Ours was daily mysterious,
sometimes near mystical,
rapture;
a sensual yet platonic
dorm-mate love affair,
within the only male grad student corridor
at SFSU.

He was the presumably straight Vietnam veteran
southern white good ol’ boy,
athletically studying Japanese,
with a gentle passion for young Japanese women.

Did his all things Japanese culture love
precede his Vietnam War experience,
or was this a response to West-East violence,
inviting vulnerability and compassion?
Embracing romantic remorse
and male responsibility for technology’s aggressive habits,
but,
regardless,
knowing constant passion for peace.
I don’t recall ever asking which came first.

I do recall his first words.

“Hi. Delighted to meet you,”
in a Louisiana-slash-MilitaryOfficerSchool
creolic mashed-up engaging smile
up across and through his raised blond eyebrows,
guileless,
or ruthlessly contrived,
“Ensign Jake Ruford,
Eastern Language student.”

Hi.
just Jerry,
gay epistemology student,
wondering why we are roommates
when I specifically said
“Anyone not homophobic.”
You would think Student Residential Services
at San Francisco State
would know what the word means.
Including probably not a straight Louisiana
military officer
even if he is Navy.

As he turned back toward his desk,
where he had been reading something that looked like a textbook
in an encyclopedic hard-bound scale
of inscrutability,
“Do you agree human nature
must have evolved from a bottom moral line
of eat or become stew?”

It seems we have this old reptilian thing
about eating our young and vulnerable under duress,
overpopulation or starvation
of a struggling to hunt and gather species,
especially before we figured out the matriarchal gathering part.

“I want to come back to those matriarchal parts later.
But why, do you think,
do we continue to see Golden Rule cooperativity,
WinWin strategies,
as contrasted favorably to WinLose
sacred MightMakesRight Traditions
of
Always eat others before they eat you?”

I don’t think WinLose,
much less LoseLose,
Eat first and fast,
because we all fall prey to death
in our not quite foreseeable future,
is authoritatively sacred,
or exegetically scriptural,
or fundamentalistically spiritual,
nor even evangelically Christian,
which was supposed to be about Good News
of a God defined most ecologically,
and satisfyingly,
as love and beauty
and polycultural Eden’s Original Creator.

“So you would give divine grace credit
for why we beg for multicultural Golden Rule self-governance
through WinWin inter-relationships,
rather than continue eating our young?”

No,
I think premeditated organized violence
through conscripting young adults
is how we continue eating our young.
I give God credit for non-patriarchal Golden Rules,
which do not include mutual assured violence,
nor Better Ballistics Bureaus.

But, I give the Sacred Gaia Hypothesis
and matriarchal creation stories and parables and paradigms
credit for existing
and any future
and most, if not all, past WinWin abundant inter-relationships,
rather than Mother Earth
eating Her DNA regenerative
Left and Right BiLaterally Balanced CoIntelligence,
synonymous with EcoLogical,
and oxymoronic as Military WinWin Intelligence.

“Left and Right,
like Yang and Yin.
Which is kind of the opposite
of LeftBrain dominant ideas like
Maybe it’s OK for hungry single Moms
to sell their children into slavery
to invest in better dying
through chemistry.”

Yes, and other xenophobic behaviors,
paranoias like homophobia
and patriarchal “just war” theories.

“How do you feel about Japanese ladies?”

Hopefully about the same way you feel about radically dipolar gay gentlemen
at the beginning of an AIDS epidemic.

“That’s an interesting, but dark, analogy.
Are you coffee or tea?”

I don’t think I intended an analogy.
Perhaps more of a eulogy
for continuing relationship
with much of anyone ever in risky futures.

Coffee.
If I have any idea where this inquisition came from
or might be heading.

“Oh, that’s good.
See, we already have something in common.”

Something.
Yes.

And so we went on from that first moment,
as if resuming where we had just left off,
or last eaten,
with an Ensign I had never hoped to meet,
much less eat,
and would never wish to know a last farewell.

Two travelers
along love’s mysterious,
sometimes mystically ambiguous
journey,
soldiering on.

Better thriving together,
than surviving inscrutable textbooks
apart.