The Peakin

There we are. Do I need a voice? How do I find it. Every time I tell a story, I want to tell it from the beginning. The very, very beginning.

My Mother:
My mother tells stories from the beginning. But you can't follow them. They are here, they are somewhere else before you realize which here here is; they are there, they are you. You are the story now. Don't you remember that? Don't you remember this? What is so-and-so going to do when-and-when? Uncle Sam was the best. He went to Gettysburg. Until he broke his leg. Or maybe that was my grandmother.

I forgot because then she slammed the wheel:

"DAMMIT Mommy!"
"Now why'd you do that?"

Then my mom later realized Gwenny was just pulling her leg the whole time. See... She was a prankster. She was rebellious. My Grandmother and my Dad probably would have had a lot of fun together. I wonder if that's why my mom and my dad connected. It's an interesting point to ponder considering that my mom is so prim and proper you're not sure if it's with the " " or not. But I've seen other mothers I thought were "prim and proper" only to see the fun side on the other side.

Potatoes. Skillets. Cheese, onions, ketchup. Hot sauce. Gotta love the sauce.

Frank's bitch. Nahsayin?

But to reality, oh here comes gravity. Bingo.

Sitting with John. Hey Bud. What's up?

I got it. Here's the catch.

The movie is in the moment. It is now. It is me sitting with my dad now. The story of it goes where there are memories played. A lot of my dad's. A lot of mine. Some inferences of intersection. Large areas of growth. And answers. And trust. And most importantly Love.

And Love is with a capital letter because once it's built up, it can never be torn down. You can build it and build it and build it. As high as you want to, but until you realize when it's time to stop. And not because it's going to fall down, but to appreciate the view.

The view from Love is boundless and classic and universal. It may or may not have anything to do with afterlife. But afterlife is as unknown to me as prehistoric. In a sense we conjecture backwards to figure out what it all means. We believe we have to know because we're smart enough to figure out the past. But it's the future. And the future is always the hardest because it's the only thing you can change right now.

Now.

Now we're strolling thru Madison Square Park. It's the middle of June and it's just incredibly beautiful out. Now, just so you know, originally I wrote: "It's the middle of June and it's just fucking perfect.:

Dad in church. Dad says he's been a bad boy. I tell him he's not. We go to Chili's. He stands up and threatens to punch me.

Rich, you're a good guy. You know how to hold your hands.

My dining room folks. Eh, at least it USED to be my dining room til Jonie got her hands on it. Enter Spector. Spector was the type of guy who you hated and loved. But the texture lent itself to being felt, as any interesting texture is. And I had an acting class with Spector. Spector loved my little monologue here and I can't remember who wrote it. But it always stuck with me, the past 10 years. My dining room folks.

Uncertain:

Dad throwing a party at Susquehana, being the guy who he is and was then. It's 1959. Or 1960. Or 1961. Or the like. It's a different era. Jimi Hendrix got crazy with the National Anthem and I broke it freaky weaky style to a telemarketer, who I managed to keep on the phone for however many minutes.

By the way, have you ever seen me breakdance to Raspberry Beret when I was 7 at my sister's Sweet 16? Classic me. There's some other classic me stuff, dadda dadda dadda.

Johnny the Bullet could run. Boy could that Johnny run. Like a devil. GO JOHNNY GO! GO JOHNNY GO GO GO~~~

Dad in Manhattan. At the studio. In the club. The morning after and HE REMEMBERS. HOLY SHIT, HE REMEMBERS.

He's not going to remember til tomorrow and tell my mom, right? Right? He won't possibly remember.

"Hi Betsy. Huh?"
"Where did you guys take your dad last night?"
"What do you mean?"
"Whatever it is, he won't stop talking about it. But we can't understand where you'd been."

So I responded with a fantasy. At least if I had to remember the lie and have lived it, it may as well have been something I love to live.

An art gallery. Curt took us to an art gallery.

On Kawara- The Pkins. Love it or leave it you better gain way.

Dad racing his Corvette. Dad winning one of those races for the other guy's car.

Dad being in Time Magazine while on spring break.

Pop pop. Zack calls him Pop Pop.

I called my dad's dad pop pop.

