An Unhealthy Preoccupation

I am sick, and tired, and I am a damned bad patient. As a compulsive autodidact, one of the things I do too much reading about is health, partly because I have to for my paying work (which I've just barely caught up on after a hell week of deadlines, meaning I can't do any of the fun work) and partly because I want to know what's up with my body (and those of the ones I love. To a certain extent.).

But here's the fun part--when you go into a doctor's office, you have to pretend you don't know any of the things you know. I guess I'm lucky to have doctors that explain things carefully and slowly and present me with some options. But most of what they're explaining (when it comes to a chronic problem I'm working hard to heal) is something I've researched days, months, or even years ago.

But at the doctor's office, I keep my mouth shut. Knowing too much about health generally pisses medical folks off. You get condescension, then resentment, then hints that you're a psycho. You're not supposed to be reading and learning about these things; it implies an unhealthy preoccupation and hypochondria. How many women do I know who have gone to their doctors with this study and that about a health issue and been pushed off with an offer to prescribe an anti-depressant (the go-to panacea of the internist and gyn alike)? Too many. Years ago, I would get tsked at and warned when I said I was taking supplements such as fish oil; now I'm regularly being told to do so, as if I'll find it some great revelation.

I'm not saying I'm as capable as someone who's gone to med school and practiced forever. I know all the reading I do will never make it so I could do surgery, or even fix a car or a sink for that matter. And I'm wildly in awe of those who can do all these things.

It just bothers me to have to hide what I do know. Med professionals at all levels should know by now that it's in everyone's self interest to have self-educated patients, but they don't seem to want to let that get above a certain level.

Try having a baby, for instance. You'll be told that you're the one in control of the process, that you're part of a team, all sorts of nonsense. But the nurses, goddess bless them, will clue you to the realities: If you have a healthy labor, stay away from the hospital and do it yourself as long as you can get away with it, because once you come in the door, I'll have to put you on a fetal monitor so we won't get sued, and you'll be stuck flat on your back, unable to move naturally, and your chances of having a c-section will start climbing. Tell your doctor that, and she or he will likely scoff at any connection.

And about that c-section "decision": Get one, and from one side you'll be painted as a spoiled weakling; say you want to avoid one, and from the other side you'll be painted as a selfish nutjob. We've got not one politician or two but an entire medical industry that still puts "health of the woman" in air quotes, and I'm not, jesus why do I even have to make this clear, speaking only about the abortion issue. It's made very difficult for a woman to own responsibility for any even small aspect of her health.

For women, staying on top of the sometimes weird ways of medicine imposed "for her own good" has long been a matter of survival. And hey, guys, now that every other pharmaceutical ad is being aimed at you, urging you to try something new for something you're not even sure is wrong with you, you better get on that train, too. Just remember to play dumb when you hit the doctor's office. I know you haven't had as much practice at playing dumb as some of us women have, but maybe we can give you some tips.

"Now Surf the Sun and Scale the Moon"

The other day in yoga, the teacher was playing this music that sounded like Philip Glass. Made me think I ought to get one for myself and play it all the time to get that feeling like I'm in a movie. Endless repetition can so be dramatic! Pick up bagels and cupcake liners bah-dah-bah-dah-bah-dah-bah-dah drive to the playdate chunn-chunn-chunn-chunn-chunn spread the peanut butter lee-dah-lee, lee-dah-lee, lee-dah-lee edit health policy document rriii-rriii-rriii-rriii does co-morbidity get a hyphen does co-morbidity get a hyphen does co-morbidity get a hyphen

Actually I'm listening over and over to TV on the Radio "Halfway Home." I don't know if I like anything else on the CD, but I've listened to that one about 20 times in a row. Repetition builds forms and furrows. Is that how the moon got to look that way?

Photo: I took it off the NASA website, which says it's "The first full moon of May 2007, photographed May 2nd by Tony Wilder of Wisconsin." Thanks, Tony.

Update: Holy crap, a typo! It's fixed, it's fixed, really it's fixed now. Plus: You know that Jonas Brothers, Love Bug song? Not bad!

"The Mystic Chords of Memory"

Slept late after going to Philadelphia and back for a Drive-by Truckers show. My friend thinks Our Beautiful Cooley looks a little ragged, but he'll always look good to me. Nothing quite as nice as a skinny man with a big guitar. Lunch with DD, and over a bowl of restorative cheese grits, this popped into my mind at seeing the handsome face of James Merrill looking out from a three-column photo in the Times book review.

Caught in the Act

Like hell the photographer surprised you.
I'll accept the authenticity
of the cluttered bookcase, even
the arabesque upholstery, though I suspect
Your partner picked it out.
I did the math, too: Mid-fifties,
It's cold to have your shirt unbuttoned
So very far, isn't it? I see the sisters
To your forearms in my mirror,
The ropy muscles and the veins alike,
And that pleasing, elegant precision
Of the cheekbones; I imagine, like you,
I earned these without ever appearing to--
The artifice of the daily strain against sag,
The philter and the poultice. Yet
This noon light's revealed again that nothing
Has stopped the conqueror worm
From taking up residence in my very skin
And eating me up from within.
On top of my own cluttered bookcase
Perches my Ouija board, for decorative
And entertainment purposes only.
You dead might give me pages and pages
But I'm not hearing it, not today.

Surely, you can do better than that. Enter the poetry contest, and I'll stop calling you Shirley.

Oh, well, haul your tired caboose back onto the Hope train, girl: Here's something else beautiful.

Damn Hippies

Julie and Ivy are some of the most recent in the American Girl world, a line of dolls that reflect different periods in history. There's an American Revolution doll, an Industrial Revolution doll, a Depression doll...

Julie and Ivy live in 1976. In San Francisco.

My daughter's favorite was the Depression doll, Kit, but now she really wants Julie. We can't afford her, even though Julie is something of a recession doll. Maybe an inflation doll (which must be distinguished from an inflatable one). The depression doll's backstory is that she saves her family by going to work at a newspaper. If I made a doll for today, I'd create a biracial blogger deeply in credit card debt with no dental insurance. Her accessories would include an iPod and a yoga mat.

Julie's accessories include a peasant dress, a hibachi and a bed with a beaded curtain. I'd like to crawl into the catalog and live her life. She needs a pack of tarot cards and a roach clip, though. Ivy comes with a cowl-neck top and chandelier earrings.

It's odd to see your life and your accessories as part of a historical re-enactment. Though in 1976 I was still a virgin, which feels quite like ancient history. I smoked, yes, that too, and drank. I spent a good part of Bicentennial summer on the Mall, sitting in a tent at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival as a volunteer in the African Diaspora section. My job was to listen to the blues performers all day long, writing down on a log the names of the songs they performed as an audio tech taped every minute. Some of these guys are still at it. (I know I saw Cephas, but I don't remember if they were performing together at that time. I had little idea of how amazing it was to see what I was seeing, but I liked it all the same.)

The book that best captures much of the feeling of the city at that time is King Suckerman.

I hope my daughter doesn't ask for stories from the old days, though if she does, I will share the good, non-scary parts.

Jubilee

When you grow up in and around Chocolate City and you're white, you can forget what things are really like. I grew up in PG county, which has the highest concentration of rich African-American people in the country. (My parents actually preferred I date black guys, because they were classier. My father taught part-time at Howard and Bowie State.) So I'm more likely to get this "what's wrong here" feeling when the black people are NOT represented among the ones wearing the suits and running the show. You get used to black doctors, lawyers, bosses, councilmembers. Maybe you start getting a little "colorblind," let it slip your mind that the magazine named for the city you live in has had but one black person on its cover in its long history, stuff like that. You start thinking you're living in one of those movies where the cast is so carefully calibrated, so the judge is always a black woman, and there's always a black friend in the group that hangs out at the restaurant, and of course the president is black; why wouldn't he be?

