They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

Back from taking my daughter to NYC. She wants to be a Broadway actress and I want to live at Muji. The more complicated one's affairs become, the more simplicity one's wardrobe demands. OK, it's not Oscar-worthy, but my hands hurt.

Thinking about the thoroughly modern Thackeray saga of the White House gate-crashers--first thing I was wondering about, which I haven't seen addressed anywhere, is what's becoming of the horses. These two reportedly haven't picked up a tab in a while, but they must have horses, so who's caring for them, and with what funds? Other thoughts:

--Oasis started out as a contender winery, and the scion reportedly did enology at Davis, so what happened? The wine got bad real fast and the tasting room turned into a shrine to the party-crashers. Naked Mountain took the Chardonnay honors, Horton took the innovation prizes, and Barboursville took the history/tourism. All Oasis had was a pretty good fakey limo tour business. This is an interesting blog entry from someone who worked for that.

--Why was there ever a real housewives of DC anyway? We don't do that kind of thing here. We're prized for our dowdiness. It's what we do best! We are Ugly Betty! We are the brains of the operation.

--It was funny that some local media make a point of saying that the couple have a home not in Fauquier but in Warren.

--If Bravo is doing all this as a modern morality tale, tracing the downfall of a folie a deux, that's fascinating--and horribly cruel. Maybe there's a new pseudo-celebrity delusional intervention reality show in the offing. People do get desperate in this New Depression. Just please, make sure someone's taking care of the horses.

--It's all been done.

You Will Eat a Banana Soon

1. My daughter has been making these "fortunetellers," where you fold paper into quarters and etc, then switch it in your hands according to colors and numbers and open up a flap that tells your fortune. If you've ever been an 8-year-old girl, you know just what I'm talking about. The four possible futures she has written in: You will eat a banana soon; you will have 22 children when you grow up; you have a big head; you will be the star of a Hollywood movie.

2. More journalists getting laid OFF every day; our jobs hang by a thread and all I can think of is health insurance. Fucking trapped! I'm going to die from the stress of worrying about the prospect of not having fucking health insurance!

3. My job is getting too stupid to be borne anyway. Today someone wanted me to write this: "We live at the interplay of data and analytics." No, no, we don't live there! I refuse to live there! Maria doesn't live here anymore! You live there if you want somebody living there! Foreclose that son of a bitch and tear it down like it was the Amityville horror! I won't live there! You shouldn't live there either! Get out, get out now!

4. Just give me health insurance and I'll work doing dishes, I promise, you can give my job to someone else, just don't let me have to worry about what will happen to us if one of us gets sick!

5. And we never do get sick, really. Knock wood and goddess willing. Really, I'm not even suicidal anymore since I had my daughter. Except for those flashes when I encounter people who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars and don't know how to wipe their butts.

6. Not that how often you get sick really makes any difference, or should, when it comes to health care, because it's a right. Did you hear about these pricks at Lincoln University who won't graduate students with a BMI over 30? BMI is a crock of shit; any athlete knows that. Absolutely dumbass, meaningless measure.

7. The topper is that the school head says he can't afford to provide fresh produce and nutritious food for students on campus because the school is in a "remote location." Where, the fucking arctic ice station? Even there, they get frozen vegetables. Asshat. I sentence him to not being able to afford treatment by a brilliant medical specialist who is fit but fat.

8. And nobody yet has proposed fining me for endangering my health and possibly costing taxpayers by running at night and on rocky trails. At my age. No problem, as long as I've got that cute little BMI number.

9. I downloaded a bunch of Gary Numan the other day. The early stuff. It is beautiful and romantic and gay. Someday I want to hear the break from "Replicas" in a club. If I only got out more.

10. I have to keep reminding myself that we are not in the time of Charles II. Bubonic plague AND a great fire, plus Milton and beheadings and hangings! Taking DD to the library tomorrow; hope I can find that one.

"You Know What I Feel? Bored."

Maybe it was the lightning, but the Choir was on fire tonight, spontaneously combusting into two new verses of We Three Kings that had poor Santa possibly being violated in a jail cell. But it turned out to be the beginning of a new romance!

I shouldn't be having a smoke, the way my throat was catching tonight singing, but after the rum, it tastes so good. Which two facts bring us to...

Twimoms, a, um, phenomenon, that's been written about everywhere else, so it was time for the Post to give it a front, in the charmingly tentative way it treats all newfangled trends. Written by Monica Hesse, bless her heart. It's a manu-trend, older women who are obsessed with the Twilight books and movies. I haven't read or seen said books and movies, except for this Buffy mashup (linked for the Facebookers, embedded for the rest).



The Salon columnist steered it to my demographic's conflict with distant Daddies, and I'm really glad I didn't have to read Miss Hesse going there. (I remember interviewing Sherman Alexie in a former life, and there's this line he threw down that stuck with me, tho I couldn't use it in the article: "Brown dads leave, but white dads leave while they're still sitting in the chair. They're reading the newspaper, but they're gone.")

Reader, I'm sticking with Snape. I know, I'm behind the curve, but at least he's a grownup. Disillusioned, bitter, used by the powers that be, working for the Man and never getting the damn job you want and are fully qualified for--I can relate. That Twilight vampire just sounds like more abstinence and stalking--two things I've had way too much of in life and don't enjoy.

But as for the whole, um, phenomenon? It's those Brontes again! Look, working is boring, being a grownup is boring, marriage is boring, it's all a big slog from time to time. Our minds and bodies and emotions are constructed to crave a tough workout, and life gives the typical working woman none of it. A woman today's circumstances are as imprisoning as any corset; you need to watch every bit of what you might do lest you be labeled immature or unhealthy and drugged into dullness--for your own good. I don't blame them one bit for seeking an escape valve. If I didn't have openminded, supportive DH watching my back (as I watch his, believe it or not) and my pseudonyms and writing, I'd be clawing at the yellow wallpaper, too. I wonder what it would be like if all the Twimoms decided to become artists, though. I'd like to see what they'd do.

Now the lightning tonight? That was exciting.

Image: Kris Waldherr's Tarot of the Goddess. She's really beautiful.

Les Autres Blogs

--You owe it to yourself to check out wrekehavok's November project, which is entirely focused on egregious '80s music. It's astounding.

--I think I'm going to have to just break down and buy Kyoto. I like reading fragrance blogs, but a lot of them hate on Comme des Garcons and Kyoto in particular, saying it's "too popular." I actually fought my CDG love for a while for this reason (and because they're expensive as hell). But of all the samples I got last year, they were my winners.

I read a review of Dover Street Market from this guy, who I might actually let be my shrink if I lived in San Francisco, and was a little disconcerted when he said the drydown was like 10 Corso Como, which I hadn't liked at all. So last night after a shower, I opened the sample and gave it another chance. Wince, there I was, Lauren Bacall in the 70s in Halston silk and furs. It ain't me, babe.

I also love two from the CDG Red line, Carnation and Sequoia. Sequoia is a woods/cedar plus carnation/clove and it is perfect, it is Humboldt without skunk weed, it smells like my imagination of Viggo Mortensen sleeping in an elf treehouse; I wear it to work and out sometimes, but not around the house. DH doesn't like clove. He would be very happy if I just stuck to Comptoir Sud Pacific, which is to say smelling like a cupcake. I liked their stuff when I lived in Miami, but the vanilla is too cloying up north. I hear they're Nicole Kidman's favorites, and that fits; Comptoir's vanilla-cocoa-pineapple mixes are exactly what I imagine she'd smell like.

I like men's fragrances or unisex ones best, which also puts CDG ahead.

With fragrances, you have to take into account what makes those closest to you happy, so that means I don't indulge my clove love much. The funniest sample I got was Spirit of the Tiger by Heely, which smells like TIGER BALM! which I smell like half the time anyway.

I liked L'Artisan's Timbuktu when I tried it in Paris, but not when I got home. Maybe the falafel changed my skin composition that afternoon.

Kyoto. Kyoto.

--I miss seeing Fern, but can keep up with the omnivorously brilliant mind of this locavore here.

Exercising the Prerogative Traditionally Extended to Women But Which Actually Goes Both Ways

I changed my mind.

UPDATE: Then changed it again. Really needed editing. Was too tired the other day. It's still not there.

King of Swords

Permission, Forgiveness

You have the power to make the decision
(And I'm ready to let you have it)
Once again I approach to ask,
And--I can't help it--it strikes me--

I know you're not much for art, but
In all these years of submitting my will
(Groomed to a turn) for your perfection,
May I say (may I?) that we've made something

Between us, something you could take
Pride in, really. We do this well.
We do it so it feels like hell--
(That's what she said.) I should say,
There is nothing amateur about it.

All the reasons a woman would get beaten down--
Too sunny, too sparkly, too smiley, too bold--
Oh, just the first course; we ran through that
Quickly, back and forth, like brushing the dirt
From your hands, a laborer done by five. No,

We're in the C-suites, with bonuses, options;
Executives, aligned. I exist,
You destroy; I breathe, you knock it out of me.
No mere well-oiled machine, not you:
A quality provider of comprehensive solutions.
(You've always had mine.) I might say I know
How you operate like my own mind:
What you like to watch, what you like to eat,
What raises your ire, and what puts you to sleep.

And that's how I know now
That this is the right time
To slide closer on my knees
To keep an eye on your eyes,
Closed, to keep singing softly,
And slowly reach my hand
To your lap, to tilt the hilt
And let fall into my hands
The sword you hold
That once was mine.

Rainy Night House

Strange hearing that driving the New York Avenue gateway into the city, seeing condos I wrote ads for years ago with dark windows and the clubs, too early for lines to form. Tonight was very cozy, with a poetry reading by one of my favorite poet friends who just put out her chapbook, and an open mic. I'm always so amazed at what happens at open mics of any size and the odd combinations and congruencies. Tonight it sounded like everyone had a poem about fish, and everyone had a poem about time. You could say that's typical for poets post-surrealism, almost like a ticket in. When the last open mic reader got out his sax and started doing this one-man bebop coffeehouse thing along with a computer track, I started feeling how close we were to the water, with the wind blowing the drizzle around outside and us in this old-house cafe, a small hurricane party of poets.

When I got home, I decided to pick a card for the next poem and I was hoping it would be Page of Cups, with the picture of the man holding a cup with a small fish leaping from it. But it was Knight of Cups, whom I'd actually been thinking about last week, so I'll get to work on that.

And before that a surreal trip to the mall to get DD some shoes. The mall is so big, we kept getting lost. Every few stores I'd have to check the map. There is still so much stuff there, and all of it sparkling and glittery, but not so many people, and thank goddess no Santa bombing, just perfume bombing. Every few steps, someone wanted to help us or show us something, anything, anything but how to get to where we were going to get kids' shoes. DD was a little rattled by all the people pushing us; it was like a souk out there. I tried to explain that it was hard to sell things now because many people didn't have jobs or money to spare. "Are we in the Depression?" she asked. She is fascinated by Kit, the American Girl Depression-era doll. I am glad I won't have to go to a mall anytime soon again.

Me, I'm thinking about a different decade. Shame there's just a glimpse of Jaco Pastorius, but my ears still work sometimes.

My One-Line Holiday Film Guide

In a past life, I was a movie reviewer. Now I wait for them to come out on On Demand and fall asleep. Tis the season for one-line reviews. I'm challenging myself to do this in 20 minutes. See how far into the season I get.

Pirate Radio: I'd do 'em, just for the fashions.

Precious: Got to break the one-line rule on this one. One of my fave Jezebel commentators offers pre-viewing must-reading. But for those concerned that it's just a voyeuristic immersion in one community's pathology, I can offer that there is no lack of depictions of appalling human misery from every corner and culture from anyone who's been able to pick up a camera and try to show the world. If someone uses it as "proof" that [these people] are all [like this], that's a viewer problem, not a filmmaker problem. I hate the idea of self-censoring to create a "proper" impression, precisely because that is at the root of most of the suffering (and gifts) in my own life. I'm of the more-talk-not-less-is-better school, except when it comes to these reviews, so I better cut this--

2012: Slam-dunk on Vatican City!

Bad Lieutenant, New Orleans: Nic Cage does frontal; spoiler alert: He gets eaten by a grizzly at the end. Who then staggers off to get more coke and bet on the Phillies. Oops, broke protocol again!

Fantastic Mr. Fox: Isn't this the Lars Von Trier sequel?

Twilight New Moon: Holding out for Part III, with sea monsters: "Cthulhu, Where Are You?"

The Road: Foraging for food and outrunning cannibals is a typical day in the Cougar household.

Everybody's Fine: Can't deal with DeNiro when he gets all twinkly around the edges.

Serious Moonlight: Will give Hines a chance.

Invictus: "Get off my rugby field, you kids!"

Me and Orson Welles: Awwwwww.

The Lovely Bones: Would like to say something funny about "Heavenly Creatures" and Orson Welles, but truthfully, I just can't even deal with the concept of this picture.

We Live In Public: When it comes to commentary on contemporary social phenomena, I'm waiting for the doc on the Human Carpet.

Avatar: "You write dialogue for a guy and then change the name."

Young Victoria: I'd be the only one in the audience.

Broken Embraces: Such a crush, such a crush.

It's Complicated: Please stop twinkling, please, please.

Nine: Yeah, nine big crushes!

Sherlock Holmes: The slash will write itself.

Up in the Air: Want.

Hey, I made it thru xmas!

Update: Dag, in my haste I messed up formatting. Fixed.

He Won't Stand Beating

Five of Swords
Beating Time

Each sword a slice of time,
It’s mine, it’s mine, an hour
You left behind, dropped and ran
Into the smoke, into the slime.
Whole days once yours I now possess.

They call us vultures when we glean
The fields for the fallen. Sometimes
Those I step around are still alive. Today, I found
A world from sundown to dawn, time
For one lover, two bottles, three songs—
I keep accounts, pile seconds into stacks.

The oracle said to find time I must be clever;
I will be clever, leave off
Fear or feeling my own wounds.
A chunk of iron to a wing,
Black feathers fly loose,
No matter, no time:
I see another minute
You let fall,
And now it’s mine.

Image: Today I stole the card from Serennu, home of geniuses, the source for any astrological aspect and most obscure asteroid you could want to know about, and a random tarot generator on top of all that.

Light As A Feather, Thick As A Brick

Tomorrow my little brother is scheduled to leave for a solo sail from San Diego to his home in Maui, in the 44-foot boat he just got. It's something he's wanted to do for years; they've been wanting to get their own boat for years as well. Despite everyone making jokes about him pulling his own teeth and taking out his own appendix en route, I'm not in the least worried, just excited for him. Both my brothers are great sailors, though I never got the hang of it. He stays cool under any circumstances, it's only about a month tops, and teenagers are going solo around the world. If anyone who knows who I really am wants to follow him on his blog, let me know, and I'll send you the url.

