Are You Down With This

Re-posted from Zo Blogs For Obama

May 17:  Has this been the longest five weeks of your life or what. Looking at my first post here, I can't believe the tests—test after test after test—faith has been through. Least my shreds of. I don't know about you, but I wobbled, I withdrew, I detached—I did all the things people do when they fear. When they care about something so deeply, have allowed themselves to dream—and watch that dream get shoved around. Dragged real low. Sullied, even, by some of the shabbiest human behaviors, when that is not where a dream is supposed to go.

Dreams are genuinely precious. Dreams are pure hope—pure child. And who, really, can bear to carry anything so vulnerable into this world. I don't suppose anyone can, or does … without some kind of faith.

And what if the dream remains unanswered? Hopes go unfulfilled?

I begin to see, I would have made a terrible black person like around the time of the Civil Rights marches. I begin to see the ways in which, as a white woman, I get to stay home.

Maybe this is what happens when someone inspired grabs hold of your heart and your hopes, especially after such a long time of national despair—I mean, torture, can America sink any lower—and says, “I'm asking you to believe in your own ability to bring about change.”

Someone like Barack, who ... despite all the crap politicians go through, despite the crap Black Americans go through ... somehow both the Obamas manage to exemplify faith. Somehow Barack has managed to stay on-path through some truly cringe-worthy trashings—times that make me wonder if the Republicans can possibly do worse—without giving up, without trashing back. Okay, he tried trashing back a time or two, but his heart wasn't in it. It was pretty damn feeble, as trash-backs go.

Here's the hard thing: he may lose. And of course, that's what it looked like, during this agonizing … has it really only been a month?

I still don't have any answers. I can see what the Obamas have that I do not, and that is working faith. One that carries hopes and dreams past the idea of wins and losses—and apparently, at the same time sustains your ability to go for it, in the present, as if it's a done deal.

Why, as a white woman, am I so invested. Why do I want to see a black President in the White House so much it scares me. Why is this the most exciting thing to come down the road since the Sixties …

In April, I had pure Obama-bliss. Looking back, boy, was that easy. Now we get down to it. To the uglies: racism, in all its profound discouragement,  the swift-boat thinking that has so gripped the American mind.  To hope anyway. To find one's way of working for Obama, toward the dream. Perhaps that's the key. Perhaps faith is the working-toward.

And of course, working-toward never stops.

Hating Hillary

Frank writes on Listics: “Stanley Fish fishes around the Jason Horowitz article in GQ, but neither man can quite bring himself to call the Hillary hating what it is. Jason? Stanley? It’s MISOGYNY ... I am puzzled about how the topic of “hating Hillary Clinton” could be addressed without either writer (or their editors) making a single call-out regarding the misogyny and sexism that underlie so much of the vituperative ad feminam critiques.”

Way to go, Frank! And here I thought the only man who could really "get" what it's like, being on the receiving end, would have to be black.

Like Chuck D, who elaborates so well on John Lennon's somewhat prescient, “Women are the niggers of the world.”

Yessah boss, we is. We's mighty careful what we do, where we go, how we talk.

Remember, however low a man, there is always some one lower than he. Whom, as he wishes, he may treat like dirt, ignore like dirt, take for granted like the dirt beneath his feet.

If Hillary is elected, this will be more interesting than Obama drawing racists out of the woodword—they already been drawn. But the weird silence of men on the ugliness of misogyny, the horror feminae ... know any guy who speaks up on that?

Besides Frank?

What Lies Beyond

I was thinking to list some Things I Resent. Which you're just dying to know. Aren't you.

Funny how the writer places her life at the center of human experience. But what hell if we didn't. It's supreme self-confidence—if by self we mean the writing voice—and Zo sure as fuck is a voice. Frankly, I thought she'd be more raunchy, more kickass—kind of a female rageboy.