So thank you, Real America, for once again crashing into my unreal complacency and making me see what's real, and what's really important and amazing and revolutionary. There was nothing easy about it, and I needed reminding.

LOOK OVER THERE. The annual charity poetry contest is back. And Backstretch, I still have your t-shirt. Don't let me drink next time I see you and maybe I'll remember. Yeah, right.

Community Is Contagious

If all our weenie wishes come true today, the commies I read and listen to say, we'll still have a lot of work cut out for us. Along with cultivating awareness and saving the Earth, we'll have to cultivate community. We'll need community organizers, I guess.

In my own tiny way, I've been trying to create/engage in community for years, ever since the demoralizing W ascendancy, because it seemed the only thing constructive to do (I had friends who moved to New Zealand, but that wasn't really an option for us). And just like saving energy and changing your habits, making community is hard, really, really fucking hard.

Because community means head lice. Community means getting people to come to the special meeting at the school with the outreach person from Children's Hospital who will tell us how to get rid of the head lice. Community means everyone actually has to do the work to get rid of the head lice.

Community means having a mom in the babysitting coop tell you "she only threw up once this morning" when she drops her kid off, and it means you might have to live with the fact that your kid might be throwing up by that night, because the mom has to work, but so do you, so what do you do? Community means trying to figure out how to avoid the mom that makes veiled and coded racist comments, and wondering what you should do about it.

Community means listening to the woman in your activist group who always seems to have some exotic ailment but you think she'd probably feel better if she stopped eating Doritos and walked around the block once in a while. Community means wondering if you should say something like that. Community means not getting impatient with the handsome egotistical guy who dominates every single discussion and thinking you could shut him up pretty quick if you shoved your tongue into his mouth. Community means making yourself stop and pay attention and keep your mind on the issue. Community means wondering if you're the person everyone is wishing would shut up, or go away. Community means trying to find a nice way to tell someone in your art workshop that what they're pushing is a bad idea. Community means feeling stupid when people don't like your poem. Community means getting annoying emails with dire warnings discounted on Snopes years ago, and then getting emails defending the emails.

Community means weeds. Community means the woman two garden plots over making snippy comments about the weeds in your garden infecting the rest of the garden. Community means overhearing lots of people making snippy comments about your weeds.

But community also means the old guy who is the keeper of the garden's fig trees, who is himself as round as a fig, whose English you can barely understand, chattering at you and piling your hands full of ripe, sticky figs.

Every day I think of getting out of every community I struggle to be a part of. But just like healing the Earth, there really is no other option for survival than learning how to be together in ways that don't involve buying something.

On another note: Many thanks to Brotherman for sending the Alejandro Escovedo live tracks. I love his work just with the string quartets. Strings have been getting to me more lately--we just went to see Rachel Getting Married and there's violin and fiddle work all through it, plus just this little chunk with Robin Hitchcock almost acoustic with strings just swelling it out, giving it so much heft.

Photo: Above CB's are not from the following site, but there's one that has 365 freaking days of Grumpy Bear, love it.

"Long Live the Blacklist!"

And goodbye to Studs Terkel. This is from the Post obit:

"If it weren't for the blacklist I might have been emceeing [today] on these network TV shows and have been literally dead because . . . I'd have said something that would have knocked me off [the air], obviously. But I would never have done these books, I would never have gone on to the little FM station playing classical music. So, long live the blacklist!"

I was just looking stuff up about him the other day and leafing thru my books, because he was the one that introduced that Emile de Antonio movie I wrote about a while ago, and I started thinking about him and etc. and almost wrote something but it was getting too damn long. Saw him speak on three occasions and for someone so good at listening, he was really good at speaking, too.

Another "commie" gone...now when simple decency and caring about how people live and keep it together is defined as being "socialist." Last night thru a half-asleep haze I saw on Bill Maher or think I remember Cornel West pointing his finger at everyone in turn and saying "you're a socialist, you're a socialist, I'm a socialist," etc., etc. How's this for black-and-white thinking: If you're not some kind of socialist, chances are you're some kind of sociopath.

The Dumb Supper

I'm making cornbread for the Dumb Supper, which some celebrate on Halloween--you put out foods for ancestors and departed friends and such, sometimes dining with them. "Dumb" has its archaic meaning of "silent," in this case. I usually do cornbread, greens, sweet tea and open a beer (this year two, one for my grandfather per usual and one for an acquaintance who left this year).

I got a New Year's card yesterday from a friend who can fly (Samhain is sometimes called the witches' new year), and it reminded me of her card from last year, which had a black cow and a white cow on it, and that reminded me of the artist Vernon Pratt, so on this Day of the Dead I'd like to remember him, too.

You could call his work conceptualist/minimalist, but since it gives you enough to think about for days, it's pretty maximal. He worked often in black and white--now there's something to get started chewing over. Where do they meet, where do they blend, when does it become "more black" or "more white"? For instance, one work was hundreds of marbles, black and white marbles in separate containers; one marble was dropped at a time into the other container.

Just think.

You can see his work large scale in Raleigh: The Education Wall.

I met him when I was 22 and had gotten a grant to work at an artists/writers colony, god knows how--you submitted your work w/o a name and the judging was very blind, indeed. (I wasn't the youngest ever there yet; that would have been my best friend at the time; he got in at 20, which is what gave me the idea to apply.) I was lonely and awkward and never knew what to say or do; we had to eat dinner in this big room and I felt like an idiot most of the time. Like when the director put me down in front of everyone for not having read Issac Singer.

Vernon was fun and kind and unpretentious in every way; he never flaunted his considerable intellect but was just curious and interested in everything going on around him. The colony was on a working farm that raised a black-and-white breed of cows; he had a lot of fun with that. He was also a musician and we talked alot about jazz. He had a car and I didn't, and he gave me rides to the nearby college in the mornings where we were allowed to use the pool and gym and we even went to movies in town ("Pretty in Pink," can you believe!). He was a straight man who didn't try to sleep with me; now, not that there's anything wrong with making a polite and happy attempt, but I say that to bring out how deliriously happy he was with his wife and family. He spoke often with pride of his daughter (who became Jane of Jane magazine), barely my age and already a star.

He died after a biking accident during yet another stay at the artists' colony. He gave me my first real painting by a real artist; it's one of a series of "scribble scales" he made, once again adding black gestures to white canvas. It's hanging above my altar room (aka closet) now.

Photo: James Stewart and Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle. Both such great physical actors, and the physical harmony and communication between them is so palpable. But of course the real reason I love this movie is for the witches and beatniks.

"I Wanna Get Back to the Old Days When the Phone Rang and I Knew It Was You"

My daughter is sick again, which pretty much makes me crazy with fear and worry, which I smush down and stamp on and act natural so I won't be accused of being a helicopter mother, a tag I've fought since she was cut out of me. She's much more comfortable this time around then she was with the strep a couple weeks ago. In her case, they should call it "dancing pneumonia" instead of walking pneumonia, because she is performing the complete works of Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato, with a little Jonas Bros (for this, she puts on a sideways ball cap and lowers her voice to foghorn pitch) thrown in. She has three notebooks open to jot down the songs that come into her mind as she performs. My favorite is "this is a rock and roll house, this is a bouncy bounce house," to the accompaniment of banging on a yoga ball. They say the antibiotics will clear this up in a day. We'll see.

One big privilege is getting out the big Real Artist Kit and using all the colors and different kinds of paints and pastels and pencils in it, like Real Artists, which means drawing fruit. Above, the baby pomegranate and the mommy pomegranate. She says mine looks like a pumpkin. I say hers looks like a heart.

