224. AGGRIEVED OUT-GROUPS

“The future. What’s that?”
—Belisario, one of a group of hunter-gatherers who left the Colombian jungle to join the modern world, as quoted in yesterday’s New York Times

From the Archives

(May 2006) I read today that Christianists are urging believers to participate in an Othercott by seeing a different movie on the day The Da Vinci Code opens.

And here’s a telling factoid. Their alternate movie of choice is Over the Hedge, a nice little animated feature.

(Keep those blinders on, guys, while the world moves right on past you.)

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that the reverend Jim Garlow of San Diego is training pastors in methods to convince parishioners to throw Da Vinci Code parties in their homes because Garlow asserts that “it’s the task of the missionary to learn the language of the indigenous people” so that the missionaries can correct our ignorance.

(Interesting how he uses noblesse oblige empirespeak to justify his fundamentalism, huh?)

Meanwhile, writer David Brooks has announced that the problem with democrats is that we have become “a collection of aggrieved out-groups” who have not recognized that “multiculturalism and identity politics are dead.”

He sees democrats “purging the last vestiges of the New Left and returning to the older civic liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s” now . . . and yeah, I see a little of that too—but primarily from Republican wannabes who think assimilation with Bill Frist is how we move forward.

(Do you read “Forget The Queers” of “Forget Feminism” in this approach? How about “Forget Leadership?”)

Mother’s Day is this weekend, so perhaps David has been looking back fondly on the 1950s, when his mom no doubt wore a perky Ozzie-and-Harriet skirt and popped sleeping pills when no one was looking and filtered his daddy’s coffee through Eisenhower golf socks as she died inside.

Yes, David we all long for those golden days when the pill was unavailable and battered women’s shelters didn’t exist because no one saw the need for them and the thought of a husband being charged for raping or silencing his wife was unheard of. (But where would David have heard it anyway since women were so rarely admitted to positions of power?)

Dear Dave. Just so you know, we queers ain’t going away, despite how smugly you pronounce that we're passe.

Amazing how white men so rarely recognize that considering people unlike themselves to be special interest groups is just another example of their expectation of privilege.

Meanwhile, can you believe that the Senate approved a two-year extension of the boy emperor’s tax cuts that benefit the super-rich at the expense of the rest of us?

Turn off your television sets, boys and girls. This is reality.

SANG IN SHOWER: Holly Near’s “Simply Love”

READING: Donna Tartt’s Little Friend

LISTENING TO: Jennifer Warnes’ cover of Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan”: I don’t like your fashion business mister. I don’t like those drugs that keep you thin. I don’t like what happened to my sister. First we take Manhattan. Then we take Berlin.

223. ADVOCATING A GAY “LIFESTYLE”

From the Archives

(May 2006) I’ve been catching up on my reading and so will be blogosampling again.

The Washington Blade reports that Brigham Young University is considering expelling 5 students who participated in last month’s Equality Ride demo whether or not they’re gay, despite the fact that one of them demonstrated off campus.

Why? Because their honor code forbids students from “advocating a gay lifestyle.” (sic)

And, on our side of the country, a judge has thrown out a case filed against UNC Chapel Hill by a Christian fraternity that wants funding even though it refuses to sign an inclusive pledge.

And speaking of hot-button social issues, has anyone else noticed that the governor of Illinois has taken a lesson from Bush&Co and is using his executive powers to make hot-button changes despite the homophobic Christianist legislators in his state?

He instructed the state’s health department to direct 10 million dollars in grants to embryonic stem cell research, for example, after Bush’s idiotic pronouncement of what is and is not appropriate scientific research, and used executive privilege to bypass the legislative process and grant domestic-partner health-care benefits to state employees.

(Go team)

No big surprise, but the Christianists (who make up the 32 percent of Americans who still support the boy emperor and appear to be just fine with his secret torture camps and wiretapping) don’t like it one bit when a Democrat uses such powers to set progressive policy.

Meanwhile, a 15-year-old created a set of videos about a group that Susie Bright refers to as our “Onward-Christian-Bullshitters Administration.” WWJD is the strongest of the bunch and will leave a lump in your throat and fill you with more than a little outrage (especially if you saw My Name Is Rachel Corrie last night).

Check out http://peacetakescourage.cf.huffingtonpost.com/ and please forward it to your friends.

222. THE EVERPRESENT EXPERT, NOW APPEARING AT A GYM NEAR YOU

From the Archives

(May 2006) Ever noticed how there’s always a guy who insists on passing himself off as an expert despite the fact that he doesn’t know jack?

Well, I encountered a member of this tribe today and handled it with my usual tact and southern grace.

Big surprise that he wore a big gold cross and a gleaming St. Christopher medallion (making it very easy to imagine him at anti-choice rallies, insisting that he instruct women in how to behave in their own bodies).

Dude and I attended a 2-hour Understanding The New Weight Room seminar, where he constantly interrupted the female trainer leading the session to inform us that (1) women have no upper-body strength and (2) women have no business in a gym.

In between, he told women where we should actually stand to use equipment, where we should actually walk in the new facility, how we should actually behave in general. And he became increasingly agitated when we either ignored him or told him (in my case) that none of us came to the session to hear his opinions, so why didn’t he just shut up and let the trainer do her job.

I’ve lifted weights for years now (but am unfamiliar with this new style of equipment) and, like the exercise physiology grad. student/trainer who led the session, know my way around a weight room. So, near the end of the session, when she asked for a volunteer who was familiar with the leg press, I stepped right up, smirked at the guy, then promptly pressed a 190-pound set.

Then, leaving my settings in place, I said, “So do you actually work out on weight machines or just talk about them?”

Turns out Mr. Scrawny could barely press these weights down and, when he did, they was so heavy that they flew back fast and loud, nearly pushing his bony knees into his chest.

THAT got a smirk out of all of us and left him red-faced and stewing for the rest of the session.

Conclusion: Sometimes it’s good to be the asshole.

221, MINUTEMEN IN LUNCH COUNTER TOWNS

From the Archives

(May 2006) The ultra-conservative anti-immigrant vigilante group the Minutemen will be in Greensboro NC tomorrow and progressive organizations are calling for folks across the south to show up and tell the thugs that they are not welcome there.

Unfortunately, I will be in a tedious training session for our new and decidedly inadequate health insurance during this event.

As near as I can tell, this new PPO pays for my mammogram but, should it be suspicious and my doctor proactive enough to order an immediate ultrasound, then this diagnostic procedure will not be covered (because we “elected” to change the definition of my Routine Appointment by introducing a Diagnostic Procedure).

Put another way: BCBS is willing to penalize me and decrease my odds of surviving cancer in order to ensure that their organizational schemas are kept under separate nutshells.

