Write and Wrong

Really not the Lady With the Lamp...

2009-11-08T22:57:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-30T12:52:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-10-28T00:55:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-10-26T07:59:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-10-19T21:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-19T21:07:00.000-07:00

The Public Option

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

2009-10-12T22:32:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-10-11T23:43:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-10-10T05:56:00.000-07:00

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.....

2009-09-24T19:36:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-09-24T06:48:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-09-23T11:36:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-09-17T14:12:00.000-07:00

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....

2009-09-15T16:32:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-14T19:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-11T14:37:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-09T20:56:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-09-04T11:07:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-03T19:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Hiatus...

2009-03-25T19:38:00.001-07:00

Hi there.

Yeah, It's me. Your very own Writer to the Stars. I have to stop blogging for...well, I really don't know. Not too long, I hope. What's going on is that I've been working on some fiction, along with blogging. But I've reached the point where I need to really concentrate on my stories, and burrow into them like a wood tick. I thought I could hold to my beloved blog, while cranking out short stories at the same time. But I can't.

Not right now.

Problem is, I started blogging with a very singular idea. I wanted a place where people-who-like-to-read could come and nestle in with something interesting. I'm a compulsive reader myself; I know how happy I am when I discover a good writer on-line. So, following on the best I've read in cyberspace, I decided I wanted to explore themes at my leisure, and take my time with them. And I decided my posts would have a beginning, middle, and an end. And I decided sometimes what I wrote would be funny, sometimes not, but it would always be heartfelt, and it would always be truthful. I don't know if I've succeeded, but I will say I've always enjoyed the time it takes to post something on Write and Wrong. Each of my posts takes a good amount of time...sometimes two, three, or four hours until I get it right, so something else usually gets dropped with a thud. Too often it's my fiction.

Thank you, each one of you, for reading my posts and for your comments and emails. You've been very generous, and have kept me chugging along, even through my usual shadowy periods of self-doubt. Please feel free to keep commenting here...if and when you feel like it, or email me if you like. Somehow I've acquired a band of articulate, discerning readers and you've honored me with your attention.

I'll be back.

Hopefully it'll be soon.

The real deal?

2009-03-17T12:34:00.000-07:00

A real live documented Haitian zombie

But probably not. Heartbreaking, I know. All of us have a tiny person within us, and that person is wearing a tinfoil hat and crammed with doubtful beliefs. F'instance, several years ago it only took a hot ten minutes at an urban myths website to realize that many "truths" I cherished, were actually pretty nutty. And so, onward in this post, to the possible reality of zombies, which was one of those "facts" I would have mud-wrestled you over.

When it first came out, I spent many happy hours pouring over Wade Davis' book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, a respected anthropologist's account of actual Haitian zombies. Later, a train-wreck of a movie was based on his book and I spent some happy time watching that too, shivering over the scary undead and marveling that zombies were real after all. Thanks to zombie-blogging, I've had occasion to revisit Davis' research and to wonder why I bought into it in the first place.

There are several problems with the Wade Davis book. Problem #1 is that the zombie powder used by witch doctors (or bokors) in zombie-making ceremonies is, on analysis, is far too weak to make a respectable zombie. You'd need a more massive amount of puffer toad plus fuga fish in the zombie powder to put someone in the comatose condition that's required. Once it's ingested, the zombie-nominee supposedly falls into a coma state so deep, it appears to mimic death. Then, after the zombie is "dead", he's quickly buried, periodically force-fed datura paste (which makes the zombie candidate catatonic) and dug up after an unspecified length of time.

Anecdotal and scientific evidence both suggest that people have been buried alive in Haiti for all kinds of reasons and that it's not uncommon. Since it's a tropical climate, the dead are buried very quickly, which increases the odds of a sad mistake. An interesting side-note is that people can and do recover from the whole puffer-fish, buried-alive, datura horror-show. But, according to Haitian bokors, if it looks like a zombie is coming to, he's just fed more datura. What supposedly emerges is a will-less, unconscious being, easily led and directed. However, that leads to another problem with Wade Davis book.

He seems to have jumped right into the whole spooky grave-corpse-witch doctor paradigm without considering any other alternatives (aka, hypotheses as used in the scientific method) to zombieville. The photo above pictures one such supposed "zombie", who was, in fact, never touched by a witchdoctor and is severely brain-damaged but is still considered a zombie, entirely for cultural reasons.

A considerable problem with the Wade Davis book is that, despite having a boatload of zombie powder, he was never able to zombify anyone or duplicate any "results" he saw. And a replication of results is the only proof the scientific method recognizes.

A later study by the British in 1993, included interviews with supposed zombies, analyzed zombie powders and various datura pastes, and ultimately concluded that these people were more likely the products of mental illness and oxygen starvation, seen in the context of voodou.

However, putting these poor souls to one side, to me, the more innaresting questions are small ones. Why do we use terms like zombie banks? And zombie creditors? Somehow we're conflating the economy plus the undead: Zombie Bankers Who Ate My Brain!

I'm not sneering at anyone's belief or joy in zombies, whatever type they prefer. It's forgivable. A quality of our species as human beings, is that we are highly suggestible. Like Kahnweiler wrote in his Introduction to the First Cubist Exhibition, We not only look at, we look for.

Right now, I think what we're actually seeing and participating in, zombie-wise, is one of our cultural allegories. We sit before our news websites, mouths ajar, goggling at will-less, unconscious, and immoral beings who can neither be held responsible or fixed.

That is a far, far scarier sight than any raggedy-ass zombie.

HERE ENDETH THE ZOMBIE CHRONICLES.

Fat zombies and other problems...

2009-03-13T12:02:00.000-07:00

The chunky undead

As you may have figured out, I'm something of a monomaniac. Once I get into, uh, anything, I tend to keep at it until the topic/activity/chore and I are ground right into the floorboards, and my husband has to tell me what day of the week it is. But unlike a lot of obsessives, there's a more than a pinch of curiosity involved in my labors. So I've been researching zombies of all types, realizing that I may actually be looking for The Zombie Who Does Not Exist. In the last post, I took on girl zombies since I had this idea that girls were, at the very least, unwilling participants zombie-wise, and thus statistically rare. As you saw, I got my comeuppance big-time,and discovered that girls are totally enthusiastic about being zombies and would like blood to drip down their gray decaying faces 24/7. So, onward through the fog to fat zombies. I was positive there were no chubboid zombies, but check out my pix today. More where that came from too.

As half a minute's worth of the Google will show, fat zombies are not only ubiquitous, but according to the game, Doom 3, they're the most dangerous because their heft gives them momentum. However, in HellGate, fat zombies are just fat zombies, no special powers given. I think we can overlook HellGate entirely, since Doom 3 appears to be the gold standard zombie-wise. In fact, there's a certain consternation among the zombie websites about how to combat fat zombies. At LostZombies, it's strenously suggested that you not heave a fat person at a pursuing fat zombie, because you'd only wind up with two fat zombies as a result. Why you might heave anyone at a zombie, rather than just getting the fuck out of town is a question for another day. On PlanetDoom, zombie obesity is pondered, with one poster suggesting that once a body is dead and decaying, gases tend to bloat a corpse. This poster goes on to say that maybe fat zombies have been mislabeled as porkers, when they're actually just more dead than other zombies.

Since we're becoming heavier as a nation, I've wondered if zombies are just eating a richer diet and a lot more of it. Personally, I find fat zombies more appealing, since they seem to have less decay, and thus don't have the grisly display of exposed stringy muscles, body-parts and glimpses of the ribcage that skinnier ones seem to.

For myself, I've been wondering, on and off, if fat zombies might not spell the welcome end of this series. And yet...I realize I haven't considered the most important zombies of all: real zombies. The kind they create in Haiti to do the shit work like harvesting sugar cane etc. In that context, they seem mild enough and not prone to wolfing down passers-by. Anyway, their raison d'etre is to save money, since they don't eat much of the precious little there is to eat in Haiti.

Then too, as far as zombies go, I haven't considered a far more depressing kind of zombie: the symbolic kind. It's so depressing, given these troubled times, I wonder if I'm even up for exploring the topic. The fact that financial whiz-boys are talking about zombie banks doesn't seem accidental to me.

It means something is dead and stinking in the culture.

Been dead for a while, too.

Girl zombies, hotter than evs...

2009-03-12T14:38:00.000-07:00

Girrrrrl zombie's night out.

I'd been thinking of zombies as being a semi-equal opportunity horror-fest, although probably lower on female participation than male. Some of that assumption reflects my bias. Since zombies-in-general look like hell on a cracker, I thought most females would recoil at the necessary slob-out of zombiedom. That's what I believed until I dipped into the Internet. Doing a Google on the phrase, "girl zombies" brought up a wealth of female longing and participation. Some of this is attributable to the female celebrity scriptwriter Diablo Cody's likely production of Breathers: A Zombie's Lament. Then, through www.evilontwolegs.com, I discovered that at one horrorific get-together, being a female zombie was the most popular costume choice, hands down.

Given the moldy look of most female zombies (except for Japanese zombies, see yesterday's post): flesh falling off, fucked-up hair, blood-drool on the chin, and hideous clothes, my knee-jerk reaction had been, Not in a million years. But actually, this is exactly what's attractive to many young women today, especially those who feel oppressed by having to shave above the knee, wearing a faceful of makeup, and the whole blow dryer thing.

Along my bumpy path of zombie research, I came upon the promising post: Zombies Ate My Brain from the blog Tales of An Ordinary Girl, which I highly recommend, in which the poster wakes up from a nap to overhear a conversation between her husband and sister-in-law. As she listens, it becomes clear that her sis-in-law believes zombies are real and is fretting about them. Her husband is far more patient than I would be, and points out that basing your assumptions on Dawn of the Dead doesn't make you the brightest bulb in the tanning bed. But the poster points out that she herself grew up in a Pentacostal household and believed in all manner of spirits and witches.

