200. POET BEATINGS AND FIGHTING INJUSTICE

From the Archives

(March 2006) Consider for a moment the irony of the fact that Yahoo!’s lead headline today is The Trumps choose a name for their baby boy!

But only one major US paper has reported the news that Iranian security forces brutally attacked a group of women observing International Women’s Day.

These feminists organized under a platform of peace to support basic human rights, yet were ambushed by truckloads of state-authorized thugs who dumped garbage on them, kicked them and beat them with batons.

Victims include the famous (and elderly and nearly blind) poet Simin Behbehani, who says that the purpose of her poetry is to fight injustice.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali as-Sistani issued a death fatwa against queers and is calling for us to be killed in the “worst, most severe way.”

This fatwa makes Medea want to grab her handy-dandy Sears and Roebuck vise grips and wrench the grand(iose) ayatollah’s scrotum about in the worst, most severe way.

SANG IN SHOWER: No, but I conditioned my frizzy hair

READING: Hiss and Tell’s latest entry (singing the praises of large breasts)

LISTENING TO: Kasey Chambers’ “Falling Into You”

BEST OF SPAM: Want your love back? (Well, I’m SURE I’d be asking a random e-mailer for it if I did)

199. A NEW DARK AGES, OR, REMEMBERING AWE

From the Archives

(Monday • 6 March 2006) I’m thinking about faith.

Many of my progressive Catholic friends miss the rituals and mysticism of their faith but cannot in good conscience participate in what they describe as a repressive and greedy organization. These days, their evolving spiritual practices include worshipping the moon or Spiderwoman weaving this big world. Others have joined Unitarian Universalist fellowships. And others use energy work and meditation to fill the void.

I once worked with a group of radical Catholic activists who rented whole floors of apartment buildings that we used as stealth offices. Priests’ or nuns’ bedrooms were off limits, but everyone otherwise walked freely between apartments, setting up women’s pottery collectives in Nicaragua; acquiring, organizing, and delivering humanitarian aid to Central America; writing inclusive non-hierarchical lectionaries and responsorial psalms; working to end the death penalty and to free Mumia; working to include women in the distribution of holy sacraments; editing and creating an inclusive non-hierarchical Bible; thwarting the anti-choice movement and the many sexist bishops who oppose women’s equality.

The founders of this organization—a Jesuit priest and nun—have since been excommunicated, but their work goes on.

One of the many things I learned as we ate our hummus and bean sprout sandwiches was that the now rabidly anti-choice Catholic church actually allowed abortions until the late 1800s, when the pope conveniently declared abortion an excommunicable offense just as France’s diminishing birth rates threatened its ability to maintain a strong army.

(Not coincidentally, the emperor declared the pope infallible soon after this decree.)

Matthew Fox, another radical Catholic, said

There are two Christianities in our midst. One worships a punitive father and seeks obedience at all costs. It is patriarchal, demonizes woman, the earth, science, gays, lesbians and deep thought. It builds on fear and it supports empire-builders. Its theology includes a Punitive Father in the Sky and teaches original sin.

The other Christianity recognizes the Original Blessing that all beings derive from. We recognize awe, not sin, not guilt, as the starting point of true religion. We recognize a Divinity who is source of all things and is as much mother as father, as much female as male. We honor creation and diversity. When God created everything, He pronounced it all good. We are here to make love to life. Yes, we are here to make love to life… Delight in creation and take your dreams into our politics and institutions….

We live in the midst of a suicidal economy, motivated by love of money. We have reached a dead end. What we need to turn it around are hearts in love with life. How do we do it? We first must move from domination to partnership and we begin by educating our young in awe and wonder, not how to take tests. Awe leads to reverence which leads to gratitude which will reinvent our species. This is the task of our generation, to regain awe. The 3 R’s need to be balanced by the 10 C’s; contemplation, creativity, chaos, compassion, courage, critical consciousness, community, celebration, ceremony and character.

I don’t recognize a divinity as the source of all things but do recognize that it is possible that we, plants and animals and people alike, could make up a larger soul (but not in an icky Borg way).

And we certainly make up boocoodles of matter and antimatter.

I also favor the notion of honoring creation and diversity, and appreciate the notion of being here to make love to life and delight in creation and take our dreams into our politics and institutions.

As Barbara Kingsolver says,

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what to hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it. Elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers or the destroyed. That's about it. Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallways and touching the walls on both sides.

