233. THE CAPITAL OF PETTINESS

From the Archives. (June 2006, late) The French novelist and essayist Stendhal called his hometown "the capital of pettiness" and fled to Paris as soon as he could. I fled to New Orleans. With Danishgrrrl. And boy am I glad I did.

I savored every second of uninterrupted time that we spent together.

The city itself was sobering though, an empty shell of a once-vibrant place that I am only now able to even write about.

Flood-damaged vehicles still lie in rusted, crumbled heaps beneath overpasses. Small white trailers stand in the driveways of moldy houses still in serious states of disrepair. Blue-tarped roofs are everywhere. And plywood-covered windows and doors stretch across the entire city, punctuated by the snapped-off trunks of palmettos.

But where are the people? Even in the French Quarter—an area the floodwaters ostensibly spared—there were so few people.

I understand that tourist dollars are important right now and that our conference brought needed funds to the area, but felt as if we were invading the precious few remains of someone’s sacred shrine, that we were surfing on the residents’ collective misery in a gauche and callous way as the shell-shocked looked on, too tired and despondent to even react to our thoughtless invasion.

Empty turnstiles suggested where crowds once gathered and all I could think when I saw them was Here is the church. Here is the steeple. But where the bloody hell are the people?

No crowds filled the riverfront park or waited to board the Algiers ferry or stood in line at the cool aquarium and even the residents seemed baffled by the malfunctioning walk/don’t walk signs that nearly got us killed more than once.

And the over-riding stench of rotting garbage was everywhere.

Bourbon Street is a sad spilled beer of a place populated by a few mullet-wearing bleached-blond types clutching plastic and looking down the vast and empty streets, trying hard to find the party they’ve been promised. They whoop it up momentarily but, with so few of them there, their gesticulations are herely sad and overly desperate gestures, signifying nada.

Only Cafe du Monde seemed vibrant, still alive.

The place is surrounded by tropical courtyards maintained behind gorgeous wrought-iron gates, and the balconies still boast overflowing flowerpots set against beautiful pastel-tinted stucco .

Plenty of restaurants still offer gumbo and shrimp with remoulade sauce and crawfish etouffée too.

Danishgrrrl and I even stumbled upon a festive wedding parade be-bopping its way down Royal Street with a brass band leading the way.

That felt hopeful at least.

But what felt most hopeful (um, besides the fact that I learned oh so much that will help me do my job more effectively) was the fact that Danishgrrrl and I got to spend so much uninterrupted time together without the kids or our everyday obligations or deadlines and are now practically glowing in each other’s presence.

Sadly, we must now resume our workouts after all that Creole food that we consumed in the shell-shocked shambles of the once vibrant city that is now America’s shame.

READING: The Piano Tuner, which my reading group will discuss tonight.

BEST-OF SPAM (Subject Line): Your penis reminds a computer mouse? (Well, the florescent blue trackball on my Mac mouse IS a little like one of those dolphin dildos. And I do finger the little gray clitoris on my PC mouse when I need to doubleclick. Still, I’d have to say that my penises—‘cause who wants to be limited to one?—are much more shaftlike than any mouse I've seen. Dude.)

232. THE MEANEST FLOWER, AND POWERFUL BODIES REDUCED TO TENDER BATTLEGROUNDS

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
(Wm. Wordsworth, from Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood)

From the Archives. (June 2006) My former long-term partner has had to resort to anti-depressants to get through her chemo and her eyes look so damn haunted that I can hardly bear to look at her right now.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, she’s a 43-year-old triathlete with breast cancer who can hardly walk up the stairs now on bad days.

OF COURSE she’s depressed. And overwhelmed. And looking at the strong possibility of not living till old age. And exhausted. And in pain. And weak. And haunted.

And her medical degree, although helpful, comes with loads of statistics about every thing that can go wrong between now and the end of her life.

Who wouldn’t be depressed given this scenario?

I’m glad we’re having dinner tonight, but hate seeing her so sick, have such a very hard time swallowing this reality.

•

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
(William Wordsworth, from Ode: Intimations of Immortality, from Recollections of Early Childhood)

Now it is Sunday evening and I just ran inside after getting drenched in a downpour.

We’re in that stage of summer when there’s a thunderstorm with lightning practically every night and it is humid but beautiful so long as you keep the AC blasting.

Last night’s full moon was incredible. Danishgrrrl and I snuggled into the hammock and watched it darting in and out of the clouds, so luminous and beautiful and huge, then fell asleep with it peeking into our windows just ahead of the storms.

