Poetry Slam

Ode to Quiet Mornings

O dark early morn, 'fore the sun doth rise
'Fore the wee birds a-chirp in the leaves of the treeses
How I love to rest within thy breast, close mine tired eyes
To thine beauty, thine quiet, and thine softly whispering breezes.
Ahh; to sleep, perchance to dream
Whilst the morning stars, moon, and the fireflies seem
Preternaturally powerful against the blackened sky,
Some live for their sights! But nay, not I;
I seek naught but slumber, whilst the hours pass by
I seek naught but silence, as in Target sheets I lie.

A ferocious clamor outside mine window glass!
Encroaches upon my lullaby, what crisis hath come to pass?
An atrocious manner of awakening mine ass!
Too precocious, too alarming, for this over-exhausted lass.
I hasten to the pane to see what could be the matter,
Who should, so early, so wrongly, be causing such a clatter?
Who would seek to be so surly as to create such a ruckus?
Those Tom-Petty-concert-parking-lot-looking-motherfuckers!
Mine eyes, they open wide, then they narrow into slits,
As I hastily plot revenge, in detail, bit by bit.

The engines howl and scream and whine, useless are the police,
I merely seek to redeem what's rightfully mine; peace. O blessed peace.
Storm from the bed chamber! Run to the door! Into the yard!
My feet, they barely gloss the floor; I am full guard! Streaming curses
I lunge for the lawnmower, edger, hedger, and leafblower,
Soon it shall be over, soon it shall be over.
I reclaim the weedeater and start to beat the mouthbreathers,
They scatter and they flee but they shan't escape me!
They should not have made so soon, such a thunderous sound
For now I shall not rest, until I hunt each of those bastards down.

You! With the yellow ribbon glued to the butt of your riding mower!
You are an idiot, a lout, an oaf, a buffoon;
And you are mistaken to believe that I am slower
For the trimmer now revs for thee, you obnoxious maroon.
Fueled by the fiery hatred of a million burning suns
I go a-chopping mullets, one by one by one by one
Shreds of stringy greasy hair, they now alight the morning lawn
They shimmer so prettily with the goose poop, shining 'neath the birthing dawn
Never shall such cacophony disturb any of us forevermore,
The yard guys hath been silenced, and peace hast been restored.

Swimming Lesson

Death always makes me reflective. It always brings up my troublesome relationship with that thing that Camus calls the Absurd. This is not necessarily a bad thing, although it is usually very uncomfortable. I frequently experience growth opportunities with some measure of discomfort, but I often goad myself into finding some kind of perverse pleasure in that discomfort.

Finding out about Jason's death definitely wasn't one of the harder deaths, like when my mom died in 2002 or when my best friend Kevin died in 1996. So rather than having to go through shock and grief and rage and all of that in large and unbearably intense quantities, I went almost directly into the reflective stage, which, for me, is always a kind of dance with the Absurd. Not a danse macabre, exactly, but that's not too far off from the right metaphor.

Lately it occurs to me that I've allowed myself to make friends with some people who appear to be assholes. This is not the first time I've done this. I suppose I've done it again for more or less the same reasons I've done it in the past; because some part of me believes that it's better to have assholes for friends than to have fewer friends. But upon reflection, I don't really think this is true. I think it's better (for me, anyway, I wouldn't presume to speak for other folks) to have fewer friends.

Hobbes isn't exactly one of my philosophical heroes, but that whole thing about how life is short, brutish, and nasty resonates for me. It always has. It is all so very unfair. But there's no changing that aspect of it. There's only finding a way to coexist with it and get on with things, or effectively deny it and get on with things, or perhaps perhaps perhaps transcend it. (I would love so much to find a way to transcend it, but I haven't, not yet. I keep looking. High and low, in and out, all around.)

True, I've been bent toward self-destruction in the past. I still kind-of am. But I don't really want to be, not anymore. It's a defense mechanism that I developed very early on and which has outlived its usefulness in my life. Now it's just hanging on out of habit, like an unwanted guest who's overstayed their welcome, crashed on the couch of my psyche, eating all my Cheetohs and flushing the toilet while I'm trying to take a shower.

[Six Feet Under Spoiler Alert]

In this one arc of Six Feet Under, right toward the end of Season Two iirc, there's this storyline where a guy is dying from pancreatic cancer. At first he is all I Hate The World about it, and ready to die because people suck and he doesn't even like himself and what's the fucking point anymore. He has not resolved any of his shit, he has never found happiness or joy or love or peace, he is being shoved into death as a relatively young adult, and he is in a kind of furious denial about all of it. Not the kind of denial that doesn't accept the reality of what's happening, but rather, the kind of denial that doesn't let him confront his fear about it all.

