Really not the Lady With the Lamp...

The Flinty Bitch

In the second grade, when the subpar Bluebird Reading Group, the hamster sickening in it's pinched lousy cage, our wilting bean plants jammed into dented Dixie cups, or the paste eaters in the corner all conspired to send me into a depressive tailspin, I coped by conjuring up some lie potent enough to get me outa there and to the library.

It was a pisspoor library even as kiddy libraries go, but it had a shelf of bright Orange Books that became my earliest addiction. For whatever bad reasons, they had no pictures, these books, only prissy silhouettes, but I could overlook that for the tender meat within. These were all highly digestible bio's of Famous People's childhoods and not entrancing People at that. Besides the obvious nominees like George Washington et. al. there were lots of the uncharismatic like Luther Burbank and Thomas Edison, who were geeky way before geeky got hot. But despite their awful syntax and suspect scholarship, I fell in love with the Orange Books because of two of them were about Clara Barton and Amelia Earhart, actual girl heroes! a grouping that was thin on the ground during the dark atomic '50's.

My two Orange Books awakened some flickers of what I later identified as ambition, but at the time only felt like a novel disquiet. I loved Amelia Earhart but I absolutely didn't want to do Amelia Earhart-type things like sail into cloud banks (Jesus, no!), never to be seen again. So, that left Clara Barton, The Lady With the Lamp who, despite her sweet sobriquet, was clearly such a flinty bitch that even the Orange Book's weasely prose couldn't disguise her. Well, she'd have to be, what with disinfecting the entire Crimean War and inventing modern nursing. And, in fact, I would later learn that St. Theresa, George Sand, and Marie Curie all had something of the flinty bitch in them, a quality I've deeply envied in others. A bitch I may be, but I'm the chaotic distracted kind, a bitch who flips someone off in traffic about 20 seconds too late.

I find that in my slog through this Valley of Despond, I've garnered a bit of entirely undeserved admiration because of my boy's travails. This makes me jumpy, since I know I'm the proud owner of a really bad attitude about nearly everything, especially those things involving official forms, adult diapers, and wan expectations, all of which I have in spades. Right now, in fact. But a certain amount of stress is beginning to tell. I know all the signs, and one is my quickening desire to get a tattoo.

I spent a bunch of time yesterday carefully examining flash, trying to choose one, so I could head over to Suffer City that same night and get it hammered into my bicep. Something, probably the thought of pain I'd actually have to pay for, plus a few bleached grains of sanity kept me from it. But I 'fessed up to my boy. He's been readmitted to Baylor after a really fearful asthma attack, and I walked in just as the doctor was telling him he also had a MRSA staph infection, a particularly resistant kind.

"Well, they'll take care of it, right?" he asked once the doctor left. I stared at the floor trying to think. My medical knowledge tends to conclude somewhere around the early '70's, and what I knew of staph was that it was a real mofo. In fact, I didn't know how I could be in his room without being scrubbed and gowned. An airy glob of handcleaner didn't seem to cut it. "So whatchoo been up to?" he asked.

"I nearly got a tattoo," I said dully. "And I watched a Charles Manson documentary around 1 AM."

"You have absolutely no bottom," he told me. "Jeez. What is it with you and Charles Manson? Plus, the only tattoo you're allowed to have is a panda bear on your ankle."

"Really?" I asked. "That is such shit. I hate pandas. You're just saying that because you know I hate pandas. Their babies are the size of baked potatoes and pandas never know what to do with them. They just sit and stare until some zookeeper goes, Alright already and takes the kid off to their two room apartment."

"They don't know how to fuck either," my husband pointed out. "Most animals seem to know how, but pandas just get confused."

"Well, it's hard to tell a boy panda from a girl panda," I said reasonably. "I mean how do they know what they're getting? I can see their side on that one."

"You're not sleeping," my boy said, suddenly alert as a whippet. "You always want a tattoo when you have insomnia."

"Yeah," I agreed. "Plus I'm sleepwalking. I haven't done that since I was little. What I'm doing now is leaping up, grabbing the wheelchair and banging from room to room looking for you." (Then I'll suddenly come to, in the dining room holding the handles in a death grip, or I find the chair hulking in the hall like an Alfred Hitchcock title graphic.) "Anyway I'm going to the doctor tomorrow," I said, "We'll see what he thinks." (I didn't tell my boy that I hide the car keys every night. Whipping around with a wheelchair is benign enough, but I really don't want to wake up in my ancient Benz, rattling off to Galveston, zooming towards the shrimp boats and other mischief.)

So I spent the day watching snatches of football, massaging his feet and hands. "I just hate that you're going through this," I said, getting weepy, feeling angry too. "You're suffering so much and I'm so sorry."

"I was an athlete," he told me, eyes still fixed on the Tampa game. "I learned when it's something you really hate, you just go moment to moment."

"Yeah," I said absently. Now I was thinking of my undeserved back pats. What was I supposed to do after his stroke? Leave? Ride the Dog to Albequerque and start anew? Go to Home Depo where guys huddle up, hoping for a day's construction gig, and pay the first joker to say he'll change a catheter?

Q: So how do you get to be long-time married?

A: You don't leave.

Q: But what do you do when everything turns to shit?

A. You don't leave.

Or something like that.

We're in a weird motel...the indie version

During the late Jurassic age, I taught elementary art to get my teacher's certificate. Humping more supplies than a hundred dollar mule, I schlepped from school to school and met the wee ones. No mistake, these were tough rooms, so as an opener I'd asked the same question. How old are you inside? The six year olds were a bust, since that's a surreal age anyway. "I'm a bone," I remember one of them saying. "Just a big ol' bone."

It's a good question though. I happen to be 26 inside. How about you? And here's another. Where do you live? If, by temperament, circumstance, or a really bad smack habit, you live outside this culture, then you are, in effect, a Navajo. Being a blanket-wearing Navajo isn't too bad because you can see that everyone around you is bleeding from the ears over a construct that has no reality: arsisiety, I call it. 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.

But arsiety has a lot to say about airline tragedies, small children, Internet porn, and the durable horror of a dire medical prognosis.

So far only a few friends have ventured over to see me in my omnipresent Chucks, latex gloves, a sexy dab of Clorox behind each ear. As to the folks on the phone, their heads are totally full of arsiety doomsday ghastlyhood. Still, they seem to know all they need to. Oh, my God. How are you going to do this? There's no way you can take care of him. It's impossible. You've got that artificial hip. And at your age.

(Go screw yourself. I'm 26 inside.)

So, a girl walks into a room and Mistah Stroke opens his eyes and says, I got my keys and my tackle,and he holds out his hand to show me a nasal spray, his Primatene, and a plastic ruler from our auto insurence. S'all I need, he says. And the girl says, "Groovy. Time to change your catheter." And Mistah Stroke moans, But there's no one left. Where is everyone? Ohdear, Ohdear, Ohdear, Ohdear, Ohdear. And the girl says, "They're all making Halloween costumes. Lift up your butt." And she whips off his XL Depends. And Mistah Stroke says, Oh no, oh no, oh no. They're all gone. Everyone's gone. They'll get us too. And the girl says, "Bullshit. Roll this way." The girl says bullshit a lot.

So she puts down the waterproof pad, trades out his suave leg catheter for the giant flabby nightime catheter, gaffer-tapes it to the bed, puts anti-fungal ointment on his butt, powders him with lemony Mexican talc and whips on a new pair of Depends and yanks down his tshirt. Then she takes his blood pressure and his blood sugar. Mistah Stroke pronounces both excellent. "Bullshit," says the girl, scribbling down numbers. "Blood sugar is way high, blood pressure isn't great either."