Tonight is the new moon in Scorpio; I always do a new moon ritual, but this one may be difficult. I ran across this astrologer's website by chance and like what she has to say: "The Scorpio New Moon is a night to strip yourself bare and release your pretensions..." But hon, with all my pretensions, I'm going to be stuck standing around nekkid til the year 2525. Nevertheless:

"Scorpio is the sign that seeks deep truth in all things. The New Moon in Scorpio is the night to acknowledge the ways this questioning process manifests in your life. This is the most serious New Moon of the year. This is the night of truth and dare: dare to be truthful with yourself and you will greatly increase the rewards of this ritual."

I know I'll be working for healing, because we've had enough. But it's also a good time to let go.

"Have You at Long Last, Sir, No Sense of Decency?"

I was excited to see that a staged reading of "Trial of the Catonsville Nine" was slated for election eve even before I realized it's by a director I admire. And there's a chance I might even be able to go, because my in-laws have plans to steal my child next weekend.

Trial transcripts turned drama are an interesting case--you always expect a trial to be dramatic, but they don't usually live up. I've heard rumblings but don't know of any successful attempt to do anything with Brecht's HUAC testimony, which would be my top pick to see enacted. Maybe with some embellishments to make it even more "Duck Soup"-y.

Long ago, I saw a video of another Berrigan trial put to drama, "In the King of Prussia," about the Plowshares Eight, who in 1980 sauntered into a GE plant and beat on nuclear bomb parts with hammers--beating swords into plowshares--one of the few times when taking a biblical exhortation literally could rate a hell yeah from me. The video, by Emile De Antonio, was shot in two days, just before the crew were carted off the jail; Martin Sheen supported the production and also plays the judge, who becomes apoplectic each time the defendants non-ironically but certainly disruptively break into "Kumbaya." It's a quick and dirty job I wouldn't necessarily rush onto the Netflix list, but de Antonio's work (he also did films on the McCarthy hearings and the Weather Underground) is part of the roots to current political documentary making and deserves its props.

It was made in 1983, not pre-MTV but damn close, when artists were still arguing about whether video was worth anything. AFI used to be housed at the Kennedy Center, and they'd have a video festival each summer and I'd go and give myself a headache from nonstop viewing and no eating (KenCen then as now a wasteland when it comes to any nearby affordable food). Saw my first Nam June Paik installation; there was a Twyla Tharp piece with cameras mounted on the dancers that caused people to stand up and yell at her; and there were many complaints that "In the King of Prussia" was slapdash. The point was that video could capture this sort of thing in the days before the subjects would be sent up; it changed time and distribution.

I actually think that the longing-to-become-slick early-80s audience was just embarrassed by sincerity--going to jail for your beliefs was so last-decade. Such a showing today might touch off a "real Americans" vs. "domestic terrorists" cage match.

The tone taken by the Others in these last days before the election is scarier to me than the dire prediction of an "international incident." They're stirring up the ugliest, in code; Palin is sounding more like George Wallace in (overpriced) skirts every day. My comeback line, when people told me after 9/11 that I ought to move away from Washington, was: "Yes, we'll go someplace safe in the heartland, like Oklahoma." You know, you can't have a day care center in a federal building after that happened? You can't have on-site daycare. Parents, nursing mothers, have to walk out of their buildings and down the street to visit their children during the day because in Oklahoma, a clutch of our fellow Americans didn't want Their Taxes going to food and roads for Those Other People. That's just one of those tiny but breathtakingly horrible details from the act of domestic terrorism everyone seems to have forgotten.

So why am I not outraged that Bill Ayers is walking around free to eat mache and give pretentious lectures? Fair question, but you could ask it of anyone--as Dick Gregory has been doing: If we think he's an evil domestic terrorist, why are "we" letting him teach at a major university? Why didn't all these appalled people go in and bust him years ago? Gregory also adds in another factor that gives me pause, that he suspects plants inciting or even committing destructive acts, something that was common then. Um, or maybe not just then. (Paging Lucy Shoup!) The degree and intent of the damage, the times, the cause behind it, all make me want to think that one over a while more. There's a little teeny aspect of college intellectual boomers getting away with shit while farmboys don't that I don't choose to go into right now, either.

But it gets very complicated, doesn't it? If you break into a nuclear power plant to stage a pacifist protest and a security guard believes she's endangered and takes a shot and hits an employee, who is responsible for the harm? Where is the boundary between destruction of property and harm to humans? Who should be more free, a protestor or a police officer in St. Paul? Who's more endangered? Whose rights are more endangered? It's way too complicated for me. I wish I could turn on the TV and hear people debating these questions, but we're not allowed to talk about it--all we're allowed to say is "He's pallin' around with terrorists" or "He's just some schlump he knew on a committee once." We're under orders to keep it simple.

Photo: Martin Sheen in Badlands. Man, that Terrence Malik could pick 'em, could he not?

Oh No, Must Be the Season of the Cinnamon Broom

Today's musings over the microwave minestrone...

Our Mad Man friend wrote a while back about an odd encounter with a tall, bony blonde in a grocery store. She helped him find a can of chicken broth, inquired solicitously about his health, and then, when he told her he was buying it for his fiance, who was making a special dinner, said he was a lucky guy. It was Ann Coulter. Doesn't that sound like one of those weird dreams you'd tell your shrink about? But it was real.

Latest Pew says 60 percent of women don't like Sarah Palin; the right says that's because we're just jealous that she's so pretty. Hon, that's the only thing about her I can stand. You know, in a bar, maybe, with the music too loud to hear her talk, well...I might sidle up. But $150,000 for clothes? Girlfriend is buying the drinks.

Full disclosure: I'm thinking my hair/makeup/clothing budget probably hits a grand, and that's including running stuff. I hardly ever wear makeup, but I'm so phobic I throw out all the (cheap organic) stuff every three months and replace it anyway. Most of it's the haircolor and waxing, which I pay an arm and a leg and an ass for. But it's worth it--the woman who does it, besides being really good at her job, is a former French literature scholar who left Iran and has lived all over the world, and she always has such interesting things to say. I thought Sarah P.'s highlighting job looked a little skunky under the debate lights. I really should find a way to get that number down from a grand. It's unsustainable.

I know I'm kind of tiresome with my constant foisting of astrologer Eric Francis on people, but he reran this piece that took me right back to Miami in hurricane season. A bare hotel room, a perfect stranger, a mirror, candles, a trance CD playing over and over, power down and a wind right out of Cuba slinging rain at the windows. Book me for that one.

Instead, I'm on the couch wrapped in a blanket, watching Countdown. And, goddess forgive me, House. Jesus. My TV consumption shot up to almost four hours this week. I'm a little under the weather. Bored. Microwaved.

And then there's the other side of Miami: An old friend formerly from there won a cooking contest with a recipe for "Pig-Wrapped, Pig-Stuffed Pig." He's a really, really good cook. And the video's pretty funny.

[I know, you're thinking lipstick joke, but jesus if you say it I'll virtually stab you with a pen, the way my Hot Friend E did a lawyer in her office the other day, because he wasn't listening. And he just shook it off and kept on talking.]

Photo: Muse Erato, from the muses sarcophagi in the Louvre, public domain.

I Read. I Smoke. I Admire.

That's Laura Bush's reply to her mother-in-law when asked what she "does," brought back to me in reading reviews of W (though they attribute it being said to a different character; no, haven't seen the movie, come on, babysitter?): "I read. I smoke. I admire." It’s so Whartonesque, and so sad; such a cave to the requirement that a woman in her position be ineffectual and decorative. I read—an independent act, a richly exploratory act, but a lonely and interior one; I smoke—again, independent, transgressive even, but in a way that harms only the subject; I admire—the only outer-directed action being that of a mirror, a springboard, a prop, in effect nonexistent until the real people come along and need you. She turned herself into a flaneur on an exclusive, stunted boulevard. And I’ve been there, even to the specifics on a lower scale: With my own family and the ones I’ve married or partnered into, I’m an outsider suffered a place at the table to the degree I can provide a charming reflection or render myself invisible.

And it’s a tiring state to maintain; you can hear the exhaustion in that laconic delivery, can’t you?