Then, when he does die, he freaks out at the last minute. All of the sudden, he really doesn't want to die. He panics. He has no sense of resolution, no sense of comprehensible finality, no sense of acceptance; he cannot locate any fucking light to go into or anything sappy like that, there's just...abject terror and a direct confrontation with the void as his life comes to an abrupt, unwanted, uncontrollable halt. The guy can't stop himself from dying, of course, life kills us all eventually, everything ends, so he dies whispering, "No, I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't wanna," and then it's over, his face left stuck in an open-mouthed silent scream.

I'm reasonably sure I will never recover from having seen that. This show was brilliant. It was art. It really was fuckin' genius. But this shit should come with a better warning label. That said, what haunts me always teaches me, too. What goes round and round in my mind often does so for a reason. (Or maybe I just assign it a reason. Doesn't matter, really. Distinction without much difference.)

There are some very good people in my life. Loving, kind, passionately good people. I'm going to spend more of my time engaging them, and less of my time engaging the assholes. How I spend the bulk of my time, what I choose to care about and what I choose to reject as superficial bullshit, those are some of the precious few parts of this whole life deal where I actually get anything close to real control, and it's more than worth the effort to beat back the lying demons of my ego that whisper seductively at me that it's better to have more-more-more of the kinds of things that the external world tells me have meanings that I know they do not really have.

Surrounding myself with assholes that I count as friends does not make me any better of a person, or any less alone in this world; it just means, like Igby said when he went down, that I'm drowning in assholes.

And fuck that. I can swim like a fish.

Sounds Like Bullshit To Me

My parents were Fucked Up so badly they warrant the capitalization. I went through a lot because of that, but that's not really what this post is about. Suffice to say that one of the things I went through was traveling back and forth from Florida to Alaska every year from 1978 to 1984, and then again one more time in the late 80s.

The first time I actually went up there with the idea of staying for a while, I had just turned 14 and I was ready to start ninth grade. In Florida, ninth grade was the last year of junior high school, whereas in Alaska, it was the freshman year of senior high school -- a detail that probably would have changed my mind about staying had I known about it beforehand. But once I was there, I was sort-of committed. It's not exactly easy to hitch a ride from Anchorage down to Miami even now, and in the early 80s, that wasn't on my list of acceptable options. Plus which, part of the reason I'd moved up there in the first place was as a result of an ongoing power struggle with my mother, and I was damned if I was going to lose that round by running home.

That's how it came to be that on my very first day of senior high school, I knew exactly no one in a school full of about 2200 kids. I got off the school bus (which I hadn't ridden since being bussed to my last grade school gifted program), found my way through the massive campus to my homeroom Honors English class, and discovered immediately that the kids were all very cliquish, most of them having grown up together, such as I had with my friends down in South Florida (who were also very cliquish).

The teacher seemed all right, and he assigned us the traditional first-day-of-class essay to see what kind of students he had. I finished my essay first and turned it in, then sat there becoming increasingly agitated throughout the rest of the class period. Nothing out of the ordinary or traumatic had happened. I suppose it was just being the new kid and being 14 and being wholly unable to handle the vast array of personal problems in my life from which I had no escape. I tried writing letters home to my friends but that just made me feel worse. I sort-of freaked out, and after the class ended, I made a split second decision to dodge out on the rest of the day.

I didn't go to back to any classes at all for the next three or four, maybe as many as five days. (I think there was a weekend in there but I don't remember anymore.) I'd get up every morning at five o'clock and be out there waiting for the school bus by 6:15, ride the bus to school, then haul ass and just kinda screw around all day, and go home after school hours were over. I don't know what I was thinking. I guess something like, "Let's see how long I can get away with this." Finally the school called my dad's house and I was busted. My stepmother promptly ratted me out to my dad.

Dad: "Are you not going to school?"

Me: "Uhhhhh..."

Dad: "Where in hell have you been for the past week?"

Me: "Uhhhhh..."

Dad: "You have to go to school!"

Me: "Uhhhhh..."

Dad: "I am driving you to school tomorrow. And I am going to call the school to make sure that your ass is in every class."

Me: "Uhhhhh..." (Thinking: "Shit.")

So, I went back to school. The first day back in English class, the teacher asked me to stay after the bell and offered to write me a note letting me out of second period PE. Sure! He was wondering whether I'd ever come back to class, he said. He definitely wasn't the only one, I joked. He was really impressed with my essay, he said. I looked at my shoes. Did I want to be considered for the gifted program, or to be evaluated to skip ahead a few grades? I explained to him in vague terms that that wasn't an option I felt like I could employ.

Then he asked whether I'd be interested in an independent study arrangement wherein he and I would choose a reading list, and I'd be exempt from both class and class assignments, and I could just come by once a week for lunch and discuss the material as I read it, maybe occasionally write a paper. No one in Florida had ever made me such a sweet deal; you bet I took it. He was a pretty cool dude.