But the nice thing about writing voices is that they are who they are, not who you want them to be. They have no neuroses, by definition, whereas you do. Which makes this the healthiest relationship most writers ever know. Sigh. Am I going all Alice Walker-ish? God I hope not. I loathe, in these New Age times, to use words like relationship. Like what I am about to say: this relationship does heal.

I think someone a little less squishy, less Oprah, already said as much: It'll kill you if you don't write it out. Maybe it was Alice. I'll pick on anybody.

One thing I do know: the brain's drive to heal, to recover—in the literal sense, as in finding what was lost—is relentless. Has far more energy than I. Exhausting. What I could do vs. what I do do. A horrifying ratio. Not that I'm judging or anything.

But perhaps this is just another example of What Is The Case. The thoughts being limitless, whereas we are small, flawed and hampered—a.k.a. human.

Like what if you were born with an enormous gift for the dance, broke both legs which mended badly, and found little call for however-talented professional stumblers. Art is funny that way.

What was the subject. Oh, yes. Just this teensy, weensy observation: The web is more than business.

Imagine, if you can, a world without professional bloggers, a term the first time I heard was good for a hoot. Back in the day, maybe six, seven years ago—I don't know, don't ask me about time—you found something in the blackness like Catherine's work (link to come) and were astounded. Now Catherine cannot shine, cannot stagger with her work the way she did then, because Tech is Crunching up the web. Thousands and thousands of little pac-men, operating under the always-distasteful assumption there's no one out there but them.

Never mind, for the moment, that PodTech is going under—and what a shocker that is. There seem to be any number of people who, so far as I can tell, really don't do anything at all. I've searched in vain for what it is they present in in all those Presentations, for which one simply must fly to Europe tomorrow, oh drat. Though I gather, it is often in order present the (really complex) idea of blogging to, shudder, corporations.

My, that was refreshing; a dip in self-pity always is. But have you noticed, the more cleanly you slice the personal, the more you speak to the universal, to the larger life we all lead. If there is one thing the writer banks upon, it is this strange truth that the small is also the unimaginably enormous. Like a pea rolling around inside the Hindenberg—and oh my god, what a way of travel that was. Take your trips to Europe over several days of strolling the promenade deck and peering down at the ocean from a thousand feet. No, there's not going to be any explosion. Just, the personal is the political. (Like that? I just made it up.)

And the politics that result from this awful confluence of professional wing-nuts and the corporation? Teh Suxxor.

Hell-o, TechDirt, you ain't the whole web, you and your kind. I'm thinking, “Take Back The Blogs.” A new movement. Viral as all hell.

What a radical notion. Do something, midst consumer-nation, for absolutely free. Refuse to be (shudder #2) monetized. Lend weight to the idea of the real. To the life that lies beyond Adsense.

Techdirt: “Ultimately, the most meaningful measure of a site or service is its profitability, which, unlike page views or time spent, isn't so easily gamed.”

Steaming. When my father was a boy, those piles were called Road Apples.

The Rain In July

Doug posts: "I got up this morning to discover that it had rained during the night. Real rain, not just an exaggerated fog. I’m not sure I remember it ever raining in July in the Bay Area, so this is something pretty special. Nice for my garden too, and the cats had gotten really dusty so this has cleaned them right up."

Au contraire, mon ami. If you had the weather engraved into your soul such as only an unhappy woman stuck in the boonies will have, forever after, you'd know it always rains once in July. I kid Doug, he works here, taking care of such house and grounds as there are. We both live in Berkeley ... but the country town of which I write isn't far away, maybe sixty miles ...

In time, however, and in the lumpy bag of space that time drags along behind, rough edges becoming smooth, harsh lines gently blurring ...Oh, dear, we are slipping into novel time ... where it is long ago but not so very far away after all ...

(from The Last Time Anyone Was Happy)

By July, the buildings and roofs and fields and even hearts and hopes had so thoroughly shrunken and dried in the heat— as if we were all some ghostly extension of the prune industry, only it was the sun and the air which dried us, daily, at high temperature, never mind that it felt as hot as the prune driers when they ran—that any thought of rain, the soaking, flooding winter rainstorms, the river cresting at 41 feet, had long since been driven from the feeble collective unconscious of Venada.