But this made me laugh: Daphne Merkin writing about Sophie Calle, relegated to the NYT Sunday Fashion Supplement (which I'm slavish about reading for the perfume reviews). She's the one who did the piece where a man broke up with her via e-mail, and she gave that e-mail to a wide group of women of substance, who then used it to create works of their own (a scholarly essay, poems, drawings, more). My favorite was by an editor who corrected the e-mail's grammar and wording. As Merkin quotes one academic: "it's rare in contemporary art to make people laugh." The title is the funniest part of all: "Take Care of Yourself."

Of course, there are those who pound on her "narcissism," a critic who calls her work "more in the territory of mental disorder than art," "soft-core identity politics to advance/indulge/realize herself." Oh lord, and more than a hundred years ago we have poets proclaiming "Nothing human is alien to me" and "I sing the body electric"; no quibble with a man seeing himself as the universal human, is there? But here's Merkin with the big finish:

"[Calle says] 'The way I use stories protects me from bitterness.' Which leaves her as she wants to be seen: as a lone ranger of a sort, a defiantly risk-taking woman in a man's world, making her mark, like it or not."

Photo: Another enigma that splits the prodigy/late bloomer mold: Jean Rhys. Brilliant youthful work, silence; terrifying midlife work, silence; and as an old woman, one of the greatest novels of the last century, Wide Sargasso Sea. In between, she had husbands and children and lovers and drinks. Her letters are terribly moving; in one, she advises her adult daughter to go the chemist's and get vitamin C and calcium powder for her children, that that was one of the things she did for her daughter when she was little, during the war, and she grew up healthy and tall.

"We Are Ugly, But We Have the Music"

Seven things that made me burst into tears in the past seven days:

1. Esperanza Glass is in her 40s.

2. High school bullshit never stops, even when you're in your 40s.

3. High school bullshit dogs one to the assisted-living facility, if one isn't lucky enough to keel over on the 18th hole before that point.

3. High school bullshit actually starts in elementary school.

4. My daughter is not after all showing signs of being as big a social tard as I am. She is also, entirely objectively speaking, beautiful, and she has a naturally long, lean physique. These gifts may allow her to glide past the high school bullshit present and future like a mermaid over a sewer pipe. Beauty generally frightens bullies (who are usually ugly, if you look hard enough, and who as unfair as it is nonetheless sometimes have the music).

5. Amid the deafening silence of the week, I heard from an old, old friend. And a new one.

6. My Hot Friend E left a wise, two-call-long message on my phone that I want to try to save forever. Or at least as long as the high school bullshit lasts.

7. I ran Billy Goat Trail B and C today through blazing trees and a river just high enough to talk. I've been in a low-boil depression for a while, doing the things I need to do to roll through it to the other side. One of those things: Working a ritual with Oshun, Orisha of love and beauty and in a deeper sense, renewal, and running by the river is part of that, as she is a river goddess. I have always been moved by the story of Oshun and Ogun. Ogun, the maker of tools, and in a deeper sense, perpetual creator of what humans need to live and keep going--he works unceasingly--became disillusioned and exhausted, feeling as if his constant work was for nothing. So he quit. He went to the forest to hide. For a while, no one noticed, but soon there was fear and chaos. People and Orishas alike called through the forest, telling him how much they were suffering, how he couldn't behave this way. Oshun quietly slipped into the forest, wearing five yellow scarves and carrying a gourd of her sacred honey. She wandered silently until she sensed Ogun behind some brush, watching her. She didn't say a word, but began to dance. Ogun crept closer, watching her dance. She dipped her fingers into her gourd and quickly reached out and brushed his lips with honey. He came closer, and she fed him again, wrapping him in her scarves.

He agreed to come back to work.

So I run into the woods, but have to send a part of myself after me, must gather my own honey, must try to tempt myself back to work, without any of her conviction that it's worth the effort. The answer to that is always the big, brick-wall question: What's your alternative, hon?

The Hamster Wheel of Necessity

My friends, please represent and support the American Center for Sarah Palin Inspirational Limericks, my friends. My friends, I know you can show them the best. Oh, that goes for my enemies, too. Thanks to the most voracious poetry blogger on earth for the tipoff.

And for this one, too. Someone's hip to the fact that my prodigious output is part of the plot to bring down the system, man. An apologia for the poetry bailout:

"The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance. What began as a subprime poetry problem on essentially unregulated poetry websites has spread to other, more stable, literary magazines and presses and contributed to excess poetry inventories that have pushed down the value of responsible poems."

Brazen as the Trees

Autumn in DC. Why does it seem so...depressing? It'll pass. I just have to get out of the conference rooms and onto the Gold Mine Trail this weekend.

Malcolm Gladwell's look at prodigies vs. late bloomers posits that the latter are "experimental innovators" who, awwww, love the journey more than the destination. Tell that to Cezanne, throwing his paintings up into the trees in fury and frustration. Examples of women artists are conspicuously absent in the piece, as well, perhaps because the reasons behind the caesauras in their oeuvres tend not to fit the theory.

And there's nothing anywhere that explains the impulse of a foolish woman to start at the age of 46 cranking out poems, clueless about their quality, entirely unconvinced of their use, and helpless to stop. It's been a year now since this madness struck me.

Enough complaining. Here's the mix: Could I Be Your Girl, Jann Arden; Stoney End, Laura Nyro; Next Time Round, Elvis Costello; The Infanta, the Decemberists; Love and Anger, Kate Bush; Me, Erykah Badu; Wichita Lineman, Cassandra Wilson; Spirit, The Go-Betweens; Gamma Ray, Beck; Holding on to the Earth, Sam Phillips; Get it While You Can, Janis.

"I'm no trouble...nothing like the trouble that I used to be when I was somebody's double..."

Photo: Louise Brooks, acting prodigy, writing late bloomer; and what happened in between was between her and the bedpost. Again, no permission. They'll put me on home detention for these copyright crimes soon. UPDATE: Had to fix--bad photo--instant karma? Thanks, whoever you are...

Make Them Open the Kimono First

Back in town from Mommy's Special Camping Trip with a big haul of poems. I keep thinking I'm never going back again, but as my acupuncturist says: "There aren't many places you can get that many insights in three days without destroying your marriage or your job." I'm speed-dating the cosmos. For all the discomfort and awkwardness, it's still the greatest place I've found yet to wander around drunk with gratitude toward people you don't even know. These are just fast snapshots written on the drive home and between loads of laundry. I would love to hear whether they work at all for people who don't know the setting.

Irish Pub
No one would ever swing from that chandelier.
That’s reassuring. Two melody lines
From the fiddles entwine in the warmth,
And nobody minds when the singer forgets
A few lines—“something about knife,
Something about wife”—because
We’re all fucking family here.

Camp Sexy
Most people want it in the morning, but
They get to it in different ways. Some use the scent
As a cue to speak their aubades, an excuse to roll
Out of the tumbled blankets and ease down the road.
Others stumble out alone and shivering, chasing
The promise of warmth. Then there are those
Who ignore the call and turn to one another,
Not minding the salty lips,
Or that there may not be any coffee left
By the time they get there. When I went
To get my cup, the sugar was gone,
But there were many other kinds of sweeteners offered.

Tower of Power
It’s all in black and white on the screen,
Sharp as a tuxedo at 9 p.m., cool
As the condensation on the shaker.

Gringos
“I am like an island adrift that would like to unite with a continent.”
--Carlos Fuentes
Maintaining the border matters. Two saguaros, once stately,
Now sagging, hold the line, their strange and dangerous spines
Suspiciously like bars. Beyond them lies a nation
Of fast patter and shifting images. You only get a glimpse,
But the people in the pictures look happy.

