The DaVinci Code: Fiction or Documentary?

Anyone who has read 'The DaVinci Code' knows that religious art is teeming with secret symbols and messages only meant to be interpreted by the initiate. In fact, these truths were consciously withheld from the greater part of mankind by a jealous Papacy and the universal, unswerving complicity of Catholicisms' innumerable adherents.

As a small child I was initiated into the basic secrets of the Roman Church. Ritually married to the Godhead in my sixth year, each new year built new levels of esoteric knowledge onto that primary foundation, each stage of indoctrination capped off by rituals and oaths administered by black clad virginal acolytes of the inner circle.

By the time I had reached adulthood I was privy, as each Catholic is, to all the occult knowledge. All the hidden agendas. I was ready to go forth and fulfill my role in the Popes great army of world domination.
My orders: Seize control.
My rank: Uterus with legs.

It is only after years of sorrow and indecision that I have come to the conclusion that to continue to hide these secret teachings from the rest of mankind is to do my fellow man a grave disservice.

Let me begin with the revelation of a despicable incident known as The Suppression of J. M. Barrie:








...'We simply do not see the blessed mother battling pirates' says Rome.

The first version of 'Peter Pan' was banned by Pope Pius X.



A surveillance device familiar in all Catholic homes, placed there to ensure silence and to report all lapses of faith to the nearest Parish authority:
The Icon.
"The saints are very, very disappointed in you.
The saints are ALWAYS very, very disappointed in you."



The tentacles of the Pope remain a strong yet invisible presence in modern popular culture. Here is the proposed cover art for 'Hallelujia Kid Hitz volume 14' featuring Sir Mix A Lot:


"...I like big butts but I can't deny...that horse is gonna smush that guy!"
Oh yes. The Church is 'Down' with the 'Street'.



The true message of many paintings has long been a subject of debate among scholars. Know them now.

The flying babies failed to arouse St. John's enthusiasm at the prospect of being martyred in boiling oil.


You cannot escape the possibility of uninvited company when you have a glowing baby.


If Mary had owned one of those really big bug zappers history would be different.



Not even matters of the most basic household management or personal life were exempt from the mandates of the Church:


"...Yes I know you're the King of the Beasts and I know you have wings but as long as you live in this house you'll crap in that box."

When the hallucinations get shitty about your spelling it's time to go to bed.


Things you leave outside during a tornado will get blown away.
Know where your grandpa is.

Before you demand that miracle, balance how much you really miss the deceased with 1. how dead he is, and 2. how comprehensively freaked out you'll be when he comes back to life in the middle of August.



In some instances, a spray-on repellent like DEET simply isn't enough to keep away flying babyheads. Sometimes you need a steel-tipped flail and a grenade.

understanding class

I just got reminded that the word class has a straight definition.

When I was in making a payment on my furniture in ultra-Christian, ultra-conservative Lynden the other day I happened to use the term in passing. Extreme 'have you taken all your medications today?' look from the clerk. WHOOSH! Right over the windmills. Gone.

To have class or to show class are bike culture terms.
When I say class I mean something completely different than the traditional American definition of the word.
Martha Stewart pre-prison defines the generally accepted use of the word.
Martha Stewart post-prison defines mine.

Examples:

Our own Pamelas' son, Burning Buffalo Chaos, shows an innate understanding of the term. Not content with chopping enthusiastically at a pumpkin close to his tender regions with a huge knife, he subsequently filled same with gasoline, lit it on fire and lost all the hair on his arm in the resulting mushroom cloud. Then, in a brave attempt to save his home and family he kicked it. It rolled across the patio and into the yard leaving a trail of flaming cucurbitty devastation in it's wake.
As this demonstrates, class is equal parts panache and disaster. And fire.

A martini with an olive in it-traditional class.
A martini with a glass eye in it- true class
A martini with a severed human extemity in it - a Sourtoe cocktail.

The Hells' Angels showing up for a members' trial en masse in full colors THINK they have class.

The president of the Hells'Angels motorcycle club carrying the Olympic torch through the streets of Los Angeles riding his Harley actually WAS class...on the part of the Olympic Committee. Although they didn't realize it. Which actually kind of makes it even more classy.

A wealthy socialite getting stabbed in her own apartment by a burglar is a stupid rich twat who should have locked the damn door.

A wealthy socialite getting stabbed in the lung by a burglar in her own apartment, who PULLS THE KNIFE OUT OF HER OWN CHEST AND JAMS IT THROUGH THE PERICARDIUM OF THE BURGLAR AND THEN CALLS THE POLICE, PUTS ON A NICE ROBE AND WAITS FOR THEM ON THE COUCH WHILE THE BURGLAR WRITHES IN AGONY AT HER FEET is true class. Yea, a camel passes through the eye of a needle more easily, but this broad did it.*

Scale of class:

3. The Magnificent Seven
2. Lee Marvin drinking whiskey out of a dirty glass
1. Fat, hairy, leather-clad German with bleached hair smoking a big cigar and ripping throttle on a pre-AMF Harley rigid running shotgun pipes

Phantom class, with modifiers:
An apparition marching around the Tower of London with her gross messed-up severed head tucked under her arm and blood totally running down her dress and the stump of her neck all sticking out with tendons, and nasty ill gross crap all hanging down it is pretty goddamn classy.

An apparition of the spirit body of John Lee Hooker standing on top of a pile of burning Harleys is very fucking classy. If it hasn't happened it needs to.

A poltergeist manifestation of George Washington appearing to George Bush in the can and giving him a presidential twirlie while sticking a chicken up his ass is probably too classy for this dimension to sustain for more than a nanosecond without tearing a cataclysmic hole through the screen door of reality and letting in a bunch of flies and shit.


See! That wasn't so difficult! In fact, like MJ that was both fun AND easy!

Now that you have mastered this term you can hold your head up high at the next ABATE run. To be absolutely certain, take this quick test:

1. Guy in a brand new Viper doing burnouts in front of the Harley shop crashes into a line of parked bikes is...

2. Fat drunk naked broad doing circle burnouts in the parking lot, catches gravel, crashes into line of parked bikes is....

3. Fat drunk naked broad doing circle burnouts in the parking lot, catches gravel, crashes into a rest home, lands in bed next to an old man who has a heart attack, fat drunk naked broad found humping the corpse is....

4. Fat fully clothed broad crashes bike into side of ditch, bounces three times and leaves three separate craters is...

Answer:
1. classy. And true. I was there.
2. sad and lame but hysterically funny. No it wasn't me.
3. extremely classy but a lie.
4. this one was me.



* True story, too - even though I can't find it anywhere on the www; dammit. She had a fairly well-known name, too. Anyway it happened in the 1970's.

IT'S PAYBACK TIME

Hold still, duckies.
I have a burlap sack here full of pine cones and I know how to use them.
I'm tagging all of you.

See, it just ain't gonna be a perpetual bouillabaisse of syntax errors and the word 'fuck' around here, kids. I have another, darker side. A side that I fully intended to blog about as much as I do all the other stuff until I became seduced by the bright lights and applause.

I am a history nerd.
I like medieval and renaissance Italy.
I read classical literature.
I DO IT FOR PLEASURE. Because I LIKE IT.

And I have questions. Several of them. I damn well intend to get them answered.
And what I need from you, my darlings, my lurkers, my pseudonymous peeps, are answers.

Good answers.

