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.)

When Nazis are in bloom...

Neo-Nazi Gathering photo from www.rickross.com

My stats have been unusually good tonight. When my husband congratulated me on that, I said, "It's Nazis." I don't know why it is, but you can always count on Nazis to be crowd-pleasers for a certain group. As for my faithful readers, I hope they'll put up with me, figuring that Nazis are just a momentary burp of Write and Wrong tastelessness. And if new readers happen along, I should say I don't write about Nazis often, so if you read an older blog and see something else you like, then welcome. But if you're a new reader in hot pursuit of Nazis, go back to Google, kthnxby.

I never understood the Nazi thing. But if I were stupid or, even better, stupid and psychotic, maybe I'd think, Way cool! You get to wear great-looking uniforms, ride motorcycles, and beat the shit out of anyone you want! Plus there's that great salute to Hitler, who's always right and dead besides, so he can't boss anyone around! I also understand that some S&M sickies are attracted to the leather and boots factor, while all sickies everywhere can link their arms in brotherhood and universally agree on the wisdom of killing people you don't like.

There's a website I stop in on every so often; it's for people who have cats that look like Hitler. It's at www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com. Cats that have the forelock and little square moustache are known as kitlers. And while I enjoy looking at kitlers, and realize they didn't ask to look like Hitler, I don't know how I'd feel about having one myself. I guess I'm Naziphobic.

There are worse things to be.

Hate speech...

US Neo-Nazi Party Member. Unattributed 2007

One of the problems in being a Nazi, Neo or otherwise, is that, evidently, you're driven to do things like this to yourself just to stand out. Witness this poor schmuck whose face doodlings are an almost exact match to those junior high notebook covers scrawled by underachievers everywhere.

There's been a lot of chatter around the blogosphere about all the hate speech spouted by La Palin, how it's riled up a group pundits have prissily labeled low-information voters. In thinking how this riling up gets accomplished and what it does to you and me, I ended up where everyone else does when it comes to hate speech: comparing the McCain ticket to Nazis. This is stupid, because McCain and Palin are not Nazis, not even secret ones, and rabble-rousing existed long before Nazis. Still, Nazis are where I landed.

Given my Nazi\hate speech fixation, I decided I needed more research. I've been surfing, and in my travels discovered this chunk of info, courtesy of Wikipedia:

In March 1959, Rockwell formed the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists, a name chosen to denote opposition to state ownership of property. In December of that year, the name would be changed to the American Nazi Party, and the headquarters moved to 928 North Randolph Street in Arlington, Virginia.

This refers to George Lincoln Rockwell, who started the American Nazi Party, and, as Wikipedia notes, was subsequently shot in the head by a member of the party.

On August 25, 1967, Rockwell was killed by gunshots while leaving the Econowash laundromat at the Dominion Hills Shopping Center in the 6000 block of Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia.^[17]

The Dominion Hills Shopping Center still stands, and the spot where George Lincoln fell is thoughtfully marked with a freshly painted black swastika on some anniversaries of his death, depending on just how motivated the local Nazis happen to be. Lately, not so much.

I bring up these unriveting excerpts about the American Nazi Party, because George Lincoln Rockwell lived two houses down from my family in Arlington, Virgina in 1959. His arrival was unmarked except for the dented Bondo-body truck he parked at the curb, and the many boxes he lugged down to his basement apartment at the V's, who were looking to make some extra cash by taking in a tenant. Later, he dragged down a printing press and that's how my family got involved.

The V's were nice people, Armenian immigrants who had been in the US a good long while. Pete V. had already earned some admiring nods among our neighbors, after he'd threatened to brain a local wise-guy with a double-ended truck wrench. On this particular night, Mr. and Mrs. V. showed up at our house, looking troubled, wanting to see my father, who the neighbors all agreed was probably the smartest guy around. In times of turmoil, he was consulted on all sorts of matters. And so the V's came knocking.

My memory is that Pete brought some resiny-tasting Armenian liquor as a gift, but I imagine my mother just served coffee. Me, I was crouched at the top of the stairs in my jammies, curious about why the V's were visiting.

