fauxblow

this dysphoria is over a month old!

2005-09-12T21:49:00.000-04:00

(And yet, I'm posting it anyway...) I spent a great deal of time watching television this weekend, in between reading proofs of the new John Hope Franklin memoir coming out. The television consisted of horrifying scenes accompanied by dischordantly upbeat reports from New Orleans and the pastel hothouse of the US Open, all of which I watched with a weird hollow urgency in my chest. And then I'd be reminded of my work by the high pitch of the chemical smell floating up from the blues in my lap, and I'd go back to reading what was an inspiring and impressive story. John Hope Franklin has survived a century's worth of racism in this country, filled his life with work and teaching (by virtue of the assistance and bottomless sacrifices made by his wife Aurelia, featured in the frame to his left). His book read like an extended and extremely impressive resumé dotted with brief anecdotes. Several patterns extended themselves from Franklin's quiet and optimistic text to the distracted reader.

John Hope Franklin did everything absolutely by the book, with the righteous and powerful exception of his refusal to bow to the expectations of the racist nation in which he was born. A rough paraphrase of the mantra that thrums in his mind when faced with the cruelest, most manipulative and intimidating of racial injustices is You must do as they do, but do it a thousand times better. The second repetition which manifested itself: Franklin started his life believing in the U.S. government, and continues to from the looks of his memoir. Despite being misused and manipulated by presidential adminstrations and their minions responsible for addressing the very injustices they were calling on him to enumerate, he soldiers on to the next civic task, ever optimistic about the democratic and academic institutions to which he's dedicated himself.

My sense of his anger was mute, the emotion being tempered, I believe, by his vast historical perspective. But then I think his life has been spent trying to demonstrate the significance of history, the truths contained in it. The limitless potential in its study for people to gain the capacity to evaluate, question, recognize (reknow), and empower themselves.

P.S. The NYTimes magazine's delightful and disastrous Deborah Solomon interviewed him shortly after the book's release.

Q. As a renowned scholar of African-American history, a field that some say you virtually invented, how do you think Hurricane Katrina has altered our view of race in this country?

The tragedy is that Katrina changed our view at all. We should have known the things that Katrina brought out.

Like the fact that blacks in New Orleans live in the lowest and most flood-prone elevations, while whites occupy the higher and safer land?

Yes, but we don't have any interest in that. We have more interest in who won the last football game, and who won the last basketball game, and who's on TV, and who's in Hollywood. It's a fundamental problem of this country today, the lack of critical thinking and judgment on the part of
the American citizens.

Lawrence F. Kaplan just published an essay in which he laments the decline of national greatness not among our leaders but among our citizens, among ordinary Americans who have lost all sense of civic responsibility.

It was never any different. It has been the same since 1619. That was when the first ships arrived from West Africa with blacks on them. We got off to a bad start right then!

How can you, as a man who was born in Oklahoma at a time when lynchings were common, and who later worked with Thurgood Marshall on Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that outlawed segregation in public schools, claim that we have made no progress in advancing the rights of African-Americans?

I'm not saying that! I'd jump out the window if I thought we had made no progress. What I am saying is that the changes have been superficial, and we are still a segregated society when it comes to schools and the neighborhoods where we live.

And of course, you are a teacher yourself. In fact, you are said to be the most decorated professor in this country. I hear you have so far earned 130 honorary degrees.

I think it's up to 137. But that's not the way you measure anything. Some of it is conscience pay. I don't want to belabor the point, but giving out awards makes the givers feel good. It is easier to give me an honorary degree than to make certain that all blacks have a decent place to live.

You yourself live rather nicely in Durham, N.C., where you're a professor emeritus at Duke University and have a building on the campus named after you.

I call myself retired now, and I try to act my age.

How, exactly, does one act at 90 years old?

You go fly-fishing all day.

Or you write all day. Your history of a slave family, "In Search of the Promised Land," just came out, and next month you're publishing your autobiography, "Mirror to America." Do you ever get tired of working?

I have never experienced fatigue the way other people do. I remember the first time I experienced
fatigue. It was in 1960, and I was in Australia. I thought I was going to die.

Now that you are a widower, who prepares your meals for you?

His name is John Hope Franklin.

Yes, I've heard of him. How's his cooking?

Pretty good. I had a big cookout on Labor Day. I had six people over for dinner. I did Hawaiian chicken, and baby back ribs, and we had corn on the cob, and potato salad, which I am ashamed to say that I did not make myself but bought at Harris Teeter supermarket. Isn't that awful?

Unforgivable. Have you ever missed a day of work?

No. For what?

What do you think about before you fall asleep at night?

I don't think about the past much. And I never think about whether I am going to wake up or not the next morning. I'm too busy trying to read the last pages of the newspaper before it falls in my face.

waylaid

2005-09-06T23:09:00.000-04:00

What I keep thinking of is a girl who moves into an apartment in a neighborhood she doesn't know well. Her downstairs neighbor is a shouter and a screamer. This neighbor lives with her mother, who is a good person but who insists she has a bad heart, that the sound of the girl above is ticking days, months, years off of her life. The girl learns to step lightly up the stairs, across the tile of the kitchen, easing toe to heel. She chastises her visitors for too-loud laughter or for idiosynchratic foot-tapping without hesitation or premeditation. She only plays with her cat if she knows he'll be scrabbling for twine on the soundproof surface of the mattress, his untrimmed claws shredding through the sheets to foam padding, through foam padding to quilted bed. There's something cowardly about this way of life. Something overly precious and falsely concerned. I'm afraid this is, again, a fucking metaphor.

It's the classic blog post: where did she go; what the hell is she doing; why the hell do I keep coming back if there's nothing the fuck new? I'm a bit crushed by work right now, and please, feel quite free to make as much fun of me as you so desire. Work is a pleasure, a privilege. My apartment and place of work are dry and everyday I eat so well as to gain back the weight lost to graduate school. My nails and hair are growing so fast. So what if I'm not getting paid much? So what if my potential for advancement is equal to my willingness to sacrifice my personal life and my own creative work. The notion of the overworked and overfed girl ironically fits my own laziness. I have time. For thinking about and working to do all things. Including this goddamned blog.

The ladyfriend over at Tangential is totally on top of the mushrooming social, political, and above all human consequences and responses of Hurricane Katrina. We spent hours crying and watching the news together on Friday. Watching Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parrish, break down into sobs when he tells the story of the parish's emergency manager, calling to tell his nursinghome-bound mother they were coming to save her day after day, only to have her drown after five days of waiting. Watching Kanye West's deadpan delivery of a statement that everyone was thinking but no one was saying. Fuck, even Matt Damon is spouting negative shit about Bush.

Something is happening here, people. I hope you're paying attention because shit is bigger than the pathetic and miniscule discomforts of my life.

nice ears, Garvice

2005-08-21T21:57:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned, briefly, several misbegotten posts back, I am now gainfully employed by a certain publishing house in New York City. Solicitously, I neglected to inform those who sanctioned my employment that a previous girlfriend of mine had served as an editorial assistant (verily, dear reader, my own role heretofore) several years ago. She left before the completion of a year, having discovered that she wasn't cut out for either the pay or the work, and jaunted off to bonny Albion in search of other satisfactions (she found a fine new girlfriend there, older, and a corporate lawyer, whose lifestyle if not her vacation time suited her ideal). I have since discovered from coworkers that the editor my girlfriend worked under was less than comfortable or productive in the house, spiritedly unhappy, and was soon "asked to leave," as no one there is ever actually "fired."

So, indeed, I entered this job with some awareness of her discontent, and have been happy to discover that my own experience so far has been thoroughly endurable.

I work for two editors. The first, older and a VP, who I'll call Clara, has been granted by many at the company the epithet of sweet Jewish mother, known for leaving treats and other signals of goodwill on the desks of those with whom she works. My predecessor arrived on her penultimate day of work to discover a deep purple orchid, well in bloom, wedged between her/our keyboard and monitor. Clara is in charge of the paperbacks published by the company as well as the "classics," works from the backlist either out of print or deserving of more attention, which are reissued with fresh introductions written by the contemporarily hot-to-trot. She worked formerly for Vintage Contemporaries (an imprint whose fiction I read more than any other) and is so pragmatic as to be self-effacing (at a recent editorial meeting, in which all of the editors sit at table in the Publisher's office and the editorial assistants drag in folding chairs and desperately strain to hear the meeting's whispered proceedings in the offing, Clara took a spot on the windowsill, recognizing the lack of seats for everyone). She is difficult to read but extremely even-tempered, and asks about the amount of sleep I've been getting or whether I've eaten a sufficient amount on the day of her questioning. She even told me, last week, that she was glad that I was leaving work at 5:30pm on one particular day, in order to attend a party, and said that I'd been staying too late.

