30 December, 2003

Seeking The Teeth

Something in me, dark and sticky
All the time it's getting strong
No way of dealing with this feeling
Can't go on like this too long

Her: ya know what? i just might need to start hanging out in places like that. normally i go for nice, clean cut guys with good jobs and all that other b.s. and that is NOT working for me. guess i need a dirtball in my life.

Her: maybe a dirtball will be nice to me.

Me: Was your last boyfriend not nice to you?

Her: you know, there is a realllly fine line between teasing and hurting/being mean. And he crossed that line so many times I couldn't even count. And he knew it and didn't care.

Her: And sometimes he wasn't even teasing - just plain being mean.

Me: I'm sorry to hear that.

Her: I experienced some violence last year so I have fear

Her: it was bad....

Me: I'm sorry!

Her: Oh its ok - it is just that it makes it more difficult for my confidence

Me: Well, I can certainly understand your hesitation. Are you OK aside from some fear?

Her: I have 1 broken tooth at the back thats left physically

Her: other wise no lasting stuff you can SEE

Her: I dont talk about this enough, I am very ashamed

Me: Don't feel ashamed!

Her: after he beat me I did not leave him right away

Me: How long did it take you to leave him?

Her: 3 months

Me: why did you stay with him? did u think he'd change?

Her: its like I was in a trance or something - SO much fear

Her: I felt like I could not live without him

Me: Why didn't you report this guy to the police?

Her: too scared - get this - the truth is - I DID NOT WANT TO LOSE HIM

Me: Emotions are such wonderful things but can be so fucking weird sometimes.

Her: thank you for not telling me to 'get over it' or saying 'what th e hell i s wrong with you'

Her: very rare - you are cool

Me: You're welcome!

Her: I feel vunerable that I told someone about the beatings. I need reasurance that it will stay quiet

Me: What can I do?

Her: just don't ever make light of it please - I just feel kinda exposed

Me: I promise you I won't. I like you - I didn't mean to pry or anything.

Her: oh I know - its amazing that I told someone that over the internet

Me: I am very honored that you did - thank you for trusting me.

Her: ..something about you - I can tell you are not one of these morons that exist on the chats

The earthly power sucks shadowed milk from sleepy tears undone
From nippled skin as smooth as silk the bugles blown as one
You lie there with your eyes half closed like there's no - one there at all
There's a tension pulling on your face
Come on, come talk to me

Arguments, Banter, Contradiction, Duologue, Exclamations - It's Only Talk

My words won't come out right
I feel like I'm drowning
I'm feeling weak now
But I can't show my weakness
I sometimes wonder
Where do we go from here

It doesn't have to be like this
All we need to do is make sure we keep talking

"I am very scared and unsure of how to deal with my fiance, Adam. I basically have been wavering back and forth between wicca and christianity for the past few years, and just dropped the "bombshell" so to speak that I have chosen Wicca last weekend (I've been procrastinating and trying to keep it a bit secret). As I mentioned in other emails, he's very devout Christian, WELS Lutheran, which is one of the more conservative branches. He then made a statment to the effect of 'I don't know if I can marry a non-Christian woman. Marriage is a Christian institution.' I want to show him that essay, but I think he will take it the wrong way. Do you have any advice on what to do?"

Mi ŝatasrenkonti novajn homojn


just curious who all has the msn messenger on here, i have it and just want to know who else has it...

if you do, anybody want to add me to their messenger?!!?

lol

james


(6)


All Your Base Are Belong to Us

"Monday night I saw the Flower Kings at the Hamilton Street Cafe in Bound Brook NJ. I last saw the FK (other than Saturday night) at the New Brunswick show in 2001 on the first Rainmaker tour. At that time I had been less than a month removed from a very difficult round of chemo and a stem cell transplant to try and stop the cancer that was ultimately killing me. I met the band, told them my story, which seemed to touch them (Roine and Tomas especially), got them to sign some stuff, and we went our seperate ways.

After the show Monday night, I walked up to Tomas and said, 'I doubt you remember someone you met two years ago, but I last saw you guys play at the New Brunswick show. At that time I didn't have any hair, as I was undergoing treatment for cancer. I told you how important your music was in keeping me going and positive, and...'

He stopped me and said 'Yes, I do remember. How are you doing?'

I told him I was two years on from the treatment, I was still going, and still listened to the FK's music to get me up when I was down. Honestly, I kind of feel as stupid as it may sound to some of you, that the Flower Kings helped keep me alive by keeping me up when I was at my lowest.

I told him this.

He signed my copy of Unfold The Future.

And then, when I held out my hand to shake his, he grabbed me and hugged me.

If anyone ever needs a reason to listen to the Flower Kings other than their wonderfully uplifting music, remember this tale :-)

Bill K"

Reaching leaning scratching vainly
Faces dancing locked lipped and between thigh secret
Briolette tears drip from frozen masks
As all those death row questions don't get asked


In the autumn of 1999, there was a spate of public revelations about Soviet spies in the United Kingdom...But how did these people get their instructions? Well, one way - and a method still used by many security services - is by coded messages on shortwave radio.

The thing about these messages is that they can be heard by anyone with a shortwave radio that covers the frequencies between the broadcast bands. They consist of groups of numbers, usually repeated several times, sometimes in English but also in Spanish, German, East European and Far East languages.

6-0-8-5-5-5-7-6-6-6

.- -. - - - - .- - - - - / ... - - - ..- .- -.


Comma comma comma comma
Commai commai commai commai
Commu commu commu commu
Communicate

Virus Alert

"A new computer virus is spreading throughout the Internet, and it is far more insidious than last week's Chernobyl menace. Named Strunkenwhite after the authors of a classic guide to good writing, it returns e-mail messages that have grammatical or spelling errors. It is deadly accurate in its detection abilities, unlike the dubious spell checkers that come with word processing programs.

The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate America, which has become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words and mangled syntax so acceptable in cyberspace. The CEO of LoseItAll.com, an Internet startup, said the virus has rendered him helpless. "Each time I tried to send one particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error message: 'Your dependent clause preceding your independent clause must be set off by commas, but one must not precede the conjunction.' I threw my laptop across the room."

A top executive at a telecommunications and long-distance company, 10-10-10-10-10-10-123, said: "This morning, the same damned e-mail kept coming back to me with a pesky notation claiming I needed to use a pronoun's possessive case before a gerund. With the number of e-mails I crank out each day, who has time for proper grammar? Whoever created this virus should have their programming fingers broken."

A broker at Begg, Barrow and Steele said he couldn't return to the "bad, old" days when he had to send paper memos in proper English. He speculated that the hacker who created Strunkenwhite was a "disgruntled English major who couldn't make it on a trading floor. When you're buying and selling on margin, I don't think it's anybody's business if I write that 'i meetinged through the morning, then cinched the deal on the cel phone while bareling down the xway.' "

If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could mean the end to a communication revolution once hailed as a significant timesaver. A study of 1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J., found that e-mail increased employees' productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less time to formulate their thoughts. (The same study also found that they lost 2.2 hours of productivity because they were e-mailing so many jokes to their spouses, parents and stockbrokers.)

Strunkenwhite is particularly difficult to detect because it doesn't come as an e-mail attachment (which requires the recipient to open it before it becomes active). Instead, it is disguised within the text of an e-mail titled "Congratulations on your pay raise." The message asks the recipient to "click here to find out about how your raise effects your pension." The use of "effects" rather than the grammatically correct "affects" appears to be an inside joke from Strunkenwhite's mischievous creator.