The problem was, Mr. V. explained, their new renter. After he had wrestled the printing press downstairs, Mrs. V. became curious about Mr. Rockwell. She had also discovered if she stood on a vent in the floor of the coat closet, she could hear every word coming from the basement. It seems on certain nights, Mr. Rockwell liked to have some guys over to discuss the coming race war, the far-sightedness of beloved Adolph, and the recruiting of more storm troopers.

She found out that they had been meeting at the Economat over on Wilson, before Rockwell rented her apartment. Now that he was in our little neighborhood, he liked it and thought his digs might be just the thing for the American Nazi Party Headquarters. Later, Mrs. V had gone outside and peered in her tenants truck, only to discover the cab was littered with shabby little pamphlets with swastikas on the covers. The V's dilemma was that they wanted him gone, but since he'd paid his rent, they didn't know how to toss him out. Pete mostly wanted to beat the crap out of him which, my father admitted, was tempting.

I don't remember what my father eventually came up with as a plan. His position was that nobody needed to put up with Nazis, especially not in their house. The V's hadn't bargained on his printing press, his meetings, or his storm troopers when they'd rented, so George Lincoln and his ilk could trundle right back to the Economat, and good riddance.

What I remember from that night was the V's great fear and anger, which puzzled me. The moochy-looking guy I'd seen didn't seem capable of stirring up big emotions like that. I knew Nazis were bad, but the man I'd seen didn't look anything like Nazis I saw on TV in old newsreels.

Lincoln was booted out of the V's that week without any protest, and our lives went on.

Eight years later, George Lincoln Rockwell was murdered just outside that Economat, where all his trouble-making first started.

You live by the laundromat, you die by the laundromat.

Don'tcha do it..

Billy Graham Preaching At Earls Court in 1966

Looks like I missed him by a year. I lived at Earls Court in 1965, when my parents were in London. But that's not why I clipped this, nor am I consumed with preachers or their lack. This is about a writing thing. In his blog, my husband has made a few references to my saying that a writer shouldn't lecture his readers.

Yeah. Okay, I said that but only because I couldn't remember what I really said, and still can't. What I meant was that a writer shouldn't lord it over her readers. She shouldn't set herself up as a better-than version of normal humanity. The way I think of this is leaving some white space: giving the reader room to inject himself, herself, themselves into what's being said. A reader needs to stroll around the text, try it on for size, see if it fits and if it doesn't, the reader should feel like he can stay a while, maybe see if the text is ill-fitting but still intriguing. That's what I meant, and I still can't figure out a simple way to say it.

Enough of that.

I've been thinking about the Great Depression. My extended family was in Oklahoma then, and had been since well before statehood. We did not become fruit-pickers in California, nor were we sharecroppers, with our fields and houses buried in a tomb of dust. Instead, we seem to have gone on much as we had. One of my grandfathers was a lawyer, who mostly represented Native Americans, and the other was a wildcatter. The wildcatter grandfather thought the depression had a real bright side, which was cheap labor, and built his house in Tulsa then. My mother suspected she was served horse for dinner several times, but otherwise didn't feel terribly deprived.

Illustration for Main Street, by Grant Wood
1 of 9 drawings 1935-1937

Meanwhile, in 1932, Grant Wood established the artist's colony, Stone City, Iowa, while teaching at the University of Iowa. It's still there, Stone City is and, when I was in school, so were a lot of people who knew Wood and studied with him. One was my faculty advisor, Byron Burford. "If you took a class with Grant Wood, you just about went crazy," Burford used to say. "He made you learn painting the way he thought it was taught in the Renaissance, so you had to grind pigments and all that stuff. But actually, he didn't know much about the technical side of painting. He did a bunch of screwy things like shellacking over the surface and sticking his paintings in a hot oven to dry."

But Wood, like a lot of artists had quit looking to Europe as any kind of art center, and, instead, began to develop a type of aggressively regional art. And, how nicely this brings us full-circle, back to the preachy-stuff. There hasn't been any giant upsurge in the value of depression era art. It's always been seen in the same light as soviet propaganda painting. And it is propaganda since it's also about delivering a big, fat social message that urges the viewer to do something!...generally a something like converging on governments, with pitchforks and torches. Didactic, is what we call art like that.