Whiskey and Whores
So a woman walks into a bar,
Takes a seat, asks the bartender for a light,
Pulls something out of her bag. One cowboy
Jackrabbits to the couch, grabs a snoozing blonde,
Tries to dive into her mouth for cover. But the Woman
With No Name just passes it around, and everyone takes a shot.
The men tell stories other people made up, in other places.
They’re all accustomed to taking the spin, the chance, and the consequences.
Outside, a turtle lumbers down the dirt road,
Stops to feed on a wilted rose, its jaws snapping the stem,
Working its way to the bud.

Then the Mariachi comes strolling by the bar,
Armed with nothing more than ordinary guile.
Long shots from three points of view, and some
Rapid-cycle close-ups on the eyes.
The Mariachi speaks three short, honest sentences
And sweeps the Woman up in his arms and carries her off.
Her pleasure makes the lantern sway on the pole.

Zelda’s Inferno
The caravan stopped here and spilled its cargo
Of quilts and cat-eyed poets. Cardamom scents the air
From the bubbling samovar at the next camp.
Parti-colored flags flutter above a pair of reclining lovers,
As a flame-haired woman reads aloud
From a book of prophecy.

Deviant
Bright tangles of candy twine,
Candy jewels awash among the flotsam—
What’s dropped at the amusement pier
Piles up around the jetty’s sturdy legs.

Contact
Holding the long line, they pull together on the canvas
As one, tugging it over the dome and lashing it to the poles.
What will happen here requires that the circle
Stay in close contact with the earth. It may be
It would like to float away like a big balloon
And take its cargo back to Kansas.
What you learn here is that there is always
Another way to get home.

Photo: Don Draper gets hip to the beats. Permission? I don't need no stinking permission.

What. Not.

I've been feeling guilty about being so distracted by the election "and whatnot" that I haven't been writing much. So I forced myself to come up with a poem today while running.

Carolina, My Ass

Something in the way
It sounds makes you think
You've heard it before. But you're lulled.
The voice, rich and reedy at once,
Diction a mix of precision and drawl,
And that fingering, sliding
As if the strings have been lubricated.
But they still ring out plucked steel;
There's nothing sloppy about it.
An intake of breath and he constructs
A country in his chest, pouring it drop by drop
Into your ear. Ain't I weak, he sings.
That's when it falls apart. Now you hear
The junkie whine behind the words,
And the only hardness is that of a heart
That takes what it wants and turns away,
Then turns back to ask for more.

I should make myself do it every day, like the rock and roll poet, who filled out almost a whole month last month. Check out the one for David Foster Wallace--it's stunning, I think, and could apply to almost anyone, like the one above could, except it's shorter, which is always better.

Kinda Mainstream Racism

Well, several nights free of trouble, and a daughter dancing and singing all over the house in her usual fashion. Life is good again, and giving mommy plenty to feel sick about. From the Post:

"Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

"...Palin, speaking to a sea of "Palin Power" and "Sarahcuda" T-shirts, tried to link Obama to the 1960s Weather Underground. ... "Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience."

At least that paper's still managing to get the reporting job done, despite being cut to skeletons and spending all its money on interns testing cosmetics. Sunday, our Times wasn't delivered and my husband went out on an errand, leaving me with the newspaper dregs--including that egregious banality, the Sunday Source, in which I read that for "retro curls" I should spread between my hands "an egg-size amount of voluminizing mousse," which sounds kind of sexual? Maybe that's just me, and in which someone actually got paid for putting this subhead on a sidebox: "Teach Your Children Well." Gag me with an egg-size...well. That's enough of that.

But it's got ELECTROLYTES!

Photo: Idiocracy. Permission? What's that?

Hugs and Drugs

Like the prospect of hanging, having a sick child concentrates the mind wonderfully. (Course he also said that no one but a blockhead writes but for money, so what does that make me?) I don't give a shit who dives out of Wall Street windows; just gods, gods, gods, make her stop waking up crying at 1 a.m.

She askes me these scarily grown-up questions in our rocking late-night encounters, ones that run through my own mind as well. So perhaps that means that my questions are simply childish. You be the judge.

"What if this never stops?"

"It'll get better, baby, I promise."

"I'm so tired of being awake. I want to sleep. I never want to wake up at night again. What if I never sleep?"

"Remember last night? It started feeling better and you got back to sleep. You will. You just have to give it some time. Give the medicine a chance to work."

"What if this never goes away? Will I ever be able to play with my friends again?"

"You will. I promise. We'll make it better."

"But I'll still remember what this feels like. I'll have the memory of this and it will never go away."

"The memory will go away, too. You can help make it go away."

"But if I make the bad remembering go away, will the good memory go away too? How can I keep the good rememberings?"

"You just keep putting the good thoughts in instead of the bad. Who's the boss of your mind? Who's the queen of your mind?"

"I am."

"You are. Right. We'll all help make it better together."

And on and on, over again. I have no idea what I'm doing. This line of questioning isn't supposed to start until the college years. I want to punch doctors who are reassuring, yet am stuck with nothing more than being able to be reassuring myself. (BTW, it's nothing horrible, don't worry; just very, very uncomfortable and difficult for her, between medicine and side effects.) And I don't, don't, don't want to be at work (where I'm sneaking this in while waiting for a late client because if I don't write something real I'll go nuts). I passed a store window with a t-shirt on display: "Lucky Mom, 24/7" and about lobbed my coffee cup thru the window. If I were 24/7 mom none of this would happen, she would never get sick, the world would be peaceful, the market would be humming, right?

Milk and Honey

The farmers market by my work has only a few weeks left to run. The woman from my favorite farm, Licking Creek, has been transfered to NIH. The handsome farmer who gives me discounts says he doesn't have greens--hardly anyone buys them, he says, so there's no point in even picking them. I buy a bunch of chard, which I'm cooking now, to have with pasta, in between typing and helping with homework. I never have chard. It seems like such a New England thing. Chaaahd. Like John Updike is saying it. The local honey guy has still has a big crowd around his stand. It makes me feel good to see a bunch of men standing around tasting honey from little spoons.

Hey, this just in: Nathaniel Mayweather's honey, Hyla, will be on Chelsea Lately again tonight, but with an ALL-REDHEAD panel. You know I'm not missing that.

Of course the sunshine isn't going to last: The Post ran this piece from a Chinese blogger about the melamine in milk horror. This blogger, a university teacher, visits the countryside, where her unsophisticated cousin tells her that the last crop of rice they grew was poisoned by pesticides, so the farmers took it to Shanghai and sold it. She doesn't know what to make of the story, or what to do:

"What could I do after I heard something like this? Where could I go to report the problem? I can't think of any official in this vast country who would patiently listen to me and try to address the problem. Most officials would probably regard me as insane if I went to talk to them....

"There are all kinds of things like this happening in the country. There's nothing I can do about it," I said to myself, trying to appease my conscience.

"How pitiful I am. I already know that my effort will be useless even before I take any action.... I am caught in the same situation as my imaginary, impassive official. Both of us are controlled by a curse and have lost the ability to take appropriate action . . .

"Trapped in this kind of silence and not able to do anything about it...I almost feel that I've become a pile of [dung], or a slave who only knows work but not how to speak. I chat and joke with people around me, but I am not able to talk about the biggest bewilderment on my mind."

This Kafka state is similar with the current cri$i$ (thanks to Professor of Osculation for the locution). It seems there's nothing you can say, nothing you can do. That's an illusion, as usual, created to make us give up our power. I hope it's not a dress rehearsal for the next big crisis, when there could be babies' lives at stake instead of just 401ks.

I just remembered we have some andouille left over. I'll put that in with the chard.

Photo: Daughter and I went to an arts festival and did Craft Projects. That one's mine. Blurry photo of collage. Moon, flames, trees, the usual preoccupations.

A Series of Something

I haven't written a new poem in a month--the wheels in my head are on a completely different gear now that I'm stuck in a long fiction. Of course, some might argue that I've been stuck in a long fiction all along.