You got a pen? asks Mistah Stroke asks her. "Yeah, why?" says the girl, holding hers up. For when they sign everything over to you. After I'm gone. "Nobody's signing dookie," says the girl, "we got shit to do." What? What? What can we do? There's no time. No time, Mistah Stroke wails a thin high wail. They've got us. We're so little. We're just so little. "You gotta get ready for Neuro-Rehab," says the girl. "That's like the rehab Olympics." Mistah Stroke brightens up considerably. The Olympics? he asks, looking pleased. I had no idea."That's you, bub," says the girl, giving him a peck. "Olympics all the way."

And that's one night down.

How do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mistah Stroke?

Baylor Rehab people are great on setting goals, even when those goals are tiny and creep out us more abled types. My goal is to know when I'm going to crap. My goal is to roll my chair to the short bus. My goal is to clean my dick. And, don't get me wrong, I salute all goal-setting and a victorious climb to the summit from base camp.

This cheerful can-do thinking can leak into us bedraggled caretakers too. Me, my goal is to search out Mistah Stroke and beat him with a frying pan until he looks like a mashed peach. But I probably shouldn't add it to the optimistic scrawlings on the white board installed in our newly rearranged home. The eighteen pounds of stroke reading Baylor piled in my arms mentions that there will be a change in emotions.

I imagine my funny witty boy is in there somewhere and maybe he can dig out. Sometimes I can even see him flickering like a candle in my hub's eyes. In the meantime, as the literature says, a flat-voiced entity, prone to fury has taken over, equipped with lousy judgement and the self-centeredness of a toddler. "Why haven't you picked up my shirts from the cleaner's?" Mistah Stroke demands. Because you can't walk, or button it, or have a place to wear it, and I'm too fucking tired, I answer in my echoing head, but I say, "I had other shit to do" and Mistah Stroke glares at me. "Like what?" And I don't say that I get up at 7 AM and keep running until 12 PM, when I write, pay bills, and watch drops of sweat land on my calculator. "Just a buncha shit," I say, in what I hope is a kindly voice that my boy might recognize.

Mistah Stroke requires catheter changing, 3 + large special salt-free, sugar-free carefully balanced meals, blood sugar readings, blood pressure readings, sponge baths, haz-mat waste disposal, swabs of antibiotic on a pressure point, Gold Bond Powdering, chair lifts and transfers, pillow shiftings, and clothing changes.

I require a nights sleep.

I took a nap this evening and woke to screaming. COME IN HERE RIGHT NOW! GODDAMNIT I KNEW IT! THIS ISN'T GOING TO WORK! I DIDN'T KNOW WHERE YOU WERE FOR AN HOUR AND A HALF AND WHAT WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO? AND THERE YOU WERE IN FRONT OF LAW&ORDER. YOU ALWAYS GO TO SLEEP IN FRONT OF LAW&ORDER. THIS IS A BIG FAIL. A BIG FAIL.

So I cried for a while and then got Mistah Stroke ready for bed. We ended the day like we began it, Mistah Stroke and me: in complete lunacy. He was up bright and early this AM. And when I dragged my weary ass in, he told me he was worried about all the money we owed Led Zepplin. "We do?" I asked, brightening some, wondering if I'd been living a more exciting life than in my current tar pit. "Yes," Mistah Stroke said, firmly, "and I'm worried." "I'll figure it out," I told him when I returned with his lumberjack's breakfast, which I plopped in front of him. I drank a Red Bull as he chewed moodily, then remarked grudgingly, "The food's better than in the hospital. Maybe it's better here." Maybe.

You have to take care of yourself, say the well-meaning voices. I'm given nice lotions and a candle. Pamper yourself, say the voices, as I throw the 18th wash in and scrub down two bathrooms with Clorox ala the infection-fighting pamphlet from Baylor. I've got other things on my mind besides fun pedicures, believe me.

I like to think about owing money to Led Zepplin, though. Rockers trump rehab every time.

Chop water, carry wood...

The Homestead

"Chuck Taylors," the bodyguard-sized black guy, remarked approvingly, glancing down at my feet. We were sharing an elevator at the Baylor Institute for Rehabilitation. He wore khakis, a Baylor-issued polo shirt with Baylor Rehab stitched over the tit, and enormous cross-trainers.

"Yeah," I told him proudly. "I can do anything in my Chucks." And stuck up one foot so he could check it out.

"I know that's right," he said, grinning.

It's right and it's true. When facing a gruesome job (frightening kid diseases, vomit, cat shit, horrible glop in the refrigerator) my sister always says, "I can do anything in rubber gloves." With me it's Chucks. Once I'm laced up I'm ready for serious rock n' roll. My mini-encountor in the elevator cheered me up. I was wearing my Buddha t-shirt, tight dirty jeans, and a hoodie in honor of Training Day with the Team and the black guy was obviously hip. I'd be assisting a person twice my size, half of him inert as public sculpture.

The black guy was certainly hipper than the lady with concrete hair, gold shrimp earrings, a $$$$$ suit, and foot-killer heels, when we encountered one another in the elevator at the Roberts Tower. She looked me up and down as I sagged grayly against the elevator controls. At the time, Lynn was in ICU, I had the Swine 'flu and was chugging between two hospitals, the house and drug store, and I had on my Awful Life uniform (see above) in honor of The Horror Show, and my attitude was as advertised.

"I looked like you in junior high," the lady told me.

"So flame on," I said, getting out on my floor. If I came on like an old badass, offending all and sundry, then avert your eyes muthafuckahs.

But this particular day, getting off on the 3rd floor, I spotted Lynn stretched out on the bed, wearing his navy scrubs, looking like the old athlete he is, and grinning his new lop-sided grin. And then suddenly the Team piled in. There was Speech Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, Lifestyle Counseling, plus two or three I can't remember, and they all seemed young, well-adjusted, determinedly nice, with a kind of Lutheran Youth Group vibe and smelled like hand sanitizer. Each therapist addressed Lynn one by one, rattled off the goals he'd met, and predicted a stunning comeback. My boy, it seems, had worked his half-paralyzed ass off and this hoo-hah was a valedictory and graduation.

Perhaps it was a graduation too soon, I thought, trying to fathom the directions on a Foley catheter, while Lynn snarled, What's the problem? from his bed. The problem was that he was home and I was up to my chapped elbows in Baylor reading materials, scary-looking equipment, and a long list of arcane quandaries.

Even wearing my Chucks, I felt queasy. He had to have a glucose reading in the AM and PM, and our glucose-monitoring stuff was out of date and the unidentifiable battery was fritzing. His carbs had to be counted at every meal and each meal had to weighed and measured out, then recorded.His catheter was a leg device in the AM and putting it on was like putting clothes on a raccoon for sheer impossibility. The PM catheter held no joy either. His shoulder brace looked like a bondage freak's delight and everything I picked up was made out of velcro. He had eight separate perscriptions of which we had only two and lots of calls to make to the charge nurse at Baylor and the two other pharmacies involved in the fuck-up. Lifting him up was impossible and, lying on his back, he ate most meals with his fingers and all my blessings.

By two in the morning I was face down on the bed, still wearing my clothes, feeling I'd been beaten with a pair of cast-iron xylophone sticks. And that's all I remember.

Sunday was better, but that's a whole other radio show.

Mom's Sonic Boom Atomic Apple Pan Dowdy...

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Friday night I ate dinner in the bathroom, which seemed weird but there was no one there to comment. I was gnawing on the roast chicken I'd bought a couple of days before, but my cats frothed into Chicken Madness with such ferocity that the Big Chicken and I fled to the john. As I hung over the sink, tearing at a thigh, I could hear sounds of gnashing and howling just outside the door, like animal mutants from some sleazebag gore fest. I ignored them.