There was a lot of adjusting to the new school. Things were very different in Alaska from how they were in Florida, and among the differences was the fact that we were given locker assignments rather than being able to choose our own lockers, and these came with school-issued locks and locker partners who were also assigned by the school. This was not because the school district had less money -- far from it, it was a much nicer, richer school district than any I ever attended in Florida -- but rather, they were very up front about this being a way that we kids were expected to spy on one another, and to promptly report any deviant behavior among our peers.

I was anxious that whole first full day about who my locker partner was. I saw books and notebooks come and go from the locker. I saw a jean jacket, a little too big to fit me, appear and disappear. I saw a pack of Marlboros. I was supposed to report those. I wasn't about to report anything. There were no other clues.

The next day, as I was digging around in the locker looking for the copy of The Odyssey that my English teacher had given me to start my independent study deal, this foxy little blonde stoner-looking guy came up behind me.

"Hey, so I guess you're my mysterious locker partner!" He looked me up and down with these brilliant blue eyes and gave me an open smile. He had a touch of a southern drawl. "Well, all right. I'm Jason." He extended his hand.

"I'm Jennifer." I shook his hand. It was warm and dry and firm. All good signs.

"Where the hell have you been, Jennifer?" This was a friendly question.

"Uh, out sick."

He chuckled, and the open smile widened into a shit-eating grin. "Sounds like bullshit to me."

I laughed. "That's because it is."

"Such as I figured, such as I figured. So Jennifer, tell me, you get high?"

"Depends on which kinda high you mean, Jason. Pot, yes."

"Sweet. Got lunch plans?"

"Nope."

"Want any lunch plans?"

"Totally."

As it turned out, Jason was also in my PE section. In Florida, PE was very general, but in Alaska, we got to take specific sports or activities, and Jason and I had both signed up for soccer.

We saw each other again on the field outside after we'd dressed out, and during roll call Jason whispered to me about which of the kids in the class seemed like assholes and who seemed like they might be okay. I explained to Jason that I'd recently moved up from my mom's to my dad's and he explained to me that he'd been sent up from his mom's to his dad's because he kept getting popped with dope and his mother decided maybe his father could straighten him out. This wasn't, he explained with that same open smile, very likely to occur.

We hooked up with these two other kids who were also new, a sweet-faced super-short girl named Wendi (who would eventually become one of the best friends I ever had), and this ruddy-cheeked tall lanky kid from Idaho whom Jason called Potato. I don't even remember Potato's real name anymore. He was a nice enough kid, though; I still remember going over to his house with Jason and Wendi for his birthday and his mom being so stoked that he'd made some friends.

Anyway, that first day I met Jason, we met up during lunch period right outside the cafeteria in the hallway, and after we bought some Pudding Pops we walked across the street and smoked a bowl out in the nearby woods.

We talked about which music rocked: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest (him), Def Leppard (me). We talked about why our parents sucked, and how the Reagan administration sucked nearly as much and how they might could just wind up killing us all.

"Everything they say, you know, it just sounds like bullshit to me," said Jason.

That turned out to be his catch phrase, "Sounds like bullshit to me." He always said it with that same shit-eating grin. I can still hear him say it in my head.

We hung around together for a while. We kissed a lot, we'd skip class, we smoked a ton of weed; we'd go roller skating, see a movie, play video games down at the mall, all the usual stuff for kids in my generation. Eventually, he got busted for smoking pot and his dad came down pretty hard on him, and my home life did its usual crazy routine and I decided that I might as well go back to Florida where at least I'd have my own goddamned bedroom while everyone was being an asshole.

I never saw Jason again. But I never forgot him either. I always remembered him so fondly; particularly that shit-eating grin and that voice in his slight southern drawl saying, "Sounds like bullshit to me." I heard it in my head earlier today, actually, reading through the news, and I got to wondering what ole Jason was making of BushCo, what he had made of his life.

I googled him and got his obituary. Died a few years ago. A sudden illness, it said, and that was all.

Hey Jason, I never forgot you, baby. If I had a fuckin' bowl, I'd smoke it tonight while I'm thinking about you, missing you, wondering what you wound up doing with yourself, your too-goddamned-short life, your smart-assed wit, your stoner wisdom. Thanks for everything.

Mad Skillz

We all know the ladies love mad skillz.

Back on NewsRadio, Maura Tierney's character, Lisa, was a math whiz who could find square roots in her head*, which I always thought was hot as hell. I have two exes who were so artistically talented that they could sketch practically anything you could dream up in less than 5 minutes; also very hot. A friend I met in college, another Jen, is a stellar dancer, and even though I'm not really into modern dance and all like that, I've always admired what Jen could do and I loved watching her perform. Another friend from college is a writer and a fellow theory-head, and I am constantly in awe of her talents in those departments -- so much so that she makes me fuckin' nervous all the time, even though I completely adore her.