This would be the time to mention that it is customary for those employed by this fine if somewhat patriarchal institution to arrive at eight in the morning and depart well after six. Overtime, my dears, is undocumented but paid in free books. The nature of the work is such that it is often easier to stay late in order to complete the tasks one has begun than to leave them for the next day, that next day being a day which may present a climate more hostile to their completion, given additional sundry tasks, duties, obligations, and caterwauling authors.

The second editor I work with, I'll call her Lise, lives in an office just across the hall from mine. She has, as my ladyfriend has stated, an early nineties haircut and dye-job: blunt horizontal bangs and just shoulder length hair, with the bangs and bits of the face-bordering fringe bleached a brassy blonde. The effect is severe and cute, simultaneously, admirably so. She often wears necklaces that declare her outdoorsyness (in certain genres of sci-fi or romance fiction the "amulets" would be described as being affixed to her neck by leather "thongs") and polyester dresses too garishly printed not to be vintage. Lise is my height if not a bit shorter, and I made the mistake this past week at marveling at how tall I felt in her presence (more often than not she wears flipflops to work), I perched in my misguided and uncomfortable heels. She chuckled, but I could tell it was more courtesy than genuine entertainment.

One positive interaction led to our agreement that my ladyfriend is, indeed, totally hottt. As Lise is the editor of the author who I worked for this summer, she had seen said author's documentary about abortion, which includes (features) my ladyfriend and her story. This was the best part: Lise is standing in my doorway, I'm seated at my desk, and another editorial assistant is standing to my right. Lise says, "Yeah, when [your ladyfriend] came on the screen, George [her partner] and I were like, Whoa, she's totally cute. And then after the screening was over, [your ladyfriend] gets up to answer some questions and we were like, Whoa, she's even hotter in person." There's just nothing like bonding with your boss about how fucking attractive your girlfriend is, seriously.

Lise edits the imprint that primarily publishes plays, books on film, pop-cultural histoires and analyses, in addition to some fiction under the flagship imprint. Lise is stern, deep-voiced and dark-eyed, and when she laughs I feel compelled to describe her as a jock. She demonstrates the necessary patience and acute performances of drama in order to elicit action or simply text from her authors, often playwrights and filmmakers who are distant in either mind or body. She has frequently lectured me on the absolute necessity of maintaining absolute discretion when dealing with their contact information (the address of a famous person in the wrong hands can very well necessitate said famous person's migration to an esoteric state) and has given me scores of proof that when it comes to dealing with people in Hollywood, it's best to pretend that everything is happening right now and you need to get me this right now and why isn't it here yet goddammit? I'm pretty sure I don't yet have the license to play the "goddammit" card as of the present moment, but I'm sure it will come, jutting out of the deck like a green light, a premonition of some new and aggressive personality that I do not yet fully possess.

All said, I'm grateful to be working for two women. Face it, people: I'm much more likely to earn trust and give my trust to women; though there are plenty of good examples of fine menfolk in my life who I admire and trust, many of you are reading this, it sure does take a while. More detailed descriptions of my duties to follow, if they be desired.

I remain, yours, in absolute frisson in the face of the inequities and idiosyncrasies of publishing, theories about which I'm sure to develop in the foreseeable interim.

Tarte

bathers 1

2005-08-15T23:16:00.000-04:00

bathers 2

2005-08-15T23:14:00.000-04:00

bathers 3

2005-08-15T23:12:00.000-04:00

bathers 4

2005-08-15T23:10:00.000-04:00

appeas'd be

2005-08-14T17:00:00.000-04:00

Sorry for my absence. A thorough rundown of the work situation soon to follow. In the meantime. I posted some of the North Dakota/Colorado photos on my Flickr page.

Here, my mom (on the right) and my aunt Sue (on the left)demonstrate the power of mastery through imitation. If you examine my mother's facial expression, you'll see she shares my transparent sense of irony. The stripper mannequin was posted at the top of the stairs of this tiny restaurant in Amidon called "Georgia's and the Owl" that had kindly announced, "Welcome Stegner Reunion: 100 Years."

by way of annoncer

2005-08-08T13:05:00.000-04:00

My dear people, I am very pleased and grateful to say that I now have a job.

Or possibly more accurately, I have been told that if I come to the same place every day from 9 am until 5 pm I will be given rent money plus some benefits that will come in handy should I collapse while working.

Scary to think of me in the working world, primarily because I believe I have a great number of illusions about the working world. Like, once I gain their respect I can wear as many cleavage shirts as I so desire. Or, no one will give a damn about my hairy armpits. Or, because I'm a reasonable and capable person, no one is going to yell at, throw things at, or generally disrespect, moi. Or, because I'll be working for women, one of them a self-declared feminist even, the situation will be most likely simpatico (meaning, hopefully, clear expecations, reasonable demands, a reduced likelihood of demeaning, unnecessary, and time-consuming tasks, or in the event of such tasks, a shared sense of the ridiculousness of humanity's lapsed ability to optimize working environments; i.e. copy machines and fax machines should have been turned into coffee dispensing, lunch/drycleaning fetching, mood-sensitive robots a LONG TIME AGO). The ladyfriend's own situation at the Agglomerate of Canards and Legal Ululation will attest to instability of the previous hypothetical.

But perhaps my most cherished illusion: now I can help to publish the work of my talented and beloved friends!

dream post #1

2005-08-05T18:44:00.000-04:00

So currently, I'm in Colorado with the family, a situation interesting only insofar as it confirms my nascent (good and bad) suspicions, derived from and harbored since my own time as an angry teen, back when I was so much better at acknowledging my feelings and yet so powerfully inarticulate.

I'm in a condo in beautiful Steamboat, one of those Summer is for Sports and Winter is for Skiing towns where the rich people flock on weekends and the people who actually work the cash register at the Safeway live in trailer parks ten miles away, just off the interstate. The sounds are pleasure planes and million dollar home construction, the smells are just west of girl scout camp.

Like most of my visits home, I believe (when I book the ticket) that I will enjoy staying for as long as I can. But a week here (and in North Dakota) and I'm spent. The goodwill is turning sour and I can already feel my limbs stiffen with each ensuing hug. Four days to go. I've done the obligatory sprinkling of visits throughout my former hometown to the fractured Stoner relativities of blood and history that mar Fort Fun's shiny surface. These somewhat forced but still cheerful encounters are interspersed with bittersweet pilgrimages to the former homes of girlfriends, crushes, boyfriends and enemies who have systematically moved away from Fort Fun. And yet, I still think when I click that purchase button for the plane ticket, that maybe I'll get to see some friends. But having fled the town myself I can hardly complain.

Noteable to this visit, however, has been the fact that my mother and I convene each morning and recount the most unbelievable dreams. Ever since she dreamed of skiing and sex with Eddie Murphy and I listened, rapt, to the most literal eroticization and hyper-masculinization of a black man I'd ever heard, my mom believes I have a potent interest in her dreams. And I do. Oh yes, I do. We've also managed for this dream talk to be an exchange, something my mother and I are not especially good at. She tells her dream, and I tell mine.

So Wednesday morning, I woke up and shuffled downstairs in the pants my mom has threatened to burn at least five times since I've been home, and listened to her tell me about her dream of a Wild Safari to Africa, which included countless African scouts, during which not a single animal was spotted let alone shot. She doesn't care for hunting and yet she woke up feeling horribly disappointed. I ate the rest of my fiberlicious breakfast cereal with a "hint" of brown sugar, then I told my mother my dream.

