Gratuitous Holiday Cuteness...

Miss Xmas!

A Christmas Outfit...for reals

About which, more later. In the meantime, read "A Dangerous Lag In the Holiday".

Later. The above is what you get if you use Google Images, searching for "women's Christmas outfits". Actually, what you get is babes in Santa-slut outfits gently flicking a whip, round-faced mommies in Mrs. Claus red flannel nightgowns and ruffly mobcaps, and this one. Dress? Housecoat? Fiercely nuts? You decide. I love the notion of a hard-charging Christmas mom stumping into the family Christmas morning on her big square gift-wrapped feet. Even better, I like to think of her in the kitchen, whipping up her special Holiday Waffle Surprise while dressed as a tree. But this post isn't about beating up people who have delusions of Christmas.

Or maybe it is.

When your own Writer to the Stars was just a young twinkler, she took a job at one of the big DC tony department stores at the start of The Holiday, that is to say, before Hallowe'en. Here I'll segue off into a chunk of one of my short stories, since it sums up what the job entailed:

When you were at your most naive and, you hope, your stupidest, you took a job as Miss Christmas in a DC department store. You weren't the only one. There were swarms of Miss Christmases, a few as young and dumb as you were, a few who were young but hard-eyed, and a few who were young but already exuded a slutty passivity. Being Miss Christmas called for all of you to dress like a package: to hide your torsos in a brightly wrapped box, to wear red tights and high heels, to tie bows and gift cards around your necks and to top your heads with fake fuzzy poinsettias.

By October, the store had launched a flotilla of Miss Christmases throughout the store. Whenever a man appeared (and you were ordered only to wait on men), you were to clop over to him rustling seductively in your box, and announce, "I'm your Miss Christmas! May I help you with your Christmas shopping?" No matter how vile the response, you were supposed to whisk him through one expensive department after another, cajoling him into spending, spending, spending. Each Miss Christmas had to make $200 a day, which meant, in 1964 dollars, a lot of men.

Your own station was by the E Street door, where timed squirts of Elizabeth Arden's Blue Grass spattered over you at three minute intervals. Somehow, reeking like a chorus boy, your box becoming more battered by the week, your poinsettia more frowzy, you managed to live through three exhausting months as Miss Christmas. Out of the gray, anonymous hordes, you still recall helping Avril Harriman, the entire cotton lobby, and a whooping drunken sailor. After work, in The Blue Mirror Bar, drinking whiskey sours, playing Pretty Woman over and over on the jukebox, you sat collapsed in a tufted booth, feeling assailed, dented, much worse for wear.

You gave up your cherished dream of being a high-priced call girl or, for that matter, any other occupation involving high heels.

Excerpt from: What A Job Will Do

Yeah. Retail. It sucked.

A Dangerous Lag In the Holiday...

The Twosome Blanket from Iceland

What with honest toilers getting laid off from their cube farm jobs, the assembly line, or their sore-footed retail labors, I sense a dangerous lull in The Holiday festivities. This quietus used to be taken up with enforced jollity like attending the Team Lunch at Steak and Ale, donating gifts for crack babies, and listening to co-worker carolers howl out some version of Little Drummer Boy. When we weren't getting hammered by Xmas cheer at work, you could find us at home cooking up a mega-casserole for The Division's big noontime spread. And if we weren't layering glop into a glass dish, wrapping crack-baby gifts, or staggering back from a hi-carb meal at El Fenix, we were plotting a bruising mall visit to Christmas shop.

But we're all broke and fired now, aren't we? And if we're not fired, we're broke, and if we're not broke, we're about to be fired. With worry afoot, we can't scamper through the stores the way we once did, grabbing lavish gifts with all the thought of a meth-amped gerbil. The usual buzzy Holiday impetus is stalled-out, and on a national scale too. This current dead time makes me fearful for my fellow citizens who are, no doubt, trolling the Internet on a misguided quest for the cheap and unusual gift. Or, worse, just the stunningly unusual gift (see above).

After many years as an artist, I've learned that most situations don't require a lot of creativity and that there are numerous occasions when creativity is to be strongly eschewed. The Holiday is one. Forget what the hag-mags tell you. Your beloved really doesn't want a hand-scrawled certificate promising 100 Hugs! Nor will she want the Tater Mitts (shown below).

Tater Mitts

The Tater Mitts, which are both cheap and unusual, violate the no creativity dictum that operates in most real-life situations. Somewhere around the Bronze Age, our ancestors learned how to chisel the hide off a potato using a knife and thought, Okay. Got that one knocked. Since then, not too many variations on the chore have been needed. The same, perhaps, goes for Toilet Candy (below).

Toilet Candy

I haven't noticed that either small children or adults need to be snookered into eating candy, so the logic behind this novelty eludes me. I'll give a quick product description. The toilet proper is filled with two flavor choices of lumpy powder--grape or watermelon, or going by color alone, either green or pale blue. Since green gives rise to some unspeakable toilet-associations, I suggest blue which, at least, connotes that perpetual blue toilet cleaner found in some bathrooms.The product also comes with two mini-toilet plungers. To consume, you lick a plunger, stick it in the bowl, lick it off, and repeat. When I first came across this, I wondered who on earth the target consumer might be, but on closer examination, I think I know: people who eat out of toilets.

Tell me I'm wrong.

Twits for The Holiday...

Blythe Danner, American Actress

Quickly, quickly, I need to note that Blythe Danner is not a twit; she's the mother of a twit, though, through no fault of her own. With my worldview of life as chaos, I consider twits to be born, not made. And here I refer to her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow, whom I consider a wide spectrum twit and launcher of a deeply offensive self-serving blog called GOOP.com. GOOP has yoga/decorating/vegetarian/fashion/kabbalah advice for those with globs of money and zero self-awareness. I imagine nearly everyone on the planet can live their lives in some manageable fashion without either GOOP or Gwyneth, and will probably do so. I do, however, have the sinking feeling that both GOOP and Gwyneth will have some expensive ideas for The Holiday.

It's impossible for me to imagine Blythe launching anything like GOOP or, for that matter, giving birth to Gwyneth, although by all accounts she loves her dearly.

I went to school with Blythe, when I attended Bard College. She was several years ahead of me and looked only slightly like the picture above. I wish I could find a picture of the way she looked at Bard, but haven't been able to. Her dirty-blonde hair hung well below her butt in a ragged coiling dryish mass and she wore incredibly baggy jeans rolled up on her shins, coupled with a t-shirt and no make-up. Her skin always looked healthy but chapped. By appearances, she was a kick-ass bohemian and a hard-working one at that. For her senior project she appeared in a play, the name of which I never learned, but I do know that a bunch of agents came up from the city to see her. Even then she was enough of a celebrity that whenever she passed by, someone would nudge me in the ribs, and whisper, "That's Blythe Danner."

I was interested in observing Blythe because she was like a lot of the students I ran into at Bard: a busy, very young professional. Her dad, however, was a bank executive, and so, like me, she also belonged to a seeming minority at Bard: kids with parents who worked in offices. Most of the students I bumped into had parents who worked in daytime soap operas, were fortune-tellers, poets, or hard-core communists. If these parents had fights with their kids, it was usually because they felt their children didn't care enough about the proletariat or the Socialist Party.

But my point here is that Blythe labored like a stevedore and deserved every break she got. Her twit-daughter, on the other hand, seems to feel that those who aren't communing daily with their aromatherapist are, well, somehow lacking. In any role I've ever seen Blythe take on, she always displays a kind of intelligent grittiness that I've never, ever seen in Gwyneth. Somehow Blythe got a snootful of reality and her daughter never did.

Of course the times were different then. Hard-nosed realism was more prized; bohemia wasn't a life-style choice, it was something that just took form around certain people. We may be getting back to something akin to those times, a chancy place I call Edge City.

It produced one good actress, at least. And I've noticed something else.

Easy times never make much worth having.

Gifties continued...