Although I used to be able to do a few more things, the illness has robbed me of a lot, and at this stage of the game I only have three native talents left. I rate anywhere from fair-to-middlin' on down to suck at everything else. Here's what I can do:

1. I am smart. Really smart. I took a major hit on this with the illness but I'm still hanging in there with it. It manifests mostly in writing, clever jokes, abstract thought like theory, and various kinds of social systems analysis, but that's a matter of personal preference. I can wield it to do anything except for math. I have no idea why I can't do math.


2. I am amazing at taking care of people, in every way from surface pampering to intensive therapy. I often know what you need before you know what you need. While it's true that this skill was, for the most part, honed as a survival mechanism from a childhood spent taking care of my mother, it also always felt as though it came very naturally to me. Insofar as we have any "natural" inclinations, I believe that my caretaking is either inborn or so close to that as to be indistinguishable from it. What this means in a practical sense is that I can love you, not just emotionally but in an active manner, like few other people can.


3. If you let me -- by which I mean, if you trust me -- I can also fuck you like few other people can.

Unless you also count being able to roll joints near-perfectly, even at the beach on a windy day, those are the only skilled tricks I have in my bag. Everything else I can do I'm either not very proficient with, or if I am good at it (yes, Liv dear, like the cherry tricks with my tongue, although that is tangentially related to #3), it's not really a skill but is rather more accurately filed under Stupid Human Tricks.

What can y'all do?

*Apparently, Lisa answered a math question wrong at least once, which the writers may have done on purpose** and which I'd have thought was pretty damn funny if I'd been math-savvy enough to catch it, alas.

**Phil Hartman's Bill used to quote lines of poetry and attribute them to Keats when they were never actually from Keats. Ah, I still really miss Hartman.

Egg On My Face Out My Nose

Between the underlying chronic illness and the bout of tonsillitis, I'm sick as shit right now and having a lot of throat trouble. One of the things that always happens when my thyroid swells up, such as it currently is (oh, but according to that endo I saw last month, thyroid disease has no symptoms! Riiiight), is that it also twitches, and that tends to make me swallow involuntarily and unexpectedly. This can make eating much more challenging and adventuresome than I'd prefer, such as the time it once caused me to swallow a peppermint hard candy whole, which then dissolved in my esophagus and gave my whole chest cavity that minty fresh feeling, like someone had just painted the upper portion of my rib cage with a primer coat of Cool Mint Listerine.

Yesterday the involuntary swallowing caused me to choke, inhale sharply, and in the doing aspirate a chunk of scrambled egg. Not a large chunk, but still, a chunk of anything rocketing toward your lungs is generally bad news. I don't know how far into my lungs it got, but I coughed up a storm, and then while I was catching my breath and googling to see whether this warranted a phone call for some kind of medical attention, I felt it up in the very very back of my nose, you know, right where that mucous membrane in between the nose and throat is. (I'm not good with anatomy, is that called the nasopharynx?)

SO GROSS.

Good lord, what a stupid way to die that would have been, right? Totally worthy of a Six Feet Under opening, though. My lifeless form, all slumped over at the desk, glassy-eyed, the monitor showing search results for "aspirate food" with half a plate of stale brunch nearby on the floor.

All I can do at this point is hope I coughed all of it up and that I don't wind up with pneumonia from it. I'm going to go take my antibiotics and narcotics and go back to bed shortly. Just thought you'd all like to know I'm still alive, and that if I do manage to off myself in some MacGyveresque way involving my keyboard, a ballpoint pen cap, and a broken nail file, I'll make sure E blogs about it for your entertainment. :)

Fudgesicles & Narcotics

Yeah, the title means what you think it does. I got a couple of good days last week so I thought I might be coming out of the most recent flare of my illness, which has been very painful and unpleasant, but I'm back on painkillers. Oh, and I have tonsillitis, too. Posting will thus be sporadic again.

But on the bright side (I can find the silver lining on a pile of dog shit), I just got a tremendous amount of enjoyment out of something incredible. Partially because people have been recommending it to me for years, but mostly because a friend with excellent taste raved about it, I recently got into Six Feet Under on DVD. It was fucking amazing. I watched five whole seasons of it in two weeks and three days. And once it digests, I will watch it again.

If you missed it, do yourself a favor and rent the first season just to check it out and see if you like the ride. Even to say that it was cleverly written, skillfully cast, and beautifully filmed doesn't really do it justice. Most American television is crap (a thing I say with love) but Six Feet Under? That was brilliant. That was art.

UPDATE: There are spoilers in the comment thread discussion, so if you don't want to know, don't do the clicky. :)

Everybody Do The Propaganda

Going out to idiot America.*

Whatever it takes to make my FBI file more interesting to peruse.

*hat tip to Pam Spaulding at Pandagon for the link; I gave up watching cable news some time ago because it is not good for my rage.

Baby You Can Drive My Car

I went to try to get my driver's license yesterday and they were closed. On Monday. Not just that Monday, and not just that office. Every Monday, every office. The hell? Monday through Friday, people, 9-5; those are the "normal working hours". So unless you're on the night shift, working freelance, and/or you're a hooker or summat, GO TO WORK.