Gawd. No wonder my doctor friends are leaving the field in droves!

•

This is one of those weeks in which I have something scheduled every evening through Sunday (which is why I am doing laundry at 11:30 PM).

Tonight, I attended a reading of the disturbing play My Name Is Rachel Corrie. My favorite local experimental theater company hosted this reading and asked invitees to help them decide whether or not to disrupt their fall schedule in order to produce it this year.

Rachel Corrie is the 23-year-old American peace activist who was crushed by a bulldozer while acting as a human shield for Palestinian homes in Gaza and this play was created from her journals and e-mails.

So why the mad rush to production?

Well, after 2 sellout runs in London, the NY Theatre Workshop was SUPPOSED to begin a run of the play next month, but they suddenly cancelled production, citing a need to “mollify” the pro-Israeli community.

Katharine Viner, co-editor of the play, says

if a young, middle-class, scrupulously fair-minded and dead American woman, whose superb writing about her job as a mental health worker, ex-boyfriends, troublesome parents, struggles to find out who she wanted to be, and how she found that by traveling to Gaza and discovering the shocking conditions under which the Palestinians live—if a voice like this cannot be heard on a New York stage, what hope is there for anyone else?

Besides the obvious censorship implications, this cancellation is of particular concern because the producer says he is not concerned about people who see the show, but is instead concerned about the people who don’t see the show but declare it viciously anti-Israeli anyway.

Viner again:

Since when did theatre come to be about those who don’t go to see it? If the play itself . . . is not the problem, then isn’t the answer to get people to watch it, rather than exercising prior censorship?

Indeed.

Rachel's words condemn violence and express outrage about attacks by the fourth largest army in the world on people whose livelihoods and food and water and shelter have been taken away from them.

That’s powerful stuff and well worth presenting to the world, despite the censors’ threats.


This is the second play I’ve seen this week that asks how clean our tax-paying hands are.

The off-off-Broadway Guardians, staring Katherine Moennig (the actor who plays Shane on The L Word), was poorly attended and may have already closed, but I am so glad I saw it.

Moennig portrays Lynddie England as a somewhat sympathetic grunt who understands the implications of ignoring a direct military order far more than she understands the implications of her (abhorrent) actions.

Then there’s the vacuous Guardian reporter following her in search of a bigger office.

At first I was concerned that the playwright planned to make a series of easy jokes about uneducated southern hicks who grew up in violent landscapes and so spread their violence around the globe, but the play was better than that.

In fact, the Oxford-trained reporter comes off as the true empty shell in the end—as an opportunist who cares about the atrocities committed at abu Ghraib only insofar as they can further his career or heighten his experience of violence as an erotic sport.

A (gorgeous) lawyer representing Gitmo prisoners spoke after the play and reminded us of yet another of Bush&Co’s many communications ploys: They basically changed the way they refer to prisons in order to avoid Geneva requirements for how prisoners of war must be treated in prisons.

She also reminded us that, while armed services scandals are typically punished by moving up the chain of command to the ultimate authority who authorized the crime, in the case of abu Ghraib, a handful of women who all say they were following orders they were left no choice but to obey have taken the fall while their superior officers remain in command.

220. EPISTOLARY EROTICISM AND THE RICH AND THE ARTLESS

From the Archives

(May 2006) Just read Susie Bright’s description of being included on an infuriating Pushing The Envelope writers panel at the recent LA Festival of Books.

What fool would put Susie and Karen Finley and Dennis Cooper—legitimate visionaries who do push the envelope and encourage us to think and fuck and gasp and experience the world in new and profound ways—on the same panel with the milquetoast let-me-flaunt-my-riches-and-good-looks-as-my-bona-fides-’cause-there-ain’t-nothing-else-of-substance-here lame late-late-night TV host Craig Ferguson (a man who actually sums up sex as an act between “one man and one woman” in between berating feminists)?

The intent was obvious—showcase a privileged white man performing The Man Show and watch a bunch of progressive writers react (in the interest of creating a buzz at the festival, no doubt), but the organizer somehow failed to inform the writers that they were being set up for a public smackdown.

“Complacent, over-monied right-wing jabberers. They’re just as ubiquitous and just as annoyingly useless as the wanna-be Maoists back in the mid 1970s who did their level best to remind us that personal fulfillment and artistic expression were politically incorrect and counter-revolutionary. Popular politics invariably spawns a host of trend-riders just as surely as a damp basement spawns mildew.
—an apt comment someone left on Susie’s blog

Meanwhile, Kate Clinton said (at her show last night) that she woke up dreaming that Suzie Ormans was going down on her.

She also described our boy emperor as someone who gives new meaning to the term “unattended luggage.”

Apt, eh?

219. UNIVERSAL MUSIC

From the Archives
(May 2006) This just in:

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is composed of stories, not of atoms. The physicist Werner Heisenberg, on the other hand, declared that the universe is made of music, not of matter. And we believe that if you habitually expose yourself to toxic stories and music, you could wind up living in the wrong universe, where it’s impossible to become the gorgeous genius you were born to be. That’s why we implore you to nourish yourself with delicious, nutritious tales and tunes that inspire you to exercise your willpower for your highest good.

Astrologer Caroline Casey offers an apt metaphor to illustrate how crucial it is for us to hear and read good stories. She notes that if we don’t have enough of the normal, healthy kind of iodine in our bodies, we absorb radioactive iodine, which has entered the food chain through nuclear test explosions conducted in the atmosphere. Similarly, unless we fill ourselves up with stories that invigorate us, we’re more susceptible to sopping up the poisonous, degenerative narratives.

The preceding oracle comes from Rob Breszney’s new book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings

218. CONTINUITY AND THE DECIDER

Let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know—fiction!
—Stephen Colbert, keynote speech at White House Correspondents’ Dinner, 28 April 2006

From the Archives (Cinco de Mayo 2006) I’m on seemingly perpetual hold while trying to make an appointment to get my bashed-in car repaired and feel as if I’m standing at St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt waiting for the next chord in John Cage’s “As Slow a Possible” organ recital to peal through the air.

(The next chord in the first movement of this recital won’t sound for another full month. Then either silence or another chord will follow and will perhaps offer some variation in musicology, if a pipe is added or deleted from the organ.)

Let’s mark our calendars in advance for 5 September 2070, when the second movement of this slow recital begins . . . and tell our grandkids to pass on the Prophecy of the Slow Recital, for it is foretold that, 639 years (after the second movement begins (or when the church gets sick of dealing with a deceased composer’s work), the composition will finally be completed.

Actually, hearing ANY new chord would be a vast improvement over the wretched musak version of “Afternoon Delight” that is currently playing on my speakerphone in between the sporadic Your call is very important to us and will be answered in the order in which it was received. Please stay on the line. message.

