History

Pete Buttigieg Announces

/ fearsomebeard / 4 Comments

Yes he did!

It’s official. He made history.

Mayor Pete really makes sense. He has our support.

Pete Buttigieg 2020

Text PETE to 25859 to show your support and to get involved. We did.

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A breath of fresh air

/ fearsomebeard / 3 Comments

If you haven’t yet listened to Mayor Pete here is your chance in a candid, honest and refreshing interview.

Pete Buttigieg, he’s got our attention.

Veterans Day 2018

/ fearsomebeard / 1 Comment

The Music used in the attached video is from my childhood. I remember it playing at the swim club during summer as well as emanating from behind my older brother’s closed bedroom door. I always loved this tune.

My childhood was innocent. I thought people always landed on the moon. I come to find out later that the moonlanding I watched was the first ever. I thought Seasame Street and color televisions had always exhisted. Turns out that season of Seasame Street I was watching in 1969 was the very first season, and that color TV we had was the first my parents had ever owned.

I hated war. Vietnam reinforced that fact. The TV showed horrible scenes. I didn’t understand why people had to do such destructive things. It was wrong. I knew it was. Innocence tainted.

My uncle was in Vietnam. My father and another uncle served in the Korean era. My father’s uncles served in WWII and his father’s uncles in WWI. War stole innocence. War destroyed lives.

My brothers and I avoided the service. No war drafted us nor demanded our service.

Even though I hate war, I respect and I wish to honor those who serve. The serve their country. They serve their family, community, neighbors and each other. They didn’t start nor cause any war. Those who serve do so for a common good of service to something greater than themselves.

I am deeply grateful.

If you served, either in war or hopefully in peace, I thank you.

Clarity

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Vote.

I find it hard to believe I actually have to post this. It’s clearly written yet orders are being prepared for signature to directly violate this very article.

I’ll say it again, Vote.

Vote because the validity of the U.S. constitution depends on it.

Capital Treasures

/ fearsomebeard / 6 Comments

As we sit boarding our stopover flight in Denver, memories of the past week of travels fill Fearsome’s brain. He asked that I post a few pics to document a few of his favorites.

Easter at the National Cathedral

Spring gardens at Dumbarton Oaks

Cezanne 

Pollack

Nickson

Warhol

Hopper

A Leader

An Inspiration

A Cause

May we never forget the cause. May we pick up the baton and continue forward.

A dream

/ fearsomebeard / 4 Comments

As a young teenage boy I dreamed. I also feared.

I feared that my dream of being able to be part of the late 1970s Castro Street Gay Scene in San Fransisco wouldn’t ever come to fruition. Still I dreamed and I hoped I would be part of it one day.

The 1980s came and I came out, graduated from high school then started college. I still dreamed. Then an epidemic spread and gay men were dying. Not only dying but dropping like flies of horrific painful deaths. The AIDS epidemic had started in San Fransisco and New York. My dream dimmed, flickered and died out.

Gay society, as it had evolved, died along with the casualties of 100’s of thousands of men in the prime of their life. Or so it seemed.

Life in my hometown isolated away from the gay epicenters became safe. California was far away. I had never been and thus made no plans to go.

Later on life would take another path and California would become my home. San Fransisco and L.A would become my playgrounds just north of my San Diego home. However this post isn’t about that turn of events and eventual blessings. This post is about a lifestyle from a part of history.

My understanding of it is that in the late 1960s, before my childhood memory kicks into consistency, San Fransisco became a social experiment. It became a place of refuge, expression, dissonance, art, rebellion, experimentation and change. Born of this era the later 1970’s sexual revolution would allow gay lifestyle to flourish, especially in San Fransisco. It was this 1960s era in this enlightened place that would change minds and broaden the potential of a society that was to come.

Today I stumbled upon this historical clip. At this moment I pause, reflect and feel gratitude for those who expressed themselves. Expressed themselves not only so they could live an open honest authentic life, but that others may follow their newly emblazoned path.

Their path helped us get to where we are today. May their path also help us to continue and go to many new, better and brighter places in our future.

Never loose sight. Never stop dreaming. Don’t ever loose hope. Start by enlightening yourself, then those around yourself.

MLK

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“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” — then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

…Martin Luther King Jr  …April 1963