I dreamed that I ate another human being. This person I ate, quite genderless yet naked, was awake while I was doing it. The circumstances weren't desperate and I certainly wasn't being secretive, as this happened on the street. It wasn't gruesome, exactly, but it also wasn't clean and neat. I was as methodical finishing leg, then arm, then leg, then arm, as I am methodical in finishing each pile of categorically different food on my waking dinner plate. And this person I was eating seemed to approve of my process. Or at least, I thought they did until my first meal's friend (or acquaintance, I'm not sure) approached me, offering themselves as dessert. As soon as we reached some sort of bizarre agreement, "do you find me worthy enough to consume you?" was my big question, the second person agreed. And then they entered the butcher shop on the street behind us and called the police. My first agreed that I should be prosecuted for agreeing to partake of a second; the head belonging to the person I had just eaten was still animated and offering details of my appearance for a police sketch. So I fled. I ran as fast as I could through clean streets and the kind of greenbelts that only the most canned of suburbs can find beautiful, until I felt my bones tell me that I'd reached a town whose residents, all of them, had done something terribly wrong. I settled there, with people whose features I recognized but whose names I didn't know, and after enough time had passed, I believed I was happy.

My mother shook her head, in that special way she has of locking her eyeballs on me while her head rotates back and forth, back and forth. It gives you the impression that her eyes are the locus of her body, around which everything else flutters and turns. Then she said, "Every time I think my dream is weird, your dream is so much weirder. How is that?"

I didn't have a good answer for that one, beyond the obvious, "Because I'm weirder," or "Because you take dreams even more literally that I do." But I had to confess that this was a first. I've flown a lot, I've killed a few people, I've (twice) rapidly alternated between the positions of penis-bearer and vagina-bearer in some sort of trans/bi body snatchers event, I've even channeled the voice of some powerful, wrathful being (due I think to the ancient electric blanket I was sleeping under), but I have never before dreamed of eating someone. I can only wonder if this was a symptom of the vast quantities of ground beef I consumed while visiting the Stegner homestead in North Dakota.

they called me "worldly"

2005-08-02T01:37:00.000-04:00

adj 1: characteristic of or devoted to the temporal world; "worldly goods and advancement" [ant: unworldly] 2: very sophisticated especially because of surfeit; versed in the ways of the world; "the blase traveler refers to the ocean he has crossed as `the pond'"; "the benefits of his worldly wisdom" [syn: blase] 3: concerned with secular rather than sacred matters; "lords temporal and spiritual" [syn: temporal]

So this third uncle of mine, twice removed, once divorced and never remarried says to me, "You, girl, are some worldly folks." And I spend the rest of the weekend wondering about what he meant when he said it, how much of the true definition of worldly he intended, how much of the negative connotation that sprang to mind was true to his intent, his hat-tipping tone, his fly-batting handswing. Most of the folks I met this weekend in Amidon, North Dakota, where Fred Stegner, Sr. staked his claim on a parcel of farmland signed off on by Theodore Roosevelt, were related to me by some portion of blood, more or less, give or take, a thimble-full or a mosquito, it seemed to matter not.

My mother, aunt, grandfather, and I drove the 8 hours from Fort Fun through Wyoming and the Dakotas to this tiny town where my grandfather was born and lived for six years until his father decided that Colorado was the place to be. By that time, Fred Sr. had a son old enough to run the North Dakota farm, and a wife stubborn enough to drag all of her chickens down to Colorado in a coop hitched to the back of the wobbly Hudson with spoked wheels that came off of their own accord and brakes so absent they required meticulous downshifting. And every time I thought of my origins there in North Dakota those same origins were moving south to Colorado.

It didn't take long to feel like an alien. No, Aunt Jill, I don't talk to God, but neither have I suffered the torture of breast cancer. No, Uncle Floyd I don't have a boyfriend and I don't plan on marrying, but neither have I witnessed a marriage worth emulating. No, Cousin Bryce, I haven't cultivated a special dish to attract men, not like your Yvonne and her hamburger casserole. No, Cousin Gordon, I'm not afraid of the city and I don't believe in God and she's my girlfriend goddammit not my roommate. Farm life didn't glow with timelessness for me, but I could see how it could. Though they told me they were proud, my precious education didn't mean much up there, but that seemed as it should. My teal eyeshadow was likened to a dye job on a cow, but somehow I knew it would.

I met (Georg(e)tte) on the fuzzy lip of Amidon, just past Georgia's and the Owl, the most famous (only) restaurant for miles around. I didn't have a car, he/she did, but neither of us were going anywhere. It didn't take me long to realize that a transexual mannequin faux-cop like (Georg(e)tte) knows something about worldliness. He/she spent some time describing recent additions to his/her car, how he/she received a scarf in winter, the new glasses stolen by an ex-partner who'd run off to Bismarck.

We sat with the spiders in the squad car, watching cars race then slow then race on by. It was when I decided to go home that (Georg(e)tte) offered me the consolation prize: a short celebration of the necessity of surprise, discomfort, indignation, and humor. As I lingered outside his/her window, he/she slumped over suddenly, striking the car's horn with his/her pointy powdered-looking nose.

dr tonk to a ah

2005-07-30T00:56:00.000-04:00

or...North Dakota. Where I currently am. And have minimal phone coverage...My mother just told me that "Billy Roach doesn't like [her] anymore"...but hotel room internet! Postings tomorrow!

colorado does mean "color red"

2005-07-26T05:01:00.000-04:00

Note: This whole post is an excuse to bring up this news site: Watching America. Bad design, really interesting content. All articles from international news sources translated into English, the huge drawback of this being that the site managers primarily rely on computer translations which are sporadically checked by human beings. Highlights include a touchy article from Russia about NASA's hubris, a piece from Canada about the country's victory over the U.S. in the category of "Dumbest Government of the Year," and the unbelievable: that an ancestor of our dear president, named the Rev. George Bush, wrote a biography critical of the Prophet Mohammed in the 19th century. This from Egypt, which has reluctantly allowed its reprinting.

I'm not sure when I began to experience this nagging feeling about Colorado. Maybe around about the time I realized that I'd been driving around with the title of my car in my glove compartment for the past three years, which was recently, though it took me an additional couple of months to actually put it someplace safe. I have a growing sense of obligation to pay attention to the social and political culture of the state in which I was born. The ladyfriend has a pretty stellar, almost masochistically obsessed, reputation for keeping up with events in the big O of the northwest, from misogynist serial killers and abductions of local blond girls to The Willamette Week and voter-initiated ballot measures. Last Christmas, as we drove over the Cascades to visit her sister and her new nephew, I witnessed a conversation between the ladyfriend and her pa about how Colorado was the testing ground for some of the most vengeful anti-environment, anti-preservation legislation that the U.S. has seen. They explained that Oregon eventually became the target for similar legislation, perpetrated on behalf of logging companies.

I really felt compelled to recognize that my political consciousness belongs to my post-College era, and that any exposure to politics I received from my family were the odd invitations to ritzy fund-raising dinners (mostly unattended), those thrown for local candidates who were either pro-business or pro-development. Post-college my politics have been queerer, more theoretical, way less practical in terms of useful facts, publications, or people. But during college I met people like the ladyfriend and Brook-trout whose investments in their local political situations began in toddlerhood (flag-waving age).

Colorado was a weird-ass state to grow up in. Part farm, part resort, the state has earned a reputation as a stomping ground for tree-huggers and gun-toting isolationists, WASP-lite small business owners and Cali-Texan imports.

Then there's the fact that the following organizations have sprouted, blossomed, and spread through Colorado like evil, smelly, stinging vines over the past five years: Focus on the Family (which, should you desire to contact it, requires no street address on the envelope, only "Colorado Springs, CO"), the Promise Keepers (the organization for men started by Coach McCartney of CU Buffalo infamy, who proudly notes in his second autobiography that he "had built the program on the Rock of Christ"), and the Fellowship of Christian Cowboys (keeping the link between Jesus and slaughterhouses alive). All are nationally known (syndicated) but maintain their roots in Colorado. Not to change the metaphor, but Colorado Springs alone hums with an impressive network of Christian culture machines.

We English majors are always vacillating between the mechanical and the organic metaphor. Both seem to suit these groups. There's something so organic about their comprehensiveness. You could spend your entire life trying to get a grip on all the little micromanagements necessary to achieve the status of ideal heterosexual, middle-class Christian. And yet, there's something so mechanistic about the writing, something so canned and reproduced. Many sites feature similar articles by the same writers. The delightfully named Michael Fey contributes broadly to numerous online Christian publications, focusing primarily (of course) on the reparable nature of homosexuality.

In other words, Colorado totally rules, and I just can't wait to stumble, drunk, poor, and addicted to Nicorette, back to the old homestead there. Perhaps later on there will be a post about how super Colorado is, but not now.