Until the July thunderstorm. There always was one, and it always came as a surprise, people saying We don't have thunderstorms! which we mostly did not, and It doesn't rain in summer, which it always did, at least once. And there was so much work, in those days, to farm life, to summer. Keeping prune orchards watered and your workers from disappearing after their first paycheck. Dragging out rusty prune harvest equipment with the prayer that it last another year.

In town, the businesses around the plaza were quiet, which made Mama's tour the more delightful,when their ceilings began to leak. And leak they would. The Bank of America building with its columns in front, its certain undeniable grandeur, set out as homely a collection of buckets and pans as anyone, the redwood planking of their high, vaulted ceiling especially prone to shrinkage in the heat. Plink, plonk. She watched for a while in fascination. We had to make a thorough tour of the plaza, that her inspection might be complete. Not that I blame her. Attractions, then, were simpler, both more enjoyable and hellishly sparse. Boredom so integral to country life that people made no bones about the least excitement. I know Mama's pleasure in these things reached, touched levels that may no longer exist, in the modern heart.

Mama knew we were good for at minimum one colossal thunderstorm per summer; her deepest pleasure came in watching the spectacle from the safety of her high old bed, where I would climb up beside her—after having unplugged, as per ordered, every cord from every socket, house and barn, her excuse for sending a child nothing more than that handy enfeeblement that appeared on demand and was otherwise forgot.

The Electric—her name for the beast that lived within our walls, I had brought home a chart in third grade that explained it, which she admired, tacked up and ignored—taken care of, we settled in the darkness, surveying from our perch if not the entire universe, then certainly all relevant parts. I hardly knew what fear was, in those days; it disappeared in the company of that old woman. Who not old, to me, not at all. Had no age. For all I knew, that's what a mother was, and so it is that I remain linked to Mama's reactions and Mama's beliefs. Her amusement when everyone else forgot: it always rains once, in summer.

Half The Time

(fiction notes)

... half the time i don’t know whether to cry because it is so beautiful, so bittersweet that life is short, that it is so often wasted if not by your own profligate self then by someone who feels the necessity to take something from you. a piece of your birthright, something he clearly regards as precious and valuable else he would not bother to steal, now, would he.

... or because it is so painful. painful to be old, aware there are no second lives ahead of me, no second youths where i might enjoy a normal marriage with a normal person, any normal happiness of home life. no. that opportunity was stolen by someone who—why is it always this way—did not, could not profit from this theft, except insofar as his delusional thinking allowed ...

... half the time, the crying doesn’t know either, the two aspects of this feeling so close, so very close, so barely divided, i wonder that any of us knows. i wonder that anyone dares really love. for to do so is to spit in the eye of mortality, yes? yes. a kind of thievery of its own, but of a redeemed sort .... redeemable in the currency of the genuine happiness that lights the human heart ...

The Churn

(Fiction) ... It wasn't for many years that I got even a hint of a grip on Alec's issue with work. First, we start with the assumption that I am a sponge, a freeloader, then we move on from there. That was the current that ran below everything, a resentment, a form of hatred that I certainly sensed, and from the start ... yet what desperate young woman can afford the truth. I wanted to get married because that is what I knew to do, I needed help with my dear little children, I had no money ... and I suppose the truth is that in Alec, in his hatred, I was given yet another crummy gift. Why me, oh Lord, which is exactly the sort of plea that goes unanswered.

Because the real question is, why Alec.

Why men.

Why the hatred and no end of punishment to women in need.

Now that we know of some of the nastier attitudes of the really entrenched, okay, there's a tiny hue and cry. Perhaps it is not quite the thing, this stoning to death of the woman fucked out of wedlock. Bury her upright in a pit and batter her about the head. On the other hand, as Alec used to so cheerfully say, Better you than me.

