected. The most obvious, of course, is the human toll: One American in every 11 has tested positive, one in every 628 has died. But even those who’ve escaped that fate haven’t escaped the virus’s touch. It has transformed virtually every field of endeavor: sports, education, entertainment, the environment, the economy, eldercare, worship, justice, journalism, protest and politics, to name a few.

“Its effects have also been felt in an arena you may not have considered, though here it has not so much changed something as revealed it. Meaning: it has shown us the high cost of living in a facts-optional — indeed, an anti-fact — society.

“Actually, two events have done that. One was the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by a zealot army drunk on conspiracy theories as laughable as they were deadly. The other is this pandemic, which, though it has killed 525,000 Americans, is still regarded by some as “hogwash.” That apparently includes the governors of Texas and Mississippi, who just lifted mask mandates.

“Because of them, people will die. But when facts cease to matter, consequences do too. Troublingly, the power of anti-fact will soon increase exponentially as more so-called deepfakes come online: seamless, utterly convincing videos that show people doing things they never did and saying things they never said.

“Think about it: If some of us are willing to throw out our masks in defiance of stern warnings from respected epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci, what happens when a false video seems to show Fauci himself ripping off his mask and declaring it time to party? Now extrapolate that beyond the current crisis. The picture that emerges is terrifying.

“When everybody has their own truth and no two truths look alike, we will become — as we are becoming — a society unable to effectively mobilize itself even to save its own life. If we are to avoid that fate, journalists must disenthrall themselves from false equivalence and stop signal-boosting entertaining liars, voters must extract a penalty at the ballot box from politicians who embrace the anti-fact ethos, social media must be more aggressive in denying platforms to anti-fact superspreaders and educators must make a priority of teaching critical thinking, civics and media literacy.

“Or else be ready for more of this: more than half a million Americans dead. ‘Hogwash,’ the man says.

“The pandemic has changed many things. But it has also given us a harsh gift, showing us what it means to live in an anti-fact nation. Let’s hope we absorb the lesson. Because in the absence of common truths, our future is chaos. Believe it or not.”  (Published March 11, 2021)

One month to the day after the forever-awaited presidential election, ****p is still gaslighting the American people and declaring himself the winner. (Credit goes Stephen Colbert’s Late Show for the typographical depiction of the soon-to-be-former POTUS).

As the coronavirus rages in the USA with more daily cases ever and the highest death toll in the world, and while food bank lines of cars stretch for miles, he spends the time he isn’t golfing inciting his followers with conspiracy theories and abject denial of reality.

Bill Clinton was impeached (and acquitted) not for his sexual relationship with a White House intern 27 years his junior, but for lying and obstruction of justice. That pales beside the four-year onslaught of untruths numbering past 20,000 by the current occupant of the White House.

And now ****p  is gathering mounds of cash to pay his campaign debt by continuing to fund-raise for his bogus legal fights.  You may or may not believe that the erstwhile presidential lawyer and co-liar is being paid $20K per day to prolong this losing battle (perhaps to bank some cash for his possible prosecution?)

I think it is important to note that in order to pardon someone, the president has to admit within the pardon document that the person has committed a crime. Considering yesterday’s report of possible pre-emptive pardons, (dubbed by Brian Edwards-Tiekert of KPFA “pardonpalooza”), will ****p say what crimes Rudy Guiliani has committed, or what crimes his children and son-in-law should be pardoned for?

President Obama did many things I did not condone (the drone kill program, letting Wall Street execs go scott-free for their role in the 2008 financial crisis, his role as “deporter in chief”) but at least his first lady cared, and did much more than walk down staircases clutching his arm (or vise-versa). Obama’s daughters were not sued by the New York Attorney General for abusing funds from their charitable foundation.

Even Republican officials are past the breaking point — at least a year too late (I’m counting from the  impeachment trial in far-away January 2020.) On December 2, Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling pleaded with the ****p camp to stop stoking election fraud claims which have brought intimidation and death threats to poll workers. “Someone is going to get hurt, someone’s going to get shot, someone’s going to get killed and it’s not right.”

And not only poll workers. There have been death threats to the employees of Dominion Voting Sytems, one of whom had to go into hiding after his address was published. In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said he had been the target of multiple death threats. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs released a statement on Wednesday reacting to “ongoing and escalating threats of violence directed at her family and her office.”

Come on people! Are we a third world country? How can we allow a tin-pot dictator wannabe to keep this up for an entire month?

I had a miserable day Tuesday, with frustrating computer issues, brain fog from several sleepless nights in a row and the stress everyone is experiencing from isolation, fear for our health, and the daily struggle to just go on with our lives in light of economic challenges.

I’m writing this to get it out of my head, and to bless the help and comfort I received from friends and family which helped me get almost a full 8 hours of rest last night. When I woke up, I felt the fire to get back to my blog.

Immense credit must go to my 12-year-old grandson for his “Joke of the Day” videos; he has sent me 18 so far,  “because I love you so much, Gramma.” Not sure how to link videos sent to my phone here (if you know, tell me). Theo shares baseball jokes because playing catch and doing batting practice are fave things we do together.

Q. What happens when you cross a tree with a famous baseball player?
A. Babe Root

Q. What do you call a haunted baseball stadium?
A. Field of Screams.

Q. Did you know Chewbacca played baseball?
A. He won “Wookie of the Year.”

There, now don’t you feel better?