LISTENING TO: Ferron (Beware you sagging diplomats for you will not hear one gun, and though oceans lie between us, we will not be undone. And it won't take long . . .)
READING: Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes
BEST-OF SPAM: A cure for every disease!

198. I GOT THOSE MARKETED CRAVINGS AND BODY-IMAGE BLUES

From the Archives

(March 2006) I went to a diva competition last night that was a real hoot.

The post-performance gathering was also quite illuminating.

See, several contestants were overweight by today’s standards, so, as soon as they left the post-performance party, the petty remarks began:

Did you see those flabby arms? Someone should have told her to dance with those ham hocks covered.

and

How many babies do you reckon she’s had anyway? If you can’t lose the tummy, honey, at least hide it with a girdle.

and

Good lord! Did you catch a glimpse of those thunder thighs?

(Thighs that were, interestingly enough, primarily on gorgeous African-American and Latina contestants.)

I am relatively fit, yet understand that devotees of our culture’s diet, exercise, fashion, beauty, cosmetic, and plastic-surgery industries can have severely limited images of beauty and health.

And they really don’t like it when audiences crown a diva who doesn’t conform to the narrow standards of beauty these industries promote.

In fact, judging from last night’s behavior, I’d say this makes the scrawny girls downright pissed.

Don’t you wonder why, as a culture, we won’t acknowledge the reality that weight loss, for most of us, does not generally translate into improved chances of survival?

(Newsflash: being skinny does not ensure happiness either, but the pursuit of it can certainly harm people.)

Most of the “fat” divas weren’t really even fat, but were instead what my grandmother called “pleasantly plump”—maybe a size 14.

(You know, like Marilyn Monroe.)

So I’m wondering why we as a culture need to make fun of/marginalize/look with disgust upon moderately overweight people.

Why do we continue to believe that scrawny people are healthier when evidence confirms that being moderately fat by today’s standards isn't even unfit (and it looks a whole lot better on a woman IMHO)?

And let’s remember what the appearance industries don’t want us to acknowledge: 30 thousand Americans die annually from being underweight, in part because we equate with unworthiness.

Here’s some alarming data from Courtney E. Martin’s soon-to-be-published Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters:

In 1995, 34 percent of high school-aged girls in the US thought they were overweight but, today, 90 percent do.

To make matters worse, a survey of contemporary American parents confirmed that 1 in 10 would abort their child if they found out that he or she had a genetic tendency to be fat.

(READ THAT AGAIN. Slowly.)

Commercials feed us the lie that overweight people possess weak character and magazines feed us the lie that normal weight people are fat.

So I’m curious: Do you find it alarming that a recent Ellegirl magazine’s poll of 10 thousand readers found that 30 percent said they would rather be thin than healthy?

Or that over half the young women between the ages of 18 and 25 would prefer to be run over by a truck than to be fat?

No mention is made of the type of appearance-related articles and ads that run in this fashion magazine, but let’s remember that the teenage group most likely to consider or attempt suicide is girls who worry that they are overweight.

My hunch is that most of them measure themselves against models such as the ones found in the pages of Ellegirl too and find themselves wanting.

What’s particularly sad to me is that these girls feel worthless because of their appearance, when their substance, their souls (if you will) are so much more important.

I have rarely measured out my activity in tedious little TS Eliot coffee spoons and did not grow up reading magazines that encourage me to believe that I am inferior and ugly simply because I reject their products and diets and lies.

My friends would tell you that I have a healthy ego despite this obvious lack of social conformity (in between my bouts of insecurity and shyness anyway) and that I am tall, dark and handsome, and I guess what I'm saying is that I feel very fortunate because I've never felt compelled to focus much on what it feels like to present as ugly.

Still, I’m a dyke and one reality of being a dyke is that most of us wind up rejecting our parents’/church’s/peers’/cultures’ ideals in order to live life authentically.

Most of us also present as different, as Other—and, in my case, as more masculine than my mainstream sistuhs(and definitely more cocky).

So yeah, I guess I do have some experience in this arena, despite the fact that I have mostly lived in the interior with little interest in conforming.

Meanwhile, where's the valid nutritional information that is not driven by sales and that does not reject the perfect creature that I know I am? (-;

Where's the information driven by data, not cultural bias?

Maybe I'm just in denial but, to me, a healthy life style does not entail punishing myself or focusing on what I lack, but instead focuses on living in a manner that enables me to be as healthy as possible, both spiritually and physically.