The virus also has left government e-mail systems in disarray. Officials at the Office of Management and Budget can no longer transmit electronic versions of federal regulations because their highly technical language seems to run afoul of Strunkenwhite's dictum that "vigorous writing is concise." The White House speechwriting office reported that it had received the same message, along with a caution to avoid phrases such as "the truth is... " and "in fact...."

Home computer users also are reporting snafus, although an e-mailer who used the word "snafu" said she had come to regret it.

The virus can have an even more devastating impact if it infects an entire network. A cable news operation was forced to shut down its computer system for several hours when it discovered that Strunkenwhite had somehow infiltrated its TelePrompTer software, delaying newscasts and leaving news anchors nearly tongue-tied as they wrestled with proper sentence structure.

There is concern among law enforcement officials that Strunkenwhite is a harbinger of the increasingly sophisticated methods hackers are using to exploit the vulnerability of business's reliance on computers.

"This is one of the most complex and invasive examples of computer code we have ever encountered. We just can't imagine what kind of devious mind would want to tamper with e-mails to create this burden on communications," said an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via the telephone out of concern that trying to e-mail his comments could leave him tied up for hours.

Meanwhile, bookstores and online booksellers reported a surge in orders for Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style."

A Flake's Progress

Victory is mine! I finally got java running on Firebird so all those goofy scrolling thingies on web pages work now. Actually, what really irritated me was that I couldn't view any of the art work at the home page of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg where Russian Ark was taped. Also, I snagged a very handy yenc decoder. This makes newsgroups much cooler.

Pete got a set of those new-fangled walkie talkies for Xmas and we were playing with them yesterday. Of course, the first thing we did when giving them a go for the first time was to do the Young Ones thing - you know, "Charlie, Teakettle, Barbeque - CCCCHHHHHH!!!". I've got TechTV on (go figure) and they've got this little hottie now on Fresh Gear - Stephanie Siemiller. I've got some fresh gear for her, alright.

I see that our helpful and friendly federal government is banning ephedra. What the hell are truck drivers gonna do? Plus I used it occasionally for a buzz. Pop a few of them and wash 'em down with some coffee and your scalp starts tingling in a few minutes. Bummer.

OK, here's something uninteresting. I'm in the process of writing this lengthy paper on the lyrics of Jethro Tull's music and I've gotten up to 1981. Then I go ahead and find this bit from John Watson's Behaviorism:

"Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant chief, and yes, even beggar-man thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors."

Now compare this to the lyric of Tull's "Cross-Eyed Mary":

"Who would be a poor man, a beggarman, a thief --
if he had a rich man in his hand?"

Was Ian Anderson on the nurture side of the debate? Had he read Watson's book? Does this cast my interpretations and argument into doubt? Nah. He prolly just snagged the phrase for his own purposes. Now don't get me started on potential references to Dante's Inferno in Tull's A Passion Play. The "icy wastes" and such.

...................

I put on my Live at Leeds bootleg by The Who and have been reading an interview with a guy named William Dumhoff who is a dream researcher. Quite interesting. He basically says that Freud and Jung are full of shit. So then what are dreams? "Dreams express our conceptions of ourselves and of people close to us." This is to say, dreams aren't our subconsciouses trying to sort out repressed or underdeveloped bits of our personalities, they're just reflections of ourselves, albeit in weird and convoluted forms. If I could remember any of my dreams, I would reflect upon them.

Ya know, this Who disc is fucking awesome!! If aliens came to Earth and wanted to know what rock'n'roll is, I'd give 'em a copy of this show. It's got everything: simple verse-chorus-verse pop songs and longer, more complicated pieces such as the whole of Tommy. But whatever song you're talking about, it's loud and raw. There's nothing quite like the sound of a Gibson SG turned up to 11. Something about the way "My Generation" weaves in and out of various other songs...you get "Sparks" which is raucous and full of distortion. Then a short, quiet passage and then Pete launches into a fast, heavy riff and we're off to the races again. You have some order, some melody and then decays into chaos. Feedback and distortion reign. Then the notes organize themselves again into something peaceful. And then entropy kicks in once more and the shit hits the fan. It is, as Dave Marsh noted, hallucinatory.

"Magic Bus" too is great. Formula: take a Bo Diddley beat (which he got from his grandmother's singing when he was a child) and have the band go fucking insane.

The song starts off slowly but it builds over the course of five minutes. The beat picks up and becomes faster. Townshend and Daltrey start screaming in call-and-response. ("You can have the magic bus for 100 English pounds!" --> "No! Too much!") Gradually the song swells and you can just feel that it's going to bust out at any time. Just when you think it is, they hold back. But it reaches critical mass and they let loose in a musical climax. You've got Moon all over his kit, Entwhistle's bass part fills out the bottom end and acts as a lead simultaneously, Townshend beats the shit out his guitar and he yells some more, and then there's Daltrey screaming, "I'm gonna ride her!" It is loud, distorted - it just oozes energy. It's fucking primal. It's like sex - rhythmic and raw. Tension slowly builds and then is suddenly released. The song is so hypnotic - it's so easy to lose yourself in it. That's rock'n'roll!!

Speaking of hallucinatory, I might be able to get me some psilocybin! Not sure if I really need a ¼, though. I guess I could just divy it up over a couple doses. Or, if I could find someone to go on a trip with me...

Ed Anger Is My Hero!


I am as angry as a stewardess with an armful of vomit-filled air sickness bags! Last night, the Sundance Channel was having a documentary fest and I caught The Trials of Henry Kissinger. To say that it left a sour taste in my mouth is like saying that Hitler disliked Jews. It chronicled how Hank played both sides in his ascendency to power and then pointed finger after finger at him for prolonging the war in Vietnam, the invasion of Cambodia, the tragedy in East Timor, etcetera, etcetera. Can it be any wonder that most of the world fucking hates the U.S.? Time after time, he'd deny something in an interivew, such as giving Indonesia the green light to invade East Timor, and then some declassified document would come up which contradicted his statements. Kissinger defends himself in his books but he does so by referring to documents which will be unavailable to the public until 5 years after his death - at his request! Unfucking real. I just wanna throw a fucking Confederate flag on my Cabalmobile and start shooting guns. How can an American explain why we let our government get away with this shit? The United States isn't a dictatorship so it's not like we've got guns pointed at our heads if we dare try to make a change. "Sorry Mr. Third World Citizen, I'm too busy on my cell phone to do even a little thing to help out like voting."

Nothing can survive in a vacuum
No one can exist all alone
We pretend things only happen to strangers
We've all got problems of our own
It's enough to learn to share our pleasures
We can't soothe pain with sympathy
All that we can do is be reminded
We shake our heads at the tragedy

I went to bed beside myself. Honestly, I'm surprised that I fell asleep so quickly. My brain was wired - I had been stoned on caffeine pretty much all day and hadn't eaten anything excepting a piece of cake. Thougts of morality and geopolitics kept running through my head - I was so fucking angry. (Oddly enough, I also felt very frisky. Perhaps anger and libido are on the same coin...?) After a short stretch of tossing and turning, I finally fell into the arms of Morpheus.