It got me to remembering a point I made early on in this blog. I wrote that down the road, Evangelicals would come to love them some zombies. If they were hot for rights of the unborn, they'd be maniacal about full-citizenship for the undead.

Seemed like a winner to me.

I wonder why no one ever commented.

Japanese zombies...

2009-03-11T12:20:00.000-07:00

This is not really the topic of this post, although for you zombie fans out there, I will certainly acknowledge the very real cultural contributions of the Japanese undead. Actually, I had just read an article in Slate this morning about RapeLay, a violent interactive rape simulation game from Japan. This got me thinking about Japanese teen fashions which, a couple of months ago, including the fashion-fad of dressing-up like you'd just been beat to shit: purple bruises, bulky casts, and artfully wound bandages. At this point my topic rapidly cycled into Why Are The Japanese So Nuts?

For that, I have a fairly speedy answer. The Japanese are nuts because, by necessity (eg. centuries old civilization, little-bitty island, few natural resources), they have an extremely rigid society. The more rigid the society, the more violent the porn. The End. All that is true, but hardly the stuff of a good chewy post, especially after discovering there is a US availability of RapeLay, and that knowledge is currently radiating in my brain like an exploded dirty bomb.

With a lot of throat-clearing, all manner of US venues are banning the game, but a fast 30 seconds on Google will uncover a fully functional copy you can download, creepily promising "hours of fun!". The Slate reviewer reports it's more like hours of depression, contemplating that special basement where true scum suckers live. Like a lot of Japanese bad-ideas, RapeLay is aestheticized so that its true yuckiness lives below a scrim of improbabilities. For example, once you've cornered your fair lady, a make-out session ensues and, after a yes-I-will-no-I-won't kind of struggle, the deed is done. And wuddya know. She likes it! Just like all rape victims really do. RapeLay is fodder for a lot of ire and ire a-plenty has already been expressed on the Jezebel and Shakesville websites. Me, I'm holding off on my own molten ire in order to hop on Japanese zombies.

Actually, the more I get into zombies, the more of a pounding I can expect from true zombie fans. Since I don't enjoy seeing the undead eat the living, my zombie-knowledge is woeful. In digging around, I discovered that some zombie lovers have created an artistic hierachy for zombie judging. There are those who believe that black zombies are the true undead creme, and they have their reasons. Zombies originate in Haiti, home of mixed races, and besides, there was that guy in Night of the Living Dead who was black, and Night of the Living Dead is the gold standard of zombie movies. However, an angry poster on a zombie website, like UnDead BackBrain, pointed out that the black guy in Living Dead wasn't a zombie at all. The first poster fired back, so what? He was the coolest guy in the movie. At which point I baled.

Supposedly the best Japanese zombie movie is one called Junk. I don't know. I've only examined a bunch of stills from few undead flicks. Checking those out, I conclude that Japanese zombies appear well-groomed, neatly often fashionably dressed, with really excellent makeup, which makes them scarier in a way. You're unlikely to know who's really a zombie unless you spot one squatting on a subway platform, munching up a commuter. Here at least, they demonstrate one universal quality of zombies: making pigs of themselves. After gobbling up one of the unfortunate, the Japanese undead have whole rivers of brilliant red blood coursing down their chins, which they leave in place (see illus. above). Actually, I consider this a weak point, horror-wise.

I'm a great fan of the straight vanilla Japanese horror movie. My quibble with them, however, is their buckets-o-blood syndrome. It's always too bright, too glittery, too much of it. But that's just my cultural bias.

We Americans like our virtual blood to look realistic.

I'm not sure why.

Zombies or vampires?......

2009-03-03T13:38:00.000-08:00

I have to give a lot of credit to my readers, who are an uber-thoughtful bunch and inclined to mull over the deeper issues at some length. In my initial post on zombies versus vampires, I was persuaded towards vampires simply because of personal hygiene issues...superficialities in other words. Embarrassingly, I became fixated on how male vampires get to wear shirts with puffy sleeves, have long yet clean super-black hair, a preference for tight britches, and they rarely climb out of the coffin in saggy underpants and a lot of stubble. Female vampires get to sex it up with tight bodices, beaucoup cleavage, big black hair and, in more modern times, a nod towards S&M leather.

Yet a reader says in a well-reasoned Comment:

"Tough call, but I have to vote for zombies.

Don't get me wrong. Vampires are interesting. But I think there've been too many changes to the vampire concept in the last 20-30 years. It seems like the core vampire rules have been abandoned. One of the best-selling vampire books in recent memory features vampires who sparkle in the sunlight? Puh-leeze.

But zombies are (mostly) still mindless killing machines. The details have altered somewhat, but at heart they're still similar to the zombies of yesteryear."

And I have to say, on further reflection, he's right. The classical vampire of the snaggly Nosferatu type is no more. Overlooking the standard '50's I Was A Teenage Vampire (Wolfman, Werewolf, Blob etc.), probably the first important historical break with the accepted vampire-genre came with the movie, Near Dark, made in 1986, which postulated a bunch of white-trash vampire no goodniks, who rolled around the country in a dented Bondo-body van. At the time, a reviewer billed it as the first "...vampire hill-billy film", which brings to mind MA and Pa Kettle vampires and misses the point. It's really the legacy of Near Dark that informs the HBO series True Blood, although the True Blood vampires look like the League of Women Voters in comparison to the Near Dark skanks.

Zombies, on the other hand, are remarkably and classically unchanged. In fact, a very partial list of zombie movies gives you a quick sense of the remorseless unchangeablity of zombies and their goals.

Zombie 4: After Death, 1988
Zombie 90: Extreme Pestilence, 1991
The Zombie Army, 1991
Zombie Creeping Flesh, 1981
Zombie Cop, 1991
Zombie Holocaust, 1979
Zombie Island Massacre, 1984
Zombie Lake, 1984
Zombie Nightmare, 1986
Zombies of Mora Tau, 1957
Zombies of the Stratosphere, 1952
Zombies on Broadway, 1945
Zombie Rampage, 1992
Zombiethon, 1986

Zombies, in a real sense, are democracy in action. By the end of the film, they're all still together as a group (those who haven't had charcoal-starter squirted on them and set afire), gnawing on someone's leg, with no higher aspirations. Although they seem to get around a lot (to lakes, Mora Tau, Broadway, islands, nightmares, army posts etc.), travel doesn't appear to broaden them. Once there, whatever their destination, it's the same damned program: grab a human, tear his head off and gobble up his brains.

The whole business of zombie vs. vampire is, I see, a replay of that aesthetic argument between the post-modern and classical virtues.

But which is better?

Are you going for results or looks?

Zombies are the new vampires...

2009-02-26T11:51:00.000-08:00

I CAN HAZ ZOMBIE?

Today, there's so much news of a certain kind that it's hard to understand how the human race has been saved from extinction. This heaving plethora of Bad Ideas has made me wonder if only a tiny minority of people have rotten ideas but a lot of flashy publicity, or if a great number of us are lumbering around harboring disastrous thoughts, but keeping our sucky notions to ourselves. And what saves us? Are there just a few smart people in the avant garde who warn us not to have sex with couches ? (...about which, more later.) Or does the phenomenon of the great hive brain take over, suggesting en mass that we not make a raincoat from our own hair? Make A-list movies starring zombies? Have sex with a church banister?

Greater minds than mine are surely on this. At least I hope so.

Today I read that no less a publication than Time magazine is declaring that our love of vampires is so last year. Zombies are the new biggie. Diablo Cody, she of Juno scriptwriting fame, is hard at work on a zombie flick, so that settles it. My husband and I had an intense discussion and agreed that Diablo Cody is full of shit, as is anyone who'd switch from vampire love to the undead. For one thing, my hub and I noted, zombies can't carry a picture. Hell, they can't even play second bananas. The best you can hope from zombies is background. As a group, they can stagger through New York City, ripping the arms off passers-by and gnawing entrails on the sidewalks, but that's about it. Plus, they have no fashion sense, chunks of them are always dropping off, and they smell godawful. Whereas vampires generally look pretty terrific, if you don't mind that deathly bluish-pale skin. They wear great clothes, can fly through the air, nibble on hot-looking humans and live forever. What's not to like?

Purusing my news sources, I've also come across an account of a Romanian woman who has woven an entire wardrobe from her own hair. She notes proudly, “I have nine items – a hat, a shawl, a skirt, a blouse, a raincoat, a purse, a handbag and a pair of gloves." She went on to say, "I did this because I wanted to show how practical human hair is. The clothes are warm and comfortable – and the materials are free.” She's right as far as she goes, but I think she's a little disingenuous in overlooking the yuck factor.

Marching on, last I came across a sexual preference I hadn't known anything about. Not that I'm a drooling libertine, but I fancy I'm as worldly as the next, however I'd never run across objectum sexuality. OS people, as they prefer to be called, are not in least attracted to people, squirrels, or blow-up dolls. Rather, they fall in love with fences, couches and roller-coasters and feel that the object of their desire reciprocates through telepathic communication. The only real difference between male and female OSers, is that men mostly want to have sex with their La-Z-Boy recliner, whereas the women want to marry it.

So what's your preference today? Zombies or vampires?

Or that sexy microwave oven?

The twitter tweets...

2009-02-24T15:30:00.000-08:00

Tweety Deconstructed 2009

From time to time, I work with a management consultant on a book about relationships. He's the author and I edit, although he generously allows me to toss in my two pennies on the content. We've hit a disagreement, though, in what constitutes a relationship. He maintains a relationship is a physical I am here and so are you relationship. I say a relationship can exist between a couple of bloggers, Tweeters, or Facebookers, one in New Jersey and one in Kathmandu.

Today, on the XX blog in Slate magazine, the subject of Twitter, Facebook and the like arose:

An Oxford neuroscientist is suggesting that social networking and the hours kids spend doing it is rewiring their brains so that we are at risk of raising a generation of solipsists. Dr. Susan Greenfield fears this exposure is permanently "infantalizing" young brains, leaving them with truncated attention spans and the inability to interact face-to-face with other human beings...