All I really remember about Pop Pop are the few following things:
I was 3. Ish. Sitting on Pop Pop's front porch petting Suzi and playing with the "Mrs. T Haircut" she had. She had these longer hairs right down the middle of her head but only in the middle. You could stand them up and make her look like Mrs. T. Even though she more closely resembled a Gremlin. With the personality to boot.

And there was a mouse skeleton sitting on the wall in the basement.

Two levels, excluding the basement. Small. Dingy. How could like 12 people live in here as I've heard about his childhood. Where his 3 year senior aunt lived with him. And her family. But some people were in the war. And some people were dead.

I couldn't go to the funeral. He so weirded me out. And not to mention I was still angry that he peed on and chewed on my GI Joe figures. My dad thought they were dolls. He hated those WWF figures the most. He thought they were dolls. But now that I think about it I wonder if he thought they just looked gay in those tights.

My uncle's gay.

And honestly, it's awesome. I don't see him often, but every time I see him it's like you couldn't wait to see him again.

Great story about my uncle and sister-in-law. Dad's 70th birthday party. K-Dog is f'n smashed. C-Snap and I are chugging forties in the parking lot. And I'm not even sure why. I think we just wanted to roll forties more than something like they ran out of booze. And I know they didn't because K-Dog and Uncle P were chillin at the bar. My father-in-law was sitting there. He's got this amazing mustache. It's just so full and long. My uncle couldn't get enough of it. But anyway, Uncle P was checkin out K-Dog's fun bags as she's all but flashing the entire bar saying "I've got great tits. I've got great tits." He's like you sure do baby. K-Dog falls over. Not standing up. Not leaning on the counter. Not belly flopping with a Yanatwist off the diving board. Mom screams MY NAME! EZ-E yells out FUCK, those happened in reverse order, sorry bout that.

Dad and me walking the dog. The day after that night at the club.

The Letter. Read the letter to him.

The screen with him dancing on his anniversary. and saying I love you.

White light.

The Hoboken walk. That is my favorite moment with my dad ever, I think. That one was precious.

Posted by F.Newara at 11:37 PM | Permalink

Living and Loving Freehouse

Missions:
To bring Alzheimer's inflicted clients from fear, despair, doubt, anger, anxiety, and mistrust to peace, hope, faith harmony, love, security, and trust.
To reflect the concept that THIS PLACE is "heaven on earth" either explicitly or implicitly. * See Note 1
To expose the opportunity to live and love life in spite of the overwhelmingly apparent dismay and despair.
To expose and focus on the emotional impact of the disease on the client and client's family.
To provide a new family and/or community for Alzheimer's afflicted people that loves them and lives purposefully with them unconditionally.
To provide a framework for accepting and understanding the fear and unknown. To expose the unknown and offer a way for achieving peace and security.
To collect robust data following the course of disease from the earliest time possible through the end of life. The product of this data should be manifold, ranging from essential products of daily living to products and services designed to enable and assist the journey. Not to mention the medical and psychological insights.

Brand Development:
The emergence of the Living and Loving Alzheimer's brand will start as underground, viral and grassroots. Once the infrastructure and products/services are ready to launch, we will launch a pivotal and revolutionary marketing campaign. The essential idea is to launch the brand through a mass media channel such as a movie, a large budget, high profile, Oscar worthy performance that will brand our hero with Alzheimer's. Some comparable examples include Forrest Gump, Philadelphia, A Beautiful Mind, Rain Man, and I Am Sam

BRAINSTORMING STREAM:

Rooms filled with OLED projections. Walls covered in OLED screens offering life simulation (our interpretation of "virtual reality" and "reality TV/programming"). Life simulation can reflect a client's historically correct life. It can offer "what if" scenarios and outcomes. It can allow the client to create his or her upcoming moments. Allow them to choose the moment they wish to experience now and increase the frequency with which you monitor their choice of direction.

Create a Living and Loving Videpkin series of entertainment options, including "HEY BUD!" and "Knuckles, the Friendly Madison Square Boxer".

Take all home video and photos of clients. Understand their life through sharing enough time with them that you effectively gather information. Put the pieces of information together into a Life Package and create products tailored to each client and eventually to the universalities that you can make very personal. These can include but not be limited by movies, books, magazines (or LNL-inspired improvements), video games, etc.