Chewing on the ass end of a chicken was a celebration. I'd coaxed my elderly Benz with its all its fearsome nuh-nuh-nuh sounds from greasepit to grease pit before winding up at Faustino's Transmission Repair. There, with the TV jammed on a blaring Mexican channel and a small beautiful child asleep on an oily couch, the Universe delivered me to a shop where the mechanics truly knew their shit. I got to stand under the carraige and, with a guy pointing things out, I actually eyeballed the three dripping seals and dented pan signaling an apocolyptic tranny burn-out. They couldn't do it that very day, but they poured in two quarts of oil and said I'd be okay until Monday.

On Saturday my dear pal called me to say he could cut my hair afterall, and I blew a kiss to God and all his crazy angels. This never happened during hippie days, when I actually wanted my hair down to my ass, but now in my declining years, my hair has turned into something kudzu-like. I was moving toward dreads as a clear next-stage.

"Oh, my God," my friend said, when I climbed out of the car. He looked pretty awestruck himself .

"I know, I know," I said. "I look like a goddamned troll-doll. Then happily settled on his fold-out high kitchen stool, I suggested, "Maybe cut to the middle of my neck."

"You'll get it cut the way I fucking cut it..." he started bitterly, yanking a comb through my raggedy multi-colored mane.

"...and I'll like it," I finished. I know how these things work: the kindness of others, that is.

Two weeks ago, Lynn's work place delivered three oozing file-boxes full of hot food. When I tore one open I stared down at a fatty pork chop casserole floating in oil, canned vegetables, and mushroom soup, next to it was a plastic container full of pink rubber slabs of ham. But this is what the generous hearts of others send. You get what they like, what comforts them, and their love is the real taste of the thing. I wonder how many Poor Souls have smacked their lips over my Super-dooper Gazpacho Tastee Delight. Probably they've sighed deeply, wondering why I sent over a jug of iced down V-8 juice with crap floating in it.

We do our best, you and I. We do our best.

Sunday, another old friend hauled my wild ass over to Baylor. My boy had called me the morning before, while I stared dully into space, wondering why he was calling on the phone when we lived in the same house. This is something I do every morning, and I'm so glad I'm not a widow. If I were, no doubt his naggy ghost would haunt my every waking hour, like some sorrowful mirage of loss.

"This is extremely important," he said impatiently. "Write this down."

"Okay, okay," I said, scrabbling for my pen, still hoping he'd hurry up and come down the hall to get his coffee.

"When you come on Sunday, I need you to bring the clippers. I need to get all these Old Guy whiskers off. Got that? Next, I need the nose-hair clippers. I've got one that that's like four feet long."

"Gotcha," I said. And all day Saturday, I wondered if I could shave him because I never have, but I decided I'd give it a shot. I remembered myself with my broken hip, staring at my chipped toenail polish, my scaly heels, wanting to kill myself.

So Sunday, when my friend and I finally tumbled into his room like a couple of clowns, I got out all the stuff, wrapped a towel around his neck, then shaved and trimmed, not doing a great job, but doing what I could.

"You look like yourself!" I said, amazed, watching his familiar face emerge out of all that Gentle Ben shubbery.

"Stay a little longer," he coaxed.

And I did.

Alt.ending

The Public Option

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Some things don't bear thinking on. Like what happens to Easter chicks and those free puppies at the mall. Or wondering uneasily about that child's shoe discarded and tumbling on the freeway? Or remembering my husband's body become wax, his skin turning loose and gray like a tattered garment, his mouth a dark O, as he realizes the ultimate betrayal of the body years before his time. His terrible awareness during the stroke: I had so many plans, and his wife's terrific rejoinder: I think we're on a whole new plan now, baby.

There's no time to brood over stuff like that. There isn't time to ruminate darkly over the mean prick at my support group who cut into my melt-down, noting prissily, Other people would like to talk too. There's no time to take satisfaction at the numbers of my group who shot him deathray looks, or for me to construct a stylish grouping of you-have-a-little-dick remarks to be delivered later and savagely. Nor is there time to take to my bed for a satisfying weepy escape, clutching a bouquet of radiology and ambulence bills to my soft breasts. I'm operating in 15 minute intervals now. and everything depends on other things.

The Benz is still mouldering bleakly in the garage, a victim of contingencies.The Iraqi garage-guys are close to me but still too far to walk home, and everyone I know is too booked up to take me . Then a friend calls me and she can do it, but only tomorrow. I'd told Lynn yesterday, I might have to miss seeing him, and his voice flooded with tears, Really? Then I realized I could grab a Cowboy Cab and get to Baylor that way, and I said, I'll be there, darlin'. Because isn't that what I actually promised 31 years ago?

There are my pals to contact, thank, and dissuade, like the guy who promises he can be in Dallas within 24 hours, bringing two ten ton army trucks, full of water, food, guns, and ammo. Me highly tempted to say either Jesus Christ! or Absolutely! picturing army vehicles rumbling down the freeway here, helocopters circling above the traffic like jumbo buzzards, then quietly deciding that he and I must have a talk, maybe quite soon, over his world destruction fantasies. There's my cookie-factory owning friend who promises clear bubbles of his pricey dough to Lynn's room for nurse-bribing purposes.

There's money to be lined up, payments to be arranged, put-off, and rescheduled. Me glancing nervously at the incoming bills, then recalling the wife of a client who perfectly fufills the biblical Good Woman ideal, with a modern twist. For she riseth at dawn, to upchuck bulemically and rag on the pool guy. Then, for her childs' sakes, she swoopeth upon insurence companies, to shriek at her HMO until night cometh. I make a note to call her, hoping to acquire the necessary shrew skills. I wonder if I'll be thrown upon America's only actual healthcare system: the bake sale. The one held in a windy parking lot, dirty newspapers flying around, and blown-up photos of the Poor Soul placed here and there, with fat teenagers offering a car wash as well.

There's no time to wonder about that either. But there's time, there must always be time, to hammer out an angry blog posting, as I'm drawn deeper into America's Healthcare Fun House, as I try not to bite some blank-faced functionary on the neck.

And there's time for some quick cat cuddling, as Antone Boudreau, Dickie Lee, and Lola rub around on my legs. It's not love really; it's about the roasted chicken I brought home the other night. They know I've got it stashed someplace.

That's me. Keeper of The Big Chicken.

Luck 2.0

Shitstorm 6.0

One nice aspect of living through a shitstorm is that it's kind of restful, if you think about it right. Since everything needs doing Right Goddamned Now! it doesn't much matter what you pick up and fiddle with. It needs doing. One fairly awful night, Right After, R.A. The Stroke, Lynn was convinced I was the Governor of Louisiana. Well, we're not going to have a bunch of conversation tonight, I thought brightly, and diddled with a client's website design.

I was glad I had, when the Chairman called today. "How can you do this?" he asked. "Don't you have the Swine Flu and doesn't your husband have a stroke?" I explained patiently, that down here on the 8th circle of Hell, we're not just toasting marshmallows. We're still doing shit. One thing we're not doing is the laundry however, so all my jeans have fairly serious diaper butt. But meanwhile, I'd gotten four whole hours of sleep, surrendered my will over to God, talked to a member of the reality-based community, and felt like a monster of health. Had decided if Lynn was going to die, he was going to fucking die, against my most strenuous wishes, true, but there wasn't much I could do about it. I had to float on the wings of the world and trust them.

I was now wearing my black and white Chucks, my favorite Buddha t-shirt, diaper-butt jeans and a faceful of makeup. Planned to go see my boy.

But when I wandered out to my ancient war pony, aka The 15 year old Benz, it wheezed like an old whore. For this is the Law of the Shitstorm: If It's Big And Expensive And Breaking It Will Really Fuck You Up, It Will Happen. So I knew something horrible was going on with the transmission, and was not amazed. I was just grateful I didn't need to have both knees scoped too. But I was out of catfood. Oh Jesus. Can you do just one grocery run? I asked it and the war pony's headlights gleamed seductively. Wait right there I told it and raced back to the house. Had to call my boy. I thought about breaking down in that particular part of Dallas and shuddered. I'd be barbequed and eaten in a vacant squat, probably before nightfall.