The blog goes on to say: but wasn't it ever so? When TV was adopted in a mass fashion, the this-will-rot-your-brain arguments quickly switched from comic books to television, only to switch again when rock n' roll was popularized. Actually, you can trudge back through all of human history and find lots of this-will-rot-your-brain opinions. When (thanks to the Van Eyck brothers) oil painting supplanted tempera as the most widespread artistic medium, rot-your-brain groans were heard throughout Europe. Now, with oils, any dope could paint, the opinionmeisters declared. After the printing press was developed the same brand of moaning was heard: books would destroy all need for the human memory. But I think at the bottom of all rot-your-brain statements is the notion that anyone can do it, whatever the it may be. And ::poof:: goes the need for mastery or artistry. Or that enjoyable sense of superiority.

And so, there's now a forest of experts announcing that since the roiling dumb-butt masses can now Tweet, email, or IM at will, there's no need for the Rude Generation to do much except punch out their ur-messages of marginal interest: My mom sux. Urz 2? WTF?

As one who is more comfortable writing than speaking, I greeted email with unqualified delight, and blogging with an even bigger gush of welcome. Twitter? Not so much. The Tweeting I do is more in the spirit of experimentation, wondering WTF the big deal is in recording one's most trivial thoughts and actions. I never Tweet about my non-belief in original sin, say, or the possibilities of free will, or my fictional use of an unreliable narrator. My Tweets are always uninspired blurbs about small dull chores: Sorting my husband's sox.

Then too, every so often I get a post from some stranger announcing that they are now "following" my Tweets. Their reasons for doing so are completely opaque to me, but I will note that many of them are writers engaged in Goth, vampire and/or zombie fiction...a factoid I avoid thinking about. Their interest would seem akin to cyberstalking, except that they have no further interest in me except as another being to bombard with their specific dwarfish thoughts: Watching a True Blood rerun. How-how!

But then, Twitter-wise, maybe I just don't get it. Any day now, one of my zombie-loving-Goth-writing-graphic-novel-reading followers will surely Tweet me:

Tweeting. Ur doin it wrong.

Apres les Oscars...

2009-02-23T11:59:00.000-08:00

It's always struck me that Hollywood and academia have a lot in common: a closed, deluded society, self-anointed big cheeses, and an unseemly love of awards. Consider the Oscars, as everyone seems to be doing today. About the Academy Awards, Marlene Dietrich once snarled, "What's wrong with these people? Are they children, that they have to be given prizes?" And the answer, of course, is yes, they are children. They have to be given prizes, not to mention a lot of anticipation,and special clothes as a build-up to the big prize-giving day. It's not unlike the university, which awards tenure, endowed chairs, and, yes, prizes, with the same bloated build-up and accompanying hoohah on the days the tenure committee meets. Except that the university eschews sparkly gowns and dance numbers. I put it down to a failure of the imagination.

Don't get me wrong. There are two bloody dripping chunks of popular culture I never miss: the Oscars, and the Super Bowl commercials. The Super Bowl has a more legitimate claim on my attention, since it's the groundwork for advertising trends that inky-stained copywriters like me will be forced to contend with, react against, or copy during the following year. Whereas I have no excuse for watching the Oscars. Year after year, they're generally as dull and boring as they were the preceding year. But I'm a film buff and so is my husband and, I suppose, we could count ourselves as having brushed up against the industry from time to time.

Now that the economy is turned to a progressively slurping quicksand, and now that we, in our slow ::duh:: American way are becoming both angry and populist, it might be time to initiate Oscars for Everyone! Think of of it: an Oscar for the best supermarket checker! An Oscar for the speediest gal at the McDonald's drive up window! An Oscar for the top Frisbee-playing dog! An Oscar for the fastest car detailing guy! You get the idea. And with it, of course, I propose a full orchestra, rented tuxes for everyone, a gigantic audience, and a 45 sec. limit on acceptance speeches.

Great idea, or what? Or maybe it's just the cold I've had for a week. Cold medicine puts me into a weird Carlos Castaneda-land. I start to imagine things.

Or could you tell?

Completely irrelevant cuteness...

2009-02-14T19:02:00.000-08:00

St. Valentine's Day porker...

2009-02-14T11:51:00.000-08:00

The porker in question

Maybe you've gotten used to my snarky ways. Maybe you were thinking this whole post would be an ill-tempered screed against Valentine's Day. Maybe you were hotly anticipating some mean-ass prose, decrying the corruption of love.

And just maybe you were wrong.

Actually, Valentine's Day is one of my favorite holidays, even though its origins go back only to the 19th c., the industrial revolution, and the sugar-coating of nearly every aspect of our culture (kids, pets, death, marriage, love, war, prison etc). Also forget every "historical" (aka religious) explanation of some fabled St. Valentine. It's a sketchy notion at best. Until 1964, the Catholic church acknowledged eleven St. Valentine's saints' days, all of them suspect, and none of them having squat to do with romance.

Never mind. I think you've gotta love any holiday commemorating the mysteries of the heart, even if it's sometimes celebrated in weird, creepy ways. God knows, we do our best. I've just gotten back from Walgreen's Drug Store. I mostly went just to get cigarettes and a new lipstick. Once there I was confounded by the sight of bewildered men thumbing through cards and hefting candy boxes. "Yeah," my husband said, when I reported back, "it's the one holiday you gotta sweat."

When Valentine's Day fell on a work day, I was often in Albertson's supermarket around 6 PM. Not wanting to miss a lick or a dollar, Albertson's goes for Valentine's big time. This year they've dedicated two full store-length aisles to crap of all things Valentine's: teddy bears, heart-shaped things, candy, mylar balloons et. al. It only shows how ignorant a soulless corporation can be. Men always put off doing anything about Valentine's until the very last possible minute, when everything is limp, grimy, and nothing you'd give to anyone. Back then, I was often waylaid by some frightened guy holding a wilted plant, wanting to know, "Is this is okay?"

Well, obviously not.

Since we were already in a supermarket, I'd suggest, "How 'bout a nice brisket?" Something I knew I'd like.

But then, I'm not a romantic.

A valentine in questionable taste any time at all

Gratuitous cuteness on Friday the 13th...

2009-02-13T13:39:00.000-08:00

Extraneous cuteness courtesy of Cute Overload

With the Republicans acting out over the stimulus bill, I've once more taken refuge in cuteness. I'm not proud of it. My grandmother used to take to her bed on Friday the 13th, and while I don't do that, I still get a little jumpy. Hence the pix of a hamster about to eat something the size of its head.

La la land

2009-02-13T07:42:00.000-08:00

Move-in ready w' kitch, 3 bdroms

During the Nixon, Ford and the Carter years, unemployment rose to 9% with inflation rising to 11%. Me? I didn't keep track of such things and rarely read the newspaper, except for art and book reviews. I lived in a factless and imaginary La La Land--something solemn grown-ups often pointed out to me.

In those years, as a nation, we discovered the president lied, Vietnam was a rotting deception, the Manson family were murdering thugs, and Haight-Ashbery was dissolving in a welter of crime and speed. My father dropped dead in the Pentagon at age 49, and thinking, why the hell not? I resigned from a secure teaching job and went to a distant art school that offered no financial aid. I lived in a series of improbable places and often held three jobs, while painting in my unheated studio over the WeeWashit Laundromat, and stayed a citizen of La La Land.

In the past few weeks, some friends from that time have contacted me. One of them sent me Google map coordinates so I can see where he plans to hole up apres le deluge. There's a large barn-like structure in which, my friend informs me, he has built a library, a stashroom full of dry food and seeds, plus guns. There are workshops where he can weld things, and labs so he can keep his business going. Back in the day, I remember, he was always puttering on a shelter, in which he planned to seal himself and his daughter, come the revolution.

In my more befuddled past, had I known of this concept, I would have informed my old friend that he's experiencing a world destruction fantasy, so he really doesn't need to go to the barricades. But back then, I mostly shouted and threw things. I had a very low tolerance for fruitcake notions. I thought things were already loony enough.

The outlook is dire right now and it's tempting just to go nuts, but there have been other crazy, dire times, and we'll make it. As the writer Frank McCord points out, there are stories that would break your heart, which weren't too bad to live through.

Even so, you might want to plant a garden.

La La Land can always use the greenery.

When crap was crap...

2009-02-11T15:47:00.000-08:00

The Notebooks of Susan Sontag have recently come out. Aside from being the outpourings of a really, really annoying person, they remind me that she (along with James Joyce, and, every so often, William Burroughs), was one of the very first high-flown intellectuals to examine crap and crap culture. She wrote her Notes on Camp in 1964, isolating just a small chunk of that terra incognita: garbage. I looked through the essay today and was struck by how she just dives right into it, never mentioning that camp was already a very developed gay sensibility.

Well, she wouldn't, would she? Things were different then, so why risk getting your ass kicked? I remember that Notes on Camp made a big stir, mostly a big angry bee-like stir. At the time, a very sharp division existed between a serious intellectual life and cultural crap. Teachers and parents warned that if you read comic books, went to horror movies, watched TV all the time, and listened to rock n' roll, YOUR BRAIN WOULD ROT. Then Pop artists started doing paintings using cartoons as a direct subject matter, rock n' roll made it onto the college campuses, and Terry Southern got a few things published. All this was good news to those of us who had been busily reading, viewing, and listening to crap all along.

I was in art school at the time, and remember the long, sad looks on my teachers' faces as they warned us that the barbarians were at the gate. God only knew where this crap-acceptance would end up. Well, it ended up right here: With Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and I, for one, kind of, sort of welcome it. If I sound lukewarm, it's because this sweaty cultural embrace of crap has also given us Real Housewives of Orange County, a translation of the Bible into LOLCat-speak, and a female desire for tattoos and really huge lips. And, as the Hag-Mags continually demonstrate, no one has any taste at all.

But, hey, it's fun. And that's the whole point.

Or so I'm told.