No, not with Congressman Tom Tancredo, R-Colorado of the 6th District (of Littleton and Columbine fame) representing our interests, mostly wacko immigration policy. I discovered I have a connection to this person, tenuous and conflict-based, besides our status as U.S. citizens. In this utterly bombastic letter, in which he exemplifies conservative victimhood while simultaneously begging for loot for his "war chest," he names an "ultra-liberal activist" (read "rich and bored lukewarm liberal") I once babysat for. Pat Stryker is actually a billionaire whose money comes from tiny, surgical parts invented by her grandfather and whose house is across the reservoir from my parents'. She butted heads with Tancredo when she helped preserve bilingual education in Colorado. All of the men in my hometown couldn't give a rat's ass about her (in this pointed "I wouldn't even marry her for her money" kind of way) until she gave 20 million to Colorado State University, most of it going to the football team.

Anyway, I'd heard about this "Watching America" site on NPR, and low and behold, when first I opened it, there was Tom Tancredo, who I honestly had no idea about before. A Moroccan newspaper had reported on the response of the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) to a conversation Tom had had with a talk radio host in Florida.

Tancredo made the comments in a conversation with talk-radio host Pat Campbell at WFLA in Orlando, Florida. They were discussing an article on the conservative Internet site WorldNetDaily that said Islamic terrorists have brought nuclear devices across the Mexican border, preparing for an attack on the interior United States. Cambell asked Tancredo how the country should respond if terrorists were to strike several U.S. cities with nuclear weapons.
Tancredo: Well, what if you said something like - if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites.
Cambell: You're talking about bombing Mecca.
Tancredo: Yeah... I mean, I don't know, I'm just throwing out there some ideas because it seems to me...at that point in time you would be talking about taking the most draconian measures you could possibly imagine and because other than that all you could do is once again tighten up internally. (Image courtesy of Tancredo's imagination and the delightful discussion boards of the Free Republic.)

JUST THROWING OUT SOME IDEAS??? I keep looking at Tom's picture, willing his existence to be a violent farse. Tom Tancredo: Crusader Against the Alien Hordes. A charade of Coloradoan proportions. Searching for other responses to Tancredo's comments yielded the sublimely bogus looking "Northeast Intelligence Network," which had this glowing response and the link to the audio of Tancredo's threats. He shows his light touch when he refers to the bombing of Mecca as "Draconian." Gee, sir. Draco was supposed to be "impartial." Spanking you with a sportsman's knife live on national television while forcing you to eat uncooked tofu might be considered Draconian. What you're talking about is the destruction of a culture, not the poking out of an eye. There were a few conservative blogs that were inspired by Tancredo to talk about the "liberal censorship" of brilliant ideas such as his. Mainly, I feel a little obsessed with the fact that there is zero national news coverage of this bozo's comments, but this small Moroccan paper has got its eye on him.

But this, this was the kicker. Someone's decided Tancredo is the 9th most likely Republican candidate for the 2008 race. Just ahead of the wackolicious Rick Santorum and just behind every right winger's exotic (Black and a woman?) fantasy, your favorite and mine, helmet head Condi. Colorado yesterday, the U.S today, and tomorrow, dear friends, the WORLD.

To be continued...

help a monster

2005-07-22T18:58:00.000-04:00

It's sort of like that Christian health insurance, you know the kind where you and your chilblains or your construction accident or your kidney failure are listed in a newsletter, and then people pray for you. Oh, and they're supposed to send a check as well.

Except this kind is for a creature. And it seems less sketchy. Less bureaucracy. I don't think this chick is going to buy herself a mansion with your donation.

I'm broken by all this jolie-laid

2005-07-21T15:25:00.000-04:00

Does someone have N.S. Köenings' email address? Is she still working on her condiments project? Will you send her this link?

sensational new citations

2005-07-21T13:10:00.000-04:00

Dear all—please notice that citations can now be viewed on their own little page, reachable by the link beneath my picture. It was too difficult to edit and update and archive the citations as they existed in their previously footnoted form. These citations will reference the theoretical and political turnpike of my brain. Hopefully they won't be entirely unrelated to the frothy narratives chronicling the banality sublime of my daily existence which are more likely to appear here. And perhaps, perhaps, perhaps (to quote from that fantasic Doris Day song) we'll witness, together, the convergence of my modestly idiosyncratic quotidian bumbler-self and my violent and abstract political personality. And the "of the day" part will be more truthful. In fact, there are two today, from Francine Prose and Roland Barthes by way of the tragic and too-young-to-be-deceased Craig Owens, whose book Beyond Recognition is sharp and accessible theory for anyone interested in subjectivity, representation, gender, and queerness.

P.S. The pictures are often links for related articles and information. Or simply the ipso facto context for the image itself. In this case, I found the "Bally Citation" pin ball machine on this crazy index of original adverts for vintage and contemporary toys and games. The page takes a while to load but names alone ("Crash N Score!" and "Border Beauty") make poking around worth it. It could be valhalla for that emo-band name you've been looking for.

a parable, a myth, a poisoning?

2005-07-20T16:07:00.000-04:00

I only wish it were Friday, so that my story would have added resonance for Mrs. Pants.

I am both sad and grateful that I have no accompanying picture.

Climbing up the stairs of the subway today (Q-line, 7 ave.), I made the turn toward the drugstore and stopped to dig out my sunglasses. But before I could shield my eyes from the heat lamp that's currently using our damp smog to turn Brooklyn into a hot house, I really stopped and looked at the street. There was a pile of something, shimmering (I can't see much without my glasses) near the bus stop sign and in front of a store called "Li'l Miss Muffin and Her Stuff'n" which has the most demonic looking puppet-child mixing a bowl on its sign. Eventually, I began to see the pile was, in fact, edible. Indeed, taking the two steps which make a huge difference in terms of my vision, the amorphous shimmering pile became a collapsed heap of donuts, some whole, some mangled, and of an assorted variety, the most obvious seeming to be the frosted chocolate sort. They were encircled by a damp moon of what I presumed to be oily donut sweat. I was charmed by the generosity, or the bad luck, that led whoever it was to leave or drop such a bounty in the open street, easy and delightful prey to bird and bug. And lo, a yard away from this steaming mound of sugared carbohydrates, there were five pigeons lined up on the curb, looking in my direction.

At this point, I started to laugh. One of the short explosive ones that make people's heads turn. The pigeons were not moving. Not even daring the customary uneasy rocking from one foot to the other. They were as still as I have ever seen pigeons. Their necks all extended and their heads unswiveling. I laughed again. They looked liked plastic models of themselves. Were they so full as to be immovable? Had they so glutted themselves on the feast of donuts that they were dumb with satisfaction? The pigeons did not approach the donuts. They even seemed to keep their eyes aimed away from the donuts, all five of them with such similarity and adamance that I couldn't believe they hadn't garnered more attention from other people climbing up the stairs or sitting in chairs, all baking in the heat.

But no one wants to stand still in this weather; no, all focus and intent drives us toward the next air conditioned compartment we walkers imagine. One can almost hear a countdown of the blocks in every ragged step.

Then, in the midst of my own swooning, one pigeon went down. First it staggered from the curb into the gutter. Then it sat down and let its neck roll to the Flatbush side. I can only imagine that it was minor weight of its head that tugged its body over, down onto the pavement, its eyes still open and glistening. But, dear reader, I believed this pigeon to be dead.

None of the other pigeons moved. Not that it would be reasonable for them to dash to their fallen comrade's aid like little avian EMTs, but still I was hoping for a gesture of some concern, some registration of regret. I hoped for this because I was shocked.

Suddenly, the greasy puddle in which the donuts sat looked suspicious. I thought I smelled gasoline. I thought I smelled something chemical enough to be poison, as if poison had a smell, like the "grape-scented irritant" pellets they laid out on the shores of City Park Lake in Fort Fun with the hope they'd irritate the Canadian geese all of the way back to Canada. It didn't work. The geese just ate the grass out from under the pellets. But pigeons, pigeons I can imagine being desperate enough to fall for anything edible.

Having waited some time, hoping that the prone pigeon would pop up, having survived its (surely) donut-induced apoplexy, I turned, getting weepy now, toward the drug store. By the time I felt the rush of cold air from the opened door, I'd become convinced of the dastardliness of humanity and tearily mournful of the bad taste of birds. Just one more reason why my heartless consumption of mammals and birds is too hypocritical, forgive the rhyme, for words.

grandmother's prophecies

2005-07-19T01:09:00.000-04:00

A wise old owl sat on an oak
The more he sat the less he spoke
The less he spoke, the more he heard
Why can't you be like that wise old bird?

