Time & Stance…

It’s not a matter of either really, is it?
Time…goes by….
Circumstances…never change….
Politics, methods, agendas might change….
For most of us, the day, that night, just stays the same….
Where was I?

I was securely tucked into a California bed that night, no doubt the window screen fully open, why not, there’s nothing to fear from window screens on August 9, 1969, is there?
Yes, the 60s were raging, if you pretended to take notice, Middle America didn’t much…I don’t think….
Knives, guns, sure, in the news, Vietnam, far off…not here, not of any real significance…anyways…..
Not to 10050 Cielo Drive anyways….
Not to any of us………..anyways….
Nancy Pitman COULD have been making sand castles on Malibu Beach…if she had chose to do so….
Malibu Barbie, after all, was patterned after Sharon Tate, who could have been her iconic idol, but wasn’t, in the end, Sharon became her enemy, a target she knew nothing about, but for the empty hatred she felt through The Soul…Charlie…and as we all know, Charlie then, nor now, just don’t surf…
How can so much go so wrong on just one summer night in one year…way back when….when we all thought nothing counted…when every little thing just did….
Sand castles, screened in windows…southern heat, ocean breezes, hot, humid oppressive coastal haze…it all seemed so natural that night, something we all could relate to, yet, the morning after, was anything but….
How many nights like that one have we all fell asleep, sound asleep…how many nights like that have we had a glass of wine with a close friend, talking on everything, and nothing…forgetting to lock the front door or shutting that dining room window…it happens, we happen…stuff happens….
Yet, we are not slashed and stabbed beyond repair, are we?
There is a time and stance for everything in Life, is there not?
But where, in all the photos of the beautiful Sharon Tate, am I supposed to fit a dirty, slimy image of a skeleton draped coffin? Where?
If beauty like that could exist and not exist now, then where am I?
Where am I?
Beauty as in innocence, beauty as in naiveté, beauty as in the face of God….
Only matched by the pure unadulterated evil in this world….
And the evil still breathes…while the dead innocent…don’t.
Maybe too maudlin tonight, maybe too much booze, maybe….
But the hurt is real.