Had I but known it, every hateful thing Alec said was a direct pipeline from ancient tribal feuds. The kind of hatred baked, after eons under the sun, into a shrivelled, bitter lump that once eaten, sits there in the gut, neither regurgitated nor shat. Churning. Churning like his old man, churning like Alec. Churning but stuck. Churning without hope of removal of the indigestible truth of their lives ...

So they strike out. Which relieves exactly nothing. Perhaps only aggravates the churn.

And women are so used to it, I am so used to it, tell me, does it not seem normal? This ... cycle of buildup and release? Don't we pity the poor souls, having no better way? Yes, we do. Pity which has no bearing on the fact, we are maimed. Pity, genuine pity, will get you killed. Hold up a sign, go around, “I feel for you.” See how long—with someone like Alec—see how long you last.

Hell For The Dictionary

You know what, fuck the word dysfunctional. It splatters the pages of Amazon reviews like so many deer turds, stripped of its meaning by vast and shallow overuse, primarily by people whose most loving descriptions are of themselves, deployed via the hidden (yeah, right) mechanics of projection.

Jesus. And the mind delivers itself of another little thought-packet of rage slash humor slash truth slash hell, something bigger than I ever knew. In fact, a whole lot of the sentences that languish in Blogger Drafts forever, going back, what, three, four years now—so shoot me, I cannot subtract in my head, there must be bigger human flaws but none that immediately come to mind ...

Well, revenge is sweet. Living well is the best revenge—that and skewering fools like so many chunks of flank steak per kebab. Never pointless. Never empty calories. This is the good stuff, the stuff by which we live in this stinking sea of crassness, atop which float so many islands of beauty and grace ... Floating islands, made of vegetation, of land and sea all richly matted together yet rooted nowhere, their own little worlds. And so is the soul is, if it is to live.

And the animal life, upon those islands, and the fish that swim beneath them, and all manner of good things ... Isn't that the most painful truth of all?

Well, which is it? Are you going to be among those who trash this life, in the face of its fragility—one stingray barb, two inches, three minutes away from death—or are you going to be a stand-up kind of guy?

Well? Are you?


Rest in Peace, Steve Irwin.

Pastor Becky

Well, first place, any church camp for teens run by an overweight person who goes by her first name, that stinks to high hell of psychological problems we don't even want to think about. Do we.

Of course she wears glasses. And curly hair most all cut off. Can't you take nothin for granted?

So these kids, their hormones are buzzin and pretty soon she's got them yappin like dogs, weeping for Christ and George W. Bush, who almost overlap, both bein' in the Pantheon, you see. Pastor Becky's got her eye on a spot for herself, but it don't do to move too fast. How many souls do you s'pose you have to save before you can sit up there with Christ?

When Pastor Becky thinks about very large numbers, she has to take a extra Ativan. Doctor says so. And the headaches from the yappin' you just would not believe. Sometimes Pastor Becky lets herself be weak and dwell upon her years behind the cosmetics counter, where is was so damn quiet and the most she had to puzzle over was mascara, brush or wand. Oh here, she sometimes thought, take the wand you old bag and go home—but seldom, because she wasn't being tested for the Lord, in those days.

Not like this. For one thing, sex. Pastor Becky is certain that at least eight of her campers are humpin' like bunnies and she wishes to heck she had hired more Juniors for Jesus. Zip! Zip! Zip! She couldn't very well unzip every sleeping bag herself now could she. Not and get a good night's sleep. Besides which, it made Pastor Becky remember highschool—and what she wanted more than anything else, right now, was to forget her past, forget there is even such a thing as the future, and most of all forget she was stuck for life in that body, and wouldn't ever be Pure Spirit.

Does the Spirit appreciate Ativan? She chomped another one down ...

link: inspiration for this little fictive dream

Se Habla Nirvana?

(Just ignore the Spanish, okay? We are not here to judge the voice, merely to record.)