But why stop at twelve...?

2009-02-09T16:28:00.000-08:00

Family of twelve, 1960's style

About this woman who's just had a litter of eight, adding to the six already at home. "I just always wanted to be a mother," she said during a very odd interview, although she had a hard time talking, given her abnormally large lips.

And what are we saying about this? From a hot mess standpoint, she doesn't measure up to Brittney S., but she's the best we've got in the early austere days of '09. We can yearn for those halcyon days of no panties, a flotilla of paparazzi, pink wigs, rotten boyfriends, deluded moms, and the seriously under-reported purple drank, however I think Nadya has her own charms. Those charms are now being minutely examined by that special cheesy press which, like God, lets no sparrow fall without a lot of speculation, pseudo-horrified gasps, and lotsa photos.

For those mystified by the government's hi-jinks, war, and a pig-greedy Wall Street, there's plenty to discuss about Nadya. "Why is her mouth so weird?" my husband asked, as we spent an alarming five minutes watching the evening news. Having checked out a full-face Nadya-view, I had also researched the weirdness of her tiny nose and big chipmunk cheeks. "She's a plastic surgery fruitcake," I told him. I'd already spent a tough couple of hours on the awfulplasticsurgery.com website, and was too enervated to say much more.

While Nadya may love the idea of birthing an entire classroom, my observation of huge families is that they're not the big jolly gathering, portrayed by movies. Not for the kids, at least. My maternal great-grand parents had fourteen kids, with twelve surviving. None of them particularly enjoyed their upbringing, although they understood why their parents considered a crowd of kids necessary. It was frontier Oklahoma; times were hard and mortality rates were high. Not one of those children grew up to have more than three children.

It's curious to me that although we love us some kids in America, we don't seem to care much about childhood...that strange, dreaming condition full of puzzles and bewildered adults.

The hag-mags hit it...

2009-02-07T20:30:00.000-08:00

Standard Issue Hag-Mag

Yesssss. A fourteen year old on the cover, eyes Photoshopped so far apart she seems to have fetal-alcohol syndrome, thighs the size of my arms, and plenty of idiotic headers surrounding her (The earring makes a comeback!). Yesterday, I bought my hag-mag for the year, wondering if fashion had finally gotten the word on rich-is-no-longer-in-style and being someone's arm candy is out. I can safely report a resounding No! What's between the covers are tight skirts and five inch heels, all the better to cripple you, my dear, and blouses that cost $1,600.

One of the most depressing parts of The Second Sex by Simone DeBeauvoir, written in 1949, is a chapter where she exhaustingly iterates all the work that goes into the acceptable female appearance: the mending, the hand-washing, the shaving, the trimming, the plucking, the curling. DeBeauvoir listed all that crap sixty years ago and I just spent three hours today, doing exactly the same stuff. Of course, the argument could be made that I chose to do this. The second wave of feminism certainly gave me the right and freedom to go about my business with hairy legs, a furry upper lip and Frida Kahlo eyebrows, while smelling like a wet dog. But having seen the societal acceptance of women who actually did this, I "choose" not to.

Anyhow, my quarrel is with a consumer culture that creates images which, in turn, foster a lifestyle that would be sustainable only if we had four more planet earths just for us ugly, overweight, fur-draped, Manalo Blanik-wearing, beef-eating Americans. Of which, hag-mags are only symptomatic.

I once counseled a younger woman about life choices, on an on-going basis. She had a college degree but seemed addicted to low-bottom office jobs. One night, she called me to report that she'd managed not to put a $2,600 designer suit on her credit card, but now she was weakening. It was a good investment she told me. No, I told her, it was not. Owning a suit like that would just make all her other clothes look like shit. She would be left with only unenviable choices. One, she could wear her fancy suit every day of her life. Two, she could wear her fancy suit only on the fanciest of occasions and be seen by perhaps twelve people, tops. Three, she could bankrupt herself getting the rest of her wardrobe up to snuff. She had already declared bankruptcy once. Why was she even thinking of charging this suit? Was she high?

No, she wasn't high. She was a hag-mag freak, who had tranced herself into believing that she was supposed to be wearing haut-couture clothes. And the belief that haut-couture was accessible to an eight dollar an hour office worker is a direct spin-off of a greed-head culture, that was never a reality.

And that's why I'm pissed at free-market Republicans tonight.

Makes sense to me.

Kluck 'em...

2009-02-06T10:13:00.001-08:00

Kluckers

During the 1950's, in Burke, Virginia, school was dismissed on certain days so the kids could watch the Klan, along with the Daughters of The White Camellia parade down the middle of town. It was a big parade too. My mother taught school there and would tell us about it at dinner, her eyes the size of saucers. She knew that the parents of her students were Klansmen, although she didn't know how many. She lasted a year at that job as I recall, and often cried. But Burke was then known as a steamy little backwater, one where Southern-style barbarism was in full flower.

I've thought of this during the past few days, after reading about various Republican shenanigans during the debate on Obama's stimulus package. Thing is, there aren't many moderate Republicans in Congress any more, so we're down to the nut-jobs who survived the '06 elections, weren't indicted or jailed, and didn't retire to spend that vaunted time with their families. These bottom of the barrel Republicans have done nothing but obstruct critical legislation that's desperately needed to tackle this financial morass. To add on bitter insult, they are proposing cuts to childhood nutrition programs, Head Start, and food stamps among other programs, most of them benefiting women and children. That the Republicans have focused on such policies bespeaks a nasty contempt for our societal welfare.

So why is anyone still listening to them? Somewhere along the line, probably due to the Jerry Springer show, we decided that it was only fair "to listen to the other side". Except these guys aren't "the other side". They're extremists and their sell-by date was up in 1963. I propose that they be treated the way we'd treat any extremist hate group. Or used to treat them, I hasten to say. Now thugs, Nazis, racists, and David Duke can all be pretty sure of a spot on the nightly news, should they desire it.

Back in the day, Klansmen marched openly in the streets, sometimes holding the hands of their little Klanettes. Racists babbled about mud people and niggers; murders were not unknown. Thugs showed up at schools with ax handles to prevent six year old black kids from enrolling. And while attitudes are not quite as, um, blatant as they once were, I can't see that much has changed. The same hatred, cruelty, and callous disregard are in full flower among certain savages.

What has changed is the media's notional perception that fringe groups represent any sort of normalcy.

They do not. The lunatics among us are atavistic left-overs from a bygone age. They deserve only our studied indifference, our silence, and our revulsion.

These scrapings from the GOP barrel should be ignored by decent people, just as decent people once ignored the Klan.

So I say, Kluck 'em. It's time to pass the whole damned package now.

Mysteries....

2009-02-06T08:31:00.001-08:00

A new anthology from The Sun

Even if I didn't have a piece in this, I'd buy it because I know what kind of stuff The Sun publishes. Their contributors write pieces that gallop, trot, or stroll without popular niceties or literary self-consciousness. If there's a unifying style, it comes in the form of actual speech, spoken in the untidy middle of life itself. This makes for startling admissions, blurted secrets, and the relief of recognition.

I haven't read this anthology yet. Hell, I haven't even read my own piece since I published it. I have to give The Sun a lot of credit for using this title: The Mysterious Life of the Heart. Normally, a title like that would send me running for the nearest graphic novel, just to get the taste out of my mouth. The title alone would clue me into the contents: chickish lit, sad break-up stories, and lotsa angst all around. But given that it's The Sun, all bets are off about what's inside. I feel almost tingly about getting my copy, knowing I'll come away with some real answers about the heart and its mysteries. Because what else is there beyond our longings, passions, and loves and what they weave together? Not much.

In some way, every story is a love story.

And sometimes an old friend will save your ass...

2009-02-05T10:39:00.000-08:00

The Mad Hatter's Teaparty
Illus. by John Tenniel

On my blog, there's a postage-stamp sized image just below the section labeled About Me. It's the cover of an anthology I'm in, concerning the mysteries of the heart. My piece is about a time in my life marked by a recognition of raw facts, suddenly made crystalline and unavoidable. It was a time when I knew I had to leave my husband, and quickly too. The only mystery of the heart was why I'd stayed so long.

That I would leave was already a fact, settled stone-like in my mind. I'd dispensed with tormenting myself over my marriage's failure, my husband's opacity, and our inability to talk. Whether I'd tried hard enough, been unkind, had loved or not loved, none of it mattered. In truth, I was probably walking out on a big damned mess, much of it of my own making, but I didn't care. I'd absorbed one great lesson from David: I could just go.

I don't remember talking to David about leaving or divorcing, although perhaps I did. He wasn't uncomfortable with conversations like that, and later, more than once, I'd soak down his shirt, weeping idiotically over one boyfriend or another. But during my separation and subsequent divorce, I was suddenly too deep in real-life dilemmas to philosophize about whatever emotions I had or didn't have.

I had never lived alone, I had never managed my own money, I had never paid a bill, had never had a checking account, and my list of nevers seemed to run on without end. I was stuck in a small square brick house on a deer lease, several miles from Iowa City and away from anyone I knew. And, as we divied up our belongings, my-then husband and I, what I mostly thought about was the stuff we'd accrued. I wondered what I'd do with my half of the stuff, how I'd get the stuff to wherever I was going, and whether I'd have room to store my stuff.

In my memory, I can see myself sitting on the living room floor, piling stuff into a collection of liquor boxes I'd scrounged. Surely there were days between that night and the morning I recall most clearly, but there's only a blank spot. What I know next is that it was suddenly Saturday morning, the sun was shining, and David showed up with a truck, looking cheerful. In a matter of minutes, he had me packed up, settled into the truck cab, and we drove away. Much later, I wrote of that moment, And I left my husband forever, and that's true too.

Had he not shown up, I imagine I would have gotten through the hassle of moving somehow. But I don't think the day would have bloomed so brightly.

As he often did, David made the day worth celebrating.

As it surely was.

And old friends will be your parents...

