The Campfire

My cuppeth feelth brokeneth

2012-01-07T21:25:00.000-08:00

About a week ago, before we turned that corner into 2012, we were doing our nightly "gratitude" round at the dinner table, and when it came my turn I was frankly stumped. I had had a hard day. A hard week. A hard year, and I just wanted it to be over. "I'm grateful for my lovely family and for.... spinach." Bruce nodded sympathetically at me. Then I mumbled something about feeling like I was a broken cup, that even if you did fill my life with good things they would just run out all over the floors and stain something. ( like that David Wilcox song. You know the one: http://www.davidwilcox.com/index.php?page=songs&category=Musical_Medicine&display=2041)
I said, I need a new cup. That's when Ella, my 6 year old daughter and savior, chimed in with, "But you have a new cup - that I Love New York cup that B___ gave you!" We grown-ups laughed so hard we snorted.
Yes, indeed, my good friend had brought me back a souvenir mug from her trip to New York City and New Jersey, as a thank-you for house-sitting during the holidays. On it was the iconic "I (Heart) NY" graphic slogan.

Of course.
So, mama's got a brand-new cup. What the hell am I complaining about? In my last blog I was hyperventilating about the fact that we Americans, near as I can figure, are headed for enslavement or similar disasters because the means of producing our own energy and food has pretty much been taken away from us, with our enthusiastic consent. In fact, if you do grow your own food or chop your own firewood or build your own house, you're still considered "quaint" and slightly off-kilter.
I was feeling pretty smug and self-righteous for awhile there because being half red-neck and half white-trash, there are certain skills, shall we say, that I've learned along the way that should help me when the End Times come. Also I'm a recovering archaeologist who has long been studying the ways of the ancients, and I used to hang out with survivalists. For awhile there I basically lived out of my car. What I'm trying to say is, I've never really been comfortable. There has always been some sort of hardship in my life, mostly financial, but also with a good deal of emotional, physical, mental and spiritual abuse thrown in for good measure. Since I married my sweet baboo, the abuse part has been exed out, but the financial hardship remains. Ah well, at least we have love, right?
Sure. As anyone who is not Donald Trump knows, when you're constantly stressed and struggling, that love can get a wee bit strained. You start blaming each other for your situation, and even glancing over the fences occasionally to see if the grass really is greener over there. (It's just my lizard -brained monkey-mind trying to ensure my survival, I don't feel guilt about it. ) Married or not, I think everyone can relate to having compulsive reactions to those people/blogs/pundits/know-it-alls-who've-never-worked-a-day-in-their-lives who tell you to count your blessings or practice gratitude as a way to grow abundance. Namely, the uncontrollable compulsion to punch someone right in the kisser. There are times when it is impossible, and I believe inappropriate, to feel gratitude. And those times include when you see that your family's options are dwindling even faster than your spirit is being ground into the dirt. The appropriate reaction, I believe, is to assess your resources- yes- but this is different than gratitude; and then act according to your deepest convictions and values in using those resources to their utmost. One resource I didn't used to count: my imagination. AKA, resourcefulness, inventiveness, and plain ol' not panicking. Also I actually enjoy figuring things out on my own, in small groups, or whatever.

But anyway, this fact of my uncomfortableness throughout life gives me some comfort. When I'm cleaning the usually very large, very nice houses of yuppie couples who are 10 years younger than me and make 10 times as much money, I bear them no ill will but I do think - WoW- when all of this comes crumbling down, it is going to be ROUGH for these people who have known nothing but comfort, or think their days of discomfort are behind them.

So I know it's cold comfort, but at least I got that goin' for me, which is nice. I know how to grow food, and compost, and sculpt a landscape so that you can save enough water to do both and not die. Conversely, I am not so great with the cooking from scratch or the canning and preserving, but armed with my grandmother's cookbook and a love for things that smell good, I think I can learn.
Also, as I've mentioned before, I've got fantastically skilled friends who can fill in the other gaps for each other, and quite the merry little community of social pranksters built up over the past 11 years.
Call me a cock-eyed optimist but I think we'll be okay.

Vulnerable, Fragile, Helpless, Powerless?

2011-12-06T20:56:00.001-08:00

We have been without electrical power, intermittently, forthe past 4 days, in the middle of a cold snap, and this situation smacks meupside the head with how vulnerable our society has made us.

So I stopped writing, right there, because truly, I do notdo my best thinking when I'm nearly paralyzed and/or erupting like a ragefulvolcano of fear. I mistakenly listenedto some in-depth Democracy Now reporting on the Global Warming summit as well,and was informed that we are WAY past any sort of "mitigation"timeline, and at this point it is going to be so catastrophic that only 1/10thof the current human population will survive.

More paralysis. More volcanoes erupting in my head.

Then I started breathing again, and talking myself down fromthe ledge as I have been doing since I was 8 years old, when it dawned on methat I was stuck in my sucky ass family situation until I was 18, and that wasit. So deal. Similar kind of thing, as far as my lizardbrain is concerned. I also remindedmyself that I am an Anthropologist with a Capital A, and I have Known This andA Great Many Other Horrible Things For A Very Long Time. But somehow, with getting married and havinga real job and a kid, those things ceased to terrify me like they oncedid. Or maybe I was just busy, gettingno sleep and working for slave wages because I HAD TO, not because it was someuppity Feminist Choice of mine. ForChrist's sake, what woman in her right mind would CHOOSE to work an additional40 hours or more, outside the home, while nursing and raising an infant??? Butthat's for another blog.

At any rate. Yes,I've known this for awhile. Theoretically, intellectually, conversationally, statistically, andoccasionally, when I'm not distracting my mind and body with caffeine and theinternet, even emotionally. Buttruthfully, I haven't let myself FEEL my feelings about this in almost 15years. Back in my 20's, I was quite theself-righteous asshole. What do you mean"was", you say? No,seriously. I would tell people that ifthey didn't adopt rather than selfishly have theirown children, they might as well slit their wrists at the same timebecause basically that's planetary suicide. And driving a car, on top of that? Are you kidding me? Why evenbother. Just kill yourself now.

If you study past civilizations for even a semester or two,you quickly learn that despite our immense, unwarranted hubris of being the"most advanced" civilization ever, what controls and dominates theentire Earth, we are seriously no more than a bunch of lucky yutzes, hanging onby the skin of our teeth. And the moreAdvanced we supposedly are, the less connected to Reality we actually are, asit turns out. ( I would argue that we'renot even advanced, but that's for another blog as well). It's not just Americans anymore, EVERYONEwants to think that they are the exception to the rule. That sure, we may be at the very tippy top ofthis here civilization pyramid- but the only place to go is UP, right? Or, to Space? No one thinks that it's all going to come crashing down. I get it. The Cahokians probably thought they were Kings of the World too, rightbefore it all collapsed and the survivors went back to hunting and foraging inthe woods. The Mayans thought that evenas they chopped down the last tree to burn for fuel within hundreds ofmiles. The Aztecs, shit they INVENTEDhubris on a grand scale- right before the Conquistadors showed up. Moctezuma was basically the George W. Bush ofhis time, sitting on an inherited/stolen throne, having no idea how to governhis vast territory, saying very little, and not making a helluva lotta sensewhen he did speak. Most of his peoplehated him too, and were sort of relieved when Cortez aka"Quetzalcoatl" appeared as if by magic, to liberate them all. How do I know this? I'm an anthropologist. One of my professorsgave me a button to wear in field school that said, "We have charts andgraphs to back up our data, so fuck off." Overlaid on a yellow smiley-facebackground.

But I digress.

The thing is, without electricity, and the means to producemy own, I am totally f*&&#@ perhaps even more so than a third-worlderwith a shack to her name- because chopping down trees for firewood is frownedupon in my established neighborhood. Thank God- the furnace was still working. And if it wasn't, we have these things calledhotels, and because I've spent the last ten years building a community offriends and neighbors- there are many people we probably could have stayedwith. But still. The point is, we aretotally at the mercy of the utility company, the electricians, and when itcomes right down to it- the owners of this 19th century place, because werent. Don't even get me started on theshit-storm of bad luck and poor decision making that led us to this place. The point is, we are effectively cut off fromthe means to make our own energy; e.g. keep ourselves warm, feed ourselves,care for ourselves- live our own lives. This is why I woke up the other night thinking about my high schoolfriend Joe Miller, and the prize-winning project he did for the Denver NaturalHistory Museum in 1987, titled "The Boneless Heifer." The contest theme was Your Vision of theFuture, and you had to illustrate as well as write about it. Joe, being a phenomenally talented artist aswell as a writer, showed the gradual transformation of a normal cow with legs,to something that resembled a big lump of meat and fat, with a hide, and ahead. Voila, the Boneless Heifer,genetically engineered by McDonald's. Because what are cows but future hamburgers for us to consume?

This is what I am afraid of people. Not that it might happen, but that it'salready happened. Are we merely fattenedcattle for the Kings of Industry to slaughter at will? Are we consumers, or are we beingconsumed? Are we citizens, or are wejust taxpayers, who only vote when our taxes get too high? Are we BonelessHeifers, or Spineless Humans? Lookaround. Decide for yourself.

So here we are, living life at the pinnacle of civilization,more cut-off from our food and means of energy production than ever before,more disconnected from each other than ever before, enslaved by convenience andcredit, more willing to believe the blow-hards on TV over our neighbors andfriends. I think we all know the onlyway to go is down. The question orproblem is, do we dive right off that cliff and hope the others' bodies mightcushion our fall? Or is there a way toease back down in a rational, sustainable, non-suicidal manner? This is the angel I'm wrestling with thesedays.

I'm pretty sure it's not a coincidence either that theAmerican/ developed world's diet is total crap, that keeps us sick, weak, andfuzzy - headed, so it's also no coincidence that I'm switching back to thePaleo diet, or a more natural human diet, right now and once and for all. More on that in my running blog - It may seem small, but taking back control ofwhat we eat is in no way small. Thinkabout it. If we're disconnected fromwhat goes into our bodies, and don't even know where it comes from, what it'sreally made of, what it really does to us, much less how to manufacture itourselves- then what the hell ARE we connected to, if anything? For starters, last year I learned how to makemy own granola. Don't laugh. It's simple, and store-bought granola costsso much I feel like a total ass buying it. Other things; I've been composting and recycling for years, but notreally growing much to feed myself besides tomatoes and herbs. The only way to really remedy this is to moveout of renter-ville and into some sort of house with a yard.

Hence, we're moving in with a friend at the end ofJanuary. She has a big ol' house andkids, and needs to rent out part of it, we need to save money, and practicetruly living in community. It's awin-win. One that most people wouldthink is insane, certainly at this point in our lives, but to me it sounds likethe F*&^ing Taj Majal. Stress-free-bliss. Money-savingmagic. Sure, we won't be there for toolong, but it's still a severe break from what's considered "normal"economic progress in a family's life.

My husband and I have talked about this for months, and weboth want to get off the hamster wheel of debt and consumption while goingnowhere, and live our true values as best we can. Live deliberately, as someone once said. Enough with the bullshit. We worked hard, are pretty good people, andstill we've been nothing but screwed by this system that favors drug-addictedtrustfunder retards over responsible, conscientious, law-abiding citizens- sofuck it. We'll still abide by the law(well, most of them) but we're not playing this game anymore, where we're thefattened, helpless cattle and The Man gets to use us as an income stream andottoman. Nope. Nor are we buying into that brainwashinghorseflop that this collapse is somehow all OUR fault, that if we were moremoral, or more responsible, or more clever, it never would have happened.

Even my Scottish, Presbyterian-bred husband agrees with menow that it's all bullshit.

So join with me sisthren and brethren in saying FUCK OFF tothe dehumanizing system that has conspired to enslave us all. I'll be posting here semi-regularly on how todo it and stay sane.

Heralding the Collapse of the Patriarchy since 1970

2011-12-03T20:25:00.001-08:00

I've been wanting to write more cogently about class warfare, the collapsing patriarchy with all its heavy accoutrements, and now the Occupy Wall Street movement that seems a long time coming to me- and wondering how to do it without sounding like just another blowhard asshole.
Then the other night, my husband had one of his vivid, cogent, "big" dreams - and wrote the main message of it down, as he is wont to do when a dream literally wakes him up. Plus, he has to get up at 4:30 am anyway, so the thoughts exploding in his head at the time might be a little more profound than if he'd slept in til let's say, 6 am.
The main message was: (and it was as if people were talking to him, and narrating this for him) "We stole the thing you were over-attached to and obsessed about. We recreated it for your own liberation. We took it apart and made art." And then he wrote below that, I LOVE this feeling, I want to LIVE here! Because if you know, or don't know, but the feeling you have in a dream is almost more important than the dream itself.
He wasn't scared of it. He wasn't even suspicious. He felt loved and liberated, all at the same time.

That's what I'm talkin' about.

This thing you, and I, and we are all obsessed with- I want to dismantle it, and rebuild it as tools for our own liberation. I want to take it apart and make art.
Easier said than done, sure. But I think I have to try. Whether it sounds like journalism one minute, or poetry, or a rant, or an interview, or just some quiet observations- I have to try. More so my own soul doesn't putrefy than any illusions I may have about "enlightening" anybody. I am going to try- to listen to that still, small voice that never gives up on me. What is telling me lately, ya know this having your own eco-friendly business is nice and all but um, have you forgotten the gifts you were given? They weren't all just for you and your own self-aggrandizement. They were to share.
Maybe I've said this before. Oh well. Nobody's listening anyway, so it bears repeating.

This movement, of Occupying everywhere, crystallizes so much of what I've been feeling and thinking for oh, most of my life I guess that it is very tempting to just let them do all the talking. But there are gaps, in their reasoning, rhetoric and genders, for one thing, and I reckon I'm the person to fill them. For another- why are all the white guys talking? Shut up already. We've heard from you. I don't need to be lectured on how to cross that color bridge of liberalism from a white guy. Just don't. Sorry.
For another, where are all the women? This movement is primed for women leaders and yet, I don't really see them or hear them. Maybe that's because the lens of the patriarchy is still warped towards the males, or maybe it's because the women, as usual, are working behind the scenes and not in front of the mics. I DON'T think it's because they're satisfied to be featured in the many photos of OWS, holding signs and looking cute as in: "Check out all these hot babe protestors. Doesn't it make you want to come on down and join us? You know that liberals have infamously loose morals, don't you? Just camp out with us and you're bound to get laid."
Maybe I'm over-analyzing that, but I don't think so.
I'm an anthropologist, and think everything should be put in its proper context, and then people should be reminded of that context early and often. So fuck you if you don't like it. (smiley face).

At any rate, I'm going to try, maybe even every day, to "report" or witness or possibly contribute something to this discussion, even if that's only humour. Some days it might be pompous. Some days it might be despairing and critical. And it will always, ALWAYS be sarcastic and full of hyperbole.
The difference with me is, my opinions are not hard and fast. I welcome discussion. I want to START discussions, and maybe finish a few. You are not allowed to read this without commenting. Seriously, I don't want to hear this bullshit of "oh, I just didn't have time and I don't want to create a profile just for comments." THen do it anonymously, assholes, but DO IT. Participate.
WAKE UP!
Have some breakfast.
Not just sugary cereal, something with protein and vegetables or fruit in it.
Remember, an army runs on its stomach.
You are going to need good energy to do good things. The world is changing fundamentally, like it or not, so we can either flail away until we're buried in muck, or we can dance into it.
I choose to dance.

Vote Yes on 300 or Move to China.

2011-10-26T20:40:00.001-07:00

I have just filled out my ballot for this year's City and County of Denver election, inking the "Yes" box on Ballot Question 300 with thick, black pen. If there was a "Hell Yes" on this one, I'd ink that in too. Basically it's a city ordinance that would mandate paid sick leave for all employees working within the boundaries of Denver. Let me repost the language exactly here so there's no confusion:

                       Shall the voters for the City and County of Denver adopt an ordinance that will provide that all employees (full-time, part-time and temporary) when they become within the geographic boundaries of Denver earn one hour of paid sick and safe time for every thirty hours worked, limited to seventy-two hours a year in the case of businesses with 10 or more total employees and forty hours in the case of businesses with fewer than ten total employees, to be used for themselves or to care for a family member (related by blood, marriage, legal adoption or affinity) in case of illness, need for preventative care or domestic violence needs, except that employees of new businesses with fewer than ten employees will not accrue paid sick and safe time until the business has been in operation for one year, and under said ordinance retaliation for use of paid sick and safe time will be prohibited and employers will be required to give notice to employees of their rights and keep records related to payment of paid sick time?

Yes vote means this will be passed and all workers get paid sick leave, No vote means No, everything stays the same.