And be forewarned:

The mere mention of the first item on my list made one womans' e-mail go down and blew another blogger completely off the www for a period of months.

Scared yet? Too bad.

Because I am leaving this shit up until I get TEN USEFUL ANSWERS.

• I need the title of a good, scholarly discussion of the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo.

Specifically, I need the assistance of someone who has braved at least the Confessio and come out the other side alive, and who can hold my hand and pass me Kleenex. Only in book form.

• I need a list of the complete works of Plutarch. (I know there's one of TCWP which exist on the www. I need to know the titles of everything Plutarch wrote. I don't care where it is, or if it's lost. And...
  

• ...I need to know the date when each one of them was first published in Italy A.D and an idea of how widely they were distributed.
  

• I need titles of good, scholarly, detailed works about agriculture as it was practised in Italy c.1452 - 1519. Preferably with lots of pictures and archaeological stuff.

• " " about clubs, guilds and secret societies in Italy c.1452 - 1519. THE FIRST PERSON WHO MENTIONS 'THE DAVINCI CODE' WILL BE HUNTED DOWN LIKE AN ANIMAL AND FLENSED.

• " " about homosexual culture in Italy, 1452 - 1519.

...and this is the short list.
Git crackin'.


UPDATE: the lovely and frequently transplanted ARABELLA comes in at number ONE! only nine more USEFUL ANSWERS to go before we're back to stories about public restrooms and how much I hate my cousin's wife!

BEAST slides into home with answer number TWO! (Appropriately enough.) Only EIGHT MORE TO GO before the 'shit, piss, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker and TITS' resume!
I mean resume more.

VioletForTheMoment via her Companion Viola just came through with more Augustinian references than Carter has little liver pills! Companion Viola, you are a strong and brave viola with the cast iron constitution of a grizzly bear. I get to the part about the damn pear orchard and I throw the book against the wall every single time. ONLY SEVEN MORE!!!

PINK saves your whining asses with TWO SEPARATE ANSWERS bringing the total to FIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The South HAS RISEN AGAIN AND THE SOUTH IS PINK!

so if the South is Pink and the East is Red...fuck it.

oregon stylie

Short version of story-
This morning I was sitting in my favorite chair, watching my shows, stitching away, when my glasses fell off.
Ok, fine; this happens all the time.
Upon finding them I realized that the earpiece had cracked off the frame.
So I fixed them:


Note the innovative use of sandwich bread, and the attitude correction which a hair elastic provides while the superglue hardens.

The moral of this story is a long one, but read it anyway. Or did you have something else to do? So:
When you purchase glasses, bear in mind that the reason you need glasses is that you have POOR VISION. Hence the glasses themselves should be massy and/or colorful enough that finding them is at least a remote possibility when you are not wearing them. Do not be lured by the promise of light weight and unobtrusive design.

Also bear in mind that, having purchased the wrong frames (i.e. weighing no more than a cotton ball, cobweb thin, partially held together-and I shit thee not-with heavyweight nylon FISHING LINE) a safe resting place for them is probably not on the deceptively convenient shelf your boobs provide when you are sitting down. Because the phone will ring, and you will forget they are there, and you may hear them clatter faintly to the floor. Where they will lay. Invisible. Completely, utterly and tragically invisible.
And in the process of searching for them you might step on them and crush them flat.
Really, really flat.
Except for the piece that fell off.
Stuck in the sole of your slipper.

I hope we can all learn something from this. Besides the obvious 'I am a dipshit' implications.

updated DEATHWISH: OREGON part deaux

update!
you say you feel like deep fried doggie squattos? you say all your clothes smell like the carpet in an elevator? you say your mother braids your hair all funny? dammit, bucko, go HERE now and read the post entitled 'Nothing Compares to 02' and get over yourself! you, like me, will laugh so hard you will pee yourself a little bit.
NOW GO!!!!!


Another group of climbers had to be rescued off Mt. Hood this week. However, unlike their counterparts back in December, this group had taken precautions. And so, even in weather conditions every bit as horrific as they were back in December, this group of amateurs was found and rescued only three days later with no loss of life.

Why?

This group carried with them a GPS rescue locator.

This device costs about 500.00. It can be rented from REI for FIVE DOLLARS.

This group was nowhere near as experienced as the group that Mt. Hood took back in December. They probably had no business up on any mountain, really. They brought a Labrador Retriver with them, for heavens' sake. But unlike their counterparts, they did realize, apparently, that
1. Winter on a mountaintop means the chance of shitty weather. This has the potential to make 2. mountainclimbing, a dangerous sport at the best of times, an even more dangerous sport. And so
2. taking reasonable precautions is a good idea.

The governer of Oregon is considering making these GPS devices mandatory for climbers statewide.
I say well done. Do it yesterday.
It's about goddamn time.

tatos in the news

This here is my boydog Opie.



...actually no.
This is my taterman...


The vet pulled every tooth from his upper jaw two days ago. All he has left up there are the incisors.

I am a sucky dog owner.

Now, in our defense I will say that neither my husband or myself have ever owned a dog that lived to be Opie's age (either 14 or 18, depending on who examines him. We got him from the pound as an adult dog.) So when he gradually became smellier, skinnier and grouchy about having his head touched we figured 'well, he's just getting old' and continued on in our ignorant, brain-dead stupor. Then my husband happened to catch him asleep and lifted his flews to see what was going on...and came into the kitchen white as a ghost. That poor dog's mouth was BAD. I won't even describe it and that's not to spare your sensitive constitutions but because I'm ashamed that something in my care reached such a condition and I never noticed.

The good news is, we took him to the vet, they cleaned him up, and now three days later he is tatoing around, burping and farting and saying 'eeuroop' like NOTHING HAPPENED. He is a new dog. He slept off the anaesthetic and never looked back. He has to eat soft food now; that's it. I am absolutely blown away.

I really feel like shit about this. He must have been miserable for so long. It's a lot like when you have an infant and they get an ear infection...they can't tell you what's wrong, they just cry all the time, as usual, and you never get a clue until they get really bad.

I want to apologize to the poor little guy. But he's a dog. So he still loves me like nothing ever happened and nothing was ever wrong.
I just feel like shit.

HEY CLAIRE

Check out your grumpy turtle!
I used your picture to get the face and the markings just right!
This turtle is not as angry as yours was, though; he's just kind of disappointed.

Ok.
When I wake up at three in the morning I want to wake up for a good reason. Instead I woke up at three thismorning because I was ferociously thinking about something I had gone to sleep idly considering. See, my daughter has a teacher who is convinced that Ingres is just a FANTASTIC artist.
The woman actually receives a paycheck to teach people this shit.
Ingres was not a fantastic artist.

This is not a collage. It is a painting. Although it looks like he sat on the floor and cut random pictures out of a magazine and then pasted them to a canvas, you must remember that the magazine had not been invented yet.

Let's call in our guest hamster, B. Schmuggleware, young rodent about town and ENTIRELY WITHOUT ODOR, as you may recall.

...his fu is unbeatable

Mr. Ware, tell us in your own words what this is a picture of. Spit out the goddamn sunflower seeds first, though. And sit up straight.
_
Its.....wow. Ok. Um. Ok, its the barbecue scene from 'Oklahoma' and in the middle of it this guy doing star jumps knocked over a hibachi.
No.
...It's the Roman centurion dance number from Fame and everyone else stopped dancing but he's still going..."I'm gonna live for-ev-errr, Baby remember my name-FAME!' and the director up there is yelling at him. And a dog got in.
No, you silly hamster person, it is obviously the Martyrdom of St Symphorian!