Here I am the next morning (and a gorgeous morning it is too) and I'm still pissed off. So I put in some Fish and Rage Against the Machine. I'm trying to be constructive but I can't. My mind is a miasma and I just can't think particularly clearly. Maybe I oughta change the music to something a little less, um, angry. OK. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis.

29 December, 2003

Through a CRT, Darkly

 
Give a clue; leave a kind word
Hint as to a destination
A domain where our cyber-souls might meet

I read the blog of a woman here in Madison on a fairly regular basis. Earlier this year, she had an abortion and found herself in a downward spiral. It was a real shame as she is very intelligent, fun-loving, beautiful, and has a good heart. I have never met her and don't maintain regular email contact with her or anything, but it still depressed me to read about her predicament. Take for instance:

"i still see babies and preg women on tv and i cry at them, at episodes of ER, of episodes of anything really"

"the bathtub vision of me and warm red water seems better every day skin is so soft and vulnerable"

Now, I grant you that people who write do take liberties and also indulge themselves with literary devices such as hyperbole, but I still find such things irksome.

She has friends and family that read her blog which must make things a bit more difficult. Ya know, there are times when I rue having let certain people know of this place. There are certain things that, however tempted I may be, I dare not publish here. I had another online ditty a couple years back which no friends nor family knew of. It was rather a lot of fun to be able to write with impunity. I mean, I put some stuff in there that I've only told 1 or 2 friends and other things I've never confided in anyone I know. Plus I was able to put anything in there no matter how poorly written it was. Some oddball writing techniques, poetry, my puerile attempts at erotica - whatever struck my fancy.

One really neat thing about that journal was the comments of readers. Since we didn't know one another from Adam, our dialogues were very open and honest. Now, they could have been lying, of course, but I suspect not. People are very willing to reveal some of their most intimate secrets to total strangers under the veil of anonymity. I have some very revealing emails stored away. It seems a shame that we are often times incapable of removing our masks with those we trust. You know, to speak in confidential terms and share a dark, unspoken fear. You'd think we'd be able to stop the performance for a while.

From one reader:

"Last Christmas I attended a bonfire at my mother's house (she's crazy). It's a long story, but I was taking the loss of my marriage badly and she thought it would be therapeutic. The idea was to write down your pain and toss the shards of paper into the fire - confront the demons and burn them alive My mother and sisters watched as I tossed my pain into the fire - only I don't think they knew what to do when I stripped off my clothes in the 20 degree weather and tossed my underwear into the flames.

I guess I got caught up in the symbolism and wanted to be free of everything he'd touched. I think if I could have shed my skin, I would have. I'm better now, but I thought you knew me, knew my story when you left the note, 'I've heard about you and bonfires'. All of the sudden you became very dangerous - someone that could know too much about my real life. I know, I'm a freak, but a very private freak."


From another woman:

"You want to know what I fantasize about? By the way, sexually I'm usually fairly white bread, but my fantasies are decidedly wicked. I guess we are all that way. *wink*

Anyway, when I'm alone, and I feel the need for release, I fall into many different fantasies. My imagination is extensive (not always a good thing :). The one that never fails goes something like this:

Note: In real life I am decidedly hetero, but somewhat bi-curious. (i.e. have never acted on it and most likely never would)

In my fantasy I am with a man and another woman. The man is an artist and loves visual stimulation as much as physical arousal. The woman is present as a helper of sorts. The man begins by tying my entire body in a spider web of intricately arranged knots. The effect is that my breasts are bare, but framed by rope which criss-crosses my shoulders in front and back and weaves patterns across my smooth, flat stomach. The patterns continue around my buttocks and between my legs so that my pussy is bound by silken twine on either side - leaving my core bare and exposed. My wrists are tied together and secured above my head by a larger rope that can be raised or lowered so that I may either kneel or stand.

While the man decorates me, the woman caresses my body with her hand and mouth lavishing attention on my breasts, buttocks and pussy. When he is satisfied with his artwork, he lowers me to my knees..."

I think you get the picture.

All of the people who wrote to me were women. It amazed and saddened me that several of them were in really bad relationships of whatever ilk and it seemed like they were reaching out through the aether for someone to listen. So they didn't feel like they were just a voice in the crowd.

"When I explain things, it is probably going to sound a little crazy. I know there is obviously a problem with myself, a problem with my marriage that I would get myself in this situation, that things would get to this point. I am very aware of things. I know it's not healthy but as much as I know this, I cannot control what I feel. That's one of my major problems...my feelings always control me."

JoAnna, a woman in a bad marriage, wrote this to me:

"Hi there~ I just wanted to let you know that I enjoy your entries...it is an escape..."

She and I had very interesting email conversations. Even in her most upbeat emails, there was always something to betray all that had come before, something that revealed her intense loneliness and the sense that she felt trapped in her life.

"I am sitting in my empty house and thought that while I am all alone I would write you a note...I am imagining what you look like. It turns me on, not knowing. I like the way you write to me. I find your stories very arousing and some times I have to step into my room and lie upon my satin sheets and 'relieve' myself. As a matter of fact I can feel myself about ready to go to my room. I want you to write to me, and tell me what you imagine, your fantasies. Tell me that I turn you on and just what you would do to me if you could. Make me want you. Make me imagine what you can do...I'll give you all the details about what you are doing to me. Oh God, how I am longing for some touch, not necessarily physical, but emotional. Can you make me feel special?" (Emphasis mine.)

"I just wanted you to know that I truly appreciate your kind words in your entry. Talk about tingles. It is so nice to hear those things. It is something that I have needed for quite some time."

"I look forward to your e-mails, and reading your diary. I love the way you talk to me, as if I were the only woman in the world. I seriously felt as if I were going to cry..."


It was nice to be able to bring a smile to her face, to make her feel "special", even if my powers were ephemeral. It was rewarding to be able to bring a modicum of cheer to someone who seemed to have an otherwise fairly gloomy life. And it was fun to write erotic stories about a woman that I had never seen. An exercise for the imagination. But this woman obviously had problems that some schmoe sitting in front of a keyboard hundreds of miles away was powerless to cure.

What does this say about people? I mean, what did housewives trapped in bad marriages do before the advent of the Internet? Take little yellow pills and just lead that life of quiet desperation?

A girl (she was 16, if memory serves) wrote this to me in an email:

"as for the honesty in email, isn't it queer how easy it's become to open up to strangers?!"

So much said about the Internet is negative: pornography is luring men away from women, behind every chat room door lurks a stalker, most email is spam, and everyone out there is seeking only to relieve you of your money. All of the utopian rhetoric has fallen by the wayside and we're left trying to figure out how to assimilate the technology so it can co-exist with all the foibles and failings we've always had and can't get rid of no matter how hard we may try. As I discussed in a previous entry, the Internet is too new to really to set many sociological impacts in stone. We can do so with the Industrial Revolution because it ended well over 100 years ago. But the Internet has only been a major force for less than 10. Aside from stalkers, spammers, and the salacious, surely millions of people put the Net to good use. Emailing kith & kin, chatting with loved ones on the other side of the globe, shopping, paying bills, et al. But let's return to the question posed above. Are people so dislocated, so estranged from the real people in their lives that they are compelled to make "confessions" to a total stranger via the anonymity of the Internet?