In case you were confused.
Because despite the mild and fairly clear language of this ballot initiative, the Denver "business" community, (and by that I mean mostly large, chain restaurants that are head-quartered elsewhere), have grabbed the media's megaphone away from true small business owners, and are trumpeting the "news" that what 300 proponents REALLY want to do is send violent criminals on all-expense-paid vacations in the Bahamas to rehabilitate themselves.
I'm only exaggerating a little.
If you're like me, you didn't even know what Initiative 300 was all about when you first started getting mailers and fliI ers pleading with you to vote NO!! on this horrible, evil, ill-timed, stupid idea.
And if you're at all like me, that raises some eyebrows right off the bat. Since I hadn't heard of it, and yet there was this group that was already against it, in a big, loud way that made it obvious that they had money, my natural instinct was to be suspicious. My gut feeling that followed the instinct, and is based on experience as well as cynicism and prejudice, was that if the moneyed interests were totally against this thing, I was probably going to be for it. That's just how life has played out so far.

And that's why I wasn't going to spout off on this issue at first, but now, with the election less than a week away and b.s. coming fast and furious, I feel the need to contribute to this lopsided discussion in a big way. As a small business owner, and as a former employee of many, many, low-level positions that were full time and yet curiously had absolutely no paid time off or other benefitsperhaps I can offer a unique, yet universal perspective on the issue.

First of all, in full disclosure let me say that my small business has no employees, per se. It's basically me, and some independent contractors who help me out either on regular gigs that are assigned to them, or just when I need several extra pairs of arms. My business is eco-friendly landscaping, and landscape maintenance, and eco-friendly housecleaning, with some pet-care thrown in to keep it interesting. Having even "part-time" employees makes no sense for me because a large part of the work is seasonal, and the other half is just inconsistent enough to make the paperwork of having actual employees more trouble than it's worth. Plus, as a former independent contractor myself, I feel it's most beneficial to the worker this way. They get paid more per hour, and if they work efficiently and use their supplies wisely, they can make quite a bit more money overall- as opposed to having me take taxes, Social Security, Medicare, yada yada out of their paychecks before they even see it. Less paperwork and headache for me, more money for them, so it's all good.

I realize not all businesses can do this, and are in fact required to make everyone working for them an employee, else they get in big, big trouble with all sorts of government. At all of the small business classes and seminars I've ever taken, having employees is the number one fear that stymies entrepreneurs from the burrito guy to software start-ups. That's because it's terrifying, not only to navigate all the Federal, State, City and County regulations, but to have the responsibility for peoples' means of living, essentially. Your business plan may have looked like fool-proof gold on paper, with nothing but profits, Profits, PROFITS!! ad infinitum - but once you factor employees into the equation...it's like... oh, my.... where did all my money go?

So I get that. I'm not insensitive to the pains that small-business owners face on a daily basis, just to keep the doors open and everyone fed. Here's the thing. If you get past your white-knuckle, Come-to-Jesus-with-Capitalism fears as everyone must, there are scads of people ready and willing to show you how to write a business plan that includes employees where you can STILL make money and live your dreams. Employees are a fact of life. Suck it up and deal with it, is what I'm trying to say. And if you look around, there sure seem to be a lot of businesses with employees on the payroll that are doing just fine. My business is actually more of the exception than the rule. When I do have to, for legal and tax reasons, have employees rather than independent contractors, I know full well that I will not be able to treat these employees as independent contractors. In other words, they will be my responsibility, and one of the core responsibility of a business owner/founder is making sure the people who are doing all that work for you and earning all the moolah are well taken care of. In other words, sick leave is a basic right of every employee. Full-time, part-time, term-limited, temps, whatever. I don't care. You're an employee, that means you're under the umbrella of a larger entity that has agreed to profit from your labor, and in exchange for that, you get some basic job protections. Like sick leave, for Christ's sake.

Let me illustrate some examples. From 1998-2000, roughly, I was working full-time during the school-year as a substitute teacher for Denver Public Schools. Even though I had some long-term assignments and was considered staff at those schools, I got absolutely no benefits or paid leave of any kind. In fact, the first day of my first long-term assignment in an elementary school, as the Art/Music/Drama teacher, I had a doctor's appointment in the morning that I couldn't change, and so arrived at the school about 45 minutes past the bell. When I checked in at the front office, the secretary told me to wait a moment because the principal wanted to speak to me. I waited, and in the meantime some kids wandered in to see the nurse or something, and they were standing behind me. The principal came out of her office and commenced screaming incoherently almost immediately, and I assumed she was addressing the kids. I actually turned around and looked at the kids like, "what have you guys done to deserve THIS? Not that even a kid deserves to be addressed like this." And they just shook their terrified heads and looked right back at ME.   It was then I realized that the principal was screaming at me, like I was an errant 5th grader and not a full-grown, professional staff member. Now, most people, upon realizing this, may have turned on their heels and walked out of that school that instant- and I too, considered doing just that. She wound up her incoherent tirade with ".... and so I cannot HAVE this, do you understand me?" and I nodded my head not because I actually understood her, just because I wanted the screaming to stop. All the while thinking, I need this job. I need this job, I need this job. Just get through today and they might decide to keep you, and steer clear of the crazy woman.
I don't think it matters that the principal was in fact a rage-addict who had un-medicated, untreated bipolar disorder. It also doesn't matter that I grew up in a household with the same sort of untreated psychosis coming from one or both parents, depending on the day, and so to survive I learned to do whatever it takes to appease the crazy people, if even for a moment. No one should have to put up with that kind of abuse just because they desperately need a job. In this case, the office and the principal of the school had been forewarned of my doctor's appointment, and knew that I would be late that day because of it. And still, what it came down to was, put up with this abuse, or hit the road. She got away with treating her staff like that (not just me) because everyone there needed those jobs very badly, and because the policies in place let her do it. Clearly, if she wasn't treating her own profound mental illness, she sure as hell wasn't going to acknowledge anyone else's.
Now, I don't know if you've ever been around kids, and lots of them at once, but they are pretty much snot-nosed, walking vectors of disease. It's a good thing many of them are cute. After my auspicious first day, it only took 3 more days for me to come down with the most hellacious cold/flu/sinus infection I've ever had in my life. I took one day off, but when I still wasn't any better after the weekend, I had to make the tough call again of going in sick/feeling like utter crap, or losing my job. So I went in. I could barely speak, much less yell at the kids all day in a foreign language, as I was required to do, and somehow made it through that day. And the next. And the next. Lucky for me, I infected so many of the kids in those first few contagious days that their numbers dwindled steadily over the following few weeks. Making my job somewhat easier. I remember speaking to the gym teacher at lunch one day, telling him how sick I was but I came in anyway because I had the sneaking suspicion that the principal would have told me to not come back at all if I called in sick- and he said, without hesitation, "oh yeah, she would have fired you on the spot. This is great that you came in- it shows her that you really want the job."   I looked at him like, oh so you come from a dysfunctional family too?   It was then I realized that I was in a sort of insane asylum.
Because this is utterly psychotic, people.
Do you really want sick, contagious people teaching your kids? Serving their lunches? Serving YOUR lunches? Making change at the grocery store? Stocking your food? Cleaning up your table? Driving trucks all hopped-up on flu medicine because they have no choice?
I didn't think so. Even if workers aren't deathly ill on the job and coughing in your soup, the effect that no paid leave has on employees is demoralizing to say the least. We have ourselves an overworked, stressed-to-the-max, exhausted workforce at the end of their mental, emotional and physical ropes because they are terrified of taking a sick day lest they lose their jobs. And many of these people are operating heavy equipment.

No, this isn't China. Yet. But it might as well be. Several times I've wanted to ask my employers of the last ten years, "oh- did you think you had outsourced me and this position to Southeast Asia or something? Because I'm still here, and this is America. Not a rug-making sweatshop in the 3rd world."   When I was a temporary/seasonal/contract worker back in my archaeology days, the treatment was sometimes better, sometimes worse. Quite often we were told to work faster, and more accurately, for less money, because whoever was in charge basically couldn't do a budget to save their lives, and /or were not accustomed to jumping in and helping out. But even then, we got semi-paid sick leave, or an accrual of "comp" hours that we could use however we wanted, as long as we got our work done. Still, women and minorities were (and probably still are) the most vulnerable workers in the field, because project directors are watching like hawks for any sign of weakness that could possibly justify them firing and replacing you with a white, male crony. So because of that, many times I went out in sub-freezing temperatures on surveys with a head cold at the very least, and without much sleep. (shivering in one's tent for 8 hours because the project director is too cheap to pay for motels does not count as sleep). Thank god I wasn't interacting with the public too much back then.   There would have been a swine-flu-wide swath of disease cut from Winslow, Arizona all the way to Tucumcari, with my name on it.
I have more stories just like this, and I bet you do too. It may be too late to pass this measure, this year. But we will get some kind of humane law passed at some point, and hopefully it won't take another e-coli or listeria epidemic to do it.

Addendum to the Jobs Blow, I mean Blog

2011-09-20T15:51:00.000-07:00

Since I published the last blog about BlowJobs for Peace anda Better Economy, I've gotten a lot of feedback, or flak, mostly from peopletoo cowardly to leave a written comment with their name attached to it. The overarching gist of these non-publishedcomments has been, basically, that it sounds like an idea Bill Clinton wouldhave come up with, nudge nudge, wink wink, and of course "I" wouldnever do that. So it seems that I needto set y'all straight, yet again.

Let me be absolutely clear on this point: if ANY of y'all,and I'm including John Tesh, Barack Obama, the Pope, Chaz Bono, Bert, Ernie,and Barbara Streisand in this- got your dick sucked by anyone who was notsupposed to be sucking your dick, you MIGHT after much duress andself-flagellation eventually confess to it, but the FIRST thing you would do,is lie about it.

Do I need to repeat that? Really? Okay. Y'all know this, deep down inside, but peoplewho pick on Bill Clinton as the Arch Enemy of Fidelity and Truth raise redflags and eyebrows for me. Because um,as I said, if y'all got your wieners sucked, blown, fondled, touched, or evenaroused by someone who was NOT supposed to be doing any of those things- theFIRST thing you would do it is lie about it, and probably the 2nd, 3rd, 4th,5th, 6th and 7th things you would do is lie about it, and only when your ownpersonal version of Ken Starr comes along would you actually, if EVER tell thetruth and beg for forgiveness. And thatmight be the 29th thing that you do about the illicit blowjobs. Odds are, you would be doing this confessingin a completely abysmal state of remorse, with either paparazzi flashbulbsgoing off all around you, surrounded by an angry mob made up primarily of yourfamily, at the funeral of a loved one who would be extremely disappointed inyou if they knew the truth, or with a gun pointed to your head. Confessions don't usually come on a Saturdayafternoon after a leisurely round of golf.

As the appropriately named Republican Majority Leader DickArmey said when asked in 1998 how HE would expect to be treated by the pressand Congress if the accusations Bill Clinton was facing were leveled athim: "Listen, there would BE nopress conference or hearings if I had done these things. I would be lying in a pool of my own blood,with Mrs. Armey standing over me holding a shotgun, yelling, "Teach me howto re-load this thing, you sunnofabitch!"

And then 3 weeks later, Dick Armey was caught in his own sexscandal. And several people in Texas hadthe gall to be surprised.

What I'm saying is, there but for the grace of God go y'all,and don't you forget it.

The other side of all this feigned self-righteous horrorabout the illicit dick-sucking is, of course, the inevitable blaming of thesuck-er rather than suck-ee. I evenchimed in at the time, calling Monica Lewinsky the "Malinche of ourtimes" and blaming her for the Republican takeover in 2000. It may be true that she had something to dowith the temporary downfall of the Democratic Party and the loss of the WhiteHouse to a bunch of guys who can barely wipe their own arses, but eviltemptress? Hardly. Just a very stupid girl who fell in love witha guy who took advantage of her adulation and used it to fluff up his own ego,at the cost of (very nearly) his family and his job. And why? He admitted, because he could get away with it at the time. Or as the Germans say, "when the dickgets hard, the mind goes soft." Hewasn't thinking with his brains, in other words. Or rather, only with one part of his brain,known to us anthropologists as the Reptilian Cortex- or in commoners' parlance,the Lizard Brain.

So please, all you Bill Clinton haters doing your littleSuperiority Dance - enough with the self-aggrandizing moral superioritybullshit. Either have the balls to leaveyour names with your comments if any, or just slink back to your dark caves whereyou came from, and leave the rest of us imperfect humans alone. I've got a blowjob scheduled for 3 o'clockand I don't have time for this shit. :)

I Had a Dream- About Jobs.

2011-08-31T11:04:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, prior to our Mayoral election here in Denver actually, I had one of those vivid, memorable dreams that you have right before waking up. When I woke up, I felt disgusted with myself and with society, as usual.
No it was not THAT kind of dream.
After a few minutes of consciousness that I spent trying to sort out what exactly had just occurred in the back of my head, the icky feeling gradually subsided into laughter. I told my husband about the dream, who also started chuckling and even said supportively, "I think you're onto something, babe."
Feeling much less dirty and sinful, I also shared this dream with my chiropractor and good friend Zach, whom I saw later that day. I knew he wouldn't judge me, because this is the man who once advised me, in serious tones, on what to get Bruce for his birthday: "Steak and a blowjob. That's all guys want. We're easy."
So when I told Zach about this dream, he started cackling hysterically and shouted, "That's BRILLIANT Suzy! You should run for Mayor on this platform!"
Thus encouraged, I still dithered about writing it down in a blog, because the Mayor's race was turning somewhat nasty, and I didn't want to add fuel to the fire (such a thing, taken out of context, would be considered as ABSOLUTELY FACTUAL by Fox news and most of our local media). And I'm glad I didn't, because the campaign got even nastier, with the Republitards blowing all sorts of smoke up the public's arse about one of the Democratic candidate's "Possible" ties to a prostitution ring, in order to draw attention away from their guy's actual misdeeds in the stock market.

So what was this earth-shaking dream?
Well, it's about jobs, people. Bottom line.
I dreamnt that I was returning to Denver after a long trip overseas, and the mayoral election had happened about a month before. I had heard that a woman was elected for the first time, and that she was very liberal and innovative, but that's all I'd heard. Walking from my flight's gate to baggage claim, I noticed that the airport looked different. Some of the news stand and toiletry shops had been replaced, and the shoe-shine booths now had curtains or cubicle-like walls around them. Except there was no shoe-shining going on in those booths. In fact, riding on one of the escalators, I had a perfect bird's eye view of EXACTLY what was going on. Several men were sitting in what looked like barber's chairs, fully clothed from the waist up- some with their boxers still on, quite nonchalantly receiving oral sex from scantily-clad, attractive young women. A sign on the booth said, "Introductory Special! $20!"
In the dream, I went over to the woman who was standing just outside the booth, shouting "Twenty Dollars to Make you Holler!" like a carnival barker, and asked her just what was going on. Not in a prison-warden kind of way, just in a curious and slightly aghast kind of way. She explained very matter-of-factly that as one of her first acts, the new mayor legalized blow-jobs much in the same way that medical marijuana was legalized in Colorado, and new businesses were popping up all over. They were thrilled to get a space at the highly-coveted airport concession, where a steady stream of customers flowed by nearly 24-hours a day. The proprietor pointed to a storefront across the way that was currently being remodeled as their permanent space. "Once that's finished we can accommodate over 20 customers at a time- but we'll also have these little kiosks scattered around the airport, on every concourse, for those people that are in a hurry." Next door to their space, another storefront was being remodeled, apparently for the same purpose. Next to that was a McDonald's.
"Looks like you already have competition," I remarked to the woman.
"Yeah," she said, "But we're not too worried- they weren't able to get the license for kiosks, and quite frankly, we're better." She smiled. I nodded.
Then in the dream I was suddenly heading home in a taxi, and along the way, in every strip-mall, historic block and new-lofts-with-retail-below, jobs were being created, and in fact, done. And not just on Colfax.
I gaped. Then I woke up.

