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.

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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.

92. TRISKAIDEKAPHOBIA , OR, I GET MY KICKS ABOVE THE WAISTLINE, SUNSHINE

From the Archives

(May 2005) Friday the 13th. Huh. Maybe that explains why my laptop went bonkers and started typing Arabic numerals when I tried to type words today. Yeah, I’m sure some random date on my calendar and not an accidentally pressed button is to blame for that one.

Now this is going to seem like a picaresque leap—which I can assure you my poetry pals and I do love to make—but give me a few sentences and it’ll make sense.

Joy Harjo replaces the hierarchical system typically presented in Christianity with a vortex, a spiral-shaped “pattern of survival,” and says,

I think where theologians get into trouble is that they’re working out of a hierarchical structure. There’s God sitting at the top of the world, in the image of a man, no women around in that trilogy of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I propose a different structure; it’s not original but what I’ve learned from being around tribal peoples, and in my own wanderings. The shape is a spiral in which all beings resonate. The bear is one version of human and vice versa. The human is not above the bear, nor is Adam naming the bear.

No Great Chain of Being for this poet, and no masturbation-punishing graybearded old god either.

I like this notion of a spiral, which suggests interrelationships, going back and forth, nonduality.

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Now, since two people have recently told me that they’re abstaining from sex, I’m posting 3 excerpts from a popular ABSTINENCE ONLY program (as compiled in the February 2005 edition of Harper’s):

• Occasional assistance may be all right, but too much assistance will lessen a man's confidence or even turn him away from his princess

• While a man needs little or no preparation for sex, a woman often needs hours of emotional and mental preparation

(You don’t say? Me, sometimes I like those unexpected quickies that make us late to something.)

• Sexual relationships often lower the self respect of both partners.... Emotional pain can cause a downward spiral, leading to intense feelings of worthlessness. Depression [from a break up] may lead to attempted or successful suicide.

Oh that’s ripe. Think I’ll use that as my reason to never have sex again—“Sorry. I can’t have sex with you. It’ll make me kill myself.”

SANG IN SHOWER: “Wilder Than Her” by Dar Williams

READING: details of my home warranty insurance policy

SELECTED SPAM (Subject Lines): r u little? • Fix your situation Mamie