I think that being anonymous is the key. There are plenty of reasons to wear one's heart on one's virtual sleeve. For instance, telling a flesh & bones person a secret opens you up to opprobrium. It does as well on the virtual side of things but this can be remedied by closing a window or putting someone on a chat program's ignore list. You don't have to suffer scornful glances on the Internet and, generally, word does not leak out to everyone else in your neighborhood. Secrets are usually no fun to keep and the swellings of the heart need to be relieved. So confessing to a stranger across the aether can be a relief - a relief without repercussions. You can say what needs to be said while saving face, in essence.

While it's not fair to say that this phonomenon is wide-spread based on a dozen or so people from my experience, I surely can't be the only one to see this happening. I'm no sociologist but I wonder if we are interacting with our fellow human beings face-to-face less and in less intimate ways. By this I don't mean to suggest, like Naomi Wolf, that men prefer porn to real women, but rather do people go online to meet "friends" instead of social gatherings in their communities? Is there a general way in which friendships are declining? About 400 years ago, Francis Bacon wrote, "A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce." Are we discharging the swellings of our hearts electronically more often that when looking a friend in the eyes? Lots of questions without answers.

Being optimistic on the odd occasion, I don't believe that we've lost touch with the people in our lives. I do think, however, that, as our lives become more hectic, we lose some patience and, in general, become less willing to just listen. Perhaps, in a certain sense, we have come to expect everything from the news to entertainment to the deepest feelings of those in our hearts to come packaged in short, pithy sound bytes. And I think this is the primary reason those people (women all of them) opened up to me as they did. My blog entries were open, honest, as well as lengthy (and, often times, meandering like this one). And when they wrote to me, I wrote back and answered their questions in addition to asking questions of them - and I "listened" instead of spuriously passing judgement. Here's an excerpt from a chat I had with a woman who told me about a boyfriend she had had who beat her:

Her: I dont talk about this enough, I am very ashamed
Her: I have flashbacks
Me: Don't feel ashamed!
Her: after he beat me I did not leave him right away
Me: How long did it take you to leave him?
Her: 3 months
Her: I was beat a lot in that 3 months
Her: I called the abuse hotline once - useless
Me: why did you stay with him? did u think he'd change?
Her: its like I was in a trance or something - SO much fear
Her: I felt like I could not live without him
Her: a common thing with abused women apparantly, it builds slowly
Her: it was absolute agony - like an addiction
Me: Why didn't you report this guy to the police?
Her: too scared - get this - the truth is - I DID NOT WANT TO LOSE HIM
Me: Emotions are such wonderful things but can be so fucking weird sometimes.
Her: thank you for not telling me to 'get over it' or saying 'what the hell is wrong with you'
Her: very rare - you are cool

I don't mean to come across as Joey Blow-My-Own-Horn here but I think this dialogue really says something. People want others to listen to what they have to say, to share themselves, and to know that they are not alone in how they feel. If this takes an interlocutor hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away, so be it. Francis Bacon began his essay On Friendship thusly: "IT HAD been hard for him that spake it to have put more truth and untruth together in few words, than in that speech, Whatsoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god." Setting aside the "untruth" which Bacon goes on to consider, it must be admitted that human beings are not merely the solitary beasts that Hobbes envisions. We are creatures of proximity - social creatures. Sure, we do require time alone but we also spend a good chunk of our time craving and seeking the company of others. Love is supreme and criticisms do sting, especially from those we love. Was Brutus' cut not the unkindest? It is a bitter irony to think that, in our attempts to get closer, we look to people far away. How many of us read or hear the words of a friend and feel something bubbling underneath the surface - a need to explain or get something off of the chest - yet turn away onto the next email or let the comment go thinking "well, they'll get over it"??

We also all have the need for not only emotional closeness but for physical nearness as well. And I don't just mean sex, I mean also the simple consolation of touch such as pats on the back, holding hands, and hugging - just simple acts. Who among us hasn't sat around petting a dog or a cat and thought how wonderful it must be to have such physical affection given so freely and so often? What kind of society would we have if it one could touch another (in a non-sexual way) without fear of being seen as too effeminate or of a lawsuit? Men espeically. Generally, we can only engage is such activities if our team wins the Super Bowl (subliminal message: Go Pack!!) or if a loved one dies.

While it may seem like an odd notion, touching is part of listening. It indicates understanding and sympathy. The next time you find yourself in a conversation, think about this. How well do you know this person? How are away do you position yourselves from one another? Do you or your interlocutor touch one another during the conversation? For instance, does one of you slap the other on the shoulder with the back of a hand to indicate agreement? Or perhaps put your hand on the other's? We, in America, at least, have this sense of "private space" or "zone of comfort". A radius of 2' or so from our bodies and, if a stranger enters this space, it's considered intrusive or threatening. But, for people we know, it engenders a feeling of intimacy. When you're at a table with just one other person, do you sit next to or across from them? Perhaps some things to cogitate upon.

Writing this brings a whole host of things to mind, not the least of which is irony in my act of writing this in a blog. In addition, Ervin Goffman's ideas of our front and back selves and how we present ourselves to each other. Also, why were the people who wrote me all women? But I suppose these are for another time. I leave you with a quote from Erasmus which is nice because it presents a view of the topic at hand, sort of summarizes Goffman's theories, and ties in with a recent entry of mine about Marillion as it appears on one of their album sleeves. To wit:

" If a person were to try stripping the disguise from actors while they play a scene upon the stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theatre with brickbats, as a drunken disturber? . . . Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows."

28 December, 2003

Eureka!

I finally found out the name of a painting I love as well as that of the painter. The painting in question is The Rock by Peter Blume. It's in a contemporary section of the Art Institute in Chicago and I just think it's da bomb. The picture at the link I gave doesn't do it justice. The colors aren't saturated enough and the size in woefully inadequate. Go see it. Now.


 

Viqueens C-H-O-K-E

The Packers pulled it off - with a little help from Arizona. Mike Sherman oughta send everyone on the Cards a 10lbs wedge of cheese in thanks. I called my brother, who is a Vikings fan but got Andy, his roommate. Unfortunately, Andy was on the other line so I asked him to have Carl call me back but was told that he refused to do so and called me a name. Ah, filial love.

OK, now I'm pissed. Camille Paglia is on C-SPAN2. The host asked her for her thoughts on Michael Moore. She replied that, while she generally agreed with his political views, she found his use of a staged scene in Bowling for Columbine disagreeable and thought that only "truth" belonged in documentaries. Ya know, Ms. Paglia, you have no idea what a documentary is and are completely oblivious to the fact that staged scenes have been used in documentaries virtually since the beginning of cinema. This is not to say that every single documentary style includes such but, traditionally, fictional scenes have been used by documentarians for decades to serve non-fictional narratives. It's good to know that someone who earns a living, in part, by commenting on the media has no idea how an important bit of it works. Let's send Camille Paglia back in time to tell some of the pioneers of documentary filmmaking, like Vertov and Flaherty, her view on how documentaries ought to be made. I swear, the more feminist diatribes I read, the less I feel that I will ever find a feminist with whom I agree to any significant degree.

Why are there no feminist writers out there who can make a cohesive, logical argument based on facts that she understands? Christ, other than images of women, feminists seem to have no idea how the media works. Fuck, and I only have a modicum of understanding, at best. How is it that a dumbass like me can pick out logical fallacies, lies, non sequiturs, inconsistencies, etc. in the works of academics? Doesn't our society train polemicists to actually know of what they speak and how to speak before they are allowed to speak?