2009-02-03T08:08:00.000-08:00

Elvis Presley's Grandparents
Copyright by EP Music 1996-2009

I'd like to say there was never a harsh word between David and me. If I was slightly sentimental, I would. It might even be true, like certain brain-dead remarks: Kids are great! and Puppies are a handful! We never fought, he and I, but we had our moments, you might say. He worried about my boyfriends and my wild-child ways; I worried about his career, his health, and what I privately thought of as his silliness.

He was certainly the smartest guy at the Iowa School of Art and Art History, but he dawdled over his MA thesis on Samuel Palmer, then abandoned it, saying, But everyone's written better stuff than I ever could. When I wound up in Texas, teaching 18th c. visionary art, as I'd grub for Samuel Palmer-factoids, I'd think, goddamn it, David, because, in fact, no one had written anything better. He wouldn't go into Iowa's art history doctoral program either, but neither would I. He smoked too much, didn't get enough sleep, and stayed up late reading, but I was the same way, and we kept each other company during those endless insomniac nights.

Still, he had massive grand mal seizures, took heavy sedatives for them, and, against all Iowa vehicle laws, he drove. For him, a car was more necessary than breath. One winter, finally, he had a seizure on any icy road, wrecked his car, and banged himself up. Afterwards, I waited in the hospital, along with his brother, the two of us slumped in bright yellow plastic chairs, silently staring at our knees, scared to death. But David was okay.

His silliness, as I called it, was any uncharted Davidness I didn't get: his weird asshole roommate, his lack of a companion, the part-time teaching job at Coe and, later, his thirty year residence in the same apartment. But whenever I'd mention any of it, he brushed me off as benignly as a wayward ant.

His lack of a companion was something I almost understood. David was profoundly, deeply solitary. He was effortlessly charming, knew many more people than I did, and liked them all but, ultimately, he delighted in being alone. I liked being alone myself, and was always swapping out one boyfriend or another, trying to find a guy who'd put up with my sudden absences. But I was also in the throes of ending one long marriage and, not much later, would marry again. "Being alone is the ultimate existential position," David argued, when I told him about my plans. "Seeing another person's toothpaste in the sink is pretty existential too," I said. That we used the word existential about such things tells you how young we were, not long out of school.

I couldn't crack the weird-roommate-riddle though. Not for a long while. Ken, as we'll call him, was a narcissistic artist, with more compulsions than toes, who shared David's large apartment for three years, in a moldering Victorian mansion. Each morning, sitting bolt upright in bed, he loudly recited his latest dream into a video cam. The furniture was arranged in a nutty shin-scraping fashion, because Ken believed that furniture wanted to be in certain places. Whenever I stopped by the apartment, one of Ken's many depressed girls was always in the kitchen, moodily eating cornflakes, dressed in one of his t-shirts. They came and they went, these girls, and I never knew their names.

Ken was a performance artist, one who ran around on all fours, mimicking animal movement, wearing a black stretch suit, using self-invented shock absorbers so he could lope along easily, like a dog or coyote. He nagged David into photographing him outdoors, doing his thing, which David hated but always acquiesced. Inevitably, a fearful passerby would call the police to report a huge black ape loose on the streets. When the squad cars came, Ken refused to say anything. He'd just trot around aimlessly on all fours, while David tried to explain performance art to a bunch of cops.

Eventually, Ken disappeared into a Bowery studio, where he may be to this day, for all I know. For years, David maintained a near saintly patience with Ken's vagaries just because he liked him. At least that's what I believe because it's so David-like. It may even be true.

The closest David and I ever came to a fight was ten years ago. Just wanting to hear his voice, with its welcome flat Pennsylvania accent, I called. We chatted about this and that, innocuously I thought, and then David asked very quickly, "So how does it feel to be a corporate sell-out?" There was real anger in his voice, an anger I'd never ever heard, and I was speechless, then felt a dangerous hot answering anger in myself.

But the better angel of my nature, a smallish angel to be sure, recognized the innocence in his question. David didn't know squat about global business and why should he? Gently, unlike me, I explained I'd wanted to know how consumer products got dreamed up, created,and manufactured. I'd been curious and went adventuring and that was all. "Oh," David said, his voice lifting with something like surprise. And then we were okay.

Later I thought how old friends become our parents if we don't watch out. Bewildered by our later choices, they wonder out loud, But the man you divorced was so perfect. And then you threw away your whole career, moving to that crime-ridden city?

Exasperated, you want to smack them in the head. That man I divorced was crazy, my career was a big zero, and my home town was a cracked-out Springsteen rust belt.

Your friends' questions are as unanswerable as those of aging parents, shouted over too a far distance. But like our mothers and fathers, our old friends are only asking, Do you remember me?

Sometimes, we can holler back, loudly and truthfully: Yes! Yes! I see you! I see you as you were. I see you as you are. I loved you then. I love you now.

If we're lucky, lucky dogs, that's what we can say.

My old friend and the day he left...

2009-02-02T09:54:00.000-08:00

Kill Mathew Barney by Jock McFadyen

I knew my friend David had once lived in Boston; it was one of those David-facts I filed away, like knowing how he tossed empty Styrofoam cups into the back of his car, until they boiled up over the seat. The how and the why of his being in Boston was something I didn't know. Probably I'd be just as ignorant today, if James McGarrell hadn't come to the University of Iowa. The university's scrawny painting and drawing faculty was fleshed out through guest artists, which is how McGarrell wound up there, scheduled for a talk.

Whenever there was a lecture, David and I always went. McGarrell was a figurative artist, whose work I knew and wasn't nuts about but then, I was abstract painter and an unforgivng one. Slouching into the auditorium that night, I settled in next to David, prepared for a dull hour. However, McGarrell knocked everyone's socks off, showing slides of paintings, all beautifully structured, with perfectly placed light and shadow. Even then, he was quite famous and, it turned out, he was also darkly good-looking, tweedily well-dressed, articulate, funny, and down to earth. It was unfair that heaven's bounty had been showered on just one guy, but by the end of the lecture I was madly in love with James McGarrell, along with most of the audience.

Afterwards, during our usual post-lecture coffee, David casually mentioned he'd met McGarrell at Ohio, during his MFA work. "You met him?" I squealed. "I never knew that. Did he like your work? What did he say to you?"

"He liked my work a lot," David said. "So I asked him what I should do, meaning with my whole life. I don't think he understood that's what I was really asking. Anyhow, he said I should go to Boston." David paused, and took a slurp of coffee. "He didn't give me any reason. I think Boston just popped into his head, and he told me to go. So I went."

"Just like that?" I asked. "You just went?" I was quietly impressed. Wow. How could you just go? I wondered, without a thought or a plan. That was Jack Kerouac territory.

Indeed. David just went. He drove to Boston at the end of the year, with his MFA, cloudy McGarrell-inspired hopes, and as much forethought as he could muster. Through a bulletin board or a newspaper ad, he'd arranged to share an apartment on Beacon Hill. Since he didn't know anything about Boston, he was ignorant of precisely how hurtfully high the rent would be, and that there would be no legal parking within miles. He'd never met his roommate either, who would turn out to be a slick-haired financial manager, one who was making a hefty salary and schemed to keep more of it: hence his desire to split the rent.

All David needed was a job, and he got one, working at a small unprofitable greeting card company. Tiny, cheerless and unprofitable though the company was, it delusionally viewed itself as direct competition to Hallmark. To this end, each employee specialized in a particular type of Hallmarkesque card: sappy condolence/birthday cards with floral bouquets rendered in drooly watercolor, kiddie birthday cards showing a kiddie clutching a giant number over his cute pot-bellied nakedness, fakey 19th century scenes of jolly coachmen and hounds that were cranked out for Christmas.

Of course, David was assigned the naked kid card.

His boss explained that for reasons of taste and propriety, the tot's nakedness was to be hidden by an immense number, signifying the birthday child's age. Since the company was poor, obviously it couldn't put out a separate boy and girl card, so David was instructed to paint a little androgen, who could be taken for either. Again, because the company was three steps from bankruptcy, it couldn't offer separate cards for little black, Hispanic, or Asian children. Still, the company was sensitive to race...and so David was told to shade his little androgynous tyke a tasteful coffee color, and to keep the hair and eyes a medium brown.

Off to one side, where David sat, were three twittering old ladies who painted the drooly watercolor cards and wrote the idiot verses inside. In order to sharpen their writing skills, one night a week, the biddies attended Robert Lowell's poetry workshops at Harvard to no obvious benefit. On David's other side, hunched the man David bitterly envied. He too was quite old, but he was allowed to render The Big Christmas Card. This was the fakey 19th century scene, complete with drifts of snow, stamping horses, shiny coach, jolly horn-tooting coachmen, red-faced burghers offering steamy tankards of cheer, excited swirling dogs etc. etc. And while it was a stupid and banal card, at least it was a complex one, and no toast-colored androgens were required.

And, David quickly learned, the card company paid next to nothing.

So, for the next year, David wandered out to his car each morning, peeling off the illegal-parking ticket he'd been given the night before; then he'd drive to his soul-killing job, and paint a little tan boy/girl mix for the next eight hours. After work, he'd stop on a street corner and panhandle passers-by, unleashing a volley of abuse. Once he'd begged for loose change, he'd cut through the Parker House restaurant, stealing rolls out of the bread baskets as he went. Even with the change and swiped bread, he wasn't making it.

And, back at the apartment, each night his fat-cat roommate would say, "If I'd only known you couldn't carry your weight...I gotta have someone who can pay his part of the goddamn rent."

The only friend he made was a girl about his age, who worked at the card factory too. She was a rich kid, whose bewildered dad had opened an account for her at a gourmet specialty shop. "She loved hors d'oerves," David said. "When she had me over for dinner, that's all we'd have, ordered from that shop. She'd eat something off a little piece of toast and say, 'Isn't this good?'" Privately I thought of my own weird friend, the one who ate salad with her hands.

By the end of that year, he told me, he owed $7500 in parking tickets.