And as I said, it took me a few minutes, but I started to realize what a huge economic boon and social cure-all legalized blow-jobs could become. Much in the same way that "medical" marijuana dispensaries have filled every empty, or floundering, commercial space in Colorado and employed thousands of previously unemployable stoners, the BJ biz could employ, rather than incarcerate, thousands of feckless young men and women. In my real, waking life I remember a police officer from District 6 speaking at a neighborhood meeting on the plague of prostitution in our area. He stated quite clearly that most of the "johns" were married, suburban dads looking primarily for oral sex, ostensibly because their wives wouldn't perform that service. Their impound lot was overflowing with johns' cars because of this, and the jails were overflowing with prostitutes who would be back on the streets, working, within 24 hours of getting arrested. Besides, he said, when they cracked down on street prostitution, the hookers would just go to the massage parlors for "jobs," and when the police cracked down on the massage parlors, the hookers would just go back to the streets. It was like squeezing a balloon, he said.
Because of Denver's somewhat lax prostitution laws, there wasn't much they could do.
At the time we were living half a block off Colfax Avenue, in a lovely little neighborhood between City Park and the main drag, which was used in the summers by prostitutes and their customers. Our alley was a popular place for business. Every morning we would walk out to our car and find used condoms stuck to the asphalt, mere inches from our back gate. We were lucky though. Some of our neighbors would come home and find a couple or two in the act on their front porches. One was even told to "wait a minute" when he politely asked them to leave.
My husband and I started joking that as the host house, we should get a cut. Maybe leave a locked box nailed to the back fence, with little envelopes for monetary deposits- on the honor system of course- just like the State Parks do?
But seriously. Even though we don't live there anymore, and the worst of the prostitution was over by 2004 (economic downturn, dontcha know), apparently the problem-solving part of my brain has been hard at work on this dilemma ever since.
For those of you who've been living under a rock, or up in Ward, or somewhere other than Colorado since 2008- this legalizing of Medical Marijuana thing has really taken off. Much more so than those of us who voted for it thought it would. Dispensaries now out-number Starbucks in Denver, and they're showing no signs of slowing down.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it's not that hard to get a medical marijuana prescription. As a result, there are zillions of customers, millions of dispensaries, and billions of dollars being made right here in the Centennial State- in the middle of an otherwise limp economy. One might even call it flaccid.
I've mentioned the previously vacant commercial properties that now house thriving businesses, and the employment opportunities provided by medical marijuana outlets; the retail staff, the growers, the bakers of yummy mj treats, the modern-day geishas at the ready to make your whole experience more pleasant... but really all that would pale in comparison to legalized blow-jobs.
First off, regulation would have to be tighter, for obvious health reasons. So "monitors" for every bj performed would be on duty, ideally a person with some nursing experience, to make sure the blower and the jobber were using every hygienic precaution. I don't have any experience with dental dams, but apparently they work. Whatever. Once this is legalized, necessity is the mother of invention, and I'm sure the future Bill Gates or Martha Stewart of BJ safety is out there somewhere, waiting to realize his/her moment.
Then there are the service providers themselves. Of course, they'd have to be at least 18 (preferably 21), disease free, non-smokers, non-meth heads, etc etc.... so we'd need a whole new regulatory agency, armed with kajillions of doctors and nurses and so forth, to license these people. These young men and women (or old, if you get off on that) would be making decent wages, in a safe environment, rather than working the streets or throwing their lives away in corporate America*. (where they would be doing much the same thing, mind you, except not paid as well, and treated much more poorly.) Last but not least, there would be the cashiers and "teasers," or people working to keep the cash flow of these places up and steady.
I'm not even mentioning the tangential revenue generated by advertising firms, sign-makers, lingerie boutiques, barber-chair retro-fitters, and manufacturers of anti-bacterial moist towelettes. The potential benefits to our economy simply cannot be dismissed, or spat out as distasteful. Personally I would not partake, and hope my husband wouldn't either, but I can't imagine a kiosk or storefront could be any grosser than a thousand used condoms stuck to our parking space every day.
In order to revitalize the country and rebuild our former greatness, we need a "Whatever it Takes" mentality, that thinks outside the box.
It's time to get serious about jobs. As Hedwig would say, "mostly the jobs they call blow." Or as I frequently mutter under my breath, "Use your f*&cking imaginations people." Put aside that Puritanical facade for 5 minutes and think about all the children going hungry tonight because their mom or dad's job got shipped to Mexico by some insensitive corporation.
Imagine instead a thriving, local economy that is based on real connections with people and literally throbbing with life. After all, this is about jobs.

Come to Jesus, I am not my possessions

2011-03-26T17:25:00.000-07:00

Come to Jesus, I am not my possessions
This is a big CTJ, one that I stubbornly (thank you, German ancestors) and hot-headedly (thank you Black Irish, Basque, and Mohawk ancestors) have resisted and been in some sort of denial about for many years. No wonder it was like passing a pumpkin when it finally came about.
My name is S________, and I have been in a codependent relationship with my house for 10 years now. I realize now that I do not have the power, nor the obligation, to save this house, and that continuing to live in denial in this relationship is unhealthy for both of us. I do not have the funds to fix the foundation, or do the many other repairs that need doing, even if we had a willing/able neighbor to split the cost. I do not and will not have the funds to float said non-willing, non-able neighbor his half of the costs of the repairs. I will not, most likely, win Lotto just in time to save the house and save ourselves (supposedly). I am not and will never be willing to sacrifice every other goal in my life just to save this house. I will no longer contort my life around this 104 year old, 3 story, altered Denver Square, crumbling stucco, house. I have no duty to be the one who saves it from crack-heads, shady real estate investors, bad tenants, and irresponsible-beyond-belief trust-funder dope-heads who choose to spend their money on drugs rather than take care of the house.
A home is supposed to shelter and comfort you, not cause you endless stress and anxiety and borderline homicidal fantasies. (ok, not borderline. They were epic-ly homicidal.) It did shelter us, splendidly, for a few years total. But any relationship should be a give and take, with the balance on the positive side.
Sorry Detroit Street, but this relationship has been toxic for more than half of it.
Sure, when we met and fell in love, things were great. It was our first place together. Our first place that we OWNED. We had legendary parties there. (before the child came along) We stored a lot of crap there for free, ours and that of friends in transit. We took in at least 4 stray cats and 2 stray dogs. Our beautiful daughter was conceived there, and it was her first home until she was 2 years old. She still remembers it fondly though. We have some fantastic memories there, and some pretty awful ones. Which I will not reiterate, because I am trying to forgive everything about it.
Recently we put the house back on the market, and it is most likely going to be a short sale. A week before, I had my friend James come over and do some energetic clearing of the place, and of me (his idea) because as it turns out- um, yeah. It was like 75% my energy that was keeping things stuck, or at an impasse, with the house. The neighbor’s half is going on the foreclosure auction block in a few weeks, but he is still squatting there. James very neutrally explained, “because he’s still here, I’ll have to come back every 10 days or so and re-clear the house.” That’s one hell of a diplomatic way to put it. He also explained forgiveness in a new, totally refreshing way that resonates with me. As he put it, imagine forgiveness as "allowing someone, or something, safe passage THROUGH your place of judgment.” (My emphasis on THROUGH).
Your place of judgment, aka the Ego, aka Lizard-brain, sees things in black and white and is really just trying to protect you from all danger. If something has hurt you once, best not ever go near that thing again. But things frequently get stuck there because of all the hurt, anger, rage and pain that they’ve caused. Your lizard brain just can’t let go of them. And if you can’t let go of something…. Well, things are probably going to stay stuck. So this is how I assuaged my lizard-brain about the house/neighbor situation:
Me and my heart of Loving Kindness: Dear one, if we do not allow this individual and this whole experience to safely pass through our place of judgment, then he will STAY – for who knows how long. And we don’t want that, now do we, dear one?
Lizard brain: Rrrrrrrrrr.
MMHLK: Do you see?
Lizard brain: RRRRRRrrrevenge!!!
MMHLK: No, no, honey. Believe me. Remember what’s happened to all the people who’ve fucked you over in the past? All the sexually-harassing bosses? All the corrupt workplaces? All the stalkers and bad boyfriends? Hmmm?
Lizard Brain: rrrrreeellllll…… they did get what was coming to them. Without us having to do the work. But that was so--- unsatisfying. I didn’t get to punch anyone.
MMHLK: I know, I know. But that’s what those churchy people mean when they refer to the Seven Deadly Sins- God simply says, “Vengeance is mine.” As in, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about it, or pollute your hearts with it. I will smack down, smite, and otherwise seriously fuck with anyone who breaks my laws. What goes around comes around. Have faith. The Universe always comes through, doesn’t it?
Lizard Brain: Yes but- Can’t I just hit like, one person?
MMHLK: When the time really comes for that, I will let you off-leash.
Lizard Brain: Promise?
MMHLK: Promise.

He made me pinky-swear actually. My lizard-brain is a five-year-old boy. I need to treat him as such. So that’s that. It’s no coincidence, I think, that for the first 8 weeks of this year I was helping to clean out, clear out, clean, clear, and otherwise evacuate my parents’ old house in Parker after my brother got them moved to Arizona.
I haven’t spoken to them in 10 years. (see other blogs for more on that) The deal was, my brother would do the front end, and as soon as they were at least 1,000 miles away from me, I could clean up the mess. Besides, I’m a professional cleaner now, so I could approach this with some professional detachment, like any other job. But still, it was a helluva lot more work than I anticipated. At any rate, it’s done. It’s not only on the market, it’s under contract, and we’re just waiting for the banks’ approval. (another short-sale).
And yes, to answer your question, it was very healing for me. Very healing to THROW OUT all the junk that they’d stored, squirreled away and sequestered for decades, rather than make their living relationships a priority. My parents valued their stuff more than their children, and the thing is, their stuff is absolute junk. I am not kidding. There were waste baskets in there dating to 1968, and coated with grime I remember putting on there in my childhood. No exaggeration.
We put all my mom’s old artwork and supplies on the front porch, and on the FREE part of Craig’s list- and it was decimated within a day. Decimated. The nice neighbors very nicely helped clean up the debitage and threw it in trash bins. A truck-load of stuff went to the VVA. I took everything of value in a moving van back to our place. Sold some of it, gave a lot away, put a lot in storage in the garage or basement. Much is going to HazMat disposal.
The whole experience made me pity them more than hate them or fear them. From what I know, pity is just to the right of hatred. It's the same way I feel about Republicans now. So they too, are being allowed safe passage through my place of judgment, at last. It helps that they are 1,000 miles away and otherwise physically, mentally and spiritually completely unable to show up on my front porch someday and somehow force me, at emotional gunpoint, to take responsibility for all their mistakes and failures. I needed to see and feel just how incapable of that they really are though. I'm kinesthetic. That's how I roll.

And now I can roll along much more easily, because I am not my possessions. I am not my parents. All I am is free. And grateful.

The Monkey's Paw

2010-06-20T13:57:00.001-07:00

This is a very long, drawn-out excuse for having writer’s block. I blame the Monkey’s Paw. And our stupid, Puritanical society that teaches us it’s evil to wish for anything you want. ....

You know what I’m talking about. That horrid short story by W.W. Jacobs, circa 1902, about a family who receive a magical monkey’s paw from India that is supposed to grant the bearer 3 wishes. The first thing they wish for is money. And guess what? They get it- in the form of a death payment from their son’s company because he’s just been killed in an industrial accident. Second wish: They want their son back alive. Guess what? Sonny-boy crawls up out of the grave, still horribly mutilated and yes, a zombie , and comes a’knockin at the door. They use the third wish to make him go away. ....

Pretty horrific stuff. Perfectly illustrates our Puritanical society’s neuroses about positivity, wishing, wanting, desire, dreams, etc. I seriously don’t fucking get it. And yet I am ensnared by it, like the rest of us. My Mohawk ancestors have virtually the polar opposite views on dreams and desires. They knew that dreams have a lot to do with wish fulfillment, and if your wishes or desires aren’t fulfilled during your waking life, your normally innocuous dreams and desires would fester into something ugly. So to counteract this potential social disruption of unhappy, unfulfilled people charging around the longhouse wreaking passive-aggressive havoc everywhere, they instilled the tradition of speaking their dreams aloud to the people who might be able to grant their unconscious desires. For example, if I dreamt that I was wearing that beautiful shell necklace that my best friend had, I might tell her about this and by social “law” or custom, she’d have to give the necklace to me. At least for awhile, until she dreams that she has it back. Same goes for when you dream about sleeping with someone else’s spouse.

I’m not kidding. To keep social harmony, you’d have to grant your tribe-mate’s wishes if you possibly could. There’s even a few stories involving the granting of non-tribe mate’s wishes, such as the British dude who figured this custom out rather quickly, for a white guy, and told one of the chiefs that he’d dreamed the Mohawk gave all their land to the British. D’oh! I think we had to have a council about that one, but you know what happened in the long run.

Anyhoo. We all know that repressed desires turn into ugly horrible monsters if they’re not expressed in a healthy way, so why the overlay of Puritanical bullshit, here in 2010? Just confirms my belief that my ancestors should have filled those pasty-faced bastards full of arrows before they even got off that damn boat. This is how the bullshit manifests in my poor heed, and perhaps in yours: I have a deep-seated fear of horrible things happening to the people I love if I get what I wish for, so better not even wish for them. And really, better not even think positive, because that could get me into trouble. In a nutshell, I still believe on some level that if I do finish this script, win an Oscar, become rich and famous- or really, achieve my potential in any other way- my husband will die a horrific death. And maybe other people too.

Sick, enit?

That’s what holds me back from going ballz-out. ....

But then, there’s this quote from the BIBLE of all places. Thomas (the former doubter, I believe) was talking to Jesus, and Jesus said to him, “If you bring out what is within you, what you bring out will set you free. If you do not bring out what is within you, what you do not bring out will destroy you.”

Other parts of our culture have different ways of saying this. One I especially like is that your wound, whatever it is, is also the source of your gift- whatever that is. All of your hurts and suffering – they are also the fount of freedom for you. However if you continue in the victim posture, and nurture the festering of that wound rather than the healing of it- or rather, think of it always in a negative fashion rather than a positive one, aka “what could I learn from this?” – then the wound will rot you out from the inside. You know people who’ve chosen that path. Lord knows I do.

What with all this Secret stuff going around and the Law of Attraction entering into the common parlance of our daily lives, these beliefs fly in the face of our unconscious, pasty-faced Puritans who’ve taught us from day one that Providence decides who deserves to get good things and who should be burned at the stake- not us humans. It’s predestination and there’s nothing we can do about it.

We grow up and we all know that’s hogwash, and horribly outdated, and yet unconsciously we all still deeply believe it, and follow it’s unspoken law.

Well, I’ve said this before but it bears repeating. Fuck that noise.

My non-Puritanical, Earth-centered Mohawk/Basque/Black Irish/Stubborn German/Stalwart Scandinavian soul says otherwise. Lately I’ve had a mini-epiphany on how to bring forth this script, or opus or whatever it is so that it doesn’t destroy me: since it feels like I’ve been pregnant with this thing for over 12 years, if I want to give birth to it, nurture it, coax it out of the womb- I have to prepare a nest. A very nice, cozy nest. Something the polar opposite, almost, of what I have now for a workspace. It needs to be organized, but not sterile. Useful, and comfortable. Plenty of space for stretching out my imagination so I don’t feel hemmed in and distracted by clutter. Lots of delicious, inspiring images and quotes up on the walls. Maybe even a tapestry hung up to demarcate the space as a SPECIAL, SACRED, BIRTHING ZONE.

Right now I share this space with a clothes dryer, so this could be complicated. However in the summer we rarely use the thing (clotheslines rock) so….. I’m thinking, candle and incense stand.

If a certain someone {{squeeeak}} comes to nanny for us, we have to rearrange stuff down here and make it livable anyway soooooo…. Perfect excuse.

Aaahhhh, I feel better already, thinking these thoughts instead of dreadful, limiting ones. If I had a monkey’s paw, I’d bend the middle finger so it sticks straight up, and I’d bend all the other fingers down. Then I’d stick that fucker right on top of my computer.

Andale!

Read more: http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendId=171200606#ixzz0rQeDDMkj

Policy Creationists

2010-02-02T11:15:00.000-08:00

It's a new year and I've been cleaning out my email inbox and unsubscribing from a few
things that are either redundant, don't serve me, or piss me off. I was rather surprised
to find this group on that list, as we slouch towards health care reform in this schizophrenic country of ours.
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2009/12/21/10-reasons-to-kill-the-senate-bill/

That's right, my ultra-progressive pinko friends, Fire Dog Lake. I'm done with them, and mostly for the post/email campaign action they sent out right before the Senate version of the Healthcare bill was signed. Maybe it's a combination of lack of time, lack of sleep, bullshit overload, or what fundraisers call "constituent exhaustion" but this thing was the fucking straw that broke this camel's back. After mulling it over a few days,an epiphany came to me in a bubble of coherent thought during my usual early-morning, pre-caffeinated haze.

Here it is. These people are the equivalent of Creationists, but with policy. They don't believe in Evolution. They are dogmatically, dyed-in-the-wool, inextricably bound to the idea of everything, and everybody of worth, being born perfect, and remaining perfect throughout their immortal lives. Or springing from the forehead of the father/mother God, fully armored and ready for battle, if you prefer the Greek version. But more than that, they don't believe in Evolution at all, as applied to everyday life. That it exists, and that things can change dramatically from what they were in the beginning, (toad-like things crawling out of the muck) to something that is indescribably beautiful and/or ugly and yet perfect because it is perfectly adapted to its environment, and also able to change as the environment changes.