As J. Eric Oliver says in Fat Politics: The Real Story behind America’s Obesity Epidemic, “equating weight loss, instead of life style changes, with improved health is like saying ‘whiter teeth produced by the elimination of smoking reduces the incidence of lung cancer.’”

Okay, I’ll end with the entire quote:

It is not fat itself that is unhealthy, but our hypocritical attitudes and compulsive behaviors that are. We drive two blocks to the grocery store and then spend 20 minutes circling the parking lot so we can get a close spot. Once inside we load up our carts with low-fat, microwave meals and diet shakes filled with artificial everything. In the checkout line, we read about the latest fitness trend in Men's Health or Self, then get back into our cars, drive the two blocks home, and sit in front of the television all night eating Pizza Hut while drinking a liter of Diet Coke. We go to bed late, wake up early, head to work—in our cars, of course—where we will spend the next eight hours stationary and bored. Rinse. Repeat.

The messages are coming in loud and clear, and they are riddled with disempowering dichotomies—all or nothing, feast or famine, disgustingly fat or virtuously thin, deeply flawed or triumphantly perfect. There is no talk of what Buddhists describe as ’the middle path,’ no discussion of the pleasure of walking, eating homemade food, slowing down. There is no permission to say ‘no’ sometimes and ‘yes’ sometimes, and have those no's and yeses be simple answers, insignificant scores on a Scrabble board, representative of nothing more than a mood. Instead our yeses and no's signify our desirability, our life expectancy, our self-worth.

And that’s bullshit. Because, as Martin says, ‘It is not fat itself that is unhealthy, but our hypocritical attitudes and compulsive behaviors that are.”

197. CASUAL AND MEANINGLESS PRODUCTS

From the Archives

(March 2006) As some readers know, I love the Pacific NW and would like to retire to Whidbey Island or thereabouts and spend the rest of my days kayaking in Lake Washington’s bird sanctuaries (where I will photograph and sketch birds) and off Vancouver (where I will cavort with the killer whales pods) and at Ebey’s Landing (where I will paint watercolors and watch birds).

I’d like to write on the deck of my tiny cottage and take long ferry rides and walk the wind-swept beaches while admiring the Olympic mountain range, then drive to Hurricane Ridge with my windows down and finally make use of my copy of How to Make Totem Poles (but I will never never ever kayak through the busy locks again as the huge boats nearly wash me into the walls).

Here’s something I don’t like about Seattle though: The Center for Science and Culture at the Discover Institute (which may sound like an organization that uses the scientific method to study and understand the world, but it’s really a bunch of so-called researchers who advocate the theory of intelligent design) is there.

(And I've already noted C-YA’s presence there.)

So, even though the Seahawks finally reached the SuperBowl (a game a coworker described as “they try to get more balls through the goalposts than the other team, right?”) and even though there’s all that water with mountains and fabulous sunsets and rain in one cool place, Seattle is nevertheless a little bit less appealing to me now.

The city's hosting the 14th Annual Women of Wisdom 2006 Conference (Return to the Well) though, and wow do I wish I could go to this crystal-squeezing feel-good event.

•

And speaking of evolution (heh) have you noticed that the Catholic church doesn’t promote the fact that Pope John Paul II said (in 1996) that evolution is “more than a hypothesis” ?

He qualified his statement though:

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense—an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection—is not.

Whereas the new homophobic pope Benedict said that humans “are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.”

And there you have it folks: two men in skirts who devoted their lives to scientific exploration in accordance with professionally established evidence-based methods of scientific inquiry have, in the typical voice of the (white male) expert, solved the vast mysteries of creation for us all.

Meanwhile Christianists recently coined the term “evolutionism” to categorize people who use the theory of evolution to refute what the Christianists call God’s hand in creation.

(Or was that a Martian’s hand? You can never be sure with their so-called Intelligent Design.)

Meanwhile, in the About Time category, a recent Supreme Court ruling said that Ashcroft’s Federal Department exceeded the proper bounds of its authority when it tried to undermine Oregon’s assisted-suicide law—or, as the Times says so well, the decision “rejected Mr. Ashcroft’s attempt to impose his religiously conservative ideology on a state whose voters had decided differently.”

Mastuh Ashcroft first tried to trump the election results with a federal law that was overturned. Then, as attorney general, he announced that the Controlled Substances Act granted him the authority to prevent doctors from prescribing lethal drugs for the purpose of suicide.

Clever little troll, isn’t he?