Brooch by Bettina Speckner 2001
Photo Etching on Zinc, Set in Fine Gold
with black diamonds

Bettina Speckner's jewelry is the best argument I know for making a ton of money. She's my favorite jeweler for an assortment of reasons, most of them arty, so bear with me here. First, she's an odd kind of deconstructivist, and I love me some ironic deconstructivists wherever I find them. Her pieces show you how they're made, while at the same time, they're a narrative on jewelry in general, explaining how jewelry functions as a keepsake, a reminder, and a collection of precious materials. Here, let me show you another couple of pieces.

Brooch by Bettina Speckner 2005
Photo Etching on Zinc, Set in Fine Gold


Brooch by Bettina Speckner 2003
Photo Etching on Zinc, Set in Silver
with Gray Pearls

There's also a kind of gloomy memorial nuttiness about her work. They remind me of the Victorian funereal hair jewelry I used to see at my grandfather's house. This was truly creepy stuff in the best creepy death-worshiping Victorian tradition. Head hair was collected from the dearly departed, then macramed into strange intricate knots and chains, then set into rose gold fittings with cut rubies added for contrast. The stuff made me feel crawly just looking at it. But Bettina's work takes the memorial idea and turns it on its head in a couple of ways. Sometimes she uses an "unworthy" subject; see cow above, and elevates it with precious metals and beautifully matched pearls. Sommetimes she goes for broke and takes an antique photo, one of those that's so antique you can't imagine that a human ever lived outside the image (See below), then decks it out with raw diamonds.

Brooch by Bettina Speckner 2003
Ferrotype; Silver; Split Raw Diamonds

She often tosses in some strange bit of offhandedness like the little hats floating below the subject in the brooch pictured above, or the globs of gold scattered on her 2005 brooch.

If you're cudgeling your head, trying to think up an anonymous gift for your Writer to the Stars, head on over to Bettina Speckner. Any one of her pieces would be a prize and I'd wear it every day. Otherwise, I may have to write a book and squander aaaallll the advance money.

Be worth it though.

Gifts that keep on giving...

A Motorcycle Cozy

Other than fudge, the gifts I've made tend to have the sweaty fingerprints of what my mother called, Made By Loving Hands At Home. You already know what I'm talking about. Long endless stretched out scarves, dishtowels embroidered with wavering stitches, lumpy needlepoint wrapped around bricks. Besides coming from a long line of cheapies, I come from a long line of talented needle-women, of which I am not one nor will I ever be. Even as a child, when given my Xmas-gift-to-make, I'd think, Big waste of time. Then I'd sit there splitting embroidery thread, pricking my fingers, getting brownish dots of blood over the linen, feeling sorry for my grandparents, who were the recipients-to-be of whatever tangled mess I conjured.

The woman who made the motorcycle cozie belongs to a new breed. She's an extreme knitter, one of a number of subversive anti-girlie craftspeople. You can see quite a lot of these women's work on the Art For Housewives site at http://housewife.splinder.com. This makes a lot of sense to me. There are plenty of oddball connections between revolution and weaving, since threading a loom is irritating and time consuming. Sitting over a bitterly repetitious task allows plenty of time for brooding and plotting. It's no accident in Tale of Two Cities that Madame DeFarge tirelessly knits, watching the carnage of the revolution tick on. Her clicking needles become a kind of metronome for the gathering violence.

There are some extreme embroiderers too. I think my attitude towards embroidery might have been a bit more, well, open if I'd known I could do something like this:

Cotton Square By Andrea Dezsö
from the Exhibition "Pricked"

Or this:

Cotton Square By Andrea Dezsö
from the Exhibition "Pricked"

Or if I could knit something like this: (from the show "Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting"...)

David Cole's "The Money Dress"
is made from 879 U.S. $1 bills cut
into 1/8" stripes and woven together.

or...

How about those for Christmas gifties?

Yeah, me too.

Xmas rapping....

This is a Japanese job aid that accompanies a chunk of cloth used for wrapping gifts. I have no idea why my family didn't adopt this idea wholesale. Could be because Japan was a very different place than it is today, and nothing Japanese was considered particularly good. In fact, Made In Japan was synonymous with Built Like Crap. But in the 50's, the whole country was still something of a smoldering heap, thanks to us bombing them into rubble during WWII. Crap or not, this little genius how-to-wrap diagram could have saved my family endless heartache.

A friend of mine remarked that if she had gotten a roll of Scotch tape for Christmas, she'd have been divinely happy. "I just figured it had to be a high dollar item, since my parents wouldn't buy it." Neither would mine, and I came from a family equally WASP-y. My parents seemed to feel that doing something in the most inconvenient way possible was character building. So, no Scotch tape, no pre-tied bows, no name tags. My parents would spring for a few rolls of thick cut-rate wrapping paper and dig out the household's single pair of paper shears, and then we were all off to the races wrapping gifts.

My mother and father, their characters already built, could actually make our non-system work. They carefully calculated the exact amount of paper needed, cut out a neat rectangle, bent it around the gift, and then called for my sister or me. Our job was to hold down the wrapping paper while my parents tied it with the thin crinkly gift ribbon they always bought. During the tying part, my sister and I had to hold the ribbon in place with our thumbs, while my parents knotted it into place, usually hurtfully catching our fingers and thumbs. For gift tags, they used left-over calling cards, engraved with my mother's maiden name, or they snipped them out of index cards. By holding the paper shears open and whipping them down the length of a trailing bit of ribbon, my mother could magically create curls.

All this took adult brawn and know-how and was clearly beyond my sister's and my abilities. Nor could we make up for a lack of Scotch tape by using lots of ribbon. Gift wrap supplies were rationed out like war-time luxury goods. Once Christmas day was over, my mother carefully ironed the nicer-looking wrap for the following year, as did her mother. I like to think I've broken our family's dysfunctional cycle, because I tear off wrapping paper with abandon, although I'm known to recycle gift bags.

I've puzzled over my parents' penny-pinching ways and can't lay them at any particular door. They were both products of The Great Depression, but came from well-off families. As I've said in an earlier post, my mother was fairly sure she ate horse at a couple of dinners, but otherwise she, like my father, didn't suffer the way most of the country did.

Squeezing a nickle seemed to come naturally to all of us. One of my aunts cut the fronts off all the Christmas cards she got, glued them to a piece of red or green construction paper and sent them out as her own cards. It was not unusual to receive a card from her that you'd actually sent her to begin with. Another uncle sent as gifts, the craft items he'd made while in the loony bin. I remember two sand-cast lead dinosaurs he gave me, and three hand-knit wash cloths that weighed in at about ten pounds when wet. He also made me a doll that had such a palpably evil face that my father threw it in front of an on-coming train.

Perhaps my uncle wasn't so much nutty, as thrifty in his gift-giving. And perhaps such uber-thriftiness is also my right and just Scottish heritage.

As Hemingway says, Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?

Getting ready for The Holiday...

Maybe it's because I was a depressed sort of kid to begin with, but I can't remember ever making a snowman that didn't wind up shop-worn, dirty, and featureless: a dud, in other words. In fairness, our little household wasn't the sort that had an extra floppy fedora and trailing scarf just waiting for Frosty. And my mother wasn't about to fork over a carrot for a snowman's nose. "Just use a rock," she'd say, not looking up from the ironing.

I was fine with that. The only reason I went outside and beavered at building a snowman was because that's what kids did, but my heart was never in it. I preferred to stay curled up on my bed, reading The Borrowers for the 800th time, but my mom always booted me out for my fresh air quota, snow or no snow.

In the winter, I was even less enthusiastic about our Christmas projects at school. They were always the same: the mural entitled Christmas in Other Lands, the potato-print wrapping paper done with blobby tempera paint, the gift for your parents (about which, more later), and the talentless classroom pageant.