Rebecca Traister in Salon: “Psychologist Steven Hayes says the American obsession with feeling good is preventing us from living good—and that living life to the fullest means a lot of pain.”

Quite an eye-grabber. So it turns out this ... this guy has published this book, and I am like, Whoa! You couldn't have done this a teensy bit sooner? Like, I had to slog through all those years by myself?

Alright, not entirely true. But I was forced to learn—alright, dragged kicking and screaming—by that most god-awful of qualities, an unrelentingly painful (is that a word? it is now) condition. Driven to find a better inner life, only it felt whole lot more like driven crazy, so I also had to find a way to bless that.

(Honestly, is there no end to this woman's nobility.)

Hayes: “ ... values require definitions, because there's not a lot in the culture about values. But it's not just a matter of redefinition, it's about changing the game. The natural game most of us are in is how to feel good. That's not the same thing as how to live good.”

I ask you. Do you think this is fair? That Hayes should be Amazon number seventy-three and climbing, while someone too whipped to send off her book because she has already lived his fucking book ...Gee, this kind of thing gets unseemly real quick, doesn't it.

Rebecca Traister is one of the terrific writers at Salon, and Tim Grieves, and Gary Kamiya, don't get me started on Gary Kamiya.

I must admit, this guy Hayes gets impressively bizzy: Just Do It You Big Sissy. Destroyer of lives.

But the path that feels in truth like you have a good life, like you are good. Which is, after all, all anyone wants. (It is? He hasn't met—never mind.) There is this little tiny fork in the mind, exactly like my grandson's Thomas the Tank, where the little train of thought can travel down the bitch-funny track, i.e. love, or the bitch-screw-you track, (which upsets the stomach) depending on how the switch is set.

What I've found is that easing back, in some way that is hard to describe, allows the switches to set themselves on, really, the more happy-making path.

Oh, wait. Maybe this is what Hayes means, duh. When he writes of our pain and crap. That instead of JDIYBS and blowing it off by hurting someone else, someone smaller, one can “carry all that forward down a path that that is neither indulgence nor suppression.”

(And I don't want to hear from any Middle Way know-it-alls, okay? Let the man speak.)

(Note to self: Will you shut up.)

“What they tell me are things like, ‘I want to contribute to other people’ and ‘I want to be a loving person.’ By saying it, you're connecting to it. But it's hard. Because [once you acknowledge it] you know it is not bullshit, and that it's not something you can ever stop doing. If you say that your values are being a loving person, do you ever get to say, ‘That's done!’ No. A value is like a direction, like going west. No matter how far west you go, you can still keep going west.”

I'm glad he mentioned that part. The icky, dark side of right life: it never ends. However. This is the single most powerful illusion, the maya that lays like a filmy, choking veil over all of life. I don't know why it has to be this way, why we just can't have life sweet and pure, why it is not simply ours, at birth.

Why, instead, we are given this task, which is to somehow find a way, in the course of life, to penetrate the illusory meaning of ... well, of task itself. To find, at the price of health and years, the real meaning of the work.

All I can tell you is, I wouldn't have designed it that way.

But, as per usual, nobody asked me.

String Theory

Margaret Cho “I don't know where sorrow is anymore . . .”

Such a lovely, haunting line, makes a person want to draw out the novel behind those words. Oh, yeah, that's what it's like, you hear a title—in the world, in your head—and if you can catch the end of that string—not easy—and have learned the patient art of holding—pulling—it's rather like giving birth, in that you are an essential part of the process but not exactly in control. It's a whole lot like a birth. I had to deliver a baby alpaca once when her exceptionally dimwitted mother kept spinning around to see what in god's name was happening to her behind, the feeb. Fortunately she was a smallish animal—alpaca are not as large as llamas, nor do they spit as much. In fact, they reminded me, in style and personality, of nothing so much as cats.