In my experience, viewers and readers are equal to artists and writers. Both groups gotta make up their own minds.

(Anyway, you can't tell nobody nothin' no how.)

greed is....

If you don't have a greedy friend, I suggest you run to the nearest mall or WalMart right now, and buddy up to someone, preferably a someone with a packed-to-the-rafters shopping cart or a someone tilting under the weight of ten Nordstrom bags. Tip: You'll recognize the uber-greedies because they're also sloshing a 32 oz. soda as they go thundering down the store aisles.

This is not to say that I'm free of greed myself. As my husband would acknowledge, I can mow through a bag of Pepperidge Farm Ginger Man cookies at warp speed. But, as with all sins, there's greed and there's greed. Being friends with a real pig is helpful in setting your personal greed benchmark, just having like that invaluable dirty friend, who hasn't tossed a pizza box since the eighties, can make you think better of your own crappy housekeeping. Plus, you learn things.

Way back when, before it was fashionable to be enormous, I had a huge friend who owned a car, which I didn't, and she was also something of a slob. A three-fer, in other words: greedy, car, slob. She had it all. When I was around her, not only did I have a ride, I felt like a living testament to The Balanced Life.

One day she offered to drop me off at home, but asked if I'd mind stopping by the grocery with her. Not a bit, I said. Going shopping with her turned out to be a transformative experience, as Oprah herself might say. When we meandered down the aisles, she'd give these sudden ::cries:: Oh my God!! she'd yell, look at that ham!!!! Then she'd lift a giant hock out of the meat case, oh so tenderly, and cradle it like an infant, beaming down at where its face might be, if hams had faces. Sweet Lord! she'd holler when we passed the bakery, Looky here!! Cupcakes!! Lemme just grab this box!!! And she'd stare into the clear plastic container like we were at Tiffany's gawking at a 56 caret rose-cut diamond. And on we went, pausing reverently like pilgrims in front of soup displays, blowing air kisses at Sara Lee cakes, tickling cheeses, etc. My intro to food porn.

Some years later, I became semi-friends with a different breed of greedhead. She was very attractive, worked as a graphic designer from her house, had a scandalous marriage in her past, a rotten teenage kid upstairs, and was born dead. On the wall, right next to the front door, there was a proudly framed news account of her lifeless entry into the world and her subsequent revival. She was also the kind of person who would take you hostage without a single qualm. I just need to run by Dillards, she'd say. Come with me. And I would, only to discover one thing leading into another, until I found myself home, finally, at 10 PM, with nothing in the house but a sticky carton of Chinese take-out for dinner.

My friend drove a big black late model Caddie, and bought stuff in quantity. She'd say she needed jeans, but this really meant she needed 24 pairs of them. She'd tell me she just needed a crew neck cotton sweater, and then bought 50 at one swoop. And on we would slog, buying the improbable amounts my pioneer forebears purchased when they drove into town twice a year. Except she did it every weekend: 36 Lady Hathaway shirts, 200 pairs of cotton socks, 15 pairs of Maine Trotter penny loafers, 200 tortoiseshell barrettes. This was fascinating to me in a lot of ways. First, why so much? (Ans. Because she wanted this much.) Second, why was it all the same dull pastel preppy shit? (Ans. Because dull preppy shit was what she wore.) Third, was this mountain of stuff just for her? (Ans. Yes.)

For me, seeing such a monstrous display of piggery bought a bit of self-forgiveness. After watching my pal buy 73 Ralph Lauren hoodies at one whack, my bingeing on drugstore eye shadow didn't seem too terrible.

But here's the deal: my food friend and my clothing friend would have argued until past sundown that they really needed this stuff. And they believed they did.

But don't believe me. Find your own greedy.

'tis a pity...

The Pity Party by John Wos

And a while it's been since last I posted, gentle reader. I've been up to my lightly penciled eyebrows doing accounting things, and writing nada. Still, thoughts have fluttered through the dark caverns in my head on their little bat wings. To remind myself of their fleeting presence, I've been collecting pictures that seemed reflective of my fancies. This glum little number was the best of the barrel after I Googled self-pity and clicked on Images.