The gift business always defeated me. From the time I was a sprat, my mother repeated, year after year, that homemade gifts were the best gifts of all. Although she was my mother, early on I suspected this wasn't true. I didn't think she was deliberately lying, but I decided she must be incredibly self-deluded. If homemade gifts were the best gifts of all, why didn't department stores have massive displays of wavy-looking lumpy woven potholders? Why didn't the downtown Garfinkel's drape its windows with ineptly embroidered dishtowels and set out trays decked with badly-made seashell jewelry?

Usually, with a resigned sigh, I could hand over whatever atrocity I had crafted to a theatrically delighted parent or grandparent. But one year I couldn't. It was the year my fourth grade gift-making was hijacked by The Traveling Art Teacher. The Traveling Art Teacher wasn't often seen but was still universally loathed for her fascistic coloring system and her strange, hideous clothes. "No! No! No! No! No!" she would yell, often at me. Then peering through her slanting cat's eye glasses, she would declare, "Grass is green like this," and she'd scribble a few lines with the most unnatural lime-green Binney-Smith had yet devised. "Grass is always green, tree leaves are always green, skies are always blue, and the sun is always yellow," she'd remind us decisively, while we all nodded obediently, certain she was full of shit. Some arguments aren't worth having, and our fourth grade class already knew that much.

This particular gift-making year, The Traveling Art Teacher instructed us to bring a phonograph record from home and, as was her way, refused to tell us why. "It's a surprise!" she twinkled, fingering her awful handmade ceramic necklace. Maybe it was a surprise to her, but for us it was a day's work chiseling a phonograph record out of our parents for no good reason. But somehow, all of us managed to grub up a phonograph record and bring it to class.

On the appointed day, The Traveling Art Teacher had already set up a little workshop at the front of the class, with our own teacher, Miss Clemons, assisting. On one table, there was a hot plate and oven mitts, while the other table was covered with newspaper and sported three colors of spray paint: silver, gold, and red. The more adventurous of us thought we were actually going to be allowed to spray paint something, and an excited twitter rippled through the class, and was savagely quashed. As it turned out, this was just an assembly-line job.

We stood in line with our phonograph record, mutely handed it to The Traveling Art Teacher, who softened it over the hot plate. At a certain point in the heating, she bent up the record so it had four sides. We were then directed to Miss Clemons who stood by the spray paint and who asked us what color we wanted. Most of us picked gold, a few picked silver, and hardly anyone except me picked red. I thought the gold and silver looked cheap, but was too polite to say so.

Picking up a can, Miss Clemons would woosh our record so it was covered on all sides with gold paint. When the first two of these objects were finished, our class stared at results dumbly, and looked at each other. Do you know what it is? we mouthed. "Sillies! It's a candy dish!" The Traveling Art Teacher squealed. The suck-ups grinned like fools and said, "Oh, yeah! Sure!" while the rest of us wondered what kind of candy dish came with a hole in the bottom and a label.

I still remember trudging home with my candy dish. It was hideous, I knew it was hideous and I knew my parents would think it was hideous. They might lie and exclaim over it, but then it would disappear into some closet with my other crappy-looking homemade gifts. I didn't mind that. I knew I made terrible presents; I was just a child. What did they expect? It was my parent's facial expressions I couldn't tolerate: that rictus of distaste before they caught themselves and pasted on a phony-baloney smile. Christ, I'm just a child, I muttered under my breath,What do they expect?

A very large crack loomed in the sidewalk before me. Somehow my toe caught it and before I could catch myself, I fell heavily, careful to land on my candy dish. It shattered into a hundred pieces, which I gathered up. I would show the shards to my mother, maybe even squeeze out a tear, and say I made it for you! For Christmas! And now look! My mother would look at the ruins with a mixture of relief and bewilderment. Never mind, she'd say, it's the thought that counts.

It was a point on which we could both agree.

Silver bells...

I stopped by Marshall's today to pick up a couple of chachka's for a friend's newly remodeled bathroom. The store wasn't crammed with customers, but it was crammed with stuff, Christmas stuff. Even in the middle of a very warm, no-coat, Dallas November day...warm enough that I popped a sweat just driving over...it's still Xmas Time in the City. Ting-a-ling.

As I glanced around at all the packaged-for-gift-giving glop, I imagined the way it's all going to look by the big day: shop-worn, creased, dingy, and missing some crucial parts. Yeah. You got it. I've worked Christmas retail, many, many times, and therein lies a tale, but not right now.

While I was standing in line to pay for my almond soap and body butter, several aisles over, a shopper suddenly went batshit. "I'VE LOST MY PURSE!" she hollered, while the rest of us stiffened, and glanced around, maybe wondering if it was somehow lying on the floor near us. "IT WAS RIGHT HERE AND NOW IT'S NOT!" the woman screamed. Several people got out of line and ran over to her. "I BET SOMEONE JUST GRABBED IT! JUST STOLE MY PURSE!" the woman yelled, waving her arms around. Two managers left the Customer Service booth and headed her way.

Meanwhile, the lady cop behind me said, "You need to hang it across you. Yeah. Like this lady here." She pointed to me, while several people craned to get a good look. I had a messenger bag slung crosswise over my chest. "Right here," said the lady cop, gesturing towards me. "At's what I'm talkin' about, baby." My body butter and soap were rung up and I swiped my card quickly. I was also the poster girl of purse-wearers at our Crime Stop meetings, always lavishly praised by the visiting beat cop, and asked to take a bow. I didn't feel like explaining I was wearing my bag the same way when I got mugged, my purse grabbed, my ass kicked and, ultimately, my hip replaced. At's what I'm talkin' about, baby. Yeah.

"I FOUND MY PURSE!" I heard the lost-purse lady hollering as I pushed out of Marshalls, "IT WAS RIGHT HERE ALL THE TIME!" But I didn't look back. I was busily remembering my father's branch of the family and the way they Christmas shopped. It was a branch of the family that was strange anyway, but, most intriguing to me, they operated on no set schedule or any rules at all, for that matter. As a child of six, I might be affably offered a cigarette by one or another adult as I passed their armchair. Dinner could be served at three in the afternoon, or ten at night. There were no bedtimes. If you woke three in the morning, there was always someone up, maybe thoughtfully frying a hamburger patty in the kitchen.

When the holidays arrived, my father's family took no notice. Nothing was decorated. No cards were sent. Then, at eight o'clock or so, on Christmas Eve, my grandfather would slap his knees decisively and stand up, signaling the rest of the family to get to their feet. Everyone would troop out to the garage for a trip to the drug store, which was generally the only thing still open back then. Dusty gift boxes of My Sin, including the soap-on-a-rope, were hastily purchased, as were ball-point pens, and a checkers board plus pieces. It was thought that office supplies made fine gifts too, so a stapler was added to the pile along with a gardening trowel. Nothing was ever gift wrapped. On Christmas Day, one wrinkly brown bag or other would be yours, along with the sales receipt.

I don't remember ever being disappointed; I thought it was a splendid way to get through the holidays without mess or stress. Actually, it was probably those ancient Ur-memories of drug-store gifts that allowed me to give up on Christmas completely.

And sooner or later, I had to give up on Christmas. It made me insane. But that's a whole other radio show.

There are fruitcakes and then, by God, there are fruitcakes...

Fruitcake with marzipan elephants

I had a reader take issue with me regarding fruitcakes (check out my last post). I made some throwaway remark that led my reader to think I was anti-fruitcake, which is not the case at all. I am only against some fruitcakes, generally the kind it's possible to buy on the open fruitcake market.

Since I have the attention-span of a fruit fly myself, I decided to put off my next scathing post about The Holiday, and turned my attention to all things fruitcakish. My photo above is what you get if you keyboard weird fruitcakes into Google Images. If my art history serves, I believe the image above is a baked representation of the Sumerian world view: a flat earth, supported by four elephants, supported in turn by a large turtle. The turtle part is made out of fruitcake. While I applaud the ambition, I can tell with a single assessing glance that this is not a particularly good fruitcake either. Ambition without tastiness will only produce cardboard fruitcakes and the Bush administration.