Nope. Not this bunch. For them, a bill has to be the faultless creation of an omniscient God, preferably a beneficent dictator that they elected, whose actions are the perfectly timed distillation and shimmering result of this groups' cacophonous dreams and desires, shouted up to him/her via prayer and email.
No, I did not just compare Obama to the Messiah.
But maybe they did. Or really wanted him to live up to that impossible ideal.
And now, as it turns out, he's just human. And quite possibly, an imperfect politician, as well as a good man, loving husband and father.
But God? No. Our country just isn't set up that way. Even if Jesus himself were at the helm, He would have to defer to Congress on many things, including the price of salt and sorghum, and health care.
As an anthropologist, you know why this gets under my skin. To me it's plain as day that everything in its current state has evolved to that state, and will continue to evolve, or die. Even extinction is part of evolution. Nothing sprang forth from anywhere full-blown- it's all been an incredibly long, painful, beautiful process.
If you're a Creationist, you believe God created Earth and the Heavens in 7 days, and they were perfect and full-formed from the get-go. Much as they'd like to think of themselves in this way, our Congress Critters are not perfectly formed, much less God-like. Trust me, if a Congress of 459+ people had created the Earth rather than a single, all-knowing God, it would also be a watered-down, trite and hackneyed, though very well-intentioned, version of what we have now. Grizzly bears would not be allowed to eat themselves silly every salmon run, the Nile might make several jerry-mandered turns through Africa so every district gets a shot at the water, and flowers might have to hold a yearly convention with the bees so that everyone's on the same page. It would be bureaucratic pandelirium. So sure, I see the appeal of just having a dictator lay down the law and say, My way or the highway, you ignorant sluts.
But look around- everything here evolved on its own, and in concert with everything else around it, and as a result we have harmony. Well, we're fucking with the harmony, but underlying everything, I believe, is balance and harmony.

It's more than just my anthropologist's brain that's pissed off though. Our dear
friend Lindy died of a preventable, treatable form of cancer because she had
no health insurance, and therefore no health care, for a critical year, even though she was working full-time. I don't think she died so that a bunch of rich white kids who went to Ivy League schools could build their careers off her "story," while simultaneously launching their versions of Utopia and standing on shiny marble pilasters of Principle, for Christ's sake. If she is saying anything to us from beyond the grave, it is probably "Do something" and not "We Need More Sacrifices for The Cause," because, um, we don't. And she'd also probably say, Enjoy yourself, and Listen to more Pink Floyd.

In short, I've had with dogmatism and ideology, and I'm going to be pretty godamned dogmatic about that from now on. Be warned, all you list-serv masters around the globe. The legs of my proverbial in-box are slamming shut. Only the noblest of missives will get through.

Dressers

2009-11-23T21:03:00.000-08:00

Many of you already know, but many of you don’t because you were raised by a goddamn pack of hyenas, but dressers are a hallmark of civilized life.

Dressers. You know, like, the things with drawers that you put your clothes in, dude.

It don’t matter if all you have in your dresser is a bunch of 20-year-old concert t-shirts, your underwear of choice (if any) and some holey socks- if you even have a dresser, e.g. something besides milk crates and boxes to put your clothes in- you are therefore civilized.

If not, you may be homeless, or a college student, or simply choose to live like a homeless college student /animal because “yer clothes need to be FREE man! Free! Like, no constraints of wooden pseudo-categorization and subliminal attachment to class and status, man. “ *

This brings up a good point. Rich kids, aka trust-funders, who don’t USE their dressers as an act of “rebellion” against Mummy and Daddy don’t count. They HAVE dressers, so therefore, unfortunately, they belong to civilized society. Just because they leave all their clothes on the floor, clean and dirty, doesn’t mean there isn’t a 700 year old mahogany family heirloom just begging to hold their designer undies.

However, for more than a year now, two or more people in this small family of mine have not had dressers. We sold my daughter’s changing table/dresser last summer at our garage sale, thinking we’d immediately replace it with something better. We put her clothes in the cute little cloth-lined wicker baskets she already had, plus boxes I snagged from work. Months went by.

My husband hasn’t had a dresser since I forced him to give it away, during the move from our old house to this one, because it was an ancient, ‘70’s era hand-me-down from my parents and I was trying to clear the bad ju-ju. We thought we’d get him one, or get us both a big one to share, almost immediately. You know what happened. Months went by. He stored his underwear first on the floor, and then in boxes, on the floor of my daughter’s closet, our closet being too tiny to accommodate his stuff.

I was the only one with a dresser for a long time. And it was tiny, by today’s standards, and to my eyes, hideous. It had belonged to my mother when she was in high school, so its original provenience was Lincoln, Nebraska, the 1950’s. It was a maple stained, possibly even maple wood 4-drawer little number, of a style popular in the mid-century. Not too “modern” looking, but not too old-fashioned either. The drawer pulls were desperately trying to be Colonial, or Federalist, and even had a fake patina of age on their cheap brass veneers. Two of them had committed suicide sometime in the 90’s, so thankfully I only had to bear the ugliness of the other two.

It had gone through at least 5 college-era moves with me, and had the scratches and stains to prove it. For a long time it was my night stand, and I was happy to use it as that since the tomato crate I had for that purpose was busted, and too small. In my 20’s, I was grateful to have it, since most of the rest of my furniture consisted of the aforementioned crates, and a futon. I couldn’t afford anything else, and it even looked “cute” with a table runner thrown over it and afternoon sunlight hitting my jewelry case/cigar box just right. In my 30’s, I still had the damn thing, still couldn’t afford to replace it, and was no longer speaking to my parents. I wanted the thing dead, gone, or set on fire. Many were the times when I contemplated leaving it in the alley to rot a good five minutes before the local scavengers picked it up. Many were the trips to Goodwill and Salvation Army where I very nearly gave the thing away. Even to replace it with an equally hideous, formica-coated-particle board off-gassing relic from the 70’s would have been better, because it wouldn’t have all the emotional baggage of my abusive family.

Now that I near 40, and am properly medicated, my heart is turning towards healing rather than bitterness. My focus is not so much on revenge, or reparations (which will never happen) but on transformation. Mostly out of curiosity, as in; seeing how it would make me feel, I decided that instead of donating the thing (when we NEED dressers, hence, stupid) or setting it on fire, or chopping it up with my landscaping axe, I would refinish the thing for my daughter. Cover up all the scratches and water stains with white paint, put some handsome “Restoration Hardware” style silver knobs on it- and voila- maybe it wouldn’t heal the relationship with my family, but it might heal my relationship with IT, and all hand-me-down furniture.

And this transformation thing- it does invite me. I’ve managed to transform my relationship to Disney movies as my daughter now watches and loves them. Yes, me, the so-called “raging feminist with a Marxist agenda” (whatever the fuck that means.) Maybe it’s the medication, again, but as I watch Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and even the Barbie versions of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker (which are, seriously, not that bad) - I realize they’re all about transformation. And that is not a bad message at all. Any little girl can be, or already IS a princess. Kindness and love are tremendously powerful. Opening you r heart and your mind can change the world. It’s really not about the dresses and tiaras, although the outfits are a fabulous, visual and tactile metaphor for the transformation that has taken place inside the characters.

It’s a daily struggle for me to transform myself from the wretched victim of abuse that I was, to the fabulous babe I know I’m destined to be. I want this dresser to be the visual symbol of fabulousness that came from wretched circumstances. The ugly duckling transformed to a swan. The silk purse made out of a sow’s ear. The love I feel for my daughter, made manifest. A reminder that Love (capital L) is so powerful, it can reach back generations and transform abusive narcissism into supportive, nurturing, unconditional, beauteous, immortal, love.

We also might paint cowgirls on it.

Shotguns to Shambala; or, Family Camping

2009-09-13T08:14:00.000-07:00

From Shotguns to Shambala: Or, The First and Last Tent Camping Trip with Our First and Last child.

The whole trip started innocently enough. Our daughter’s preschool always takes a week-long break in August for teacher in-service training, cleaning, and getting ready for the new school year, so it’s a natural time to take a vacation. Normally I’d be fine with a “Stay-cation” but for a long time we’ve been meaning to introduce our three-year-old to the adventure and pleasures of camping, preferably in the mountains. The break happened to fall, this year, right after our in-laws’ annual family reunion up in Walden, Colorado, so my husband suggested,

“Hey! Northern Colorado! In August! Let’s find something up there!”

“Fabulous idea, darling!” I responded with genuine enthusiasm, and set to work right away looking for inexpensive Forest Service campgrounds in the area.

As a former archaeologist for the State, I told myself, “I am imminently familiar with the Medicine-Bow/Arapahoe-Roosevelt National Forest (or the M-BARF, as we called it at the SHPO), or at least maps of it. I will have no problem doing this. It will take me two minutes.”

Two hours of precious work-at-home time later, I had finally come up with some options for camping. Both of them were developed, Forest Service campgrounds, meaning they had water and bathroom facilities on site. This fit our criteria, as we were not at all interested in doing the “extreme” or “hard-core” version of wilderness camping, especially for our daughter’s first experience. The goal was to have a good time, do all those fun camping things like sleep in a tent and eat outdoors, without scarring her for life against the experience. Besides, wilderness camping is really more suited for single people or couples with no children, and lots of time on their hands, or as I like to call them, trust-funders.

At the same time, we had no desire to spend our time “camping” in what basically amounts to an RV parking lot. That happened to me once in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, near the Mexican border, in January, where the snowbirds flock and settle in enormous RVs that block out the sun, and enormous generators that run all night. I pulled in with my Volkswagen and two-person tent, and spent one of the worst nights of my life, twitching at the sound of bug-zappers and late-night television, in the beautiful desert. As my friend King so aptly put it, “that’s not a vehicle, that’s a mobile barn.” Ixnay on the mobile barns in parking –lot style campgrounds-ay.

But that’s another story. Suffice it to say, we are not extremists, and we are also not RV people. So. With this criteria, or reverse-snobbery and practicality in mind I scanned the MBARF listings of their campgrounds online. Ah! Wonderful! There are several near Red Feather Lakes, and one very close to the Shambala Mountain Center, with the Great Stupa, that we’d also been meaning to visit for years. Hooray! The campground closest to Shambala didn’t require reservations unless you had an RV and needed electrical hookups, so I didn’t bother making one. Camping fees seemed to have gone up in the last 5 years, but I didn’t worry about that either. We’re 2.5 people in a tent, after all! How much could it possibly be??

The last day of the reunion, we headed out after breakfast with our bellies full of wonderful food, well rested after sleeping on comfortable king-sized beds, our heads and bodies freshly bathed, and a happy song in our hearts. Okay, truth be told, we were also a little hung-over from all the rich food and festivities. Before we left, we were invited to go shoot skeet at one of the cousins’ ranches, not too far out of town. Of course we went- it would have been rude to refuse. And like most people coming off a 3 day family reunion/bender, we wanted to shoot things.

Ella played on the family’s trampoline with the other kids while we took our turns, the picture of childhood happiness, day-glo orange sound mufflers dangling from her ears. She tired herself out so much she actually grudgingly accompanied us as we said our goodbyes and snuck out of there- the shootin’ match having devolved into a typical, ultra-competitive “tournament” way too hard-core for the likes of us.

Using my trusty book of Colorado topographical maps, I navigated for my husband as he drove. Apparently he thought the campground was much closer than I knew it to be.

“Turn here?”

“No.”

“Alright, how far is it?”

“A ways.”

“Tell me when to turn then.”

“I will. We don’t turn until Glen Isle. That’s a ways away. You’ll see it.”

“Up here?”

“No.”

It really didn’t take long to find the turn-off and the dirt road that led to the campground, but it felt like it did. By this time our daughter was awake and using the same powers of inquisition that she inherited from her father.

“Is this the camping place?”

“No, not yet honey.”

“Where is it?”

“Up here a ways.”

“And we’re going to play tent?”

“Yep!” (Sometimes we play “tent” by sitting under the sheets on the bed. She loves it. Based on this, we figured she’d love camping.)

“Right now?”

“Pretty soon…”

“Today?”

“Yes, tonight. Tonight we’re going to sleep in a real tent!”

“I like tent. Today?”

“Yes, today.”

It went on like that for awhile. Eventually, after a couple of false leads and turnarounds, we found the place. We pulled up in front of the Campground Host’s RV and watched as an elderly couple tried to back their gigantic fifth-wheel camper into the spot nearest us. The woman was waving and yelling directions to her husband at the wheel, who couldn’t hear her, or wasn’t paying attention. I felt a pang of recognition and sympathy. After all, there but for the grace of God …. Maybe we’re not so different from these RV’ers after all.

The hosts showed up in a golf cart pretty quickly, but informed us that to their regret they had no tent spaces left. We would have to take an electrical hook-up RV space, and pay the full fee. My Scottish-bred husband was not going to like this. The host gave us two choices of spots, said to go check them out, then come back and pay him. We chose the one not too far from the water and bathrooms, and not too parking-lotty. It had shade trees, and a whole pile of beetle-killed pine for wood, and best of all- fire pits that we were actually allowed to USE!!

I went back with my check and asked Mr. Host, just to be sure, “are we allowed to have fires in the pit?” practically giggling with excitement. “Oh, you bet” was his reply, and I think I may have jumped up and down. “That’s great- we’ll be careful- you know I haven’t been allowed to do that since I was 9 years old, at Girl Scout Camp! But I used to be a forest firefighter- I know all about fire safety,” I babbled, grinning. “That’s great- I used to do that too. You have any questions, you just come right down and ask me or Janine*.” Then he smiled politely and shut his RV door.

I ran back to our site.

“Honey- HONEY! We can have a FIRE! In the pit!”

“Really? Alright!”

I felt that this extraordinary news merited a more joyous response. After all, it was true that the last time I’d sat around a campfire, in the actual forest, in actual mountains; I was 9 years old and in Girl Scout Camp at Tomahawk Ranch near Bailey. Nightly sing-a-longs, S’mores, ghost stories, and hot chocolate from an old enamel kettle drunk out of our metal camp cups- the whole bit. The next year, the fire bans took effect. And the year after that, and the year after that, and so on for apparently, close to 30 years. No campfires, anywhere, no how. The risk of wildfire was too great. Thousands of Girl Scouts pouted, but carried on valiantly, toasting their marshmallows over indoor fireplace flames rather than outdoors. I think it’s partly for this reason that I became a Wildland Firefighter in my mid-twenties. I missed the smell of wood smoke- in the air, on my skin and hair for days afterwards.

My husband started unpacking the car. “Hon- I don’t think you understand- we don’t have to use the cook stove now, we can cook over a FIRE! A real one!”

“Yep, that’s awesome. The wood might be a little wet though…”

“Pshaw,” I snorted. “I’ll get a fire started. You and Ella can go for a walk.” The little girl was clamoring to change into a dress and glittery shoes, but we convinced her that pink sneakers were best for tromping through the woods. Not that she’s excessively girly and prissy and we’re trying to cure her of that- oh no. She routinely dons her best clothes at home, and then plunks herself down outside to fling rocks over her shoulder, searching for bugs. Like me, she wants both. Unlike me, she usually gets her way.

I handed off the bouncing, jumping 3-year-old girl to the husband with some relief and began to hunt for matches. As their figures gradually receded down the road that led to the lake, I was imagining an almost fully erected tent and a roaring fire when they got back. After all, I was formerly a fire-fighting archaeologist, and forever I will be an anthropologist. Humankinds’ persistent priorities were etched into my brain both by rigorous professors, and real-life, brawny work in the field that demanded you pay attention to those priorities, or possibly die (more likely get fired for being a dumkopf). You set up your tent before you go out and play. You prepare the fire pit hours before you actually need it, so it will light quickly if people are cold, wet and hungry. Food, warmth, and shelter. The essentials. I heard our camp-neighbor’s microwave beeping in their RV and scoffed out loud.

And of course, I have nothing to prove. Like all anthropologists, I’m above that.

By the time they came back, I did indeed have a respectable pile of dry kindling assembled, and the tent laid on the ground to air out, with all the major poles slipped into their sleeves. I had decided it would be a good educational experience for my daughter to actually see, and help with the tent being set up. Also, she would enjoy it. Ah yes, the tent. Since this thing hadn’t seen the light of day in over 3 years (see above: child) I wanted to make sure there wasn’t black mold or giant spiders growing inside, so I shook it out and made sure all the parts were present and accounted for. The last time we had used the thing, I was pregnant with my wee one and we were visiting our wedding site for our anniversary. Yep, good times. Our “starter child” Aussie shepherd Zeke was with us, and so relaxed we almost didn’t recognize him. His soft gaze seemed to tell us, “Thank you for taking me out of that stupid city. I hate it there, it stresses me out- how do you guys even stand it?” We resolved to take him camping many, many more times, and soon. While I look back on that now with nostalgia, I realize what complete morons we were for having no idea of the maelstrom of child-rearing coming towards us.