The current Bland Old Party is, when you think about it, amazing. Frist announces that he is capable of medically diagnosing a patient via video; Ashcroft announces that physician-assisted suicides are not a “legitimate medical purpose”; and Bush announces that he can wiretap anygawddamnbody he chooses because he is the commander-in-chief of the known universe.

(um that’s of the armed services, dude)

The GOP clearly believes that they, not doctors, can define the parameters of medical practice...

....Meanwhile, it is 78 degrees outside, so I am going to walk in the great outdoors now, where daffodils are suddenly popping out everywhere, and banish any images of Karl Rove from my skull.

Ciao.

196. PRESIDENT FOR LIFE

From the Archives

(February 2006) DC's City Paper used to call Marion Berry “Mayor for Life” before he got busted for crack cocaine.

If Bush & Co had moved forward with their plan to cancel the recent presidential election (citing the threat of a terrorist attack), as Newsweek reported, then the City Paper would have perhaps revived this phrase while kicking it up a few notches.

Yep, the White House and DOJ seriously considered cancelling the elections (no doubt before those computer programmers devised a way to change Kerry votes to Bush ones).

So, who knows, we could have had a president for life who raises the terror alert to high whenever someone protests his position on the throne.

•

Meanwhile, an Austrian court has sentenced a historian to three years in prison for espousing his belief that the Holocaust never existed.

That’s in Austria.

In the US, people like Dr. Paul Cameron—who was kicked out of the APA long ago for announcing manufactured and bigoted results—continues to spread their homophobic crap far and wide.

And politicians like Rick Santorum continue to pronounce Cameron’s fictions as fact.

Cameron is the one who broadcast the lie that gay men routinely insert hamsters into their rectums.

Research groups failed to find even a single queer who practices this sex act and Cameron was uable to back up his claim with evidence, yet Santorum et al. repeat this data as if it’s accurate.

They also repeat the rumor that queers die in their forties, which is a lie even when you factor in the AIDS epidemic.

And no. I don’t believe one should be jailed for espousing opinions, even when they’re misguided and hateful and ignorant.

The Klan had the right to their ignorant opinions and so does Dr. Cameron. I’m glad that thinking people challenge their lies and logic though and kick them out of societies that require e-v-i-d-e-n-c-e. . .

(and don’t you wish the press still had to offer fair and balanced news? Thanks a whole lot, Ronnie.)

Telling historians that they cannot explore controversial theories—even about horrific events such as the Holocaust—limits knowledge. And I believe that scholars should be free to pursue their theories.

That’s how we learn new things and expand our knowledge.

•

And now a quote.

The now busted Ralph Reed said the following to Christian teens:

We will never know how many marriages and lives were saved, or how many children were spared the consequences of compulsive gambling, because of our work to shut down casinos.

To quote Ecclesiastes, all things shall come to pass, Asshole.

•

Okay. I’ll close with this factoid. It’s 27 February 2006. On this date in 1991, President Bush the Older declared “Kuwait is liberated. Iraq’s army is defeated.”

Prescient, wasn’t he?

195. LITTLE PINK HOUSES FOR YOU AND ME

From the Archives

(February 2006) Sometimes I think I should just quit reading the news because stories such as this one leave me shaking my head in disbelief like the curmudgeon that I seem to have become, and then, instead of scribbling these tidbits into my journal as I once did, I wind up regurgitating this wild mix of random factoids into my blog like so much hip-hop news sampling.

My latest head-shaker? Well, there’s a Seattle group called C-YA (Catholic Youth Abstaining) that could come up with nothing better to do (since they’re abstaining from sex, natch), than to copy those idiots who object to “Happy Holidays” greeting cards and so launched a put-the-saint-back-in-Saint-Valentine’s-day campaign.

I though this story was a spoof at first because the group doesn’t provide any details about who their revered saint is or why we should consider him relevant to our lives, but then I went to their webpage and saw their floating discombobulated Jesus head that looks exactly like the Jesus that Southern Baptists used to print on their paper funeral fans and, well, knew it was legit.

I’m thinking maybe I should log onto some fundie websites and encourage them to protest this site, perahps by launching a put-the-body-back-on-the-bobbleheaded-Jesus campaign.

•

Meanwhile, the CIA has apparently gotten away with secretly removing over 55,000 pages from public access (even though they are required by law to report such removals to the Information Security Oversight Office.

Yup. Access to 9,500 documents was secretly revoked, depriving historians and the public of our nation’s history and of our cold hard facts.