We slept in this morning, then went for a long hike by the river, where we hung out on the rocks and in the water and talked a lot before hanging out in the hammock again.

(Did I mention that the back yard is looking so cool now that a winding creek runs through it, inviting people to step out of the sunshine and into its shaded spaces?)

•

Had dinner with Tree Friday night to celebrate the end of her chemo. She looks and feels good now and even sauntered through the Race for the Cure on Saturday.

She’s not her normal marathon-running self yet but is doing so much better now that chemo has ended and even her hair is beginning to grow back in a little.

Radiation is easier but now she’s covered with tattoos and ink marks and plastic bulls’ eyes that tell the technicians where to zap her.

I guess you could say that her body is a battleground in an entirely different way than we’ve thought about that battleground before.

She said that Pottergrrl is terrified of this cancer and has returned to the Seventh Day Adventist vegan meals of her formative years.

I guess controlling the food you eat as a response to seemingly healthy people around you suddenly become gravely ill could provide some semblance of control, convince you that (given enough spinach) you might actually remain immune to death and illness.

And yeah,spinach could keep you healthy for a long time but, let’s face it, we’re all going to die.

I got no qualms with that, but would someone please get the sex toys out of the house before my family shows up to claim my stuff?


READING: Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions

LISTENING TO: the glorious, sexy rain. Also weaklazyliar’s “Forgive Me”: I thought that truth was the line that anchored the kite. I thought that love was a kite to fly. I thought that I was holding on, but I was holding on to nothing, holding onto nothing. Forgive me.

BEST-OF SPAM: She needs better sexx, navy bean!!!

231 .JAGGED EDGES

From the Archive (June 2006) I can’t remember who said “Youth will go but passion and freedom will have to be reconquered each day of your life,” but I have been thinking about that line a lot lately.

So many things vie for our time, threaten to reduce us to strangers spasming at the stoplight as we worry about the next commitment we must reach on time because of some artifical frame that we have allowed our need for a salary to place around our true selves.

It is too damn easy to get wrapped up in crap like this and forget to live your life, forget to even notice that beautiful goldfinch right there in the tree beside you.

Work is consuming nearly all of my time right now and would be a twenty-four-hour job if I allowed it to be.

This isn’t surprising, given that it’s the end of the fiscal year—a normal June, really—but I am trying very hard to retain my passion, to hold onto the poet in the midst of my overcommitments and changing job landscape and arrogant yet oh-so-lousy new boss and her disappointing new administration (and did I mention that she has no idea how to perform my job yet keeps trying to micromanage me anyway?).

Mainly, this is very bad news because I must stay here another year before I am vested and have benefits for life upon retirement.

Danishgrrl says I am burned to a crisp and has suggested an impromptu cookout with friends till she can whisk me off to the beach for a long luxurious weekend.

Hope this helps.

•

Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.—Harry Crews

So did anyone else hear that naval-gazing poet Billy Collins read on NPR last night?

Jezzzuslawd that man is self-absorbed! He read a precious little poem about poetry (with a capital P) that was basically a bunch of masturbatory self-congratulatory lines that didn’t amount to anything, and then Terry Gross practically peed her pants congratulating him.

Ugh.

I guess I need to remember that poet laureates are not chosen from poets’ poets.

As for me, I want to slap the pompous man in the name of O’Hara and Broumas and all the new and innovative poets writing meaningful lines today.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is running a series of articles on how genes move and change, written by the amazingly hot smartypants evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson and wow what a picture of her they have posted! It’s almost enough to make me subscribe to Times Select instead of reading my electronic freebie.

Not much time to read right now though—although I am following the impact of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Rolling Stone article on how the Republicans deliberately stole the election in Ohio.

This is, what, the fourth report to verify this horrifying reality, but has the story been broadcast by the mainstream media

(who, for that matter, still haven’t reported that Gore actually won in Florid.)?

There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark when Americans have to listen to the BBC to find out about the demise of our democratic principles.

LISTENING TO: the wheels go round and round (I really love to watch them roll)

READING: Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions

SANG IN SHOWER: Kasey Chambers’ “Pony”: When I grow up I want a baby. I’m going to name it after Ralph Stanley...

BEST-OF SPAM: Anything to please your woman (uh huh)

230. EROS

The inner voice of Eros is arbitrary, bizarre, impeccably honest, bountiful, and so powerful as to be cruel. It takes courage to hear its demands and follow them.—Patrick Califia

From the Archives. (June 2006)That line is from Susie Bright’s site.

Huh. So Pat Califia of Macho Sluts fame has morphed into Patrick huh?

Frankly, I am not at all surprised.