Meanwhile, I fucked up my ankle running on the stupid Crescent Trail today, so goes to show. Bumming because I want to do this simple parks fundraiser 8K in a few weeks. Plus I've been living on red wine, steak, pizza, and chocolate for about five days straight and feel like I could roll down the trail like a big rubber ball if I don't get some major miles in soon. DH says as he gets older, he may be able to run with me more often, because he'll be able to be as slow as I am. I told him not to aspire to too much; not everyone can function at my kind of speed. It takes a unique tolerance for boredom and infinite patience to perfect the 20-minute trail mile.

Plus, I'm a solo type.

But a healer at the dinner tonight told me the place that was hurting is at a meridian, so I'm hoping the Singing Acupuncturist can work some magic on it next week.

Came home choco-and-wine buzzed after the trick-or-treat extravaganza and lit the candle at the Dumb Supper for the ancestors, set out with my daughter before sundown. Greens, gingerbread, beer, peanut butter crackers, chocolate; all the things the ancestors like to eat. In my buzzedness, had a terrible yen for some Jethro Tull and downloaded a dozen songs; thank the goddess DH got home or it could have gotten really ugly. I already would have been jigging around the kitchen playing the air jazz flute if it weren't for my ankle. Forgive me for planting such an image in your no-doubt fevered brain. Blessed Samhain and Happy New Year; that which is remembered, lives.

Photo: There's supposed to be a pretty wild movie that goes with Passion Play. If anyone knows about it...

Ten Titles In Search Of

Don't say I never gave you anything.

1. The Cabaret License

2. Shake It Til the Metal Ball Rattles

3. Rampant

4. We Need More Skulls for the Steps

5. The Surveyor's Marks

6. Pinking

7. Polar Mambo

8. Heather Waits for the Signal

9. The Garam Masala Incident

10. An Acute-Angle Sandwich

These came out of a run this morning, except for #9, which came out of an actual conflict among me and my sisters-in-law, and #10, which I've had in mind to write for going on 10 years. I'm slow.

Clip: Purportedly from the Solid Gold TV show--but then where are the damn dancers?

So To Speak

When I imagine that at my age I cannot be shocked, I learn I am wrong. I may have a passing familiarity with many terms in the Urban Dictionary, but when after a recent post it came to my attention that there are pages and pages of erotic fan fiction based on the character of "Professor Snape" from the Harry Potter books, I was shocked.

Obviously, first, because erotic fiction based on kids book characters, ewww, yuck, gross, stop. But a two-hour cruise of Teh Internets, purely for research purposes, alleviated those fears slightly, as all the authors take great pains, so to speak, to spell out that all fictional participants are of legal age and fully consenting adults. But still. All I can think of is, oh, that poor Alan Rickman, such a good actor, and this...oh, and poor Ms. Rowling. High price indeed for fame and fortune.

I know how the game works; long long long ago, I wrote erotica for a while because I thought it might be easy money, which it wasn't. Easy, yes, but not much money. You shape your stories based on whatever the paying anthologies and contests are calling for--vampire lesbians, rough trade interplanetary warriors, etc. This practice may have led to the writing of a short story of an encounter between a certain secretary of state and the wife of a Nobel Prize winner (not the latest winner, go back a bit), and also one that was a magical realist story set at a bass fishing tournament (it was an attempt at an environmentalist homage to Carl Hiaasen, which, looking back, I doubt he would have appreciated, but one does what one can). I ain't saying. But this world pays more for a 70-word web page blurb about an "IT Solution" than it does for 1,000 words of high-quality erotica, which is just one among many indications that this world is heading in the wrong direction.

Anyway, my skim of the Snape archives revealed a lot of British-flavor bodice-ripping softcore Mr. Rochester memes, starring somewhat spirited but pure woman and head-game, so to speak, playing, brooding, authoritative man. The other one that pops up, so to speak, ok I'll stop already, is the Heathcliff meme, in which the woman is just as nuts as the dude. These are also the most common romance novel models. I felt a twinge of nostalgia, because the Mr. Rochester model used to be my specialty. Oh well, another art chokes, so to speak, ha ha!, and dies. (Which last word, if you're doing Olde English softcore, could also get a "so to speak.")

And no, I will not provide links. Poison your own damn search history.

But let us go a little deeper here, you said you'd stop doing that, and explore the origins of the archetype. I'm a Stones person, a George Harrison person, and a Jane Eyre person (as opposed to a Beatles, John, Wuthering Heights person). The real Jane Eyre, of course, is as absolutely whack and wonderful as anything by the Brontes, and much more feminist and in touch with reality than her sister's book, relatively speaking. The story makes no sense, but everything she says is revolutionary. You can hear how smart and above it all that poor innocent 'Bama Charlotte believes she is; she fends for herself with such effort and ingenuity; she practically ends every third sentence with "unlike YOU bunch of dumbasses and hypocrites." What's funny is that what appeals to Jane about him isn't his "Byronic" brooding and smackdowns, but his willingness to talk to her as an equal in intellect. But it's the Byronic parts that live on in the model.

And that's not even touching the whole madwoman in the attic racial-social thing. I love Wide Sargasso Sea just as much.

Fully by chance, I came across this hilarious, weird piece from the Daily Mail years ago that's a perfect primer on Jane Eyre, "the sexiest novel ever written" and "simply the best novel ever written by a toothless parson's daughter from Yorkshire or anybody else." One correction, though--Charlotte Bronte did not "die of disappointment" after her marriage; she most likely died of dehydration and exhaustion after weeks of prolonged morning sickness, something that still happens today more often than many realize. From all biographical accounts, she really, really wanted to hang on to life and have that child.

So here's a dramatic chunk, when Rochester's doing his usual head games, trying to trick her into going for him by saying he's going to send her away, and she's like "fuck your horse, buddy," but so honest! She's freaking blazing! Emphases mine.

"I grieve to leave Thornfield: I love Thornfield:- I love it,
because I have lived in it a full and delightful life,--momentarily
at least. I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified.
I have not been buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every
glimpse of communion with what is bright and energetic and high. I
have talked, face to face, with what I reverence, with what I
delight in,--with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I have
known you, Mr. Rochester; and it strikes me with terror and anguish
to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the
necessity of departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of
death."

..."Do you think, because I am poor,
obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think
wrong!--I have as much soul as you,--and full as much heart! And if
God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have
made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave
you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom,
conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;--it is my spirit that
addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave,
and we stood at God's feet, equal,--as we are!"

"As we are!" repeated Mr. Rochester--"so," he added, enclosing me in
his arms. Gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on my lips:
"so, Jane!"

..."Jane, be still; don't struggle so, like a wild frantic bird that is
rending its own plumage in its desperation."

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with
an independent will, which I now exert to leave you."

Also keep in mind that sex with the governess was seen as every man's right and every wife's nightmare; that it was about the only job a woman could get if she wasn't on the street; that any governess could end up on the street for saying three honest words to an employer; that women who asserted equality could be jailed and force-fed or put in insane asylums. What on earth gave that toothless parson's daughter the idea she could write such things--under a pseudonym, of course?

I am not toothless, and I do not write fan fiction, and that's enough disclosure for the day.

Photo: From the latest BBC miniseries. Because as much as I love Orson Welles, and as good as he is in it, I just can't get with him in the role.

Voices in the Mist

Night's work done, time to have a glass of sake and decompress. I hate looking at old work. In fact, I rarely revise anything. Once I write something, I'm kind of creeped out by it and bored by it, and it's all so disappointing--improve it? How? Not because it's perfect, but because it's hopeless. I also get this weird feeling of "who wrote that?" as if someone else had taken over my mind and voice. So to avoid that, I rarely look at it at all.

Which makes an evening like this, once DD is in bed, dull and taxing, and more of it to come. I'm turning a series of old poems into a play in the hope that they can be useful somehow. On top of that, with our computer limping into senility, I now have to go through some 70,000 old emails, with all the mixed feelings that entails. I want to save some things, like emails from friends, those to my daughter from my mother, for instance.

Plus decide which poems, stories, outlines, drafts I need to save and keep somehow. Plus I guess I'm supposed to gather up things and try to publish them, but it's a horrible exercise--for all the reasons given, and larded with futility; publication is unlikely, even if publications themselves weren't keeling over daily.

I guess I should be glad that actual revising, cutting, pasting, tossing, changing--none of that is difficult. I don't have any sentimental attachment to what I've written. Maybe because I never feel like it's mine, like I really wrote it, anyway? And some 25 years of newspapering gets you used to being chopped up. This makes me unpopular in writing workshops, for instance, where I say unintentionally mean things like "you could just kill that middle section." Another side effect--if it's not from the past week or so, it's like I haven't written anything. I always hated it if I went for a week without my name on something new. A lot of poems I've just written on this blog, cold, and never looked at again. I'll have to sort through those and gather them up sometime, too, I know, I know. I know if I'm going to be a grownup writer, I'll have to show more respect for The Work, but it's a drag. I have so little time left, but even less time to waste in making excuses this way.

So going through old poems goes against my nature, but I know, even if it's to no use, it's something I'll have to learn to do, as a karmic exercise. It's just like sifting compost. I hope it will build up some muscles, at least.

Speaking of something new, the Post redesign--fail. Appalling in its willingness to scoop up scraps from other dying newspaper carcasses and paste them onto its thinning skin--an NYT logo here, a WSJ engraving there. It's like someone costumed out of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. And everywhere, column after column of underpaid people telling me I have to go out and buy overpriced vodka at some damn club. Glad the City Paper called them on their shit, but it's not like that's a hotbed of ingenuity either. Sigh. Nobody has any new ideas.

The crap happening with the LA Sheriff and TMZ is proof that the "new models" are no solution--unless you have a strongman with lots of money and lawyers sworn to watch your back, you'll be at the mercy of anyone who wants to sue, take your notes, whatever. Journalists at "new model" media will have to not only buy their own health insurance, but buy something akin to malpractice insurance, not to mention save up bail money.

Better drink up and clean the kitchen. Tomorrow: Write something new, even if it's just a wheeze of exhaust.

Severus, Severus Awaits You There

We've made our way to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in print and to Phoenix in DVD. Because you don't get to see the movie until you've read the book. Before checking Half-Blood out of the library, DH wondered if it were too grown up for our 8-year-old, with all the dating and kissing and such. Now I'm wondering if it's too much for me, and we're only a few chapters in. I mean, if you've read it? What do you think? What am I supposed to think, with Dumbledore spouting lines like "let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure"? It really is Oscar Wilde's birthday, isn't it?

And the scene with Snape plying the sisters with wine and they're all kneeling at his feet and taking the Unbreakable Vow or something? Do I just not get out enough, or is that not kind of hot?

DH always accuses me of having a thing for Snape, and as usual, he knows my inclinations. I know most people would cast their lot with Gary Oldman, but I'm a contrarian. A supernaturally talented Goth guy who got beat up in high school--what's not to love? Let's qualify that a bit: Goth guy who's in pretty good shape and doesn't wear too much makeup.

But of course I'm also thinking about this.



Well, Phoenix was so phoned-in it's not surprising my eyes and mind went wandering after serving the pizza on movie night tonight. On the shelf next to the TV is a jug brought back by BA and KennyMac from London, evidence of hopes of better days; the idea is you put coins in the jug and when it's full, we would have had enough to go to the World Cup. There are strict instructions from the craftspeople who make these jugs that the vessel must be shattered with a hammer in order to bring in good luck and more money. But the jug will be spared. Besides the economy and layoffs, I'm dismayed at the practice of removing South Africa's inconvenient poor from the premises so as not to rattle the tourists. Look for something similar to go down in Rio around the Olympics. As much as I love Brazil, the love isn't blind.

This New Yorker article on the Parque Royal favela in Rio tells of a drug lord who allied himself with an evangelical pastor who admits he pretends to cast out demons from the assorted dealers of the island. Like any tyrant, the drug king has attempted to limit freedom of religion and has has forbidden practice of candomble, as well as umbanda and macumba, and even Kardecism and spiritism, which actually are based strongly in Christianity, saying they are all akin to devil worship. They are also religions that acknowledge and respect African traditions and are creative, original, uniquely Brazilian in detail, culturally connected and powerful and, surprise, even have strong woman as leaders and practitioners. But the drug lord says these religions are devil worship, and you can be hacked to death if you're caught at them on his watch.

"The writer pointed out the contradiction between Fernandinho's religious faith and his continued life as a drug trafficker. He asked, “For you, where is the dividing line between right and wrong?” Fernandinho smiled, and said, “Who's deciding?”"

Anyway, the jar is too beautiful to smash.

Bamalam!

When you try new things, you learn more about yourself, like that you suck as a DJ. The only way I could have sucked more as a DJ is if I'd woken up at 7:30 a.m. and started blasting Ram Jam's "Black Betty" from a 40-foot tower of speakers. Somebody beat me to that one.

(As usual, names changed not out of some creepy George Bush homage, but because innocent people may not want to have their real names associated with my fake name in public.) What happened was the Handyman got offered an extra-long set at this sort of um festival thing I go to, a mini-Burning Man, and he asked if anyone wanted to help, and I was all me, me, pick me! Except that my computer skills are barely at a functional level, I'm actually afraid of most technology because I'm sure I'll just break something expensive, and the music I like is kind of like, well, music not many people like.

You'd think I'd have realized this the night before, seeing people dancing in 40 degree weather in their underwear to real DJs. Like DJ Sequoia (whose real name I'll use in case you want to check him out when he plays around town, and you do), who had this whole lineup of cute Princess Sparkle Pony Go-Go Girls crowding the stage to dance to his music. Or while drifting off to sleep as brilliantly deranged mashups created by the Handyman and Handsome Handsome D played into the dawn.

Nope, I went on ahead with it. So it was later in the afternoon that I stood on the stage in front of the Handyman's computer, which has one of those knobs on it instead of an old-school mouse, the thing some people call a nipple but which is known around the Cougar household as a "clit." It was appropriate for that computer, because said knob was bright red. It also began to behave in the elusive manner for which its titular organ is notorious, and I rubbed and clicked away for a while, getting nowhere and eventually freezing the computer, which then began to play the Monsters of Folk song I wasn't even sure I wanted to play in the first place. Again. And someone yelled "You suck!" and I wanted to cry. Except that I was wearing a devil costume with booty shorts and a belt whose buckle was in the shape of red sequined lips, and it's illegal to cry in an outfit like that, and I am a law-abiding woman. DJ Sequoia came up to help, and then the Handyman came back, and then he and Handsome Handsome D started doing more of what they'd been doing the night before, and all the humans and woodland creatures were again happy and playing and dancing, and I grabbed a friend's abandoned hoop and spun my troubles away.