Daydreaming as such, when the family returned, I hadn’t lived up to my own expectations. Little girl had to go potty again. I took her, grateful for the non-outhouse bathroom just down the hill. On the way back, she started running on the gravel road and immediately wiped out in a grand way. Screams, crying, blood and dirt- I carried her right back into the bathroom to wash her off. Thankfully, it really wasn’t a bad scrape. And thankfully, she would only do that 27 more times during this trip.

We get back to the site, bloodied and bruised, and find out that I had put the wrong color tent poles in the wrong sleeves. After much struggle, we took them all out again and put them in the right sleeves. Little girl was playing with one of the shorter poles, which was still about 10 feet long when snapped together. She wasted no time in whacking everything we had set up on the picnic table off onto the ground, and then started on the car. So the tent setting-up went something like this:

“Ella, stop that. You can play with that, but don’t hit anything. “

“You got that end? Ok, push- Ella STOP. I’m taking that away from you if you hit.”

“Is this even the right pole?”

“Ella, STOP! Now!”

“Ella- I mean it. We can do time-outs here too.”

“No! Don’t want time-out. Can I have some gum?”

“We don’t have gum when we’re camping.”

What seemed like 5 hours later, we had the tent set up. It was Ella and I’s turn to go for a walk around the lake and stick our feet in the water. My clean, well-rested and fed glow had already worn off and I was dusty and stewing in my own stench. The lake sounded nice. We got there quickly, just as the sun was starting to set, ripped off our shoes/sandals and plopped our feet in the water.

“Oooo, cold!” Says the kiddo. Suddenly she’s back to being the cutest thing in the world. “Me and Daddy put our feet in the water too.” Suddenly I’m jealous that she did this with him before me. What the hell was I doing back there, pretending to make fire with my bare hands and set up the tent by myself? Please. This isn’t about “Que es mas macha?” anymore; this is about making memories with my family. I let my toes settle into the squishy bottom mud of the lake and start to relax.

Some doggies came along, and we petted them. We helped a family catch crawdads with hotdogs and put them in a bucket. Not to eat or anything, just for the challenge of it. They had thick yellow fishing line tied around willow twigs on one end, as makeshift poles, and the other end tied around the hotdogs. The dad had already caught two, but the kids were getting discouraged. Ella was utterly fascinated. She “oohed” and “aaahhed” in an encouraging way that the other kids caught on and started smiling again, as in, “maybe our parents aren’t total dorks for making us do this. Maybe this really IS cool!” (Note to self, other thing we forgot to bring: fishing poles.) This very nice family stated that they were from a small town North of Greeley, and they were staying in their RV down the road. I could not dislike or judge them for it. If we had more than one kid, who knows if I’d even have the energy to catch crawdads, let alone make a weekend of it in the RV, let alone do the whole trip in a tent.

On the way back to our site, we saw many more dogs and kids, but absolutely no-one else camping in just a tent the way we were. Some people however, had done a very wise thing. They had the RV for the adults, the bathroom and the shower, and kids and dogs were relegated to tents. Because kids and dogs generally think tents are “fun,” and either way, they’re going to stay up all night giggling so they may as well do it away from the grown people who are actually trying to sleep. Hmmm, I thought to myself. Maybe it’s possible to have both? I began to entertain the possibility of a very small RV. A pop-up camper. Something towable with a regular car.

That night our fire roared and scorched our hot dogs to perfection, and the leftover pasta salad from the reunion was a perfect complement. Ella loved the novelty of a meal cooked over a fire, and squealed with delight at the chipmunks’ antics as they tried to steal our food. We all brushed our teeth the Leave-No-Trace way and crawled into our sleeping bags, content. One storybook read by flashlight later and all of us were sound asleep. It was maybe 8:30 at night.

The moon was so bright that night that I woke up several times thinking it was already morning. I was grateful for this as I had to heed the call of nature at one point in the pre-dawn hours, but thankfully didn’t need to grope for the flashlight as I forced my feet into boots and gracelessly crawled out of the tent. It was astonishingly quiet. No rustlings of wildlife, no owls hooting, and gracias por dios, no generators humming in the background. It was so quiet the splash of my pee on the ground was as loud as a waterfall. I don’t consider our neighborhood in the city especially noisy, but in contrast this silence was positively eerie. It reminded me too much of the ill-advised drug trips of my youth, and I quickly scrambled back into my sleeping bag, where I could at least hear my little family breathing.

The next morning broke cold and gray, and of course my daughter wanted to get right out in it. We let the daddy sleep in a bit and wrapping ourselves in all available layers, stumbled out into the light. I was anxious to get a fire going, my daughter was anxious to have cereal. I set her up with a bowl and spoon first, then got right to work finding more kindling and non-soggy matches. It was cold and dewy out, but nothing serious, I thought. I’ll have a kettle of hot water for tea and coffee in no time. Sure. Meanwhile, the young’un announces that she has to pee. Daddy is still sleeping in the tent. I take her small, fleece-covered hand in mine and we walk down to the bathroom. It’s still chilly, and mostly I’m just grateful that she is potty-trained now. Think how much worse it would be if she had soaked all of our sleeping bags with her toddler urine, which tends to be pungent, and surprisingly plentiful. Sure, we have to take her to the bathroom every half-hour now, but it’s a small price to pay.

We successfully use the bathroom again, wash our hands, and then, because it’s chilly, I unthinkingly hit the button for the hand-dryer, not realizing how bloody loud it was. My daughter, who had been relatively stoic and reserved up to this point, let out a piercing scream which turned into sort of a wailing howl, at this unexpected noise. She also threw herself on the bathroom floor and covered her ears while screaming, “MOMMY! MOMMY! STOP IT! MAKE IT STOP!! MOOOOO-MMMMMY!!!” So much for the eerie campground quiet. It probably sounded like I was killing her, along with several forest creatures, in the bathroom, with a large car-vac. I try soothing her, telling her that I can’t stop the hand-dryer once it starts; it just stops on its own. She does not care. “MOMMY! MAKE IT STOP!!” (Loud sobbing). Giving up entirely on dry hands, I lift her bodily off the floor and shove the door open so we can at least get away from the noise. She stops yelling, but continues sobbing as if she has just witnessed the death of Winnie-the-Pooh.

Back at our campsite, Daddy is up and at’em. “Ella threw a fit in the bathroom because of the dryer,” I tell him. “Yeah, I heard.” He says. “I think the whole campground heard.” Great. Now the RV people will think I’m not only a dirty, tent-using hippie, but also (of course) a bad mother.

Daddy finishes his breakfast and takes Ella on another walk to give me a break, while I try again to start a fire, or anything that generates heat. I psych myself up by harkening back to the fire-making demonstration put on by the District Archaeologist (and private survivalist) at my field school. His nick-name was Wild Bill, for reasons which soon became clear to us. In the middle of sparking flint into a pile of dried kindling, showing us just how to strike the platform to get the biggest sparks, he looks up at the circle of young, eager faces crowded around him and says, “I’m a warrior, I do warrior things.”

Of course the only appropriate response to a remark like that is an unspoken, “yeah, well, me too” and a steeling of the abdomen as you yourself resolve to always be a warrior. I would start this fire, by gosh, with soggy kindling, my last two or three “waterproof” matches, no caffeine in my system (due to lack of hot water), and maybe 20 minutes of free time. Go!

Well, I got the camp stove lit. I attribute that mainly to its superior European engineering, and not my warrior-cum-mommy talents. As the air warmed and the dew evaporated, I eventually got the fire started too. But it was a resentful, smoldering fire that stuck out its fiery tongue at me and extinguished itself every time I looked away. The RV’ers next door were smugly drinking freshly-ground coffee and wearing fewer clothes than they had brought with them, and looking quite refreshed after a full night’s sleep. I cursed them in my head, and secretly admired their portable yet rugged-looking pop-up camper. Thankfully the camp stove boiled a whole kettle of water in 10 minutes and our days, and possibly our lives, were thusly saved by enabling me to ingest caffeine. Daddy and kiddo came back, and we made a plan to go into “town” after our Shambala trip to get non-soggy firewood and a lighter of some kind.

We go to Shambala and have a wonderful time. We eat a delicious, healthy, vegetarian lunch in the dining tent, wander around for a little bit and hike up the path to see Buddha. It’s quiet, but friendly. Everyone at least smiles at you as you pass them.
Buttcracks to Buddha

We spot mule deer resting in the shade under some of the platform buildings, and one in the Zen archery range.

Can you spot the deer in the shade?

They do not appear to be frightened of humans at all. When we get up to the Great Stupa, and behold the gold-painted statues of the eight deer that guard the four entrances (to Heaven, symbolically) I think, the deer not only know they’re safe here, but revered. Must be nice. We take turns meditating on the cushions before the huge golden Buddha, and chasing the little girl around outside. During my turn, I gazed back up at the Buddha and that just one day before, I had shot a gun for the first time. It was a pistol-sized shotgun called “The Judge” that requires no aim or skill whatsoever, but was designed mainly for blowing huge holes in criminals as they try to flee. It’s not a very warrior thing to do, but it is fun to shoot. Would Buddha judge the Judge? I try to bring my thoughts back to a center place.

Later, while Daddy meditates, the little girl is fascinated by the offerings left by people at the altar leading up to the Stupa, as are we. She picks up a piece of gum someone has left for Buddha, and starts to put it in her mouth. “Gum?” “No, no! No gum while we’re camping. Someone left that gum for Buddha.” She pauses to consider this. “Buddha share?” “Well, yes” I answer. “But not the gum. Buddha doesn’t share his gum, because he knows it has germs and things.” She seems to accept this answer, puts the gum down, and starts gathering up the coins people have left instead.

(you'll all be happy to know that Gonzo guards the shrine)

I went back into the Stupa’s meditation room after the other visitors had left, and took a better look around. It is a peaceful place, but more than a feeling of peace, I was overcome with the sense that my problems were pretty dang petty compared with the world’s problems. Or rather, that my concerns were only a small part of the overarching issues of the world, and they were one and the same. How do I make sure my family is safe, and well, and fed? How do I deal with grief and loss and still prepare for the future? How do I protect the place I live in, for reasons both selfish and altruistic? How do I make fire with soggy kindling?

Buddha just gazed down at me, smiling that enigmatic smile. He’s a Buddha, he does Buddha things.

Refreshed by our pilgrimage into the heart of peaceful, sustainable living, we did indeed descend from the heights of our campground to get firewood and lighters in the nearest, tiny tourist town. It was probably overpriced. We didn’t care. That night we had again, a roaring fire and a satisfying dinner. We slept well and had a cheery, warm breakfast in the morning. On the way back from our sixteenth or seventeenth trip to the bathroom, I stopped and talked to the woman in the delightfully compact RV across the way. It looked like she had two adopted kids in tow, plus the husband, the in-laws, and a dog.

Basically I was trying to wheedle out of her, how do you do it? She pointed to the ginormous 5th-Wheel camper next door to the tiny one. Oh. The little one was just for the in-laws, the 5th-wheel was for everyone else. Still, I toured the smaller RV at their invitation, listened to their story of what a great deal they got on it, and started visualizing myself in one. They were pulling it with a regular-sized mini-van. I could certainly pull something like that with a biodiesel truck, or even a team of sled-dogs. Buddha would smile down upon my eco-friendly choice, and congratulate me on my detachment to self-inflicted misery and self-righteous tent martyrdom. As I talked to this woman, and became inspired by her story, an enigmatic smile began to play across my face.

After all, I’m a mommy; I do mommy things.

.. ..

10 Years gone.

2009-04-21T21:49:00.000-07:00

10 years gone. Where were you?
Really hard to believe 1999 was 10 years ago. Enit? If you weren’t feeling old already, this blog is guaranteed to put wrinkles on your knees. Remember when 1999 seemed so far away, but we vowed to party like Prince and the Purple Rain Paisley Revolution when it DID come around? Provided we were still alive and hadn’t succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver? I know I did.
But the reality of 1999 was a little harder to swallow. I was 28, and luckily started off the year with a long-term substitute teaching assignment in a mostly Spanish-speaking elementary school, as the Music, Drama, and Art teacher. Yes, I was supposed to do all three. Truth is, we ended up doing Art most of the time, and no matter what I assigned, the kids made everything, no matter the media, into either the Mexican bandera (flag) or a Broncos bandera. It cracked me up when the kids spelled Denver, “Denbear” because in Spanish that’s how it was pronounced. As the semester wore on, most of the kids got much better at English, and then half of them would leave, back to Mexico with no warning, and be replaced by another set of migrant workers’ kids with limited language and social skills. Many of them stayed in the bombed-out, skuzzy trailers in the park just NW of the school, which was surrounded by two major highways and the railroad tracks. One of those highways takes the migrant workers NE, almost to the very corner of our state, which is lined with farms and crops that all have to be picked by hand. Lettuce, radishes, some strawberries, cabbage, potatoes – that kind of thing. It’s backbreaking work that doesn’t do much to bolster the machismo of a Mexican man who is trying to feed his family and maintain some sort of dignity. Frequently, the frustrations of the parents were taken out on the kids.
And the kids frequently were angry. Most of my time in the classroom and on the playground, especially after the 2nd wave of pickers came in, was spent breaking up fights. Not that these were inherently bad kids, it just creates chaos when you lose half your class in the middle of the semester with no warning, and the kids you had spent 7 months “training” in the school culture and tending to are gone and replaced by a bunch of unknowns. Think about it if you were a kid, plunked into that situation and not so willingly. You’d probably be feisty too. Their regular teachers were having as many problems as I was, just getting them to do an assignment rather than tear each other apart- (all except the kindergarten and preschool teachers across the hall from me, who took no guff from their tiny charges.) At my wits’ end one day, I asked one of the oldest, most experienced teachers at the school what he was doing with the kids, and he shared with me that he was also losing his mind (and this guy was so gentle, he made Captain Kangaroo look like a blaggard) but that he always tried to remember that these kids were sleeping in broken-down trailers at night, and he knew for a fact that many of them had plastic tarps for windows and doors. As a caring teacher, he had hoofed it over to the trailer park many nights to check up on the kids, talk to their parents, praise the children in front of their families, and glance around to see if they had enough food, or heat in the middle of winter, or whatever. Then he would try to hook them up with whatever resources they needed, since often migrant families don’t know who to ask, or they don’t want to ask, for fear of deportation.
So after that, I had a lot more sympathy for the fight-y new kids, and I started to see the fights as just a symptom of a major, underlying problem. And then long about April 20th, something happened that cracked our hearts open even wider.
You may have heard of it, since we were “#1” for almost 8 years in the school-based massacre department: the Columbine High School shootings. It was a Tuesday, which meant for me that I had classes starting right at 8:50 am, but they were all over by 2 pm. It was a typical, busy, chaotic day with ups and downs- there were several kids who always made my day, and several who made me want to stab myself with a fork. As it happened, DPS had just sent out those “Emergency How-to” flip-chart booklets to post in each classroom, for dealing with everything from fire to bomb threats to crazy parents (we had a lot of those- and the neighborhood was not immune to drive-by shootings, and my classroom was on the outside of the building, with lots of windows all around it) so I was already paranoid.
At lunch I was wolfing down my food as usual in the teachers’ lounge, when someone came in and said they’d just heard there was a drive-by shooting at a school in Jefferson County. What school? We asked. She didn’t know. She checked and came back several minutes later- she said actually it was several shootings, and the sheriff’s department was there on the scene. So were they drive-bys, or what? We asked. She wasn’t sure. I gulped the rest of my food and headed out for mandatory playground duty, to break up some more fights. There was a bit of a buzz with the other playground teachers as well, but not too much. I shrugged at their questions and said I didn’t really know what was happening- that there was a shooting at a high school, way, way south of here, but it sounded like an isolated incident and they’d already caught the guy. Then I headed over to the kickball diamond to pull Little Mario off of Big Mario, again.
After recess, walking back to my class I saw that Bea, the librarian and my comrade-in-arms as another Specials Teacher (Library, Gym, Music/Art) had the TV set turned on and was watching some sort of news coverage, but I couldn’t tell what it was and didn’t have time to check. Back in the classroom vacuum, I had two more classes and then was blissfully done for the day. The shooting thing was in the back of my mind, and I thought I’d swing by the library and check out the news before I left, but overall I was in a good mood as the day had gone fairly well. Waving cheerfully at comrade Bea and smiling, I got to the library and asked “What’s up?” They just pointed to the TV screen grimly.
By then the local news was non-stop Columbine shootings. They were showing footage of kids climbing out of windows, evacuating out the back door, being shepherded by SWAT team members in black- and I, like the rest of America to follow, dropped my jaw and said out loud (in an elementary school library no less) WHAT THE FUCK??? I try not to be a gaper in life, but that day I gaped. The local news was showing the same footage over and over again, and didn’t seem to have any real information, so I decided to catch my bus, go straight to the gym and watch the rest there. As teachers, I can safely say that as well as being speechless (for once) we were already sick to our stomachs.
But I went to the gym because exercise has always helped relieve my stress, and because the Wildland Firefighter Type II Red Card test was to be held in 2 months, and I wanted to be in shape for it. Because I was young, and dumb, and broke, and wanted to go fight fires to pay off my student loans. Which brings me to the other question that immediately popped into my head when I saw the first news coverage of Columbine: Why are all those SWAT team guys on the outside of the building, if the shooters are inside? I thought about this all the way home on the bus. Everyone else on the bus spoke Spanish and was just getting off their shift at the Pepsi bottling plant, but I could tell they were talking about it too. I heard the words for “gangs” and “shootings” and of course “¿Donde?” In SouthWest Littleton no less. There was some discreet chuckling. As in, these stupid gringos think we’re the violent ones, and look what they go and do! A la ve.
I went straight to the gym as planned, just down the street from my house, and of course all the TVs in the cardio room were tuned to “the disaster” as we called it that day. I remember seeing the footage of parents gathered at the nearby elementary school, which served as an evacuation/triage point, and frantic parents literally pulling their hair out and sobbing to reporters, “Where is my son? Where is my daughter?”