As I was breezing through the Digest of Ohio Motor Vehicle Laws preparing for the test, brushing up on signage, local speed limits and seat belt laws and the like, I ran across a couple of interesting things. I know you're all just dying to hear about them.

The first thing I learned was that you can legally turn left on red, which I did not know. Only if you are going from one one-way street to another one-way street, and only after you stop, and only if there's no sign prohibiting it, but still, I probably would have muttered "Asshole," at someone for doing that, thereby making an asshole of myself due to my own ignorance.

Here's another one I didn't know. Ohio law requires a list of certain procedures be performed when passing on the left, and the list includes:

Sound the horn to warn the driver of the vehicle being overtaken that he/she is about to be passed.

Okay, you guys, I have a favor to ask. If you're ever going to pass me on the left, just as FSM clearly intended for you to do, please do not honk at me, too; you'll scare the living hell out of me.

Once I got into the DUI/DWI segment of the booklet, things started to get weird. First of all, they call it "OVI" in Ohio (Operating a Vehicle while Impaired), which is just further evidence of the state being inexplicably fucked in the head about alcohol in general. I mean, this is a state where it's possible to have a liquor license that doesn't let you sell wine, but does let you sell beer.

And apparently, there's no such beast as a liquor license that lets you sell all kinds of booze in a carryout fashion. By which I mean, for example, that you cannot even buy a bottle of Bacardi at the grocery store; you can buy wine, beer and all manners of liqueurs and all that stuff, but when you get to the liquor section where the liquor should be, and where it appears to be, if you look closely at the labels on all the vodka and rum and whiskey and all of that, it all says it's "diluted", and no I am not making that up. I'm still foggy on the details, but I've been told there are special state liquor stores where one could potentially negotiate a series of transactions (possibly involving signing an affidavit to testify that you're a dirty, dirty, sinner) to sufficiently stock a home bar, but I haven't seen one yet.

If they pull you over for suspected OVI, you're allowed to refuse a blood alcohol test, but if you do: the officer will confiscate your license (reasonable); the Registrar is required to suspend your license for 1-5 years just for refusing to take the test (way overkill, especially considering that if you take the test and fail you'll probably only lose your license for 6 months); and this will happen even if you ultimately are acquitted on the OVI charge (batshit insane).

The booklet also says:

It is unlawful to operate a motor vehicle with a blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) of .08 percent or higher.

and

If you are convicted of OVI with a BAC of .08 percent or above, you will face stiffer penalties.

Um...stiffer than the "none" you'd face for driving while below the legal limit? I'd guess that'd be true, yeah.

Now, considering that they make it cumbersome just to get your hot little hands on the raw materials to mix up a proper batch of Kamikaze shooters in the first place, you would think that the penalties for OVI in Ohio would be pretty harsh, huh? Heh. They do haul your ass in for a mandatory 3 days in the clink for your first OVI offense, so there's that. But the mandatory minimum for your fourth offense is only 60 days, and it's still at the judge's discretion whether to pull the plug on your license entirely.

Whenever I'm out driving, I am now going to start taking 14 mile detours around all the local bars. And the churches, because you know at least half the folks in there are only there in the first place because they can't handle their compulsive sinful natures vices without some kind of repetitive formal forgiveness rituals extensive social support.

By far, the most entertaining thing I learned reading the booklet was about the point system. (For international readers who may not have points systems in their countries: if we screw up while driving, we get a certain number of points depending on the ways in which we've screwed up, and when we get to a certain number of points, other penalties like fines, or revoking our license will kick in.) In Ohio, violations such as driving on a suspended license or street racing will net you the same amount of points as...drumroll please....vehicular homicide.

I guess the lesson here is that if you're racing some bitchin' Camaro down 675, don't be a pansy ass and stop for any pedestrians, floor that fucker and win your Greased Lightning, it's only another 6 points. Oh, and if you're loaded, let them take your blood. I mean really, what were you going to do with the next 3 days of your life anyway? Cure cancer? Not likely. And at least this way, you can be out racing again by next Friday night and it's only another 6 points.

Who's Yer Daddy?

The goslings who've lived in the pond since we arrived have grown up.


They are just about as big as their parents now, and I expect they will soon be doing whatever kind of "leaving the nest" activity that's fashionable amongst halfway domesticated geese these days. Which may involve anything from flying out of state or maybe just spending most of their time in the pond over by the Kroger, where there are other geese available for dating and mating and fart jokes, hell if I know.

Obviously, I know very little about geese. One thing has struck me, though, watching and feeding and interacting with this little goose family as the mom and dad have raised their set of offspring: the daddy goose is the best father I have ever seen in my entire life.