Apart from those few minutes of dead air, it was a lovely weekend, and I can't wait to go again and try something else new. And it was very kind of the real DJs to be so patient with me.

[Exit singing:] "I woke up this morning...and my thumb was gone..."

Photo: Duty-free heliotrope. This is how dumb I am about computers--the blog thingy wouldn't let me put pictures up for a while because I hadn't agreed to terms of service in a while or something like that. I just forgot to click a box.

Irish Spring, Indian Summer, Fortunate Fall

Death by PowerPoint this week, including a 12-hour stretch creating one Monday, probably payback for not atoning. Luckily, and I do have some half-Irish luck, the weekend was a lovely work-free zone, with a lazy visit from BA and a lot of rainy snoozing, aside from a sloppy 6-mile run on the not-restored part of the Crescent Trail. And even that was relaxing, because the usual Beltway traffic on the other side of the trail doesn't all venture past the Bethesda Barnes & Noble.

Because I'm running often when my daughter's in her extracurriculars now, I'm doing urban trail runs, dodging fractured sidewalks and Bethesda cafe sitters, trying not to give in to the urge to swoop in and run off with a coffee and donut. Other days I run on the strange streets around the old industrial park that has the big warehouse building where she has gymnastics, breathing auto paint fumes from the body shops. It is easy to think the earth might not recover when you see the kind of trash on the side of some roads. I just start to feel like, well, this is it. These are places no one ever cleans up, no one worries about making it look nice. A tangle of plastic and slime, all at my feet.

I'm scared to get the new Margaret Atwood from the library.

But at night it looks different, and for my birthday, BA took me to see Steve Wynn. I was worried that with all those songs about baseball it would be all fratty and overgrown cargo-short toddlers bobbing their heads in the white-boy dance, they're perfectly nice I'm sure, but they make me feel uncomfortable. It's true it was a bit of a sausage fest, manly, yes, but I liked it also! Some guitar trouble meant we got a quasi-unplugged version of When You Smile, quick repairs made for lots of Paisley Underground, lots of fast talking, and I can't get the new songs out of my head. They're fun and smart.

They played for THREE HOURS and the drummer kills.

Except there's another song I can't get out of my head, because BA and I were goofing around on the interwebs and she was showing me Real Housewives of Atlanta and now I can't stop singing (Don't Be) Tardy for the Party (Party-party-party-party)". At first I thought it was Tarty but of course I had that wrong. It is so tarty!

I can go back to not watching TV for 20 years again. I saw five minutes of Housewives, really scary! And that Cougartown show? Reader, I watched it. After all that, I had to. I can't believe all the outrage. It's a 30-minute sitcom y'all. One in which a character admits that she gets kind of lonely sometimes and enjoys having sex. One in which, at one point, the character yells at the guy across the street because he gets to cavort all he likes and nobody says anything, yet she's constantly judged and gossiped about and taken to task no matter what she does. Come to think of it, it's kind of refreshing. But that doesn't mean I'll take time to watch it again.

How come no one's writing NYT columns of outrage about all the shlubby guys on sitcoms? Don't men of a certain age feel misrepresented and insulted by 30-minute sitcoms, like it's an offense to their entire lives and gender? Get busy.

And I had to watch a little Eastwick, as part of my witches anti-defamation duties, and man, don't make me ever again. Plus, that noise last week was the sound of a giant Evel Knievel motorcycle revving up to jump the shark tank that was House. Cute cuddly mental patients? A catatonic revived by a music box? No, no, no, no, no, Bryan Singer, how could you? Never again.

C'est tout for the tube. Sorry to ramble on so long. Next time I babble this much, I'll make a PowerPoint out of it.

And that doesn't even get into the Nordstrom Steve Madden boots incident, in which I proved once and for all that I am not worthy of being called cougar. I just...don't really understand how to shop or how to behave in a mall. But they are great damn boots all the same. Thank you for the gift certificate, dear mother.

John Deere vs. Courteney Cougar, Cage Match

So much cougar-hating coming across the doorstep, mostly engendered (get it) by the Courteney Cox TV premiere. Boffo.

Worst offender was the straining at a fun little piece in this morning's Post, in a voice that's this weird pastiche of blogger snarkery and Sex In the City-edited-for-Bravo-reruns voiceover. How'd that thing end up the display lede when they had good stuff like Hank Stuever, Lisa deMoraes, a new James Ellroy, Tom Shales, the new Taffety Punk show, MacArthur geniuses...oh well. I know the rules, no leading with reviews, but it's scary to think they probably didn't have the bandwidth to handle anything beyond an AP mashup on the MacArthurs. Just one more bad part about being old is you can remember a Style section that changed the industry instead of one that gave cute perky tips on lip plumpers, "dating dilemmas" and vegan dog food. (All respect to Robin Givahn on fashion, btw, who is a serious writer and reporter and knows her stuff. It's the Style Plus recycling that's so annoying.)

I watched a little Bored to Death last night too, not intentionally, and I was so afraid I'd pull a muscle from cringing from looking at this fucking hipster for 1/2 hour, but hey, not bad! Some decent writing! Ted Danson helped. I was getting a little nauseated from some of the twee needle-drop soundtrack, and then to top it off they played about .04 seconds of my favorite TV on the Radio song. Which will always be a great fucking song but was hip like two years ago or at least one year ago? Which is why I get so fed up with you youngsters. Your job is to show me something new, and you give me a one-hit in a pilfered Viagra bottle.

For someone who didn't watch TV for 20 years (I've still never seen that first show Ted Danson was on), I'm watching a lot of it. That's because the broadcast medias is so much better than the movies now, especially the writing. Exhibit A: You wake up and you're on top of the world, and then you get your foot run over by a lawnmower??!!??

I've decided I want my first ultra to be along the Delaware shore after running trails around Henlopen this weekend. They're flat. I found one nice piece that was about a mile and a half of everything ranging from gravel to soft sand. I know they say don't run on soft sand but up to a mile can't kill me. Maybe in Florida? Wild boar and alligators. That's another way to lose a foot. Or two. An ultra circling Okeechobee. Sign me up.

Photo: My blog won't let me push a little button and put up pirated photos anymore. Probably serves me right, bitch.

Oh Dreamweaver, I Believe Etc.

Seven of Cups

Pursuit

If I had one breath
Left would I
Call to you

To come see
What I believe
Is in my reach?

The anger, the cries,
The counsel
To choose one,
To ground,
To test visions
Against reality --
Long since faded
To a ringing in my ears.

And here I am
Using that breath
To explain why
I do not call to you.

Little Green Teabag

Of course they were the topic all weekend. You can look at the pictures and the signs, or you can open up a can of the stuff on the right and get the same effect: Bland, slimy, and bad for you. People of bigger brain are pretty much clear now on two things:

1. Teabagger=Racist
2. Nothing else about what they do or say makes any sense. Aside from having a black president, they're mad about...what? Policy? That is so weird. For a longtime Washingtonian, it's almost kind of flattering, in a way. Here we go for so many years developing minutely detailed policy, and someone is actually paying attention! Even if they do get it wrong.

All I can say is it's one weird-ass world when I find myself working on poems about Rush Limbaugh and about Harriet Tubman at the same time. Course the Rush one is just an easy one-off, ought to be done in a day. It's about one time when I was in Miami in the car scanning stations and listening to his show for a while and thinking: That guy is SO HIGH.

(Remember that next time you think I'm just some happy housewife. I see all.)

Right now, I'm tuning in and getting this sense that the teabaggers, who after all are largely not powerful people, even in numbers, are actually super-bottoming masochists, hell-bent on testing the edge of human endurance of pain. Our President keeps trying to offer them a safe word, and they're all: no way. No rules. Take them away. Please, please, I must have Wall Street take my home, give CEOs my retirement, take my job away, make them beat me down to nothing, please, rich executives and limo preachers, take my money and kill our jobs and turn my town into a hull fit only for meth production, except that no one knows enough even to figure out how to cook it without blowing their asses to ash because we don't want education either, please, make me work for stockbrokers so they can buy ice sculptures and snort corks (that's not a typo, it's a shoutout to E) off naked nubile maidens. Please, no rules, no way to stop them, please do it until we bleed, and make sure there's no one there to bandage us up, no way. No government, no help, no health care, no options of any kind, no peace, no boundaries, no future, no change, no change, no change.

They couldn't get their rapture on with the war, so they're going for the End Times right here at home.

But you know what's worse? I'm also tuning in that all the protesting and talk radio bullshit is just a shiny-thing distraction. That as evil and real as the racism is, it's still all a way of saying, "hey, over here, keep looking over here!"

And I wonder what's going on where we're not looking. And who and why. And now I sound as paranoid as they do. And maybe that's actually how they get you.

I made the 13.1 miles in eight (slight correction) minutes less than I had two years ago. I feel a little achy, but fine. More than fine.

"I'm Tired. Tired of Playing the Game."

Rain, mud, horse poop, stupidly scheduled myself to babysit tonight, and I'm still going to do the race tomorrow. Now the girls are pulling out all the American Girl accoutrements, and the timer's going off.

Dinner break.

Pizza, baby carrots, apple slices. Conversation: Belgium, roller coasters, solar power. Eight-year-olds are all right. And it's actually easier to babysit than to have them hang out solo.

Happy to see Mel Brooks made the national honors list.

Worried about the right wingers. They are so anxious, so terrified all the time. They need treatment. But I don't think they can afford it. Here's what one of their leaders--they follow these leaders so blindly, poor things, out of their terrible, terrible fear--says:

"And so Americans are frustrated," Boehner told reporters. "They're angry. And most importantly, they're scared to death that the country that they grew up in is not going to be the country that their kids and grandkids grew up in."

I don't quite understand why that would be such a bad thing. But today might be a very good day to think about fear and what it does to people, and what it causes us to do.

I myself am terrified of Aetna. Terrified they'll drop me or worse, my child, at any minute. And I know damn well that's what you're afraid of, too, Mr. and Mrs. Bama. So I don't believe it for a minute that you're afraid of government health care, or socialism, or big government. You and I both know what you're afraid of. You can't fool me; I spent enough time in the same place you come from to know.

I'm off on the other screen searching for my favorite quote from the Washington Post this week, and I've just about given up.

--Holy shit. Speaking of health care, I just had to perform emergency surgery. My child just decapitated one of the Bitty Twins, trying to get one of those cute little shirts over her head. The doll's, I mean. I "saved her life!"--

Anyway, favorite quote from a parent who didn't want her child to see the "stay in school, listen to your parents, work hard" speech by our President the other day: "His charisma is frightening."

It's like The Blob, a miasma clouding civilization, threatening the nation, it's the dreaded Charisma of the Black President, coming your way! Run, Loudoun matron! Scamper!

Oh, I suck, truly, I can put the head back on a doll, but I can't do this justice. I wish Dave Chappelle would get back to work. He'd know just what to do.

PS: This week's library book is Mario Vargas Llosa's The Bad Girl. And it's good.

Photo: Late great Madeleine Kahn rides again.

You Say You Don't

--How's about a little Buzzcocks.

--I have to write all I can in 15 minutes.

--Because I'm trying to get to bed at a decent hour all week because I have a race this weekend that I'm not too confident about. Women's trail half-marathon.

--All the way home just now WPFW was blasting Don Cherry.

--I had a dismal, charitably speaking 7-mile run Sunday and I almost hit a deer. A very slow deer. Standing still in the middle of the trail under the old trolley line. DH says it was a bad run because I was up the night before drinking wine and smoking cigarettes with BA, but that had nothing to do with it. Besides, we ate peaches too. They're good for you.

--I'm covered with mosquito bites from two outside parties, but the rain didn't start til the end of each.

--Catch the Douglas Sirk reference in Mad Men?

--Late night channel surfing surfaced the first half of 24 Hour Party People. "It's George Martin and Brian Epstein! Brian Epstein! Not George Epstein!" And the scene with Howard Devoto in the men's room. I love that movie.

--I'm going to take some of my time to find a good picture or something to link to now.

--Got it.

--I was feeling my grandmother for a moment there, very strongly, Saturday. The year she got her first seal-a-meal, she gave up canning for freezing. I lived on her turnips and kale for one winter. When she married my Irish, saxophone-playing grandfather, her family disowned her to the point that none even came to her funeral, 68 years later. He always had a victory garden, even when victories became not so clear. So Saturday, the berries and peaches and pesto were all in the freezer, and the peach cake was cooling, and the dark pink gazpacho was in a lighter pink bowl in the refrigerator, and my friend had just come to take her babysitting shift and take the kids to the pool. And I sat down and ate an ear of corn.

--And so this is all dedicated to Backstretch. You may not believe it, but in my experience, that which is remembered, lives.

The Other C Word

My sister-in-law took the Outside magazine with Aaron Eckhart on the cover home with her. She said she wanted it to show her son the story about the skateboarder. Uhh-huh. OK.

The pictures inside are even better. But my real crush is from the month before.

But anyway. She is forgiven for taking Aaron away, because she lent me "The Widows of Eastwick," the Updike sequel. Only halfway through, but I get the feeling he gets it, better than a lot of women writers do. I had a lot of problems with the first one, but this one is just about age and time and change and death. The descriptions of nature, and of men's bodies, are poems in themselves. These women are in their 70s and they're still powerful and sexy, and they're losing their power every second. Voila, they're human; guess it takes a supernatural character to be just that.

We have cut back our cable to save money and now get "only" HBO and a dozen channels that show British football. So, TV report: I don't know how to deal with the last "Mad Men." It was just so sick and shocking. I know the show is all Stuff White People Like anyhow, and you know, somebody had to make the point that there was a lot more shit going on than those dresses and cool furniture. But I'd like to hear from some different voices about What It All Means.

I've watched a couple of "Hung"'s, which I like for the doofy guy and the economic collapse, but most of all Jane Adams as the poet/pimp, with her baked goods and bohemian pillows and noisy "reactions." No, not seeing anyone I know there, not at all.

And I read they're going to try to revive L Word as a reality show. Well, if it doesn't have Jennifer Beals and Pam Grier, it's not part of my reality.

Here's one I probably won't have time to catch, Cougar Town, which premieres on the day I turn 48!--not that I listen to bad reviews or anything. There was a wavelet of various cougar news and commentary recently that I was too busy to respond to in any way, despite somehow having become a default expert.