27 December, 2003

An Admonishment


Let me give you guys out there a word of advice: If you’re a poor sap like me, don’t ever read any books about the evolutionary psychology of sex. They are just too depressing. I’ve read two or three now and, after finishing each one, I have spiraled downwards past melancholy, past utter perdition, and straight to suicidal. This is because these texts lend scientific credence to what I have suspected all along, namely, that I am not particularly attractive to women.

These books all tend to say the same thing: “The idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is basically a bunch of junk. Look. Genes are selfish and just want to be passed from one generation to the next. And evolution has instilled within us various methods for finding the best possible person with whom we can reproduce. These methods vary depending upon our role in the whole affair, i.e. – our gender.”

Women, for example, bear the burden of having an embryo develop in their wombs for nine months, risk life and limb in that dreadful business of childbirth, and then suffer with an infant suckling at their breasts for a stretch, causing them to become sore, etc. Men, on the other hand, don’t have wombs and thusly needn’t worry about some parasitic fetus gestating therein or its egress. Ergo, the only worry we have is getting frustrated for a time because we are forced to watch some wrinkly ball of skin take our place at the breasts of our goodly wife. We tend to think that those tits are ours and don’t like to see anyone else playing with them. Except, of course, if another woman is playing with them. (Or our wife is playing with her own tits.) Let’s face it here, we men just want to get laid. It wasn’t a bunch of women drooling over the release of the DVD director’s cut of When Larry Ate Sally or The Hunt for Pink October – it was men.

What this all boils down to is that women invest quite a bit in this whole sordid baby-making affair while we men ideally need only donate a single sperm and then bust out of Dodge. The spanner that gets thrown into our works is that we human beings take forever and a day to grow up and become self-sufficient. Other animals are out in the world kicking ass and taking names within a few months of birth while we humans are weighted down with lazy-ass, unemployed slugs who live in our basements well into their thirties. (You never see adult horses playing Nintendo in Mr. and Mrs. Ed’s stable, do ya? Sloth seems to be a uniquely human trait.) Ergo, human fathers need to hang around after meiosis.

“So what?” you ask. “The fact that men go out and try to get laid all the time while women seek commitment isn’t exactly news.” Fair enough. But I’m getting to my point. You see, these various roles dictate what we seek in a mate. When we say men primarily look at the physical beauty of women, we are really saying that men are looking for signs that a woman is healthy and can carry a pregnancy to term and beyond. Our male ancestors sought women with clear skin, long hair, good hips, etc. and so do the men of the 21st century. (Regarding the last item, there seems to be a universal preference for women whose hip-to-waist ratio is about 0.7.) While this may be the year 2003, our brains are still wired in the same way as those of men c. 40,000B.C. If a woman can’t grow a decent mop and her skin is all carbuncular, she probably ain’t long of this earth. And if her hips are too narrow, what are the odds of being able to squeeze out that eight-pound mini-me from her belly?

Women, on the other hand, are thinking, “If that son of a bitch doesn’t want to stick around, I will just have to make him.” One of the ways they do this is by concealing the fertile time in their menstrual cycles. Unlike female chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, women don’t find their labia turning pink when in estrus, however funny that would be. Instead, women merely undergo a small change in temperature. Although I’d be willing to give it a shot, I suspect that most women would be turned off by some Neanderthal wielding a thermometer during foreplay. Thusly, we men are compelled to stick around to ensure that the offspring we raise are our own and not the milkman’s.

Anyway…So what do women seek in a partner? Since women invest so much of their time and physical effort into the production of progeny, they, not surprisingly, seek men who can materially invest in them and their children. Hence, women seek men of stature and material abundance. Joe Six-Pack may be a nice, handsome guy, but if he’s poor, what will he be able to provide to his offspring? The Aztec Sun-King didn’t have a harem of 1,500 nubile, young women because he blew his paycheck every Friday night down at the tavern.

Women look for men with power and with stuff. And it is for precisely this reason that I am unattractive to women and thusly get depressed. I may have a basement full of stuff, but it ain’t the stuff women are looking for. I haven’t amassed piles of wealth nor do I have armies of men who obey my every word. As Hank Kissinger observed, “Power is a great aphrodisiac.” And, being a lowly Help Desk Analyst, I ain’t got none.

About the only thing I’ve got going for me, say the evolutionary psychologists, is my above-average height. If someone is bigger than we are, it is natural for us to feel at least some initial intimidation. Our brains equate physical size with power. This probably accounts for why men tend to make $3000 a year above the norm for every inch of height they are above the average. This also probably explains why I’ve gotten laid in the past. My height sort of fools women for a time, they go temporarily insane. But it wears off eventually and they leave.

If you think this is all bullshit, sit back and ponder it for a while. Did the hot chicks in high school date the A students or the jocks? You don’t see groupies hanging out backstage after the performance of a symphony orchestra. They’re looking to hook up with a rich rock’n’roll star. Do you think Anna Nicole Smith married that old geezer because she thought he resembled Brad Pitt? Fuck no! He was rich and powerful. Did I mention he was rich and powerful?

Despite how positive my mother says it is that I am a nice and intelligent young man, neither of these traits has gotten me very far. After all, nice guys finish last. Rich and powerful guys finish first, however. (And most rich and powerful people are assholes.) This being the case, in the interest of my sperm, I have decided to forsake my niceness and become a jerk. $$ + power = pussy. When I’m in public, I’ll have a gorgeous babe on my arm featuring a slender gynecoid figure and its attendant 0.7 hip-to-waist ratio. She’ll be nice and hypermammiferous too. I’ll be able to buy her collagen injections for her lips so they’ll look like she could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. I don’t care if she’s only after my money because I am only after her snatch. True love is a myth, people! And since I’ll be so rich, I will be able to afford to hire someone to keep an eye on her. Yeah, you heard me right. Men have always felt that way – witness eunuchs, chastity belts, and female circumcision – we just have gotten to the point of using less gruesome methods of making sure the pussy stays put. I ain’t footin’ the bills for some other guy’s genes getting passed on down the line.Despite how positive my mother says it is that I am a nice and intelligent young man, neither of these traits has gotten me very far. After all, nice guys finish last. Rich and powerful guys finish first, however. (And most rich and powerful people are assholes.) This being the case, in the interest of my sperm, I have decided to forsake my niceness and become a jerk. $$ + power = pussy. When I’m in public, I’ll have a gorgeous babe on my arm featuring a slender gynecoid figure and its attendant 0.7 hip-to-waist ratio. She’ll be nice and hypermammiferous too. I’ll be able to buy her collagen injections for her lips so they’ll look like she could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. I don’t care if she’s only after my money because I am only after her snatch. True love is a myth, people! And since I’ll be so rich, I will be able to afford to hire someone to keep an eye on her. Yeah, you heard me right. Men have always felt that way – witness eunuchs, chastity belts, and female circumcision – we just have gotten to the point of using less gruesome methods of making sure the pussy stays put. I ain’t footin’ the bills for some other guy’s genes getting passed on down the line.

So, if I seem a bit glum, know that it’s only because I am all-too aware of my brackish countenance. And if I seem a bit quiet, know that it’s only because I am plotting away to become rich and powerful. My goal is to put as many copies of myself on this planet as possible.