He has always been very protective of the flock. (Is that right? "Flock" to describe a family unit of geese? Probably not but I can't be arsed to look it up, I'm too tired.) The mommy goose leads them all around and goes where she thinks they need to go, and the daddy goose follows behind them all, craning his neck in and out at them, as if to say, "Keep moving along, now, nothing to see here, keep up with your mom and let's nobody get distracted and lost." He honks off the ducks and the people he doesn't trust if they get too close. To his credit, he trusts both E and I. Clearly, he has sound judgment.

The biggest thing, for me, is the way he handles resources. I'll sometimes sit inside and watch them from the living room as they peck around in the lawn to feed, and while he occasionally does a little pecking, mostly he is on high alert with his neck stretched into full extension, looking around in all directions, keeping an eye out while the rest of the family munches on the grass or the bugs in the grass or whatever in the hell they're eating.

Sometimes we go out there to feed the array of water fowl (it's very relaxing to hang out with them and I am entirely cured of my irrational fear of ducks, although to be totally honest, which is an obnoxious habit I have, the geese still make me a little nervous), and that daddy goose always but always makes sure that each and every member of his family, including his mate, has a bite before he'll take one. Even if we toss some food right to him, he'll let one of the babies who aren't even babies anymore get the piece of food. Only after everyone's had some, and only when we distract the others and toss some directly to him, does he take his eye off of protection/child-rearing duty for a split second and snip up a little treat for himself.

Everybody deserves to have a daddy like that. I mean, could you even imagine this daddy goose calling his lawyer to disinherit one of the goslings for being queer?

The Bloom Is Off The Rose

So, how old were you the first time you actually frightened yourself by catching your own reflection in your peripheral vision first thing in the morning?

I was 36 and this happened to me yesterday. Wrinkled face, bags under my eyes, gray hair shooting out chaotically in all directions. (Why does gray hair not grow in the same direction as your other-colored hair, wtf is that about? Fuck you, genetics of aging, fuck you right in the gray-haired ear.) Dude, the day before yesterday I looked like a cute little 6-year-old waking up from a nap, the only wrinkles on my face from the imprint of the bedding, maybe a slight tussle of dark auburn hair pasted to my forehead; very adorable, really. But yesterday, whammo.


This change, damn, it was very sudden and drastic and I wasn't at all ready.

Fly Wrangling

Have you ever wondered exactly how crazy you are? I know for a fact that I'm not the only person who finds entertainment in analyzing my own insanity.

Lately, one of the weird things I've been getting up to is wrangling flies. What I mean by this is that I've been catching them around the house and walking them outside to set them free.

The second I told E about this, she asked, "Are you feeling a little crazy?"

Well, always, but that's neither here nor there. I have a reason for this behavior. (Most crazy people have reasons for their behavior, and the ones that don't are compensated for by the ones diagnosed with OCD, who have a minimum of 12 reasons for each and every behavior. I almost have OCD; one minor molecular adjustment in the neurochemical soup and I'd be locking the door precisely 7 times before I left the house to take out the trash, gloved to the elbows, meticulously avoiding every crack in the pavement between my front door and the parking lot dumpster.) The fly wrangling arises because the flies are bugging the crap out of me and I hate to kill things. I mean, I really hate to kill things. I accidentally killed a fly while learning how to wrangle them and I apologized and cried.

The equipment for fly wrangling so far includes an empty prescription bottle (from antibiotics; I wouldn't want the flies to lick some percocet dust and OD) and a folded sheet of paper. Since the flies love my bedroom window, that is where most of the wrangling begins. When they are banging themselves around between the glass and blinds in whatever self-abusive ritual they're performing, I trap them against the windowpane inside of the empty prescription bottle, slide the paper underneath to make the trap mobile, and then walk them outside to free them on the front porch, where the Catch & Release part of my short insanity program concludes.

By contrast, here's how more normal people behave:

Recently, the flies in the living room started bugging E past her tolerance point. Now, the woman can normally ignore practically anything, it's a gift, but once something finally gets to her, watch the fuck out. E's coping methodology was to shut off all the lights in the living room to attract the flies to the TV. I tried to watch Iron Chef America: Battle Fennel and pretend the carnage wasn't occurring right in the center of my field of vision, but she whipped out a rolled up magazine and whacked at least 6 or 7 flies in rapid succession. It was a massacre. Corpses everywhere.

Now, you all probably think you'd much rather be stranded on a desert isle with E than with me, since you probably think something like: Hey, at least E will hunt, and Jen would be a useless crying blob. But here's the facts, Jack -- I might cry and apologize, but I'd fish and hunt every day, cook whatever I killed every evening, and then clean up the campsite as well because, again, with the weird magnetism to my weird ethics, the emotionality, and the borderline OCD. And E? E would just wait for you to fall asleep and then she'd filet your ass and fry you up with the coconut milk she'd previously conned you into collecting that day. She's crafty.

I love her, though. She's not just my housemate, she's my best friend and my family. We have a little, broken family, but it's still good. Yeah, still good.