One more time: Reclaim the language and make it your own and claim its power (as this entry about the Other Other C Word elucidates). I chose Cougar for a name of this blog as half parody, half homage. There are women around DC I'm in awe of--perfect hair, perfect nails, perfect makeup, heels, handbags. I'll never be that. But I admire the way they refuse to give up, that they're warriors of a kind, refusing to accept the devaluation the market they've chosen might force on them. I don't like the market or the makeup or the money, but I like their balls. So to speak.

So, some protest that the Cougar word and the descriptions and the photos make older women's sexuality look scary or predatory or ridiculous? You know, depictions of just about any adult's sexuality look ridiculous, hilarious, disgusting, scary, weird, icky, choose your pejorative. Unless you're an adult who happens to be into what's being pictured. And then it looks sexy. Adults are funny that way. There aren't too many universals, as hard as advertising and men's magazines would like to try to make there be, so they could sell more shit more easily. All this fuss about older women, you'd think people had never seen a Hogarth or a Mozart opera.

And using that Cougar term? Doesn't mean I'm into young men in particular. The people I'm into are all of age and then some. And they're so diverse that all any of them have in common are brains.

Ummmm, brainzzzzz, yummmm....

Hammer Don't Hurt Em

"If you want me, I'll be off dancing around," my daughter says. Good enough. I'm going out to weed, myself.

Eight of Pentacles
The Stone

"Art requires form," the trapeze artist told me,
As we sat in her tent, eating candied ginger,
And drinking that bitter tea her people like.
They brought me in on the matter of some riggings,
A problem solved easily with the right counterweights.

Sometimes since then I dream of hoops and horses,
Silks and nets, my feet light and my head
Swinging low, below me, my body turning--

Not the world. But I know the muscles in my arms
Are suited for this work alone: To swing a hammer
And carve what's needed in the rock, turning
Each one I'm given into a talisman. When I began
I placed the first the highest I could stretch,
And then the next lower, the next lower,
And then to earth, to be a stepping stone.

Update: Was thinking and realized I dropped a line of what it was supposed to be.

For Those About To Black Rock, I Salute You

The way to get over fear of falling on the trail is probably not to try a tough trail in the rain without your glasses, but it just sort of happened. I wasn't sure where I'd go after I walked my daughter to school, and the streets took me in that direction. The Melvin Hazen trail is short, but nearly entirely what they call "technical." Four creek crossings, steep grades and switchbacks, many fallen trees to duck over and under, and the closest thing to a level stretch is mined with rocks and roots. One near-fall on a simple stretch, two slips on the stones on the creek crossings, one day more of rebuilding confidence.

I attempted to steal a photo from this multi-author blog that has a lot of interesting wisdom about adventuring of all sorts and describes the trail well. But it actually starts from a stretch before Connecticut Avenue.

And I stole the above photo from this fine and funny blog about solo traveling.

Here is a present for those going to the desert.

Homebody
"Drink before you're thirsty,
"Take more than you need." I am charmed
By the abundance of advice and anticipation,
The addresses exchanged for the near future.
"Maybe next year," I murmur into my glass,
And watch the polite smiles surface.
You are already far away.
The ground is hard here, too;
The weeds clutch at the clay.
Under the same sun that beats
Down on your tents, I reach
In among the brambles and the bees,
To pick the ripe berries.

Something For the Rag and Bone Man

I know I should take Hail to the Thief out of the car CD player. It's like August sealed it in there.

Two of Wands
Conference
See? We shrank it. Like your balls
When you leap into a spring-fed pool
In late summer. You can cup it in your hand.
From point to point now, our goods
Bump without a stretch. Catch! Kidding.
Of course there's always some gaggle
Ready to shake a stick. A scholar tried
To tell me the tide had receded past the point
It had ever pulled back to before. I don't see it.
And look at the olive trees, dripping with fruit.
My yard man says they bear like that
When they sense a crisis, a drought ahead.
Yes, I understand him, I know a good bit
Of his language, we can converse, a good man.
But look how the gourds and melons swell
Fit to burst, how the vines top the stones
Of the terraces. --There's our colleagues.
Let's go in. They won't stand the heat.

This is my daughter's song, which she was dancing around singing while I put this entry in. I think it's Beefheartesque:

Have you ever
Put your finger on a hot glue gun
Write back to me

Have you ever
Been on the Great Wall of China
Write back to me

Have you ever
Been to KD9 planet
Write back to me

Have you ever
Been to San Francisco
Write back to me

Everybody rock and roll
I'm a guitar
Everybody rock and roll
You rock, America
And other places

Escape Route Sought

Hurt and hiding and thanking the goddess for the library and my two novels a week. This time it's The Glister by poet John Burnside. An eerie story of a town once buoyed by a huge chemical plant, now poisoned by same--everyone and everything from the birds to the grass is sick, mutated, mad, despairing, violent. And then there are the disappearances. It is horribly real but has that abstract feeling of fairy tales.

I was rummaging around for more on Burnside and found this wonderful interview by William Rycroft, a blogger whose profile says he is an actor in London. More than this I don't know, but I thank him for getting these quotes:

JB: "...Seeing that this is a universal principle – that things are always in flux – helps us to overcome our local attachments – by which I don’t mean that we lose interest in, or passion for, anything, but we do see that things pass, and this moment’s pleasure or pain is clarified by the knowledge that it will pass.

There’s a tradition in Spanish poetry that I like – where the poet is in his garden, looking around, listening to the birds, enjoying the warmth and the scents, when it comes to him that one day this garden will still be there, but he will be gone, and someone else will be experiencing these things. Someone he doesn’t even know. This is a cause for celebration, though, not elegy or regret. The game continues. James P. Carse talks about this as ‘infinite play’ – there are times when we cease to play the game of being for finite ends, and play for the sake of the game itself, a game that will go on without us.

I know, I know. New age-y mysticism and such have made all these ideas into clichés. I was a sub-hippie myself once. But as experiences, these things remain true, and cannot be diminished. Except, perhaps, in rambling on about them – which I’ve just done!

WR: Why do you think society has become so divorced from the reality of most people’s inner lives?

JB: Oh, God, don’t invite me to take out the soap box. Seriously, though, the problem has been well analysed and we pretty much know what has gone wrong – we lost organic connection with the world around us, everything was commoditised, our politicians and business folk became hopelessly self-serving (as they have often done, through history, but recently it’s been so blatant it saps the spirit just to watch them get away with it), we have a neo-medieval culture of celebrity, excellence became embarrassing, we began to think in soundbites, we published more and more books about ‘complexity’ but schooled ourselves to think in simpler and simpler terms. I could go on. The central thing, maybe, is that we were the first society to know – actually to see and hear – the misery that was being endured in faraway places, by people our appetites had impoverished, while we enjoyed our bland and joyless feasts at home. What a burden of guilt that is – and along with that guilt comes a feeling of helplessness, a sense that there is nothing we can do about it."

Burnside also points out in the interview that his inspiration was the toxic poisoning in Weston, via ICI. Here's more about that and some other similar sites.

On a lighter note, I'm also reading a David Liss, The Whiskey Rebels. He writes historical detective fictions set during civilization's economic system turning points. This one is set during Alexander Hamilton's establishment of a national banking system, and it really is funny and fun to read. It takes my mind off things.

Fell asleep during The Watchmen on demand. Love the book. The movie was too faithful except where it counts.

Saw Funny People. Not a waste of money. I've always found Adam Sandler to be incredibly hot. You know what was too fucking distracting in that movie? All the ironic t-shirts.

Maybe there's a secret tunnel in the basement. Or I could smuggle myself out through the kitchen, draped in white, past the steaming pasta pots and shouting chefs and clanging cleavers. Hide myself in the laundry cart, bury myself in the hay in the wagon.

Photo: You can get yours from zazzle.co.uk

"I've Got Your Head in a F-in' Vise, Here."

Nobody cares what I might say about health care reform, even less than they might about anything else I'd write. I should go to bed, I should organize my daughter's school clothes, I should read a book.

1. Corporate health insurance companies are death panels.

2. Conservative Republicans such as Dick Armey and Tommy Thompson have been making decisions for me about my health care all my life. Congress, administration, corporate health insurance board positions, for-profit hospital lobbyists, lather, rinse, repeat.

3. And as long as corporate health insurance companies can keep picking up the skim, the whole lot of them of any party would be fools not to take what they can get. Everyone gets their cut and it's been pretty peaceful, but you know how it is, people start getting greedy.

4. “People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.” This quote from the Investors Business Daily editorial offends most not because it's so way wrong--Hawking is British and actually spoke up for the NHS--nor because it perpetuates the lie about "death panels," but because of its infantilization of people with disabilities. From the sobby "This brrrrillllliant man" language to the Google I Feel Lucky selection of a poster child to the assumption that Hawking himself couldn't possibly have an opinion in the matter or care about how his views might be characterized in an international publication--it's just grotesque. But I know they only got carried away because they care, so, so deeply.

5. Republicans advocate giving "extra points" to those who take steps to maintain good health. What nanny will be responsible for counting the number of pushups Rush Limbaugh does daily? I fear some of our friends on the right will be quite deep in the hole, what with their cigars and steaks and painkiller addictions and alcoholism and hearing problems and obesity.

6. I don't have any moral problems about helping to pick up the tab for an abortion for a young woman in New Mexico, say, for whatever reason she might want one, or the Viagra for an old man in Iowa, for whatever reason he might give. Being sexual is healthy.

7. I find it morally repugnant to help pick up the tab for a corporate health insurance executive's liposuction or her child's private school tuition, for that matter. In countries with national health plans, some parents get up to two months of post-birth midwife visits. That would save the lives, health and/or sanity of countless women and infants. The US still has an appalling infant mortality rate.

8. It's not costing us more because they're giving us more care, or better care, or giving immigrants care, or because doctors are charging more. It's costing more because corporate insurance executives are taking a bigger skim.

9. They're taking a bigger skim not only because they want it, but because their stockholders, who may be you and me, want a bigger skim.

10. If I believe people are allowed to do as they please with their bodies, that liberty must extend not only to their sexual lives but to their diets, habits and more. If it's none of my business, it's none of my business.

11. Some get angry thinking about having to "pay the freight" for people who are "out of shape" (what, octagonal?) and "don't take care of themselves." People who know me know my diet and exercise habits. Last week I was in a trail race and did a face plant onto a rock. Just bruises and scrapes, from my cheekbone to my kneecap, but what if it had been worse? No one seems to be proposing I pay extra for my selfish, potentially dangerous "lifestyle" of fitness.

12. They say if they give us health care we'll just start going to doctors all the time, like it's going out of style, surgery here, shots there, tra la la, cause you know we can't be trusted to handle the stuff the rich people get and our kind will just take advantage. Cause hospitals are so cool and everyone wants a piece of what's behind that velvet rope.

13. I have no moral objection to giving up my piece of the skim in perpetuity in order to establish a national health system, even if it helps pay for dialysis for a stinky old racist piece of trash who never took care of his body one damn day in North Dakota, because he is a human and like me a parasitic growth on a planet struggling to stay alive, a parasite suffering like me from viruses such as language and auto-immune disorders such as love, at least once in his life if only for his dog, and we are all, after all, ending up in the same place.

Pearl Sake

This came in on the way back from the restaurant.

The Ballroom Down the Street

I love the look of men in suits when they're
A little bit drunk and ready to take them off.
The tie, that got loosened an hour or two ago,
During the dancing. The jacket is shed in the parking lot.
A few more buttons, and it's the night.

The ballroom down the street hosts weddings
Over all the warm months, a harvest
Of festivities, a reaping of flowers, limos, music--
All to give the man his moment
When he removes the armor, the shell.

Swing That Thing, Ya Big Ol' Teabagger, You!

All the sugared-up little girls have gone home to wreck their own living rooms, and I am not fit to be anyone's babysitter, because I almost forgot to pick up one of them at camp today. I fend off despair by thinking that eight years and 90 minutes ago, I was at least lucky enough to have a little live human in my arms. She's made it so far, and I haven't lost her yet! I fend off that wearying, sighing sensation that makes you just want to sink back in and give up with the weapons of humor and absurdity. Like this guy, from a War Room post by Alex Koppelman. Because it's documented. This has got to be a huge surrealist joke (please?).

""I'm totally against government involvement in healthcare," Anthony Sutton, one of the Tea Party crew, told me. "It's not a right." Sutton, though, probably wasn't the best spokesman for his cause: at 53, he's eligible for Medicare, because of a disability claim, and the only reason he isn't using his government healthcare is because his wife's job has a better plan. He was pretty sure Obama was up to no good, with healthcare or anything else. If the country isn't careful, "we would come into a socialist state, or national socialism, like Nazi Germany," Sutton said. I asked him if he really thought Obama was a Nazi. "I don't think he's a Nazi, but I do believe that he is not what he appears to be," Sutton said. "He still hasn't proved his citizenship. I think he was born in Kenya."

"Alas, Sutton couldn't even get the bogus "facts" of the Birther movement right. The reason he knows Obama is Kenyan? "Because of where he got his education, and certain countries that he lived in -- the only way he could have lived there is if he was not a U.S. citizen," he said. "They wouldn't allow U.S. citizens." I asked him which countries he meant. "I wish I could name the countries, but I think it's -- I'm just guessing -- Malaysia, or one of those Muslim states." Obama never lived in Malaysia, and at any rate, neither Indonesia -- where he did live -- or Pakistan -- the country where Birthers suspect Obama must have traveled on a Kenyan passport -- banned U.S. citizens. Sutton also thought Obama "got money to pay for his school from the Saudis." How did he know? "It's documented.""

Now I'm off to write 20 pages of a public health document, because in this great country, even this moron has the right to have his food tested for salmonella, and to have that test done right. The people doing the testing to protect him will be so different from him in so many ways; their intelligence is only one difference, and likely not the most obvious one to him.

Entitlement

I should just stop reading anything about it. I will. It's just poisoning. I saw too many references by journalists and cops who should damn well know better who, instead of calling it out as a sociopathic, racist, misogynist hate crime, spouted nonsense like "he acted out of loneliness" or "he couldn't find anyone to love."

Pandagon says it better than I can.

George Sodini was angry at the entire world of “desirable” women for not up and volunteering to have sex with him, and every day anonymous men around the country and world beat, rape, and even kill women because said women were also considered insufficiently compliant, often to unstated demands that women were supposed to just anticipate and fill without complaint. Today, women will be raped or beaten or maybe even killed for choosing to do differently than a man desired of them---everything from screwing up the household chores to being deemed a tease to thinking they had a right to go to this party/walk down this alley to leaving a man who wants them to stay. But most people won’t see Sodini’s crime as different by degree, but by kind, because unlike most men who commit this kind of hate crime against women, Sodini didn’t know his victims.