Fruitcakes, like fine horseflesh and purty women, can be judged by eyeballing them. First, a decent fruitcake is black, black, black. This deep richness is created by packing raisins, candied fruit, chopped pecans, suet, and a very slight amount of fruitcake dough into the smallest ring-style baking pan that will hold it. Once it is baked, the cake should be stabbed many, many times with an icepick, and half a fifth of Jack Daniels poured over it. Next, the cake is wrapped carefully in waxed paper, put into an airtight round tin, and cured for the next five months. This necessitates your cranking up any fruitcake operations the August before, so that by December your fruitcakes have evolved into the required inky shade. What you will have produced is the infamous Texas Black Fruitcake. A single slice, for strong men only, measures 1/2" thick. Held to the light, Texas Black Fruitcake looks like a chunk of fine stained glass. A single ten pounder will carry you from Christmas right up to next year's Thanksgiving.

I was raised on Texas Black Fruitcake, and it wasn't until some time in grade school that I encountered the doughy, loaf shaped attrocity, gently sprinkled through with red and green candied somethings masquerading as a fruitcake. Occasionally, to my gagging horror, coconut was involved. Luckily, my lunchbox portion of Texas Black Fruitcake was never coveted either, possibly because my little companions mistook it for meatloaf.

Oddly, I've never encountered the Texas Black Fruitcake anywhere but Oklahoma, made by my own grandmother's clever hands. Since she shooed everyone out of the kitchen while she cooked and, when asked for recipes, wrote down blatant lies doomed for failure ("add 1/2 cup walnut shells"), I was amazed when my mother attempted it and came up with a remarkably close version. I've never tried to conjure up the recipe myself. Possibly I fear a reverse Proustian Madeleine experience, in which I eat something that not only doesn't conjur up a remembrance-of-things-past but forces me to denounce my childhood instead.

No, here in Texas I've only nibbled at yellow-cake monstrosities, managing to slip the remains in a large plant nearby. I don't mourn the by-gone Texas Black Fruitcake, because I no longer get all gooey at the thought of The Holiday. I'll be exploring my remorselessness in the next few posts.

The holiday...

As my posts indicate, I don't get out much. Mostly this is my preference, since I've spent a great deal of my life getting out a lot, so I'm happy to stay put, hammering on my keyboard. Still, I take some note of the larger world during my tiny, daily runs to the drug store, PetSmart, the supermarket, the post office.

Today I had to zoom up to the drug store for a handful of things that didn't justify a full trip to the grocery: a couple of cans of cat food, Cokes, a can of chicken noodle soup. When I walked into Walgreens, I blinked, startled. Walgreens seemed to have expanded: grown fleshy, opulent with glittery decoration, the shelves groaning with brightly colored stuff. Of course, I thought. It's The Holiday. I'm referring to that stretch of time from the week before Hallowe'en clear through the first week of January. We freelancers know it as The Big Dry Nothing, since work shrivels up, as the Christmas spirit expands.

Actually, everything goes to pot around this time. People take their time off, and even if they don't have stored up comp or vacation time, they still slither out to go shopping. The bosses are all gone, so nothing can get approved, if anyone wanted approval, which they don't. What the American worker wants is to start baking. Platters of cake and dishes of candy are duly toted in. Cubes are decorated. Screen savers are switched to the more Santa-esque. Slit-eyed entrepreneurial types buy a thousand of the year's hard to get toy on eBay, and hawk it to their co-workers out by the loading dock. What I'm saying here, is just hang it up, if you're a freelancer. It's a good time to work on the novel.

I've never understood why America doesn't acknowledge this phenomenon, this slide into a whatthehell mentality that extends itself every year, and just declare The Holiday, which would be a big fudgy ball consisting of Hallowe'en, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Years. God knows we need it, because after The Holiday, it's a long, dry, choking road until anything that resembles fun comes along.

This year, we need to add the Presidential Inauguration to The Holiday calendar, since I see that at least a million people plan on attending. Despite the lousy financial news that appears every day, people are still whipped into a froth of joy over Obama...and good for them, good for all of us...but it may portend the addition of a permanent November 4, to commemorate the day we got our country back.

I wouldn't mind. As long as I don't have to wear a costume or buy a fruitcake.

When the world turned color...

A friend of mine told me that her eight year old daughter, who was watching TV at the time, suddenly asked, "Mommy, when did the world turn color?" She'd evidently been thinking, as an eight year old child would, that the world had once been black and white until a certain time, and then everything suddenly bloomed into color.

I've been writing all these posts about race, mostly to look at my own experience with it, to pick it up turn it around my hands, always with the hidden fear that I've forgotten some chunk of experience--that it's somehow metastasized within me as unacknowledged racism. Some of that history, I'm glad to see again. The photo of the drinking fountain, for example, reminds me of the child I once was, when such sights were magical rather than an ugly reminder of Jim Crow.

My earliest years, as I think I've said elsewhere, were spent up North. By the time my family moved to DC, I was seven years old. I don't remember seeing Colored and White drinking fountains in Washington, nor do I remember seeing them in Virginia. Surely they were there, but maybe I never encountered them. It wasn't until a summer vacation in Oklahoma that I noticed two drinking fountains labeled Colored and White.

Of course, I pitched a fit to drink from the Colored fountain. Who wouldn't have?

Who wouldn't have wanted red, green, blue, purple, yellow, pink, turquoise and lavender waters splashing up in her face?

The panthers...

The original Black Panther Party founders

Other than one strange night in 1965, when I first encountered militant blacks, for the next three or so years, I deliberately kept my head down, and avoided confrontational politics. I was trying to finish my undergraduate degree. Besides, more and more angry groups were springing up, a lot of them clearly nuts, and I wasn't sure any more where the right side of history lay.

Iowa City was the first place I encountered real Black Panthers. By that time, I was in graduate school, getting my degrees in painting. Art had taken over most of my head, and the small amount of brain-space I had left over was devoted to feminism. There were numbers of Chicago blacks who came up to Iowa, then floated back to Chicago. Just from a distance, I liked the Panthers and the Chicago blacks, scary as they seemed. I liked their certainty and self-discipline. Being a Panther, however dangerous it was, seemed to offer more dignity, and more honesty.

It was pretty clear that America had loused up any idea of justice and equality. We were all living in the last gasp of a white supremacy America, although none of us knew it. As whitey, I could understand why the Panthers were hard for us to like, although many of us did. Martin Luther King, dressed in a suit, accompanied by other nicely dressed black people in suits and hat, plus your odd nun and priest tossed in, made for a sympathetic image. It appeared to me that as long as blacks looked respectable and were easy to beat up, white America would back King all the way, and keep it up for years. The Panthers were another matter. They didn't look nice and they carried guns.

The second feminist movement never modeled itself on the civil rights movement, although you might think it would be a natural. Maybe the reason for rejecting the King approach was that women had already been there, done that, got the t-shirt the first time around. They'd chained themselves in front of the white house, got hauled off to jail, got the crap beaten out of them, were force-fed etc., all while dressed as ladies.

A lot of social justice boils down to images and metaphors, doesn't it? During that very messy time in American history, beginning around 1966, the left understood that much in a way old white men never would.

Ultimately, the music, and pictures stuck somehow. We still play Neil Young today, but you'd be hard put to find anyone absently humming Dean Martin hits to themselves.

And those Panthers. Take it from me, when they showed up for the party, that was when black got really beautiful.

Days of rage...

Somewhere during 1965, during the end of winter shading into spring, I traveled up to Williams College to see my fiance. College life was still prissy then, especially in the little three Ivy League: Williams, Dartmouth, and Amherst. A visit to my fiance necessitated that I be stashed someplace respectable while there: ideally in one of those dreary bed and breakfasts around town. But this time the bed and breakfasts were full up, so my boyfriend made arrangements with his friend Don, who was now married. This was more than fine with me. I was very fond of Don; he was gentle, intelligent, and funny too, older than the other students. He was handsome as well: tall and well-built. I still remember his rare happy laugh, it went on and on, rushing like water. Still, most of the time, he gave me the impression of being very guarded in some way I didn't understand, and very emotionally isolated. But that could have been because he was black, one of only three black students at Williams.