Yes my friend your greatest fault is that you talk too much. Learn to keep a secret. However your other golden qualities make up for your talkativeness. Your anxiety to help others, and your consideration of other people's wishes has earned you many friends.

A friend will urge you to take a trip. Don't do it. Your best interest lies in remaining at home. I'm depending on your good sense to lead you on the right path.

Drop another Coin in slot and I will tell more.

happily occupied

2005-07-14T23:03:00.000-04:00

For the past month, I've had the distinct pleasure of spending my days (really half-days) getting paid for a great deal of pleasure. First, copyediting, which many of you know is one of the delights, neither rare nor conventional, that I hold on par with things like full body massages and cotton candy, possibly even the election of a liberal president. Second, discussing girls and sex with my writer friend in this thinly veiled, pseudo-academic fashion which allows me and her to entertain, some might even say stroke, our dual notions of ourselves as nerdy brains and hottt chicks. And third, I get to hang out with old Blue Eyes, my writer friend's babe, here pictured somewhat begrudgingly modeling the winter hat sent to him this summer by his Californian grandparents.

Blue Eyes and I roll around on the floor a lot. We do something called "belly time" in which I lift him up onto his hands so that his arms are extended and tuck his knees under so that his legs are at a 90° angle, a.k.a. crawling position. Then, I get into the position too, and he and I pretend we're thinking about moving and laugh at each other until one or the other falls down (usually Blue Eyes), then we laugh some more. This is serious business, training for possibility of the crawl, which, the doctor says, will never come. Blue Eyes doesn't need to crawl, he just rolls. His body is so big, he just rolls once and he's wherever he wants to be. He can stand for hours, which would also include intermittent dancing, but his arms are proportioned to his body like those of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. When I say Blue Eyes is big, I mean to say that at 9-months he dwarfs the smallish 2-year-old I also babysit for, Web Man, who now receives Blue Eyes' hand me downs. Needless to say, the hat probably won't even make it to the cooler end of fall.

Other pastimes: banging on our bodies with a repetitive urgency and seriousness that would test the soundness of any structure, boat or building, chair or beast. We also make noise with our mouths. In lieu of supplying the default system of signification he will later no doubt need, rather than spending my days pointing and saying BALL or HORSE or GREEN or BUFFY, when Blue Eyes says "Hup!" and "Mmmmssppbbfft..." and "Arr arr baaaah," I say "Hup! Mmmmssppbbfft...Arr arr baaaah." And I might throw in a little "Doooot," or possibly even a "Raaah," with the long "a," since Blue Eyes does more with throat sounds than nasal. I hope I'm not delaying his verbal development; every once in a while I mumble a reluctant EAR or TOE. But perhaps overall I compensate by sticking to a frequent regiment of "belly time" training.

And it occurs to me, and this revelation might be due in part to the totally sexual and yet appropriate nature of my work environment, that the only time all of us big people generally get to be expressive in a nonverbal way is during sex. And sometimes that doesn't even happen, due to domestic situation (thin walls/floors/doors), partner preference ("Shhhh! You're weird!"), or, simply, a fastidious habit of silence. Sure, we all weave distinctive nonverbal cues into our daily speech, the "bahs" and the "whas" and the "hmmms," but still they are snagged by context into meaning something. There is something so satisfying about babbling along with a contented, or even discontented, baby. I've caught myself so wrapped up replicating Blue Eyes' whine that I hardly notice that it does, in fact, have a meaning, or at least a call for action. "I'm hungry, I'm tired, There's shit in my diaper, This floor sucks, Who ordered the yoghurt? And where's the goddamned ball?" Of course, these are the meanings I immediately slap on his sounds like scented stickers. I'm pretty sure Blue Eyes doesn't value me as much for my interpretive skills as he does for the funny dance I can make his froggy do to an old Irving Berlin tune I learned from Leon Redbone (who, coincidentally, was the voice of the Warner Brother's frog).

Without my walking stick,
I'd go insane.
I can't look my best,
I feel undressed without my cane.

Must have my walking stick,
for it may rain.
When it pours,
I can't be outdoors
without my cane.

If I ever left my house
without my walking stick,
well—it would be something
I could never explain.

Oh, the thing that makes me click
on lover's lane
Would go for nought, if I were caught
without my cane.

Be-bop-bop-deee-la-dum
Re-bop-a-da-bum
Re-bop-be-ay
Romp-a-de-bomp
Rump-a-de-dum
Ra-da-da-day

sandy hooks, sandy parts

2005-07-10T22:51:00.000-04:00

There's no way to avoid talking, thinking, or document-ing the thrills, chills, and pretty/ nasty spills of the human body while at a nude beach. Exhibit A: Super adorable photo of the lady friend her youngest sister KT inauspiciously includes the hairy torso and groin of Gunnison Beach bather. The fortuitous positioning of a mere shred of Jenny's hair prevents these two ladies from being a frame for a nude portrait of a middle aged male. Somehow the gods of the digital camera were protecting his particular privates from reaching your all-seeing eyes.

Yes, naked people were everywhere, and this next one wasn't quite as lucky. Exhibit B: Ladyfriend as Petulant Toddler. This guy on the right under the umbrella was three feet from us all afternoon with the big D (and I'm not using the modifier big in any of its less literal, more colloquial senses) hanging out. Here we see but half, and that's only for you lucky cats who can work the zoom.

Most interesting to me was the fact that vaginas were sort of invisible. They were there, sure, uncovered and most often shaved, but the penises were sooo numerous. And then the men who carried the penises were really chatty. When I stopped to check out a beached horseshoe crab or jellyfish, there they were with their exposed nethers, solitary more than clustered, offering what apocryphal knowledge they had to offer on whatever subject was at hand. I kept waiting for one of them to tell me that the way to cure a jellyfish sting is to pee on it, then commence the demonstration. I got the feeling that I was in the presence of men who might be flashers, possibly arrested and subject to jail time, but instead we got to have a civilized conversation with his desire for me (more realistically anyone) to see his penis totally out in the open.

On the whole, I believe that the beach serves as an outlet for numerous different pathologies, and have decided it seems like a pretty good idea, given the half-hearted supervision of several very straight looking lifeguards and the air of fragility that seemed to hang about the place, no one making any quick moves, and everyone extremely conscious of maintaining solid space between the naked bodies. I would have taken my top off, except for the presence of teen KT, and she, I mean, we, handled our first mass exposure to aged penis remarkably well.

smote the smittened

2005-07-06T18:06:00.000-04:00

I receiveth a great number of brochures on the street. I've come to believe that everyone passing out "literature"—from the super duper suit sale dude in the sandwich boards to the juice bar special dudette in the banana costume to the Christian evangelist hocking salvation for the Asamblea de Iglesias Cristianas Bethesda, trembling in his T-shirt on the platform of the Delancey F-train stop to the well-scrubbed face of the woman professing her love for Supreme Master Ching Hai, this shot is my favorite, and advocating The Quan Yin Method of meditation as the surest way to God from the top of the stairs on Essex—all of them, really just want me to take the brochure so that they can go home.

Yes, I tuck them in my bag, later reading them too carefully, probably driving myself further and further toward the kind of midlife fundamentalist new age renaissance that a girl like me (godless, jobless, homo pervert that I am) was practically born to experience. I've never had the the structure of any type of religion, except maybe the Cult of Girlhood and The Invisible Shield of Whiteness, and I chose to be an English major, dragging myself through Dante, Milton, and Blake without a fucking clue about any of the biblical references, thematics or symbolism (I was the kind of chick who always wrote papers that were more like glowing previews from the marketing department—exhaustively praising the clever depiction of the lovers or the snake or the yawning gates of hell).

Speaking of the Cult of Girlhood, I've been studying up on "The Sin of Immorality," which offers a number of helpful tips. You know about how "evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse" (2 Timothy 3:13), a clear argument for the swollen, recently dipilated hairlessness of the pure. I also learned that "some of the pleasures which are indulged in today are drink, drugs, and sex...'Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging'" (Proverbs 20:1). Here's some nice personification and a fine use of teen lingo from the Bible. Also, the pamphlet says, "men and women go to parties and dances to relax and enjoy themselves." Such frank recognition of our important and particular contemporary condition. "The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23) says the Bible and this pamphlet, but what, I ask you, doesn't lead to death?