We’re going to write him off as crazy. But the thing is that “crazy” doesn’t mean completely detached from the world, at least most of the time. Sodini wasn’t one of those people who is so wrapped up in their delusions that they can’t hold a job and need to be kept in an institution. In fact, what’s disturbing about his diary entries is that they sound pretty much like the same ranting you get from every misogynist who thinks he’s a Nice Guy®, and who hates women for their perceived malicious unwillingness to have sex with him.

Dan Savage, bless his heart, has also been on the case. Other feminist websites have also known and been writing about this misogynist group.

I'm going to stop wallowing in scaredness and anger now, and move on to other things.

Oh, except Amanda Marcotte has more to say:

I’ll add: LIFE ISN’T FAIR.

Many women are more gorgeous than me. Many people, period, are smarter than me. It’s 100 fucking degrees out and that sucks. I don’t like getting a period or taking a shit. LIFE ISN’T FAIR.

Lizzie Skurnick, in her very light and fun book, Shelf Discovery, made a really good point: fairness and justice are WAY different issues. You can demand justice. You can’t really demand that life be a bowl of roses by stomping your feet. Women can demand equality. Men can’t demand sex. Nor can women, but for some reason, no one sheds tears for unattractive women who can’t get laid. Rape is injustice. Not getting laid is unfairness.

When life doesn’t seem fair, there’s two things you can do: fix what you can and accept what you can’t. ...[But] these wankers... think by being men, the unfairness they perceive is way more important than the actual injustice women face. They’re worse than children throwing temper tantrums, who can on occasion be reminded that Mom is a person with feelings, too.

Absolutely Free, Like The Mothers Sing

I'm giving away a copy of Gravity Dancers, a collection of Washington women's writing, to whoever submits (wait for it) the most original knock-knock joke (in my judgment) over the next two or three days. Put it in the comments here or on the facebook version, all's good.

Some people, like like Ira Shapira in this Washington Post story, say when you give it away, you're messing up the whole structure. He said bloggers took his story. Well, first off, they didn't really take his story, they just made fun of it. I don't know if he gets that. That's what the blogs are for. I think he started to understand that in the chat. He isn't allowed make fun of people in the Post, whereas snark is Gawker's business model (and it has had its ups and downs). I've heard it said that Gawker media is quite the sweatshop and doesn't pay for crap, which would put it on a par with most newspapers through the past 30 years.

When I post a poem on this blog, it means I probably won't be able to submit it to get published anywhere, or enter it in a contest. I'm supposed to put all kinds of privacy settings and prohibitions on my blog so Facebook, where it's mirrored, won't be able to take my blog snark and my poems and give them away and reprint them. I'm imagining that scenario, or that of a blogger taking my poems and making fun of them. That's so pathetic, I'd actually feel sorry for the blogger. Besides, a poem I didn't post here or on Facebook or anywhere but which was sent with proper decorum to a contest, and won, got picked up by a newspaper and got made fun of, so what's left for me in terms of humiliation and lack of recompense? Butt, meet rock bottom.

If I give away poems on my blog, am I reducing the overall value of poetry? Mostly I have no idea whether anything I write is any good, so I might as well put it up here as spend the time trying to get it published. I send a lot of random bait into the cosmos, and sometimes good things come back my way. I don't mean to sound insulting, but I'm much too lazy and it's much too dull to worry about who has the rights and who has the copies and where it's all going, so I refuse to do that for my poems, at least. Let them be free!

The Harriet Tubman poem turned into a multi-part mess, but this portion is relevant to this rant...

Master Spy for the Union

Because I cannot bear to see your brilliance
Thus dimmed, I write you,
I have set my mind to the task
Of finding some way you might now be
Repaid for your heroic service.

In the new world, they say there is no need
Any longer to hide ourselves. In the new world,
You are a laundress. For a while, the work
Brought an odd peace, a return to the time
Before the weight, without the weight.
Days passed so. And then it brought your head low.

That is how I came upon you, nodding into the lye
Suds above the tub. Because I cannot bear
To see your brilliance thus dimmed, I pretend
This is another role you have hidden yourself
Within; she is listening, she will report all--
But there is no one here to hear.

I reach my hand across the table
To cover yours. Because I cannot bear to see
Your brilliance thus dimmed, I will write
Your story. You will tell them who you are.
There may be some repayment in it.
You do not want promises, and
I do not want to lie.
We will be free or we will die.

Photo: By the way? If you want to BUY the book, go nuts on Amazon.com or Politics & Prose! If you want it but you're really strapped for cash, I have some copies at cost that I am happy to sell.

"I Could Be In Love With Almost Everyone"

"Almost" is operative. But even before a night spent sleeping in the dunes, I was feeling the spirit of Arthur Lee. I'd been reading Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson's Lost Masterpiece by Domenic Priore, the 60s LA music expert, and getting obsessed with having to hear some of his stuff again, so I spent $7 on downloads and burned a CD and then was late to pick up E. Our quick beach trip felt entirely and satisfyingly like getting dropped on Venus for one solar cycle, or at least into some parallel universe, not least because of snapshots such as midnight LED bocce and splashing up in the morning to see a small herd of ponies just standing around looking at the surf, followed by my favorite Libertarian candidate and his girl strolling by, eating watermelon. Tip: If you wave an LED frisbee at the ponies, they will leave your tent alone. "They hate LEDs," a veteran of the beach informed us.

Driving through the Eastern Shore and Cambridge got me working on a poem about Harriet Tubman. Could take a good long time. Best quote of the weekend, from E, from a story relating a conflict: "Is there some way to resolve this situation that doesn't involve yelling at me?" Oh, and I invented a new cocktail called the Via Ferrata: Rum, blueberry juice (for the wild blueberries growing out of the rocks), and limoncello (for Italy).

I got Smile at the little ad hoc storefront library in our neighborhood (while the big new library is being built), along with
In the Heart of the Canyon by Elisabeth Hyde, which I crunched through in a few hours like it was a bag of chips eaten in a PMS frenzy, accompanied by a similar mix of pleasure, annoyance and lite self-loathing that usually accompanies said latter activity. It had gotten a pretty great review in the Times, so I was game, but a book that begins with a list of characters (which you really need to consult in the reading, because they start to sound alike) and ending with a list of travel companies--well, that's an interesting marketing tie-in. It's a sort of Grand Hotel approach to a Grand Canyon river rafting trip, delving shallowly into a collection of adventure tourists and their guides, their motivations and discoveries, which aren't too momentous. But it could have been worse, and at least it wasn't melodramatic about it all.

An "adventure" trip, even of a tamer variety, sure does bring out character and conflict; people are put through an intense and demanding experience mentally, physically and emotionally that hits many psychological triggers, all in a tightly compressed duration and constrained, privacy-challenged environment. The guides are especially interesting to me, as they're guides of this process as well as of the trip; at best, they can lead people through a challenging growth experience, and at worst, they have to wrangle some champion assholes. My brother had to do a lot of this when he guided sailing and snorkeling trips, in his former career. This book wasn't the one to work that dynamic, though it tried.

Oh, well, two days til the new Thomas Pynchon is out. It's about a private detective!

I have to go scratch mosquito bites now.

Photo: This portrait of Arthur Lee pops up in a lot of places, and I managed to find out who shot it: Ronnie Haran Mellen, but not much more. I prefer the more gothy/baroque Lee persona, but he looks so happy and healthy in this one, I couldn't resist.

"The Spirits of Bruce Lee, Brandon Lee, and Sara Lee Are With Me"

DH had a penetrating piece of advice this morning, penetrating my skull, that is, with something everyone from BA and My Hot Friend E to the Singing Acupuncturist (who is kind of like the Dr. House of TCM only without the Vicodin) has tried to tell me: "Use the bot."

We saw The Hurt Locker this weekend after I had spent two days writing copy for a similar 'bot product for a military contractor. It was strange watching the company video then seeing the Hollywood-via-Jordan version. Amazing acting. Anyway, the story centers around a bomb hunter who always wants to get in there and do it by hand, all by his lonesome, when he could just as well use the little robot seeker, which really, does a fantastic job, considering.

The point is, when it comes to doing the Pay Work, or doing anything you're doing just to survive, it makes sense to use the bot. Save your own hands for what matters to you. I fall into a trap of trying to do too much for the Pay Work, and before too long I despise my entire being. And nobody else likes what I'm doing, either. As the Singing Acupuncturist puts it: "They will be much happier if they get something without any subtlety or creativity." She's right; DH is right; I will use the bot much more often.

It's been months since I heard about the miracle of the Three Wolf Moon Shirt, but I just wanted to give it some love. The headline is from one of the testimonies on the review site. I know and love people who would wear this shirt unironically. I also know and love people who would climb on this Amazon snark train. I think this is what's known as being "between the worlds," am I right, let me hear a shout-out from you witches, y'all! Last week I bought a t-shirt that reads "SMOKE HOLE CAVERNS" in glitter, with deer and bunnies cavorting around the big bubble letters. I believe its power may top that of the Three Wolf Moon Shirt. I will fast, feast, follow my vision, and let you know.

And another snark site to make one's day, many thanks to the Stay-At-Home-Bitch for publicizing it: Passive Aggressive Notes.

Last but not least, one I wish were updated much more often: Crap Email From a Dude. I would love to submit something to them, lord knows I've got plenty of candidates, but that would just be too passive aggressive.

Stupidly

I don't understand why the police do what they do. I haven't taken any criminal justice classes or had any experience or taken any academy training (though I do know how to shoot a gun, but that's a very small proportion of what a police officer has to learn).

But the few times a police officer has come into my life, he or she has not improved the situation. I really try to avoid encountering them and am usually fortunate enough that this is easy, as I'm a quiet old white lady.

I don't understand why a police office told Henry Louis Gates to step outside of his own house when he had proof that Gates lives there.

I don't understand why a police officer told a crazy boy standing outside my house shouting at me to go into my house.

A long time ago, I got away from an abusive boy. I'll call him a boy, even though he was of age, because he wasn't a man. I got an apartment with my girlfriend. Our names were on the lease. Our names were the only names on the lease, the application, anything.

About six months later he tracked me down. Someone told him where I was living. It was about 40 miles away in a place I'd never lived before, so it took some doing to find me.

He came at night and stood in the parking lot shouting. My apartment was on the second floor. I hollered out for him to go away. So did my girlfriend. Then we turned the lights off and went to our rooms.

He kept shouting that he "just wanted to come in and see me," and a neighbor called the police.

The police came to my door and I told them he didn't live here, I didn't want to see him, and I never asked him to come here. I must not have been clear enough.

The police went down and invited him in. I opened my door to the police again and he lunged at me. In the process, he knocked down, hit, and kicked the officers and broke a lamp and a table (my girlfriend's) and a bookcase (mine).

They finally got him into handcuffs and dragged him out.

A time before that, when we lived in the same house, he assaulted me and neighbors called the police. They advised me to "patch things up."

Now, this was a long time ago, and I'm given to understand things don't go like that anymore, oh, no.

Am I entitled to say that the police behaved stupidly? Or do they have some really smart plan that I am too stupid to understand?

You might say I behaved stupidly ever getting involved with such a person. You might say Mr. Gates behaved stupidly bringing the officer's mama into things. You might say a young man behaves stupidly by walking in a certain neighborhood after dark. You might say that "stupid" is a bad word and people in high places ought not to use it about anyone.

Whatever. But those who say what happened to Gates "would have happened to anyone"? Well, that's just plain ignorant.

Et tu, Brute: Sportswriter Christine Brennan says Erin Andrews' attractiveness is guilty of "encouraging the complete nutcase to drill a hole in your room?" That's just sad. That is just sad. I'm just worn out.

I'm going to go put on a short skirt and have a margarita, but hey, I'll have my big strong husband there to protect me. And then I'm going to go see The Hurt Locker, by Kathryn Bigelow, who you know, she sure has some pretty hair and legs, why is she out showing them off??? Doesn't she get it?

With all my love forever,
Princess Boneslave Hottie McSlutmuffin

Photo: Madame Directress.

Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know

Spent a long week off: on the beach, lying by the pool, getting my daughter onto a boogie board, running along with her riding her bike on the boardwalk, going to the Asbury Park Candyteria for sour patch worms and Smarties, watching her ride her bike around campgrounds, and standing on rock ledges and steel pipes of about an inch wide, 100 feet or far more from any remotely friendly surface.

We made it to the via ferrata at Nelson Rocks Preserve, and I made it through it. Yes, I know whole Boy Scout troops skip through this rock-climbing course hooting and hollering, but I am afraid of heights to the point that I used to need an escort to make a drive across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I got over it. I kept breathing.

And I liked it, not least because as with trail running, I had to think with my whole body; where each hand and foot would go next, and whether each surface would hold, and where I was headed. The difference is in trail running, you fall and maybe shatter your teeth, your nose, your knee, your hand; here, a fall means it all goes, maybe all at once.

You're always clipped in--if you do it right--in at least one place, usually two places, to steel cables, which are anchored in the rock and loop along your entire climb. That's the trick. Staying clipped and keeping moving at the same time.

My climbing style was much like my running style: slow. As our guide kindly put it: "Well, you've got the 'being methodical' part down all right."

Superlatives are boring. There's the view from the top; discuss. Because I myself am still too damn high on the experience.

I am catching up with what pissed me off over vacation, and it certainly didn't take long to find anything. Last Sunday by the pool I had only opened the New York Times Book Review to the Letters section last week to find A Victorian broadside against Cristina Nehring's “A Vindication of Love," a book that argues that maybe the human brain, body and heart are intended to cut loose and enjoy some wild, juicy emotion once in a while. That maybe we were made that way, capable of experiencing emotional complexities, for the pleasure of it, and that maybe a proportion of humans are meant to explore these the way others do the sheer faces of rocks. But with all the passion of a wizened Dr. Kellogg preaching against the evils of red meat and the sin of self-abuse, the letter proclaims that:

"Nehring’s central position supports impulsive, unthinking and self-destructive behavior in the service of what she calls love as elevating and worth it for those brave enough to throw themselves into relationships with no regard to how injurious they may ultimately be to the self as well as to those around them.

"Basically, what is described could serve as illustration for a manual of emotionally disturbed living.

"What she doesn’t do is affix a warning label: 'This book may be dangerous to your mental health and your ability to manage your own life; proceed with caution when reading.'

"The writer is an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School."


Well, of course he is. There, there. You're getting yourself all emotionally disturbed, hon. But really, you don't have to worry about a thing! It's not like it will ever happen to you.