Here's a poem from last year's disaster series, in honor of Sen. Ted Stevens, whose trial began last week, or last month or sometime. If you have to know specifics, I'll have my people look it up and get back to you. Cause that's how they do it up north.

Tubes

People laughed when that old fuck called it all
“A series of tubes.” I even had a t-shirt making fun of him.
It’s in rags now. There goes the last connection.

But when pieces started crashing, it really was like tubes,
Like we were miners trapped in tunnels, cut off from everyone,
And me trying everything to fix it, and everyone cursing me,
Then just staring up at me, quiet now, thinking
“What if he can’t get us out of here?”

Kool-Aid and Cocktails

Got daughter to bed, came up and turned on the debate to hear McCain arguing that his experience with Keating made him best-qualified to deal with the current mess. Bah-dum!

I think I'll just watch this Nick Cave video BA sent my way today. I could listen to this song go forever, and it practically does. Very purgatorial.

The other day the Post Style section asked "Where have all the protests gone?" and answered its question on the next page in the GOSSIP column, where it told of the PEN/Faulkner awards speakers:

"The annual PEN/Faulkner Award gala at the Folger Shakespeare Library -- typically a genteel literary affair -- turned into a mudfest Monday night when two authors launched into denunciations of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

"Like most cult leaders, they really think the public is stupid enough to drink this Kool-Aid," best-selling novelist Terry McMillan said. "I am not taking a sip."...

Poet Amiri Baraka railed that the choice is between Barack Obama or that "patient from the Vietnam War." But it was McMillan ("Waiting to Exhale," "How Stella Got Her Groove Back") who eviscerated the GOP ticket with deadpan sarcasm:

"Now a senior citizen dying to dress up as the new sheriff of this land of opportunity and opportunists, John McCain, alongside . . . his charming VP running mate (who has finally gotten a chance to wear that tiara, even though this is not a beauty nor personality contest), Sarah Tall-and-Pretty Palin, have -- as self-ordained mavericks and reformers -- been making empty . . . promises about how they want to clean up Washington." All McCain really wants, she went on, is to "find a new war to fight"; Palin and her "uneducated snowmobiling husband just want to fly first class."

The crowd laughed a bit; mostly people whispered, "Did she really say that?" Oh, yes, she did -- and more....

We asked local novelist Alan Cheuse, another reader at the gala, if politics had spoiled the party. "Stendhal said, 'Politics in a novel is like a pistol shot in the theater,' " he told us yesterday. "Terry's a very passionate woman and speaks her mind." He called Baraka "a poet and a bit of a propagandist -- his problem these days is that he doesn't know the difference."

Decorum returned for the post-performance dinner in the Folger's Reading Room, where the 250 guests and the authors effortlessly switched from campaigns to cocktails."

Thank heaven things got so quickly back to normal.

Yep, their comments were rough. But ruder than war profiteering? That's, um, debatable. I'd rather have a poet confused about propaganda than a president. Where is the "decorum" in a death toll?

But hell, they're just angry black people, and one of them a poet besides. Marginalize them on the gossip page.

This is where the protests are--everywhere.

I'm thinking about multiple PEN/Faulkner winner E.L. Doctorow and my favorite of his novels, The Waterworks. It's a love poem to the newspaper business and scary and readable as anything by Stephen King. But it's also a look at the riches of the last part of the last century, conspicuous consumption and moral hypocrisy, the North's role in slave trading and war profiteering, and the cynical, damaged, despairing generation that came after these profiteers.

It's about a cabal of old men who want to live and control everything forever.

I'm not one of those who wants to be my child's best friend. But I would like to live now in a manner that my daughter's generation won't despise me later.

Down in the River to Pray

Dearest Annwyn has completed an amazing, enormous work of magic: kayaking 444 miles of the Susquehanna River to the Bay. Here is one of her dispatches:

"I'd like not to present it as some huge pageant - but rather small intimate details...like petals and feathers which float upon the water and I gather as I move on the water - or like the flowers beginning to rise from ravaged waters - soft yellow blossoms moving toward the light - water so polluted no life may try...as I paddle with determination - and rain falls and
strokes the surface and the wind challenges or covers one's back....and all the while your fingers are freezing...your butt is wet...but there is a place to be...a place to find shelter ...paddling..paddling...crying over the devastation... pollution flowing into the already destroyed waters.... heavy with PH change from the acid...complete disregard but to profit...holes which breeched her depths ... and moving on you paddle... having known Her first as a Darling - a lovely charm born from gathering waters... so narrow but winding and taunting and visiting and embracing...then in to places where civilization
cornered Her and she simply took her place...not dissuaded by province...circling sometimes you think you've been here before...

"There were man-made challenges - the Goodyear Dam that was SO boldly challenging - causing not only incredible physical determination - but the weather -20' and raining ... yet so brilliantly part of the beauty...several hundred facing this 70 mi. part as a "regatta" folks from Canada come to face this winter's edge of river...

"I faced hypothermia and exhaustion - later in our travels the standing stone I sat with was worth every effort...

"As it all comes together - my heart is blessed; and each singular drop that ever fell upon my head, ran down the brim of my hat to my nose and I licked with my tongue....

"There is not piece of what is human for which I do not hold compassion; there is no "one" I would NOT look in the eye.

"But I still challenge - that the waters run free. We secure the health of our waters. And we secure the health and truth of our human rivers.... our blessed selves which hold this water holy.

"With love, from the free state of Avalon
In Peace, Annwyn
The Roving Fool"

Her intention is entirely and harmoniously made manifest. Blessed be.

Photo: Paul Nevin, from the Friends of the Susquehanna Rock Art site. Educational uses permitted--figure this counts?

It's Kind of Like the Chorus to 'Venus in Furs'

I am weary of people proclaiming, as if it's something to be praised, that they admire someone for "getting it done" or constantly trumpet that "she's just like me! She's gettin' it done!" without once asking what "it" is or whether "it" is worth gettin' done (the dropped 'g' being totemic in this campaign).

Bill Clinton would have asked what "it" is, dagit!

And I am weary of hearing people say they support Sarah Palin because "she's just like me!" Are 51 percent of America's white women solipsists? I want someone as little like me as possible running this country, and believe me, dear, so do you. How about an engineer, maybe, or someone who can at least read a balance sheet or fix a computer glitch?

It's family reading time in the Cougar household, which means the prescribed 30 minutes of Magic Treehouse for DD while mommy reads, works, blogs, does a horoscope chart, and cooks pasta. Tonight, it's the New Yorker, only been ripening about three days before I peeked inside. Observations:

Spike Lee looks old. But good.

He gets up at 5 a.m. I'm going to have to start setting my alarm another half-hour earlier.

Elsewhere, Anthony Lane attempts to redeem himself from his recent savaging by Jezebel and assorted gals with this review of The Women--and I'm ready to forgive. I head to the online version to copy this, here:

"According to Sylvie, “Nobody. Hates. Saks.” Such is the moral of this film, run a close second by “Don’t give a shit about anybody—be selfish,” as delivered by Leah (Bette Midler), a trumpet-voiced movie agent. In short, we are back in the land of “Sex and the City,” and thus with the lurking suggestion that greed—emotional greed, not just the material ravenings of the shopper—is the only alternative to the humiliation that comes from subservience to men. No middle way is permitted.

"Compare this with the split-and-try-again comedies of Hollywood’s heyday, like “The Awful Truth” or “The Lady Eve,” and you can’t help recalling the satisfaction of watching the heroine come out on top, not because she had mooched around reflecting on her self-worth, or invested that self in handbags, but because she had fought like blazes to get there. Real women like Barbara Stanwyck, Irene Dunne, and Katharine Hepburn scrapped for their power, against a society that had no wish to give it up, or against hapless, dithery males who had no clue what to do with it, whereas “The Women” of 2008 gives empowerment a bad name....