(I'm the one on the right.)

Not From The Onion

I love this.

What appears to be a transsexual hen is causing a ruckus in a henhouse in southern Sweden, Agence France-Presse reported.

[The owner] woke up one morning in July to the sound of two roosters crowing instead of just one. To her surprise, one of the black hens, Anne Boleyn -- all of the hens are named after Henry VIII's wives -- had undergone a transformation.

"She had lost most of her hen feathers and had begun growing a comb and tail."

"Henry VIII [who clearly thought he was the only man in the house] is bloody angry...the other hens are mostly just surprised, but they seem to increasingly accept him or her."

All the ongoing bad things and bashings considered, I still feel encouraged that I keep seeing signs of science helping us crawl toward a society with a glimmer of recognition that all bodies just don't and won't fit into these neat binary divisions that people have crafted as fictional categories to help us understand and navigate the world. Not that I think there's anything wrong with crafting fictional categories to help us understand and navigate the world, hell, I think that's both necessary and useful -- so long as we keep in mind that they're fictions and resist the urge to confuse them with truth.

Fact is, one's sex can be kinda squishy and hard to define sometimes. Probably not quite as squishy as one's gender, but still, not as rigid as most people think. When folks fail to realize that the edges of all social categories are kinda blurry, and they try to impose some rigidity that the facts of the material world simply will not support, that's where they leave the realm of being useful fictions and become oppressive bullshit that actually hurts people. Every social/identity line you draw too harshly is a line you draw right through the flesh of someone's actual body somewhere.*

*I am paraphrasing this and would source it if I could remember where I got it. I once read this sentiment, more or less, somewhere in a feminist theory piece and I cannot for the life of me remember where. I want to say maybe from Cherrie Moraga and/or Gloria Anzaldua or some Chicana feminist theory, but then again it could probably just as easily have come from some pomo theorist riffing off of Merleau-Ponty. If anyone knows, please post so I can stop obsessing over it.

Buy The Book

As a kid, my circumstances and my personality came together to create a context wherein I was virtually always reading. I read in the bath, in the car, while eating dinner on my little Muppet Show TV tray with The Carol Burnett Show on in the background, while in bed long past bedtime under the covers with a flashlight. I spent almost all my in-school leisure time in my elementary school library. After school and on the weekends I'd sweep the local city library, where I'd consumed everything that interested me by 7th grade, which led to skipping junior & senior high school classes to hop the public transit to downtown Miami where the big library was. (I wasn't a square, I did my fair share of skipping school to smoke pot and surf at the beach, too, I'm just sayin', I used to read a lot.)

I can't read like that anymore. Ever since I got sick, it's been very limited. So I've become very picky. But I'll tell you this, I'd be buying this new release, WebMage, even if I wasn't already fond of the author, Kelly McCullough, on a personal level. I don't know him well or anything but from the perspective of my friendly acquaintanceship with him, Kelly's a helluva guy, both smart and funny, and I've enjoyed a bit of his short fiction in the past.

As for WebMage, he had me at:

...a fantasy-cyberpunk hybrid, revolves around Ravirn, a grandson of the Greek Fate Lachesis. In order to keep up with an ever increasing number of life threads, the Fates have upgraded to a computerized system that blends magic with programming. Of course where there are computers, there are also hackers. In the process of "testing" his great-aunt Atropos's security, Ravirn a hacker/sorcerer and his laptop familiar Melchior uncover a plot that could shake the foundations of Olympus and change humanity's relationship with Fate forever.

If you need more to tempt you, go read the boss review Kelly got from Publishers Weekly.

Because I Said I Would

The first thing I noticed was that Instead comes in purple wrapping. Purple is my favorite color. This felt like an auspicious omen (for about 2 seconds). The wrapped product looks a little like a condom...


...for an elephant.


Which was a smidge intimidating and immediately eradicated the purple-induced glee. But the unwrapped product looks pretty benign, kinda like a pink plastic ring with a baggie attached to it. The pink plastic rim is flexible enough to bend and squeeze and twist but firm enough to revert to its proper shape and hold. The clear plastic baggie part feels like thick Saran wrap.

My first stumbling block with the product was that I couldn't tell which end was up, and the instructions made no mention of it. I tried squeezing the sides of the cup to see if the clear plastic "naturally" cupped in one direction or the other, but no dice. I felt stupid about this right away.

(Short Memo to the Instead People: it wouldn't kill you to mention which end is up or that it doesn't matter which end is up somewhere in your product's literature. Allowing your consumer to feel stupid within seconds of opening your product -- even if your consumer is stupid -- often complicates said consumer's development of a sense of loyalty to your brand.)