The self-pity on my mind was that of the Republican party's hard right wingers. I've been wondering why it's such a favorite emotion in those quarters next, of course, to that crowd-pleaser, vein-popping rage. I'm thinking about this, because I got to see it in full flower on the Rachel Maddow show. One of her announced guests was David Frum, Bush's ex-speech-writer who coined the unfortunate axis of evil phrase, which started the dominoes toppling. He came on the monitor in a big fat sulk, the kind that always made my father chortle, Careful. Don't trip on your lower lip.

After Rachel's first question, which was on the order of, The McCain campaign, WTF with all the racist screaming? David said Rachel had no room to talk about irresponsible speech, and let loose a pissy stream of whine about Rachel's meanness and sarcasm. And Rachel did as she does, listened alertly like a doberman, ears cocked, and then asked why he thought her questions compared with people screaming Kill him! Treason! Off with his head! at the La Palin/McCain goon-fests. David pouted, then mumbled that Rachel had her own show, which was a public forum of sorts, and that, within her very limited arena, she had a duty to be more careful in her speech. (Cue snuffles, quiet sobs)

Watching him quiver and sniffle, I thought, Damn, I've already had you as a boyfriend several times over. Not David Frum, natch, but guys with lots of similarities, and most specifically that brand of drenching self-pity. During that dating period, when I was as close to a Separatist Feminist as I'd ever be, I remember some of my boyfriends screaming about dykey women having the fucking nerve to protest anything when they were sitting on a fortune to begin with. When I'd lash back at this cruel idiocy, they'd melt into a puddle of salty tears, and choke, See? Feminism makes you mean.

The first couple of times it happened, I gaped in amazement and said, You don't really think this cheesy bullshit is going to work, do you? And, yes, they all thought that cheesy bullshit would. Thing is, I was raised to believe this kind of reaction was despicable, and so, in turn, I only became more hard-hearted. This, I think today, was the right and proper response. Watching the Democrats on CNN, these past eight years, I realized they were treating Republican self-pity as though it was a genuine felt emotion rather than a bogus contender. Don't! I'd yell at them from my side of the screen. But they'd soldier on, every self-defeating one of them, making nice and caving in on warrantless surveillance, no SCHIPS for kids, more money for the Iraq mess.

I had a beloved aunt who referred to such gluey manifestations of self-pity as very inexpensive behavior. And now, thinking of her, that's where I'll leave things tonight.

It's good to be back.

Dinners and nightmares...

You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he's done.

Richard Hugo, Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

I'm picturing Wall Street today as looking like this pix I found. I think it would be great if it did, if all the traders, hedgers, and short-sellers just had it out, went apeshit on each other. Be helpful in getting rid of all that money-fear.

During a different time, my own forays onto Wall Street made me wonder deeply about humankind. I always landed there around 5 PM, and always seemed to be facing a solid wall of tramping people staring ahead blankly, into some psychic middle ground. If I tripped and fell in front of that advancing horde, I knew I'd wind up a flattened corpse, entirely covered with shoe-prints.

I was first in NYC during a crack in time, between the Beats and the hippies. It was a pretty good time, although we little bohemians didn't have a label for ourselves. We were all artists of some type or other, seeking each other out in the East Village, hanging out in Washington Square, just glad to be together like puppies in a heap.

The title of my post, Dinners and nightmares is the name of a book I happened on that year, by Diane diPrima. She was writing poetry when, outside of some brittle academic types, not too many women were letting it rip. The poems in Dinners are pretty hilarious, describing the kinds of meals you make when you're down to oatmeal, an onion, and maybe a crusty can of tomato sauce and you're not a Nothin-Says-Lovin-Like-Somethin-From-The-Oven gal to begin with. She writes about her innumerable guys, relationships about fifteen minutes long, and casual good/bad/let-it-go sex, with enormous ease about herself. It's a good portrait of life in edge city, which was where most artists lived back then. A time when, as Dylan noted, he once got paid for a gig with a chess piece.

