Raymond, Scott, and Kurt work on show in SF, sister Linda reports she fed them spaghetti dinner

The header above kind of reflects how I feel at the moment. I think the horse represents Raymond getting ready to do still another show with more wear and tear on his system. He has not really had a steady job which must feel rather scarey. I am thinking that eventually he might want to return to Phoenix for the winter months, a city he knows well, as his health problems might worsen and he will need to find jobs he can do until he is to the age of retirement or is disabled, whichever comes first. These were my circumstances when I was in my late forties. I have been talking to some of these younger guys living here who had to seek disability. My neighbor is 49 and back problems plagued him until it was suggested he try for disability. He just moved in here a few months ago. Until then he drove a cab, did whatever jobs he could find between being down with his back.
There are hard times to be struggling with health problems, but life goes on, and things happen no matter whether the economy is good or bad. My neighbor lives in a one room apartment and is happy to have that. Some of these apartments are quite small, which male residents find quite adequate. I had so many books and manuscripts I requested a one bedroom.
I think everyone past fifty has to think about what they might have to do if their overall health does not last until retirement age. For many I know it is panic city. At first. But it is not an uncommon thing to have health problems before sixty. I would say the fifties can be quite precarious. Some workers might feel they are barely making it with what they are contending with. But once problems are faced and dealt with, there can be a measure of relief. The important thing is to recognize that this too will pass, as depression can be just as crippling as anything else.
I do think we have to deal with the cards that have been dealt us and take an optimistic attitude about what lies ahead. We will get through it!
I have told Raymond should he get to that point he can always come and live at the Westward Ho with me! This is where disabled guys his age and younger want to live. It is in the heart of the city, a place with ambience and a rich history.
I know he is still raring to go now, but I also know he cannot carry the heavy load that full time teachers get to shoulder regardless of age. That got to be too much, so he has to be careful now about staying within his limitations. Once you have had health problems, that becomes very important. You can go on quite a while, if you work using moderation!
So I am hoping that insomnia and panic attacks will not plague him during this two week run in San Francisco. I am sending up a prayer for him to prevail with a show that will touch people and help them to face the uncertainties of old age. Raymond's dad, the subject of this show, hit panic city I am sure when he disappeared into the desert nearly four years ago and has not been seen since. He had gotten his truck stuck, all four wheels, and having known him so well, I think he would have gone into a dreadful mental state over a relatively minor crisis. His reaction to crisis could become a bigger problem than what had originally gone wrong. Raymond cannot help but have inherited some of his characteristics as well as some of my own. If his dad got upset enough he would go into kind of a fugue state and just start walking. If he headed out into the desert, he could have walked miles before he came out of it.
Of course Raymond doesn't have fugue states! He stops short.
But anyway his show is very realistic about how a man can just disappear if he decides he can't solve his problems. We don't want that! There is a lesson to be learned here about keeping calm, talking, staying connected, and never ever thinking you have become too much of a burden and just as well end it all!
So I am offering up a prayer for calm here and moderation, and faith in the art of theater which Raymond has studied so many years. Experience will help him to find the excitement and the power once more in a play. He is good.