...See; he is defiantly forming the letter 'X'! It's a symbol! X for No! X on sacrificing to pagan gods! Defiant, noble X to that crap right in your face! DEFIANTLY! Then they kill him.

Never mind that nobody in this picture occupies the same frame of time or space. Each and every item in this picture plane is completely unrelated to anything else. It's like a prop closet. And everything is marked out in a completely different light, which comes in from completely random directions, as though they were all watching a fireworks display, only it isn't night and they didn't' have fireworks, except for in China, but this is supposed to be Roman Autun so there you go.

The castle-y tower-ey wall thing in the background there just makes me sad. It has been the victim of an act of senseless, random miniaturization. No. Let me cry.

As you can see, this was a man to whom perspective was a complete mystery. So much so that I honestly think there was some kind of physical impairment there. The popular opinion holds that this was purposeful exaggeration on his part, but even a casual overview of his work gives lie to that. The guy just had no damn depth perception. It gave his pictures an odd quality...some things appear as though they are stamped upon the outside of a ball, they have that distorted, swollen, fish-eye lens look.

When the sitter was less than classically beautiful this could have really unfortunate consequences.


Things he likes are big and detailed and REALLYREALLYCLOSE. Things he doesn't care much about are small and barely sketched in. Each item is portrayed from it's own separate dead-on point of view, giving the whole the appearance of a luxury store window designed by a profoundly stoned child.

Ingres was also desperately uncomfortable with the undraped human form.

And let's not forget the guys...

...yeah.

Now womens' arms; that's another matter entirely.

Here we have as lascivious an image as Ingres was ever to produce. Bare nekkidness as far as they eye can see. (I mean, no fluffies or anything; that would be gross.) There's even girl-on-girl booby honkage going on. But what you see are aaaaaaarmssss. Successive undulating waves of them which disappear into the distance like a seascape full of pink water balloons. It's one of his hallmarks. Most of his depictions of women have this trademark erotocized, plump arm.

Hand it to the man, his craft technique is fantastic. His paintings are beautifully finished objects. Furthermore, as is plain from his portrait drawings, the man can capture a likeness. He knows about texture and color, but he tries to make it all patch over his shortcomings in the depth of field department.

And that's what gives his work this odd, 'ahead-of-it's-time' modern look. Nearly all his stuff has the odd, flattened out, discontinuous look of modern art that is trying too hard. But that wasn't because he was a rebel. It was because he needed laser surgery.

it is 3:45 am.

Yes it is.
3:45.
I woke up at 3:am. would you like to know what woke me up at 3:am?
It was not cats.
It was not junkies.
It was not the Yummy Biker, more's the pity.
No.
It was Ingres.
Ingres.
I woke up, wide, wide awake, at 3:am thinking about Ingres.

You are going to get your request, Tim.

What is the matter with my brain. Why can't I wake up and worry about my future or something normal people wake up thinking about? I've woke up thinking about things like dystopic fiction, The Andy Griffith Show, bird migration, gardening...oh hell, the times I've woke up thinking about that. And I mean like a whirlwind, with my mind just going 100mph! Thinking about the impact of the Japanese popular aesthetic on modern design!
Man, I'm going to go drink some fucking coffee. Sometimes I hate my brain.

WHERE IS BEAST?

Where did he go?
I want him back.
He is my beastly bud.

crap.

kinda rough.

When I was a kid we lived on the West Coast in a small town which is now a suburb of Portland, Oregon. My fathers' side were original pioneer settlers there.

It was an agricultural community to start with. My first generation dad would point out with disgust how whatever new shopping center or paved roadway used to be Gundersons' farm or Bardo's dairy pasture and what a shame they sold out during the depression. Or Nokamura's radishes, or Watanabes' celery field, and how they'd lost their land during WWII. Of course , they had to go. They might have been spies and helped the enemy. You couldn't take chances back then.

Which is how I grew up knowing about Japanese interment camps and never thought a thing about it.

When I was about 10 my grandfather died and a box turned up in his stuff. When it was opened it turned out to be filled with photographs and legal documents that belonged to the Watanabe family. My dad went through the whole thing...laid it all out on the table, had my mom read him the papers, went through all the photos. Some of them were extremely old... cabinet daguerreotypes with weddings, babies, stuff like that, things that came over from Japan.

My dad wanted to throw it away. Because it would 'just bring up bad memories' and 'it's just a lot of old stuff anyway; they've probably forgotten about it, if it'd been important they would have got it already.'

Now they might have been fighting at the time; probably. I don't remember. Anyway my mom made the phone call. (Small town, small phone book, few Watanabes, all related.) My dad stood in the background red in the face hissing 'Why'd you have to go and embarrass me like this for?"

The entire Watanabe family came over. Tiny, tiny little Great-grandma and grandpa came too. Grandpa was so frail that two big boys held on to him and helped him walk. He was swimming around inside of his best suit from about 1940 and wore a big old fedora hat that rested on the tops of his ears. He shook my dads' hand and thanked him and they lead him back out to the car to sit down.

His wife stayed and looked through the things and cried. She was overcome, and had to sit down, and everyone hugged her, and she rocked back and forth. The whole time somebody was thanking us and shaking our hands, and I mean me, too.

That little elderly couple had been in the camps.
Their citizenship papers and land titles were in that box.
The family's history was in that box.


One of the guys that showed up that night was 'G' Watanabe. My dad attended school with G. Watanabe. My dad was on the Milwaukie High School football team with G. Watanabe. All while this took place, the team photo hung on my parents bedroom wall, and there was G. Watanabes' face, and there was his name.

As you might imagine, growing up with these people and having a different racial heritage had it's difficult moments.

quaint vignettes from my charming rural idyll

Yesterday I went out and played a little game. I would birdwatch without going over one mile away from my front step. I took my digital with me, but birds are small, so the only images that showed up were of the larger birds. Fortunately there were metric shitpiles of them.
So bear in mind, now...every single one of these pictures was taken within a ONE MILE RADIUS of my front door.
They are not fantastic pictures, but they ARE pictures of giant carniverous birds. And some cows, and a car. And a couple of nests.
Nests the size of ATV's.


(Remember, you can click on these to enlarge them. In most cases you'll have to.)


Seven town blocks from my front door, headed south, we see this young lady up a hawthorne tree on the road shoulder.

...on the lookout for Al Qaida

This isn't some backroad, either; it's the newly enlarged freight crossing. Here; I'll prove it...


I'm standing right under this Huge Killer Bird with my back to her, facing north now. There is my new tiny shitty car, beyond it a picturesque dairy farm and beyond that, Canadialand.

...it's a leaker.


This is three blocks straight off my front porch, on Hovel.
There were three eagles. Now only dad is left, and he is not real pleased with me. I was standing on the side of the road, making 'kiss-whistles' to try and make them turn their heads towards me. Mom and daughter got disgusted and flew off to another tree where they sat and called me really dirty eagle names at the top of their lungs.

...use the flash you ignorant peasant.

Now 'kiss-whistles' didn't impress the eagles, but they worked really well on cows, I discovered. There was not cow one in sight when I pulled over. I looked down and theres this big pile of them close enough to lick me. I never heard a thing.