Meanwhile, I’m having a true lunch break for a change because I feel lousy and skipped my workout. Stayed up till 2:30 AM finishing an illustration project and slept very little in the city, so am probably just exhausted.

And I’m reading about teledildonics as I snarf down my salad.

Don’t know what teledildonics is? Well pull up a chair chere!

Author Liz Langley (of Alternet’s “Cybersex Grows Up”) describes teledildonics as “the ability of two people, in separate locations, to manipulate sex toys via the internet. You could finger your mouse in New York, and make someone in California sing the ten-second aria.”

Yep. Apparently, a few computer-savvy American soldiers are already using the Sinulator to keep their lovers happy from afar.

The possibilities are mind-boggling.

•

Meanwhile, student stores is closing for renovations, so I just purchased the following items for ~$2 each:

1. a CD of American lesbian composers
2. Physics Demystified: A Self-Teaching Guide (coz I have forgotten way too much)
3. House of Leaves
4. Susan Ludvigson’s Sweet Confluence: New and Selected Poems
5. Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems
6. Carolyn Forché’s Blue Hour (poems)
7. Robert Creeley: Just in Time, Poems 1984–1994

Whee! Lots of reading to do after I finish this project.

I also have lots more to write about and am so so happy that I finally got to see my bestgrrl again. Haven’t had time to process the trip yet, so that'll have to come later.

LISTENING TO: John Cage and Lou Reed's Songs for Drella (of course).

217. UNDERWIRE ALERT. QUICK! RAISE THE TERRORIST THREAT LEVEL TO RED!

From the Archives

(May 2006) I finally rolled into my driveway after a long day of traveling and, as my pal Cin (who picked me up from the airport) said, I can tell you’re completely exhausted, Medea, because your voice sounds different.

Yeah.

Mostly, though, it’s different because my reconstructed shoulder is hurting like hell from hauling a suitcase and laptop all over creation.

Lars and I left the Village around 10 this morning and I’ve been traveling ever since. Took the subway to Grand Central Station (while reading a scene in Carole Maso’s Ghost Dance that occurs in Grand Central Station), then hopped the express bus to LaGuardia.

Sat around for an hour and a half reading (after my underwires alerted security to the fact that I have big tits), then sat in the Atlanta airport for another two hours before finally touching ground here.

Cin took me out to dinner afterwards and we talked nonstop till she pulled up in front of her house . . .

. . . where we discovered that someone crashed into the driver’s door of my cute little car!

Fortunately, a young woman came running up as we were studying the damage and fessed up that her new-driving mom was making a U-Turn and hit me.

Whew!

•

So. Back in the nineties, the village of Chapel Hill produced a poster showcasing the coolest doors in town.

After staying at Shulamith’s apartment yesterday, I decided that someone should cop this idea and produce a Bathtubs of the City poster.

As any struggling artist (who isn’t subsidized by Daddy Warbucks) knows, the bathtub is seldom in the bathroom in low-income NYC apartments. Instead, it's usually somewhere in the general vicinity of available plumbing (and smack dab in the middle of the kitchen or living room, in most cases).

Shuli’s tub is by the kitchen sink and in clear view of any location except the toilet in her apartment (and, if I lived there, I would make a collapsible tabletop that fits over the thing).

Anyway, Lars and I stayed there last night because Shuli is currently in the hospital and we needed to take care of her cat this morning anyway.

(Actually, Shuli is not just in the hospital, but also currently believes that she OWNS her building and the two buildings beside it, and she demanded that Lars hand over the keys. She also said that Lars is dead to her and shoved her out the door. And she insisted that her own cat is dead, even after Lars showed her photographs of us petting the cat.)

Poor Lars. She’s a good friend and went back for more abuse today because she knows Shuli will remember the visit when she’s back on her meds.


So, understandably, I’ve been thinking about Kate Millet’s Looney-Bin Trip a lot today—especially because Shuli discussed the premise with Kate in detail as she worked on the manuscript.

They both assert that people with mental illnesses have the right to choose whether or not they take medication and both insist that medications blunt their brilliance.

This is a complicated subject for me, since my mother has an adult-onset suicidal paranoid schizophrenic disorder which caused her, at various points in my childhood, to OD in an attempt to silence the voices, and wrap the piano in tinfoil in an attempt to silence the voices, and douse her children with witch hazel or Lysol or whatever she believes at the moment would keep us safe from the voices at that moment, and to ultimately shoot herself in an attempt to escape the voices.

These occurred while she was off her medication as we were trying to get her help (but when she did not yet qualify for help because she was not deemed an immediate threat to herself or someone else).

We did manage to involuntarily commit her twice—a legal procedure that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy—and this forced her to take the meds that keep her relatively functioning and, frankly, the meds have kept her on a fairly even keel over the years, so I have to say that I disagree with Kate and Shuli (but understand their resistance to meds).

They see the meds as blunting their brilliance, but it seems to me that mental illness is the real culprit here and not the meds.

Sure, mania can convince you that you are filled with brilliant perceptions as you crank out reams of writing (been on mania-inducing drugs; done that), but it can also convince you that your neighbor's mailbox requires you to kill them.

We're all familiar with those sad statistics too.

And the fact of the matter is that Shuli is not brilliant when she quits taking her meds.

Instead, she overflows her bathtub until the ceiling below hers collapses and sets her living-room floor on fire and stands in the middle of her apartment screaming until the police haul her away.

What a shitty-ass situation all around.

216. UNITED STATES OF STUPID’S DAY WITHOUT IMMIGRANTS

From the Archives

(May 2006) Irregular girl has a Flickr photo of a graffitied wall that reads “pay your own way.” I’m trying to parse this sentiment with our country’s resistance to illegal immigrants, who point out regularly that businesses survive on the sweat of their minimum-wage labor.

I’m in Brooklyn right now but we’re headed to PS1 to see Jessica Stockholder’s gallery show soon. We’ll head over to Dietch Project’s Garden Party next, where we hope to see a mound of earth with beautiful nude women draped on it. Then we’ll head over to Union Square for the big immigration rally.

The East Village is weird to Lars because the Second Avenue Deli, an institution, closed since she left and there’s just a big sad empty building where it used to be.

Meanwhile, yesterday was too beautiful to be indoors so we spent the day walking all over the city.

Met up with pals for lunch, then went to check on Shulie’s cat (because Shulie quit taking her meds again and was consequently committed). It took thirty minutes, but we finally coaxed the kitty out from behind some paintings.

Actually, Lars and I may stay at Shuli’s after we see Guardian, since I’ll need to hop the bus from Grand Central Station to LaGuardia early the next day and, well, the cat needs some attention.