Lynn picked right up and his voice sounded good: nice and rich like it really is. "You sound great," I said. I explained about the car. "I think the transmission's going to fall out on the floor, but don't worry. I got it covered," I said figuring quickly. I could do one transmission, but not a vacuum system. But then no one can do a vacuum system. We ancient Benz owners live in dread of something going wrong with the Benz' completely insane vaccum system that transports various vital fluids and gases. We think. None of us really knows anything about it except it's totally unaffordable and you are truly SOL when it goes.

"No. Shit no. Don't come," he said thinking about empty lots, pointless murders, awful drugs, and sketchy characters too. "I showed Heidi my blog," he said. Heidi is one of the army of creamy rosy-cheeked Baylor therapists.

"You did?" I said. "What'd she think?

"Oh, she was impressed. And then I said maybe we could get the communications up to what I'm more used to."

"She was treating you like a moron," I guessed.

"Yeah. But I think it'll be okay." I bet it will, I thought. I bet old Heidi's fucking shiny white veneers fell out on the floor when she got a gander.

See, my boy has a blog with upwards of 6000 viewers daily and sometimes 10,000. It's read worldwide, with 200 readers in the Vatican alone and about 20 in some yurt in Tibet. My theory? I think he's done TV so long that he just intuitively knows what tweaks people. Plus, he's ravenously curious about everything, so it's always an interesting effortless blog. His theory? People suck. "They just like the big tits, and weird stuff I do. And anything about Miley Cyrus." Actually it was moi, your very own Writer to the Stars, that caused him to go viral.

Now at my tiny blog, with my 10-20 dog-faithful readers, I really do write about weird shit and then draw curly inferences with each hand-carved letter. So I came upon this article one day, Man Marries Pineapple, about a guy in Germany with a thing for fruit. There's stuff that's actually too weird for me, so I sent it to Lynn. He'd just started Athensboy: The View Behind Blue Eyes and was averaging about 60 hits a day, which I thought was so successful, you'd have to be a greedy bastard to ask for more.

He posted it and then fifteen minutes later, he yelled, I think I'm going viral! The two of us stood there staring at the screen, watching different parts of the world map light up. Holy Shit! we breathed.Within two hours he had 16,000 hits and it's never slacked off much since. So old Heidi can go fuck herself. She's lucky just to get to hang around him.

But we'd already had The Talk. And I'd given him my view of rehab as I'd experienced it."See, I think it's like public school.They're really aiming for a good C average joe. They don't like failures and they sure as shit don't want any A's. So if you don't want to turn into one of those old assholes on a motorized chair, with a nice black lady trudging behind you, then you gotta fight. It's a head game. When I was a patient no one listened to me and no one believed me. So I just decided I would never, never, never shut up about the horrible pain in my shoulder (turned out to be a snapped rotator cuff) and I would not answer any dumbass questions beginning with the words Are we... " I shut up abruptly. He was dealing with enough. And who was I anyway?

Then I went home and sobbed for about four hours, feeling unequal to all of it, as I always am in the face of love and loss.

On the whole, a shitty day...

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I hate that word: shitty. The word itself makes my sister go nuts: there's a sense of a great rage, heaving breasts, rustling skirts, maybe a rolling pin. A 19th century fit coming right at you. She never actually does anything, but she leaves you feeling that she could be serious bad news.

My mother on hearing a single declared shit would leave the room hurriedly looking pale. Saying "shit" in my starchy Scot-Presbyterian-lawyerly family was...I don't know what it was like since I didn't know that many bad words. I thought "ain't" was a really bad word. And it wasn't like all this repression kept us from having foul, filthy mouths, although my sister keeps it clean. Like my ex-Navy dad, I swear 24/7.

"It's so relaxing," my husband told me one afternoon, when I apologized for unleashing a cartoon style string of awful words: &@#%$v9+##a6&^&."I never have to watch myself with you," he said happily enough, which is the relaxing kind of guy he is.

But some days, it's just shitty out there and no other word will do.

It's been drizzling rain so much the yard is squelchy and the cats are pissed at me. They think I control the weather and why wouldn't they? Me with the mighty light switch; me with the roaring faucets.

The swine flu settled in my chest and like a real dope, I loaded up on Mucinex last night and realized too late I was completely jacked on guiafenisen. I stayed up for the second night in a row, coughing up chunks of asphalt, old hubcaps, and greasy car parts. Then I put on a faceful of makeup, really tight jeans, and my black leather jacket and set out for Baylor, in a decidedly foggy state. I hadn't seen my boy in a while.

Thing about Baylor is it's a monster of a hospital that lives between some really good real estate and junkie-land. As I mumbled along north Washington, praying to that old bastard, God, I realized that the guy in front of me was incredibly drunk and tilting into the passenger side. The guys behind me...I guess they were guys...the windows were so darkly tinted and dirty I couldn't tell, but they seemed glued to my bumper and were driving a serial-killer van. The cops pry these fat ancient vans open after a good long lawless chase and scared kids with their underwear inside out topple out on the pavement.

But so be it. That's the way God had ordered the world this particular day. I went to the wrong rehab center first, and while the receptionist tried to call up Lynn's records, a tiny East Indian man on a glucose drip and a catheter came up to me. Blease, miss, he said politely, I need to bee. I tried to smile gently, but I know all about the need to bee and the ways of catheters. Lynn's had two bladder infections in as many days. I couldn't do a thing for my tiny Indian and this dawned on him as the nurse practitioners closed in like wolves and took him off to bee.

But another thing about today that made it unusually shitty, is that I cried. I hate crying, but if crying is called for, like over my dead cats nearly two years ago, then I will cry. I would still rather throw up in public than cry, so obviously I have all these Grief Issues. But it was today that I realized that Lynn could really die and that God, who has already gobbled up my parents, an ex-husband, my painting teacher and my two very dearest friends, might decide to grab Lynn while he's at it.

Later on I kept crying and wept over the phone tonight at my dear couple-friends. He could do it, I shouted, God could take Lynn and why not? And if God takes Lynn, I am going to be one angry bitch. The way I have to go about Acceptance is to imagine God doing his goddamn worst on me, at me. And that means I have to know Lynn could die, despite Baylor, despite me writing our way out of this mess, despite all my hopes and idiot plans, Lynn could still die. I have to really fucking know this, otherwise I'll have no peace. This may sound like a five-year-old's idea of church, but it's part of the way I write and practice. I try to imagine things as simple and stupid as they really are.

So Lynn could die.

I hate this, I yelled at my two very dear friends. He's lying in bed, looking like bleached catshit and no one has any idea that he's a really astonishing painter, and for thirty-one years, he's made me laugh every single day. To Baylor, he's just some old guy, who looks pretty fucked up. And I hate crying. I'm not a goddamn girl.

You're really not, the husband agreed calmly. You're not a girl at all. But you're a good fighter.

And I am. Except there's nothing to fight right now. There's just a bunch of events I'm trying to figure out, while my boy lies on his back, bored out of his skull.

I'll go tomorrow and see what medicines he's on, find out how to get this bladder thing licked and I'll tell him, Fuck rehab. I'm not impressed you can sit in a wheelchair and you shouldn't be either. The point is to get you out of that goddamn wheelchair. So you're gonna have to be smarter than any of these jokers. And I'll find him some of that good dry shampoo while I'm out.

We've been here before and it's a real pig of a rodeo. But it's the only one in town.

It was a really shitty day today. I'm sorry Marty, I'm sorry Mama, but some days you've got to call it just the way it is.

And it's shitty.

This Spaceship Thing We're In

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The Spaceship Thing

Five years ago, it was my good fortune or not, depending on how Zen you are, to be mugged at four in the afternoon on a very bright April day. It was April 17, in fact, and I remember it well because it was one of the few times I didn't file for a tax extension.