...disturbingly silent. unsettlingly watchful.

That was beginning to feel like a well-rehearsed mugging set-up so I booked.



Seven blocks north of my house, on Gough. Inside city limits. This nest is about five years old now and you could park an ATV on it. One of the owners is in the background. That tiny tiny dot. That's an eagle. Yeah.

...missing any children?


Seven blocks west of my house. This nest is two blocks off Main (called Cherry Street.) The site is at least eight years old, but it blows down every winter and so it doesn't accumulate layers like most eagle nests do. The birds build it back up in the same tree every year.

...we like the neiborhood and the schools are excellent.

The nest site is less than 100 feet from this thing...

...an asphalt shingle plant.The largest enclosed space in Whatcom County. There are a constant stream of rednecks, semi trucks, trains, and forklifts running around right underneath the nest. I know this for a fact because my husband used to be the redneck in the forklift.

Almost exactly one mile from my house, heading northeast on Hillview. I am parked right beneath this young man. It's a crappy picture and a dark day, but he still wouldn't have shown up real good because he is still in his dark-brown juvenile plumage. His distinctive profile, as well as the yellow beak and feet give him away.


His mate (also wearing brown feathers) sits out in the field beyond him, waiting. Waiting for....

...A nice duck dinner.
These mallard ducks decided not to migrate and as a consequence are living pretty thin. The eagles will wait and see who takes off last, or not at all. Eagles aren't total scavengers; they'll take live prey very neatly. I've been out fishing on Silver Lake and had them come skim right across the bow of my little rowboat and pluck a trout out of the water like music.)

In addition to the ducks, different fish are starting to run now. Every little creek, ditch and river around here is full of bright new fish and the eagles are here to take advantage.

The fact is, though, that dairy farmers around here have their milk cows bred in August so they freshen right around now. In addition to the usual giant heap of guck produced by a normal calving, the harsh weather tends to cull out the weak calfs naturally. All that goes to the eagles. I live in dairy country, and so that explains why in a one mile radius I saw OVER FIFTY BALD EAGLES. Today, in Sumas, Washington. February 9, 2007.

Supposedly Eagles only take a mate once they're out of juvenile plumage. This is not true at all; I've watched juvenile pairs in full mating display, seen them breeding, watched them engaged in nest building. This young couple have a nest back at the base of the foothills there in the background.

I've heard it said that the farmers who leave out culls are disrupting the natural breeding cycles of the eagles. Could this be an example? No. It's a case of plentiful food resources impacting the breeding cycle, but there isn't anything unnatural about it.
An eagle is primarily a scavenger. The most popular aquila nesting place in this end of the county is in Cedarville...not on the river, but in the firs that surround the dump. In wilderness areas their habit is to nest around the mouths of rivers, the bases of waterfalls and the headwaters high up in the mountains...not for the live fish so much as the bounty of dead, spawned-out salmon, and the scavenging to be had from the leavings of other predatory activity around these places. And so, in accordance with their natural tendancy, they nest here, in the alders that line the creeks, near the dairy farms. They clean up the dead calfs and birthing waste, which they do in the wild, too. What in the hell do people think happens around here when a moose or an elk births? Or dies, for that matter? Or gets hit by a logging truck?
What do they think happened to beached whales and other sealife carcasses?

Another fact that folks tend to try to ignore is that before the settlers came the local NA performed 'sky burial'(if they liked you. If not they slung you into the brush.) The dead could be seen on platforms in the trees around Ferndale, on the land my husbands' family homesteaded up until at least the 1920's. My father-in-law remembers seeing them, or at least what was left by then. And the local NA created lots of dead people. We were not nice indians. We were mean, head-taking, slave killing, settler shooting, liver eating Indians. Thanks to us, back in those days the eagles probably took cabs everywhere because they were too damn fat to fly.

It was co-existing then, and it's co-existing now.

A She-Devil?? Peach Armadillo

Ok. Miss Pink Drama decided me. I was going to throw up this depressing thing about prejudice but instead I'll throw up a lighthearted thing about prejudice and regional accents. 'K? 'K!!

The thing that clinched it was an 'Are you a Yankee' test I took over at someones place last week. (Was It yours? Do come forward and accept your Rice a Roni!)
Judged by my speech patterns, I am not. Although I live almost as far north as it is humanly possible to live and still be in the contiguous U.S. I am a damn mushmouth.

Now let's do that as if I were to speak aloud.

So like th thingit clinchtit wuh zis 'Are youwwa Yankee' tesdai tuk overda summons place lass week. (Wuzzitchores? Do cm ford n ukseptcher Rysa Roni!)
Judge by my speech patrns, like, nuparntlee umnodda yankee. Ulthowai live almoziz far fuckin north azitz humunlee possible n stull be in th c'ntijis U.S. I'm a fuckin mushmouth. Uh mean, Dude.

Now Miss Pink makes the assertion that Yankees still portray folks with a Southern accent as a bunch of tards. Truth be told, she's right. For example, on television lately the only positively portrayed character with a distinguishable southern accent is that blonde weapons expert lady on CSI Miami. Otherwise, if they're women, they're fat, slutty and stupid. If they're men, they're stupid inbred thugs who run around assraping people. I bet everyone south of the Mason Dixon line still wants to wring the neck of the guy who wrote 'Deliverance'.

But where did I learn to speak lke a cracker? Well, from my father, for one. In fact he twanged. This was a man who spoke Finnish until he was in second grade! And remember, he was born and raised in Oregon. So where did he learn? I figure it had to be from all the little cracker children he grew up with.

Think about it. During the Civil war, there was a huge influx of southerners who wanted no part of that mess and came out to homestead (up until 1972, in fact, there was still lots of free land in Oregon yours for the homesteading. All you had to do was prove up $200.00 and they gave you 2 years to do it.)Another huge wave came West around the time of the late 20's and early 30's, when corporate logging and shipbuilding were booming in Oregon.

Now, I think what proves my case here is that a few companies from further north up here in Washington did the same thing. To this day there is a pocket of twangin fools up in around Alger, five miles away from Bellingham. Also Clear Lake, Big Rock, Newhalem and so on. Different timber companies would go out, buy a giant chunk of land, build a town in the middle of it and then sen recruiters south with busses. But unlike Oregon, which was already crossed by crude roadways and being logged off pretty intensively, these communities stayed isolated. The woods in Washington were another thing all over again. There were dinosaurs and pterodactyls still running around lost in these woods from back in the stone age, practically. It was still virgin rainforest here.* Even the bracken grew six feet tall. You dump a bunch of poor people into the middle of primeval fucking forest like that, almost inpenetrable and largely trackless (parts still are) , and you get small communities in the middle of north Yankeeland where everyone still sounds like Minnie Pearl and Jethro Clampett. In fact, the NA up around Alger run around 'y'allin' too. That's how pervasive that syrup southern accent is.

Another peculiarity of the Oregon-West Coast accent is that everything sounds like a question. Bike builder Jesse James is a perfect example of that. There is no such thing as a statement in his conversation; his tone of voice lilts up and down the 'duh' range from clueless to kinda uncertain. He sounds like everyone I ever got baked with back in high school.

Pure blue-collar Oregonspeak is also lousy with the word 'like' used as a thought pause and general way to make yourself sound like a dumbshit. Like, people will, you know, like, say it every fuckin other word, like all the time, so, like you can barely just even understand them, dude.