Of course, I read these things with a drumroll or a magician in mind—hoping for that great high-hat tingle in my nipples or the wonderful shazzamm of a bunny from the hat—waiting for that direct and personal address to moi, she who so assiduously practices her homosexual fornication. Usually the homo beat down is set up by a positive review of the spiritual and eternal benefits of marriage and followed by the threat of AIDS and a cursory condemnation of adultery which aim for withering worldliness: we're hip to your game, we've got your number, you're going to sacrifice that key deposit if you don't check out on time, etc.

But then I'm so goddamn literal. They're not talking about me, I think, they're talking about boys. All this he will resort...and his unrestrained passions...his work...Not to mention that God, "He said, 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination'" (Leviticus 18:22). What to make of this? Really sounds fine...maybe they're going the old reverse psychology route. Who's thou? Tell me no, sorry, you can't, it's bad—and whatever IT is glows with the ambrosial odor of sex. I'm a simple girl. I'm thinking of contacting the Gospel Tract and Bible Society, P.O Box 700, Moundridge (!!!), Kansas 67107 U.S.A. I'll tell them that if they really want to snag the ladies in their moral you know where, they should start with the pronouns. That's kid stuff. I could be their consultant!

the second person offers promises

2005-07-03T21:15:00.000-04:00

of a job. You see a friend at a barbeque, the kind with people you've met at least twice but whose names you can't remember. You knew your friend would be there because it's at her girlfriend's apartment, so you're not surprised. You've been here before. There is a large backyard covered entirely by a tree with flowers so pink and feathery you swear it's either not real or transplanted from some tropical location. The ladyfriend says there's one in her front yard back in Oregon, but she can't tell you what it is.

Your friend spends a lot of time picking up half-dried specimens and proclaiming the flowers' pathetic beauty. They fall apart as soon as they're in your hands. This friend at the barbeque was someone you went to college with, the second person you met at your orientation, someone who you crushed out on as a first year, someone who sent you beautiful blank squares of translucent red paper in an envelope that appeared to be made of gold. You turned them over and over under your desk lamp and gave the envelope a good search, unsatisfied and titillated by the lack of words. This was before you knew she had a lot of money, and you were impressed and wondered where one found paper like that, or how one came to the idea of sending blank missives. Then you began to realize that this style or brand of flirting was a way of life which inspired devotees, countless crushes, and imitative followers for this friend. Money is good, or helpful for this way of life. Money becomes psychological sex/war paint in this game. After all, how difficult can it be to send out blank pieces of very nice paper or buy next-day plane tickets to Paris if you can afford it. After graduation, your friend works very hard in university publishing and ends up working on a master's, associate editing for the publishing arm of a sexy indie mag and a stodgy book review, both of which you read quite often.

This friend makes her way over to you and your ladyfriend mid way through the party. Way more attention is being paid to the tropical fruit drinks than the food. There ensues a brief, breathless, and hopelessly je ne sais quoi declaration from the friend about "summer," loving it, personifying it, then eulogizing it as though it were dead, not simply passing. Then you and the friend begin reminiscing in earnest. Talking to her, you remember the blank paper and the coy way she drops her chin to her chest and lets her eyelids fall half-closed. This friend always looks exhausted in a pleasant and indulgent way. When her eyes are on you, you can't help feeling indebted to her, as if she were the power station and you were the family of seven who'd left all of the lights on. A great deal of effort has gone into this moment of her smiling and listening—to you. Which is the same for everyone, and yet, this moment with you becomes most meaningful. This effect is also achieved through the position of her mouth, which is most often smiling and eerily still, but not phony, as she reveals her attractive and well-formed teeth. The smile is still there when her lips do close but they appear pressed together as though she must fight back the urge to tell you something intimate and earth-shattering.

You tell her about the stories you've been reading, much like the stories you've been writing, which have been shrinking, shrinking, and she says, glowing, leaning forward a little but not tooo much: "I love it. Please, keep writing those short short stories." You tilt your head, enamored briefly of the impetuousness of her tender statement or by the statement behind her tender impetuousness, and then right your head in order to knock the fact that she's not read a one of your stories back into the prominent position it deserves (that achy little spot between your eyes). And then she asks you if you do any copyediting. "Sure," you say, almost adding, who wouldn't? She offers you the possibility of a copyediting job at the aforementioned stodgy review. Part time. By the hour. On demand.

Allow yourself that certain unassuming connections exist between you and people and places which are suited by metaphors ranging from a hair to a highway. The degree of intimacy has nothing to do with the likelihood of "meaningful" contact or "useful" exchange. Your friend could get you a job. Or another friend could get you a job. (You have friends!?!) No, things happen as the result of guts and foolishness, class (the social kind), money, some bragging, drunkenness, maybe a little bit of luck, or a stickiness of mind that's fortuitous—which is just a fancy word for luck that's ripped off from the French.

You might have, shall we say, potential. Sparkly flakes or dim flowers. You tell your friend, who's beginning to look around for something urgent to remove her from her chair, that you are both lazy and inspired. She smiles back at you when she rises and you think there might be something useful at the bottom of that dumpster there, the one that appears tailor-made for its location. You see this possibility as a problem, a tiresome inconvenience, given the overwhelming contents of said dumpster.

Lacking the patience for exploration or the sense of adventure necessary to throw care for your ______ shirt to the wind, you are temporarily but decidedly unimpressive. You try another fruity drink. Mango and Rum, this time; Not Vodka. You sit back down, deserving of many adverbs lacking any action to be modified: slowly, coyly, loudly, sourly, poorly. The wind washes over and the strange tree drops its weird tropical flowers in your drink and you pull bits of them from your ladyfriend's hair. You kiss her cheek and roll her hand between yours. Then you hear your friend say to someone else, "Pennsylvania. I love it. Please, keep living in Pennsylvania."

puh-ride: a long backstory

2005-06-28T22:46:00.000-04:00

It's true. I have no affliation whatsoever with "Scouting for All," the organization whose banner I marched behind, hollered for, and bared my silken pit hair and blue-white belly for this fine irriguous 26th of June. The banner itself, in fact, belonged to the dear friend who led our gay posse (the jolly lad with the yellow poster in the photo of the previous post). He met us at 52nd St. and 5th Avenue with a wrinkled banner and some darling glossy brochures detailing the pure, unambivalent desires and godless but infinite rights of homos and atheists to belong to and learn from the great institution of scoutery. What nobler cause, i.e., what better excuse, truly, to march four miles half-naked in front of millions, I ask you?

One factoid which you might keep in mind before you file me in your crazy file is that I was, indeed, a girl scout for a solid seven years. Brownie to Junior, kindergarten through sixth, from dear octogenarian Pied Pianist Mrs. Ulrich through closeted but female-partnered Ms. Koch (the lesbian frosting on the lesbian cake of my elementary career). I'm sure the only obstacle to my continued participation in the girl scouts (besides the insipid and redundant pleas from my comrades to sing "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands") was the fact that we Barton Bulldogs were separated for junior high; the neighborhood kids went to Lesher and the bussed-in losers (moi) went to Boltz (see incendiary mascot). GO PHOENIXES!!! Phoenixii? Man that was a tough mascot. The school burned down in 1972 shortly before it opened and after it was rebuilt they slapped a crude rendering of a flaming bird on its front. But I don't recall ever chanting for a Phoenix on the volleyball court or proudly proclaiming my own flaming potential for reincarnation. No no, that came in high school. When I was a lambkin.

There would be no more scouting for me, and once my mother married the formalwear king she decided that the Fort Fun Kuntry Klub affiliated "National Charity League" was just the ticket for my sister and me. It was a privileged coterie of ensemble-matching mothers and daughters who mostly showed up late for meetings and planned menus for pointless gatherings like the Valentine's Tea, an event at which there were neither Valentines nor tea. But we labored over countless mini flower arrangements that sweated daintily and dampened their doilies until the appointed hour at which time they were shuttled home in BMWs and Suburbans and Mercedes and posted in basement bathrooms and forgotten about for the two days it took them to wilt and begin the inevitable rottening. The doilies, like the white gloves they joked about requiring us girls to wear, never made it past our hosts' marble foyers.

