Does a Duck Care when it Rains?

My father helped liberate this camp.

Does a duck care when it rains? I don't care. I love it. I can't help but to be happy when weather seems to make many others blue. See, I've lived the past 50 years in Southern California and New Mexico where we are lucky to get and annual deluge of 12 inches of rain, at least half that of Paris.

 So, what does a man that likes the rain do? He goes to a cemetery where the gloom strikes joy in his heart. That man is me. I went back to Pere Lachaise Cemetery to look specifically for three graves; Edith Piaf’s, Oscar Wilde’s, and an obligatory visit to the, overly revered, Jim Morrison’s.

 Jim Morrison is one of my all-time favorite artists... his

often-extemporary lyrics/performances and poetry were my style of Rock ‘n Roll, but I don’t worship the man. His tomb is merely a place where his old vehicle decays. I have mere reverence for his short life’s work. I feel much the same abut Oscar Wilde and Edith Piaf, but their tombs aren’t a shrine.

 
Edith Piaf’s was the humblest of the three. It was so modest it was difficult to find, even with the help of GPS. I had to ask a British man, who’d come from the general area where the GPS lady in my ears said it was, to assist me. He affirmed that it was hard to find because it was marked by a simple PF on an urn and in very fine print, her name was engraved. Sure enough, I’d passed it a couple of times.

 The Morrison tomb was made interesting enough by the fence around it. On the rails were pasted hundreds of stickers... names and images of rebellion like his life that a tomb could never tell of.

 Oscar Wilde’s was as dramatic as his life. He would have embraced the term “Flaming Fag” in a time homosexual men were still imprisoned for the crime of taking it in the ass and sucking another man’s dick. This was called Sodomy in legal terms. But he was like the queers I came to love in the sixties. Gay bars were taboo in those days and off limits to US Navy men. If a place is deemed off limits to the authorities, I had to be there. My best friend back then was gay. Richard and his friends were secretly so. I was a straight man in the gay bars and was introduced as “Rough Trade”. I was treated with respect.

 

I had so much fun with those men because their rebellion was liberating on the edge of society... hell, they gloried in being outside of society. I don’t think that these men would have liked to be deemed special in a way that the “Norms” would accept. A true rebel doesn’t seek approval, he seeks to be on the fringes where the risk is taken. They didn’t have parades. Their parades were in their hearts. They had the spirit of independence and nothing of victimhood could be found in any of them. This was so when they were the most victimized of all of us.

So much for that subject.

 I was also impressed by the variety of tombs throughout this city of the dead. Some were so old they were neglected and decaying. Others were occupied by the titled as well as the privileged nouveaux riche of the 18^th and 19^th and a few of the early 20^th centuries. The unique funerary sculptures there tells of the spirit of the era as much as the Eifel Tower does.

 One thing the rich and the poor... the artists, and those that don’t have a creative bone in the dust of their lives, have in common is that they are no longer there. Perhaps their spirit hovers but they, like the sunshine, are gone and will come back. The sack that; ate, shit, held their spirit, and created a culture that is also doomed to die in the 21^st century, is gone like the rain to. Therefore, I love walking in the rain and don’t care if is pours. It dampens the rich, the poor, the anonymous

masses, and Tibetan monks who get a Sky Burial in the Himalayas where the buzzards feast on their bones.