I like the quote.

•

Meanwhile, I spent most of yesterday installing a French drain in my backyard and can hardly bend today, but it is nearly finished and I am heading out there again as soon as I finish my cup of coffee.

The drain runs along a dried-up creekbed that pools during rainstorms and stays too wet for decent grass. I plan to plant a weeping willow where the pipe empties today, after I take a photo of the huge pile of river pebbles that will form a rocky creekbed in my yard by this afternoon.

The mostly wooded backyard needs some attention, and, with luck, the landscape fabric I placed under the drain will keep the whole area clean of weeds and give it a nicer look while draining the standing water away efficiently and attractively.

LISTENING TO: Jenna Mammina’s cool cover of Honeysuckle Rose

READING: a biography of Benjamin Godard and The Poet’s Notebook

BEST-OF SPAM: pseudo saintliness

229. I’M LUCKY. I CAN WALK UNDER LADDERS...

Show me a 50-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder—Arizona governor Janet Napolitano

From the Archives. (May 2006) Bush has come up with some dumbass ideas before, but building a 50-foot wall (which he calls a fence—I guess because he was advised to avoid those wall associations) that costs $3.2 million per mile along the border as our economy sucks is justifiably INSANE and doling this work out to cronies via yet another noncompetitive bid after every shady thing this administration has done is tantamount to shooting the bird at the tax payers whose dollars this president squanders on his ego rollercoaster.

228. SHE’S A HOUSE ON FIRE; I’M A HURRICANE

Remember that it only takes one hurricane in your neighborhood to make it a bad season” says Conrad Lautenbacher from the National Hurricane Center.

From the Archives. (May 2006) I hate to bring this up but hurricane season is upon us and guess who’s still in office, tuning his guitar.

I was thinking about the Katrina debacle last night after discovering some chilling yet somehow beautiful New Orleans footage and videos at http://www.filmstripinternational.com and http://www.chrisvids.org.

This made me remember how weird it was to drive from DC to Charleston after a hurricane nearly destroyed the city.

Signs as far away as Charlotte were bent to the ground and debris littered the roadside for hundreds of miles.

It got worse the closer I got to the coast. Then I reached Charleston and discovered that the damage was even worse than I had imagined,that the city had been effectively transformed into a bombed-out wisteria-dripping ruin.

Still, years later, when a local weather station warned that a hurricane was heading my way I said “Are y’all crazy? Hurricanes don’t come this far inland.”

Boy was I wrong.

Our seventy-year-old windows shook in their casements as Mud and I kept looking at each other and asking Is THIS when we fill the bathtub with water and stand in the stairwell with the mattress over our faces?

It was the only time I hated the fact that our house was filled with French doors.

The rain pounded against our thirteen-inch stucco walls so hard that they were saturated clean through. And, even though we scoured the neighborhood, we never found the patio furniture that the wind carried away or mangled beyond recognition.

(And did I mention that plants we’d never planted sprouted up everywhere even as we wondered what became of our tomatoes? Or that I was so damn desperate for a cup of coffee in our powerless town that I actually ground my beans with a rolling pin?)

All of which is a precursor to my saying that being in New Orleans next month is going to be mighty damn weird and I can’t believe that Bush isn’t doing more to prepare for this season (and that I can’t find some long-distance way to make plans to work in a neighborhood while I’m there) .

Meanwhile, Pat Robertson has announced that his god told him that a tsunami will hit the Pacific NW this year (which, to my undying delight, caused owlbear1 to write “Oh mighty Thor! I beseech thee to wack Pat Robertson’s pee pee”).

Meanwhile, tickets for Madonna’s new tour are a mere $350 apiece.

Puhleeez! I mean sure Madonna is great and like a virgin and yogatastic and all that and she survived that unfortunate equestrian accident unlike Christopher Reeves and I am sure that it is oh so fantastic to watch her because she is, after all, Madonna, but we are talking about HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS here and the biggest irony of all is that her tour includes a video montage of Bush, bin Laden, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. juxtaposed with starving African children (all of whom could be fed and clothed for years if Madonna donated her profits to this cause).

Meanwhile, David Sirota points out in In These Times that the same neocons who preach the so-called culture of life are paid boocoodles of money from the health-care industry to look the other way when sick people skip a trip to the physician because they can’t afford to go.

He asks “Why do we hear so much about how well-off America is, yet our country has the highest number of uninsured citizens in the industrialized world?”

Why isn't that question asked? Because you can't answer it honestly without exploring how Corporate America has bought off enough politicians to make sure our government helps corporations perpetuate this travesty.