23 December, 2003

Tortelvis Has Left the Building


I don't care what anyone says - Dread Zeppelin are fucking awesome! Back in 1991when I lived in a dorm, a few of us sat on the lawn playing cribbage with my roommate's stereo pointed out the window blaring DZ's first album. Someone shouted, "What the hell is this reggae/Led Zeppelin crap?!?" I thought the whole point of college was to explore new things, learn esoteric knowledge, drink, and fuck. Well, we were doing half of those on that fine spring day. (The exploration and the drinking.) Close-minded fucks.

So I've got Dread Zeppelin's version of "Moby Dick" playing. Fucking classic. Over the drum solo, Tortelvis reads from Melville:

"'Give way!' cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates' boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar."

Come on! How can you not like Dread Zeppelin? While I liked Jane's Addiction, some guy from Marinette played them and (seemingly) only them constantly. It would be a year or so before I discovered Nirvana and I wasn't interested in the alternative scence. Most of the people who listened to Jane's Addiction, Sonic Youth, and that ilk did so just to get out of listening to other music. They reveled in and proclaimed their alternativeness at every given moment.

"Yeah, yeah - you're cool."

Personally, I got along with the rednecks listening to The Replacements better. And Husker Du. (Where does the umlaut go?) This is probably because they listened to such bands for the music and not for any scene. They had no pretensions that they were somehow hipper than the rest of us. This is why it took me so long to get into Nirvana: I dispised all the hype surrounding "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and the media making blanket statements about me and my peers. Finally, some months after grunge broke, I saw Nirvana doing "Territorial Pissings" live on MTV and that got me interested. After all was said and done, I had fallen in love with Nirvana's music, Bleach becoming my probable favorite. Nevermind was too slick-sounding and most of the songs lacked the raw power of their first album. I was sorrowed by the news of Kurt Cobain's death but I shed no tears and had no need to call an MTV-sponsored suicide hotline. Cobain wrote a bunch of great songs but I never really felt like his lyrics somehow chronicled the inner workings of my mind. Some of his lyrics were fun while others were meaningful in generic kind of way. In the end, he was a great songwriter but also a fucked-up person who was so troubled that he turned his back on his daughter, his wife, his friends, and his life.

Back in 1990, alternative music still had a modicum of alternative to it. But, ya know, I've always like music that was alternative. That is, music that most of the world's population hated. Going around telling people that you listen to old Genesis, King Crimson, and Gentle Giant is not a good way to be popular in high school, especially when there are only 200 students in toto. And everyone hated Marillion.

20 December, 2003

Ragin' Cajun

Oh man! James Carville is goin' off on the Republicans AND the Democrats on CSPAN2 right now. Awesome!

Bacon Redux

OK, you know I had to look. And I found.

Bacon-of-the-Month Club.

A Wonderful, Magical Animal


In return for having driven his drunk ass home last night, my friend took me out for breakfast this morning. And I will admit that we ate our share of pork products. Mmmm...bacon...

Lisa: No I can't! I can't eat any of them!
Homer: Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute. Lisa honey, are you saying you're *never* going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad! Those all come from the same animal!
Homer: [Chuckles] Yeah, right Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.


I feel sorry for people who don't eat pork for health reasons. I don't understand people who abstain from it for ethical reasons. And people who refuse to eat pork for religious reasons are just crazy and have a good excuse for apostasy. It's just too fucking good. On our way home, I dreamt aloud of a world in which people put out dishes of bacon around their house instead of candy. My friend opined how cool it would be if the dishes floated and followed you around. I then asked him if he thought there was a Bacon-of-the-Month Club. Imagine, a nice slab of bacon delivered right to your door. Mmmm...hickory smoked bacon, peppered bacon, bacon cured between the thighs of a virgin...the possibilities are endless.

19 December, 2003

News

Well, a judge finally told the RIAA where to stick their subpoenas. According to the AP:

"WASHINGTON - A federal appeals court on Friday rejected efforts by the recording industry to compel the nation's Internet providers to turn over names of subscribers suspected of illegally swapping music online.

The ruling from a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was a dramatic setback for the industry's controversial anti-piracy campaign. It overturned the trial judge's decision to enforce a type of copyright subpoena from a law that predates the music downloading trend." I wonder if Kazaa traffic is gonna increase because of this.


Also newsworthy is Ralph Nader's decision to run for Prez again next year. This will, no doubt, engender more argument between my landlord and I as he is dead certain that Nader cost Gore the election. hehe

More Music

Here's another humorous band to check out: Beatallica. They do Beatles tunes in a Metallica style. Their singer does a good James Hetfield. My personal fave is "The Thing That Should Not Let It Be".

Connections


I watched a couple episodes of Connections 1 by a historian of science who goes by the name of James Burke. One episode traced the development of radio technology. He ended by asking in the most prescient voice, how will our ability to communciate over greater distances and in shorter times affect us. I shall have to find out what he thinks of the Internet.

It's strange to think that I was in my 20s when a revolution began. I wonder how it compares to having lived in late 18th century England as the Industrial Revolution kicked in. Many people take the Internet for granted and can barely remember what life was like before it but, really, the revolution has only just begun. In England, the Industrial Revolution lasted about 100 years - 1770-1870 - and the Internet was foisted upon only about 10 years ago. People can polemicize all they want but we won't really know the effects of on the world of the Web for some time to come.

The second episode began with Burke demonstrating a global positioning system. But, since the show was made in 1977, the GPS he had was not like the kind you can buy at your local Best Buy today which fits in your hand. Instead it consisted of several bulky components - much like a stereo system with Dolby 5.1 Surround. Funny how in 20 years, the GPS has gone from an expensive, cumbersome item in several parts to a relatively cheap bit of electronics that fits in one hand. This episode is one of my favorites as he traces the use of the waterwheel and cams to the computer punch card. While they're no longer used, I grew up with punch cards. My dad worked for IBM and we'd take down phone messages on them. (Our phone was of the rotary type with pulse dialing.) Yeah, I'm just a computer geek.

18 December, 2003

Stephen Hawking in Effect

Everyone has got to check out MC Hawking. Heeeelarious! Here are the lyrics to "Fuck the Creationists":

Ah yeah, here we go again!
Damn! This is some funky shit that I be laying down on your ass.
This one goes out to all my homey's working in the field of evolutionary science.
Check it!

Fuck the damn creationists, those bunch of dumb-ass bitches,
every time I think of them my trigger finger itches.
They want to have their bullshit, taught in public class,
Stephen J. Gould should put his foot right up their ass.
Noah and his ark, Adam and his Eve,
straight up fairy stories even children don't believe.
I'm not saying there's no god, that's not for me to say,
all I'm saying is the Earth was not made in a day.

Fuck, fuck, fuck,
fuck the Creationists.

Break it down.
Ah damn, this is a funky jam!
I'm about ready to kick this bitch back in.
Check it.

Fuck the damn creationists I say it with authority,
because kicking their punk asses be me paramount priority.
Them wack-ass bitches say, "evolution's just a theory",
they best step off, them brainless fools, I'll give them cause to fear me.
The cosmos is expanding every second, every day,
but their minds are shrinking as they close their eyes and pray.
They call their bullshit science like the word could give them cred,
if them bitches be scientists then cap me in the head.