And to think the original shrinks were such brave, mythic explorers. Therapists today, you've got some splainin' to do. I blame the health insurance system--those bunch of half-assed mail-order MBAs would never want a human to spelunk his or her self, desires, or experience. Today's therapists just want to patch you up enough to get you getting and spending again. Take this pill so the wheel won't make you so godawful dizzy anymore, little hamster.

Didn't get a chance to read much further, and I didn't have to, because there was this soothing and bright lede to the review, by David Orr, of the Thom Gunn selected poems. There's a guy who knew his way around an emotional ledge, all right. And yes, I'm well aware of how he died. And he wrote poems about that, too. Because somebody has to. Because it's going to happen to all of us sooner or later.

"'All poets, if they are any good,' Charles Simic has said, 'tend to stand apart from their literary age.' The key phrase here, of course, is 'if they are any good'; average poets don’t just stand within their age, they compose it. But we sometimes talk as if ­poets are exceptions not simply when they write well, but because they write at all. According to this way of thinking, the art form demands such devotion to one’s individuality that every poet, no matter how lowly, is a kind of outsider — a Cheese Who Stands Alone. This perception frequently finds its way into depictions of poets in popular culture; it also emerges in the vehemence with which poets themselves regularly declare their opposition to labels, categories, schools, allegiances, booster clubs, car pools, intramural softball teams and so on. Yet when everyone is busy standing apart, how is it possible to stand out? What does real independence look like?"

I'll take that one for $500: For a writer and maybe for others, I think it kind of looks like standing on a very thin, crumbling ledge, but staying clipped in at all times to at least one of two places--to the earth, and to the other humans living on it.

Photos: Fins to the left, fins to the right...for once, I'm not using images without permission. They're shot by DH, and he gave em up free and clear.

Safety Third, As the Cool Kids Say

I might go to the Nelson Rocks Preserve to wind up our beach-to-mountain vacation beginning tomorrow, if it is still open. I am not a climber, but they apparently have a way non-climbers can try. Even if not, they have good trails, and those I can navigate.

Their long, entertaining and absolutely truthful disclaimer is one of the funniest things I've read. I was thinking about it while running/scrambling on the Billy Goat Trail last weekend. People take their kids out there all the time; I've taken mine (very carefully). But the prevailing attitude is either that I'm crazy for going running alone (I have never ever been bothered on a trail run, except by my homeless friend whose interference is confined to reminding me that I am running on land he owns and it is only because he is a generous person that he lets me do it) to well, hell, we can act as dumb as the rocks we stand on cause nothing's gonna happen to us here, right, I mean come on, it's so close to the Beltway! It's like Disney World, right?

Nelson Rocks says nahhhh:

"Real dangers are present even on trails. Trails are not sidewalks. They can be, and are, steep, slippery and dangerous. ... They are unsafe, period. Live with it or stay away....A whole rock formation might collapse on you and squash you like a bug. Don't think it can't happen...

"If you scramble in high places (scrambling is moving over terrain steep enough to use your hands) without proper experience, training and equipment, or allow children to do so, you are making a terrible mistake. Even if you know what you're doing, lots of things can go wrong and you may be injured or die. It happens all the time...."

Just don't wear an iPod when you go running, for heaven's sake. Why you'd want those wires and shit all up in your ears and around your neck anyway, I don't know.

The House of Vampire

"Once you enter the house of empire, you are lost. You are going to be silenced." That's what Howard Zinn said on Democracy Now this morning about Robert McNamara and the impossibility of changing government from within; they went on to talk about Daniel Ellsberg.

But my daughter piped up from the backseat: "What does that mean, enter the house of vampire?" So we went on to talk about supernatural creatures, admitting it when you're wrong, telling other people you won't be in on it when they do something wrong, etc.

Tonight is the first of a series of eclipses, this one in my first/seventh house, the rest in the second/eighth. Does that mean progress?

Here's my Michael Jackson memory: William S. Burroughs' 80-something birthday party, basement of Herb's restaurant on P street, and they kept playing stuff from Off the Wall over and over and over and over. The big sheet cake had plastic cowboys on it; I think I still have one.

I was thinking of the above commercial the other day; "no, no my brother" is something I say fairly often, but I was a little surprised that there are so few references to it out there. There was another commercial I can't find in which he gives the "no, no" line to a guy trying to cut in on him while he was slow-dancing. This is the time of year that puts me in mind of slow drags, close to skin smelling faintly of chlorine from the pool. I felt more strongly the death of the great Curtis Mayfield; while only one radio station did tributes to him, I painted the room that would become my daughter's nursery; equal parts sadness and hope.

Eclipses mean an open door to choose where you want your life to go next; I choose the blue light in the basement and the grass-tinged night air coming in the open basement door, not the house of vampire.

Messing Up the Paintwork

My mind is officially blown; Mercury is in my 1st house, so I'm bombarded with extraordinary information and writing and new concepts. In the spirit of the first item, I hereby am not allowed to simply rant but must actually do something concrete as regards everything I note here.

Sorry to break the news, but you are not Neda: Study shows Facebook activism is for shit. A researcher created a fake activist page about an issue that didn't even exist, and had hundreds subscribe. They were so alienated from actually physically doing something that they didn't even realize the issue didn't exist.

People have long sought to accessorize their souls through loud public expressions of concern; Facebook and blogging and etc. are just new kinds of loudspeakers.

Don't get me wrong; I love, love hearing the thoughts, whereabouts, jokes, metas, madnesses, links, music, video clips, all of it from my tiny group of online friends. Some of my days would be killer-dull without your brilliance.

It's the random naive, simplistic political rants I could do without. I used to have to edit letters to the editor, so I developed this allergy to tortured metaphors and carelessly brandished outrage unaccompanied by any viable solutions or power or effort to execute the orders these writers issued to the world from their safe basements. Nausea, hives, worse.

From the Post:

What surprised Colding-Jorgensen about people's behavior on his site was that the group was "in no way useful for horizontal discussions." Users wanted not to educate themselves or figure out how to save the fountain, but to parade their own feelings of outrage around the cyber-public. "Just like we need stuff to furnish our homes to show who we are," says Colding-Jorgensen, "on Facebook we need cultural objects that put together a version of me that I would like to present to the public."

What I'll do? Keep on doing my volunteering and etc., and not bore you about a single bit of it, dear.


Haven't You Ever Listened to Country Music? When it comes to Mr. Sanford (not Fred, by the way), I'm practicing love the sinner, hate the sin. A man who writes, married or not, adoringly of a woman kneeling over him, holding her breasts, well, I just can't object to that in any way. But I hate the politician who voted against health care for children.

The latest outrage by women about his comment that he's "trying to learn to fall in love" with his wife is misdirected as well. It's common in women's magazines and therapy, as I understand from others, to be ordered to "work" to "fall in love again," plan "date nights," "light candles," "improve communication," blah, blah, a task that sounds far more arduous than sifting compost. As Sandra Tsing Lo explains in her bright and beleaguered Atlantic piece:

Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance... what with all the abject and swallowed misery: Why do we still insist on marriage? Sure, it made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?

What I'll do: Same as ever, walk the earth like Krazy Kat and let the bricks of love hit me where they may. Often these are thrown, entirely metaphorically speaking, by the person I'm legally married to.

"Jealousy is considered precious, but it’s rarely described as an attribute of narcissism." That's from a great piece on "self-esteem," that much misunderstood term, contributed to by the always-insightful burner Maya. It goes into the mistaken conflation of self-esteem and narcissism, our culture of narcissism and competition, and our refusal to cultivate ourselves and create our own lives according to our true needs and desires.

Maybe reaching that point of positive self-esteem is the moment when we feel we are worth an investment in ourselves, despite the fact that time goes on without us. The death connection can be useful in that it’s a reminder that nobody is inherently better than anyone else, and that what we choose to do with our time is entirely up to us. As is (with the exception of our children) who we spend it with: people who care about themselves and act on it; people who care about us and act on it; or someone else entirely.

What I'll do: Not sure. Have to think about this one for a while.

The more you hate yourself, the more they love you: Really nice piece on a mini-genre in women's writing. Apparently, you'll have no trouble getting published if you choose to write about how much you hate your body or your emotional life. Women's plastic-surgery nightmares and that old reliable I'll Never Find A Husband rant really sell!

This genre has nothing to do with journalists opening a window into what life is like for women today. It does women no favours at all. It is entirely about perpetuating an editor's misogynistic image of what women are like (self-hating, self-obsessed) and making a semi-celebrity out of the writer in the belief that readers like to read journalists whose names and faces (and breasts) they recognize. I have no doubt that the women who write these articles truly feel the emotions they describe. But these women need help; they do not need to be made to feel that their professional USP is to play up their misery.

What I'll do: Shine up my womany-style personal essay, which deals with my romantic and sexual life but expresses no opinion at all about the size or shape of any of my body parts. I don't know how I managed to pull that off in this world. Anyway, finish it out and get it published some damn place.

PS: It was great to hear from wrekehavoc, the tireless, devoted, overqualified curator of Blatantly Bad 70s Music! I thought I was the only person on this planet who'd read the book by the Apple Records House Hippie. What I'll Do: Read more blogs and listen to more bad 70s music.

Wheat. Lots of Wheat. Fields of Wheat. A Tremendous Amount of Wheat.

Overlapping back into this space again. Resurfacing from a long migraine I finally managed to kill after a few hours of sweating pints in the community garden plot. It goes like this: pull weeds, screen compost, plant zinnias, pull weeds, screen compost, plant basil, gulp leaded dc water from garden hose, repeat. People with individual gardens and tidy individual compost bins don't get the whole compost-screening thing, I think. A compost heap in a community garden is more just a big invasive-vine-covered hill, a dumping ground for everyone's weeds and spent plants. So you have to go out there and dig in and dig under for a while to hit the weeds that have decomposed into dirt, then shovel some of it onto one of the wood-and-quarter-inch-screen contraptions that the wonderful guy who told me all about invasive earthworms, imagine!, made, which you put over a wheelbarrow, and then you sift and shake and rub the dirt through until you have about an inch of something really good, then you repeat. About a half-hour later you've filled the wheelbarrow, and if any of it spills, you cry.

Along with migraines come hallucinations for me, like someone chasing me with a hammer to hit me in the head was one from the other day, so I have a few go-to scenes to cheer myself up. These include:
1. Love and Death: "The wheat. The wheat."
2. Duck Soup: "To war, to war, to war we gotta go, with a hidey-hidey-hidey-hidey-hidey-hidey-ho!"
3. Laughing Wild (Christopher Durang): "I'm the Infant of Prague! Prague, Prague, Prague, Prague, Prague!"
4. Blazing Saddles: French Mistake musical number.
5. Boogie Nights: As the boys are in the studio, recording their inimitable number "Feel My Heat" and they decide: "I think we should do a few more "feels" in there."

Come Hear Poets, or I'm Not There

This season, I'm sharing my small community garden plot with another woman who has no time. She transplanted a long-established comfrey, which is out of control in a good way, and a peony, which neither of us expected to take well the first year. It not only settled in happily, but was covered with about-to-burst buds one day. A week later, the poor thing looked like it had been hacked to shreds. Someone had stolen the flowers, despite my fence and tall gate wired with unintentionally spiked spears of fencing. Now, we don't know if the peony plant will make it. Times are hard when people steal flowers to sell.

Untouched of course are the pungent sage, bursting with flowers the color of the heart of a flame, in fact, all the herbs--which are what are most valuable, of course. I eat weeds. I leave little bits of things drying around the kitchen and in glasses of water, which ticks my triple-Virgo husband off. I snip into a salad bowl violet leaves and flowers, the early fennel and mint that has to go, anyway, small dandelion leaves, and my favorite, the purslane.

This volunteer is frighteningly healthy, with tons of omega-3s, calcium, magnesium, vitamin A, lots more. I know people from the islands cook it like spinach, but that's not for me; it's too much like okra, that texture that is politely described as "mucilaginous." Raw, it's crisp and citrusy. You can feel it being good for you. The woman who taught me about Santeria and Candomble used to use it as a "bath," where you combine herbs, soak in water and pour over your body or head. It is an Eshu/Mercury herb, so it's one of mine. People used to soak it in water and then make a skin treatment, and it has enough acid to make it akin to an over-the-counter toner.

So. I love peonies, but I will be grateful for purslane.

I'm hiatus-izing this blog for a while and hiking my heinie over to my poetry-event-only one-time temporary-installation blog, Come Hear Poets, cause I can't keep track of that and the purslane and most of all the dear child, who will soon be out of school and mine to enjoy and hug and play with for more long, summer hours. I'll come back to this guy when Artomatic is over.

Image: Gorgeous, or what? By Thalia Took. You can get her a lot clearer and closer, on a tarot deck, poster or even t-shirt, here.

Midway Down the Midway

I should be writing my own poems tonight. Should be writing a lot of things. Something about coming home felt like autumn. Maybe it was the clouds.

I'll let Joni tell it.

I met you on a midway at a fair last year
And you stood out like a ruby in a black man's ear
You were playing on the horses, you were playing on the guitar strings
You were playing like a devil wearing wings, wearing wings
You looked so grand wearing wings
Do you tape them to your shoulders just to sing?
Can you fly--
I heard you can! Can you fly?
Like an eagle doing your hunting from the sky.

I followed with the sideshows to another town
And I found you in a trailer on the camping grounds
You were betting on some lover, you were shaking up the dice
And I thought I saw you cheating once or twice, once or twice.

Photo: Creative Commons 2.5; by Michael Maggs

Le 'Stache, C'est Moi

I bought a fake mustache today with the idea of going full drag king during my Special Camping Trip this weekend. The fake mustache store is right around the corner from my work, so it was easy.

The guy there showed me how to put it on, and urged me to buy two, because, he said "you'll be dag, I didn't do this right, and then you'll be stuck without a mustache." I said that's OK, I'll take that chance.

He himself had a thin, handsome mustache. Why do black guys with mustaches not look porny, like so many white guys with mustaches do? He bade me goodbye with the words: "Have fun with your mustache!"

See, I saw this photo of Brad Pitt out of Cannes from the Inglourious Basterds premiere, and I thought--I wonder if I could do that. Favorite Cousin, whom I most resemble, looks like Brad Pitt with a sharper nose. But my nose is sharper and bigger still, so it just doesn't work. I still think I make a better-looking man, and anyone who sees me next to Favorite Cousin might agree. I really liked Brad Pitt's boots and costume, though. I would like to call myself Oscar Wilder or Titus Entry. I would like to be a dashing drag king, but instead I just look...confused.

The Magical Elixir That Is Red Box Wine

I don't know what it is, but every time I spend an evening rehearsing dirty songs and having choreographed simulated butt sex, I get a poem out of it.