I think a lot of us are going to be rediscovering edge city, and it's not too bad. Hard to believe now, but many of us grew up not expecting to make much money and not caring that we didn't. Voluntary poverty, Michael Harrington called it, in The Other America. What little glittery treasures were we after if not gelt? Raw experience, was one, going to a place few middle-class anglos went to, and so some of us took off for Kathmandu. Another was mouthing off in our liberal mags, often published in someone's apartment, or starting another liberal mag to mouth off in. And some of us were just what we were, like Diane.

Anyway, now that the Golden Calf is melting down, it's going to be innaresting to see what folks will find to do instead. Just putting it out there, but may I suggest attempting the unknown? The artful? Or the heroic?

It sure beats cruising some big box store for a case of macaroni and cheese.

As my wise husband sometimes says, There are higher ways to be.

And I say, hell to the yes. You bet there are.

In dreams, I dream...

The picture I posted is by Henry Fuselli, called The Nightmare, one of several he painted on that theme. He used to be a great favorite of mine. I was very young when I first saw The Nightmare, and it struck me as revealing something profound about women. Now I think it's more about a man's view of women, seen through the cultural dream of his time. And it's still a rip-snorting portrait of a nightmare.

It's 2:30 AM now, or maybe closer to three, and I can't sleep. Partly it's the financial mess, a fine mess built on dreams, illusions, delusions, and lies and fueled on greed. Luckily, I went broke after the tech bubble popped, then slowly, slowly began to crawl out. So I'm spared what so many people are going through: the shock of losing the life you thought you had.

At such times, when I can't sleep, then the megrims and the gremlins come. Nietzsche astutely remarked, With sleeplessness, one is visited by fears one conquered long ago. But tonight's fear is about nothing I've known. It's about the sheer immensity of this crisis, the hugeness of it curling over everything, like a tsunami roaring to shore. And, of course, once a big important fear like that creeps over me, the little ones come scuttling in on its coattails, ready to nibble a night's rest into lace. The one thing these anxieties have in common is that I can't do a thing about them at 3:20 in the morning.

Although it didn't help me tonight, I usually take 5 mgs. of melatonin before bed. If I take an extra half-tablet, I have dreams. They've never been bad ones, only lurid and panoramic, with lots of characters and bright scenery. Last night's was like that, although it dissolved like soap bubbles when I tried to recall it. I remember I rode a donkey, and wore a long skirt of blue-checked coarse cotton. And the guy Henry Paulson picked to administer his bailout billions, Kashkari, appeared as an auto mechanic, smeared with black grease. I recognized his shaved head.

When I'd call her in a panic, always very late, my mother would say, What in the world can you do about it right now? As I'd think about it, I knew she was right: there was absolutely nothing I could do, and I'd toddle off to bed.

Talking one evening with some other women, our chat turned to insomnia, and how it nudged our anxieties awake.

I repeated my mother's question, and mentioned what a comfort it was, when a friend nearby spoke up. My mother said the same damn thing, but I knew what I could do right then. I could drink Diet Dr. Pepper, smoke cigarettes and stay up all night, my girlfriend announced.

As soon as she said that, I thought, She's right! What a great idea!

So now I'm smoking, trying not to grab a Coke, but the dawn's coming fast.

That one...

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Alexander Pope, Essay on Man. Epistle ii. Line 217.

So if the Lords of Karma decided my earthly ride had gotten a little, um,...too elitist, and suddenly put me in charge of the McCain campaign, here's what I'd do. I'd slap a couple of strips of duct tape over La Palin's mouth, put some powdered Xanax in McCain's coffee, and force-feed Cindy McCain a cheeseburger. Then I'd thin out the skinhead factor at their rallies by posting a No Shirt, No Screaming rule. If I could do all that, I'm not saying McCain would win, but he might not get the ass-kicking that's surely waiting in the wings.

The problem with the McCain\Palin hate-mongering is just what Pope says. At some point, we all embrace the nightmare. So keep it up and you lose, McCain. Just keep talking about That One, mofo. Keep pointing out his vileness, his terrist social clubbing, his weird high-yeller otherness...and sooner or later the horror movie will no longer scare anyone. In fact, we'll begin to feel sort of furrily comfortable with our ghastliest fear. This truism is utterly predictable. Should the rotten GOP campaign go on long enough, a moment would come when the angriest, most church-bombing, Nazi-saluting, Palin-supporting dumbass would start loving him some Obama. I guarantee.