And that's the word of doom right there. Dude. If you hear a grown person running around saying 'dude' a whole bunch, then that person is from Oregon. Dude! Like, they say it all the fuckin time, dude; it's crazy! Like you know, they're walking along and they're like 'Dude! how's it going!' like.

I still do this, and it never fails to crack my husband up. Then I have to listen to him saying 'Dude! Like, doooooooood!' for another half-hour. Which doesn't help any.

Basically, I am doomed. It's a wonder anyone can understand my spoken conversation now. By the time they pull out all my teeth it's gonna be really ugly.

And EVERYONE from the West Coast is going to deny this and say I'm totally insane, now. Watch and see.


*There were Douglas Fir and redcedar here as big around as my garage, and that's a fact. Hell; there still are, but back then MOST of them were like that. I can walk you up to the stumps of them; they're still out there. The marks remain where the guys had to chop steps into them and set planks into the notches to stand on, all to get up to a place on the trunk that their saws would reach across to cut. Deal with having to saw a monster like that down, twelve feet up off the forest floor, BY HAND with a crosscut saw, a beer bottle full of kerosene to grease the blade and that's it. My granddad did it.

CSA. which Kevin Wilmot made. Not Spike Lee.

Confederate States of America
Spike Lee
UPDATE: KEVIN WILMOT!
KEVIN WILMOT, BY GOD! NOT SPIKE LEE! I WAS LIED TO! just read the goddamn thing anyway.

Or wait, don't read this. Just go out and buy the dvd NOW, is how good it is. They ought to show this in schools, is how good it is. Starting in fourth grade and every year thereafter.
Attendance should be mandatory. Grades should count on it.

This movie answers the question ' What if the South had won the Civil War?' and explores the subsequent journey of a Confederate America up to the present day, one which functions with all the original Confederate institutions and policies in place. In particular, slavery. It is presented as a made-for-television 'documentary', complete with lead-in graphics and cheesy music. The backstory: Produced by the 'BBS' (BBC) and banned in America at the time it was originally released, it is being re-broadcast at a later date on American television, with American commercials interspersing the acts, and updated American 'expert commentary' spliced in.

A lot of people my age in the U. S. probably remember a regrettable television comedy series called 'McHails Navy' that aired back in the late 'Sixties...'CSA' is harder to watch than McHails' syncophantic P.O.W. Fuji Kobiaji was.

Remember Hop Sing? The cook at the Ponderosa? This is WAY harder to watch than Hop Sing was, scuttling around the ranch blustering in Cantonese with his queue and a frying pan. (I'm not going to include any of the NA from F Troop because I thought they were awesome. They controlled the stereotype. Or they'd get bored and tell one of the other 'braves' in 'Indian lingo' to 'find out what this fuckin' blanco wants; I'm going to go check my investments' kind of a thing. Plus their 'Indian lingo' was Yiddish.)*

The craft quality of the piece is definitely 'film school project with moderate funding'. I wonder if that was something (WILMOT, not Lee) used consciously, in order to throw the irony into higher relief, or if it really was produced on the cheap with a bunch of interns. In any event it doesn't particularly detract from the experience, unless you were expecting something on the order of 'Mo Betta Blues' visual dexterity. Because this is by Kevin Wilmot, who didn't do Mo Betta Blues, not Spike Lee, who did. Which is why.
Um, yeah.

One one level CSA is played straight. The research is accurate. Racism is the issue under attack, but revisionism is the enemy being exposed here.
On another, it's made to entertain. ( WILMOT, not Spike) has no problem with admitting that some of this shit is funny. He's laughing too. It isn't 50 minutes of undiluted rage.
Fucking A, Spike, how many years has it been? You finally got it right!

Or, uh, no, Wilmot got it right. KEVIN WILMOT.

Now Lee has to sit at his feet and take notes because he still doesn't get it. Here's why.
In the past Spike has been content to send his audience home in a state of guilty despair. At 8$ the theatre ticket...no. Quite frankly if I wanted to pay for that kind of treatment I'd still be a practicing Catholic. Bitterness, guilt and contempt are valid emotions, but they work better as a goad, not as an end in themselves. (big edit here.)
Now, while CSA entertains, it isn't 50 minutes of har de har har, either. The same thing you're laughing at (so hard that tears are running down your face and you're spitting chunks of biscuit at the screen) is usually something that is eliciting outrage and shame.
It pisses you off, then it hands you a weapon.

That's what raises it above the crowd of 'new conscience' movies.
That's what makes it GREAT instead of merely clever or cool.
That's probably why I never heard about this when it was first released.

Did you?



* This is why so many Americans my age have a love affair with British television from the 'Sixties-'Seventies period. Those are only two examples of the type of shit we had to grow up with. Put it this way: Britain made stuff like The Prisoner, the single most excellent television show ever made ever in the whole world, and the whole universe and Mars and all the asteroids and Haleys' Comet, AND the whole universe AND infinity.
We had Lost In Space.

God bless public television. Public television snuck us the good stuff. Public television brought to our shores the blessings of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Doctor in the House, Masterpiece Theatre, The Six Wives of Henry VIII and all the rest. And while you may argue with my taste, you can't argue with the evidence. Compared to cathode offal like My Mother the Car, Father Knows Best, and The Patty Duke Show, Benny Hill slapping a little bald guy on the head is still nuclear science.

Note To all My Darlings:

The Yummy Biker has had the last three days in a row off.
I have been BUSY.
See you on Monday!



Pray for me.

CHANGE IS GOOD

...on the other hand, change seems to have fried my links list.
And your avatars.
And my comment lounge.

Yay for change.

vaseline for africa part II: uterine midnight

Let's all treat ourselves to a bracing onion smoothie while we review the results of this latest goofy and pointless exercise, shall we?
Excellent!


It was inevitable that Tim Footman would emerge by overwhelming popular acclaim as the 'John Steed of blogdom'.

...the shizz: mack daddy mcnee

He is intelligent. He is smooth. He is incredibly well- spoken. He is the type of man who would not hesitate to stab the crap out of someone with an umbrella.




...in a recent television interview. footman has been described as 'distinctly punditlike with a strong note of oak' and 'super nice-n-smart + realy cool!!! funy to!!! 4 perod math see you next yeir!!!'

Come forward, Tim, and accept a congratulatory glass of Moet&Chandon and this sleek Starbucks coffee thermos which, when hurled at the feet of an opponent, emits a crippling cloud of narcotic gas.




If for any reason during the term of his reign Tim Footman is not able to carry out the responsibilities of his office, his alternate is....

BEAST

...crying on the inside

..who ran a popular second despite my best efforts to influence the judges by (showing them all the places I have piercings) pleading eloquently on his behalf.
Well fought, my darling. Step forward and receive your second place award...ten pounds of raw pork and this wadded up Canadian $20 I found when I was doing laundry. It wont buy much, but it's pretty. You can color on it if you want.

Wyndham Triffid was notable among the field of competition; an unsung blogging GOD. His enormous brainial giftatude intimidates me so much, in fact, that I have been reduced to lurking at his place, as helpless before his mental attainments as a chihuahua under a fat lady's ass. God bless you and all who sail in you, sir.

Danator nominated herself. Then I think what happened was, she nominated Mrs. Danator, the delightful and wicked Mrs. Danator, the beautiful and vibrant Mrs. Danator, the Mrs. Danator of hot-corn-on-a-stick fame. Then I forgot what I was saying and the phone rang. It was some kind of phone sales crap. I don't understand why they bother. Its not like I'm going to buy shit over the phone anyway.