My boyfriend and I went over to Don's around twilight. I remember it was a freakishly cold evening during what should have been a warming season. The ice had begun turning into slush and it slopped into my shoes, freezing my feet. The house where Don and his wife lived was tiny, and on the very edge of town; there was nothing else around it except fields and a road. I can remember there was a porch where a yellow light burned, and I remember how the boards squeaked. Don ushered us in quickly and introduced us to his wife, who was shy, sweetly welcoming, and heavily pregnant.

He was the same nice Don, but marriage, or something else had changed him for the better. Now, he seemed more fully focused, less introverted, but that night he also had an air of distraction. Apologetically, he led us both into a hallway and showed us a ladder. The house didn't have a spare bedroom, but there was an attic. Don and his wife had piled the attic floor with quilts; I could see them up there, all homemade, glowing with color. Don looked at me questioningly. I hurried to say that I loved the idea, which was true. Something about that little house, the stack of quilts, and the dark night coming on fast, threw me back in time, back to when I was a child, when I loved coziness, especially on a frigid night.

Then Don mentioned that my boyfriend and I might want to stay there, up in the attic, but just for a while. Some friends were coming over, he explained. They were having a meeting. It was a political thing, he said, nothing to do with us. I thought this rush to tuck us away was a little odd, but I didn't worry. Everything was always about politics then, and everyone was always paranoid. So we shrugged, said okay, and climbed up the ladder into the attic. Don reappeared in the attic's opening a few minutes later, holding two mayonnaise jar lids to use as ashtrays, and then he scrambled down. People were already knocking at the door.

Curiously, my boyfriend and I peered down as the visitors came in; then we yanked ourselves back, and stared at one another. Perhaps twenty people in all eventually arrived, all men, all black, all armed, mostly with rifles and shotguns. I remember that part very clearly, because I'd never seen so many guns before. My fiance put his finger to his lips in warning, and I nodded.

I don't have any memories of the actual words said that night, only sense impressions. Everyone at the meeting was angry: at the government, at the war, at white people. Everyone talked excitedly, loudly, butting in on one another. A lot of the discussion was the kind of very detailed philosophic talk popular back then, the kind I could never follow. I could follow this discussion though. Black people had to take matters in to their own hands. King was a hankie-head. Non-violence was fucked. Whitey was fucked too. There were no good whites.

My boyfriend and I flattened out on the floor, listening, hoping to stay undiscovered. I wasn't afraid, although I thought we might be in danger, but mostly I was profoundly shocked. I didn't understand how these men could hate all white people. There were good ones, weren't there? (I was one, surely.) I thought of the gentle black people I'd known growing up. Did they really feel the way these men did? Were they as fed up and furious, but stuffed that rage inside and only showed their quiet, smiling selves? Like many white people, I had no idea how angry blacks actually were.

Although it was dramatic, that night didn't teach me much. I just thought I'd happened in on an eccentric sliver of some radical group; so I did what I always did when faced with an unpleasant truth. I trivialized what I'd seen and the words I heard. For me, the convincer didn't arrive until Martin Luther King was assassinated and the whole East Coast turned a dull red with flames and rioting.

Those days of rage would last a long time. They would last for years. I don't think we, as white people, ever really knew why all that happened.

I wonder now if we'll ever catch on to the source of that fury.

And if we finally do, I wonder how we'll bear the knowledge.

Here's your Friday on-topic kitten...

Kara Walker and Uncle Remus...

When I was coming along in Georgia, I became black in more senses than just the kind of multicultural acceptance that I grew up with in California. Blackness became a very loaded subject, a very loaded thing to be--all about forbidden passions and desires, and all about a history that's still living, very present ... the shame of the South...

Kara Walker, artist

I know what she's talking about. Blackness and the South exist in a different way, than blackness and, say, Detroit. For one thing, there's a closeness between the races in peculiar ways. In Portnoy's Complaint, the narrator tells about seeing "the girl" who helped with the ironing, eating lunch alone in the kitchen, noshing on tuna salad made only for her. That's New Jersey for you. The South is more blatantly racist, and yet kinder, both together. For years, my family employed Mary and Dave and it says quite a lot that I never knew their last name, and don't know it today. At lunch, Mary ate the same food we did, but my grandmother ostentatiously left out handfuls of change, and marked the liquor bottles as some sort of test.

When Mary's daughter went to college for her Master's degree at OU, my grandparents paid her full tuition, drove her to the campus, and introduced her to the dean. And yet, my grandfather told me time and time again that black people were like little children and it was our duty as white people to care for them. This notion struck me as sickening, and I know I said as much, and at great loud length too. But I revolted against this view less as a civil rights enthusiast, and more from the standpoint of a child.

If you grew up in the South, at a certain time in this country, and in a certain way, you got fobbed off on black people. And as a child, you knew instinctively you'd rather be with them than anyone else around. As I said in one of my posts, I took many train trips alone, with only a note pinned to my ruffled front that said Mr. Porter, This is our little Writer-to-the Stars. She is going to visit her great-aunt in Sapulpa. Please make sure she buys a sandwich and gets off at the right station. Thank you. Mr. and Mrs. Writer-to-the-Stars. A very kind porter always looked after me. I can't recall any of them being less than impeccably polite.

I was also handed off to a succession of maids and cleaning ladies who told me wonderfullyPosting frightening stories, let me know when I was a pain in the butt, and sometimes took me home with them. I always had the feeling they were less hypocritical than the grown-up white people around me. They were certainly more controlled than most of the alcoholic white adults I knew, but that was through dire necessity. Still, if I found a racist anywhere around, I always stirred the pot. I can remember, at the dinner table, delighting as my grandmother broke out in racking sobs whenever I pointed out the half-moons on my nails...one of the sure signs you have black blood. While this Southern-style drama raged on, Mary would stoically pass around the cornbread. (No. We didn't have good manners. Not about race.)

It's complicated, this race stuff. In one way, it's hard for me to dump my To Kill A Mockingbird outlook, but I've got to. That time is gone, baby, gone. I see multi-racials all around me in every lovely permutation. The teenagers and people in their twenties don't seem to notice race much at all. Even here, even in Dallas, Texas.

All our weird convolutions, way back then, were the results of people living in an unholy situation. It deformed everyone. For those of us who baked and steamed through those hot drowsy years, feeling grubby and soiled from an unjust immovable system, we thought we'd have to overcome racism by inches and decades.

I know that's what I thought.

Didn't occur to me that a sweeping change could happen in one blast, like a cloudburst.

Never occurred to me at all.

A fifth grade racist....

One day, in the early part of spring, my fifth grade teacher announced that our class would put on a minstrel show. Our blank pie-plate faces must have told her that we had no idea what she was talking about. So, in answer to our unasked question (WTF?), Miss Taylor passed around some pamphlets. But these flabby little booklets didn't make anything clearer; if anything it compounded our confusion, making it richer and more complex, turning it into a deep loamy soil of plain bewilderment. As I recall, the booklets had a photograph showing lots of people poised on the stage in a semi-circle, their faces unaccountably blackened, and contained a script of sorts, written in the densest Uncle Remus dialect.

Miss Taylor liked to do things, usually ambitious things. We'd just returned from a week-long trip to Philadelphia, paid for by our own bare-knuckled grade-school labors. We'd sold coat-hangers back to the dry cleaner, washed pots and pans for the neighbors, walked dogs, etc. So we knew whatever this was about, it would be A Big Deal. Miss Taylor, however, was less forthcoming about the whys of our collective projects. She wasn't anyone you felt you could approach with a question, either. She had a big hard butt, eyebrows penciled into a cross expression, tight knotted calf muscles, and was very nearly bald. As her student, sensing that protest would be futile, you sighed and did what she wanted.