Bass!
Bring that shit in!
Ah yeah, that's right, fuck them all motherfuckers.
Fucking punk ass creationists trying to set scientific thought back 400 years.
Fuck that!
If them superstitious motherfuckers want to have that kind of party,
I'm going to put my dick in the mashed potatoes.
Fucking creationists.
Fuck them.


You've got your phat hip-hop beats and that goofy electronic Stephen Hawking voice doing the rapping. Caaaalassic.


The Quality of Yale Graduates Is Somewhat Lessened As of Late

(Photo found here.)

Alright, now I'm pissed. Naomi Wolf is really on my shitlist. I've been reading The Beauty Myth and I am disgusted with her bullshit. And I'm only 90 pages in, for fuck's sake! It starts in the first chapter in which she clearly demonstrates her ignorance of science and her excellent grasp of fallacious logic. How in the name of Jehovah did this woman graduate from Yale? She ignores facts she deems inconvenient, uses false statistics, and posits statements with no proof. The chapter on women's magazines is fucking ridiculous and she commits the sin of omission. She blathers on about the power of advertisers and their power over content in Cosmo, etc. and she makes it seem like the phenomenon is restricted to such periodicals. Fuck - all she does is reiterate the arguments of the likes of Bed Bagdikian and Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman without bothering to mention that the problem is epidemic in the mass media generally and not just women's magazines. So maybe what's happening is the result of greed as opposed to a desire by all of us evil men to keep women down. Another classic: she trumpets that anthropologists have finally disproven the idea that males are by their nature polygamous and cites research about higher primates (excepting we humans). What kind of fucking bullshit sweeping generalization is this? Certain primates exhibit a certain characteristic thusly all animals are so. Oh my fuck. Lady, I knew this was bullshit in 6th grade yet you, a Yale graduate, fail to grasp this basic bit of logic. And Wolf obviously knows nothing about science. One of the chief characteristics of science that distinguishes it from, say, religion or superstition, is that it is self-correcting. So when she quotes Darwin, the reader is supposed to assume that he was right about every fucking detail of natural selection and that it has not been in anyway modified over the course of the past 153 years to accommodate newly discovered facts and observations. Nice appeal to authority. You know what? I knew about that logical fallacy in the 6th grade too.

And what about women's responsibilities for the state of affairs she criticizes? Holy Mary Mother of Jesus! She explicitly says that she is not espousing a conspiracy yet only men are responsible for the situation despite the fact that women permeate nearly all the power structures she claims are out there oppressing women. Wolf mocks the notion that men are hapless and can't control their sexual urges while she supports the notion that women are hapless and can't help but be taken in by this "beauty myth". Everyone is a fucking dunce in her world. Then there's the way she modifies her definition of "beauty" to suit her tastes, which really irritates the living fuck out of me. One minute it is not just a notion of physical appearance and the next time around it is.

I can't wait to get to her claim that 150,000 human females die each year from anorexia. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Summers has shown this to be bullshit. Wolf's comeback? OK, so some of the statistics are false but, hey, the rest is all good. They don't put lying in lists of logical fallacies because it's understood that falsehoods require no explanation as to why they're wrong. And we're not just talking, well there were only 149,999 so I rounded up, we're talking more like one hundred (100) deaths from anorexia.

While I think that the problems Wolf discusses are serious and need to be addressed, she is not the person to do it. Her methods are...unsound. Intellectual malfeasance and there's no excuse for this.

The Return of Papa Bear

It's official. Tony Levin will be reunited with King Crimson.

 
(Photo found here.)

 

05 December, 2003

We Have Some Snow

After a rather crappy day, I spent yesterday evening actually being productive. I can now see the top of my desk in spots!

The trim for the house arrived yesterday. My landlord did some experimentation with polyurethane and today is gonna be sanding day, methinks.

I was watching CNN International and saw a plug for a show on Sunday called Design 360. What really caught my attention was that they're gonna profile Vittorio Storaro! Yeah, that probably doesn't interest you but, for me, it's like manna from heaven. Storaro is one of the best cinematographers ever. He is know for being Bernardo Bertolucci's partner in crime. He shot The Spider's Stratagem, Last Tango in Paris, and The Conformist - which is a fucking masterpiece - in the 70s. in the 1990s, they collaborated on The Sheltering Sky and Little Buddha. He also shot Apocalypse Now and the recent Dune mini-series on the Sci-Fi Channel which was made using his Univisium technology. Needless to say, I am fired up to see the segment on him.

I got some emails from a friend who lives in Minneapolis. He's been in Rockford at the Burpee Museum of Natural History the past week. His father is an archeologist and has been overseeing the restoration of Jane, a T-Rex. They are still trying to figure out The Critter's biological age - they suspect she's from the Cretaceous period. In addition, he is learning Portuguese in anticipation of the arrival of a frined from South America. He may here in MadTown tomorrow and I'm hoping he is able to visit.

A different friend has invited me to happy hour this evening but I ain't sure if I really wanna go. In addition, she is keen on having me over to her new apartment for dinner in the near future. We shall see.

Alright, I need to head to the credit union'n'such...

03 December, 2003

The Body and the Flesh

It's your day -- a woman's day
It's your day -- a woman's day
Turning the tide, you are on the incoming wave
Turning the tide, you know you are nobody's slave

It is quite fitting to be listening to “Shaking the Tree” at the moment. This is because I’ve got women on my brain. More specifically, women’s/feminist issues and problems. Honestly, there is no surprise considering the events of a few days heretofore.

The whole mess started fairly early on Sunday when I read some of Andrea Dworkin’s writings. Personally, I found most of them to be venomous screeds full of misandry and etymological obfuscation. The lone exception was her mournful tale of having been drugged and raped at a hotel in Paris a few years ago.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I did a stint of dogsitting despite the fact that I had retired. If Michael Jordan can emerge from retirement, so can I. At least I think that was my friend’s reasoning. Another friend of mine stopped by Sunday night to drink a few cocktails and to avoid festering on her couch alone. Well, not having eaten much and gulping down bourbon as we did only served to loosen out tongues hastily.

Conversation took a turn towards the prurient after Buddy, the Black Lab-Dalmatian mix, began his customary post-prandial activity – licking his penis. Buddy is 12 years old and has not had gonads for most of his life. Nonetheless, he remains cuntstruck and tries to hump Pesto, the Airedale, often. Since Pesto is a cocktease, however, he is always denied. Apparently getting blue balls transcends the actually possession of testicles so, after failing with a bitch (as well as after dinner), he heaps generous oral pleasure upon himself. And thusly we sat there drinking bourbon & sours while Buddy licked his erection.

Although human, my companion and I are still animals and sex became the topic of choice. As the night harrowingly progressed towards its climactic drunken stupor, I was complete unaware that I would be learning more than I had bargained for. In fact, it didn’t take long for me to realize that my understanding of women and relationships was distressingly more limited than I had previously imagined.

Things began innocently enough with the usual not-getting-enough/any bitching. Then came the first lesson – my friend’s knowledge of erections was a bit hazy. I made a comment to the effect of being a schoolboy again and getting hard-ons.