Models to study: current elderly care solutions - assisted living, long-term care, nursing home, retirement community, fraternities, casinos, Freemasons, Disney, Hershey - particularly the ideas of the men themselves, galleries, museums, sports complexes, schools

Products- bathroom solutions need to be completely rethought. Maybe some kind of clothing and toilet that are activated by Bluetooth? As a whole the place could be Bluetooth, or other, enabled so that when a client walks in the bathroom it automatically gets them bathroomed.

Building design could incorporate the OLED idea where the exterior of the building appears to each client what he wants his life voyage to be.

Did you always want to be a sailor? well, we have the days of the most fabulous explorers of history. you are christopher columbus my friend. you are. If you want them to be.

The Living and Loving Time Machine?

Philosophy-
In what I believe is most closely reflective of what I know about the Freemasons, Living and Loving Freehouse will be non-denominational, but the clients must profess either faith in a "Supreme Being" or a "Supreme Concept" or have hope that such is true but both has not felt it and promise the Freehouse its openness to feeling it. And if neither of those conditions can be professed, then the client must subscribe to love. To believe in the power of love to provide an abundance of joy. To want to not be scared and trust that Living and Loving will take you to peace.

We accept that memory loss is a particular fear. We understand that the disease leads to a social death that preceeds a physical one. We can only feel the pain of what it might be like as it changes the very nature of the emotions you feel. Moments feel like days. Days weeks. Eternity. When we are kids, weeks and months feel like epochs. What must it feel like to have memory and ability fall from the floor below you? We don't know. But we care more than anyone enough to imagine what would be very terrible and let ourselves feel that fear. So while we may not know exactly what happens we can to the best of our abilities and relentless efforts, we can feel the empathic pain you feel. And use our creative energies to redirect your pain and lift you from the depths below. We will reach you. We promise. We will come and get you and take you to that peace before you retire.

Thinking of it as a membership with "secret" components to each level of initiate. So that by the very end days, the last place you are with us, call it our interpretation of "hospice", we have flashed the love of your life before your eyes and you drift off peacefully into the light.

Some thoughts from Dec 6, 2008

A planned community for Alzheimers' patients and their families. It's a place of new family. The old family is seduced to be new family. The goal of the new family is to take the old patient and family and free them to peace for passing.

The Freehouse would be part of the school community. Perhaps barracks on school property. The residents would have relative access, if not directly, then by proximity the spirit of youth. The residents could help serve at sporting events. Be part of the school day. Hallway monitors. Lunch room monitors. Classroom assistants. Kids who want extra credit or preferably being demonstrated that it's important to care for and think of the elderly. To understand part of the "peace process".

Find school districts with lots of space. Renovate old school buildings into new Livin n' Lovin residential communities and build NEW state of the art schools incorporated into that spirit of planned community for the children and elderly (specifically Alzheimer's here, maybe ever, maybe only at first).

Find hearts of "Bohemia" where artists can access free studio space and whatever other incentives and be inspired by what they see within to create masterpieces to showcase in the LNL Gallery.

Some thoughts from Dec 21, 2008
A Freehome or Freehouse caters specifically to its clients' hopes and details. One possible modality is a living environment where spectacular historical events - whether global or personal yet distinctly universal - are played out each day. Each day is a new day, lived out as if it were happening that very moment. A running list of days to do will be included as follows:

1. His/her wedding day
2. The day Rome defeated Whoever
3. The day the pyramids were completed
4. Some random day in the life of Michaelangelo
5. Days of spectacular human achievement - put them there, let them feel the joy and inspiration of all the most inspirational days of history

Notes:
Note 1 - Wikipedia entry for "Heaven: Basic Concepts"
"While there are abundant and varied sources for conceptions of Heaven, the typical believer's view appears to depend largely on his religious tradition and particular sect. Some religions conceptualize Heaven as pertaining to some type of peaceful life after death related to the immortality of the soul. Heaven is generally construed as a place of happiness, sometimes eternal happiness. A psychological reading of sacred religious texts across cultures and throughout history would describe it as a term signifying a state of "full aliveness" or wholeness.