Studying Michael Jackson

This is what I think we will be doing for quite a few years to come, trying to understand what really happened. I have just been watching the Martin Bashir interviews of Michael, plus excerpts from what he said on a morning show interview very recently. I have also watched several videos of the behind the scenes documentary that Michael made of the same Brashir's interview which of course was not edited the same way.
I have studied many men accused of child molestation, tried to find out as much as I could, primarily because either they had targeted me as a child or later on one of my kids. I had one man arrested who brazenly grabbed my daughter and molested her in a space of a few seconds while he was walking through the hallway to the exit door. He was very drunk and I had suggested he leave. My sister who was there saw him turn and go into the bedroom where my daughter and her daughter were playing. He had always acted quite fascinated with my daughter who was a beautiful little girl, but I was very wary of him because his own daughter had left home, when she had barely become a teen, saying he had been molesting her. As far as I know she never returned home again
I was quite surprised to find that he was a brilliant, witty, charming man, when I got more closely acquainted with him, but always drinking. I decided to try to get to know him better for the sake of his kids. He was in the community to stay so I thought it was better to start off trying to be friends with him. I have been criticized for doing this, by my daughter especially, but I don't think ignoring a suspected child molester right in your own community is safe either. I did cut off relations with him when he went so far that I did not think it was safe to continue to be friends with him. I told him he had violated the friendship. But he would always know that I spent time trying to get his side of the story.
So then here he was taking advantage of a very small window of opportunity to grab up my 5 year old daughter and briefly molest her before my sister Ann entered the room and ordered him out. I then had him arrested, and he was ordered to have therapy to escape a jail sentence. He had an important government job and was flown all over the country to solve computer problems. It was only by complying to his sentence that he escaped being fired, but my daughter, 5, had to testify in court. I did not talk to him after that for about five years, and then through a mutual friend, we somewhat resumed talking, but I was even more wary, and it was not long until he did something that was unacceptable, again involving my daughter who continued to fascinate him in a sexual way. His friend, now dead, and not a sterling character himself, said he was obssessed with underage girls.
So few molesters had ever been charged in that country, I thought having him arrested was progress, only I don't think my daughter thought of it like that. I had finally surfaced my story of being molested at 5, only partially at 8, but my molester disappeared as though off the face of the earth 2 months later. I did not know if he had been murdered or what. Only years later did I hear a story that he had been shot at just before he disappeared.
The charming pedofile who molested my son and any number of boys his age during his fairly long criminal career was never charged once or arrested for child molestation. My son did not admit to me that molestation had taken place until he was in his 30's, saying that was a hard thing for a boy to admit. That was one reason I acted when my daughter was molested and had the man arrested. He had gotten away with molesting his own daughter, I thought, so he was not going to get away with molesting mine.
I just did not think my father would have waited for the law to take care of my molester. I feared he would murder him, partly because of his own involvment in a homosexual affair with him. I thought fear of exposure would have made him more murderous. This man was given to very obscene remarks, to say nothing of molesting a 5 year old, so I thought my dad would fear he would expose him if he was arrested, and their affair. This might have seemed unthinkable and unacceptable to him, I thought, given the times, and as secretive as anybody gay was, especially those married to women. You have to remember I heard my dad threaten to kill a man who had rustled his cattle. He first tried to beat him up, and then he was going for his gun, and this man had gotten a five year jail sentence in court for the rustling and was only home taking care of his affairs when my dad spotted him. My mother kept screaming at my dad that he would go to jail, too, if he murdered him!
I think that what needs to be determined if possible is whether Michael ever crossed the line into actual sexual behavior with children staying over with him. I think the very fact that he was so focused on children, and that he wanted to sleep with them was abnormal, which I dont think he ever could acknowledge. I don't think Michael thought that this focus on children was a means of sexual excitement to him. More than one woman called him asexual. He apparently had to force himself to be sexual with women, and he stated very adamantly that he was not gay, but I think that he did not recognize perhaps the sexual aspect of the attraction children had for him. And that he was possibly always flirting with this attraction, trying, of course, to keep it in check.
Now this is exactly what anyone who is attracted to children needs to do, is to be very careful to keep the attraction from finding expression. On camera Michael insists that sleeping with children even not his own was a loving caring gesture on his part, and he defends it, but does not seem to realize that an adult male sleeping with them may not have been what these children needed, but would have not been able to say so, perhaps. Other adults would know that this was probably a 'kindness' that Michael needed to deny himself the pleasure of giving, which he never seemed to see.
Adults sleeping together is strongly associated with having sex, and it would have been hard for children not to have been conditioned this way, so the very fact that this bacame something Michael wanted to do and defended tells me that he had not accepted the limitions that he needed to impose on himsell. It was like he was not listening to all the reasons he needed to be more cautious and was not accepting them, so even though I found for example his generosity in creating Neverland and giving visits there as a gift to many children wonderful, I still had to note a disturbing aspect to his thinking. Some child molesters I have liked very much, but I always had to stay wary. I think we have to stay wary so as not to be seduced ourselves by the charm of some who are determined to do their own thing. And will not listening to any reasoning that might suggest that what they say is loving and 'pure' really isn't.