....I'm not naïve. I know that corporations exist for one reason and one reason only: the relentless, single-minded pursuit of profit, no matter who gets shafted. That is their stated purpose in a capitalist society, and that's fine. But in our country, corporations aren't supposed to pursue this purpose in a vacuum, unchecked, unregulated, unopposed. There is supposed to be a counterweight, a government separate from Big Business whose job is to prevent the corporate profit motive from destroying society.

That government once passed laws protecting the environment, so the profit motive wouldn't end up eliminating breathable air. That government once protected workers, so the profit motive wouldn't result in Americans toiling in sweatshops. And that government once demanded better wages, so the profit motive wouldn't result in a race to the bottom for poverty-level paychecks. But that government, as we all know, is long gone. Our government has been the victim of a hostile takeover. Over the last thirty years, Corporate America has applied its most effective business tactics to the task of purchasing the one commodity that's not supposed to be for sale: American democracy.

So yeah. Next time you’re watching one of those feel-good Blue Cross Blue Shield look-how-we-love-our-customers ads, remind yourself that HMOs doubled their profits in 2003 and spent $600 million on lobbying efforts and campaign contributions that year.

Sirota also points out that “Frist’s family was forced to pay $1.7 billion in criminal and civil fines for trying to rip off Medicare while running the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain“ (a chain where I toiled in their crummy kitchens for 7 long years).

And to think it was once considered primitive to feast on the poor.

BEST-OF SPAM: Do you want your dick to be wallpaper for a computer? (Um. I’m not even sure how to answer that?)

227. BAD BREAKS AND EQUESTRIAN MEMORIES

From the Archives. (May 2006) Maybe it’s because I grew up in an equestrian town where the elite ponies train then race before going on to the big time.

Maybe it’s because racetracks and steeplechases and training grounds and polo chukkers are ubiquitous to the place.

Maybe it’s because my little brother was a fearless polo player.

And maybe it’s because a whole section of my town of origin was unpaved to better suit the magnificent thoroughbreds.

Yeah, maybe it’s because my childhood is laced with so many memories of hall-of-famers racing across the grass that I get a lump in my throat every single time I read about Barbaro.

Current headline > Barbaro’s Chances: 50/50.

226. VULVA LANDSCAPES AND FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY

From the Archives. (May 2006) Tee Corinne, author of the Cunt Coloring Book, is dying of cancer and needs some money. Susie Bright is holding a fundraiser for her but, well, I ain’t in California, so I sent in my donation through paypal because, as Susie says, Tee is the beginning of lesbian erotic photography.

Wish I could claim credit for my title, but Susie used it in Nothing But the Girl to describe Tee’s contributions to the lesbian community, so credit where credit is due for those vulva landscapes (which is about the only thing that would make me switch my painting style to landscapes).

Meanwhile my dear friend Tuscaloosa called to say she won a big writing prize and that a big-name press contacted her with a book contract.

This means that Tuscaloosa and I must hole up and write, but fast!

Meanwhile, with everything going on in the world, Yahoo! wants me to know that Jennifer Aniston is house-hunting in Chicago.

Meanwhile, Bush (the Texas touter of manufactured evidence and terror alerts who employs fear to convince working citizens whose wages continue to fall under his administration to wrap the American flag across their cross-adorned chests and slap yellow ribbon magnets on their cars and send their children off to die in an unnecessary, ineffective, and budget-breaking war against a population that didn’t even produce the terrorists who destroyed the twin towers) now has a six-year history of saying whatever he thinks will most effectively manipulate people regardless of the truth behind his claims.

He recently announced his plans to militarize the Mexican border, for example, but also told Mexico’s president that he does not plan to militarize the border.

Bush took his lying to new lows in a recent immigration speech though, when he said (with an um straight face) that “we cannot build a unified country by inciting people to anger or playing on anyone’s fears.”

Now I am SURE that the terror alert went up and telephone calls got traced when Jon Stewart commented on the ridiculousness of this statement by adding “that’s what terrorism and gay people are for.”

And what are we to make of this president’s assertion of a unified country when his administration has made it blatantly clear that it could give less than a shit about the mass of our citizenry?

Why doesn’t he just proclaim the truth: Y’all peons can just fend for yer selves coz I am giving my SEVENTY-BILLION-DOLLAR tax cut to my prep-school pals..

Budgetary brutality. Distributional bias. Fiscal irresponsibility. Oh my fucking my!

Molly Ivins notes that people who earn over $1 million annually will receive a nearly $42,000 tax cut while the average schmoe will receive a whopping $20.