"So what did you finally do?" I asked, morbidly fascinated.

"Well, one night I was lying in bed, and I thought, I can just leave... It hadn't occurred to me. I thought I had to stay and make everything work out, but I realized I couldn't. I'd just gotten promoted too. The old guy, the one who did The Big Christmas Card, died doing overtime, and they gave it to me. But I still wouldn't make enough money. I'd never make enough money there. So I got into my car in the dead of night and left. I never wrote the card company to resign, never wrote my roommate. I ran away."

"Damn," I said. It was quite a story. "Good for you," I added, and meant it. A useful bit of knowledge, I thought. One I might have occasion to use: Just leave.

"Yeah," David said, "It was the right thing to do. Of course, I can't go back to Boston for five more years. The parking ticket thing. That's when the statute of limitations is up. But that's okay, I can live with it."

"Hey," I said, "who needs to go to Boston anyway?"

RIP old friend...

2009-01-29T12:50:00.000-08:00

A Grave In Salem

This January, with some online digging, I found out that my friend David had died that September before. He had been my closest friend, and was still my oldest friend, living in Iowa City thirty years after I'd left. At first, we kept up with phone calls and by sending bits of art back and forth, then our calls became less frequent, and I just wrote long letters, which I knew he'd never answer. He hated writing letters, but he always sent me a card at Christmas.

Year before last, I had a feeling, a constriction of the heart, you might say. Sometimes I'd wake up in the dead of night, cramped with anxiety. Sometimes, too, I'd think, David could die! and then, with horror, brush the thought away like an insect. Finally, not knowing why, I wrote him, asking him never, never to drop me from his Christmas card list. He immediately wrote me back, one of two or three letters he'd ever sent me. Then I wrote him. It was a nice exchange.

This year, he didn't send a card.

It wasn't until this January that I searched the Iowa Press Citizen obituaries, and discovered he'd died. Later, I'd find out that he died in his sleep, of heart failure. By reading a Facebook discussion page, I learned how widely he'd been loved and admired as a friend and a teacher. His great kindness and brilliance were cited. Everyone mentioned how important he'd been in their lives. Some quoted funny little scraps of conversation. I nodded to myself. He sounded exactly like the David I remembered. Then I looked at some photographs that were posted, and smiled, seeing him. He didn't look much like David, my David, but why would he?

After I left, he took a teaching job at Coe, was made professor of an endowed chair, and taught art history and studio. He never left, never taught anywhere else. Since he didn't seek out the world, the world came to him, probably much the way I had: over cups of coffee, just walking down the street, eating one of his spaghetti dinners, drinking at The Mill. And there were conversations, no doubt, about books, about art, about ideas. These were conversations that could go until dawn, interspersed with David's stories, which were hilarious, bittersweet, or both, depending.

As he aged, he enlarged himself to fit the world. He became more David-ish, more kind, more learned, more brilliant, more joyful, more sharp-eyed about beauty, whether he spotted it during the Iowa spring, or spied it in chunk of raku. I visualize him in my mind now, filling up like a helium balloon, growing lighter and lighter, until he sails away, into the wide Iowa sky.

Recently, another Iowa friend wrote me. She's an artist and a teacher, and was on Sabbatical when she first heard he'd died. By the time his memorial was held, she was already in NYC, unable to get back in time. I'm still in denial, she wrote. And then she wrote, thinking of the three of us, her, David, and me, hanging out together in Iowa City. It seems like only a few years ago, she wrote, but it all seems clearer now, than it did then. I knew what she meant. Memory is another country.

That's where I keep David, and where I've kept him for a while, in that pocket of the heart where the sky is blue and empty, the day is bright, our laughter is louder, our voices are hard and sure, and we are always young.

When art comes in and takes you for a spin...

2009-01-28T12:56:00.000-08:00

A Section of the Rincon Center Post Office

Plenty more where that came from: 27 monster panels as a matter of fact, all preserved at the Rincon Center Post Office in San Francisco. The artist is Anton Refrigier, my drawing teacher at Bard College. Besides our studio class, one night a week, Ref made us attend his lecture on the government support of art. He had just completed a thin little pamphlet on the subject, which he'd read at the podium. His Russian accent plus his grim Marxist prose used to hypnotise all of us into snoring boredom. He was a WPA artist during The Great Depression, and still thought of that period as one of the happiest in his life. He was a social realist, Ben Shahn-style, and a political radical. I privately classified him as an unrepentant commie, old school, and was a little wary.

He bragged that he'd completed more post office murals during the 30's than any other artist, and I believed him. And while I wasn't sympathetic towards the government stomping into studios on its big flat feet, I grew to like Ref a lot. He was a an old-time boho sweetie who said things like, "You young kids want everything to be so cool. You should wish to be hot with desire!" Yeah, a romantic.

Ref working on a mural during the '30's

By the 1960's, American demand for politically radical muralists was at an all-time low, so Ref would pop down to Mexico during the summers to design monster weavings, using a big workshop of Mexican women. He asked me to go with him as his model and was quite insistent. By that time he'd been married to Ilsa for over 30 years, so I don't think there was any guile intended. Probably, because I was very thin, pale, and nearly 2-dimensional, I looked exactly like the pancake people he painted: a slam-dunk subject. Still, it's one of those life events I sometimes wonder about. What if I'd gone to Mexico with Ref?

As it turns out, Ref established some valuable precedents with his murals that are nearly forgotten today. In 1953, at the height of the red scare, he found himself before the House Committee of Public Works, accused of undermining American values, promoting communism, and just painting ugly stuff. The Rincon murals aren't an exercise in cheer, since they portray a lynching, police brutality, men begging for jobs, and the oppression of Native Americans and the Chinese. But Ref wasn't the only artist around who used social injustice as a subject matter. Diego Riviera comes to mind, Ben Shahn did his share, Dorothea Lange did too, and there were more. Times were hard and, unsurprisingly, artists used art to bitch about it.

At the end of the hearings, Ref was completely exonerated. I'm glad Congress hung in there and refused to trash our first amendment rights. Still, I've got a hard time with art of the 30's. It's preachy, and I like to think art, like life, is bigger than that. More ambiguous, and accommodating lots of different interpretations.

I admire those artists, though. We may need that kind of brave passion again.

Not to mention the government funding.

Tiresome advertising will abound...

2009-01-27T10:58:00.000-08:00

Virtuous Americans 1930's Style

On January 23, in Slate magazine, Jack Shafer wrote a great article called "Selling Virtue". Check it out at http://www.slate.com/id/2209615/pagenum/all. Reading it, I thought, Aha! It's not just me. Lately, in my nightly TV watching, I'd begun to pick up a preachy tone in commercials of all stripes: green energy, cars, insurance, detergents etc. I noticed that cosmetic companies were touting their "natural" make-up lines and pizzas were all about whole grain. Underneath the brave smiles of TV people, I sensed a certain anxiety: Here we are, about to have another Great Depression, and who's gonna art direct it?

Cotton wash dresses will be needed by the metric ton. For the guys, hats will be required: Brad Pitt newsboy jobs, stained trucker caps, and of course, the classic gray felt fedora. We'll ride bikes with big balloon tires. Cars will be streamlined and dark, but battered pick-ups will be ubiquitous, and all of them will run off old Chinese restaurant cooking oil.

You get the drift.

We have to be good now. Obama said so and Oprah's been yammering about it for years. We're going to give up childish things, like gaming, fast food, and snorting Ritalin, and start gathering around a battered Monopoly board instead. We'll have dinner as a family and gnaw on vegetables from our garden patch.

Personally, I find this late-in-the-game high-mindedness pretty irritating, especially when it comes from greed-head behemoth companies. I remain deeply offended when a large guy with a deep voice tells me I need to check out library books and carry bag lunches, especially since his ultimate aim is selling auto insurance. We're back to the basics, he rumbles, standing in what purports to be a public library. And the basics are good.

He should check out the libraries in my neck of the woods. Homeless people snore in chairs, and there's someone who shits on the copy machine. Don't even think about looking at the art books. Half the pictures have been razored out. Thanks to years of lousy funding, some of the basics are not good. In fact, some basics are barely tolerable.

I shouldn't be surprised that ad agencies feel we need direction and encouragement, especially of the hectoring variety. Ad agencies all believe that campaigns really do something, and I guess, with companies going ::pop:: every half hour or so, they're imagining the end of skin care, tampons, fast food, Viagra, and chat lines. And what will they do then? No wonder they're glomming onto responsibility, respect, and community to sell coffee and oil, then boring us stiff with baritone spokespeople, shots of church steeples, happy families wolfing down sandwiches, and old folks planting tomatoes. Cue music and logo. Show website address. End.

Yesterday I saw a couple of Mormon missionaries wheeling around the neighborhood. I thought it was a good time for them to be out and about, banging on doors. Goodness is all the rage.

In fact, it's a seller's market.

Bravery will be desired...

2009-01-24T20:56:00.000-08:00

We may have a spanking new president, but he's stuck inside the DC sludge factory now. He and his minions have good intentions no doubt, but it's going to take some time to get them going. Maybe a lot of time. How fast did FDR move? At New Deal warp speed? I don't know, and there's no one around for me to ask. If those in my family who could remember were still alive, there's no guarantee they'd tell me anything. My family made money during The Great Depression, hated Roosevelt and called him "that man".

Meanwhile, there's the Zen non-sound of no-business. People are scared. Crime is up.

Last night, in my neighborhood there was a drive-by shooting. My husband and I were just drifting off, when we heard the quick, fast bangs of an automatic handgun: ::pop:: ::pop:: ::pop:: ::pop:: like that. My husband called the police and then, the next day, trooped around the neighborhood to see what others had heard, and came home, his pockets jingling with new stories.

Two of our neighbors had been robbed fairly recently, one of them at gunpoint. The other had his door bashed in and the marauders just came in and grabbed stuff. it's easy to feel unsafe, except it's a terrible feeling to have, so my thoughts are turning to bravery. Outside my iffy neighborhood, I think it's a quality we'll all need.