Miscarriages

The angels instruct:
Attend to what remains.

A woman of courage and stamina
Would at least lift her head
And wash out those empty cups
And put them away properly.

A woman of strength would
Not collapse into herself
At a word at the door,
At an innocent question.

The angels offer no comfort;
Silence, the two full cups,
The stream that's not much more
Than a trickle now.

A woman of assurance would stand up,
Raise a toast, and at least attempt
To trace that flow to its source.

Comic Book Heroines

Wretchedly busy, but have been thinking about these things for days--
My daughter grabs the paper every morning now to read the comics. I took her to free comic book day a few weekends ago, and they gave her a whole stack of comics, and the end was served--she's hooked. Mama got a special Swamp Thing reissue. Here are my other favorites:

I don't always agree with this young lady, especially what she did to her boyfriend's guitar, but that's easy for a person who doesn't get jealous to say. But here, Judge Judy meets Courtney Love and Margaret Choand I concede her brilliance.

Alison Bechdel got me through some tough days back in the '80s. This handsome reissue of Dykes to Watch Out For plays like a box set.

Carol Lay's graphic novel memoir has gotten some controversy because it's a weight-loss book. I peeked through it because I couldn't figure out how she'd managed to gain weight at Burning Man. I've only ever been to my little local regional, and I always lose about five pounds, cause I'm so busy stumbling around and I'm so paranoid about food poisoning. It's not as anti-fat evil size-ist bad as people say--gets into a lot of issues of women's body images, food habits, some Omnivore's Dilemma-esque musings, etc. You know, if it's OK to be any size, why is it evil to choose to be smaller? (And it was cause she ate the s'mores. Didn't she realize you can get listeriosis from those things???)

UPDATE: I am so fucking embarrassed--I typed Sandra Oh instead of Margaret Cho above, fixed now. Does this mean I'm an anti-Asian racist deep inside? I'm going to be all freaking about this for weeks. I don't even watch Gray's Anatomy! (But somebody posted about the show on Facebook and all the sudden I had this rush of remembering a mistake, damn!) I know the difference between the two Tony Leungs, damnit! (Big Tony is handsomer and gets the straight sex scenes, and Little Tony is a better actor. And gay.) Does any of that make a difference? No. Lack of sleep? No. It's indefensible. And I'm sorry.

A Bit of Vertigo

Torn from the Lonely Planet

San Francisco was the site
Of the coldest summer solstice I've experienced.
We'd been running the roads at Big Sur,
Jade pebbles, seal barks, rogue waves;
Then the winding drive up the coast;
A ball game, the Portuguese water dogs
Plunging into the Bay with all the abandon
Of Kim Novak in one of her trances
(They were never phony to me, Scottie);
The filtered light behind the screens
At a Japanese noodle house; the movie
Where the singer's space helmet filled with water
As the last words of his song bubbled out,
Take after take, he endured; a reading
At the famous occult store, the counsel:
Cultivate the quality of discrimination,
The need to balance these ambiguities persists,
You'll have to shoulder those swords
A little bit longer, dear.

And then the ceremony, just south
Of the Sutro baths. The witches came
Carrying wood, built a bonfire,
And one set a chair in the sand, in the west.
The priestess sat with her back to the ocean
And hoisted the swords into position, and nodded
When she was ready for the blindfold.
I had a few pages I was finished with;
I fed them to the fire.

Tomorrow Leaf

The Batman alerted me to the story of poet Craig Arnold, who went missing on a simple hike while in Japan and is now presumed dead.

His last blog post is a beautiful page on the plant angelica, and the LA times blog above has some links to poems online.

Healing and Stealing

I keep forgetting and can't afford/get childcare, but you could go! Eternal Return, a collaborative performance piece at the Source, Friday and Saturday eves and Sunday 3 p.m. Hey, actually maybe I could go Sunday. That would mean not pulling invasive plants that day as I had planned. What is the right thing to do? The critical choices one is faced with. Why is life So Hard.

Involving my favorite local living artist: Rosemary Feit Covey, BosmaDance and the Smith Farm Cancer Center for Healing and the Arts. She has an exhibit at Torpedo Factory in cahoots with it as well. She did a whole series on emerging diseases, how can you not love that.

We just had an ethical issue in the Cougar household cause DD thought up a scheme whereby she could get more than her two allotted library books through a convenient evasion of the truth. My daughter lied so she could get more library books. And my heart is torn. I mean, means and ends? We have been discussing it and acting to correct it for two days now. She is now afraid to tell the librarian (the next step in trying to make it right), but I told her that her librarian looks to me like a person who has seen it all and will understand. Which is true. She's kind of Goth, in a good way, and I like her very much.

Photo: Stolen from BosmaDance website, and created by Enoch Chan--more of his photos are here.

Renaissance Men vs. Medieval Haters

Wow. Cool wild lightning flashes and big Thor thunder outside.

The once admirable civil rights fighter Marion Barry has folded, refusing to support equal rights and standing on the side of ignorance, along with a gang of "ministers" just about holding pitchforks outside the DC council meeting.

And just a few days ago, there I was calling out to DH over breakfast, reading aloud chunks of Colbert King's column and banging the table in astounded approval. He reports on Morehouse College president Robert M. Franklin's recent address, in which he calls Morehouse students "Renaissance men with social conscience and global perspective."

The column goes on to quote the speech:

"As an all-male institution with the explicit mission of educating men with disciplined minds," said Franklin, "the great challenge of this moment in history is our diversity of sexual orientation."

"Why don't we," he asked the students, "use this opportunity to model something our community needs?"

"Straight men," Franklin said, "should learn more about the outlooks and contributions of gay men. Read a book by a gay author. Have an intelligent conversation with a gay neighbor." Franklin reminded the Morehouse students: "At a time when it was truly scandalous to have homosexual friends or associates, Dr. King looked to Bayard Rustin, a black gay man, as a trusted adviser. And, Malcolm X regarded James Baldwin, a black gay man, as a brilliant chronicler of the black experience."

"To my straight brothers," he said, "diversity at Morehouse is an opportunity that can enrich your education if you are courageous enough to seize the opportunity. We cannot force you, but we invite you to learn from your environment."

Um, amen?

Photo: More info on the film.

Singing on a Kia

It's not all bad.

And I've got such a crush on Margaret Chan.

What we are now hearing is calls for a fundamental re-engineering of the international systems. We are hearing clear calls, from leaders around the world, to give these systems a moral dimension and to invest them with social values – like equity, sustainability, community, and social justice.

Personally, when I hear these calls, I cannot help but think of primary health care and the value system articulated in the Declaration of Alma-Ata 30 years ago.

Even before the financial crisis, many public health leaders saw great merit in returning to the values, principles, and approaches of public health.

In my view, values like equity and social justice are more important now, in this out-of-balance world, than ever before.

Human society has always been characterized by inequities. History has long had its robber-barons, and its Robin Hoods. The difference today is that these inequities, especially in access to health care, have become so deadly.

Technical tools for saving and prolonging lives keep getting better, yet more and more people are left behind, excluded from the benefits of even the older tools.

Not Much More to Say

Than this.

Jesus on a Cheez-It

When I did a search for an image of wisteria, all this TV stuff came up, and I couldn't resist the pun. I've only seen it once, the pilot--but I do love me some Felicity Huffman.

But seriously folks: Fuck newspaper corporations, fuck you, fuck you. That will be all.

The Alley Fence

I can't see a wisteria without
Remembering him telling me
About the snake that surmounted
The thick brown vine that twined
Along the alley fence,
Stretched itself, sunning.

His intention was to prune.
He'd heard snakes liked the plant.
He'd already cleared out "that, and that,"
He gestured with the long tongs,
Pointing to the corners of the backyard,
South and east, then paused to turn the meat.

I think it's a convenience
To attribute to them the motives
Of a human: The snake, we would say,
Is patient, is sly, even feels
A sense of ownership. He (the snake
Will be he; again, convenience) was there
Before they bought the place, after all.
But with summer slowing my breath,
I was moved to speculate:
Does that tightly focused bud
Of the reptile brain contain layers
Of elaborate perception I would never know?
What is it like to smell with the tongue,
To swallow it whole? The screen door slams,
And I jump, a skinny stray,
As his wife hands me a glass.

"You'll Be Surprised You're Doin' the French Mistake"

Even after 13 years of marriage (a lucky anniversary for a Dan Marino fan), there are always, always surprises! Like the other night, when I came home from rehearsal for a fabulous new production and flopped down in absolute exhaustion next to my husband on the king-size bed, as he attempted to watch some kind of game.

Me: I had choreographed simulated butt sex. Again.
DH (eyes not leaving screen): Oh God I hope I get it.
Me: (laughs)
Me (sitting up): Wait a minute. What did you just say?
DH watches game.
Me: Did you just quote from a musical?
DH (watching game): Yeah, just, you know.
Me: How do you know a line from a musical?
DH: I know things.
Me: But a musical? You've seen a musical?
DH: There's just six minutes left.
Me: That's until the year 2525 in non-game time. When did you see a musical?
DH: We lived in New Jersey. My parents took us to see Broadway musicals. A lot.
Me: (who would have given anything to have done that) No way! You've never told me that.
DH: I tried to forget.
Me: What did you see?
DH: The usual stuff. Annie. Jesus Christ Superstar. Godspell. You know.
Me: Jesus. You were getting more christian stuff than I was. (Pause.) Though that makes sense, I bet your mom went for that subversive take on God. It really was considered pretty subversive then. As musicals go. (His parents are Jewish atheists; mine, Catholic.) Did you like them?
DH: I was a kid, what did I know. I had to go.
Me: What was that line you said from?
DH: You know.
Me: I'm testing you.
DH: "One...singular sensation..."
Me: Oh my god. I never knew.
(Pause)
Me (laughing): That was pretty funny.
DH: What.
Me: That line.
DH: You should lie down. I want to see the end of this game.

Photo: The beautiful Uma, in one of the greatest musicals ever made. Used without permission because I can't help myself. And the headline is a Mel Brooks production, too.

The View from the Tube

A day of jury duty has left me staggered. I am happy I wasn't called to help decide anyone's fate.

Yesterday I rebuilt my garden fence, all by myself. Happy Earth Day!

Three good reads:

--Wells Tower attempts to recreate a sort of redneck version of Cheever's The Swimmer in a pimped out inner-tube on the rivers of North Florida. It had me on the floor laughing, it was so true of North Florida (and hoping I can get my daughter onto the Ichetucknee before you can't see clear through to the bottom anymore). And it reminded me how much I liked an older story about him traveling with his father after his father beat cancer and decided he had to see the world.

--John Goodman takes on Godot and his demons.

--And a horror story. There isn't enough money in the world to pay your debt if you have a catastrophic health crisis, by the way. You will never, never, pay it off, no matter how rich you are. You will sink completely if you have a catastrophic illness or accident:

"If there is an upside to the country's healthcare crisis, it is that the problem is hurtling toward a point at which it absolutely cannot be ignored without immediate and disastrous consequences. If there is an upside for me, it is this: returning to those difficult days of poverty and fear in 1969 also means returning to a place where anger inspires activism. I was a young woman then, of course, with a lifetime of battles ahead. I am not so young now. But I have enough years left to have one more fight in me. Healthcare is it."

Then go back and start over again with Wells Tower. Fear about health insurance is still not a good enough reason not to seize the opportunity to sit in a pimped-out inner tube in alligator-filled waters. Sometimes you have to put your butt into a slightly dangerous situation in order to feel alive. Just ask the guy with the whip.

Photo: Burt Lancaster is The Swimmer.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

On a friend's Facebook recommendation, I think I might break the no-buying policy and get a copy of Brad Gooch's Flannery O'Connor bio. (Certainly solely on his recommendation and not on the wretched review in the NYT a couple weeks back--the way it was written was wretched, I mean, not that it was a bad review. And thus is introduced our theme of precision of language.)

When the book came out, there was some controversy about new revelations, chief being that O'Connor used to seemingly revel in telling racist jokes to a particularly sensitive, liberal friend. I dip into The Habit of Being, Sally Fitzgerald's collection of O'Connor letters, which had expurgated the most obvious offenses, but not all, as you'll see. But the last time I read it through was about 20 years ago. O'Connor's formidable skills as an apologist almost had me getting unlapsed from being a Catlick, as she liked to write it, but I managed to hold onto my Old Time Religion (paganism), thank goddess.

Anyway, the reactions to the racist joke revelations tended to fall into two paths:

1) Oh, dear, I so loved Flannery O'Connor and those quirky Southern "characters" of hers! She was such an eccentric! So weird! So Outsider! Where did she get those names? But now I can't like her anymore, because she's a racist! I will never read her again. Why do all my idols have to fall?

2) She was a woman of her time, and she just couldn't HELP it if she thought like that. Everyone thought like that back then. Look at Fitzgerald and Wharton--they were anti-semites!

Both arguments are wrong in too many ways to know where to begin, and I think, just from my reading, that they're both wrong about O'Connor, too. Her other published letters, while not as explicit as perhaps the material in Gooch's book, make it clear that she just really, really liked fucking with people, especially Northern liberals. Check this little parody piece out from a letter to a friend and see if it isn't kin to Randy Newman's "Rednecks":

"What you ought to do is get you a Fullbright to Georgia and quit messing around with all those backward places you been at. Anyway, don't pay a bit of attention to the Eyetalian papers. It's just like Cuddin Rose says all us niggers and white folks over here are just getting along grand--at least in Georgia and Mississippi. I hear things are not so good in Chicago and Brooklyn but you wouldn't expect them to know what to do with theirself there."

She thought James Baldwin was a blowhard and got ticked when people kept telling her she had to meet him. But she also got ticked when her Catholic friends tried to make her go to Lourdes (and she made fun of the place, even as she caved and went on a pilgrimage). She was terribly impatient with the veneration of the Virgin, and she said just looking at the book The Nun's Story made her want to throw up. And all this from one of the most devout, thoughtful, committed Catholics anywhere. She mocked hypocrisy wherever she found it, flicked her own forehead for her petty sins of pride and vanity (without making a big, breast-beating deal out of it--because that's about the most vain, prideful thing to do of all). I recognize in the letters the character in the stories who is the modern thinker, the enlightened progressive, and usually grotesquely evil (she preferred, by the way, word grotesque to the word gothic). I speculate that in those characters she saw herself as she sometimes was, might have been, might be, but, quite literally, for the grace of God.

In short--equal opportunity hater, a woman with little time or patience for anyone. "My question is usually, would this person be endurable if white?" she wrote in another letter. And she found very few whites endurable. I don't think anything really mattered to her but the truth of the incarnation, the mystery of flawed people making up the perfect Church, and the mortal modern error of denying the existence of the Devil. Her God stops at nothing, including allowing the death of his son and self, asking simply if he deigns to speak at all: Where were you when I made the world?