"Taken together, “Sex and the City,” “Mamma Mia!,” and “The Women” add up to a spectacular trilogy of the inane, and to point that out is not the prerogative of the misogynist or the killjoy. It’s the view of someone who thinks that women deserve better from the movies, and who sees no joys to kill."

Word. I am weary of being told that I love shoes and handbags and care what labels they once bore (bore being the operative word). I actually dislike shopping, quite a bit. I love sexy heels, lingerie, the art of fashion, most of all the art of perfume, but the day my goddamn life revolves around all that you can just go ahead and shoot me. With a crossbow, please.

Photo: Nola Darling from "She's Gotta Have It." Don't make em like that anymore. Didn't you love that bed? No, it's not at Saks. Used without any permission whatsoever. Just another in the long list of reasons why I don't want anyone like me in higher office.

Lookin' Good, Cannonball Run

Trail running, distance running, in some ways all running come out of a human ability that evolved for a reason. Running for long distances over varying surfaces was necessary for food (to track game), for communicating (or spying on those strange people on the mountain next door), and for protection (to outrun predators).

Though I have spurred myself into some speed by imagining I'm being chased, it's frankly a tactic that's hard on the body (and I have this little device my weapons-loving cousin turned me on to, if that kind of protection is really necessary). For communications, we've got those Internets. But tracking game on foot is still an honorable pursuit. I think it's hardwired. That's why I like trying new trails. Even though I'm only looking to spot rectangles of paint on tree trunks and rocks, not spoor or nests, I imagine it's much the same feeling.

We're made to run, to swim, to climb trees, to use our brains and facility for planning in the pursuit of game. We're even made to use weapons to kill game when we're hungry, if we have to.

A bow hunter in a tree aiming for deer is an intelligent wildlife management device, especially when the meat and skin are donated. It's fairly even competition. In fact, I wish there were some way it could be done in the DC city limits, especially with Lyme disease so bad; it's making the deer and other animals suffer because the weak ones aren't being picked off by any kinds of predators anymore, so they live to spread it and breed all kinds of other parasites and viruses, and sooner or later, their weakened immune systems may brew up something that will get other animals, including the human ones, worse than anything we've seen so far. I don't hunt; I live in the city, for god's sake. But it's not evil to kill an animal to thin a herd and to eat. One of the best eco-witches I know of is a former champion bow hunter.

A fat fart hunting with an automatic weapon in a helicopter is just a fat fart with an automatic weapon in a helicopter. It throws off the balance. Too many predators gone, too much game gone, you're as bad off as when you started. No problems solved.

There are some who say that the human animal is entitled to use that big brain in whatever ways we want; who say that the automatic weapon and the helicopter are just natural extensions of the technology of the sling and the bow.

But there's another great facility of our big brains, one we don't use nearly often enough, and I ought to know: It's the ability to know when enough is enough and to make ourselves stop.


Why do I keep looking up David Foster Wallace eulogies in random moments? I never read but some magazine pieces; never was a big fan; I'm too old-fashioned, not smart enough. Because he was a suicide, which carries too many triggers; because he was just my age; because you're not supposed to do that if you're a genius, and fucking big and hot on top of that. But I will stop, because projecting your own crap onto the occasion of death is how ghosts are made. It burdens the spirits, who don't deserve it.

Photo: Marilyn Monroe at Black Rock, rehearsing for The Misfits. Photographer Eve Arnold; I doubt I have permission.

Freedom Is Scary

Happy Birthday, DH Lawrence. If we find any of your books on the shelves, the librarian gets taken out.

Because on a day like this, we all have to show how we support our free freedoms being free.

Photo: From the latest Lady Chatterley. Adults doing things adults do--ewww, scary.

Closer to Kurtz

Thanks for the headline, Backstretch. You can always tell a pro.

New Beck is really groovy, except for two tracks with this stupid shuffly beat, bleh. The rest is like what would have happened if Ian Curtis had just run off with that photographer and moved to LA and made it past 40.

Tomorrow: Back into the woods to find out how many trees have fallen.

UPDATE: An oak with a branch spread of about 15 feet was down barely a half-mile into my usual trail, taking out a holly and assorted other saplings. I stopped to pay respects and gather a couple of tiny fragments of wood for magic and heard the branches rustle. A tall, lovely young Nordic-looking woman was making a careful scramble over the whole mess from the other side. "That was fun," she said, dripping with sweat and sarcasm. "I'm not even gonna try," I said, turned around, and took the AU hill as pennance.

Say "Hi" to Your Knee

My trail half-marathon today was canceled due to Hurricane Hannah. Instead, I took a gig covering AARP events (but I don't get to go to the Chicago concert) and did the convention hotel 5K. There's got to be a limerick in there somewhere. Give me til the end of this entry to think of one.

So the other day, I see a teaser in the Post about Sarah Palin's health care policy work. So I'm thinking, well, let's not judge, maybe she has some good ideas. Turns out she has had but one idea, about a pretty obscure policy issue, and her take on that is kind of, well, mavericky. She pushed very hard for radiologists (imaging) to be able to open their own shops freely, separate from hospitals and as independent businesses. In Alaska, it's hard to open your own freestanding healthcare shop, probably because of legislation designed to protect hospitals. See, in the past 10 years or so, doctors, surgeons, all kinds of health care folks, have been opening up their own places where they can ply their trade--anything from the surgeon who did my daughter's adenoids (one of the best in DC--she wanted to go out and play two hours after it was done) to the guy who'll Botox your cock--and not have to give over the money to hospitals. But hospitals don't want the competition. In-and-out surgery and mammograms and the like are really good clean moneymakers for them, and help pick up the losses caused by uninsured homeless GSWs in the emergency room.

Seems pretty simple to solve that one--don't have any more uninsured homeless GSWs. At least address ONE of those problems, right?

Instead, the for-profit hospital lobby has worked to stifle competition, as probably happened in Alaska, where a doctor or similar has to obtain a "certificate of need" to open a business. Here's where it gets funny. The for-profit hospital lobby is majorly Republican, big McCain supporters, and a huge source of Republican K street revolving door lobbying "talent." It's loaded with lawyers who pop back and forth between advisor positions and lobbyist positions without even having to put down their steak knives.

So why has Palin been pushing to make things so hard on the poor widdle for-profit hospitals in Alaska (where there are probably more than their share of uninsured homeless GSWs, what with all that wild moose shooting going on out of helicopters and all)?

Her one idea on health care policy is obscure, parochial, and contrary to the party she says she stands behind. So OK, I gave her a chance, she fails, and now it's open season. Thanks for the link, BA.

Oh and, um, Dear Police of St. Paul: What part of "he's not resisting" do you not understand?

OK, so it's not up to the one in The American Wife. But here's a try:
There once was a lady named Hannah
Who choked on a great big banana
Her teeth couldn't stop it
Nor the epiglottis
But it stopped when it hit vox humana.

Just Like Evelyn "Champagne" King and Shirley and Company Sing

If politicians want journalists to stay out of their bedrooms, I guess they'd better learn to stay out of journalists' bedrooms. But nooooo. Instead, they've ordered the cops to camp out in front of vegan eco group houses just in CASE someone inside is THINKING of throwing a soy-whip pie at a state delegate sometime in the year 2525.

So, if preemptive arrests of journalists is OK, I guess journalists should have been allowed to preempt Miss Cristal or Bristol or Britneee or whatever the hell her name is's pregnancy.

My conspiracy theory: The hurricanes and the VP choice and the pregnancy alike are all out there to divert attention from the fact that journalists and activists are being targeted, harassed, arrested, beaten, jailed, silenced, prosecuted, persecuted, all without cause.

Time out for a little ray of light, as Madonna sings: The rock n roll poet is back to taking care of business, every day, in honor of National Poetry Month.