I know that fear is usually about not getting something we want or losing something we have. Actually, given that definition, I was more scared during the years of the Former Occupant. The ripping noise of our basic rights being torn away got fairly loud. The frightening thing was that life went on, looking about like it always had. I suspect dictatorships look much the same way. Movies often show truckloads of soldiers, but I think it takes a while before they show up. I imagine, for a while at least, the populace is quiet, hoping better times will return.

And now they have.

Justice will be sought...

2009-01-22T09:43:00.000-08:00

That blindfolded lady

Dear President Obama,

Congratulations on the gig. I always thought you'd get it, even when Hillary people were on my neck, biting hard. Frankly, I was skewing that way myself for a while, because I didn't think you had the experience. Still, I knew you had the attitude and here in America, we like our presidents to have some street smarts. Or some kind of smarts, which makes the past eight years a little puzzling.

I know you're very busy now, undoing all that godawful stuff the Former Occupant and his Merry Band of Thugs engineered, but I need to make a confession. You see, I'm responsible for the whole laundry list. Guantanamo, torture, secret trials, wiretapping, unprovoked acts of war, cherry-picked intelligence, lying to the American people, Abu Graib.

Yeah. That was me, Writer to the Stars.

For quite a while, I didn't think I was on the wrong side. I voted against the Former Occupant, I marched, I wrote letters, I signed petitions, and basically checked out of the whole culture and became a stealth-writer, unwilling to support a rogue regime. I thought I was doing enough, but I knew better. I'm a DC kid, daughter of a government work-a-daddy, a work-a-daddy who did his Ph.D work on the Geneva Conventions. So I can't say I couldn't spot a putsch from the get-go. I knew there had been a coup d'etat, even though there wasn't much about it in The Dallas Morning News.

I'm also a survivor of Watergate, so I remember those hearings. I still recall Barbara Jordon saying, “Why don’t we just take this 17^th century document and put it into a 20^th century shredder?” I'm a little surprised the Former Occupant didn't do that when he had the chance. Maybe someone ought to see if the Constitution's still around. (Could you check on that? Maybe send Rahm or someone? Thanksabunch.)

Even with all that history and me sticking my oar in now and again, the Former Occupant & Co. kept on keeping on, while our country crumbled like a huge stale cookie. Then too, we voted for him once, then turned around and voted for him again. Sure the elections were sketchy, and lots of people were mad about all the shenanigans, but if our country had been in good shape, these bozos wouldn't have lasted five hot minutes. But I didn't do enough, the newspapers didn't do enough, and congress didn't do enough. There were a lot of people writing, screaming, demonstrating, and hollering, but not enough of them.

And then, we got our act together. The voters, that is.

Last time I looked, America was a country of the people, by the people, and for the people. Without us, creeps like the Former Occupant can't get a toe-hold. And this is the real point of my letter, Mr. President. We need to investigate what happened, we need to have trials, and we need to send some bad guys to jail.

Otherwise, we'll always be scared because we'll know it could happen again. I know I'll be scared. This time we pulled it out but we might not be able to again. While my thoughts are often dark ones, that's a thought too black to bear. Then there's my guilt. I'm walking around, still feeling slightly terrible because evil things were done in the name of America. And there's no getting around it, America is me. It says so on a bunch of very old documents: We the people. And I'm the people.

Give it some thought and get back to me.

Thanks a lot,

Writer to the Stars

Cuteness will not be mandatory...

2009-01-21T14:42:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of cuteoverload.com

I don't know how you sweated out the last term of our Former Occupant, but me, I spent uncounted zombie hours in a tranquil muttering haze over at cuteoverload.com, where everyone speaks a mutant brand of English, and where there is an endless stream of animal pix, showing all species of critters who are tiny, adorable, and often occupied with eating something bigger than their heads.

Today, in the cool pure light of a new day, I did not once feel the need to scurry over to my website haven, and stare at a hamster trying to cram a large carrot chunk down its gullet. I count that as A Good Thing, since only God knows how many brain cells I was losing through sheer disuse. I'm not proud of it, but I was also known to hang out at icanhazcheeseburger.com, glomming digital photos of cats doing the darndest things.

And, when I woke this morning, I didn't race in for my required 2.5 hours worth of reading political and news blogs, posts, and newsfeeds to see if the Current Occupant had decided to just fucking go for it, and set off the big one. As I bumbled through my day, I didn't have to monitor those same news blogs, posts, and newsfeeds, checking on what fresh hell was happening, and deciding whether or not to run for the border.

The last eight years have been hard on us, maybe harder than we know. We're all fatter, dumber, and meaner now, but why wouldn't we be? It's hard to take a lively interest in working out when you can't afford the gym fees and when a looming global apocolypse trumps toning up those jiggly thighs. Don't know about you, but I sure clocked a lot of TV time too, mostly watching true crime shows, like there wasn't enough real crime around.

Maybe we're turning a new page. I don't know if we are or not, but I think we're turning a better page.

And good for us.

Dumb-asses will be pondered...

2009-01-20T13:52:00.000-08:00

They're baaaack

The New York Times today has devoted a whole article to the ill-starred Campbell family, whom I myself accused of being pussy Nazis. I stand corrected. Thanks to the Gray Lady's sterling reportage, it seems that Heath Campbell, the daddy of the brood, is not so much a Nazi as he is terminally stupid. And the bad thing about real dumb-butts is that they make smart people stupid. People like me, for instance.

When I discovered one of the kiddos was named Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie, I thought this was the name of a famous Nazi, or infamous Nazi, I didn't know about. Turns out, Heath claims that this is the correct way to spell Heinrich Himmler, and he is not only wrong, but flat-out wrong, and I feel like a dumb-ass, which is what dumb-asses like: the propagation of more dumb-asses.

Their landlord, a Mr. Lippincott, who shares the two family home where the Campbells live, says that awhile back Heath was into Confederate stuff and then switched over to the Nazi thing purely for stylistic reasons. According to the Times, Mr. Campbell is now into swastikas, which decorate the apartment and are etched in skull decals on his car. Mr. Campbell, a collector of German combat knives, also wears Nazi-era boots and likes to click his heels together.

Since Mr. Campbell sought out a local paper to complain that ShopRite wouldn't decorate a birthday cake for his son, now Adolph Hitler, but formerly Antonio Adolph Hitler, blogs and newspaper websites have reported incendiary information. There's Mr. Campbell’s previous marriage, which produced a few comments from his former mother-in-law, who wrote that her daughter wouldn't let him name one of their children Satan. A wise move on her part. Others wrote in saying that the act of naming kiddos after Hitler and Himmler constituted abuse.

Daddy Heath wouldn't be the first. My mother, observing that my male cousins named Ashley had to slug their way through grade school, said naming a boy Ashley was like naming him Percy or Vivien. Having known a Marine named Percy, I concur. Nonetheless, people keep on saddling their offspring with godawful names. Look at the Morning Star Redwings, Dawnlight Dancers, and American Star Wanderings and other goofy names my generation inflicted on their kids...commune kids who probably grew up to be cost accountants, as an act of bitter protest. However, one of my checkout ladies at Albertsons was named Quivoria, and another was Rotunda, and they seemed fine. Some things can be can be transcended and we ought to remember that.

Mr. Campbell broke down when his kids were removed from his home. The local chief of police remarked, “He loves his kids...his kids to him are his future. As he told me, his kids are forever; wives aren’t.” A remark that has a plain, if benighted, eloquence all its own.

Face it. The guy's simply pig-ignorant, although with befuddled aspirations. However, as far as I'm concerned, there are still unanswered questions, like: how come we only have this one photo, so far? And who are these two women? Today, a friend of mine asked me, "Who are these two lesbians with little Hitler?" And yeah, there's that overtone. I put it down to bad reporting.

When questioned, Heath Campbell is clear enough.

And I guess that's the problem.

Joy will be needed...

2009-01-20T11:30:00.000-08:00

That was really something wasn't it? The speech, the pomp, Aretha's hat, the hip benediction, it was all good. As an ex-DC person, what I remember is that DC is a very large small town and not the epicenter of sophistication, but every so often it'll blow your doors off. The Marine marching band, the bell-ringers, the cannons: I guess they're kept in a big warehouse like Mardi Gras floats, waiting for the Next Big Thing. Well, honey, this was it.

Personally, I loved the crowds, all colors, all ages, old guys who marched with King, the 'Nam vets, the young un's wearing all their Obama flash, old ladies with joyful tears. Everyone happy, shouting, singing, stamping, dancing, and chanting. You guys should stop by more often. Without you DC can turn into a hushed unfun tourist destination, with sightseers tippytoeing reverentially through marble halls, breathing on moldy documents, looking at the Capitol with gaga expressions.

For a while there, like the last eight years, it looked like an armed graveyard. Lots of heavy-necked military bulldogs around and a scattering of depressed sightseers trying to find a buddy/son/husband/dad on The Wall. I had to hold very tight to my own memories of stopping in on the Senate, watching a filibuster, eating at the cafeteria, and checking out the White House. Back then it was my Capitol, my government.

Maybe it will be again. And yours too.

Fingers crossed.

The great big day...

2009-01-19T20:00:00.000-08:00

How terrific would it be if everyone in DC was wearing one of these tomorrow? Pretty terrific, in my opinion, but then I'm always wanting life to be performance art. (And by the way, there's a new post dated Sunday, the 18th, called Basic skills will be demanded... I kept trying to move it and couldn't. It's kind of presidential too. Check it out.)

I love the way things are stacking up for the inauguration. As I've mentioned, I grew up in DC, but the only inauguration I ever attended was LBJ's. This was because DC has a perfectly vile climate that seemed to reach a nadir of vileness with every new president. But one year I was working in DC, and had become friends with a very nice girl about my age, who lived in Maryland, introduced me to Pimm's Cup, and about whom the FBI would later question me closely.