You see, like an elephant, your own Writer to the Stars has such a memory, she can recall when Psycho first came out. All the newspaper ads noted that a trained nurse! would be stationed in every theater, just in case... Those with weak hearts were cautioned not to attend at all!, at least in Arlington, Virginia c. 1960. Should you melt down completely, an ambulance! would transport you, as you howled, bit and scratched, all the way to a hospital! And now? Norman Bates has taken on the fond, strange-smelling, slightly embarrassing aspect of someone's elderly clocked-out uncle. That one... The one you have to invite for Thanksgiving. The one who mumbles to himself and who gloms the relish tray, then puts all the black olives in his pocket. That one.

This AM, as I was perusing various pix of Medusa, I was innarested to learn that she has come to be seen as a Gorgoneion. That is, as an evil diverting device. According to the classics, just gazing upon her turned men to stone. She was killed by Perseus, who used her head in battle against his enemies, who were promptly changed into enemy quartz. And then her image was transferred to the shield of Athena, a butt-kicking goddess if ever there was one. Most other evil diverting devices, I found out, were reflective, so that when evil peered into them it only saw itself. Is that why Versace used the Medusa as his logo? To deflect possible rock-star and botox-celeb cooties back onto their carriers? Something to think about, but not today.

Today, I'm happy Obama cruised into a classy win on the debate. I'm sorry McCain can't seem to get a grip and is, in fact, becoming a little Norman Batesy himself.

You know who I mean. John McCain.

That one.

Talkin' 'bout my evolution...

Courtesy: National Geographic

Professor Steve Jones, you have glued up my hopes for the human race, at least the ones I had this morning. And I hope you feel a little bit bad about that.

Professor Jones is a geneticist at the University College of London, who thinks humanity is about as evolved as it's going to get. After reading reports of the brutal Weimaresque crowds the McCain/Palin campaign is now attracting, I consider this bad news for everyone.

On the mixed-blessings side, however, it seems that dangerous times and low-rent practices are responsible for evolutionary change. Since we now live past the age of 25, natural selection has done about all it can for us. Farming has made humans about 10,000 times more common as a species, and globalization has done away with inbreeding. However you might feel about cousin-to-cousin, and even more unsavory marriages, their scarcity means we don't have the mutation mechanisms that could click us up the evolutionary ladder.

To cheer myself up, I remember that I've never subscribed to the F.R. Leavis idea about our collective selves. Crudely put, Leavis postulated what he called The Unchanging Human Heart, an idea that's still spooking around today. It's the mistaken I'd Like to Give The World A Coke outlook greatly responsible for conditions we're all suffering through now. It's a view unable to comprehend that some people might actively hate Coke. Those people might be the ancient Romans, for example, whose fave flavor was a spoiled-fish condiment they poured over everything like ketchup. And knowing that much, we can surmise the Romans would probably think Coke tasted like ass.

However, with an iron-clad sense of right, and convinced that the Iraqis would love WalMart if they got the chance, we've waded into a rats-nest war. We've dragged our ghastly fast food all over the globe, believing every national cuisine was a make-do until the Big Mac arrived. We've set up democratic elections for unprepared nations that deteriorated precipitously into thug-rule. Witness Russia, now back and badder than ever.

But factually, history tells us that we do change, if not physically, then intellectually. One glance at Wilma (pix shown above), ought to tell us that. Wilma is a reconstruction of a Neanderthal female, done by the National Geographic, based on Neanderthal skeletons coupled with computer calculations.

While we can see that Wilma didn't use a moisturizer, what we can't see is how smart she was, what her desires were, or if she had dreams of her future. And, not knowing this, we don't know if the Neanderthal extinction was a good thing or not. There is a school of thought that Neanderthals might have been smarter and more humane than the homicidal hominid who eventually evolved into homo sapiens. Us, in other words. Another notion is that the species managed to interbreed, so that we're all a little Neanderthal now.