The clear plastic did form a cup when I nudged it through the pink plastic rim in either direction, but in one direction it cupped down slightly further than the other direction because of where the two pieces adhere together, so I used this to determine which side should face toward my cervix. (In fairness, I should warn you all that I baked whole chickens upside down for nearly 3 years before I could reliably figure out that little flesh-puzzle, so even though there's not a whole lot of commonality between chickens and vaginas, don't take my advice on finding the proper orientation of the Instead product, because the fact that I am a losing contestant at the Which End Is Up game is not the exception, it's the rule; it's just one of the universe's many sadistic games humorous themes which needlessly overcomplicate enhance my life.)

Over the course of the next 15 minutes or so, I met with abject failure in using Instead. I could insert it without any obvious trouble, but I couldn't get it to seat itself in the right place. There aren't that many steps in the procedure, and my vagina is just not that complex, so there are not a lot of opportunities for mistakes, but I managed to fail anyway. Repeatedly.

I figured I must be putting it in wrong, and since I hadn't yet noticed that they have video instructions* at their website, I went back to the paperwork and read the printed instructions (link opens .pdf file) carefully. Again.

To insert the Instead Softcup, hold the Softcup so the bottom of the cup hangs down.

As described, I did initially have trouble determining which side was the bottom. Having tried to use some logic to make the proper choice, I soldiered on.

Squeeze the opposite sides of the rim together.

Check.

Keeping the rim pressed together, insert the Instead Softcup completely into the vagina.

Check.

When you are sitting, your vaginal canal is horizontal, sloping slightly downward.

And this is where I ran into trouble. Mine seems quite not-horizontal when I'm sitting upright. It's not vertical either, but it's certainly not horizontal. It's angled almost like a J-shape, with how much emphasis on the angle depending on whether I'm leaning forward or back. Further, to my perspective, it's angled upward. Which perspective am I supposed to use? Mine, right? That would seem necessary.

But even from another perspective, doesn't general cultural conversation presume the vaginal entrance to be "the beginning" of the vagina? So even from that pov, it kinda has to slope upward rather than downward. Even all of our slang references it as "up" -- you never hear of anyone putting anything "down a vagina", it's always "up". Plus which, I'm absolutely certain that every single vagina I've ever put so much as a finger inside of (and I don't grope and tell but this is not a small number) has sloped slightly upward when the woman who owned it was sitting upright.

When the Instead People say "downward" do they mean "upward", or do I only have experience with mutant vaginas? I'M SO CONFUSED.

Use your finger to push the Instead Softcup downward.

Sorry, but as much of myself as I'm willing to expose in the name of entertainment, we will not be discussing the only part of my body that is "downward" from the position I just assumed via these instructions.

Use your finger to push the Instead Softcup downward and back as far as it will go. It will slide into place under the cervix and behind the pubic bone.

Okay, that "slide into place" thing? That's what was totally not happening. Rather than unfolding around my cervical opening (like a pretty, pretty flower), the product remained scrunched together, its plastic rim tightly squeezed by the walls of my (apparently miniscule yet startlingly strong) vagina. The second I moved out of position, it would start to slip downward (Shorter Memo to the Instead People: downward = out), away from my cervix and toward my vaginal opening again, still folded up.

I took it out and tried it again with my hips aimed toward the floor, then again with them aimed toward the ceiling. No go. Even with one ankle over my head, wrapped around the towel rack on the wall, I could not persuade the menstrual cup to unfold, embrace my cervical opening, and stay there. Like I said the other day in the comments thread of the initial post I made about it, it was a bit like trying to stuff paper into a straw, and then, after it's all jammed in there, do origami with it.

However, for this attempt I had just woken up and I had just started my period only moments before, so after indulging in a minor crying fit about how frustrated and incompetent and stupid I felt, I decided that perhaps I had chosen a bad time. I sighed, surrendered to tampons, and planned to give it another go later.

The beginning of Try #2 was supposed to find me pants-less, lying on a towel on my bed and wondering how the fuck I'd ever pull this maneuver off in the bathroom at, for example, Home Depot, but I got impatient when I got out of the shower, sat on the toilet, tried again and met with instant success. I'm still not sure why because I don't think I did anything differently. I wondered if maybe my mutant vagina just went all shape-shifty on me, or if perchance my uterus had gone journeying around my ass to visit my elbow and thus my cervix had simply not been available in the morning, but whatever, it did work very easily the second time I tried, and has been easy every time thereafter.

I'm still adjusting to it, but so far, I like it quite a bit. Unless something goes horribly awry :: knocks wood:: then I am saying good-bye to tampons for the rest of my life.

::waves:: Goodbye tampons! You sucked! I won't miss you! Don't come again!



*It was only after I managed to get the whole procedure to work that I finally noticed the video instructions at the Instead website and only after I watched the video that I finally figured out what they meant by "downward". Apparently, women need to be told how to not ram something into their cervix, and I had assumed that this would be unnecessary, when I should absolutely know better by now. The misunderstanding was thus totally my bad, and the Instead People should not be maligned for my incompetence.