I got up early this morning and went up on the roof to stare at the water. The statue of liberty was there with her white arm raised and, beyond that, New Jersey sat in a smoggy gray haze.

Instead of enjoying the view though, I was thinking about how wonderful it would be to wake up in Seattle and have coffee on my deck while staring across the water at snow-capped mountains.

If Lars stays on the west coast, then there’s a good chance that I will wind up there eventually.

•

Met Tuscaloosa for an impromptu dinner before leaving town. She was awarded a two-week stay at a writing retreat and wants me to apply for the same time period, since we get tons of work done when we retreat together (and eat very well to boot).

Meanwhile, anyone keeping up with the King and King controversy—not to be confused with the Rodney King controversy, in which actual people were harmed—knows all about the uproar in Massachusetts over a teacher reading this tale of a crown prince who rejected one beautiful princess after another before falling in love with a handsome prince.

He and the prince marry, seal their commitment with a kiss, then live happily ever after just as het fairy-tale lovers do, and all was right in the world until a meddlesome “parents’ rights” group threatened to sue the school for portraying queers in a positive light!

Meanwhile California fundie doctors are claiming that their religious beliefs give them the right to treat lesbians differently than other patients and are refusing to provide fertility treatments to us.

It shocks me that this case was thrown out of lower court three years ago.

They’re job is to treat patients, not make moral or religious judgments about us.

Meanwhile, University of Cumberland in Kentucky expelled a twenty-year-old boy for identifying himself as gay on his personal webpage.

It’s happening right here folks.

215. YOU CALL THIS A SUSTAINABLE WORLD?

From the Archives

(April 2006) Short, brutish, and dirty. Is that all life is?

Here I sit in my studio at 11:48 p.m. on a Thursday night on the eve of my trip to NYC. It rained all day (again) and my grass is suddenly very high (something I can do nothing about till next week).

My drive home from the theatre tonight was a journey through a foggy undifferentiated landscape that no more than suggested a sustainable world (whereas my pals' experimental Chekhov interpretation that I just witnessed squashed flat any possibility of a sustainable world).

My favorite local theater staged this adaptation of Two Sisters (On Ice), which they describe as “a passionate look at desire and disenchantment set in an Edward Gorey-like landscape with a Hawaiian soundtrack.”

(Ponder that.)

The male cast alternated between stiff brown uniforms and revealing tighty-whities and one sister masturbated whenever the subject of work came up. Oh I looooong to work. I really looooong for work, she moaned.

How could one possibly rise in standing ovation to a Chekhov play when his message has squashed you flat into your seat?

(And yet sex, in all its emptiness, does still offer at least momentary transcendence.)

Came home to play around on my keyboard and then stare at my cello and guitars and twenty-four-volume art encyclopedia set—at this stuff that can occasionally make my existence seem meaningful.

There’s The Life of James McNeill Whistler, sitting beside me on a shelf. And Vita Sackville-West’s letters to Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir’s biography, Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy, Kafka’s Trial and, because I live in the violent southland, Larry Brown’s Fay and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina.

Plato’s Parable of the Cave asks me to consider whether or not I am turning to look at the light and Warren’s Symbolism of Subordination reminds me that I have not chafed against black leather in entirely too long.

My worn paperback copy of Works of Love, Kierkegaard’s nonpseudonymous picture of his Christian faith, has been overtaken by the solid blue planes of Sartre’s paperback Existentialism and Human Emotions (since Sartre tied Kierkegaard to my easel some years ago and continues to lash him there as I cogitate, demanding that Søren face the implications of personal action in this purposeless universe).

Meanwhile, Daniel Chirot is bursting at the seams to explain in professorial terms How Societies Change as Jane Wagner shouts that reality is “nothing more than a collective hunch” y’all.

My Cherokee sacred calendar competes for space with Ken Wilbur’s Brief History of Everything and Carolyn Forché’s always nearby Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.

Ernest Hemingway still sneers from The Sun Also Rises (a title, that, although the writer ultimately chose to end his life, nevertheless suggests hope) and shock and awe: america’s war on words offers cross-continental evidence that our bloody clashes leave us with bloated defense budgets even as we suffer from near-global and decidedly immobilizing post-traumatic stress disorder.


•

Meanwhile, the dada exhibit in DC ends in two weeks and I have very little chance of getting there, let alone considering firsthand the artists’ interpretations of their culture-destroying world ravaged by war.

Bet my favorite fur-lined cup is there, too.

(Yeah yeah. I know this is an exhausted image now—just a symbol of a time and a place in which artists still had sufficient faith in humanity to be outraged by the fact that, left to our own devices, we have a tendency to sprout short brutish hairs on our fine bone china and pick each other’s bones and feeble attempts at meaning clean—or to at least satirize them wickedly well.)

Then there’s Foucault, iconoclastically exploring why we as a species feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex.

Meanwhile I am trying to figure out what to do with my two plastic tubs of organic broccoli florets, half a plastic tub of organic mixed herb greens, bag of Brussels sprouts (which I hope will still be salvageable by the time I return), an unopened packet of good goat cheese.

A good meal, but that’s probably more broccoli than I can eat in a day, even if I do cook it in some good sesame oil and garlic and have it with tempeh for breakfast.

•

And now it’s morning and various experts are announcing that the possibility of frost is officially over for this season. I started fragile plants from seeds weeks ago and will plant them in earnest when I return from the city.

That’s not my worry right now though. For the moment, I just need to eat some breakfast and head to the airport.

So I’ll end with a poem:

WILD SWANS
by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying.

214. CYNICISM SURVIVAL KIT

From the Archives

(April 2006) The New York Times recognizes today’s somber twenty-year anniversary with an interactive “Chernobyl’s Legacy: 20 Years Later” online exhibit that includes these observations:

We all know what Chernobyl is, what an atomic plant is, but I’ll tell you how we saw it. An enemy had come to our country. We had to defend ourselves. And we set out to protect our country, our people. We all had those feelings, all of us in the 100-man brigade (that initially went in to create the sarcophage). But of course it differed from a real war. In a real war, shells explode, bullets fly, bodies fall, blood flows. Here, the sun was shining overhead. Beautiful gardens stood all around, bulging with fruit. Birds were singing. You couldn’t possibly have imagined that all this was death.—Arkady Rokhlin, Nuclear Engineer and one of the Chernobyl liquidators

In war you know where you are, where the neutral territory is, where the enemy is, where the plane is, how its bombing you, how its chasing you, how it catches you. There you couldn’t see the enemy. You see it when you’re burned already. When you’re a corpse. It’s invisible. It’s everywhere and nowhere.—Constantin Baskin, Nuclear Systems Specialist

Your soul is covered in blood. You want to cry, but you can’t.—Leonid Shavray, Chernobyl firefighter

This reminds me of a poignant poem that French surrealist and working-class hero Jacques Prévert wrote during his military service in WWII.