But, really folks, we're talking about the girl scouts here. I'm insulted by my own tangent. Not only did I personally research and invite the cosmetologist from Merle Norman who gave our troop the makeovers that sealed the deal on our makeup badges, not only did I (four years running) sell the most cookies (sometimes ranking in the top tier of the whole goddamned Mountain Prairie Council), but I, friends, I went to girl scout camp, and it has made all the difference (to murder a serially killed line from your favorite and mine, Mr. Bobby Frost).

I went to Meadow Mountain Ranch for five years, and with each ensuing year, my reputation grew in seniority and significance, if not at all in height (and like all details in these charming and pointless narratives, my midgethood is very important to the story). I know I have already regaled a few of you with stories of the prepubescent, subconscious, fully-clothed sexual awakening which occurred in these earnest, neatly freckled years. You, I hope, will bear with me now. Perhaps I will make up new salacious details to earn your titillation. (It should be noted, before I start, that what is truly impressive about any of this is the fact that my mother could afford to send me to this camp, year after year, as a parent without reliable or fair support from her co-parent. It should also be noted that my mother regrets having been so enterprising to send me, having heard this story before.)

My fourth year of five, the most glorious of my attendance, I was enrolled in the theatuh camp. For the uninitiated, one has a myriad of choices at girl scout camp, or at least one did in the mid- to late-80s. They each had clever names like, "Horsing Around," "Hike-a-roo," "Comedy and Tragedy," and, simply, "Adventure." The first and last I did not experience for reasons of cost, though I do remember an early and pleasurable encounter with a horse called Pantyhose. They had all-around camp registration, too, but never cleverly named it. It was something utilitarian like "Session I." Anyway, this fourth year featured a group of fine and burly and sporty and hippyish 18- to 20-something counselors who had, according to custom, rechristened themselves with names like Skipper, Cricket, Gaven, Sunshine, and Bananaz*. The new names not only armored the mystery of our counselors with the metallic-edge of sex but they made it effectively impossible to locate them in order to act out our burning crushes. And it was a big deal if a counselor told you her real name. Clearly, the two names which stand out in the above list are Gaven (ambiguous in terms of meaning, unambiguously butch in connotation, and she had a mullet) and Bananaz* (pronounced Bananazzzstar, often provoking jazz hands, which I believe was the desired effect). These two also happened to be in charge of us, the thessspians.

Having established my seniority to campers and counselors alike (mostly by bragging like an asshole, which was the rule amongst all of us), I quickly demonstrated my commitment to our production. The first time the "cast" (the other gals who could afford to be there) convened, I was clearly the bossiest and the wackiest. And I brought my Harriet the Spy secret notebook to the first meeting. Shortly thereafter, Bananaz* took me out to the woods alone and told me I'd earned the title and obligation of writer/director for the show we were to perform (I acted as well, but the role was really quite peripheral). First I kneeled in front of her and then she took me on her lap and gave me her clipboard (for keeps), whispering to me of the seriousness of this job and her love for and trust in me. Bananaz* (in my memory) was physically arresting but in private had a sly, chin-lowering charisma. She resembled Chloe Sevigny with twice the weight and half the hair, and I burned with adoration and the desire to please. The title of the play I eventually foisted on my peers was "Vanna White and the Seven Weight Watchers" (oddly prescient of my thesis debacle).

Late at night, the ladies would often smuggle me out of my "tabin" (the top of a canvas tent lashed over a wooden base) so that we could "work"; meaning, they would feed me other campers' candy from the camp ordained rubbermaids, they would take off their shirts, and I would gently walk on their naked backs. We also talked, although I can't really imagine what I could have contributed to any conversation about their lives they might have had around me. I was 11-years-old. And they were nearly, if not wholly, a decade older. What I remember is that I was very very small compared to them, and that they seemed to derive a lot of pleasure from the kneadings of my toes and the tempered weight of my heels. There were nights when they invited other counselors for my famous back walks. It was also somehow clear to me that it was because of my tiny body and my weird brain that I was chosen for these late night encounters. And this felt profoundly sexual in a way that at that point translated only as extreme nervousness. What I don't know is whether these encounters were as numerous as they've become in my mind. Maybe the counselors did this with all the campers, to make them feel special, to make them feel initiated into something mysterious and adult.

What I do know is that I left camp that year knowing Gaven's real name was Kelly Brink and Bananaz* was Evie...only Evie. Kelly lived in the Fort, my hometown, and Evie, well, she'd recently played Ronnette (one of the trio) in Little Shop of Horrors in Denver and was headed to L.A. to be an actress. I do know that shortly after I came home from camp I initiated a prank call campaign for Kelly's love ("Hello?" "...click." "Hello?" "...click." "Hello?" "...(pause)...click") but that I never heard from or saw Evie ever again, which made me doubt that the real name she told me was real at all.

I eventually found out that Kelly is the daughter of my be-loath-ed high school choir director. She showed up my senior year for our Christmas Sing, when we travel around and sing for all of the under-schools (including Boltz, but not Barton as it was closed the year after I moved on). After attempting to totally dissociate her from her numbnuts father, we went for a little walk out to the parking lot to perch on the bumper of her Geo. She'd kept the mullet after all these years, and the most urgent, honest thing I could do was immediately come out to her.

"WE ALWAYS KNEW ABOUT YOU!" she laughed and pointed.
"You did?" I was shocked by the confirmation of my gayness, something I wasn't (at that point) even all that comfortable with.
"YEAH, totally. You had this way of talking even then that was more like flirting."

And there was more to that conversation that has pretty much disappeared, although I could reconstruct it sometime if you like. I did, after all, spend three years pretending to write fiction while making up stories about my own life. But this story is what I thought about when I marched down 5th Avenue in my old lady sandals, carrying my "GO GIRL SCOUTS!" poster that our leader had lovingly painted to match my green pleated skirt. And if the crowd waved and smiled frantically enough, I'd shout, "How many of you had your first sexual experience at girl scout camp?" and I'd survey the disturbed faces, watching for any hands.

we're here, we're queer,

2005-06-27T11:04:00.000-04:00

and we can start fires.

between a rock and a rrrrock, part dux

2005-06-25T01:09:00.000-04:00

Living in urban environments compels a soul to develop all kinds of trust. For example, tonight at the Get Up Kids show I was standing beneath a ten-foot-wide disco ball, drinking something with vodka in it (something watery and tasty all at the same time), listening to music I trust won't destroy my capacity to hear in, say, ten or fifteen years (because face it people, when we hit forty listening seems to become less of a priority anyway), I somehow trust that the drunk gal dancing karaoke-video-style for her boyfriend will eventually figure out he's gay, and on the way home making eye contact with a dude on the train with a two foot long beard and a clean shaven wallstreeter who I must trust aren't a bearded psycho-killer or an american psycho respectively. Et cetera, etc. Not to say I wasn't this trusting in the heartland, but then, the likelihood that I knew the dude who hoisted that two-ton, sparkling marvel and winched it with a boy scout makeout worthy knot seemed very high indeed in the happy hamlet of Btown. And the dude with two foot long beard in Btown had renamed himself Forrest or Woods Full Of Trees, or something. But here, I feel literally compelled to trust, as if trusting in the place will make it light up or spin or throw quarters at me. So today, children, the lesson is: trust and be stupid/fun/boring/murdered/sane...trust and be, I guess. And when that business spinning above you comes crashing down, at least you won't be one of the losers crushed beneath it because they got misty and distracted, holding their cell phones stageward to funnel music to someone beloved or hated in the great elsewhere.

between a rock and a rrrrock

2005-06-23T23:48:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was Thursday and Thursdays are ESP days (electric sensory pineapples or everybody shock perception or extra smirks pretty) and so when I passed an old lady wearing the most practical padded and laced shoes (taupe) and a crisp sun hat (matching taupe) with a wee bit of white froth of hair descending over the smooth wrinkled sky of her forehead and a little jacket (mmm...tan) and a little shirtdress (taupe) I thought, SHE'S NO-NONSENSE and then she lifted up her eyes which leapt from the faces of my feet to my eyes and I heard her think, SHE'S ALL-NONSENSE. Never has an expression in reverse reflected such cunning self-vindictiveness. I was wearing green eyeshadow. This mental self-flagellation brought to you in honor of the new Onex shoes I purchased. The design is called "Present." The lady moved away from me so quickly and adroitly in her sensible shoes that I could only whisper but they're so comfortable into the mouth-warm train wind hustling through my hair.