So I had to brace her and work with the incredible power of the contraction. She certainly needed help—but you can only help in rhythm to the contractions. Which are expulsions. A series of expulsions, and she's whirling around, and somehow I got the baby out and the cord cut. But I'll tell you, if you've never been on the other end of a birth, you haven't touched the Power. And when you do, you will know forever that you have touched something bigger than words can tell. Are supposed to tell. The really fine things remain nameless.

We tied the cord with a piece of string. In two places, and cut it between. I seemed to be the only person involved who wasn't afraid. Afraid? Hell, been through it twice myself. I held still.

Thanks, Ronnie!

Now I could have this all wrong—though offhand, I don't recall that ever happening—but it sure looks like normal people will never again be able to afford a second home, a cabin in the woods, a pile of dirt, at Tahoe. The Rich have descended, that swarm of wealthy locusts, and the price for even a pile of dirt, well, dream on. The thing about being one of the Not-Rich is, you cannot imagine how far money goes, its vastness all out of proportion to human life. Which Karl Marx said, but no, you wouldn't listen. And now you can drive around the lake, but don't touch. None of it will ever be yours. Maybe a motel room in Manteca. Those'll be the family memories.

Make no mistake, when The Rich buy up the land and homes where ordinary people used to live and play, they buy up great chunks of your experience. Your past and your potential future. They make your life smaller, more guarded, more fretful. And you pay taxes so they can! Is this a great country or what!

I think we all know capitalism sucks, in theory. But did you ever imagine that its truth would arrive on your doorstep, come into your house, sit down and change the channel this way?

Anyone, any single being among the Not-Rich who votes Republican ought to have his or her head extensively and professionally examined. It's unfortunate that the political parties are divided quite so sharply, but there you are. You could drive up to Tahoe and directly hand the money to a Rich Person. Same thing, though I think they'd prefer the indirect route.

The valley I lived in for twenty years, in a county north of San Francisco, used to be so much further away. Folks there were safe to be as backwards and out of step as they liked. Which was, believe me, a much easier life. Chasing after style is a neverending source of exhaustion and bad mood. All in all, the Rich are a testy lot, which is why they put many pictures in the paper looking jolly.

In time, as life and driving speeded up, even country people wanted, as people will, more. And the Eighties gave it to them. If you went into the Eighties with a little money, any fool could come out with a whole huge lot. There were tax loopholes you could drive a Mercedes through. Fleets of Mercedes Benz. And then some wise-ass farmer tore out his prune orchard—okay, maybe there wasn't a driving demand for prunes—and planted the first fateful vineyard.

Now there is a jet airport in that valley—for private jets—and I don't know where all the families went who had farmed that land for generations. I don't want to know—I left. The town square is four sides of boutique—christ, the town is boutique.

You have to buy stylish thing things.

You have to keep on buying them.

Those are the two main rules.

Though there are an awful lot of rules to being Rich, which is what makes it such a tiring life. But this one is central to the whole endeavor: We shall never think or speak of the family we displaced.

And really, why should they.

The sense of entitlement that comes with money ... is a wonderment. Money begets the sense of entitlement to more money, pretty soon those with less begin to look like so many chickens, there for the plucking, the chickens of course come to think of themselves as a bunch of dumb clucks—I mean, look, if you can buy and sell me, I must be worth shit. As Marx so famously said.

Viva la revolucion? Not gonna happen. Better the dwindling middle class get down on its knees and pray the economy keeps trickling on down.

My Kind of Guy

Lately, it's love that cuts me like a knife.

It's still a slice. Its sudden launch, from within the body—from the stores of memory, from the firings of both heart and brain—is still as much of a surprise. Love hurts, in surprisingly grief-like ways. How to discern, when the heart pores over. When experience (this is my theory) is just too large to bear. The psyche sorts—so Psyche-like—by discarding, expressing, overflowing. I just don't know how you men decide what to keep. I don't know how you manage to live so without living, but I suspect this is at once what it is to be a woman, and the reason that you hate us. The reason, for example, that feminism has become just an increasingly real-seeming imitation of what we're not: invulnerable. Able to carry on. No matter what.