With all this going on, I was only minorly surprised when a progressive legislator told me that she and her hubbie are going off the grid and joining a self-sustaining commune because they believe that we will reach an apocalyptic moment before the next election.

Well, I hope you have a lot of guns, I replied, since everyone will be coming for your goods after the big collapse.

Meanwhile, I guess I’m just fiddling as Rome burns, since I spent part of yesterday playing my long-neglected piano.

I am currently fascinated by the berceuse, which Jocelyn the tenor sings outside the cave of the eagles in Act II of Godard’s opera Jocelyn. The melody in the second section is especially wonderful, although my out-of-practice fingers just don’t do it justice.

I also went to a private garden's open house and purchased a few native plants that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. This means that I need to quit typing and get off my ass and make a new plant bed, since it is already 11:30 on Sunday morning and my weekend is disappearing fast.

LISTENING TO: REM’s “Gardening by Night”

READING: Technobarons of the Twenty-First Century: Why Telephone and Cable Companies Want to Take Control of the Internet

BEST OF SPAM: hymen errand

225. NARROWSBURG, USA

(From the Archives) April 2006. Caught up on Bush&Co last night and the evidence of deliberate deception is overwhelming.

So here’s my suggestion: There’s a town called Narrowsburg in NY State. Let’s send the 29 percent of Americans who still support Bush there and let them live out their narrow worldviews in this aptly named place while the rest of us try to salvage what’s left of our democratic process and once vibrant system of checks and balances.

The deception started well before Colin Powell’s presentation to the Security Council but, as Howard Zinn notes in “Removing America’s Blinders” (The Progressive, 4.24.06), this speech, broadcast one month before the US invaded Iraq, “may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk.”

WMD evidence cited by Powell includes “satellite photos, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare.”

And whee didn’t the newspapers and reading public jump on that irrefutable-evidence bandwagon as enterprising young conservatives launched their yellow ribbon magnet movement?

Edna St. Vincent Millay expressed her outrage at the outcome of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial by penning a chilling sonnet that begins

Read history. So learn your place in time, and go to sleep—all this was done before.

We do it better, fouling every shore; we disinfect, we do not probe the crime....

.

What would Vincent say today, when evidence of “the mendacity of our high officials” is so clearly fouling every shore?

Read history, so learn your place in time. That’s Zinn’s message too.

Zinn’s short list of lies our presidents have told to justify American wars follows:

President Polk and American slave-owners wanted half of Mexico, so Polk declared that Mexico “shed American blood upon American soil” and went to war.

President McKinley announced that America wanted to liberate Cuba from Spanish control, “but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out ... so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations.” Polk, likewise, said that we wanted to “civilize” Filipinos, but we really just wanted “that valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos” in order to get it.

President Wilson declared that we had no choice but to enter WWI in order to “make the world safe for democracy,” but the war was really fought “to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.”

President Truman “lied when he said [that] the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was ‘a military target.’”

And everyone—Kennedy (US level of involvement), Johnson (Gulf of Tonkin), Nixon (secret Cambodian bombings)—“lied about Vietnam ... all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really [the US wanted] to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.”

Then [Pez-dispenser] Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada and said that the tiny nation of Grenada was a threat to our nation.

Then Bush the Elder “lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country” and “lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991” [on the day that his son Neil went to trial, thus effectively killing the story]. This invasion was “hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait” but was, really, to “assert US power in the oil-rich Middle East.”

And the lies continue to hemmorhage.

Zinn points out the obvious—that, when leaders throw around the terms such as national interest, national security, national defense, most citizens assume that they are talking about We The People, but they’re actually talking about profits and markets, about protecting big business and increasing its wealth.

Zinn also points out that the WHO ranked the US 37th in overall health performance in 2000.

This rating was based on money our country spent per capita for health care.

And here’s a sobering (if oft-repeated) fact: in the richest nation in the world, one in five children is born into poverty.

(Remember those New Orleans photographs? There are a whole lot more poor people out there, even if the nightly news rarely serves them up for public consumption.)

We’re the most powerful country in the world, yet 40 countries have a better record of infant mortality rates that we do.

Cuba does.

We lead the world in the number of people in prison (yet resist charging our seemingly insane president with treason).

It’s clear our policies consider some people expendable. And it’s clear that Bush&Co are rewarding the megarich at the expense of the rest of us.

Our history of “slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor ... [of] ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations ... our long history of slavery, segregation, and racism ... [our] record of imperial conquest in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” tell a story that should make us all hang our heads until we summon up the courage to get out there and protest what is being done in our name.