In ancient Judaism, the belief in Heaven and afterlife was connected with that of Sheol (mentioned in Isaiah 38:18, Psalms 6:5 and Job 7:7-10). Some scholars asserted that Sheol was an earlier concept, but this theory is not universally held. One later Jewish sect that maintained belief in a Resurrection of the dead was known as the Pharisees. Opposed to them were the Sadducees who denied the doctrine of Resurrection (Matt. 22:23). In most forms of Christianity, belief in the afterlife is professed in the major Creeds, such as the Nicene Creed, which states: "We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come."

Examples of the different terminology referencing the concept of "heaven", in the Christian Bible are:

the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:3), the kingdom of the Father (Matthew 13:43), life (Matthew 7:14), life everlasting (Matthew 19:16), the joy of the Lord (Matthew 25:21), great reward (Matthew 5:12), the kingdom of God (Mark 9:45), the kingdom of Christ (Luke 22:30), the house of the Father (John 14:2), city of God, the heavenly Jerusalem (Hebr., xii), the holy place (Hebrews 9:12; D. V. holies), paradise (2 Corinthians 12:4), incorruptible crown (1 Corinthians 9:25), crown of life (James 1:12), crown of justice (II Timothy iv, 8), crown of glory (1 Peter 5:4)

In Buddhism there are several heavens, all of which are still part of Samsara (illusionary reality). Those who accumulate good karma may be reborn[3] in one of them. However, their stay in the heaven is not eternal—eventually they will use up their good karma and will undergo a different rebirth into another realm, as humans, animals, or other beings. Because Heaven is temporary and part of Samsara, Buddhists focus more on escaping the cycle of rebirth and reaching enlightenment (Bodhi). In the native Chinese Confucian traditions Heaven (Tian) is an important concept, where the ancestors reside and from which emperors drew their mandate to rule in their dynastic propaganda, for example.

Some faiths teach that one enters heaven at the moment of death, while others teach that this occurs at a later time. Some of Christianity along with other major religions maintain that entry into Heaven awaits such time as, "When the form of this world has passed away." (*JPII)

[Titanic Mistake note: The Alzheimer's experience is such that a social death preempts a physical death and could feasibly lead to the induction of the Heaven process while still physically alive.]

Two related and often confused concepts of heaven in Christianity are better described as the "resurrection of the body", which is exclusively of Biblical origin, as contrasted with "the immortality of the soul", which is also evident in the Greek tradition. In the first concept, the soul does not enter heaven until the last judgement or the "end of time" when it (along with the body) is resurrected and judged. In the second concept, the soul goes to a heaven on another plane immediately after death. These two concepts are generally combined in the doctrine of the double judgement where the soul is judged once at death and goes to a temporary heaven, while awaiting a second and final physical judgement at the end of the world.(*" JPII, also see eschatology, afterlife)

In some early religions (such as the Ancient Egyptian faith), Heaven was a physical place far above the Earth in a "dark area" of space where there were no stars, basically beyond the Universe. Departed souls would undergo a literal journey to reach Heaven, along the way to which there could exist hazards and other entities attempting to deny the reaching of Heaven.

One popular medieval view of Heaven was that it existed as a physical place above the clouds and that God and the Angels were physically above, watching over man. Heaven as a physical place survived in the concept that it was located far out into space, and that the stars were "lights shining through from heaven".

Several works of written and filmed science fiction have plots in which Heaven can be reached by the living through technological means. An example is Disney film The Black Hole, in which a manned spacecraft found both Heaven (or another dimension) and Hell located at the bottom of a black hole.[4]

In Christianity it is believed that Heaven is a spiritual place, unreachable by humans and only to be entered after death, although it can hold physical things, such as the Ascension or Assumption.

Many of today's Biblical scholars, such as N. T. Wright, in tracing the concept of Heaven back to its Jewish roots, see Earth and Heaven as overlapping or interlocking. Heaven is known as God's space, his dimension, and is not a place that can be reached by human technology. This belief states that Heaven is where God lives and reigns whilst being active and working alongside people on Earth. One day when God restores all things, Heaven and Earth will be forever combined into the 'New Heavens' and 'New Earth'."

Posted by F.Newara at 11:28 AM | Permalink