Reading how a man screamed "Kill him!"during Palin's anti-Obama speech, I'm thinking about the snaky twists and turns history takes. And doing that, I'm wondering about Romans, Russians and Neanderthals. And I'm telling myself that humanity has changed direction many times before.

And I'm telling myself that Professor Jones can go screw himself.

We can still climb a bit higher.

Nothing good ever happens in Oklahoma...

I clipped this photo because it reminded me of a particular night during my high school years in Tulsa. It was the night I quit being A Girl, and I remember it vividly. I'd been lying on my bed, thumbing through a copy of Mademoiselle magazine. Back then, I consumed hag mags with the open-mouthed mindlessness of a True Believer. My questions about what I saw were only two: Do I look like this model? If not, what do I have to do to look like this model? Actually, at the time, I looked a lot like the girl pictured above, thanks to my savage bouts of anorexia and Kabuki make-up habit.

But on this night, something was different. For the first time, I noticed that my treasured Mademoiselle mag was crammed with godawful ideas. Mind you, I desperately wanted to believe every lousy notion between the covers, crappy or not, so that Girl Happiness would be mine. And the hag mags defined Girl Happiness as a shiny assortment of adjectives like thin! pretty! flirty! But for the first time, I was starting to notice that all the clothes cost too much, the models were too skinny, and every issue's theme was a self-improving replay of And You're A Slob Too.

My faith shaken but not toppled, I turned to another article called Teddy Bear Tricks. "Teddy Bear Tricks", it seemed, were a collection of shitty ways to manipulate your boyfriend. It listed a bunch of pointless lies and mean little actions described as flirting. I remember reading the whole thing, then thinking, If I have to do bullshit like this to be a girl, then I quit. And I quit that night. I didn't announce it, and nothing changed outwardly, but I quit wanting to be A Girl. What I would be instead was uncertain, but I knew it had to be better.

This is on my mind, after reading a post where the writer noted that what she really disliked about Sarah Palin was her being A Rules Girl. When I read that, I thought Aha! The Rules(TM): Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right: by Ellen Fein, Sherrie Schneider. In 1994, when I thumbed through that retro little screed, it was a compilation of all Teddy Bear Tricks since 1945. There they all were, those familiar do's and don'ts. "Make him chase you!" "Don't return his calls!" "Never go Dutch!" I'm sure it got into the nitty-gritty stuff too, like sending yourself flowers with a sentimentally-inscribed card, disappearing suddenly to take mysterious phone calls, leaving your perfumed panties at his place etc. etc.

Yeah. I think Sarah, with her winks and wrinkled-up nose, might be a Teddy Bear Trickster herself, a denizen of that place where every sentence is a marker on the road to Mr. Right or the White House, depending, and where every action is a lie.

Since she heaved into view, I've been trying to make sense of Sarah Palin's disarranged repetitive syntax. Some of it is clearly recognizable from beauty pageant contestants: I feel like we should strive to promote world peace everywhere. Some of it, like the aggression disguised as perkiness, is pure Teddy Bear. Some of it is, as Meghan O'Rourke writing for the XX Factor in Slate noted, a kind of deadly biz-speak:

Sarah Palin reminds me of a character in a George Saunders story. Saunders writes brilliant short stories about characters trapped in the American Dream^TM. They are workers at theme parks or Hooters-style restaurants, mummified in corporate-sponsored "flair" ... They speak in the same style of substanceless perk. They are to humanity what MSG is to flavor... Palin is, of course, far more successful than many of Saunders' characters...She buys into a whole vocabulary of signifiers that often don't signify very much, and she scaffolds that lexicon with winks, smiles, and carefully mimed gestural reinforcement. All politicians employ empty rhetoric...But I don't know that I've ever seen one employ superficial language with such a sense of palpable enjoyment at her... mastery. And just like Saunders' characters, she refuses to show vulnerability or hesitation, deploying rapid-fire prepackaged phrases like a missile shield... She loves to say "maverick" and "zero-base" and to recount how she once "quasi-caved" on an issue but didn't "compromise."

I've been known to quasi-cave myself, Sarah, but at least I wasn't a goddamn Girl when I did.