No, correct that: we carry on like hellfire. We just show our pain. Not a stiff upper lip in the house, and what you don't get is that this is endurance, this is our living of this life. I don't care if you do it your way, I depend on your doing it your way. What I would like to dispense with is the idea that when you are dealing with someone, anyone, like me, you are dealing with someone weak.

Check this out: the notion that it is weak to be weak. When did this utter crap-thought arrive? When did testosterone get so out of hand that it became the only thing? It's a boy's game. I point this out ot to condemn, but to redeem what has been trashed. To simply tell the truth. 'Cause I sure as hell know what happened to me, and I do invite anyone to step right up and tell me I deserved it. Earned it. Was karmically due.

It's all your bloody fear of death, and for what. You're going to die anyway, wouldn't it make the most sense to behave with kindness and sense now?

He who owns the most toys, wins—the presidency, no doubt, and a great many other things that ultimately control the winner's life.

I swear I am going to single-handedly bring about the return of Jesus, the guy who stood up for, honored saw the whole point of weak, and he—excuse me, He—fuck it, he—oooh, is he going to kick some ass.

The Formerly Hot, v.1

Yes my drafts are interesting. In fact I cannot think of a better, more native use for blogging than following a writer through her thinking–writing process. Let me put that a tad more honestly: a writer trying manfully (womanfully? no way) to follow her thinking, as, one foot out the door, it barely stops to wave bye.

I have not yet accepted that I will not live long enough to do justice to a piffle of these thoughts. Of all that I could do, were I as great as they, as that which would like to think through me, were I not such a weak and easily distracted instrument. Oh go find another fucking human, then, if you're so fed up with me. Ha. Stuck with this manifestation, aren't you.

You know, it's not so much that we disappoint ourselves or each other, that's not the real cloud we live under, not the real stinking-shit aspect of time, that rat-bastard.

It's that life works against us. Life and time. We disappoint that which would be. The great ineffable. Call it what you will, let me know when you live up to it, 'k? I don't think so. My, what kindness we would show other human beings, what boundless room for empathy, were we all delivered, en masse, of our potential.

The blessing, the curse, of being human. It's a fucker, alright. I, for one, haven't even accepted that I was born in a body, which a good three-quarters of the time feels so lousy that I am sick to death of these constant reminders that it's sojourn on the planet is going to be so over.


I think that's enough for today. I know it is for me. You don't think I knew what I was going to write, do you? Hell, no. This shit'll turn round and bite you on the ass. Meaning will. It's like letting the leash out on a slightly feral dog: you do it for the excitement, but keep an eye on that puppy. That's all. I'm not saying, don't go. I'm saying, like sex, it's the only way to go. Being a part of what is still, in truth, wild.

I'm just saying, Give some thought to—nah, fuck preparation. Just, keep the bandaids handy. The tourniquet.

Fish Knives

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages.

While quoting Dave Barry is always an exercise in sheer comic bliss, here he has put his finger on something eternal, something existential, something irritatingly true.

And that is, other people are so terribly, awfully ... other.

For one thing, they understand the gibberish with which they speak to one another. Whereas I, a proper English-speaking person, fail to see any difference between their babblage—however mellifluous (en Francais) or, as is the case far more frequently, just plain strange—and the language my sister and I made up on the spot, on long boring car rides. Complete with hand gestures. Never understanding, of course, a word that was said.

Let's face it, the sheer ordinariness of a Foreign language, in the life of a Foreign people, presents one of those obstacles of Otherness that most people prefer to avoid.

If they can. When I was a child, my father thought to teach me algebra by covering paper after paper with hieroglyphic-like equations, or formulae, or whatever the hell they were. I recognized the equal signs. That was about it. He understands this crap. I don't.

If it can't be intuited—I say the hell with it.