These documents do not appear to contain sensitive information that a terrorist might use to harm our country either, but do demonstrate agency incompetence sometimes.

Example: a CIA assessment released just two weeks before 300,000 Chinese troops entered Korea states that Chinese intervention was "not probable."

That one’s classified now.

(Maybe they need a new category for documents that contain “bureaucratic sensitivities”?)

One odd twist to this scandal is that historians—let me guess, Bush will classify them as liberal historians—who have copies of these now-reclassified documents may now be in violation of the federal Espionage Act.

No big surprise but, now that it’s been caught red-handed, the administration is, in typical fashion, writing off the whole thing as a “bureaucratic quirk.”

You see, gullible citizens, these reclassified documents were never properly declassified (even though they were reviewed, stamped as declassified, given freely to researchers, and published), and so they remain classified (said the Grinch to Cindy Lou Who as he stuffed her Christmas tree up the impossibly small chimbly), which means that pulling these documents from public access now is not illegal at all.

Let me guess. They didn’t inhale either.

194. DILDOS, FRIENDSHIPS, AND AFFIRMATIONS, OR, THE DIFFICULT ORDINARINESS OF NOW

From the Archives

(February 2006) My bestgrrrl Lars says she knows that she’s a real Pisces because she is so clearly divided into two different people: one who believes she can do anything and another who is convinced that she is incapable of succeeding.

She wants to turn off the lack of confidence, or at least incorporate it into her work so that she can get something done.

So I know this is hokey, but I found a book of affirmations and thought I might send a shout out to her:

Empower me
to be a bold participant,
rather than a timid saint in waiting,
in the difficult ordinariness of now;
to exercise the authority of honesty;
rather than to defer to power,
or deceive to get it;
to influence someone for justice,
rather than impress anyone for gain;
and, by grace, to find treasures
of joy, of friendship, of peace
hidden in the fields of the daily
you give me to plow.
—Ted Loder

and

May my feet rest firmly on the ground
May my head touch the sky
May I see clearly
May I have the capacity to listen
May I be free to touch
May my words be true
May my heart and mind be open
May my hands be empty to fill the need
May my arms be open to others
May my gifts be revealed to me
So I may return that which has been given
Completing the great circle.
—the Terma Collective

Meanwhile, I discovered Susie Bright’s website and have been exploring it with, um, pleasure.

She’s advertising a book about the various fucking machines that people have created over the years.

Whee!

LISTENING TO: Here Comes President Kill Again (XTC)

193. WANT SOME TORTURE WITH THOSE CHEERIOS?, OR, THE GEOMETRY OF ATROCITY

From the Archives

(February 2006) I’ve been staring at the newest Abu Ghraib photographs.

(Yes, the ones that Bush & Co. tried so hard to keep under lock and key.)

The first batch was bad enough, but these are definitely worse. They also confirm that American soldiers beat at least one prisoner to death ... and for what? Loyalty to an administration that’s eager to eliminate anyone who challenges it?
Because they were just following orders, sir?

(But no John Wayne noble soldier bullshit can justify this one, fellas, so don’t even start in on It’s a Grand Ol’ Flag or that old following orders routine.)

What we have is lies on top of manufactured weapons on top of human blood smeared from one end of a holding cell to the other on top of white Muslim asses with bright red cigarette holes burned into them.

(Nothing to wave your stupid yellow ribbons about either, folks.)

So how many Americans do you figure are following what’s really going on at Abu Ghraib, at Gitmo?

It’s time we recognize the necessity of bearing witness to the atrocities that are happening in our time. With our tax dollars. In our name.

You know, I’m a writer and I value words, but I also know that reading a hundred descriptions of abuse did not have the same impact of my seeing one photograph of a real human being reduced to a battered collection of chipped teeth and vomit and feces stains and hematomas all wrapped up in swaths of plastic wrap (to better what? Stew him in his own blood?).

So let that image sink in while you eat your Cheerios, dear readers.

•

I downloaded some of the images and have been studying them the way I study Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians—in an effort to understand this geometry of atrocity.

I suppose these images are the twenty-first-century version of those black-and-white photos of cops and their dogs attacking nonviolent black protestors or that Vietnamese man who is one second away from getting his brains blown out by a soldier.

... So, yeah, back to my recovering-Seventh-Day-Adventist pal’s question regarding why anyone would voluntarily watch violence.