Now for my own shame--and this one's just the tip of the iceberg--last week I went ahead and did a job I know was damned dead wrong. My boss gives us the chance to bow out of doing marketing we disagree with morally, and I didn't take it. It was for a product that's environmentally damaging, without a doubt. They needed a damage control, image rebranding campaign. And here's why I did it--not for the money, not out of indifference, but because I saw the samples and the ideas they'd come up with, and I knew I could do it so very much better. So it was out of pride in my work.

This week I took myself off the account. I'm not patting myself on the back. I'm still whacking myself upside the head for doing it in the first place.

I feel like comparisons, even twice removed, to evils such as the Holocaust and American slavery are by nature invidious and at the very least grandiose; there's simply nothing that compares. But as long as I'm covered in sackcloth and ashes anyway, let's make it worse: There's this scene in Schindler's List where this woman prisoner tries to pull Rafe Fiennes aside and tell him the plans for the bunkhouses they're constructing at the concentration camp are all wrong; she's an architect, she explains, she knows these things. Sir. And he says "hmm," and he shoots her. It's a big ugly metaphor for the teeny tiny small-scale cockeyed compromises I'm stuck with too often. But if you aren't aware that the teeny ones can take you by the hand and lead you right into the bigger ones, well...

So, this time they came for the vegans with video cameras, and next time they'll be coming for Keith Olberman, unless you write a poem or grab a camera or donate.

Image: Cover of Shirley Goodman's comeback hit, "Shame Shame Shame," which contains the awesome lyric referencing the great William DeVaughn: "I've got my sunroof top, I've got my diamond in the back." She also sang backup on Exile. I bet she doesn't have anything to be ashamed of.

Walk of Shame

Exhibit A: "Starting salaries for day-care teachers hover around $25,000; classroom assistants who don't have college degrees make $10,000 less than that, not much more than minimum wage...High turnover is a problem at many day-care centers, experts say, and child-care workers are among the lowest paid of any profession."--Washington Post, 8/26/08

Exhibit B: "This press has a history of unethical dealings with its authors. The only reason why I didn't know this is because last year's winner had to agree to a gag order as part of the settlement with the press. At their insistence, she is not allowed to tell her story, or warn other poets about what happened. So I submitted to a press that I NEVER would have submitted to if I had known..." Here's what happened next.

Exhibit C: "So very often, the face of wrongdoing turns out to be not evil but ignorance. Under a classic surgical cross-examination by James Esseks, Litigation Director at the ACLU’s LGBT Project, Preece basically confirmed Ms. Schroer’s story. Schroer had the best qualifications and performed best in the interview. Schroer was the best person for the job. Schroer had the job; had it, that is, until she told Preece she was transgender."

Note on Exhibit B: It's interesting, but every poetry contest I've entered so far in my short career has had a fee. None of the erotica contests I've entered has had an entry fee. And the erotica editors have been without fail respectful and professional. And I've won two out of three contests entered. So who's more ethical: Poetry presses or erotic publishers?

Can You Feel the Love Tonight? That's Cool, Neither Can I.

Everyone's going to Burning Man, and I'm stuck tending home fires. Which I really don't mind. It's putting out the work fires that's making me ill. Toxic fumes an'all'at shit.

Dear BA alerted me to the impending Led Zep tribute in the closing ceremonies of the Olympics, and I couldn't even watch because I had a wretched headache from a training run on the Billy Goat Trail followed by taking the kids to see Lion King (Julie Taymor sets, costumes and puppets made me cry, late-stage Elton John music made my head pound) and not enough water breaks in between. Hey, I'm sharing part of the Burning Man experience--dehydration!

I also got bit next to the eye by a spider during a run Friday morning and by Saturday I looked like the Phantom of the Opera. It's revenge for running through so many hard-built webs. Verily, I'm like trailing clouds of chiffon some mornings, the webs are so thick and numerous across the trails.

Stupid races I will lose humiliatingly are cause for love and thanks--they are an excuse to be out there, dragonflies hovering just ahead of my pace, sweet annie scenting the air. Just like officious, arrogant clients strengthen my resolve to do whatever it takes to get myself out of the position of being their servant.

The principal at my daughter's school sent home a welcome letter saying their goal was that "children will learn, whatever it takes." "Whatever It Takes" was also the slogan for Casablanca records, and what it took was usually at least an eight-ball.

Daughter's report from the first day back at school: "Today we talked about armpits at lunchtime." Seven years, and I'm still so blindlngly in love with her.

Well, there's always next year for Burning Man. Of course, by THEN it won't be COOL anymore, WILL IT. Ha ha ha ha bah-dum!

Fruit Cocktail

Happy Birthday, Dorothy Parker. I played oracle with the Complete Works, and after the pages fell open to a few short stories I'd rather not think about, on the third try this appropriate one came up:

Indian Summer
In youth, it was a way I had
To do my best to please,
And change, with every passing lad,
To suit his theories.

But now I know the things I know,
And do the things I do;
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you!

And Prince can do the honors:

Dorothy was a waitress on the promenade
She worked the night shift
Dishwater blonde, tall and fine
She got a lot of tips
Well, earlier I'd been talkin' stuff
In a violent room
Fighting with lovers past
I needed someone with a quicker wit than mine
Dorothy was fast
Well, I ordered - "Yeah, let me get a fruit cocktail, I ain't 2 hungry"
Dorothy laughed
She said "Sounds like a real man 2 me"
Kinda cute, U wanna take a bath?
I said "Cool, but I'm leaving my pants on"
"Cuz I'm kind of going with someone"
She said "Sounds like a real man 2 me"
"Mind if I turn on the radio?"
"Oh, my favorite song" she said
And it was Joni singing "Help me I think I'm falling"
The phone rang and she said
"Whoever's calling can't be as cute as U"
Right then I knew I was through
(Dorothy Parker was cool)

So Veddy Veddy Effed.

Found out the race I'm stuck in two weeks from now goes for three of its 13 miles along rocks high above the Potomac. Scenic!

Been out of town and out of inspiration. Not out of work, though. Almost called a client an a-hole today, but didn't fall over that cliff.

Anyone got a more pleasurable cliff to fall over?

Worthy of a Follow-Up Article in the Metro Section

Wrote this last year as part of the disaster poem series. There was indeed a follow-up article on the Brentwood anthrax deaths the other day, in the Metro section--on the front, not in the inside rail. The Postal Service denied the request of the wife of one of the victims, also a postal worker, to transfer to a different facility after the incident.

The Deaths of Two Workers at the Brentwood Postal Facility, Washington, DC

It’s not the first time white powder
Shut things down around here.
Or the first time it killed, either.
From horse to green to rock it went;
The dealers circled this island
For decades. A postal job
Is supposed to be one way out.
You do your best to steer clear,
Just like they tell you, keep your
Head down, hold your head up,
Keep your nose clean, but damned
If they didn’t find a way to bring that poison
Right in the front door.
And they even got us to carry it.

Try telling anyone around here
That it wasn’t made by the government.
Try telling us that a conservative
Treatment policy was wise.
We know some of them got the cure
Before they even got the disease.
Everyone knows there are plenty
Of pills in the White House. All colors.

Anthrax is one of the ancient ones,
Like rabies, tuberculosis, and
Syphilis.
Of course.
You should have known we’d bring that up.
The anthrax spores wait in the ground
Where an animal has died, and wait,
Until someone tries to plant, to build,
And then they jump out at the living.
The spores survive in Egyptian tombs;
An effective weapon of defense
To get our kings through to the afterlife
With their riches intact.

How long before they answer our question:
How long were they planning to wait?
For six days, the particles floated around us as we worked,
Worked their way into the folds of lungs, into
The clean line of a paper cut, into our laughter
And our greetings and our side-mouth comments,
Yes, and they came home with us to greet our children.
The spores survive so much that we can’t.
Spores have the advantages of being a lower life form—
No stress, no coughing, no bills to pay,
No fool for a boss. But all are equal underground.