But really, folks, they are that comfortable. Excellent arch support, buttery straps, well-proportioned heel. And of course there are the tasteful rhinestones, or diamantés, if you will. These shoes are about both privilege and determination. They are the key to the fake-rich-old-lady aesthetic I attempt on a daily basis. If I were a little mouse and I called myself The Brain, I'd say Onex shoes will be the key when I TAKE OVER THE WORLD. And I wore my new red shoes to the Sleater-Kinney show at Roseland last night and I danced, oh yes, I danced. I danced through a two hour show and two encores. I danced until I quite literally wet myself. There was even a brief moment when I believe I took part in the kind of dainty mosh pittance you can imagine me allowing myself. A little bit of elbow move. Lots of hair. Only one toenail, large and to the left, polish partially stomped off on the dancefloor. But enough about the shoes.

Carrie Brownstein is a rock guitar god. Corin Tucker sings like a fucking superstar, like nobody else. And Janet Weiss is a beast on the drums. When compared with the aforementioned Get Up boyband, I become wordless. I begin quoting Susan Sontag:

Art is the objectifying of the will in a thing or performance, and the provoking or arousing of the will. From the point of view of the artist, it is the objectifying of a volition; from the point of view of the spectator, it is the creation of an imaginary décor for the will. ("On Style," 1961)

This music is actualized. It's erotic because it does in fact arouse the desire for movement—moral, sexual, physical, intellectual—in the listener. Movement toward something more real. We, the audience, are witnesses to something personal that creates the deepest craving to possess and communicate something just as infinitely personal and communicable as their music. S/K's songs actually sound like distinct songs. Not just intro-hook-verse-chorus-verse-hook- with a cockrockend. And I'm sorry, like, in the junior high sense of being sorry, but Carrie can wank a ten minute guitar solo in my presence, like, any day.

2005-06-20T20:25:00.000-04:00

Monday to Friday

"suggestive" incoherence

2005-06-19T10:40:00.000-04:00

Saturday I did some old-fashioned gallery-hopping in Chelsea with friends. Two shows were decidedly mobbed, those were Sophie Calle and Jasper Johns. Ms. Calle, who the internet tells me used to be a "stripper," titled her show "Exquisite Pain"--not sure whether the translation makes it sound like early undergraduate melodrama or if it's wholly intended (one expects the words "liminal" and "spaces" to crown the gushy thesis of the catalogue like a rainbow refracting through fresh waterspray). Ms. Calle declares in silkscreened text , marking the entrance museumlike, that the exhibition chronicles the "end of a love affair." This end she casually identifies as "nothing unusual" is built up to through the dark/glib (all kinds of depressing Japanese hotel rooms) and bloody/passionate (texts which narrate the lover's past attempts to strangle her) in the photographs and found objects which count down her "92 DAYS UNTIL UNHAPPINESS." She's stamped each photo, ticket, key, book, and letter with the phrase and the numbers descending. Though I have done this kind of thing once or twice before, I'm always puzzled by certain aspects of the whole sticky wicket: First, do people just trawl about, like the lady I saw with the mercury-shaded coif and the quilted rompers, pointing at and then purchasing art? Who chooses the artists?--an obvious question, yes, but, so many of these shows felt like "friend" shows. Like, "I have this friend and she's brilliant and you simply must give her a week in June." An example of this might be the neon spray painted glossyblack fields of a painter whose name, of course, was neither memorable to me nor well-known. I suppose I'm going to have to go a lot in order pinch off my proverbial dillettante.

2005-06-12T11:14:00.000-04:00

francis bacon does the ladyfriend, or, the ladyfriend does francis bacon

we meet again

2005-06-10T12:47:00.000-04:00

The gods of the Midwest have approved my departure from Indianer, and granted me the ritual gift of an Ohioan speeding ticket--there's just something special about being arbitrarily chosen for such acknowledgment. As our great country prepared to honor our war dead with domestic beer, professional sporting events, and plastic yellow flowers, Officer X (not his real name) targeted but one of the many many many speeding through Clinton County--breaking the law. He chose the largest vehicle on the road: me in my 16-foot Budget truck. Given the Sanctity of the holiday and the statistically proven prevalence of drunk driving, my 11 mph over the 65 mph limit presented a danger the extremity of which I am most likely incapable of appreciating. He gave this little lurch in his squad car before pulling out and accelerating (which I can't help comparing to the little jerk of the wrist fishermen hope will parlay the hint of a bite into a whole fish) and I knew I was donefor.

I do, however, find it humorous in retrospect that I feel grateful for Officer X, who was polite, soft-spoken, and professional. He wore inoffensive sunglasses which were assertive but not hubristic, and he revealed only his lower teeth while speaking. These teeth appeared to be staggered into a slalom and (this could be attributed to adrenaline) the teeth seemed to be lit from each side. Deep shadows grooved each vertical border. I have to say that my perfect driving record was obliterated without much pain, but 300 miles later, when Kyle took the lead into New Jersey, my nerves raved and jangled. Driving that Budget truck with my domestic trappings in tow reminds me of something: I am a damn risky fool. But I'm also fucking fearless when I have to be. And, ticket aside, you can tell my grandmothers I'm an excellent driver. Go on, tell them.

Kyle and I rolled into East Orange around 2 am, endeavored to squeeze the truck into the fenced drive behind his mother and step-father's house, gave up, locked up, and passed out. But only for five hours or so because we had to get up and unload Kyle's business in the morning. The fact that easy passage for trucks travelling from Jersey to Brooklyn (via the Holland tunnel) is now verboten was unbeknownst to me until I rolled up to the toll and this lovely gentleman leaned over to me conspiratorially and said, "Well, hello beautiful! You can't drive that in there!" He pointed seductively to a row of cops, all of whom were attempting to morph their glares into an evil sort of Care Bear Stare to tractor beam me over to the shoulder. After a brief search of the aforementioned domestic trappings, Kyle followed me to the Lincoln tunnel (way uptown) and we managed to wend our way downtown, through Chinatown, across the Manhattan, and down into Brooklyn. When I pulled up Wash. Ave., not only was there a parking spot directly in front of the apartment, but this spot was fiercely guarded by the hottt ticket ladyfriend, her ex-marine Republican Mormon Pops, the tough as toenails Wah T., and Josh K., this delicious, muscley, masterwork-of-gaymanhood-with-an-actual-bus-driving-license who immediately hopped in the Budget truck and parallel parked it like it was a Mini Cooper. Crying, while a desired signifier of relief, was not an option given my exhaustion. Long, somewhat bruising, story short, the crew managed to unload me, load the hottt ticket, and unload again within hours. But I could not have survived this migration without all the help I got from everybody I left behind in Indiana. Like I said before, standing invitation. We have guest towels. We have inflatable mattresses. Soon, in fact, we may even have air conditioning.

While there are a few photos to come of the new digs (thanks to the ladyfriend for l'appareil-photo), let's just say that the kitchen contains more cabinet and counter space than my fairy godmother could have ever promised, and really, the closets are pretty good. Cat Madness Cat approves (lots of flies and cockroach-looking things that are so small they're almost cute) when he's not passed out in the heat. The neighborhood is just about three blocks from Prospect Park (Star Wars I, I mean, IV, played last weekend to booos and claps as part of the first Saturday funstuff every month) and the Brooklyn Museum (Basquiat closed last week, but not before I got my googly eyes on it), which as many of you know, really has a Figment-(think Epcot)-style fountain that giggling/screaming kids tempt with their dry clothes.

Another development: I am now 26-years-old (that's 26 candles on the cake down there). I called my dying grandmother to tell her I'd had her pearls restrung, and though she sounded excited, all she said was, "Tell me, where are you now?" My uncle told me she's snuck me all the jewelry under the family radar.

Due to the fact that I've started working with a couple of dynamo-feminist-writer-people (the ladyfriend has generously shared them with me) who happen to be in their early-middle-thirties but who have each started a couple of businesses and nonprofits, feminist orgs, and written and co-written several books, I still feel young. But now I'm beginning to think I feel young because I really haven't done much as of yet. I am effectively unemployed. The notion of my yet-to-be-completed thesis has evacuated my head so thoroughly I actually had to look up the title I'd concocted. I did buy a toilet brush yesterday! Oh, but I am ripe for self-scorn! Best to treat that with some new age hokum pokum...Tahitian Noni Juice...hypnosis...I have some Koolaid! Your commune is ready, sir! Hari hari hari!

2005-06-10T12:16:00.000-04:00

ice cream cakes do burn