"Hell, let's just do it right now," my income tax guy said, and we did indeed file a return on time, one that seemed a little too loosey-goosey to me. So on April 17, I'd just come out of a big box store, swinging a couple of cheap artichokes snug in their plastic bag, mostly worried about getting audited. And then I heard the sound of running very close to me, then I felt hands clamp down on my shoulders, then I was spun around to face a nicely groomed guy of about 19. To grab hold of my bag, he knocked me down and that's what broke my hip.

I remember I had a lot of thoughts lying in the parking lot, as the thief and his bf sped away. A bunch of those thoughts are still crammed in a wordy article I wrote right afterwards, because writing is what I do to keep from going nuts. My longish pensee on violence, big cities, and the importance of loud screaming was tentatively accepted by one magazine. Then, like some kind of fainting maiden I was suddenly overcome by a weird incompatible combo of exhibitionism and shyness. So I yanked my article and stuck it in a file drawer, where it still lives today.

But I can remember one of those thoughts I had on April 17: how I hated that for the next days, weeks, and months, all my conversations were going to be about This. I'd been one thing and now I was This.

It's something my husband said to me in the hospital and I knew just what he meant. "This one thing happened and now I'm all different, but I'm really not," he said through a maze of plastic tubes. He was still in ICU, wired up like a NASA project, everything bleeping, counting, and eeping.

I crawled up onto the bed. "I dunno if you are or not," I told him. "Your spaceship is kind of dented. I better check." So I looked into his eyes which, trust me here, are the exact lovely blue of old old denim. "Yeah," I said. "You're the same guy."

You need someone to tell you you're the same guy. It's something I remember.

I remember what it was like: being a collection of symptoms, being a typical This, or an atypical This, and being surrounded by lots of people who'd like you to just settle the fuck down and get with the program: being This. One of my therapists, a well-meaning woman, kept urging me to decorate my walker with plastic flowers. "Are you high?" I'd always yell. She took my horrible tempers very nicely, I must say. But then, she didn't know I was at war.

Getting well is war and don't let anyone tell you different. If you believe otherwise, you might wind up on one of those motorized chairs, cruising through the big jolly supermarket, your hair perfectly done, holding a canned ham on your lap. But that's just my idea of hell. I bet you've got your own. Whatever it is, hold onto it like a mother, swear you'll kill yourself in some forlorn ditch and let wild dogs devour your flesh before you turn into This.

And so, today, after dancing by myself to Dylan's Thunder on the Mountain, crying while I did, because the last time he and I danced was maybe the last dance we'd ever have, I thought to myself: Just quit being such an asshole.

Then I marched out to the car, drove up to the Walgreen's and bought every pen, marker, dry board, sketchbook, and flouresent felt tip I could find.

"This for you?" the clerk asked, checking me out. He already knows about the stroke. I told him yesterday.

"Nope," I said. "It's for him. He used to be an artist. It's time for him to get off his ass and be one again. And by the way, your Etch A Sketch is strictly for pussies."

We both looked at the pink Etch A Sketch. "Yeah, it is," the clerk admitted, "You still want it?"

"Sure." I said. "Any Etch in a storm."

"Did I ever tell you I had Bell's Palsy?" the clerk asked me, smiling shyly.

"Nope." I said, "And I never would have guessed."

Luck...

For no reason I can fathom, when I was young I considered myself lucky, using the term vaguely as when we say someone, generally very old or rather homely, is attractive.

Actually, the fact is that no one in my extended family is lucky, or ever has been lucky, with the exception of a single cousin. He was considered so because he managed to pay for his Yale medical training entirely through his poker winnings, was the only survivor of a horrendous car crash, married a millionaire's daughter, had six sons who each had a million dollar trust fund, lived in a cantilevered glass house in Marin and had his own vineyard. He is also stunningly handsome and extremely nice. I count him one lucky son of a bitch and I don't think too many would argue with me.

So it's a mystery I can't quite divine, this foggy sense of luck I lugged around for so many years. Perhaps, as many young people do, I confused being lucky with not being unlucky. I came from humorous intelligent parents who liked to read, which, to my way of thinking, is enough to constitute perfection. I had nice enough boyfriends, a series of terrific dogs and many good cats, travelled a bit, was a size 7 most of my life, and had naturally wavy hair. But then, as I've said, I was young.

I had not yet seen my mother die by inches of breast cancer, I had not yet lived in a freezing bewilderment as my first husband went nuts, I had not been mugged yet and gotten a titanium hip as a result, and my father had not yet fallen over with a massive heart attack.

Quite simply, life had not happened to me. Yet.

Since then, I've sat at a number of death beds, lost friends to terrible diseases, and had my own share of Bad Things but why go on? It's life, as we always say, rather oddly I think, since it's more often death. There is a consolation to all this grimness that starts piling on in middle age and just keeps coming. The consolation prize, and a good one it is, is that not much scares you. Not anymore.

So last Saturday, a week ago, in fact, when my husband of 31 years said, I feel really strange and, when I looked at him, I saw he was having a stroke. In my memory his skin is entirely gray and one half of him is pulled down like something from a horror movie. But I know enough to distrust memory. At that moment, I only knew he was having a stroke and that we didn't have much time. He could talk but not walk or use his left arm, and he didn't want me to call 911 because ambulances are so expensive. Thirty minutes had gone by with the ambulance conversation and I decided fuck it and dialed 911. Right now I'd give a lot to get those 30 minutes back. But it is what it is, as we keep saying to one another.

It's not luck exactly. But he's alive. And for me, that's quite enough.

That's a lot.

Living with the weird.....

Not what you think...

Contrary to what you might believe, when you start working the Google on "alien abductees" or just "extraterrestrials", you don't fall into a big roomy universe. Instead, you find yourself hunched over in a small airless world that probably smells like Fritos.

Yesterday, after a brutal day of looking at awful pencil drawings by abductees and patently rigged photographs, I got the uneasy feeling I could know everyone on the UFO-alien-Roswell circuit by name. Plus I saw the the same bewildered people, and rotten outer-space art, photo proofs, and those goddamned crop circles repeated unto eternity in various posts and websites. F'rinstance, in the extraterrestrial venues, the photograph above seems to be forever new and is always published as exciting actual proof of aliens: aliens among us, autopsied aliens, aliens who'll probe you, and aliens who come in peace. Actually it's a special movie effect, a head that floats bodiless in cyberspace, and at least it doesn't look slimy. Clammy, yes, but that's okay, and I really like its ears.

I did happen in on some unnerving 12 Step Groups though. There's the 12 Steps that will keep you from being abducted by teaching you to project a Christian white-light bubble around yourself. The drill's the same as with booze and dope: you admit you're powerless (over aliens), that your life has become unmanageable (what with the abductions), and you've come to believe that Jesus will protect you (from alien abductions) if he is sought, etc. Then there are the unfortunates whose parents somehow got knocked up by an alien, and wuddya know, had this big green kid. Eventually, due to social awkwardness and autistic habits, the offspring stumbles, as I did, into Adult Children of Alien Abductees. Same Twelves Steps, but instead of a generic higher power, they look to Diquad. There wasn't a picture of Diquad, but then there wouldn't be, would there?

Just my opinion, but the Adult Children of Alien Abductees seem like genuine froot loops. However, alien abductees do not. If anything, they exude a kind of mid-western Indiana-ish calm. One psychiatrist noted that they seemed oddly ordinary, if such a thing could be. Having lived in Iowa for six years, I know exactly what he meant. And, I remind myself, that most couples who "swing", ::wink:: wink::, also reside in the big blank prairie states.

Where little happens except the weather, and the population is stolid by nature, a vacuum seems to form, one that demands a high-pitched inner excitement. What might be cured by a crime wave or a good indie movie, instead converts to into peculiar longings. And it's such yearnings that can lead to sitting in rooms with other tattooed souls, praying to Diquad...or taking bondage photos of your wife wearing dog chains and a ball-gag.