I don't know how she talked me into going, but I went. Of course, this was an earlier, more inhibited age, so she and I wore the full-girl drag, girdles and all, in sub-freezing temperatures, while slush poured into our high heels, and we were spattered with dirty snow and road dirt as the president et. al. zoomed past. I saw LBJ sitting in his bullet-proof car, and his face looked like a boiled ham.

Later, my friend and I retired to the Blue Mirror Bar and tossed a bunch of Pimm's Cup cocktails.

The End.

Yeah. They're mostly like that.

This one isn't.

The obsessed are never bored...

2009-01-19T11:43:00.000-08:00

Wode: The First Pigmented Fragrance

Odious? Perhaps only to us old school types. Maybe if the ads didn't look so much like a CSI photo... Also, the designers, Brian Kirkby and Zoe Broach, might give some thought to the notion that we no longer paint ourselves blue and live in trees.

Boudicca's Wode, perhaps the most truly groundbreaking recent fragrance launch, has traversed to the illicit and taboo, including notes of opium and poisonous hemlock. Moreover, Wode lives up to its name and is the first pigmented perfume spray: the cobalt vapour colours the skin blue then disappears without a trace. "The paint dissolves through some chemical combinations – it's the magic of science," say the Boudicca designers Brian Kirkby and Zoe Broach. "Queen Boudicca's tribe would mark themselves as warriors. The markings, the coloration, would have been associated with bravery, courage, status, virility, fertility and heroism." If it is possible for a perfume to transmit avant-garde principles, then Wode comes very close to it, with innovations of colour and intimations of illegality.

From: The Independent 1-19-09

Another reason to live dept...4" Obama to be sworn in as president of Legoland

2009-01-19T10:01:00.000-08:00

Overhead View of Legoland Capitol and Crowds

Aretha Franklin Sings With The SF Boys and Girls Choir

Inaugural Porto Potties

Basic skills will be demanded...

2009-01-18T20:39:00.000-08:00

Just like you, I bet, I watched the HBO Obama Inauguration event, wondering if the Inauguration communications team had just upended Hollywood and grabbed every star who rolled out. And just like you, I clouded up a bit with emotion, especially when I saw sweet old Pete Seeger hollering out the lyrics to that Woodie Guthrie fave, This Land Is your Land. If you listened very closely, you could hear that Pete Seeger snuck in some of the original lyrics, which aren't of the mom/country/apple-pie variety:

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;

By the relief office, I'd seen my people.

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,

Is this land made for you and me?

But the whole star-coated, fireworky, music-laden business was something, I admit, battered and cynical as I am.

And then Obama gave his pre-inaugural speech, and like the rational, stern yet loving daddy he probably is, he explained that it's gonna be tough. Back to reality: no TV/Internet cruising until the homework is done, no scarfing up Gummy Bears until you gag down the brussel sprouts, no trips to the mall until your shoes have big gaping holes like his. And perhaps I was not alone that day in thinking, At last! I can use all that shit I learned in Home Ec! Because I can do it! Cost per serving? A snap. Nutritious yet cheapie meals? All day long, baby. Menus for a small planet? Got it. Stacked on top of that, I can darn socks, stitch buttons, hook rugs, make a hospital fold, and staunch the flow of blood. I can cook up a pot of starch, iron linens, and wash silk. I'm your Household Goddess: a wet-dream Betty Crocker.

Of course, all those hard-earned skills went by the wayside during the whole feminist thing. Back then, juggling a teaching job, grad school, and community theatre, I got intimately acquainted with every quickie horror-show Tuna/Beef Helper casserole mix on the market. I also became proficient in snarling, Just what I'd expect from a brain-washed tool of the patriarchy. And then, during the counter-culture years, when I made my own candles and sandals, I realized I was falling badly short of the hippie-chick ideal. There was a book by Alicia Bay Laurel, Living On the Earth, that spelled it out. She had instructions on how to bury a dead body, how to tan leather, how to dry fruits and veggies, how to have a baby and share the placenta, and I couldn't do any of it, any more than I could grow my hair down to my ass. And sometime before old Alicia cranked out her tome and sometime after the feminist thing, I learned classical French cooking.

I hope Obama understands my problem. I know old-timey, hard-timey skills will be required, but which ones? I have so many. And then there are those others where I was a total dud. I can do touch typing, cut a stencil or a rubylith, even give up hair products and roll-on mascara. Don't ask me to deliver a baby, though. What's going to be required here? And how de-automated are we gonna be?

Spell it out, brother.

Tolerance will be required...

2009-01-17T18:51:00.000-08:00

Adolph Hitler Campbell, age 3

Little Adolph, arguably one of the world's cute kids, was removed from his parents without explanation, by New Jersey’s Division of Youth and Family Services, along with his sisters, Joyce Lynn Aryan Nation Campbell, 1, and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell, who will turn 1 in April. They have subsequently been returned to their parents without any reason offered.

For their part, the parents have said that they chose their children's names simply because they liked them, that they are not Neo-Nazi's, and everyone just needs to get over it. The couple said they're neither members of the Aryan Nation nor fans of Hitler’s atrocities, although the father, Heath, has Nazi tattoos and Nazi memorabilia.

"He did this stuff, yeah, but that was in the past. America had slavery and everything else,” said Deborah Campbell, referring to Adolph Hitler.

"I think people need to take their heads out of the cloud they've been in and start focusing on the future and not on the past," Heath Campbell said. "There's a new president and he says it's time for a change; well, then it's time for a change," he continued. "They need to accept a name. A name's a name. The kid isn't going to grow up and do what (Hitler) did."

Okay, even my cats know that adopting Nazi names was not what Obama meant by change. Overlooking that, however, it's a little disingenuous to slap names like Adolph Hitler, Joyce Lynn Aryan Nation, and Honszlynn Hinler on your kids and not expect blowback. And blowback is what they got from ShopRite, when they went to order a birthday cake for little Adolph. The ShopRite bakery refused to spell out Adolph's full name in frosting and a mighty argybargy ensued. The Campbells demanded an apology from ShopRite and ShopRite refused. Shortly afterwards the state of New Jersey grabbed the Campbell's kids.

I for one am sorry that this Neo-Nazi couple have turned out to be such pussies. Time was when a proud Neo-Nazi bunch would show up for a rally with giant swastika banners, their "Kill the Mud People" signs, loudspeakers, and no apologies required.They knew that 90% of most people would loathe them and that the ACLU would defend them if things got ugly. Seems to me that when you've got Nazi tattoos up to your armpits, give your kiddies Nazi-esque names, and have Nazi objects scattered around the house, your position is pretty clear. To whine that nothing was meant by it, that all this Nazi kerfuffle is in the dim past and we should all, like, chill is taking advantage of everyone's patience.

Me, I think the kid should have gotten his birthday cake and I don't think the children should have been removed from their home: legally, the Campbells can raise a whole Aryan Nation if they so choose. Anyway, didn't we already grab kids from the LDS-cult, only to wind up sending them back? And where are we planning to send them after we snatch them? We ought to be well past any pretense that there's some kind of family norm out there.

I suppose I'm reporting on all this just because Nazi-stuff tends to catch my eye. Being a Nazi seems like such a goofy thing to want to do. Why not re-enact the battle of Gettysburg instead? Or go bang on a horseshoe in Williamsburg, and kick it 18th century style? It makes about as much sense.

Of course, those activities don't get people nearly as pissed off.

And that's the whole point, isn't it?

Isn't it?

Gratuitous Holiday Cuteness...

2008-12-11T14:16:00.000-08:00

Miss Xmas!

2008-12-10T21:07:00.000-08:00

A Christmas Outfit...for reals

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

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

Or maybe it is.

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

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

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

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

You gave up your cherished dream of being a high-priced call girl or, for that matter, any other occupation involving high heels.
Excerpt from: What A Job Will Do

Yeah. Retail. It sucked.

A Dangerous Lag In the Holiday...

2008-12-10T13:21:00.000-08:00

The Twosome Blanket from Iceland

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

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

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

Tater Mitts

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

Toilet Candy

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

Tell me I'm wrong.

Twits for The Holiday...

2008-12-04T18:29:00.000-08:00

Blythe Danner, American Actress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Easy times never make much worth having.

Gifties continued...

2008-12-03T12:25:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be worth it though.

Gifts that keep on giving...

2008-12-01T12:51:00.000-08:00

A Motorcycle Cozy

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

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

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

Cotton Square By Andrea Dezsö
from the Exhibition "Pricked"

Or this:

Cotton Square By Andrea Dezsö
from the Exhibition "Pricked"

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

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

or...

How about those for Christmas gifties?

Yeah, me too.

Xmas rapping....

2008-11-20T20:36:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting ready for The Holiday...

2008-11-19T15:36:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a point on which we could both agree.

Silver bells...

2008-11-14T14:10:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-11-13T12:24:00.000-08:00

Fruitcake with marzipan elephants

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

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

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

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

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

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

The holiday...

2008-11-12T15:16:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the world turned color...

2008-11-10T20:00:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

The panthers...

2008-11-09T09:18:00.000-08:00

The original Black Panther Party founders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Days of rage...

2008-11-08T12:36:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-11-07T13:28:00.000-08:00

Kara Walker and Uncle Remus...

2008-11-07T09:32:00.000-08:00

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

Kara Walker, artist

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know that's what I thought.

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

Never occurred to me at all.

A fifth grade racist....

2008-11-06T19:38:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except there was nothing natural about any of it.

Ralph Nader is stupider than eight chickens...

2008-11-06T12:09:00.000-08:00

Uncle Tom

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

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

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

Uncle Ben

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

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

And Ralph Nader should shut up.

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

2008-11-05T11:31:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2008-11-04T21:59:00.000-08:00

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

Hallowe'en...the aftermath

2008-11-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was it really like that? Maybe.

Bad craziness...

2008-10-30T13:12:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-10-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-10-24T14:36:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-10-23T19:10:00.000-07:00

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....

2008-10-22T08:50:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-10-21T19:54:00.000-07:00

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.