Here’s what I believe: Artists must walk into the fire with our souls bared and our eyes wide open and feed on the nightmares that are happening in our midst. And we must find a way to use these images—especially the horrific ones—in a manner that makes it impossible for people to hide inside their iPods and ignore what’s being done in their names.

•

Meanwhile, did anyone else note that this Outsource Everything administration contracted control of our ports to the Arabs?

•

And did you know that this past Sunday was EVOLUTION SUNDAY?

This little soire didn’t receive the publicity that Frist’s Creationist Sunday event garnered, but Evolution Sunday is part of the Clergy Letter Project—a religious response to fundamentalists’ insistence that real Christians must choose between modern science and their religion.

Turns out over 10,000 ministers disagree with Frist’s fundamentalism. They signed a letter stating that evolution is “a foundational scientific truth” and say that rejecting it “is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.”

They also said

We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.

The bad news is that most of the signatories are from mainline Protestant denominations, which are shrinking nearly as fast as evangelical fundie churches grow.

And here’s an interesting spin on a vote that actually endorses incorporating intelligent design into South Carolina classroom materials.

John Drake opened his AP article thusly:

COLUMBIA—The Education oversight Committee voted Monday to reject standards for high school biology that deal with teaching evolution and insisted the curriculum incorporate critical analysis.

Now I know you’re probably thinking his “critical analysis” involves evidence-based methodologies, but he’s actually referring to creationism.

And now I’ll end on a personal note.

My triathlete ex Tree just found out that she has a 69 percent chance of surviving for 5 years if she has only radiation treatment and an 81 percent chance of surviving for 5 years if she has chemo and radiation. (She elected for chemo, naturally.)

So please give yourself a breast exam. Today.
TAGS >

192. CHAMPIONS OF OBSCENITY

From the Archives

(February 2006) Norman Mailer once described himself as the

embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hardworking author, champion of obscenity ... amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter ... [who] had ... a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.

I drove all morning just to have lunch with a writer pal who fits much of this description but is decidedly NOT a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.

Tuscaloosa and I met at a Chapel Hill restaurant where racuous southern grrrls like us sometimes seek out flour-dredged ecstasy in between our healthy meals and we caught up over Mama Dip's sweet tea. Then I handed over the edits to her first draft of an excellent nonfiction piece and she handed over her comments to the newest draft of my novel.

Her essay is a real doozy of a piece, a thoughtful reflection on what happens to girls who are so damaged that they turn in on themselves.

I also reviewed her new book contract. And we decided that I really need to find a way to cut back on my academic demands so that I have some chance of giving some more readings with her.

(Plus, damn it, I am tired of being a thank you in another writer’s acknowledgments when what I want is to hold my own published novel in my own two hands and thank all of my friends and colleagues for a change!)

We wound up discussing the “rough South” stereotype over lunch and describing atrocities in our matter-of-fact way that so many people cannot stomach.

Then our conversation wound its way around to The Piano Teacher, a French film that left both of us speechless.

Practically everyone else we know stormed out of the theatre during the screening of this film, but we went back to see it again because it validated our experiences/depicted the damage that we’ve seen with incredible accuracy.

So yeah. We talked about all this in the context of our writing, and that got me thinking about my friend who grew up Seventh Day Adventist.

She had no access to films or television or public education or mainstream culture as a child and cannot view violence now. Nor can she understand why I would voluntarily read poetry of witness or watch films such as Hotel Rwanda or Schindler’s List or Bastard Out of Carolina and allow such graphic violence into my life.

But, let’s face it, violence happens on a very regular basis and often on our tax dollars. And I guess, if my hands aren’t clean, then I want to know about it.

Don't you?
•

Meanwhile I have discovered that, like Mr. Mailer, I am a much exaggerated street fighter.

I studied two styles of martial arts for years and taught self-defense for a while and still operate under the general assumption that, if need be, I could disarm most would-be attackers and, well kick some serious ass should the situation call for it.

This assumption has proven true the very few times that I have had to defend myself, but my new kung fu classes are kicking my ass now and exposing me as the wimp that I have somehow become.

Kung fu is based on monkeys’ movements. This style differs greatly from the styles I studied previously, particularly because the stances involve crouching so low to the ground that your bent knee nearly scrapes the floor (which makes your thighs scream as they become rock hard).

I sit on my ass for way too many hours a day now, I guess, and must have gotten out of shape when I wasn't looking because, wow, these sessions are KILLING me!

(Ow. Wimper. Ow.)

Whine.