So beware of boredom--especially the excruciating kind.

When they come for you...

Alien Abduction Lamp

Pretty cute lamp, isn't it? It's just the way I figure it happens when you get slurped up by outer world invaders. It reminded me that there's lots of info floating around in the atmosphere that I'm placidly unaware of: stuff about Miley Cyrus, Brazilian wax jobs, celebrity chefs, and destination weddings. It's when I get curious about some corner of the universe that I discover all these thorny problems lurking in the most benign places.

F'rinstance, it wasn't until I started poking around into extraterrestrial aliens, that I got reintroduced to the whole abduction scandal. About fifteen years ago, the same time that nursery school kids were being snatched for satanic rituals, there was a huge uptick in people kidnapped during their REM sleep and spirited onto space ships. Since I'm easily distracted, I was paying a whole lot more attention to the reported hordes of devil-worshipping toddler-eating ghouls, and pooh-poohed the sad-sack alien abductees.

I'm here to say it's still quite a problem, this getting grabbed by guys from outer space. What happens is...well, I'll let Michael Menkin of http://www.stopabductions.com website explain:

Since we are being invaded by an alien force from another world, we have a different kind of war. Our war with these beings is one of mind control, mind scan, and telepathic control... Until now, the creatures abducting us could do so at will: they could "switch off" people or render them powerless, manipulate people's thoughts and cause them to move against their will, project mental images to us, masquerade as a friendly or sexually attractive human, and scan our entire minds.

A big problem for all of us, Michael thinks, a veritable War of the Worlds. Michael, however, has come up with a solution for those who are repeatedly abducted, taken to a space ship, and then wake in the morning, all bruised and bleeding from odd places, and he has the testimonials to prove it. Check out this happy camper...

ALIEN ABDUCTEE FROM AUSTRIA WEARING A THOUGHT SCREEN HELMET SHE MADE FROM DIRECTIONS ON THIS WEB SITE.

She goes on to say that she's been abducted for years, but that the thought screen helmet has definitely raised her quality of life. And then there's this gentleman...

ALIEN ABDUCTEE FROM KENTUCKY WEARING A THOUGHT SCREEN HELMET

"Since trying Michael Menkin's Helmet, I have not been bothered by alien mind control. Now my thoughts are my own. I have achieved meaningful work and am contributing to society. My life is better than ever before. Thank you Michael for the work you are doing to save all humanity."

I feel the same way. If a thought-screen helmet is what it takes for this guy to get out of bed, it seems pretty cheap and easy. What I always miss in these and other non-mainstreamy accounts is all the little stuff. Like, did the guys at job site give him a hard time the first time he climbed into his Caterpillar Paver, wearing his thought-screen helmet? Haw! Haw! Haw! Check out the WWI pilot! Whaddaya think you're driving? Did the Austrian woman's family sigh with relief when she sat down to dinner in her helmet? And what did she say to Bub, Sis, and Dad? No more pesky thought-grabbing, my cherished ones! And whatever happened to the classical foil-lined baseball cap? (Actually, I found out that foil-lining is so 1950. And with the advanced technology aliens are using, aluminum foil doesn't stand a chance.)

This alien abduction business, it's a rich vein all right.

More to come...

No progress here...

Combining The Cute And The Topical

Yesterday I shlepped downtown for jury duty at the same elephant-gray courthouse where Lee H. Oswald met his end. Glancing around, I sighed with recognition because, in the main jury room at least, it was still 1963. Oh, there were a few aggressive 40 and 50+ ladies with BlueTooths in their ears, and some impatient semi-retired guys with cellphones, but mostly we were all of a certain age, and all of us were reading. Some folks even had newspapers. No one was texting, no one was flipping through his iPhone apps, and everyone, I noted, had used lots of hairspray.

I begin this post with a fond backwards look since I've discovered that extraterrestrials belong to those dear dead days too. In researching men from Mars, alien abductions, and aliens in general, I'm sorry to report almost no progress in the appearance of creatures from outer space. Dating before the 1947 Roswell incident, extraterrestrials are generally portrayed as big-headed, skinny, bug-eyed, slot-mouthed beings with a greenish tinge. Although I did come across a picture of something that looked like a jelly-fish. It didn't have any arms though, so I couldn't see how it could grasp those bizarre shiny instruments aliens use in probing abductees.

Looking up "Roswell" on the Google, I looked at pix from A Real Alien Autopsy with something less than fascination. The alien in question lay on the slab, huge-headed, and with big googly eyes, while the "photo" itself looked a lot like those blatantly doctored up pictures of Bat Boy in the Weekly World News. Thinking of Bat Boy made me nostalgic all over again, so I went to the current online issue and came upon an article that listed 11 HINTS YOU MIGHT BE DESCENDED FROM ALIENS! The author, Erik Van Datiken, says in his flatly declaratory lede that humans and aliens intermarried 8,000 years ago, and so their descendants live among us now: http://weeklyworldnews.com/alien-alert/11451/11-hints-you-might-be-descended-from-aliens/2/. Check it out, if only for the heavily photo-shopped illustration showing that aliens evidently have evolved in some way, since they don't have noses anymore.

Among the 11 clues that spell out aliendom are: blue or green eyes set wide apart, narrow feet with longer than normal toes, big ears etc. In other words, sort of fetal-alcohol syndrome-ish, and looking mighty like the same old boring aliens we know so well. Ho-hum. I was way more interested in reading about the DUCT TAPE CAT and THE GIRL WITH X-RAY EYES. The story titled DALAI LAMA FIST BUMP and the one about Tom Delay's dancing with the stars, however, convinced me that the difference between actual journalism and the Weekly World News is: not much. The last two stories could fit comfortably in The Washington Post.

Dumbasses +1, Civilization 0.

The Ick Factor...

And isn't it time?

Given these troubled times I think we need to get back to basics, and by that, obviously I mean aliens. Yeah, those kinds of aliens. During the 90's, I'm sorry to report, my appetite for things extraterrestrial became dimmer and dimmer, until it was extinguished utterly. This had nothing to do with Clinton, and everything to do with The X Files. Used to be that stuff from outer space (with the exception of The Blob) was relatively clean and dry. Guys from other planets looked a bit leathery and green or, at the far end of the spectrum, they might have some scaley parts. Generally speaking though, you could count on a low ick factor (IF).

Much as I liked the two X File stalwarts, Scully and Mulder (Scully more, Mulder a lot less), the two of them found the stickiest extraterrestrial glop I'd ever seen. Sometimes the whatever was covered in a coat of slime, sometimes it was just a blob of cosmic goo and, every time I could stand to look, my stomach would heave precipitously. After too many shows starring various types of gunk, mire, mucus, and sludge and despite my girl crush on Scully, I had to abandon the X. I couldn't stand one more autopsy scene, with Scully and her rubber gloves bent over some spotlit nameless pile of ooze.

Is this an alien evolution? From dry well-groomed 1950's Roswell cast-offs to the slovenly gummy outer-space guys of the late 20th C. and early 21st? If so, give me the retro stuff.

But lately, in my insomniac throes, I find myself up to the armpits in Monster Quest. I love watching crytozoologists measuring huge plaster footprints, and nodding affirmatively. Sasquatch lives! I just knew it. Sasquatch not only lives but s/he attacks! Cue the shaken locals who spotted him/her/it peeking at them through the kitchen window. It's something I'll never get over, says Mary Smith, 72, a spry homemaker from Manitoba. Cut to the remains of a half-eaten steer. I don't care what the experts say. Wasn't man or beast did that.