BARBARA
(translated by Harriet Zinnes and published in Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness)

Remember Barbara
It rained without letup in Brest that day
And you walked smiling
Glowing ravishing drenched
Under the rain
Remember Barbara
It rained without letup in Brest
And I passed you on the Rue de Siam
You smiled
And I smiled too
Remember Barbara
You whom I did not know
You who did not know me
Remember
Remember that day just the same
Do not forget
A man was taking shelter in a doorway
And he called out your name
Barbara
And you ran toward him in the rain
Drenched ravishing glowing
And you threw yourself into his arms
Remember that Barbara
And do not be angry with me if I call you by your first name
I call all those I love by their first names
Even if I have met them only once
I call all who love by their first names
Even if I do not know them
Remember Barbara
Do not forget
That gentle, happy rain
On your happy face
On that happy town
That rain on the sea
On the arsenal
On the boat of Ouessant

Oh Barbara
What shit war is
What has become of you now
Under the rain of iron
Of fire of steel of blood
And he who held you in his arms
Lovingly
Is he dead missing or still living
Oh Barbara
It rains without letup in Brest
As it rained before
But it is not the same everything is ruined
It is a rain of mourning terrible and desolate
No longer even a storm
Of iron of steel of blood
Only of clouds
That burst
And disappear like dogs
Down the streams of Brest
Like dogs that will rot far away
Far away very far from Brest
Of which there is nothing left

If it’s raining for the fourth day in a row tomorrow, then I will probably hang out in a café and write another entry before I get on the plane. Otherwise, I’ll be back late next week with plenty of stories from NYC.

Now, however, I'm going to a play.

Ciao.

213. THE EROTIC MADAME X

From the Archives

(April 2006) I wonder about so many things—why John Singer Sargent, the famous Edwardian portrait painter whose erotic portrait of Madame X caused such a scandal, abandoned portraiture in 1910 in favor of murals and landscapes.

I wonder why I inevitably forget to water the orchids that (sort of) live in my office window but have no trouble remembering to water the orchids that live in my dining room.

I wonder why posting (artful) nudes to Flickr inevitably results in guys sending me links to photos of their hard-ons

(which has me toying with the idea of returning the favor by posting a “friends”-only page of pictures of my hard-ons: the black one, the green one, the red one, the two-headed one—you get the point— with the subject line KEEPS ON TICKING—that I can send just to them).

(Right back at’cha, guy.)

And now I have to go to a 1-1/2 hour meeting. Bleah.

212. DUNGEONS AND MOUNTAIN CASTRATIONS

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

211. NOT-SO-INNOCENT HUMAN TURNED UPON BY OWN HORMONES

From the Archives

(April 2006) Scientists discovered a new blue ring around Uranus and I spent the morning editing an analysis of 2003–4 domestic violence statistics for North Carolina.

Sobering stuff.

The state’s domestic violence programs provided services to 45,211 individuals and its courts issued 11,954 domestic violence protective orders (DVPOs) in this one-year period. Also, during this year, fifty-eight women were killed by current or former husbands or boyfriends and ten men were killed by current or former wives or girlfriends.

Love makes the world go round . . . and makes us collide into each other with all our emotions blaring when it goes wrong too.

Today, I am aching from overdoing it at the gym and am feeling jaded about life in general (especially after reading all these domestic violence statistics) and I just want to curl up in a ball and eat some good bad-for-me comfort food right now.

My body is the earth. My body is the water.

That’s what my chorus sang when we performed Diane Benjamin’s amazing “Where I Live: A Breast Cancer Oratorio” recently and this pretty much encapsulates how I think about my body.

My body allows me to experience back-scratching, gasping-into-her-hair pleasure and deep intimacy.

It longs for the feel of wind blowing through my hair.

It gets goosebumps when it encounters empathy.

It allows me to experience awe and see beauty and feel such great sorrow that all I can do is rock in place sometimes, immobilized.

My body is a miraculous, sensation-driven outer shell, a vehicle that transports my creative spirit, my soul-force, the big-picture me from one place to another— the thing that gives me legs so that I can find beauty and meaning.

Benjamin reminds us that, besides being spirit, we are also complex energy machines that are radically altered by the chemicals that we absorb though.

Between the sung phrases above, a narrator intones Talc. Used in baby and other powders.... Methylene chloride. Used in decaffeinated coffee.... CONFIRMED CARCINOGENS.

On and on the narrator announces her short list of the many confirmed carcinogens that can break down our machines.

I try to remember this song when I (still) crave a cigarette, try to remind myself—especially on Mondays when the elliptical cross-trainer leaves my legs feeling particularly heavy—that I am a machine that requires regular care and routine maintenance.

Now you’d think that five people with breast cancer, two people with ovarian cancer, one person with prostate cancer, a father who died young from lung cancer, and a butt-load of (mostly average weight) relatives with diabetes and amputated limbs would be enough to bang me over the head with the fact that my machine needs my immediate, concentrated attention but, sadly, I still cave and have a big dish of fettuccini alfredo or a bag of potato chips sometimes.

Since I am a poet, I use personification when I’m zoning out on the elliptical cross-trainer, dub my body the Complex Energy Machine (CEM) that I must provide with specific fuel and, you know, walk like a dog.

And I work to understand the metabolic processes that my body executes each time I give it food and exercise.

And, because I am a poet who has a hard time stepping out of my head, I also remind myself that artists before me have also measured out their lives in such tedious coffee spoons.

•

Storms swept through here this past weekend, so I only went outside long enough to take a (wet) walk through the gardens, pick up some groceries, and rent ENRON: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Grizzly Man.

I love the fact that, when we’re seriously flawed and floundering for a way to thrive without alcohol or drugs or other destructive behaviors, some of us are lucky and realize that nature can save us.

(At least until the grizzlies kill you.)

I really like the perspective of the filmmaker who made Grizzly Man, like this film that is, ultimately, about someone who was almost crippled by his human foibles but who found grace in Alaska.

LISTENING TO: Ani DeFranco’s “Dilate” (which will probably not help me fall asleep)

READING: San Francisco trannie Emil Heiple’s Body of Loss (a zine). I started reading the Urban Hermitt’s Flow Chronicles too, but just couldn’t get into it—I guess because I’ve never felt that I’m in the wrong body. Instead, I just get frustrated when people tell me that the fact that my body looks a certain way is supposed to mean that I should limit how I use it or live my life.