Murph received one highly enthusiastic nomination. After a critical review it was decided with reluctance that, while Murph is both smooth and well dressed, the lack of opposable thumbs would prove a distinct disadvantage when battling cybernetically enhanced Russian agents. Good boy, Murph.

MUTTLEY'S varied career has included a stint as comedic sidekick, weapons expert, and alternate driver for modified racings' reknowned Team Whiplash.

..remember, ninety cents out of every dollar goes towards helping these kids.

After a puzzling silence of several years Muttley re-emerged upon the public stage as an intrepid survivor in an alternate, postapocalyptic Britain, bravely holding his own against the radioactively mutated inhabitants and slutty, hardware-obsessed naked booby ladies. It was determined, with regret, that Muttley already has enough on his plate.

Dave received one vote. But it was a vote which included the phrase 'dirty vicar' so I call that well done.




















...i like TITS!

Fine; that was a lie. It was nothing like 'dirty vicar'.
Dirty Vicar.



Knudson nominated himself.
He was barred from competition by showing up to the gate clad in a used leather catsuit.
"...Vile and unsanitary vodka nonagenarian crusted, floating balls of animal sticky hair. Heat rash, beans for lunch like a mouse squeaking in a trap, insufficient support for whenever scaly psoriasis because gravity, called moobs, deflated patchy red rash all over the unsightly lumpiness of the ew ew ew hanging out. Traffic accidents when a dog that's too licky because with identical roll-on deodorant used by teenage girls. Really icky linty too lazy in a pop bottle next to the victrola, wintergreen liniment strong enough to fricken taste (call me.)"
...from 'tribute to knudson', rod mckuen (deceased)


FROBISHER, my rat, my only rat, was nominated in a charming display of (guilt and pity) manly chivalry by Beast.

...scary robot man! his fu is unbeatable!
Frobisher was unavailable for comment as he was busy fending off the lascivious advances of his hareem with a garbage can lid and a shitty stick.

Last but certainly not least, the white hot law-enforcing goodness that is local mover-n-shaker Ed Troyer is taken, much to our dismay, by the discriminating and lovely Kristy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

...wearing Garanimals

'Think globally, lust locally' are words she lives by. I think we can all appreciate why.

Well! Wasn't that fun? I know I had fun.
Did you have fun?
Because, you know, I did.
Have fun.



ok. go away.
its done.
bye

nerd heat

stainless steel amazon? don't read this. trust me.
don't.

Well then.

Spinsterella (the Emma Peel of blogging) has a fatal fascination for scrawny, veiny guys.

100 % white-hot, nightcrawling, alley dwelling boy meat. for you it's free. the rest pay. gladly.


SurlyGirl, for Rowan Akinson as Elizabethan Blackadder.

he maketh me to swete fair, strait through my stomacher, i too have ruint for setting my inward skirts as he maketh me to shift so in my seat, to imagine how hot couydd burn the kisses of his sneering lips upon my heaving white bosom, yo.


Me, I have a real weakness for nerds.

gates-on-gates action. we all know how this turns out....

Now by nerds I don't mean chinless adolescent gamers picking at their acne in the dark foetor of their basement bedrooms, no no no. I mean full-grown man-geeks with overriding passions for say, ornithology, or experimental chemistry. The type of man who gets so lost in his enthusiasm for his interest that he fails to notice until too late that you have slipped beneath the table, mouth full of ice cubes, and undone the buttons of his pants.



1. Bill Nye the Science Guy

we believe you, bill.
UPDATE: bill, you lie like an egg sucking hound.


This guy is just likeable anyway. Still, Bill Nye was just another postmodern kids' show host...Until I saw a segment he did while standing thigh deep in a tidepool WEARING A WETSUIT. And it wasn't so much as the wetsuit, really, as it was the wet curls of hair at the pit of his throat. That, and the guy's got hands the size of canoe paddles, if you follow me. I imagined slooooooowly unzipping that wetsuit with my teeth for quite awhile.
All together now: What in GODS NAME is wrong with me?

2. Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs

...why yes! I'd love some!

Handsome and funny despite the fact that he can usually be found standing tit deep in raw oysters or stuck up to his armpit in a cow rectum, Mike Rowe is GAME. And more than likely gamy, too. Of course, that washes off. Still, he's just as happy stripped down to damn near nothing (God bless you, Mike) surrounded by tiger sharks as he is dressed in full hazmat gear chucking muck out of a dairy gutter. Never one to let the opportunity for a truly filthy double entendre pass, delivered with a gentle, rueful smile in a voice like a bank of organpipes, Mike Rowe is delightfully hairy and completely out of his mind. And very, very dirty.
Of course, as I've said, that washes off. In a hot, steamy shower, deserted when I enter, towel already inching towards the tiles....Deserted except for Mike Rowe enthusiastically rinsing off the days pay...


3. John Cleese

never doubted it for a moment, Johnny boy.
Yes, John.
Oh YES, John.
God, yes, John.
It's been like that since I was thirteen years old.
Remember in 'How To Annoy People' when he smiles, languidly clasps his hands behind his head and says, 'That's right, she can't get enough of it' ? He was right. I cannot get enough of this guy. The years have not lessened nor have they dimmed the raw bestial glory that is long, tall and british John Cleese draped elegantly across a piece of furniture, eyes intent, a faint flush spreading across his aristocratic features as he watches me slowly sink to my knees, smiling wickedly, reaching for his
*ahem.*
I was genuinely pissed off when I realized he wasn't gay. Really, really, REALLY pissed. Here he'd been on tour in the United States while I was in my childbearing prime and I BLEW IT! Or failed to. Because I would. Bald, ancient and toothless though he is in real life. Oh hell yeah. Until he had an aneurism.
Remember in that zoo picture he did with Jaime Lee Curtis when he suddenly throws her over the top of his desk and puts the meat to her? THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ME.

What? Jaime Lee is hot.

4. Jaime Heineman (I have deliberately misspelled this. The man already has girlgeek pornsites devoted to him. I have SOME pride. Kinda.)

The confident stance of a man who knows that those last two inches will always go unused.

Proving once and for all that happiness is indeed a warm gun, any time this guy does a segment of M***B*****s which involves firearms I am there. And I am lickin' the screen. It's the way he laughs when something toxic explodes in a ball of flames...that fine hard ass you could bounce a dime off of...damn. I have fantasies about this guy that include a mechanics creeper, a bottle of oxyacetelene and a large pile of shop rags. See, it's a warm day, and Jaime is wearing his starched white shirt open. The breeze moves it. Sweat has dampened the hairs on his chest into dark ringlets that follow the pulse in his throat, ringlets that dissappear into luxuriant darkness.
From where I am lying I can see him through the darkened glass of my welding helmet. I have dropped all pretense of repairing the axle of the monster truck I am under (we'll be filling it with dead swine and plastique and pushing it off a building later). I simply observe him. Sparks fall around me.
He walks over to where I am.
I have enough remaining presence of mind to turn the gas down and let the flame go out.
I expect him to lean over and say something. Instead he grasps the end of the creeper and pulls me out from under the truck.
He helps me to my feet. Takes off my visor. The gloves. The jacket.
And my hand is inside the top of his shirt. Just like that, the motion deliberate. Gliding over his throat. Up the line of his jaw. Drawing my finger across his lips. Between them.
I follow the dark line down his chest to the waistband of his slacks.
He bends his head towards me
I'm not thinking anymore
He is kissing my neck, kissing and biting it.
I can't help it. I'm making noise now.
When his hand slides up the back of my shirt and unclasps my

Gosh! Isn't it warm in here?