”What?!?” she asked incredulously.
”You know, getting an erection in the middle of class…”
This did not register with her. “What?!?
I was a bit shocked. “Don’t you remember in, like, 4th grade, the teacher would call on some boy to come up to the blackboard and diagram a sentence or write out a multiplication table and he’d be like ‘No way!’?”
”Yeah, so?” she replied. “Maybe they just didn’t know the answer.”
”OK, sure there were times when that was the case but I’ll betcha at least 75% of the time the kid had gotten a boner and didn’t want everyone to see it.”
”What the hell were you guys thinking about in the 4th grade to get a hard-on?”
”Nothing. It’s just that, when you’re a boy, you get spontaneous erections. I’d be sitting there thinking about how much I hate math and BAM! Next thing I know, I’ve pitched a tent and I’m sliding my chair further underneath my desk.”
”Really?”
”Really.”


Honestly, I thought all women knew this. Granted, not when they were in grammar school necessarily, but a full-grown woman? Come on. As boys, we males sit in school during the day and get erections for no reason and then go to sleep at night and have wet dreams. I’ve always assumed that women knew this shit and that these things figured heavily into their view that men are simple pigs who just wanna eat, sleep, and fuck. Surely I can’t be the only one to have seen an infant boy touching his tiny pecker. We come out of the womb priapically inclined and we spend the majority of our lives trying to get back in. The penis is the center of our lives.

To summarize: As infants, we touch ourselves. A little time goes by and we’re pee racing with other boys when we’re not trying to get some girl to play doctor. Then erections start to appear out of thin air and usually at the most inopportune moments. Not long after that, we find our reproductive systems doing trial runs while we’re asleep. From there it’s all downhill towards jerking-off and chasing skirts until we die with our sexual peak at roughly the age of 18. How depressing.

The conversation continued. Yadda yadda yadda. Then came the next interesting bit. My friend’s ex-husband was one of those assholes that Andrea Dworkin feels characterizes the entire male gender. I knew that he was emotionally and verbally abusive towards her but I never knew that he’d grab her hair and basically force her to give him a blow job. I was mortified. While I might have gotten fellated more often in past relationships if I had done the same, I could never do that.

This revelation was followed by others equally shocking though, thankfully, less horrifying. She said that she’d never had an orgasm with a man. Then she revealed how controlling her ex was. For instance, she would have to ask permission from him (and would often be denied) to just go out with her friends.

I sat there listening in stunned silence. For my part, I’ve never required a girlfriend to ask for my permission to do something with her friends sans myself. WTF? All they had to say was, “Since we’ve got nothing planned, I’m going out with Jill and Julie.” OK. Well, I must take this concept of trust and recognition that she’s no my serf to an extreme because I’ve had more than one girlfriend tell me that she feels this attitude means that I don’t care about her. Each time this completely flummoxed me. The only conclusion I have been able to draw from this scenario is that most women want a benign dictator for a mate. If you’re too controlling, then you’re a malicious asshole. But if you’re not controlling enough, then that means you don’t love her. See, nice guys finish last.

Anyway, now that the events of that night are a few days removed, some of the details are lost to my mind. I will say that I am unable to say if some of the things I recall were part of a dream or actually transpired. I am hoping for the former. Whatever the case, I still feel a profound sense that Dworkin is perhaps not as crazy as I may have previously thought. Don’t get me wrong, I continue to take offense at her notion that romance = rape + wine. And while I don’t think she ever really said “All sex is rape”, one certainly gets the feeling that she’s dying to. She writes as if evolution was actually some patriarchal force that gave men first dibs on choosing genitalia and we knowingly made our selection. Dworkin constantly bemoans the fact that the penis penetrates (emphasis mine) the vagina. Indeed, at some point in her life she chose not to “have intercourse” which I presume means that she is so offended by the plumbing nature has endowed us with that she refuses to allow a lover anything into her naughty bits. I personally don’t understand how this is a blow against patriarchy. If anything, it seems to be an act of self-loathing and pointless restraint.

Alright. I don’t wanna think about the crap Andrea Dworkin has written any more tonight. As for dogsitting, I did a couple more nights but have been emancipated – finally. What’s happened this week? Aside from the usual fecal matter, not a helluva lot. Been doing a fair amount of reading - The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes. It’s one of those meta-history texts which attempts to explain why the West has come to so dominate the globe. I’m only 150 pages or so in but, so far, Landes seems to be taking a different tact than Jared Diamond did in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond seemed to put more emphasis on geography than Landes (so far). Being an historian, Landes throws the reader smack-dab into the middle of the Age of Explorers. Although I’ve read about it in several places, I still cannot understand why China encysted itself in a shell of stagnation about 600 years ago. They thought themselves so be so highly advanced that everyone else was a barbarian and not worth having relations with. Harumph.

I have been doing much of my reading over at a coffee shop. As I was sitting there one day this week, a guy walked in and ogled at the book. He came over and asked if I were taking an economics class. I told him not to mistake Landes’ tome with that of Adam Smith’s. So we struck up an all-too brief conversation. It was nice to have a midday chat with a liberal artsy-fartsy type like myself.

Oh! I got an email from an old friend of mine from Chicago. He’s spent the last 8 months in Morocco and has posted some pictures at a web site for perusal. Looks like he had a blast and some of those North African women are drop-dead gorgeous.

I made the mistake of watching a thingy called Scarborough Country on MSNBC last night. The host was a complete maroon. Let’s bash Howard Dean for weaseling out of a stint in Nam but let Bush off scot-free for the same thing. Fucking hypocrite. Not that I’m a big Dean fan or anything, mind you. I must admit that I did enjoy the host ripping into Paris Hilton and her fame or infamy or whatever you wanna call her media presence. I was just thankful that someone on TV came out and called her stupid. I don’t know if this is just because of a dislike or wealthy people or only of certain wealthy people. I mean, Ms. Hilton is not dot com rich, she’s like part of a landed gentry. There’s just something about seeing wealth as a license for hedonism that gets in my craw. With the possibility to go to the best institutions of higher learning, she decided that college was a waste of time. Rather than better herself as a person, she wants to make a life of putting her body on display. And how the fuck could her daddy call the release of her little homemade porno vid onto the Internet a “tragedy”? 9/11 was a tragedy. A spoiled blonde airhead getting fucked on tape is vulgar humor.

Christ, dumb blondes are everywhere. Jessica Simpson was given a TVs how for reasons only know to a small cabal of people bent on littering television with only the most vapid, banal crap. These same people have given Jessica’s little sister a shot at fame with her own reality TV show. Then there’s Anna Nicole Smith. And Ann Coulter.

This brings me back to that schmuck of a host on MSNBC last night. What a dickhead. He gave preference to those with whom he agreed. They got the first and last words, he’d interrupt the “liberal” guest and give the soapbox back to the “conservative” guest. And he made out every question he had to be of paramount importance. Lacing each syllable with the urgency normally reserved for people in life and death situations. Every other question for the lefty either setup a straw man or false dichotomy. He was a joke. So much, in fact, that I just burst out laughing at him at one point. I was incredulous that this shit passes for journalism or learned discourse or whatever. Why does it seem like all conservative commentators on TV today lie and/or are in need of a lesson to discern logical fallacies? Despite the fact that Bill Buckley and I have little common ground ideologically, I have tremendous respect for the way that he goes about engaging issues with people. It’s easy to find someone saying that he laid the foundation for the modern conservative movement but it seems to have gone off course. Most conservative pundits share little of Buckley’s class, reasoning skills, and vocabulary. Instead they turn to Jerry Springer for help in these areas. The discourse is not civil – it’s about wrapping oneself in the flag and yelling at the opponent. It’s the kind of shit that goes down in a schoolyard.

I’m outta here…