SANG IN SHOWER: Möxy Fruvous’s “Drinking Song”

210. FORENSIC VAGINA SPECIALISTS AND THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR MEN

From the Archives

(April 2006) Random factoid: people who are employed to check vaginas for evidence of abortions are referred to as forensic vagina specialists.

Meanwhile, Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield has written Manliness, a celebration of privilege that Yale University Press recently published.

(Poor Harv. I guess his own school wouldn’t publish this sexist diatribe so hot on the heels of ousting its own prez because of his propensity to mutter sexist crapola.)

Mansfield claims that women secretly like housework and enjoy changing diapers whereas men not so secretly like war and look down on so-called women’s work.

“Now that women are equal,” he asserts, “women should be able to accept being told that they aren't, quite."

Equal? Huh? In what universe?

Slide down from your ivory tower on your own slug slime Harv and check out the Really World where salary inequities and cliterectomies and misogyny and religious bias etc. etc. etc. keep far too many women under the thumbs of violent and controlling men

(who, let me guess, are just being men when they claim such authority as their own—at least according to your neat calculations).

This inequality is happening at a time when men are intent on depriving women of the very right to control our own bodies too (yet some of these same men sue when they are forced to support their offspring).

Example: The National Center for Men—that poor downtrodden group—has filed a lawsuit they’ve dubbed Roe v. Wade for Men on behalf of a twenty-something-year-old man who claims that he should not have to pay child support because the woman he impregnated told him that she was on birth control and thought she was infertile.

So let me guess: Harvey and his ilk believe that the stripper who was allegedly gang-raped at Duke should bear the child if she becomes pregnant as a result of the alleged assault, but that the thugs who allegedly raped her should not be held accountable because boys—the poor testosterone-driven things—will be boys.

Meanwhile The National Center for Men continues to express outrage about how freaking unfair it is that men tend to die earlier than women.

(I am so goddamn SICK of hearing men celebrate their bad behavior while whining about the fact that they will be held accountable for this same behavior!)

As Kimberly Gadette says in Wake Up and Smell the Diapers,

consuming cheese doodles and beer and lolling on the couch does not make for longevity. Darn the luck, if only men liked housework. By getting off that sofa and washing a floor, scrubbing a toilet, raising a kid, they, too, might live longer.

Reality bites, iron boyz.

Meanwhile, I wish I were attending the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham instead of working, especially because this year’s festival includes a special Class in America series.

(I say that with some level of irony, since my ex-wife’s best friend’s very upper-crust British father—a man who celebrates his classism and privilege but is way too effete to ever succeed at the physical requirements of being a soldier and so maybe isn't really a man after all according to Harvey's definition—is one of the judges who selected this year’s films. )

Okay. I need to pour my homemade soy parsley soup into a Tupperware and scram now . . .

. . . but first, I forgot to mention that I had Lucinda screaming on my iPod last night while walking and was so distracted that I damn near stepped on a great blue heron, which startled the bejeezus out of both of us. Its beak was nipple height and its beautiful body was so close to mine that I felt the wind from its wings as it flew away. Wow!

LISTENING TO: Siouxie and the Banshees

READING: An article about domestic violence

SANG IN SHOWER: America's “Daisy Jane” (from my junior-high-school daze)

BEST-OF SPAM: “go longer for her” (Oh I do baby. I do.)

209. COMFORTABLE AS A FLOAT

From the Archives (April 2006)

BITTERNESS
by Olga Broumas

She who loves roses must be patient
and not cry out when she is pierced by thorns.
—Sappho

In parody
of a grade-B film, our private
self-conscious soapie, as we fall
into the common, suspended disbelief of love, you ask
will I still be
here tomorrow, next week, tonight you ask me am I really
here. My passion delights

and surprises you, comfortable
as you’ve been without it. Lulled,
comfortable as a float myself in your real
and rounded arms, I can only smile
back, indulgently
at such questions. In the second reel—

a season of weeks, two
flights across the glamorous Atlantic, one
orgy and the predictable divorce
scenes later—I’m fading out
in the final close-up
alone. As one

heroine in this
two-bit production to the other, how long
did you, did we both know
the script
meant you to wake up doubting
in those first nights, not me, my daytime
serial solvency, but yours.

Yesterday—the same day that a child was testifying before Congress about being abused by online sexual predators—a high-ranking Bush official was arrested for pedophilia. Yes, Bush’s deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security tried to solicit sex from a fourteen-year-old girl.

This also from the Post:

Another Homeland Security official—Frank Figueroa, special agent in charge of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tampa—faces trial this week on charges of exposing himself to a teenage girl last year at a mall. Figueroa, who has been suspended, pleaded not guilty.

As my Baptist mother used to say, be sure your sins will find you out, yo.

SANG IN SHOWER: Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” (which dates me, huh?)

READING: The search warrant for 610 N Buchanan St. (AKA the lacrosse team house beside Duke campus).

BEST-OF SPAM: I FAILED AND STILL MAKE 94K! [but apparently cannot find the caps lock key on his computer]

208. FAKE MEAT, ANYONE?

From the Archives

(April 2006) Strippers, prostitutes, porn stars and escorts are the sacrificial lambs we feed to the Patriarchy.

So says Biting Beaver at bitingbeaver.blogspot.com.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee Guerilla Women are promoting a flaming red burka—it’s all the rage for Spring ’06 in the red states.

But the biggest topic on wimmin’s blogs today is the alleged gang rape of a black stripper at a predominantly white Duke University lacrosse team party.

The New York Times says this case has placed new strains on Duke’s ties with the city of Durham.

(ya think?)

A spokesperson for the accused says that these boys are “from wonderful families.”

(Note that this spokesperson chooses to focus on the boys’ families though and not on the actual players, fifteen of whom have been arrested in Durham since their arrival at Duke.)

Without giving away my anonymity, I will say that I spent many years at The Gothic Wonderland and remember the lacrosse house in question being toilet-papered more than once by campus women’s groups as a warning to women that someone was sexually assaulted there.

I can also say with certaintly that the lacrosse team (and many Dukies) earned their reputation for celebrating their obnoxiousness (and that this reputation extends beyond the Cameron Crazies).

Example: Cops who arrest Dukies for drunken and disorderly conduct are often taunted with such barbs as Ooo. I bet you had to complete a whole high-school degree to get YOUR job . . .

This allegation is being made in a gritty town that is 50 percent black, a town in which 15 percent of the residents live below the poverty line.

The gap between the Haves and the Have Nots grows wider daily in Durham and across the globe, and Durham is already a place where a whole lot of the working poor resent the drunken, privileged eighteen-year-olds racing around in their luxury vehicles.