This from acolumbinesite.com: "Students and faculty who escaped Columbine High tried desperately to come to terms with what was happening in their school. Scared and confused, they helplessly waited for those as yet unaccounted for; hearing gunfire in the library and down in the field where sheriff's deputies were exchanging shots with the killers who were inside the building. For hours and, in some cases, days many wouldn't know if their loved ones were alive, injured or dead."

They played that footage over and over again, so us consumer-vultures could vicariously feel their grief and worry I guess and like we were a part of it. But it just made me feel sicker and sicker, striding there on the Stairmaster and watching this unholy spectacle unfold, 25 miles and half a world away. I went into the bathroom and threw up.
Came back to lift weights (vomiting is par for the course in firefighting, and substitute teaching for that matter, no big whoop) and more footage of the SWAT teams, on the outside of the building rather than the inside. One reporter finally interviewed someone from the police as to why all the teams hadn’t gone in at once and “flushed out” the shooters and taken them down. The police officer (might have been the sheriff, I don’t remember) said, "because we had multiple bomb threats called in, and warnings that the whole building was wired with explosives."

I was like, AND?

I do remember some of my fellow gym-regulars openly scoffing at that, along with me. This is going to sound like 10-years-later quarterbacking, but seriously, this is the thing that has bugged me to this day, about that horrible day. What if Firefighters showed up to a fire and then said, “What? Are you kidding me? There’s flames…and and and… fire! And a roof could fall on me or something! Or I could fall in a hole and die! It’s dangerous in there! No WAY am I going in there!”

Before you jump all over for getting down on brave SWAT team guys, let me say that I’m not mad at them, I’m mad at the assclowns who apparently gave the order for them to stand down and supervise the evacuation rather than go in, hunt down and kill the killers. They’re on the fricking SWAT team for Christ’s sake!! They’re combination snipers, bomb-disablers, and kidnap victim rescuers, with a touch of ninja thrown in! Why the fuck do we spend so much money training them if we won’t allow them to do their jobs????
That, and many years later I heard testimony from a SWAT team member who was crying tears of frustration over this very thing- many of them wanted to go in, very badly, but the Jefferson County Sheriff wouldn’t give the order. Not even when kids ran out screaming, “They’re in the Library! They’re in the Library!” Nope. They still wouldn’t let anyone go in the cafeteria, where Harris and Klebold started their killing spree, which was on the opposite end of the building. They stood outside and waited for two hours while a beloved teacher and coach, Dave Sanders, bled to death, just inside the cafeteria entrance way. None of his gunshot wounds hit major organs, and they wouldn’t have been fatal if he’d gotten help in time. He bled to death. A few students stayed with him and even made a sign to put in the window reading “Help- 1 Bleeding To Death In Here.” And still the law enforcement remained outside, where it was safe.
"The parents of the students of Columbine High School were directed to go to Leawood Elementary School and the Littleton Public Library, which is where the children who had escaped were being bussed to. However, the busses didn't leave immediately and parents were left waiting in agonizing limbo to find out if their children were safe. No one could tell them anything apart from "wait". And wait they did. For hours. Some had to wait for days before they found out what happened to their sons and daughters, which hospitals they had been taken to or, worse, that their children were dead."
-from AColumbineSite

You have to wonder. If some knowledgeable person out there has an explanation for this, please tell me. I would love to know. Dave Sanders’ family would also love to know. They’re still mad as hell, last I checked, and tried to sue the Sheriff’s department for negligent homicide or something like that. They didn’t win their case. Probably because it was tried in Jefferson County, and apparently everyone in the Justice Department is one tight-knit little family.

"Those who were injured during the shootings received medical attention at one of four triage centers that were set up near the school. Over 160 people were treated for injuries that day, though not all of them were due to gunfire. 24 patients were transported to six different medical centers in Denver. 10 of the students were transported in the first hour after paramedics were able to treat them. The next 10 were transported by the second hour. The last four were taken out by 3:45 PM."
- AColumbineSite- so you can see I'm not making up that lag time.

The rest of the parents who lost kids are still looking for answers too. Some have moved past anger and are merely searching for some sort of peace. And when something like this happens, it doesn’t help that the local law enforcement FUBARS the whole show instead of helping the victims. It doesn’t help that they seem more concerned about covering their own asses, after they f-ed everything up, rather than coming clean, admitting their mistakes, and expressing profound sorrow. Promising to do things differently in the future wouldn’t hurt.

I swear, you would’ve thought it was the Boulder County Sheriff’s department down there, doing the JonBenet Ramsey murder case, times 13. I’m surprised the JeffCo Sheriff didn’t evacuate the Harris and Klebold families immediately afterwards just like Bush did for his buddies, the Bin Ladens after 9-11, reasoning, “well, a lot of people are going to be angry with them, their lives are possibly in danger.”

Now that we know all that “Trenchcoat Mafia” and “Marilyn Manson’s songs did this” crap is truly horseshit, it is kind of cleansing to take a deep breath and just say out loud what we’ve known in our hearts for quite some time: 1 was a narcissistic sociopath, and 1 one was his terminally depressed, insecure follower, who was only happy when plotting a huge revenge-massacre. At first I instinctively empathized with them, as a social outcast myself who was much smarter than the “popular” kids but never got any popularity out of it, not in my family and not at school. I’ve had my share of revenge fantasies, and still do, but that’s just the thing- they’re fantasies. A lot of the transformative magic of them would be lost if I actually got blood and gore on my hands. Admit it, you have your revenge fantasies too, but hopefully you don’t act on them.

I also empathized for them because hell, they ended up dead too. If that was their be-all, end-all ambition in life, to kill a bunch of people and then kill themselves- that’s fucking tragic. And pathetic, in that none of their wired explosives actually went off, and, thank God, they were lousy shots. They weren’t even very good at their one, big dream, lousy, cowardly and desperate as it was.

Four years after it happened, and just a few months after I started my current job at the Colorado Historical Society, I got a tour of our storage facility out at the old Lowry Air Force base. We were searching for certain boxes of paperwork from a few years prior, but M--, my supervisor at the time wasn’t sure where they were so we wandered up and down each aisle. On one bottom shelf (and no, this place isn’t too different from the facility in that last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark) I noticed some modern-looking, plastic wreaths and things- not the kind of thing the Historical Society usually stores. I picked one up- it was a blue and silver plastic wreath, with little white teddy bears all around it, and each bear bore the name of a person who was murdered at Columbine. It was wrapped in archival plastic, labeled with an accession number and everything. I clapped my hand to my mouth to stifle an involuntary cry/sob worthy of an overly dramatic Southern woman at a funeral. Just moments prior to seeing this, I was in an exceptionally cheerful mood, produced simply by getting out of the office and bonding a little bit with a supervisor whom I respected and admired. M-- wandered back to find me and found me holding the wreath. She said, “ahh, yeah, that’s the Columbine Memorial stuff. B----, our former archivist, took the liberty of going out to Clement Park and collecting everything she could before they tore down the memorial and threw it away.” Tears were streaming down my face by then and M—patted me on the back. “Yes, it’s very sad. And it’s part of Colorado history. So we thought we should conserve it.” I nodded. It was the right thing to do. Me, I haven’t had the courage to go to Clement Park and see the permanent memorial, even.

Usually things like white teddy bears with names written on them in glitter with big, round teenage-girl handwriting don’t move me, but this did beyond anything I can explain. There were other artifacts too- cards and posters with hundreds of signatures on them, plastic flowers, plastic crosses that had been left at the park. It reminded me of what we did at Swansea Elementary (where I had been teaching) the next day. Just about every class, including the preschool and kindergartners, made huge sympathy cards or posters for Columbine and gathered up flowers, cookies, anything they could find to send down there. And let me just say again, Littleton might as well be on another planet to these kids, that’s how far away it is geographically and economically/socially. In fact, the teachers had to set a lot of kids straight that first day back- many of them thought that Columbine Elementary, a few blocks away, had been bombed. It hadn’t. Many of them thought it was a big gang-related killing or a drug deal gone bad. It wasn’t. Many of them were confused as to the motive, in that case, because what the hell do rich white kids from the suburbs have to be so angry about, if they’re not in a gang? Plenty, we tried to tell them, and you’re right, not much. We may never know.
(you can see a timeline here, as well: http://www.acolumbinesite.com/after/1999.html)

It occurred to me that scrapping and fighting all damn day, every day, might be better than keeping it all bottled up inside and plotting mass murders. We were all more forgiving with the kids after that, and they knew it, and took advantage of us, survival-minded, lizard-brained cutie pies that they are.

The rest of the semester crawled by. With the 5th graders, I was to teach them and coach them in singing a song or two for their graduation celebration. We tried a variety of songs, mostly from inspiring Disney soundtracks, and nothing seemed to fit. Then a local artist came out with a song about Columbine, and everyone bought copies as a fundraiser, but it was a little too Christian (for a public school) and too sad. http://www.cnn.com/US/9904/28/songwriters/index.html

The 5th graders had major spring-fever and even bigger attitudes by this time anyway. “Who cares about that stupid school?” scoffed one of the more popular girls. They wanted to sing Mariah Carey. I said, “good luck with that.” Ironically, they ended up choosing the theme song from “Prince of Egypt” and changed some of the words to be secular. I never got to see them perform it, as my job with the Boulder Conservation Corps started early that year. I’ve always regretted that. Those bratty 5th –graders would be 20 years old now. The Columbine kids would be 24, 25, 26, and 27.
Ten years gone. 13 promising young lives gone. And counting.

Ward Churchill: Total Gooberhead

2009-03-22T21:08:00.000-07:00

..................The trial started a couple Mondays ago, and it's still going on. If .everyone had taken my advice 3 or 4 years ago when this whole mess started, and just formally declared Ward Churchill to be, as my friend Rachel put it (and she's 1/3rd Lakota) "A Giant Gooberhead," this other whole mess could've been avoided. But, no one ever listens to me, on any subject, much less on matters pertaining to whom should be hired and fired at our flagship institution of higher learning. So I may as well spout off.

If you haven’t heard of the Ward Churchill controversy, you’ll
probably want to spare precious minutes of your life and avoid this blog
altogether. If you’ve heard rumours, and are curious,well, it’s your life, and you’re an adult, so I can’t tell you what to do.

But, “Desperate Housewives” is on.

At first I was on Ward Churchill's side, when he first came under fire for that essay he wrote, calling the 9-11 victims in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, "little Eichmanns." Not that I agreed with that sweeping, insensitive, and some say disgustingly unfair characterization of the 9-11 victims, but I understood what his larger point was, and would defend his First Amendment rights to say it. As soon as Hamilton College in upstate New York found out that he wrote it, they canceled his speaking engagement there, and generally raised the alarm to other colleges across the country about this “left-wing potential terrorist guy” Churchill. That was in early 2005. Before that, no one had apparently even read the essay, or paid much attention to it, including his close colleagues at CU. If they had, evidently they thought it was nothing out of the ordinary for Churchill, who makes sweeping, outrageous statements about the White Race in general pretty much every day.

This might have remained just another lace-hanky waving kerfuffle in academia, had the Republicans not still been in charge in 2005, and the country had not been engaged in a controversial war, with a virtual corporate lockdown on the mainstream media and any expression of oppositional “unpatriotic” thought smacked down faster than Amy Goodman at the Republican convention. But, they were, and we were, and that is pretty much still the case. Anyhoo, our adulterous bastard of a Republican Governor at the time immediately condemned Churchill’s thoughts, words, teachings, and person. What he’s denied in the trial this past week is that he also got on the horn to CU’s President at the time and demanded she fire Churchill, or at least suspend him without pay, pending an investigation.

As they say in the fashion industry, all the rest is window dressing. When the Prez of CU refused to fire him, on grounds that he’d done nothing against University policy, and to do so would embroil them in a huge First Amendment Rights Civil Case (which is what it’s doing right now), apparently Owens (the adulterous, secretary-shagging bastard hypocrite) further threatened her, and so she resigned. Former Senator Hank Brown was brought in to do the dirty work, and look All-American doing it. And he did. But in the process, since they couldn’t LOOK like they were violating the First Amendment and just fire him for that, they dug up all sorts of other dirt on him, including lying about his ethnic background, his war service in Vietnam, other stuff on his resume, and a few counts of plagiarism. So that’s what Ward ended up getting fired for, the plagiarism. Which couldn’t be proven one way or another, but a committee got together (made up of mostly Republican Regents), closed the hearings to everyone even though they were supposed to be public, had people arrested when they dared to speak, and fired him, with a cowardly “motion.”

Now, let me say again that at first, just because I know him to be such an unapologetic gooberhead with the self-awareness of a donut, I was willing to believe these other allegations against him. They seemed plausible enough, especially from a guy who asserts all the damn time that he’s some always-changing percentage of Muscogee, Creek, and Cherokee. More on that later. But as radio host Mario Solis-Marich has said, we’re all adults here and we all know why he really got fired. Things were heating up way too much politically and he became a political liability for white-bread CU-Boulder. End of story.

So despite all my personal prejudices and peeves about the gooberhead, I now believe he has a valid case, which he should win, and get his job back. (as Ethnic studies professor at CU) As long as he’s forced to wear a sign around his neck on campus that says, “I am a Giant Gooberhead.” Hopefully this whole ordeal has taught him some humility and self-awareness, but after hearing part of his defense, I kinda doubt it. Plus, full disclosure, I do have to admit to some lizard-brain, black and white thinking here: that anything former Governor Jackass Owens was AGAINST, I am probably FOR.

But onto my peeves and prejudices. About this whole “Indian blood” thing, where Churchill was basically standing up and saying, “I am part Native American, and on this and many other subjects, you can say nothing to refute me! To do so would make you a racist!” What a bunch of crap. As a fellow part-German, part-Irish, part-Basque, part Native-American whose cultural and ethnic roots also go mainly to the Midwest and Western suburbia (aka, WHITE), I call bullshit. It’s one thing to make those assertions and proclamations and be able to back them up, because you were raised in that culture and still participate in the community. It’s quite another to make those assertions and proclamations, and then publicly scoff at anyone who questions you because, quite frankly, you don’t look like you actually belong to said ethnic group, and there’s no evidence that you were raised in that community. As my husband the psychotherapist put it so eloquently, (and I’m being really spiritually generous right now because he’s acting like a total baby tonight) is your fate tied to their fate? (the group you’re claiming allegiance to). Do you suffer from the same ills that that group suffers, as well derive personal benefit from tying yourself to that culture? In short, do you take the bad with the good? When you’re walking down the street, do people who don’t know you automatically make assumptions about you based on your skin color, build, mode of dress, hairstyle, - mostly negative assumptions based on racial stereotyping? If the answer is No to any of these, then I would say, shut the hell up.

Besides, most of the anthropology and otherwise professors I’ve had who actually WERE Native American, raised in the tribe, yada yada, took the
opposite attitude from our Mr. Churchill. Perhaps for no other reason than that their social lives at least, if not their actual lives, were still beholden to that tribe and that culture. In other words, people are watching you. Tribal people are different from us ‘mercans. They are always and forever, representing the tribe. This isn’t just an unfortunate side-effect of racial stereotyping or grouping, it’s taught by all the elders in every North American tribe that I know of. My Mohawk ancestors* apparently lived by this creed. The English, coming from a patriarchal culture as they did, thought that the bad-ass Mohawk warriors they were dealing face-to-face with were the ones in charge. But ohhhh, no! It was actually the clan mothers who told them, word-for-word, exactly what to say in all negotiations, and if they got one word wrong, hell’s bells but they would get a public spankin’.