And speaking of heat, RealDoc posed me this burning question, which I turn over
you, my darlings...

WHO IS THE JOHN STEED OF BLOGGING????

Nominate your blogging favorite! Vote early and vote often!

spinsterella

This is an apology.
I did not mean to leap upon your head clawing and tweaking and shouting 'Dammit, why can't you be more of a slut? You have readers out here who live vicariously through you, you know!'
Unfortunately, thats' exactly what one of my most recent comments came off as.
Fine, was.
Fine.
I think you're outstanding. You are intelligent, funny and well spoken. Thats' why I read you. I like what I read, and vice versa.
I'll tell you what, I wish I'd been as discriminating when it came to men. Yes, I'd have had less to blog about but also could have saved myself a lot of unpleasantness. Oh Christ yes.

You are the Emma Peel of Blogdom.
Yes you are.

another passenger on an already tippy 'blogging identity' rowboat

What blogging identity? This is me.
It's been the case for most of my life that other things came first. Now I am an empty nester. Now it is my turn.
This is The Me Show.

For me, blogging serves multiple purposes...scratch paper, soapbox, creative outlet, forum, entertainment, social contact, and therapy.

Most of all, for me, blogging is journalling. I believe that most people who journal do so with the secret hope that someone will read it. (Admiringly and with great interest.) I admit it, anyway. But when I've tried journaling in the past all it did was focus my negativity and reinforce my introversion. I mean, I already occupy this space so whats the point, right? I already know what I think. Thats what makes this venue invaluable...people read and comment, people who do not know me, who have no meatspace social agenda attached to our acquaintance, and who do not interrupt. You can read, or not. You can comment or not. And you can agree, or not. In turns.

Blogging isn't conversation. Sometimes conversations take place in the comments lounge, but this part - this isn't conversation...it's more like an old-fashioned social night at a boarding house, where everyone presented an entertainment or a contribution of some kind, in turns. And that's where the value of this medium lies. Anonymity, commentary, taking turns.

I'll tell you what, I would never have even thought about getting published had it not been for this place, and my daughter turning me on to blogging. And one year after starting this, I'm published! I'm writing every day. Those flabby little neurons are getting a workout.

Another benefit of blogging has been that it has kept me interacting with other people. For an ordinary person, living in a rural area and getting cut off for a couple of weeks every winter, that would be valuable, but for a person with clinical depression it's been golden.

That is why it tends to be sarcastic, bitchy, silly and downright juvenile around here. Also pretty blue. Laughing and having fun is better than bleeding to death in a bathtub.
Ever said 'Get over yourself and cheer up' to someone you were just TIRED of listening to bitch and piss and moan all the time? I said that to myself. Now I'm making something to cheer myself up. And sometimes, lemme tell you, it's all I can do.

It's working.

This has been one hell of a year at times, kids, but it's also the first year since I was diagnosed that I haven't had to have my medication adjusted.

So yeah. Blogging:
It's better than a peck in the head with a sharp rock.

well, enough of THAT.

Guess what my Yummy Biker just put on layaway for me? Because he loves me? Because I am his very own little red hot rockin' Native American love princess?


A BRAND NEW LIVING ROOM SET.
This will be the first time in my life that I have had a matching suite of living room furniture
THAT I LIKE.
That is BRAND NEW.
That I PICKED OUT.
From a REAL, UPMARKET FURNITURE STORE.
Not a discount house, a resale store, a garage sale, a storage unit or off the back of a truck.
It has take me 26 years to have grown-up furniture that I can stand looking at.

BEHOLD THE GLORY THAT IS MY NEW LIVING ROOM SET!

...except without the chrome, and without the coffee table but WITH a matching ottoman.

OH HELL YES.






Remember my old furniture?


..I won't even show you a picture of the whole monstrous thing. It's too awful.

What can I say? We needed a set and this was quality stuff, Ethan Allen in fact. We we got it for 200$ the set, too. Knowing full well that it is so very, very horrible. I mean, the HORROR. It got to the point this last two years that I would look at it, and it would look back at me, and be country french, and white brocade with floral trophies, and we would hate each other with a vile and dire loathing.

Then it started to tear. All of it, all in the same week. Rip, rip, rip. So much for Ethan Allen lifetime quality upholstery! Patooie! I spit upon their so called quality which has the brain of a duck you know!

Then the Goonybird started picking the batting out of the cushions and feeding it to the dog pictured above, who is just tard enough to eat it. The evidence is still in my back yard, too. Little tufts of fibrefil here and there. You see the birds carrying it around.

Nature is disgusting.

Over the last year, between the spilled coffee and the peanut butter sandwiches the Biker and I just gave up all semblance of giving a rat's ass. It was open season on the furniture of horror. The furniture lost. Bigtime.

And now I get to enjoy the sight of it waiting sadly by the curb for someone to come by in the dead of the night and think they're really getting away with something and stealing it! Yee Haw! Fokkin' Ted Nooooogent, yo! Raaaawk! Bye bye ugly couch! Farewell loveseat of evil! And away it goes to grace the shag carpeted meth lab in the trailer park it always belonged in!

New York Will Be Populated By Zombies in the Future

Do you know why?
Because she VVV

lived there.
Emily.
She grew up there. She ate dinner there, went to school there, started menstruating there, learned to read there, ate a bunch of pussy there, has family there, met my cousin VVV

there, got married there and had a kid there.
The entire city of New York is irrevocably doomed. Flakes of her dna have met and merged with the lung tissue of thousands of unfortunate New Yorkers over the years where it is even now mutating into an evil mind controlling carcinoid.
Eventually this carcinoid will assimilate its' host and thousand of whining, pself-important bullies with glistening assholes in the middle of their foreheads and superflous body hair will march forth, four abreast, past the Port Authority building for ever and ever, declaiming to the skies 'our babysitter was a man! and black! and gay!"

Why did fate see fit to give this horrible, horrible woman an expensive education? Why did it see fit to endow her with money in her latter years? Money she used to further her self-serving projects in the name of local liberalism and thus render riduculous the reputation of liberals locally merely by association?

Why did fate see fit to make her just social and just plausible enough to garner the ill-informed respect of other persons with money and educations? Persons who live in the same town as me?

Why has this vile, vile woman attached herself to me like a lamprey?

I will tell you why!
She is a birth order victim! She is a typical Oldest Sister Displaced by a Younger Sibling in a Dysfunctional Family Environment who never outgrew it! She is Jafar! The scheming and conniving, jealous, plotting grand vizier of an imaginary realm where she is supposed to be the rightful ruler because shes' better than YOU are! She is the nasty little girl at her sisters' birthday party throwing a tantrum because none of the presents are for her, and if she can't have them then SHE'S GOING TO SPOIL EVERYONES PARTY SO HA HA HA!