The demographics of the university population where the lacrosse team is enrolled and the university population where the stripper is enrolled could not be more different, and these differences are definitely not lost on the Durhamites.

Frankly, I admire any DA who would even pursue a case of this proportion, given the money and pressure that are no doubt breathing down his back right now.

(And I hope he has a damn good case too because, otherwise, his ass is now officially grass.)

So yeah I can just imagine what the town/gown relationship is like right about now.

A perfect storm.

207. YOU DON'T SEND ME FLOUR

From the Archives

i thank heaven somebody's crazy enough to send me a daisy
—e.e. cummings

Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in [an] unsatisfying society will usually be a good letter- [or blog-] writer.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

(March 2006) Tonight I’ll attend a screening of Over the Farm: A New Deal Resettlement and Its Legacy. This independent film takes a historical glance back to the landless African American sharecroppers who were offered forty acres and a mule in Tillery NC back in the thirties.

Then, even though I have no Final Four men’s teams left in the office pool, I plan to cheer for George Mason University because the brilliant poet Carolyn Forché once taught there.

•

Meanwhile, here are the opening two sentences of Benedict Carey’s New York Times article about intercessory prayer:

Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found. And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.

Shocking that this is newsworthy, really.

Christianists were, of course, quick to respond.

First a chaplain at the Mayo Clinic announced that the study says nothing about the power of personal prayer or about prayers for family members.

“Working in a large center like Mayo,” he said, “You hear tons of stories about the power of prayer, and I don’t doubt them.”

How novel.

And let me guess, you tell those same families that it was the will of your god when their prayers were not answered.

Another Christianist reminds us that we don’t know how MUCH prayer each person received

Or if they inhaled while praying, dude.

Medea. Slaps. Forehead. Soundly. Now.

206. SUDDEN AZALEAS

The Rider
by Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

SANG IN SHOWER: Alison Krauss’s “There Is a Reason” (for it all—which I sing an octave lower than this angel-voiced woman)

READING: The Epoch Times, which someone tossed in my driveway. It appears to be a Falun Gong publication.

BEST-OF SPAM: Smart brain: the subliminal software they tried to ban!

205. SEE BRAIN RUN. RUN BRAIN RUN!

From the Archives

(March 2006) Solomon Pomenya, a fifty-two-year-old Ghanian doctor who witnessed the total eclipse of the sun yesterday, said,

I believe it's a wonderful work of God, despite all what the scientists say. This tells me that God is a true engineer.

I love that we humans respond to beauty and mystery by searching for higher meaning, that we find inspiration in the natural world and its wonders, but do wonder why we must attribute such beauty to a higher being.

Inspiration, for me, seeps out as poetry or music or art, as some attempt to express in a tangible way what my senses and mind and soul absorb and process.

This means that, when I read a statement such as Dr. Pomenya’s, I substitute “creative spark” for “God.”

•

The philosopher Umberto Eco taught himself to eat and walk and shave and live and write faster in order to get more work done.

Eco says

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

I share this suspicion yet obsess about meaning.

Eco studies semiotics, a field in which philosophers analyze the complex meanings of cultural/pop products: Michael Jordan bobbleheads and that stupid bucking chicken commercial and Bond. James Bond and Brangelina and the whole American Idol phenomenon and that vapid Barbara Walters television show in which seemingly intelligent women say such things as “Well, I call other women bitch. Sure I do, and don’t tell me you don’t either.”

(This MUST be some male producer’s idea of what women do when we are alone together—when we’re not tying each other up in knots and fist-fucking each other to earth-trembling orgasms, that is).

So what is it about Americans and our cultural products, our stuff, that makes us max out our credit cards and pay exorbitant interest rates just to garner more stuff?

Are commercials really that persuasive or do we lack some core meaning that would keep us from going on such mad spending sprees?

Why do so many of us prefer to be consumers rather than citizen activists?

Jon Stewart riffed on the genetically altered “healthy” omega-3 hogs on tonight’s Daily Show.

Scientists have apparently altered them to match the naturally healthy but rare Iberíco hogs (which North Carolina’s Cane Creek Farms raises and sells to organic restaurants).

Stewart asks “Why should we eat in moderation when a scientist can just change an entire species’ genetic make-up to benefit our fat asses?”

Why indeed.

And why do we prefer poison to spots on our apples? Epcot to the real thing?

Don’t Americans want to know why so many foreigners despise us, how other cultures live and change and deal with consumer products?

(Wait. I know the answer to that.)

Perhaps our lust for consumer products and our isolationist tendencies are the natural by-products of Americans’ fear of our own emptiness, are the result of our inability to move beyond the Puritanical workaholic ethics that our culture has handed down to us.

What, besides God, would help us find meaning?

Eco says

I'm not saying there's no difference between Homer and Walt Disney. But Mickey Mouse can be perfect in the sense that a Japanese haiku is.

Ponder that one.

204. BACKSLIDING AWAY

From the Archives

(March 2006) I’m sitting in a grease-scented dive listening to Johnny Cash as dyksters smoke clove cigarettes around me.

(Johnny would like to remind you that he never got over those blue eyes and I would like to remind you that the illuminated keyboards on Mac Powerbooks are truly wonderful things.)

Did y’all note that the New Hampshire House defeated a proposed amendment to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman but, interestingly enough, the good folks of this same state do not recognize gay marriages or civil unions performed in other states?

Or that Kris Kristofferson has a new CD?

I am brain-dead and sick of work and in need of some serious escape, and so have been Googling random words from Alternet stories in a sort of Charles Bernstein approach to information gathering. This has resulted in my discovery of some interesting conspiracy theories that, among other things, detail the size of Dick Cheney’s large schlong.

Seems that in 1995, way back when I was a poor post-grad student dedicating most of my income to paying off student loans, Claudia Mullen gave the following testimony to a US presidential advisory committee investigating post-WWII government radiation experiments:

Between the years 1957 and 1984 I became a pawn in the government's game. Its ultimate goal was mind control and to create the perfect spy, all through the use of chemicals, radiation, drugs, hypnosis, electric shock, isolation in tubs of water, sleep deprivation, brainwashing, verbal, physical, emotional and sexual abuse.

I was exploited unwittingly for nearly three decades of my life and the only explanations given to me were that the end justifies the means and I was serving my country in their bold effort to fight communism. I can only summarize my circumstances by saying they took an already abused seven-year-old child and compounded my suffering beyond belief.

The saddest part is, I know for a fact I was not alone. There were countless other children in my same situation and there was no one to help us until now. I have already submitted as much information as possible including conversations overheard at the agencies responsible. I am able to report all of this to you in such detail because of my photographic memory and the arrogance of the people involved. They were certain they would always control my mind.