So far, despite motion sensors, tranq darts, and cages that drop out of trees, the cryptozoologists haven't caught Big Foot, a mutant canine, Birdzilla, or Stalin's Ape. But it would be totally okay with me if they did, since all of these creatures have an extremely low ick factor, except maybe the Giant Squid. Even Nettie, the Loch Ness Monster, appears to be a jolly rubberized leviathan.

So given my happy hours of goggling at the Swamp Beast and Creatures of the 4th Dimension, what I think is, I might be wanting me some aliens.

But not the gooey kind.

Civil discourse cont....modern discussions....

A deeply flawed syllogism

Or maybe we can just say that here's a fab example of arguing towards a cherished conclusion, a cherished party-of-one conclusion, that is. Notice the chick being magnetized has the freaked-out expression small animals get just before the car hits. So onward.

A flawed syllogism is like saying Obama, being a black guy and all, should not be president (::duh:: how obvious is that?) so therefore he was born in Guam or Nairobi or Kenya or some hot place without 48 oz. Coke slushies and shouldn't be president atall since he's not An American Citizen, so there. And since it's 2009 and we live in the age of bountiful crap, there's a huge consumer range of awful conclusions to choose from. Obama is a Nazi? Nazis everywhere? Gotcha covered. Death panels/check lists/whatevs administered by shadowy bureaucrats? You bet. Forced abortions? Absolutely. Internment camps for white people? Honey, we're there.

But let's just invoke the law of parsimony and call all of it for what it is, this "discussion" that's making the rounds, this populist tidal wave of 2m or 1m or 750k or 40 gazillion-trillion souls, depending on your news source, who showed up in DC last weekend. It's racism and it always was racism. (A tip o' the hat to Jimmy Carter for spelling it out and I second the emotion.) The world is not what it was. It's doubtful we can go back to those dear departed days of Klan marches, poll-taxes, and colored-only everything. It's not only the negras who've gotten uppity, it's the ladies too (most of them currently supporting their hunky guys), plus those little brown health-service-grabbing immigrants taking all those great American jobs. The celebrated era of the white guy is over and, in case you live under a porch or a rock, it's been over since about 1964.

But one thing that confounds me about stupidity in general, is this tendency to roar to the polar opposite of any argument. This AM, I'm currently brooding over No Impact Man: the movie, the book, the talk show. And yes, idiocy also comes to the progressive left on little cat feet. Here's this fella and his wife, plus hapless child, with a cushy income-level, who decides to give up everything for a year. It's kind of Walden Pond without the pond, the good writing, the ideals, and the 19th century, but you get the idea. So they have a pan of worms in the kitchen to compost their garbage, they walk up 40 billion flights of stairs every day, they squint under candlelight at night, and play charades for funsy. What I wonder is why they fled to this inflated dystopian vision of non-consumer life.

When I was a shirt-tailed tad, we kept our compost outside and when we lived in an apartment complex, we didn't have a compost pile. We had electricity too, and even used it at night to no ill-effects. For giggles and grins, we went separate ways to our singular amusements. I read comic books, my little sis babbled into her toy telephone, and my parents played bridge. As Terry Allen says, It weren't art but it weren't bad.

We didn't get a book deal out of it though.

No Impact Man has remarked in interviews that his vision of things was informed by Zen Buddhism, to which I call bullshit. The hardest part about Buddhism is that middle-way thingie. Extremes are easy. Hate to diet? Jump on the Anorexia Express and starve instead. Been a consumer pig? Give it all up, put on scratchy loin cloth, and hunker in the dark. The nicest part about being a total contrarian, is that you can give your brain a rest. There's no uncomfortable doubting or deciding moment to moment.

But, thankfully, extremism of any kind is always a two wicked candle. It burns like a mother while it burns, but it burns out fast.

Don't even try to light my fire. I'm here for the long haul.

Civil discourse cont...The Howling Mob

Knock, knock, knockin' at your own back door

Not to put too fine a point on it, but our Founding Fathers weren't nuts about dumb-asses either. In fact, the stupidity problem was one they recognized early on in pre-Revolutionary times and wrote long quarreling letters about it in their gorgeous curly handwriting. Sam Adams, an uncomfortable precursor of Glen Becks everywhere, thought that the Howling Mob, as it was characterized, could be put to noble service by siccing the rabble onto Loyalists and redcoats. Cooler heads, like John Adams, however, saw a lot to be wary of, like, f'instance, some rabble might be mongoose crazy and get all scary and unpredictable, and it was just possible they could get out of control completely. Which, of course they did, several times and to no one's benefit.

Thomas Jefferson thought that, in the interests of democratic thinking, one should mix with the dumb-butts and even, as he said, Lie on their stinking cots. But Jefferson had his trippy moments and who knows how he truly felt. He didn't lie on any reeking beds, that's for sure. He was mostly home at Monticello slugging down part of a truly exceptional cellar. George Washington wrote a little etiquette book in his twenties that was like many of the time: obsessed with the presentation of the self and with self control, plus exhorting his readers not to blow their noses on their fingers in the drawing room and not to pick lice out of their hair in church. On the mob side of things, I think we can vote him a quiet shudder.

So it's curious to me that we even give these poor teabagging souls a glance. Another blogger, The Rude Pundit, said that the 9-12 demonstration was the Special Olympics of protests and I tend to agree. Except that I can't overlook the fact that the howling mob is a part of America, as is their unvarnished racism. I don't know if their anger can ever be quelled, I don't know if they can be made happy; this country, even during its most somber midnights, has never done much for them. They are often constricted and deformed by poverty, whether it's a poverty of the soul, poverty of education or, the least ruinous type of poverty, financial. And yet, every so often, some strange personage arises from them, like a fabled feathered creature. Like Andrew Jackson say. Or Sam Houston. Or, in many ways, LBJ.

I've never been a believer in abreactive therapy: that it does a body good to blow his cork. Anger just begets more anger and its expression doesn't release anything, it just intoxicates. So I see these groups egging one another on and, I believe, no good will come of it. I know I'm not particularly good with idiots and it's better for me not to get furious about them, with them. But I think somehow they need to be engaged, and recognized as the part of America they've always been. It's the expression of that recognition I'm searching for.

Maybe George Washington's etiquette book has a clue.

I'm not seeing anything else that does.

I Forgot

Lest We Forget

Well, here it is, the tag-end of 9-11 festivities and I forgot how much we love us some weepy holidays. America gets more like my family with each passing day. My family loved death and all its stylish accoutrements so passionately that certain members were known to bring their wills to the dinner table. Others brought memo pads and tiny pencils so they could jot down their pallbearers, then whack them off that self-same list in a fit of pique. "Are we all a bunch of goddamn Egyptians?" I hollered at one Thanksgiving. "What is it with the funeral plans?"For that, unsurprisingly, I received the collective lemon-sucking face given to such outbursts. If Keats was, ...half in love with easeful death, my family was downright horny for it.

Now I know that, as usual, my mom n' pop n' relatives were true visionaries, foreseeing what this country would become. The older I grow, the more America hankers for frequent tearful memorials. How long did we all hang by the TV, sniffling over Michael Jackson, whose death was not hugely unexpected? It seems like we drooped around for six months, watching CSI guys trudge off with big green plastic sacks packed with mad industrial-strength pharmaceuticals. And for Uncle Ted, God bless him, we're still carrying on like timber wolves in heat, and buying up all those special slick jumbo editions of Time magazine etc., engorged with every manner of Ted K. pix. But that's what we like.

I was so at odds with myself today, what with the weird muggy about-to-do-something-awful weather and all the 9-11 hoohah pestering my unconscious, I almost fled to CuteOverload, then realized a baby hamster in a sweater wouldn't do it for me. Not today. Today I was blindly impelled to the Cake Wrecks site. When life is so ghastly that teddy bears piled in memoriam on the fatal crash site just won't get it, here in America we order us up a cake. I knew someone would have constructed a Twin Towers cake and, indeed, they had. A cake so lousy and moronic that I refuse to show it here. Look it up your own bad self. The creepy sleeping (I hope) toddler cake is shown in its place. And without further ado, let me share a few more cake wrecks.