The single event that will crown this womans' existance will be to to meet up with me by chance with her husband at her side and grandly inform me that MY FATHER DIED here, in town, and I NEVER ONCE CAME TO SEE HIM and that THEY GOT EVERYTHING and I GOT NOTHING and MY FATHER DIED CALLING OUT MY NAME (Johnny Walker, apparently) and HE NEVER GOT TO SEE HIS GRANDDAUGHTER OR HIS GREAT-GRANDSON BECAUSE OF ME and that THERE NEVER WAS ANY PROBLEMS IN MY FAMILY AT ALL IT WAS ALL ONE BIG MISTUNDERSTANDING...

MINE, OF COURSE

And that HE WAS SORRY and that MY FAMILY NEVER WANTED ANYTHING MORE THAN TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT AND JUST APOLOGIZE AND BE HAPPY EVEN THOUGH NOTHING HAPPENED BUT I COULDN'T BE A BIG ENOUGH PERSON AND COME FORWARD AND FORGIVE THEM EVEN THOUGH NOTHING HAPPENED and anyway everything that happened is ALL MY FAULT and ALL IN MY IMAGINATION and NEVER HAPPENED and THEY NEVER HEARD ANYTHING, ANYTHING AT ALL EXCEPT HOW MUCH MY POOR MOTHER AND FATHER LOVED AND MISSED ME!

BOY DID I FUCK UP! BOY AM I A LOSER! I AM THE MOST TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE WOMAN IN EXISTANCE!

The thing is, she doesn't believe that.
None of it.
Neither of them do.

They both know that they were lied to consistantly and with poor or more often no reason -or even continuity of plot, for Gods' sake. They weren't exempt from the games, the lies or the sickness. Oh HELL no.

But it seems like knowing that I am out here with this wound is drawing them to me like flies to sugar. Emily in particular. She has to play the hyenas' role and if it's the last thing she does, it will happen. She needs to be the playground bully. She needs to make me be a victim.
This freaks me out.
I cannot begin to tell you now much this freaks me out.
Someone has me targeted for a very specific and most likely public form of humiliation and pain.

Based on no facts. Only because the opportunity is there to push the knife in.

She will. She'll use a very intimate and painful and private thing from my life to skewer me with. It's all planned out and only the opportunity needs to arise.
I know this sounds paranoid. It is not. It genuinely describes two people from a family of similar people. A group of folks from whom I completely severed all contact more than twenty years ago.
Except apparently that won't do. I was absolutely nothing whatsover to them back in the day, except an object of contempt, but now that I'm removed from their circle I seem to have some kind of newfound, icky allure they find irresistable.

Does anyone know what I mean? How do you put something like this to rest? How do you end it? In my case, divorcing myself, cutting off all forms of contact, that wasn't enough. They followed my daughter around and harrassed her. They even coached their own son to follow her around and demand our phone number and address. Really!
What makes this really creepy and sick is that my phone number is listed. My address is too. It always has been.
It was harrassment. Subtle, sneaky, harrassment aimed at me, using my daughter as a dupe, who thinks I am an absolute paranoid loon for even thinking such a thing. You see how this works?
My daughter has no goddamn clue how this shit plays.
I was used in the exact same way when I was a kid. I know these moves. Oh, yes indeed. Children are nothing to these people. There are many, many good reasons I have no contact with them. They belong to what I can only describe as a tiny little family subculture of child abuse, alcoholism, battery and sexual crimes.

Oh, but they look so good.
So good.
So plausible.
So smooth.
You bet I'm still very wary.
You bet I'm still scared.
The price of freedom really is perpetual vigilance. And being thought of as a total paranoid loon.

It's like trying to leave the fricken' Mob.
______________

So in other words, yes: I was published last week, a month early, in the Betty Pages.
Under my real meatspace name.
And I am trippin my tits off.
All for you!

Flying Claw Meets Fourteen Dragons

Enlarge this, if you will, and contemplate for a few moments the worlds most elaborately decorated ceiling.
Michelangelo Buonarotti wrote of his efforts:

"I've grown a goiter by dwelling in this den-
as cats from stagnant streams in Lombardy,
or in what other land they hap to be-
which drives the belly close beneath the chin:
my beard turns up to heaven;
my nape falls in,
fixed on my spine: my breastbone visibly
grows like a harp: a rich embroidery
bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin.
My loins into my paunch like levers grind:
my buttock like a crupper bears my weight;
my feet unguided wander to and fro;
in front my skins grows loose and long; behind,
by bending it becomes more taut and strait;
crosswise I strain me like a Syrian bow:
whence false and quaint, I know,
must be the fruit of squinting brain and eye;
for ill can aim the gun that bends awry..."

Michelangelo's Poem: On the Painting of the Sistine Chapel


None of this passed through my mind as I sat in the ladies room toilet at Albertsons' supermarket yesterday and contemplated the meteoric decoration splashed across the acoustical tiles above me.

Oh yes. 'Ill can aim the gun that bends awry" indeed.

The method was at once apparent. I could picture this woman in my minds' eye as she slowly toppled from her seat atop the lavatory bowl, easing inexorably forward with hippopotamaic grace.
Midsection met knees and pressed. Forehead met floor tiles and rested there.
A huge and energetic noise like the last trump of doom must have burst forth then, one which by all appearances instantly liquefied her liver.
Above the plumbing, midway up the tile wall began what resolved into a vast and busy swath, a brown ululation of leaping ocher ichor bourne on high, comet trails of foul chunky soup, describing in the hectic loops of some secret postgastric cryptography a tragic tale of luncheon and loss.

Remember that one Andy Warhol movie?
Yeah.
Michelangelo and Warhol meet at last.

The Monster With Child In Tow Black Porcupine

(UPDATED to include Treespotter. Sorry, my darling.)
(REPUDATED to include Muttley the Dog. Geezeiz.)
I am continuing my not-writingness and not visitingness. Be assured that all is well; its just that if I sit here and type for any longer than five minutes at a stretch my fingies freeze up.
Live in an uninsulated historic building.
I dare you.
Meanwhile, go visiting amongst yourselves. I think most of these links work, which is more than I can say for my pathetic excuse for a sidebar-link list.
http://marlowefish.blogspot.com/
http://drivingthebustohell.blogspot.com/
http://professionalspinster.blogspot.com/
http://www.hendrixcat.com/
http://theinfomaniac.blogspot.com/
http://www.glitterforbrains.blogspot.com/
http://frobishersfunpages.blogspot.com/
http://newbeastbites.blogspot.com/
http://bettysutility.blogspot.com/
http://arabellalost.blogspot.com/
http://dflatchimebar.blogspot.com/
http://hardhousecat.blogspot.com/
http://mizbohemia.blogspot.com/
http://arealmother.blogspot.com/
http://gsimplysaid.blogspot.com/
http://therockmother.blogspot.com/
http://culturalsnow.blogspot.com/
http://quadrireme.blogspot.com/ new patroclus
http://awaiting.tazzyandpiggy.com/blog/
http://danator.blogspot.com/ http://oyebilly.blogspot.com/
http://somethingsarcastic.blogspot.com/
http://bitterbierce.blogspot.com/
http://centralsnark.wordpress.com/
http://hotspicybun.blogspot.com/
http://909highst.blogspot.com/
http://tamburlaine-the-great.blogspot.com/
http://pamela-troeppl.blogspot.com/
http://house-made.com/
http://www.dangerpanda.com/
http://testing---testing.blogspot.com/
http://vicusscurra.blogspot.com/
and last but not least
http://treespotter.blogspot.com/
last, with fleas:
http://mutleythedogsdayout.blogspot.com/