I took my booklet home and studied it. What I couldn't get my head around was the black-faced part and the Uncle Remus accents. Why would we do this? We were all little white kids. This was before Brown vs. The Board of Education, so none of us even knew any little black kids. I read the dialect and tried to puzzle it out. I finally decided that white people were involved because no black person would be stupid enough to volunteer. I didn't know the word offensive but I was probably groping towards it, when I thought, It's rude.

Miss Taylor was nothing if not professional. We worked and rehearsed like Broadway pros. I remember I was in something resembling a chorus, and I have dim memories of rattling a tamborine, shouting Hidey, hidey, ho! at various intervals during the show. It was fine with me. I didn't want to be a performer with lines, saying things like, Mistah Bones! Ah hea'd you wuz in de jail. Why fo' you be's lock-ed up? My parents were going to come to this and I could already envision their ashen faces.

The whole show was two hours long, and we performed it gamely, if depressively, on stage, in the school auditorium. Miss Taylor, grim as usual, took her bows. Afterwards, still blacked up with a big white-ringed mouth, I rode home with my parents in one of those stark silences, still not understanding why this show even existed.

I suppose my parents, especially my father, didn't descend on Miss Taylor like the furies from hell, because of her Miss Taylorishness, for one. And because she periodically called them in to explain that I was a genius. As proof, my paintings, including the acclaimed What Music Feels Like to Me, were flapped in their faces with a gale force. Most of the time, instead of being in class, I toiled in the hallway, beavering on murals with other talented souls. It was an easy gig and I wasn't willing to give it up and rejoin the Blue Bird Reading Circle. My mom and dad probably sensed that, so they let things ride.

We never talked about the minstrel show, my parents and I. The event just settled within me as one of those icky experiences I didn't have much control over.

So here that memory still sits, occupying some thinly inhabited part of my brain, along with Colored Only signs I saw growing up, and the sight of black men in chain gangs. Recollections like that have been with me so long, they might even seem natural.

Except there was nothing natural about any of it.

Ralph Nader is stupider than eight chickens...

Uncle Tom

Today I read that Ralph Nader called our President-elect an Uncle Tom, and nearly swallowed my bridgework. For one thing, this is a dog-whistle to us sixties types that Ralph may be past his sell-by date. It's such a moldy label now that I wonder if our text-messaging youth even knows what it means. Back in the day, a lot of whities didn't know what it meant.

Calling an African American an Uncle Tom started around 1967, and was interchangeable with hankie-head and Oreo. I first heard it used by Black Panthers in the East Coast, and I often heard it in reference to Martin Luther King. In the counter-culture, there was a feeling floating around that social justice for blacks was just taking too damned long. A lot of people were sick of police corruption, sick of getting beat to shit in demonstrations, and were about to blow-off non-violence as a strategy.

Anyway, calling a black an Uncle Tom meant he was a black appeaser, someone who made nice with Mr. Charlie, a yassuh, yessuh guy and was, rightfully, an incredible insult. This is pretty ironic, since Uncle Tom is a stand-up character in the book, and defies his white oppressors. But, despite Woodstock and anything else you might have read or seen, most white people weren't thinking much about Uncle Tom or Martin Luther King. Instead they spent their time watching The Smothers Brothers, working their day jobs, and wishing the goddamned war would end. Given the obliviousness of the general public, I'm fairly sure a number of whites and maybe blacks too got Uncle Tom mixed up with Uncle Ben (see below).

Uncle Ben

A confession here: I've never read Uncle Tom's Cabin: Life Among the Lowly. I don't think I ever will either, after peering into it from time to time. It's pretty sticky, heavily Christian with a Puritan slant, and the characters have long since been absorbed into stereotypes. As to Uncle Ben, I was sad when he disappeared off the rice box. Turns out, I thought he was a train porter instead of a waiter. (Why I thought a train porter would bring anyone a hot dish of rice is one of those mysteries. Nonetheless, I greatly admired porters, since I'd often been turned over to their care during solitary childhood train trips.)

I imagine we'll hear all the old crap in the years ahead. Hopefully it'll be ridiculed out of existence and I stand ready to ridicule as my citizen duty. The years ahead will be hard on racists of all stripes. The old epithets just don't apply.

And Ralph Nader should shut up.

A bad page...and a new chapter...

K and L Streets, Washington D.C. by Gordon Parks

This is only one of the black tenements that blighted Washington DC in the 1950's. It's located between K and L Streets. The running water and the outhouse are located in the yard. My family used to drive by a similar stretch of slums every day in southwest Washington, on our way to the Officers Club where we went swimming at a military base on the Maryland side. Whenever we reached this part of town, I'd stare out the windows of our Pontiac, see the expressionless black faces looking back. Big men often sprawled on the steps drinking beer, while tiny children played on the sidewalks and their mothers slumped in the doorways.

The DC ghettos fascinated and confused me. I wondered why so few of the buildings had doors. Usually there was only a gaping black hole, like a missing tooth in a mouth. The windows were broken too, some boarded up, but in those steaming summers, most windows just showed the empty sashes, with occasional flashes of shattered glass embedded in their frames. Each entryway had a small, beaten earth yard, often littered with trash and a sleeping dog, and bordered with a low tipping black wrought iron fence. In some of these yards, fragments of colored glass were pressed into the dirt in simple or intricate designs. In the sunset, driving home, the glass would pick up the last bits of light and glittered like jewelry.

This morning, the day after Obama was elected our president, I am trying to remember what I thought about those terrible DC slums. I didn't understand why black people lived there, but I also understood in a dim childish way, that their condition was unhelpable: as ancient as superstition.

Obama has said it's time to turn the page on race. I hope we do, because we've got a book full of ugly pages.

Last night, when I was finally able to sleep, I dreamed about Cutter Bob, my gleaming black cat who died a few months back. I dreamed I spotted him in the house, lying on his side dozing, and that I stroked his coarse bearish fur. He woke up and, as he did in life, he greeted me with his open-mouthed cat grin. I called out to my husband incredulously, Cutter's alive! And in my dream, my husband said matter of factly, Well, of course he is.

You leave the unconscious alone, and it'll grind you out some poetry. This was an Obama dream, I decided on waking. In my mind's eye, for a moment, I envisioned more than one beautiful black cat--one still alive and glittery with promise.

Today, I hope America has, finally, used up its dark hunger for terrible endings.

Long time coming...and the time is now.

“A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolved, and the people recovering their true sight, restoring their government to its true principles." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1798.

Hallowe'en...the aftermath

Hallowe'en is manic-depressive in my neighborhood. I always buy a several pounds of candy, bring the cats in, put the porch light on, then wait and see. My husband and I don't go whole hog and hang spiderwebs around our porch, carve pumpkins, or tack up fluorescent skeletons, because we just don't. The most favored display around here is an all-purpose October+November combo consisting of carved pumpkins, Indian corn, and a few flats of marigolds, neatly combining Hallowe'en and Thanksgiving, and these decorations have a long shelf life. All you have to do is replace the pumpkins as they rot.

Some years, we have floods of kids, accompanied by their mommas, all costumed in drug-store outfits, their faces decorated with lipstick and glitter. Some years, we have none at all. A couple of years, we've only had large-sized teenagers, some of them wearing a mask and none of them in costume. This year we had a single big surge of kids, with their mommas shepherding them to the door. The tricksters were little and energetic, eager to get to the next house, and had no time to let me admire their costumes. That was it for this year.

I don't think I ever went trick or treating before my family moved to DC. I know my mom and dad carved pumpkins--a process that, even at three or four years of age, I thought was sickening because of the wet strings, glop, and seeds inside. But, for the most part, in Princeton and Amherst both, I lived a life indistinguishable from one lived in the 20's, 30's or even the turn of the century. We had an icebox and our block of ice was delivered by a man in a horse drawn cart. My mother made my clothes, knitted my socks and my father's socks too, and tailored his suits. Our bread was homemade, and I envied kids at school who ate store-bought Wonder Bread sandwiches made with store-bought grape jam. It wasn't until we came to DC, that life turned modern.