I can't think of the occasion for these but, uh, I'm sure it's wildly celebrated somewhere in the deep gritty South.

Onward to the...

As the website chortles, "Now everyone can have one in the oven. " Ba-rump. A pause for all the trolls and ogres to chuckle and for hilarity to ensue.

More? Okay, okay.

You whined and kvetched for the Twin Towers cake, so here it is in all its ad hoc glory, fashioned from glued-together cupcakes. I don't even want to know how that black frosting was made.

Happy now? Me neither.

Civil Discourse cont.: Freaks and Freaking

The Romance of Freaking

Back in the day...that would be my day, not yours...those who fried their heads with massive doses of hallucinogens and were still able to talk were sometimes called freaks. However, when they flopped around on the ground and made warthog noises, this was not referred to as a freak-out. In my neck of the woods, which was the urban East Coast, we called such events a horror show and, if we lived in Boston, a wicked horror show.

All this is ancient dull history, of course, and you can judge how ancient it is when I tell you it was once possible to behave badly. It was even likely among those of us who were very young, hip, and busy grossing out our parents. That we succeeded in appalling the older generation simply by growing out our hair is just one indication that the collective zeitgeist had a massive broomstick up its ass. The 50's and early sixties were starchy times.

However, by 1966 or s0, even among our admittedly lax peer group, lousy behavior was noted. A white person with a permed Afro, carrying a copy of The Fire next Time would likely be chided for co-opting our cultural suffering. Hang on to a joint too long and your bogarting would be rebuked. Some worry-warts tormented themselves over the need to kill their parents, come The Revolution, since mom and pop wouldn't be happy in our balmy Socialist utopia.

And now, proving they don't have an original idea in their roomy yet empty heads, the Republicans are aping their constituents' wretched behavior. I'm referring to last night's Joe Wilson blaring "You lie!" to a sitting president in the middle of a policy speech. I would label this a Category 9 Wicked Horror Show but, seemingly, everyone has shrugged it off and mumbled something about how it's time to move ahead. Well, and so it is, but ahead to what?

Joe Wilson, this Joe Wilson, not the unfortunate Other, is what I would call a freak, not in the counter-culture sense but giving it the black meaning, as in, I dunno. He's a freak. Here freak is used to convey a kind of weirdness not worth figuring out. A beloved and dead aunt of mine would have said Joe behaved inexpensively, and I'll go along with that too, while still mourning the loss of civility.

The nice thing about manners is that they save so much time and trouble. You don't have to make it up as you go along. When observing a fat-ass wearing a fisherman's hat festooned with Lipton's teabags and waving a Hitler poster, you don't agonize over how to deal with this person. A blank smile will suffice, and if pressed, you can murmur ambiguously, "How utterly delightful," an all-occasion remark I find quite useful.

As Judith Martin notes in her Miss Manners guise, "Etiquette doesn't have the great sanctions that the law has. But the main sanction we do have is in not dealing with (odious) people and isolating them because their behavior is unbearable."

I wonder how we forgot that.

Hitler Does The Darndest Things...

Gratuituous Hitler Cuteness: A Liddle Kitler

Those of you who have hung in with me since my days of posting about Death Row Brides and Commie Fags (actually a brand of cigarettes), will recognize my perpetual fascination with Hitler and the jerks who love him. Since then, I've become acquainted with Godwin's Law, to wit:

Formulated by Godwin way back in 1990...the law states that: As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches 1. For those of us who have forgotten our math course segment on probabilities, that means somebody is sure to call somebody a Nazi. (italic emphasis all mine. AW.) By RICK CASEY, HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Aug. 13, 2009, 8:51PM

I'm so glad I found out about this, since it's something I intuitively suspected. When your opponent has bankrupted himself of awful names and accusations to hurl at you, he plays the Nazi card. Also the Marxist card, I notice.

Not in my day, however.

In those halcyon Woodstockian tie-dye-wearing days, you were more likely to be called A capitalist war mongering tool! by one side and a Commie faggot lesbo peace creep! by the other. We let the Nazi-stuff be, since, uh, we still knew a few things about Nazis. Like: the commies actually hated Nazis and, uh, slaughtered a bunch of them during that great Band o' Brothers war known as II. Also, some of us had dads who had fought in II and, uh, liberated the death camps. Those guys tended to be strangely quiet during Nazi discussions.

But here we all are, post-history, post-manners, post-rationality, with flesh-eating viruses, dead spots in the ocean, plastic-bag islands, loose nukes, and now dumb-asses without any filters on their brains. I can visualize them in their kitchens, a nourishing 14 lb. bag of pizza-flavored Cheetos at their elbows, hunched over their Walgreen's poster board, tongues clutched between their gappy teeth, holding a Magic Marker like a bread knife and inscribing: The Goverment Wans to kil Old Peeple & Obamma Iz a Natsi.

There's another theory around, promulgated on Daily Kos from time to time, that using the word Nazi is a substitution for the rightly-loathed N-word. And I entertained that notion for a while, except that I think our native fructose-bloated rabble are staunch enough to use the word Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! without shame or fear. Remember, I grew up in the 60's South,and discovered that lynch-loving Kluckers don't have a lot of inhibitions that way. Nope. Our very own white-trash mob figured out that the very word "Nazi" would, maybe, bring us latte-guzzling, tree-kissing, recycling types to our knees and then...Game Over.

This is what puzzles me, because those fact-free groups who turn out holding pix of Obama wearing a Hitler 'stache, are the very ones who would dearly love them some Nazi's. You know: Nazi-party politics, where you kill everyone you disagree with, wear great looking scary uniforms, and make the trains run on time, until the world gets sick of it. Then Dear Cowardly Leader kills himself and his sweet patootie in a bunker, is set on fire in a ditch, and the Allies march in to see for themselves what the Four Horsemen have wrought.

Can't see why right-wing nutjobs wouldn't love a little go-round with that.

They all seem to come from the same special basement.

Civil Discourse

I haven't blogged since March? Wow. Hard to believe but not hard to do (or not do). I eased into not-blogging like a champ and got better at not-writing as I went on. But now it's time. Time to saddle up and write some posts.

For my reintroduction, I include my facebook picture, which exhorts me or you or the world at large to be funky. (I'm so tempted.) Actually be funky is a web application that will convert whatever photo you choose into a cartoon, a stencil, Pop Art, or (ambiguously) Red, White n' Blue. It's idiot simple and a lot of fun. Once I tried it out, and then lived life as a 'toon, I decided it was too rough and tumble in toon-land, what with explosions, talking critters, and all that work at the Acme Writing Factory. So then, I decided to simply exist, placidly and serenely, as a 1950's Redbook magazine tempera illustration.

After all, it was a quieter time, when grown ups in suits ladled out the boring evening news; in the AM, we read the newspapers while munching our cornflakes and guzzling our Tang. And although we might have a few opinions on how things were going, we kept them to ourselves except when likkered up on dry martinis or schnapps, depending.

But hey, you watch Mad Men. You know what it was like.

When I've poked my 1950's head into the net or cable TV, I've seen that America, or some part of it, has gone stone crazy. It seems there's a faction out there, often fat, white, pissed-off, and draped in tea-bags, but a faction nonetheless, and one in possession of the Revealed Truth. The True Word being that Obama is a Nazi, who wants all of Amurrica for hisself, and isn't that just like a Negro? Selfish and uppity, taking over a whole country like that and turning everyone into a communiss, whether they wanta be a communiss or not.

When confronted with these folks which, thankfully is rare, as a 1950's magazine babe, I mumble, How nice for you. But within my bad-ass beatnik writer self, I can't ignore the fact that there is work for me to do: heartless comments to be made and snark to be spread.

It's good to be back.