*I'm not going to say "in my tribe" because I wasn't raised Mohawk, don't speak the language, and don't have any real ties to the community- although I do care about what happens to them, for example I've been following the whole dam on the St. Lawrence River controversy, I can't honestly say that if the Mohawk get Federally de-listed and screwed over again, I'm also screwed. Would I be outraged? yes. Would I go up there and chain myself to a tree or a bulldozer? Probably. But I also would do that if oil companies actually break into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, both for the indigenous tribes up there, the animals, and the Earth. But I think anyone with a conscience who felt strongly about it would do the same thing, regardless of "blood."

So, especially when you’re teaching, for gods’ sakes, your every word and deed represents the tribe. You may not like it, but tough shit kemosabe, there it is. You don’t go flying off with half-baked theories and opinions and say the first god-damned thing that comes to mind, like “those planes flying into the towers were chickens coming home to roost.” Shit, man. Even non-tribal people can understand that. What would your mother think? Or would your da’ smack you upside the head for that kinda static, who cares if you’re 55 years old you’re still my son, you little shit?

And furthermore, if you really are part Cherokee, for Christ's sake man, go to their website and get hooked up with the community. They have to be the most open, willing-to-share-their-culture-with-almost-anyone tribe on the face of the earth. You can take Cherokee lessons, participate in cultural gatherings, help support the Jr. High's basketball team... whatever. As long as you have one drop of Cherokee blood in you, as far as they're concerned, you're Indian, you're in the family, and guess what? Now you have to support the family and give back to your community. uh-oh. Not sounding so glamorous now, is it?

See, it goes both ways. One of my "real" Native American professors was the late, esteemed Alfonso Ortiz, from San Juan Pueblo. While he was at the University of Chicago, his professors convinced him to reveal the secrets of Tewa/Pueblo religion, and that it would help his people in the long run. So he did, and made it his thesis/dissertation, called it "The Tewa World" and sold a million copies. It's still widely regarded as a seminal, keystone work in understanding Native American worldview and religion. But San Juan Pueblo kicked his ass out after that. The thing about religious secrets is, they're supposed to be secret. You only know them if you're a Pueblo boy (the girls learn religion differently) who survived 9 months straight in a kiva being indoctrinated and trained by priests. It was very painful for Ortiz to be separated from his pueblo and his people, even in the luxurious surroundings of Santa Fe, but he knew he had made his bed and had to lie in it.

The other thing is, as an archaeologist, I was strenuously warned and cautioned about ever making assertions and proclamations and pronouncements of any kind, especially those I couldn’t immediately back up with cold, hard, fully documented and check-able, facts. Even if we’re 99.9% sure of something, we are taught to say, “We think, from all of the evidence gathered, that this is what this might be, or this is what might have happened.” The interpretive guides at various National Parks featuring Native American ruins apparently have free rein to make all kinds of assertions and pronounce on whatever the hell they want about said culture, but we, the actual archaeologists, are not allowed to. Or, if we do, we risk getting tarred, feathered, sneered at, backstabbed, and fired.

True story: on a post-fire crew at Mesa Verde, an interp took us on a tour of Kodak House, which is off-limits to most visitors, and started asserting, pontificating, and pronouncing on how “moriarities” (we think he meant moieties) of clans occupied the Pueblo. “The Winter clans ruled the kivas in the Winter, and the Summer clans were in charge in the Summer.” I literally turned to the crew-mate next to me, a seasoned archaeologist in the area, and asked, “What the fuck is he talking about?” not having understood this strange, assertive language. And still in my current desk-archy job, even though I’m 99.9% sure of a projectile point type and time period that it dates to based on a drawing, I’m not allowed to be an “armchair archaeologist” and second-guess the team that recorded it. I can make notes that say, “We at the SHPO disagree with the field assessment and instead recommend dating this projectile point, which is most probably Folsom and not Pueblo II, to the Paleolithic time period rather than the Pueblo II time period.”
I am not allowed to write, “what the hell were those idiots smokin’ out there? My 3 year old daughter could tell you that was a Folsom!!!”

But I digress.
Yes, America and Americans need to wake up and take responsibility for the misery we clearly caused, and are still causing, around the world, enough to drive people to do desperate, horrible things against us. Yes, sometimes the best way to get people’s attention is to make outrageous statements that exaggerate or draw seemingly outlandish conclusions. But Christ man, can’t you see that misery of this kind produces madness, and when that madness foments into violence, most often the people who had nothing to do with causing your misery are the symbolic targets? Except these were not symbolic people, they were real people, with real lives, and children, and mortgages and student loans to pay just like the rest of us bozos on the bus. Sure, not all of them were saints. They were not perfect, just like the rest of us are wholly imperfect, and yet still lovable, to someone. Maybe they drank too much, or left too big a carbon footprint, or cheated on their spouses, or were Raiders fans. That doesn’t make them “little Eichmanns.” Hitler’s accountant, Eichmann, knew exactly what he was doing, and who he was hurting, and he still did it. Most of the people who died in the towers, on the planes, and in the Pentagon that day were just going to work because they have bills to pay, and families to support, and maybe some of them enjoyed their work.

So please, let’s save the Third Reich Mastermind comparisons
for people who actually deserve it, like the Bushes and Cheneys and Rumsfelds and Rices of this world.

To be fair, I’ll post a link to the essay in question: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/WC091201.html

And here’s the part they inexplicably left off:

"There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on
September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military
targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . .

Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were
civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic
corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty
engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has
always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse
to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word
"ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively
well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs
and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases
excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it
was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into
their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of
which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into
the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more
effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their
participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the
twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."

.. ..

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/headlines05/0201-05.htm

.. ..

.. ..

Good News: Apply Liberally

2009-02-08T20:31:00.000-08:00

This blog has been in the works for a while- 3 weeks I guess you could say, but tonite I finally had my dear spousal unit take the pictures I wanted for it. Pretty damn spiritually generous of him considering I had screamed at him 4 hours earlier and smashed one of my favorite mugs into the nearest wall. (Good thing this place is a rental- built in the 50's- so it can withstand a nuclear attack as well as many a tenants' flung object.) Such are the ways and means of depression. One day everything is going along swimmingly, or about as good as you can expect given all the stresses in your life, and the next, your house is an f'in mess and the spouse makes one ill-timed smartass comment, and a piece of crockery has to meet its maker.

At any rate, I am going to get medicated tomorrow, for all you nervous nellies who might be concerned about a kitchenware massacre. And it's not because I gave up fancy coffee. Not even the fanciest coffees would help me right now. Part of me wanted to post this under Come to Jesus because that's what I had to do today; admit that I need help to crawl out of this hole that's been 38 years in the making. For a long time I skated by with fancy coffees, chocolate, and good comedy on TV- but, for whatever reason, my time to skate is past. Not even the perpetual good news of hearing the words "President Obama" spoken in whatever context could shake off this overwhelming grief I'm experiencing right now. Although, as you can see below, I tried that medicine.

Mmm, good medicine! That's me lying on the floor, covered with special inauguration day copies of both the Rocky Mountain News (which is for sale) and the Denver Post- and let me just say I have not paid good money for either of those raggy pieces of shit, ever since the Post endorsed Bush back in 2004 (and I wrote one helluva Howler of a "letter to the editor" and canceled my subscription forthwith) and the News went to a 2nd-grade reading level with big shiny pictures format a couple years ago. Well, the Rocky's been shit ever since John Coit died, but the Post- I expected more from them, somehow.

What I am doing on the floor is trying to soak in, by osmosis, the great, the awesome, the inspiring news of Obama's inauguration, so that it can heal my cracked soul. Hey, it's worth a try. As you can see, the 'Bama is on C-SPAN behind me, giving his address to the Democratic Retreat at Williamsburg just a few days ago.
Yes, watching that did help me, a little. But I still need drugs.
I came very close to purchasing every "Special Inauguration Edition" of every magazine I'd never heard of- the best being Black Woman Today, with their special coverage of (tears welling up again) our First Lady, Michelle Obama.
Yes, I'm one of those people. If I had the money, I'd buy every damn one of them. At this point, I will gladly read any scrap, any tidbit of good, uplifting, non-evil news, especially if it has anything to do with the Obamas. The dresses? Yes, please tell me about the dresses! The designers! The fact that she chose a young, unknown minority guy rather than some staid, boring, established house of fashion that doesn't need the money anyway! Tell me what those beautiful girls wore too, and why! Does Malia love purple and dark blue, or was that a consensus decision? Did Sasha sit on her grandmother's lap during the parade, or her Aunt Auma's, from Kenya?
And YES, goddamit, I want to know about the dog. Tell me everything you can about what sort of puppy or rescue they're going to get. I've already scanned PetFinder.com for them, and have voted on my favorites.
A lot of my friends, online and "real" seem to be going through the same sort of emotional catharsis. One described hiding out in her room, crying during the inauguration parties rather than celebrating. But all of us have been holed up in defensive postures these past 8, or 38 years, in one way shape or form. And now we're finally uncurling ourselves, and it's kind of painful. Like our hearts are being freshly torn in two. All sorts of things that we've blocked up is now gushing out, and it's not easily controlled. Rage. Indiscriminate anger. Giddiness. Peevishness. Happiness too, but it also comes with tears, of relief, or joy, who knows. And now there's not a lot to celebrate, really, (except for the Republican party going down in flames, Yaaayyy! Take that, you Bastard fucktards!)even if you do have a job.
Maybe I've said this all before, and I'll probably say it again. But I repeat, take all the good news you can, with the glossiest photos you can find, and smear it like a salve all over your dry, cracked, heartbroken soul. Roll around in it, revel in it, let yourself enjoy it. We do have to take some time to heal ourselves before we can get to work as "whole" people. And that's exactly what I'm doing tomorrow.

My Inaugural Address

2009-01-16T19:21:00.000-08:00

I've been kicking myself for the past week, for the short "essay" I wrote to try and win tickets to the inauguration, plus airfare, hotel, and invitations to all the best parties. I bet lots of you entered too- gave one last donation to the Obama transition team for the chance to be in the Chosen 10. If you won, and got to go, please be kind enough to blog about it with photos. Please.
When I wrote my little paragraph I was feeling emotional anyway, and so didn't tell my personal story for fear of completely bursting into tears, at work. Instead I spoke in generalities about what it means for a country to be truly great, and how I would for the first time be proud of my country, etc.etc.
This is the essay as it should have been written.
What does this inauguration mean to me? It means I won't I have to shave my head again on Tuesday, for one thing, to commence another 4 years of mourning. Instead of wanting to scream and cry every time I hear the news of what's being done in our names, I just might be able to remain calm enough to use my faculties of rational thought and empathy. And not that I've ever personally enjoyed anything above subsistence-level living, but this inauguration brings me hope that someday soon, I may actually get to enjoy life and live my dreams, which have lain dormant more than 10 years. I also might finally get a passport, since I may be able to afford one now, and I won't feel like I have to lie and say I'm Canadian, or hang my head in shame at my American citizenship.
In short, it means I get to change back into a human, after becoming a human volcano for what seems like 10 years.

Since I didn't win (unless they're waiting til tonight to call me), I will be watching it on TV with millions of other Americans, at work, trying not to cry tears of joy. But I probably will anyway. And at the risk sounding trendy, I'm kind of hoping Obama will mention something about that amazing "miracle" plane rescue on the Hudson last week. If I was writing the inaugural address, it would include something about that. To the effect of, see folks, this is what CAN happen, even in a crisis, if everyone remains calm, does their job, keeps a clear head, but most importantly, helps each other out.
This is what can happen, and what will happen from now on, because we will all remain calm and clear-headed instead of shitting our pants and running around like chickens with our heads cut off, screaming, "every man for himself!" like the jackasses who've been running the show for the past 8 years (or 30, depending on how you look at it.) The photo of all the passengers standing on the wings of the plane kind of says it all for me. This is what can happen if we all take care of each other. This is what can happen if we all take responsibility for ourselves, and then help those who are having a little trouble, for whatever reason. It's not up to you to judge if it's a good enough reason or not, leave that up to God. It's only up to you/me/us to help.
This is what can happen. Everyone stays calm. Everyone is rescued. Everyone lives.

Now, Obama is going to have to say it more diplomatically than me, just to be sure people don't take it as a back-handed slam against how 9-11 was handled. That's not what I'm getting at. Well it is, and it isn't. The firefighters, police, and people on the planes and in the buildings did their humanly jobs- they took care of each other as best they could. It's the leaders who failed us, with their inaction and unexplained actions. That sort of thing doesn't set a very good example for the rest of the country. We the people may have been united on September 12th, 2001, but we were very quickly put asunder by the very leaders who should have been using that unity for good, rather than evil.
I'm looking forward to not hating my countrymen anymore, because of a bumpersticker they might have, or a group they belong to. I'm looking forward to feeling good about being an American, and not just smug about being a liberal in a neo-fascist America. It's already starting, but I won't really breathe easy until about 12:35 EST tomorrow. We just got back from the MLK Day Marade here in Denver, and it always leaves me feeling extra mushy about my fellow man, but this year especially. Are whites and blacks making out on the streets, on the buses, spontaneously, yet? Well, no, but there was a lot of dancing in the streets, and you know what that leads to. :)

MERRY MAYAN CHRISTMAS!!!

2008-12-24T09:55:00.000-08:00

Here's a little story that will either warm the cockles of your heart, or make you laugh, or both. It involves approximately 20 bored archaeologists and historians (but mostly the archaeologists are to blame on this one), a gingerbread structure, and some mayhem. Really, it's best told in photo-essay form, so a tip of the Santa Hat goes to Troy for inspiring me and my cohorts to document these inspiring events in this way.

It all started a few weeks before Christmas, with the miraculous appearance of a beautiful Mayan Pyramid, made of gingerbread and candy, on our front office tables....

Here's an aerial-view to give you the full awe-inspiring effect, obviously taken by a brave Peeps in his Peeps-o-Copter....

We admired the structure with all the hushed reverence of 2nd-grade children, for a full 2 days. Besides, there were Gummi Bear guards clearly posted at the main entrance, and we seriously didn't want to mess with them.

Alas, after 2 days of hushed reverence, the gawking public and voracious looters could be held back no more, and some of the inner chambers were cracked open... to reveal... treasure!

Here you can see what must have been a Sacred chamber of Peanut M&Ms, and chocolate kisses... Not surprising, considering the Mayans worshiped the cacao bean as a god, and practically invented chocolate as we know it.

Above is the Chamber of Skittles, "mistakenly" opened by one amateur archaeologist when he fell into a trap door. Fortunately, his body was impaled on 1,000 spikes and then consumed by albino alligators that have been living in the underground river for the past 1200 years. Thus taking his greedy insolence out of the gene pool forever. Yaay!
Unfortunately, his comrades managed to destroy (probably by eating) the top of the pyramid, exposing the greatest treasure inside- a mural of The Sacred Mayan Hippo God! Named um, uh... Hippocatepetl. Yeah.

This apparently loosed the spirit of the great Hippo God(dess) and not in a good way. Protector spirits soon showed up, chased away the looters and gawkers, re-set the ancient curses protecting the pyramid so that anyone who touched it would find their flesh falling off of them in a matter of minutes, and erected licorice barriers to protect the site.

This is the main guy. Pretty fierce, que no?
He stayed on top of the pyramid to guard the Hippocatepetl mural, and deployed his troops all around as needed.

Nevertheless, looters snuck back in and viciously cut out the heart of the Hippo mural. And probably ate it, because it wasn't made of solid gold or anything, it was just sugar candy.

Emboldened by their victory, the looters and the looting continued.

And continued....

Reinforcements were brought in, including Santa the Roaring Hippo, but to no avail.

Things were rapidly getting out of hand. In the interest of science, we had to participate, and by doing so revealed another mysterious symbol on one of the inner walls. What is that thing? Could it be... Peace?

The looters were getting cheeky, even venturing to replace the hippo's heart with a red M&M...

And then, even cheekier, putting one in Santa Hippo's mouth.

At some point in here, I tried to appease the Gods by sacrificing some marshmallow Santa's on the pyramid and rolling them down the steps, as is customary, but some people in the office got offended. Go figure. I mean, what's Christmas without a little Mayan sacrifice? Complete with Cherry Cordials for blood? So there are no pictures of that. Sorry. Try and have a good Christmas without it.

Some of the hippo guards starting arming themselves with toothpicks.

One rather large fellow decided to block the entrance.

While still others doggedly kept up the licorice rope-barriers.

And of course, a few of them started getting punchy after awhile...