None of which I believe, and none of which robs her writing of a bit of power for me.

It's not about people with funny names and odd habits and colorful diction. It's not about color much at all, but about our reaction to it, and our desperate need to believe we are good, decent people, when by most lights, we are pretty shaky, maybe mostly monstrous, and by the lights of a Catholic like her, without grace we are all condemned, and all the rearranging of bus seats in the world (Everything that Rises) won't change that.

I think if O'Connor were alive today, she might well be like Colbert or Sarah Silverman--or at least writing sketches making fun of movies with a Magic Negro, maybe, or the Crying Indian. Colbert popped into my head because he is also a Southern Catholic, and because of his still untopped and wildly, widely misunderstood jerimiad at the Correspondent's Dinner. But I'm glad she lived and wrote when she did.

And Fitzgerald and Wharton? Fitzgerald was a basket case who was so insecure he'd put anyone down that he could get away with. He wasn't so much a racist or anti-semite as a narcissist (those are related a lot, I think). But don't forget the venal Tom quoting Henry Ford in Gatsby. Balance goes to Fitzgerald. As for House of Mirth, Rosedale and Lily are two of a kind, the only ones who see the whole game and realize they have to play it carefully, and see each other playing it. He always respects her skills, but it isn't until the end that she sees past her prejudice and respects his. The snap judgments are in the mouths of the characters, not the author, in that case, I believe.

Photo: Once I went to Macon and everyone there kept telling me about Flannery O'Connor and Duane Allman. I don't know as how they had read or listened to much of either, respectively. It got annoying, because I am extremely fond of both. I have a story based on it maybe I'll polish up.

Keeping Up Appearances

"Modern society is too quick to judge people on their appearances. There is not much you can do about it; it is the way they think; it is the way they are. But maybe this could teach them a lesson, or set an example."
The Talented Voice and Impeccable British Phrasing of Miss Susan Boyle, 47.

I confess to sinning in this regard myself, because I watched five minutes of The Cougar and judged it entirely on appearances. The interior design of that house they were in made me cringe. Jesus, the leather, the iron, gaaaghh. It was like the house James M. Cain describes in the opening of Double Indemnity, on steroids.

I watched long enough to see the young men toasting on a party bus, then sliding slickly into the manse on a hair gel disaster of Valdez proportions. But even the vision of Vivica A. Fox poured into that ruched emerald charmeuse number couldn't distract me from that awful faux primitive tile.

So I switched over to In Treatment. That Gabriel Byrne, he's OLD, man. But he looks like he's really keeping himself up. Good for him! Stayin in shape! Good on you, dude!

Oh, he can really act, too. Almost forgot about that part.

The TV watching came just because I was looking for something to do while I enjoyed my two-three times weekly cigarette. I love to smoke, but I don't have time to do it very often. So yesterday I got home from work, got my kid, went to my friend's house for the kiddie Seder (9 kids under age 9), helped with that, came home, helped get my kid to bed, helped her past a meltdown inspired by my not letting her stay up all night and read, finished up some work, poured a glass of wine and sat down on the couch with the windows open and the fan on, and what should be just starting but...So I tried, and failed, to watch a full episode of a reality show, again.

But I was inspired to write a poem while running this morning.

To A Cougar
Dear lady, cease your striving, for they have not what you seek--
The breath of promotional vodka and Axe cologne from these Young Masters reeks,
And tomorrow's nachos soon lay waste to this night's taut physique
I tell you truly, best succumb to charms of the regal Vivic(a).

(For it is no secret that the fairest of the Deadly Vipers has my heart entombed
Ever since I saw her fire a gun through the bottom of a box of Kaboom.
But forgive me, lady, as I get distracted
From this TVland reality you have enacted.)

Your pride, your hopes, the fierce strength of your dream
Will come to naught, for I suspect most of these guys play for the other team.
While naught is wrong with that, no naughty nights ensue
For tis not their inclination to be that into you.

Bright golden Cougar, do not be trapped by time
You could still turn this bus around while in your prime:
Make a startling publicity-engineered revelation that it is really older men you prefer,
Marry a rich retired commercial real estate broker, settle in, and lick your fur.

The Lady or The Tiger, The Cougar, or The Fox?

Because of my nom de blog, people sometimes send me cougar-related news. That and the ads everywhere you look made me aware that there's a "reality" dating show featuring an "older" (40, jesus on a ritz, she's only fucking 40!) woman and younger "men."

I named myself "cougar" out of irony, because I'm often surrounded by women with the dry-cleaned jeans and the manicures and the big, ugly, overpriced handbags, expensive jewelry, and I'm kind of in awe of them. I feel like I'll never measure up to what a woman of my age (47) is supposed to look and act like. I don't do manicures or makeup most of the time, I don't wear much jewelry, I can never seem to care about designers or men with money, I'm always doing foolish things--I'm just out of place, as always. So the name is a joke.

But back to the show. For once I'll be like my mother and just believe and quote unquestioningly what I read in the New York Times: Their reviewer said the young gentlemen were indistinguishable save for their haircuts, and wondered how anyone could keep their attention on a 40-year-old anonymous blonde when Vivica A. Fox, the host of the show, was in the house.

The really weird part is it's on TVland, the home of Brady Bunch reruns. Well, OK, Florence Henderson, someone had to say it. She had some Wessonality allright.

I was hoping to dig up some blogger rage about all this, but all I found even remotely readable was a a woman on Huffington Post who's all ticked about the show and says she's "the real cougar woman." That's kind of funny. She doesn't look like a cougar, either. She looks like a nice midwestern lady, and she's writing about things like her "journey into menopause." Come back, Shane! Guess you never can tell who's a cougar on the inside.

I've never seen a reality show episode all the way through, but I loved a "reality" movie--Series 7, The Contenders, where lottery winners have to shoot each other down to get the money. I was hugely pregnant (just like the star, played by the brilliant Brooke Smith) and laughing my head off in the theater, sitting between BA and my husband, and I think I scared some folks. But that "Love Will Tear Us Apart" video was priceless, wasn't it?

If there were real equality, there'd be a "rock of love" type show where the competing young men would wear silly clothes and get very drunk and stumble around and pee themselves and tongue-kiss for the cameras. Oh, forgot, that's Smith Point!

If there were real equality, there'd be a show called The Old Lech or The Roue or some damn thing with an old guy who likes young girls. Oh, forgot, that's...pretty much everywhere.

If there were real equality, there'd be a show where I could get a date with Vivica A. Fox! Oh, forgot, that's...only in my dreams.

"Guess I'm a Fool; At Least I'm Not Innocent"

Did 10 miles on the towpath today; had been heading for the Crescent Trail, but took a turn at the last minute. Surprised to find easy parking at Old Angler, surprised to find the path deserted north of Great Falls, surprised at my respectable time. Bluebells all the way out and the wind behind me all the way back.

I'm in an odd dull place between any hurts, passions or obsessions. Paying work is only too happy to fill my every moment, and some of this packed-in-cotton feeling is the result of tamping myself down to meet the onslaught of relatives that has come my way in the past few weeks. If this keeps up, I'll have no choice but to become obscenely healthy and work on the novel. I'm tempted to do magic, just to see what spirit or spark or wave manifests, but with all the prosaic plodding, I don't have the time or the head space.

Besides, after a tarot reading I got recently at a witch event, I'm experimenting with not doing much intentional magic. It was a very intense reading with many scary cards (ever get the 9 of swords, the tower, the 5 of wands, the 7 of swords...I mean it was almost a parody!) but the reader couldn't have been kinder or more thoughtful about how he framed things. Nevertheless, what I was seeing--essentially, you will have no place to hide and every compromise and duct-tape solution you thought would hold is no longer viable--came through his words, and halfway through the reading I burst into tears, and kept on that track through the end.

But before that, there was the Fool. And here's how he described that card to me: You're used to thinking: There's something you want, so you choose the time and the accessories and the words carefully, and you create a ritual, and that's magic for you, right? Well, you're not going to need to do that anymore. See, the Fool is walking down the street, and he realizes he's hungry. And right up ahead, there's a hot dog vendor, and the Fool reaches into his pocket, and there's the money, just enough to get a hot dog. But it's only there when he needs it. If he's walking down the street and he's not hungry?--no hot dog, no money. That's the new way magic is going to work for you.

I've been testing the theory.

Right after the reading, I went into the ladies room and was wiping my eyes, and who should appear at the sink next to me but a woman, a writer and teacher who is pretty famous in witch world both for her work and because she is strikingly beautiful and charismatic. The last time I had seen her was 10 years ago in one of her classes, when I had burst into uncontrollable tears halfway through.

It made me laugh (not out loud). I said hi, and that I was looking forward to going to her class later. Then I wondered to myself if I sounded like some weird crying stalker. Then I blew my nose and went out and got some coffee. That's a fool for you.

I don't eat hot dogs, but I have a feeling a symbolic kind of hot dog might be just ahead.

"Symbolic kind of hot dog." That would be a good title.

Photo: Today's headline was written by Mr. Cole, the original big dark brooder.

"It Is Certain," As the Magic 8-Ball Would Put It

Man I'm so tired of working and not sleeping and not running enough and sitting in restaurants and working and sitting in restaurants and working and working all night long. I feel like...hey, here he comes now! All the way from the Seventh Seal, ladies and gentlemen, it's--

(XIII)
Wait, Rider

I chose
My battles
He -- their end
His flag
A rose
The field commands
His crown
The sky
The reins -- clutched
In his hands

Before him
Rises majesty
Beneath -- the bones
Abound -- above
Wait, Rider --
Comes the cry
The hooves
Crush out

The First Occasional Kiss My Happy Heinie Foundation Awards

Because I might spend time in another life under another identity encountering occasional clueless nonprofits that are really good at bumbling away money on "initiatives" that no ordinary human actually putting up some cash money will ever understand or see any results from...I started thinking a few years back that if I had a foundation, I could do better.

It gave me something to think about on long runs--If I won the lottery and started my foundation, how would I do it? I actually get paid to think of names and taglines for nonprofits, and that process can take weeks. But my name and tagline took less than a quarter-mile: The Kiss My Happy Heinie Foundation: Giving Money to Folks Maria Thinks Are Cool. Can't you just hear that on NPR?

Once on a women's weekend, a friend suggested I should soften the name to the Ki-My-Ha-He Foundation, to make it a little more accessible and give it some of that NA cachet, but that would be so damn wrong.

Obviously, this fantasy is well-formed. But you have to have something to think about to make you forget how much your knees hurt.

The "business model" is like the MacArthur: Surprise! Have some cash, you cool person, you! Sometimes I run into people or read about folks I wish I could give a Kiss My Happy Heinie Award to, but alas, I have no money. But this evening I thought, screw it, neither does anyone else, so I'm just going to give away imaginary money.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first occasional KMHH award ceremony. It's all on a blog, so it's virtually free! Which means more imaginary money for you someday, when you win one, too!

From a Washington Post story on Chitown and other web-based micro news services trying to fill the gaps in Chicago, here's the first honoree:

"Megan Cottrell, 26, a former dancer who started last year as a volunteer, is now a full-time staffer assigned to the Chicago Housing Authority. "They despise me," she says. But spokesman Matthew Aguilar says Cottrell has mostly been fair -- and that the Tribune and Sun-Times no longer cover the authority regularly."

Honey, if they hate you, you're doing it right. They can Kiss Your Happy Heinie!

The site is funded by a foundation, which I'm not so sure about. There are Conrad Black types in foundations, too. And Rupert Murdoch types. And unfortunately, this graf is also true: "WMAQ-TV's Carol Marin, a Sun-Times columnist, says sites such as Chitown do "a good job" but don't have the resources to "push back against the powerful." The Sun-Times is helping her fight a subpoena to testify at mob-related trial. "One of the things lost in the stripped-down blogosphere is the ability to fight for your stories," Marin says."

Second, tho MacArthur might get to him first: Ari Roth of Theatre J for staging the readings and discussions of Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children. Some people can open the mind and the mouth and give people a safe place to work out these complex issues, without denying any of their complexity. Heart, balls and everything in between--and people who blast off protests and view any "side" as absolutely faultless can Kiss His Happy Heinie!

The third, in the science category, goes to my Hot Friend E, so she can develop her health-promoting-cum-conceptual-art project, the Hydration Bra. It's a combination pushup bra and Camelback water jugs. You fill the cups with water in the morning, and sip through the tube throughout the day. People could tell by your boob size whether you have been drinking enough water that day, and call your attention to it, so you'll stay hydrated. And everyone would want to attend the morning meetings, right?

By the way, feel free to send a virtual donation. It's tax deductible in my dreams.

Say My Name, Um, I Mean, Say Your Name

Got another one last night.

Writing Erotica

A tongue otherwise occupied can't tell tales.
Twin hungers: To touch or to hover,
Framing the picture. I'm not above
Taking notes. Sometimes the inclinations tangle:
Which do I obey? To the two sides of
Every story, the moment or the memory,
It's not just a time-honored device but inevitable
To add a third. Always a welcome arrival.
Could I give her your name?
The reader, the witness, flows into her own
Pleasure and writes herself
Out of that moment. So it sways,
What is, what is told, cup to cup,
And not a drop is lost but to the air,
And that becomes the rain
And fills the cup again.

Don't imagine there's no technique involved.
The honest construction of momentum,
Obstacle, delay, completion, enlivened
By the immediacy of remembered detail.
But you have to start somewhere. Like they say,
Write what you know.

Jacob, a man of experience, wrestled
The Angel of creative power, on and on,
For hours and hours. A man I know of painted
The scene of that struggle, and ran away--
On another island, he lived to fight another day.

In Like a Lion

I guess eventually I'll write one to go with all of them, major and minor arcana.

The Judgment Card

Why, you! And here I thought you
were dead. Across a crowded room,
What's new, probably she was bored,
All that. There's nothing like a glimpse
Between the gilded pillars, between the stems
Of those huge exotic blooms, the pricey trumpet
Lilies of the kind I didn't think we'd see again.
Nor those rich robes, so fresh. I see them
Swirl around her ankles as the chains fall away.
Oh roar away, and clash a cymbal or so.
What I'm listening for is her breath,
Filtered through nicotine, drawing down,
(She breathes his need, you know. No blood
For that vamp. All it takes is a whisper
Of despair, and she's there!) Oh blow;
The lion, the lamb, the lily, the rose,
The stage, all set; the revelation, yes,
And the wings, poised to lift
Those who lie to new life.