Just before Eisenhower was inaugurated, we moved into a vast sprawling apartment complex just outside the capitol, that went on for miles. When Hallowe'en arrived that first year, I can remember climbing into my drugstore costume, not liking it much. By October 31, the weather was bitterly cold, so having to wear a scratchy brown sweater under my princess costume and a coat on top of it, seemed to defeat its pink silken enchanting purpose. My mask was a stiffened cloth thing from Japan, decorated with an insipid girl-face whose painted colors ran, and its misaligned eye holes screwed up my vision. My little sister fared better as a hobo since she could wear some of her own clothes, and made do with burnt cork instead of a wilting mask. Also, she had the advantage of being excruciatingly cute, as I did not.

My parents impressed on me that my job as a trick or treater trekker, was to wend my way through the immense darkened complex, avoid big bullying kids, politely refuse offers of apples, all homemade and unwrapped candies because of their poison/razor blade potential, and get my sister back alive. For three or four years, after that first Hallowe'en night, our trick or treating, my sister's and mine, seemed like an elemental and dangerous journey, not a kiddie holiday at all, and I dreaded it.

We'd start in our part of the complex, which was largely benign. We knew most of the families there, and they made a special effort to leave the lights on and greet us by name. It was in the outlying reaches that things got dicey, but my sister would clamor to go there, up to looming apartments on the steep hillsides, because we could load up our Food Fair bags with outlaw swag like homemade popcorn balls, and stuff ourselves with good portion of it before going home. We were likely to get exotic treats up there too: liquor-filled chocolates, sticky tropical fruit from Hawaiian gift trays, and handfuls of change. But in this end of the complex, we were sometimes confronted with guys in their underwear who would just look at us glassily, or large messy cocktail parties that would sweep us inside, with drunken guests giving us treats like swizzle sticks, tepid canapes, and old I Like Ike buttons. Outside those apartments, as hordes of big kids swept up into the hills, my sister and I had to crouch in nearby bushes silently, and let them maraud past us like the Younger Gang.

When my sister, with her much shorter legs, began to whimper that she was really tired, our night ended. The two of us would wend our way home, quarrelling about what we'd tell our parents, all the while, marking our trail back with discarded handfuls of home-made fudge, bruised-looking apples, pennies, and campaign buttons.

Maybe it was better back then, to confront some real goblins, and have an adventure through a frightening night, before arriving at the yellow lights of home and our innocent parents. It was more thrilling than spending a dipshit night in a church basement, bobbing for apples and having an ersatz best-costume contest, where everyone got a prize no matter how lame they looked.

Or maybe that's just my own memory, telling me a story, as usual.

Was it really like that? Maybe.

Bad craziness...

I realized last night, as I made an attempt to snuggle up with Rachel Maddow, that I'd reached some tipping point with politics and elections. I was fried. I didn't care if Bush stayed for a third term, if we elected John McCain king, or if Barack carried every state in the union. I. Just. Didn't. Care. There. I said it. I feel better for letting my unlovely apathy hang out for all to see, even though it was nothing that a good night's sleep wouldn't cure. Unfortunately, I didn't have a good night's sleep.

This morning, as usual, I switched on my computer and bombed through the Huffington Post, BuzzFlash, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, and The New York Times Opinion page, just to see what other terrible senile mumblings were attributed to McCain, to get the low-down on just how ghastly Sarah Palin is today, and how many more multitudes Barack has attracted. Politics is my junk food and I should be brain-dead from it, with every artery to my head clogged with dense gossipy fat.

Every day, I read alarmed posts from hyped-up kossacks, I take polls online, I hiss and suck my teeth while reading Paul Krugman's speculations on the crap economy. I check into The Huffington Post three and four times a day, and goggle at the spectacular headlines. When I knock off work, feed my cats, and fix dinner, I've got NPR blaring on my headset. My hub and I sit down to dinner over Keith Olbermann and bomb right through into Rachel Maddow. Then, I race back into my office, crank up The Daily Kos again, and lurk until past midnight.

Yeah. I'm nuts, and I'm nuts in a very particular way. Maybe I'm American nuts.

When I lived in DC, I was the only one in the family who didn't work for the CIA. Come dinner time, my little spook family and I would sit down with a blaring TV arranged for full viewing. Then everyone but me would have a full-throated fight about national security, the commies, the goddamned majority whip, the goddamned senate, and the goddamned president. The difference between then and now was that I knew my family was batshit crazy, like every other DC bureaucratic family.

If you don't work for the government in DC, then you are completely outside the culture. You are, in effect, a Navajo. Being a blanket-wearing Navajo is not all bad, because you, and you alone, are able to see that everyone around you is bleeding from the ears over a construct that has no reality: arsisiety, I call it. I've alluded to it in an earlier post. Arsisiety is made up of newspaper snippets, chunks of blogging, staticky radio noise, talking heads on TV, and lots and lots and lots of colored pictures. And that's all.

I don't know about you, but in my neighborhood there are no hedge-fund managers doing people dirty, there are no Neo-Nazi hate groups plotting to kill Obama, there are no Congo rapers, and the Hague is not located here so Cheney will have to get his come-uppance someplace else. In my blue-collar neighborhood, there are missing pets, the odd but very real gangsta, a dope house or two, old people who are sick, people who are trying to sell their houses, and people who walk every morning. That is my society and it would behoove me to remember that. I could talk to some old people, I could keep an eye open for lost pets, I could phone the cops about that gangsta in his big black car, and I could take a walk.

It's not exciting, and it's not dramatic, but it has the advantage of actuality.

When I touch my particular, slightly beat-up world, I know it won't disappear like soap suds.


(And, hey, here's your kitler.)

The Villesca Axe Murders and a baby hamster...

A confession. This photo has nothing to do with the Villesca axe murders which are, yes, to this day, still unsolved. This photo, however, is of Victor Licata, who supposedly murdered his brothers with an axe in April, 1938, while higher than a raccoon, thinking that his brothers were going to cut off his arms and legs. The story, under various guises and with wildly differing accounts, went nationwide, but there's no information about what eventually happened to him, if he went to trial, or simply dissolved into history. (Still, I had to use this pix, since he looks like such a deranged evil-to-the core axe murderer.)

He is, if you go by newspaper stories, one of the uncounted numbers who slaughtered their families with axes, while under the spell of reefer madness. By looking into his staring eyeballs, you can clearly see that Victor is sorry he only got to whack one family, rather than the scores of folks his bloody imagination lusted after. Tales of psychos, out of their minds on killer weed, were thanks to Harry J. Anslinger, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who went after marijuana growers and smokers with a vengeance between 1930 to 1937. During that time you wouldn't believe the number of axe murders that groups of hopped-up young teens committed. You wouldn't believe the numbers because they didn't exist. The population of reefered-up young people, whacking whole families with axes, was roughly equivalent to the population of toasted young people ramming knitting needles into their eyeballs years later, because of that devil's brew, LSD.

But back to Harry and the weed, here is an account he wrote for The American Magazine about a teen gone rogue thanks to muggles, as marijuana was purportedly called by its red-eyed users:

"An entire family was murdered by a youthful addict in Florida. When officers arrived at the home, they found the youth staggering about in a human slaughterhouse. With an axe he had killed his father, mother, two brothers, and a sister. He seemed to be in a daze… He had no recollection of having committed the multiple crime. The officers knew him ordinarily as a sane, rather quiet young man; now he was pitifully crazed. They sought the reason. The boy said that he had been in the habit of smoking something which youthful friends called “muggles,” a childish name for marijuana."

None of Anslinger's stories were ever verified, but there is every reason to believe that Harry J. himself thought they were true, and was sincere in thinking that reefer was the great corrupter of our sorta-free nation.