Although the process of recalling these atrocities is not an easy one, nor is it without some danger to myself and my family, I feel the risk is worth taking.

Dr. L. Wilson Greene, [who] received $50 million dollars from the Edgewood Chemical and Radiology Laboratory as part of the TSD, or Technical Science Division of the CIA, once described to Dr. Charles Brown that “children were used as subjects because they were more fun to work with and cheaper too.” They needed lower profile subjects than soldiers and government people so only young willing females would do. Besides, he said, “I like scaring them.”

In 1958 they told me I was to be tested by some important doctors from the ... Human Ecology Society, and I was instructed to cooperate. I was told not to look at anyone's faces, and to try hard to ignore any names because this was a very secret project. I was told all these things to help me forget. Naturally, as most children do, I did the opposite and remembered as much as I could. A Dr. John Gittinger tested me, Dr. Cameron gave me the shock, and Dr. Greene the X-rays. Then I was told by Sid Gottlieb that “I was ripe for the big A,” meaning ARTICHOKE.

By the time I left to go home, just like every time from then on, I would remember only whatever explanations Dr. Robert G. Heath, of Tulane Medical University, gave me for the odd bruises, needle marks, burns on my head, fingers, and even the genital soreness. I had no reason to think otherwise. They had already begun to control my mind.

The next year I was sent to a lodge in Maryland called Deep Creek Cabins to learn how to sexually please men. I was taught how to coerce them into talking about themselves. It was Richard Helms, who was Deputy Director of the CIA, Dr. Gottlieb, Capt. George White, and Morris Allan who all planned on filling as many high government agency officials and heads of academic institutions and foundations as possible so that later when the funding for mind control and radiation started to dwindle, projects would continue. I was used to entrap many unwitting men, including themselves, all with the use of a hidden camera. I was only nine years old when the sexual humiliation began.

I overheard conversations about part of the Agency called ORD, which I found out was Office of Research and Development. It was run by Dr. Greene, Dr. Steven Aldrich, Martin Orne, and Morris Allan. Once a crude remark was made by Dr. Gottlieb about a certain possible leak in New Orleans involving a large group of retarded children who had been given massive doses of radiation. He asked why was Wilson so worried about a few retarded kids, after all they would be the least likely to spill the beans.

We’ve got the Artichoke, the grassy knoll, the Franklin Cover-Up, Project Paper Clip, MK Ultra, Bohemian Groove, the conspiracy of silence (a sex scandal involving children at Boystown), the Finders, The Church of Set, Cathy O'Brien’s ritualized sexual abuse involving Dick Cheney’s abnormally large penis and Mark Philips, the neurolinguistic programmer who toured the conspiracy circuit with this woman.

Then there’s Dave McGowan’s Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder. McGowan sees rampant Satanic pedophilia/ritual murder connections in this so-called pedophocracy that we mistakenly call a nation.

Lots to read and I'm a skeptic.

Nevertheless, I’m looking around this dive now wondering which of these folks drops phrases such as “Project Paper Clip” and “Bohemian Groove” as they sip their beers, which dyksters believe the UFO stories are real?

203. COMING SOON TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU: HETS-ONLY WATER FOUNTAINS

From the Archives

(March 2006) I'm catching up on the news and, as usual, sampling it.

Seems that Idaho activists recently fanned out across downtown Boise to attach small white Heterosexuals Only signs to every bench and fountain and doorway and statehouse bathroom they could find.

This action coincided with the forty-first anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma.

Amazing how time advances yet bigotry stands still, isn’t it (and how some folks use religion to justify it in both cases)?

Elsewhere in these united states, the good folks of Burlington VT—oh to ride my Bike around Lake Champlain again!—elected to name a nearby peak Brokeback Mountain.

And elsewhere Jerry Falwell had the Soulforce Equality Riders arrested when they stepped onto Liberty University property. But, in a move that makes perfect sense to my Alabama-bred pal Tuscaloosa and this escaped-from-the-Baptists grrrl, Liberty U students greeted the queer riders with cookies.

And farther south, five Savannah soldiers taunted and severely beat a gay man.

These soldiers are members of the Third Infantry Division at Fort Stewart—the same place where an artist pal’s cross-dressing young stepson is now stationed.

Gawd do I hope the boy’s discreet!

LISTENING TO: The rain

READING: Transgender Warriors and a new cookbook manuscript

BEST OF SPAM: Safe way to drown your girlfriend in cum. (Yuck! Howzabout I drown her in throbbing contractions and water-based lube instead?)

202. COYOTE O COYOTE CAN YOU EXPLAIN?

From the Archives

(March 2006) Don’t you wonder how a coyote wound up in Central Park?

It seems likely that someone released it there. But then again maybe it wandered down from that Connecticut camp where my ex Mud and her new game-playing boytoy got eaten alive while participating in one of those dumb live-action role-playing weekends.

Yeah, I’m sure that’s what happened.

The coyote scanned the surviving LARPers, decided that there were just too many insouciant Yalies who can play-act but have no clue how to interact in their herd, then wandered off to the mean streets of the city in search of real people and some Adobo-infused dinner.

The Times calls the coyote’s appearance “as unexpected as seeing Woody Allen on the arctic tundra,” and that about sums it up.

About as unlikely as seeing that poor whale swimming up the Thames too.

201. I AM A COMMON WOMAN. . .

...There are a lot more just like me
Holding the whole damn world together,
Day by day, week by week.

Turn to your neighbor;
Look in her face.
You can read it in her eyes:
We all are common women,
As common as bread,
And will rise, will rise.
—Mary Beth Elliot/Joan Simcoe’s song “Common Woman”

From the Archives (March 2006) This afternoon, we held a reception for an employee who retires next week. Our fearless leader applauded her “quiet contribution” (at the rate of $26,000 annually after 30 years of service), praised her diligence and attention to detail, then presented her with a gift certificate to a big-box office supply store before we partook of reception fare together.

I’m glad we honored her publicly, glad she retired with full benefits after dedicating so many years of her life to this place, but couldn’t help but remind myself that this same fearless leader told me to get rid of her just four years ago.

(I’m cocky, so replied Why don’t you tell me how much money you need instead [big boy] and let me find it for you?)

So perhaps readers will understand why the edges of my parched lips curled into an uncontrollable snarl when Fearless Leader shook the hand of a woman who will retire having no idea how hard I had to work to save her position and benefits just a few short years ago.

Everybody knows that the deal is rotten. Old Black Joe’s still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows. Everybody knows.

What’s that Percy Bysshe Shelley line:

The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature

Today I need some poetry so, okay, I’ll end with a poem:

MY HEART

I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.
I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar.
(...) and my heart—
you can’t plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.
—Frank O’Hara