In fact, between the Villesca axe murders, Lizzie Bordon, and Karla Faye Tucker, it's disappointingly thin pickings on the axe-murder front. As I said, the Villesca axe murders remain unsolved, Lizzie Bordon was acquitted but her innocence remains in doubt, while Karla Faye Tucker confessed and, after a born-again experience, was duly and sadly executed.

End of axe murder stuff.

And here's the baby hamster, which even I admit, is cuter than cute. As an undergraduate, my new roommate for my junior year, arrived with a hamster named Gunther and a large sack of weed, then relatively unknown on our square-john campus. I grew to be quite fond of Gunther, the weed not-so-much, since it was home-grown skunk. Gunther, though, was a real gent, whose only bad habit was to run furiously on his squeaky exercise wheel at one and two in the morning. I grew to like him so much, I invited him to my wedding shower, which he attended, his cage decorated in white ribbons in honor of the event.

Now, reporting in on my social experiment, which hypothesized that the combo of a tabloidish topic, coupled with something overly cute, would result in a booming readership. This proved true, which means, I suppose, that readers, however well-intentioned, will at least check out the cheap n' easy. But. This weekend, my numbers dropped to nut'in, honey. True, I hadn't posted anything, but this rarely affects my weekend readership who, perhaps, save my posts for a good catch-up on Sunday.

I'm tempted to call my little experiment to an end. But while I'm thinking about it, here's today's kitler.

I M UR KITLER 2DAY

Baby bunnies and ghost photos...

Paranormal photo. Unattributed 2002

So-far I'm disheartened. Having jumped into the warm and welcoming tabloid soup sloshing out there on the internet, just to see if it boosts my stats, I have to report that it does. My numbers have never been better. I'm definitely getting the Nazi Bounce (see post of same name) with the weird, the yucky, and the overly cute, plus tossing in the odd kitler for good measure. After scoffing at me for grubbing around in the cheap n' easy, my husband has gone full-tilt boogie into tab-land. Check him out at www.athensboy.webpress.com, or just click on my blog roll.

Posted at www.elcivics.com

Before I sweep into my diatribe about ghost photographs, here's the promised baby bun rabbit. And yes, it's cute, although having raised rabbits I can report confidently that it's probably remarkably personality-free. Just putting it out there from my own experience: rabbits are not the brightest bulbs in the tanning booth. However, at the time I was raising bunnies to eat, so I probably didn't go in for a lot of anthropomorphism. You don't ever want your food to be a close friend.

So my topic today is ghost photographs. For you alone, dear readers, I looked through a bale of dull, cloudy paranormal photographs, and I'm sorry to say that for all our advances in technology, we are nowhere in ghost photographs. In fact, we have regressed. When I was just a wee tiny compulsive reader, I used to go to our branch library and get out a large volume, printed sometime around 1905. In it were large photographs showing people wearing rusty-looking black suits and high necked dresses, sitting upright in ornate parlor chairs. Around them, foggy-looking transparent children floated near the light fixtures. Some of the photos showed a tightly-laced woman vomiting yards of ectoplasm, which I understand is a kind of paranormal glop the long-dead leave around. Occasionally, a huge see-through head was shown, bobbing around the ceiling. Those were some rip-snorting ghost pictures, you betcha.

Consider the wan modern example above. Here's what I was able to find out. Guy takes pix of girlfriend. When they get the pix printed, they spy this skeletor-type figure shown on the TV. Guy asks girl if she was watching some horror movie where you might normally see a skeletor. She says no. Woooooooooooo! We're now in paranormal land. Except I call bullshit on the whole deal. Anytime I see some blobby out-of-focus thing parading as an actual soul, returned from the dead, I say, probably not. If ghosts were thick on the ground, I'd like to think that we'd see some crisper images by this late stage in our culture, and maybe some communication, like a little one on one between the living and the blurry dead. Why do these lingering souls want to hang out in TV sets and old creaky houses? Are they ever jealous of our stuff? Do they want an iPod? A new Apple? A DVD of say, Saw V?

There's so much we'll never know.

Ah. It's Friday. And here's your kitler.

Death row brides and baby chicks...

I'm only one day into my social experiment, i.e. that an announced subject matter combining the creepy and the cute will draw in readers like flies. Already I feel like a tabloid whore. I really didn't think anyone would care about commies, but my stats have already doubled from the day before. Of course I did toss in that tiny kitler at the end. So far, though, this makes me yearn for my quiet little blogs, the ones no one cared about, except me and a few (much prized) devoted readers, blogs where I ruminated on long-gone moldy liberal politics, misused words, and humorous yet loony ideas.

Well, no point in sighing breathily over the dear departed past. I'm slogging on ahead, picking up readers perhaps, but screwing my chance ever to be a Noted Blogger.

I thought long and hard about today's title, to test my hypothesis: cute + creepy = many more readers. I even found some photos of beaming death row brides, sitting with their new soon-to-be-executed hubbies, and I have to say, these are definitely short-sighted women, when it comes to life planning. They never choose iffy death row candidates either--the ones who could be freed, depending on Project Innocence and a blob of redemptive DNA. They seem to pick the worst of the barrel: guys like The Night Stalker, about whose guilt there is no doubt at all. Death row groupies pursue these no-hopers like bats on meth, seemingly before giving them a hard face-to-face look. I'm all about not judging people on superficialities, but Richard Ramirez (aka,The Night Stalker) looks as crazy as a rat in a coffee can, and is, from all I know, without one redeeming human trait. But a bland looking redhead, who works as a free-lance editor, glommed him right up, and they're now hooked. Still, I couldn't bring myself to snip a pix of the beamish boy and his deluded bride.

I can't write one more word about death row brides. That's it.

Baby chicks. Yeah. The ultimate in cute. See above.

Okay. Here's today's kitler.

The Nazi bounce....

Communist Satirical Image Unattributed and Undated

As I noted last night, I attributed my jump in readership to the infamous Nazi Bounce, but seeing that it's continued unabated, I have to say it's probably also due to the Nazi\cat contribution, since I posted a kitler (trans. a cat that looks like Hitler) as well. Cats and Nazis are an almost unbeatable combo.

In figuring out which topics will blow a reader's dress up, please join me, my faithful and new readers, as we embark on a social experiment. It's my contention that certain topics are never-fail, and that web-crawlers will report that Nazis! exist on blameless under-read blogs such as mine. So I'll attract your hard-core Nazi fan maybe once, before they melt away like an April snowfall. However, by adding a kitler, I skewed the numbers. No doubt Nazi-seekers were then followed by the Cute Overload faithful, and I got the LOL Cat Bounce.

My husband at his eclectic and always fascinating website athensboy.wordpress.com got a huge rock-star level bounce when he posted his story: German Pop Star Marries Pineapple story. (Who knew there were so many man-on-fruit readers?) But, as he discovered, a story like that is hard to build on without descending into full-tilt freakishness.

Without grossing you or myself out, I'm going to experiment with a group of topics in the next few days. For example, it's my private contention that while Nazis! will attract a great plethora of readers, Commies will not. Even with the incendiary "fag" added (see above), and a little humor to lighten the total draggy Marxism of it all, Commies are just sad-sacks, and always have been. Plus there's no website for people who have dogs that look like Lenin. But I could be proved wrong.

I believe there is a regrettable human curiosity about the dark side, whether we express it by visiting dubious websites or through building a lavishly equipped dungeon in our homes. Fab fact : in keeping up with the Dallas S&M dungeon stats, I've discovered that the bulk of them are built in Plano, an over-privileged area outside Dallas proper. Here in the funkier area, where your own Writer to the Stars resides, dungeons are a fairly unknown option. But then, we have those meth labs several streets over to offset the deficit.

Well, I shall choose my topics with care, and report on readership bounces or non as they happen.

I hope you'll come along for the ride.

Here's today's kitler. (Pick him out, if you can.)