And then, the unthinkable happened. Worse than looters, or gawkers, or amateur archaeologists, or meth-head "arrowhead hunters"- yes, that's right. Developers.
The next day we arrived to find this sign erected in front of the pyramid. We rubbed our eyes like the little Whos in Whoville, not believing what we saw. Also, it was very difficult to read the fine print.

But it was true. Our beautiful sacred Mayan Pyramid site had been re-zoned, right out from under us. Something called "The Pyramid Lofts" starting at $700,000! were "Coming Soon!" We were sore' amazed and confused.

The hippos put up a valiant last stand.

But in the end, greed won out, and historic preservation was annihilated by something the developers like to call "Progress."

I won't show you pictures of the destroyed pyramid. It's just too sad.
So boys and girls, brothers and sisters of all stripes, everywhere, please remember this Christmas to treasure and protect your cultural resources, whatever they may be. That's the only point of this blog, other than to show what a serious bunch of dorks we are. And also, if you live in a capital city, go to your local SHPO office and take those hardworking guys and gals some cookies or something, because clearly we're all losing our minds.

As Hippocatepetl would say, "Oooga Booga Wooga Chooga, Happy Freakin' Christmas to Ya!"

Appendage to the Greatest Heist in History

2008-12-02T20:51:00.000-08:00

I should have been more clear with my original post, titled The Greatest Heist in History, until Now, and I apologize. Mostly the 3 Trillion dollar question for these past 8 years, for me, at least, has been- are they merely thieves, like the Territorial governors of New Mexico, or are they fixin' to build on this heap of destruction, a good ol' fashioned dictatorship? So I've come to the conclusion, after much nail-biting, fear, disorientation, calamity, and hives, that they are indeed the former rather than the latter.
They know as well as we do that not only would the American people not put up with such crap, even if there is an "R" after some elected official's name, and 2) this country is too damn big for one person to take over. Hell, it's too big NOW for one elected president to preside over. We just baaaarrrrrrely got control of this uh, United States of 'merka, as it is.
They also know that trying to bomb us into submission will only call them out and mark them as the bandits and scum-sucking sheep ticks they are for life. As it stands now, they've manipulated the media and public opinion to the point where the average citizen now feels justified in making up their own facts to support their own extremist, hateful, flimsy opinions, which are probably just extrapolations and regurgitations from the Republican Talking Points, aka Sean Hannity. (so that's a double regurgitation...eeeewwww, sorry for that).
You know that old saying, the first casualty of war is always the Truth? Well, I think we can go ahead and say that first, middle and last casualty of any Republican administration is the truth. Seriously. Go test this out on your neighbors or co-workers or friends. After 22 years of no Fairness Doctrine, and now 12 years of a completely de-regulated media, people now take Entertainment Tonight more seriously than the nightly news. That to me is the most damaging thing that's happened to this country, especially in the last 8 years. That people actually believed the shit those assclowns were throwin' up on the TV, just because they were saying it, loudly, and it was on- did I mention?- the TeeVee, it was taken as the God's Truth- that's what broke my heart and turned my stomach.
Those babies that were killed during the first bombings of Baghdad- well uh, they deserved to die, right? Because their parents were evil Iraqis or insurgents or something. I mean, how dare they stand up to the United States Military? If they had just fled like they were supposed to, or surrendered before the troops even showed up, they wouldn't have died! so it's THEIR fault! Stupid brown people. AND- how freaking irresponsible are those parents, living in a potential war zone??? I mean COME ON- they knew the United States Army was on it's way!
puh.
Yeah, with serious shit like this going on, no wonder we thought they had plans for totalitarianism. That's what a lot of their propaganda was designed for, to keep us afraid, to silence us. So we'd keep our own necks and heads inside our little turtle shells until the danger passed. But what if it didn't pass? We asked ourselves, repeatedly, and with good cause.
I started this blog a month ago, and now even more shit is hitting the fan. But it makes me even more certain that the plan all along was not to impose absolute power absolutely, if even for only a few years, but it was to break this country financially and leave it in such a huge fucking mess otherwise that we'd be too busy dodging chunks of falling sky to notice them sneaking off to their Leer jets bound for Dubai, holding big sacks of cash.
Where did that 9 billion dollars go, Paul Bremer?
But no, they're just a bunch of fucking thieves. And murderers. Who will high-tail it to the nearest, friendliest, extradition-free country (Dubai, Dubai, and Dubai) next week on January 20th at approximately 12:35 pm EST. They're not competent or smart enough to "build" on any of this catastrophe, anyway. Which is reason #3 that we don't have to worry about that.
They were smart enough to look at history, and know that greedy, murdering dictators who try to grab ALL the power and control ALL the people never survive long enough to enjoy their booty. So it was always this delicate tightrope dance, balancing just enough fear with just the right amount of media manipulation and corruption (wherefore art thou, Justice Department?) so that people wouldn't scream too loud about all the money they were stealing and the people they were killing.
As one of my hero/heart-throbs, John Cusack, said in his blog, "You gotta hand it to 'em, their gall is gorgeous."
But I still hold out hope that whether it's by special prosecutor, or Grand Jury investigation, or international tribunal, they will be held accountable for their war crimes, and the trashing of the Constitution, and for the stealing.
I still hold onto that image of Jenna Bush in a brown polyester waitress uniform, groveling for 35 cent tips so she can slowly, day by day, pay off her daddy's sins. One way or another, they will be held accountable. If not by the Congress, then by Grand Jury. If not by class action lawsuit ("The People of the United States vs. former President George W.Bush and Richard D. Cheney" has a nice ring to it) then by the Hague. If not by international special-forces peacekeeping units then... well, ya know. We'll figure something out. The important thing is that justice is restored to this country. We can't just turn the page and pretend this never happened. And remember, much of the country still doesn't know what really happened to it/them, and they may well be in post-traumatic denial for quite some time. Yes I'll say it, we need to give them a helping hand out of the swirling shame spiral.

See? it's possible for people to see the light.

Dick Cheney says he's going back to Casper, Wyoming. (yeah, right.) I think what he meant was, "I'm going to the island off of Dubai that I had created to look exactly like Casper, Wyoming. Oil rigs and all."
I'll leave it at for now- FBI agents are probably monitoring this.

And furthermore.... America, Thank You.

2008-11-11T20:05:00.000-08:00

I forgot to say this, because I was so busy not gloating, but thank you America. I love you. So much.
Thank you for making me feel sane again.
Thank you for lifting this burden off my shoulders, and sharing it with me, and putting your arms around my shoulders instead.
Thanks for singing with me. Thanks for praying with me. Thanks for having faith in me when I lost faith in you.
Thanks also for crying with me, and drowning out my embarrassingly loud sobs with your own, in chorus.
But thanks mostly for letting me know I'm not only the one out there with these ideals, these hopes, these dreams. I'm not the only who cares about the sanctity of the Constitution, and common decency, and justice. I'm not the only one who can put aside self-interest and think long-term for once. I'm not the only one who's sick to death of this death culture, of war-mongering, of raped women and slaughtered children on the evening news. I'm not the only one disgusted by corporate soldiers, and real soldiers being kicked to the curb after their service, or told to shut up and go home (if they have one). Yeah, I know, it's conceited of me to even think that.
Because, and maybe I should have come clean with this earlier, I grew up in a family that was like a microcosm of the Bush Administration, with the lying, and the favoritism, and the daily injustices, and the secret addictions, and the bullying, abusive, crazy-making behavior, and the lying, and the lying, and the lying. As a result, I still have this ingrained belief that if I don't do something, take responsibility for something, it won't get done. If I didn't water the plants, they would have died. If I didn't feed and walk the dog, she would have died. If I didn't clean the whole damn house every weekend... you get the picture. So I tend to take the weight of the world on me, and shoulder all sorts of guilt and burden that isn't mine to bear. It was true in my family, it's true for my country. If I don't try and save my family, who will? If I don't try and save the world, who will? It's odd, and not entirely coincidental, for the past 8 years, we as a people have been in a very sick, co-dependent relationship with our government. And for the past 8 years, almost to the day that the Thief got sworn in, I have not spoken to my family.
Now it seems, some kind of global intervention has taken place, and everyone else woke up from the abusive, codependent denial haze sometime after I did. For some, what shook them awake was the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. For some it was the bald-faced lies told in the mainstream media to get us into this ridiculous, tragic war. For some it was Katrina. For some it was seeing a loved one come home from said war(s) broken, uncared for, and thrown away by this government. For many it was the crashing economy that took their dreams with it.
For me, it was the carpet-bombing of the American people with lie after lie and scandal after scandal that did it. At first, I was so triggered by their violence and deception, I could only duck and cover like everyone else. I could only try and take care of myself and my husband and our cat, which was hard enough to do for the first 3 years of this nightmare, anyway. I was so triggered, most of the time, I could barely catch my breath, nevermind speak out against the atrocities, or tell my story. Even the husband said, right after I'd shaved my head in protest at the Thief's 2nd stolen inauguration (and then immediately decided to get pregnant) "you seem to be taking this personally." Well, I was. That's the understatement of the decade. For me, every time the Bush Regime cranked out another whopper, like "We know Saddam has Weapons of Mass Destruction and he plans to use them!" right after the UN Weapons inspectors were interviewed and said, "yeah, nothing here, we got rid of them all in the 90's, like we told you" it was my psychotic, narcissist of a mother threatening to kill me, herself, and burn down the house all over again- complete with the sneering at my tears and a "you're not abused, you're a spoiled little bitch." for good measure.

So thank you America, for validating my perceptions, what I've seen with my own eyes and felt with my own heart, as real. You don't know how much that means to me.
And if you're not crying yet, just read Alice Walker's Open Letter to Barack Obama, available here http://www.theroot.com/id/48726- but even it doesn't contain the crying-est part. That you had to hear on her interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! today, Veteran's Day. Many black and other oppressed-people leaders around the globe have been calling to remind Obama that the White House was built by slaves, and how he should never forget that. For many of these people, Obama is not enough of a "grievance politician" like Jesse Jackson, one who is constantly reminding whites of the wrongs they've done, and blacks of the struggles they've been through. They know he is a transcendent of that type, and not of that type, so he needs to "remember" as a cultural descendant of American slaves, if not a strictly racial descendant of them (since his father was not descended from slaves). This gets tricky because white racists could just as easily remind Obama constantly that the White House was built by slaves, but they'd be doing it to try and belittle him or "put him in his place." As Alice does, she reframed it in her gentle, rip-your-heart-open way. She said look, the ancestors have long memories, and they also think long-term. So I think they knew, when they were building that house, that they were building it for him. They poured their loftiest dreams into the sweat that built that place, and they dreamnt of him generations before he ever arrived. They knew he would come. They knew they wouldn't see it in their lifetimes, or in their children's lifetime, or in their great-grandchildren's lifetime, but they knew he would come. That's faith.
(crying yet?)
I liken it to that old saying about Cathedral builders in Europe back in the day. It would take at least 100 years to build a good one, and workers were little better than slaves, but the honor and "glory" of doing it would be passed down for 3, 4 generations.
It also strikes a similar chord to one of my favorite quotes, from one of my favorite activist heroine-moms, Winona LaDuke. She was, in turn, quoting one of her Anishinaabe elders on the struggles of Native Americans and whether or not they would ever "get there." The elder said, in a nutshell- "all this- our lands being taken away, our people diminished from disease and warfare, our people's families torn apart by poverty, drugs and crime, these past 200 or so years, all this, is but a thunderclap (and here he smacked his hands together loudly, for effect) in the history of our people."
We'll look on these past 8 years as such, amigos. I have faith. But thank you again, so much, for weathering the storm with me, and for handing me a damn umbrella when I wouldn't get out of the rain myself.

(and thanks for allowing me to officially re-christen this space as The Campfire! The Crowbar was starting to give me bad visuals.)

What, Me, Gloat?

2008-11-07T19:51:00.000-08:00

Nah, no gloating to be found here. Nuthin' to see here. Move along. Except, this is me, right now
I have no wish to behave or speak like the blowhard asswipes who bellowed their pre-supposed superiority from every rooftop, after they STOLE another election in 2004. No desire.
On the other hand, I'm not going to button my lip and sit on my hands either. A song keeps coming to me, and it's sung to the tune of, and in the style of, one of Dora the Explorer's victory songs at the end of each episode. Need a refresher? Here you go:

But my version goes a little something like this:
Hey, we e-lec-ted a President, who isn't an id-i-ot! Yeah
We did it! We did it! We did it- Hooray!
Yeah we listened to our hopes instead of our fears, yeah
we did it- We did it! We did it! Hooray!
We used our hearts and minds to win some hearts and minds
Yeah we did it. We did it! We did it! Hooray!

Ah. Feels good, huh? I'm still in that nervous, waiting-for-something-terrible-to-happen mode, which is not entirely unwarranted. And then every once in a while, I tear up, or burst out giggling, thinking of how awesome this is.
President-elect Barack Obama.
I knew it would happen, and yet I didn't. I'm still worried for him. A lot of people are. And their feelings are not entirely unwarranted either. If he is a cross between JFK and MLK- well- that's awesome, but it doesn't bode well.
We have to imagine a different outcome this time.
I've harped on this before. Our imaginations could use a little exercise, out in the fresh air and sunshine. So I'm busy imagining a more perfect union, and everyone working together to make sure it happens. I'm visualizing Malia at age 18 - the age she'll be when they turn over the White House to someone else. And yes, I'm picturing the new puppy growing up, and growing old there too (FYI, it's a Wheaton terrier from a rescue group- they have hypo-allergenic hair instead of fur, they're an American breed, and they're great dogs.)
I'm imagining the fashion standards Michelle will set as a "real" working woman, and a real woman who is really in love with her husband and not afraid to show it, while being her own person and setting a fabulous example for her daughters, all at the same time. I'm jubilant at the thought that President Obama is the first president my daughter will remember. I'm pretty glad that Bush & Co. will be but a vague memory to her, if at all, much like the Nixon administration was to me.
So. With all that happiness and sunshine- and really, I haven't gloated all week- you can ask my friends- I still have to wonder why the McCain supporters are so genuinely down-hearted.
Seriously. But if any of them are reading (doubtful)- I want to say, you have nothing to fear from us. Barack Obama means it when he says he will be your President too- he's not just paying lip service to that notion like most Republicans do. We are not the ones who keep Enemy lists of people and then act out our revenge fantasies on them as soon as we get a modicum of power (helloooo, Mrs. Palin....). We are not the ones you have to worry about dragging your family from their beds in the middle of the night because you sorta look like an "enemy combatant" or your name is similar to a terrorist's. We are not the ones who detain and torture people without due process, just because we've consolidated power in all branches of government, and we'll get away with it at least for a few years.
Nope. And ya know what? They know that. The one, lone blowhard conservative in my office used to say some amazing shit right to my face like, "Obama is a sleeper agent- his story is bullshit- how do you get into Harvard after going to highschool in Hawaii? That's right, affirmative action. yeeha, we'll have the first affirmative-action President." My jaw would just drop, my fists would clench, then I would remember I'm in an office environment... and walk away. Then I realized, he's saying this shit because he knows that when we're in power, we won't pull any of the common crap they pull on a daily basis, just because that's not who we are. He knows I'm not going to put him on an "S-list" and have him beaten senseless just because I can, because that's not how we roll. Schmuck.
So it boggles the mind as to why all these yahoos are out buying up every assault weapon on the market right now, before Obama is sworn in, because they think one of the first things he'll do is ban assault weapons. Ostensibly. What they're really afraid of, and what they won't admit to (unless tortured) is a big "Black Uprising" - the kind that Ron Paul used to warn about in his little Texan Libertarian newsletters. http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/10/paul.newsletters/index.html
He explicitly advised his subscribers to stock up on weapons, food, and more weapons, because as soon as blacks got a little bit of power, they would use it to avenge almost 400 years of slavery and general mistreatment.
Now, I've never heard any black person say anything remotely similar to what Mr. Paul projects onto them, as an entire "people"- but seriously dudes- we have bigger fish to fry right now than the whole assault weapons/ 2nd Amendment problem. Do you really think you and your damn hunting rifles are priority 1?
For instance, the economy is looming large. And global warming, which is escalating.
It's November 7th, and Cuba is about to get hammered with ANOTHER hurricane. So- even if you think we're about to go all Mad Max because of these combined maelstroms... did you really think we were "safe" under the Patriot Act, which basically suspends the Constitution whenever Dubya gets nervous (which is frequently)? And the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens by the government- that didn't make you nervous? And again, the carting-off of people to black-site prisons just because they looked a certain way, talked a certain way, worshiped a certain way.... that didn't bother you in the least? The fact that these mercenary corporate armies were sent into New Orleans after Katrina, to SHOOT CIVILIANS didn't bother you at all? But now... that we have a black or mixed race man in the highest office in the land... all of a sudden you feel the need to buy an assault rifle. And that's not racially motivated at all? Sorry, not buyin' it.
If anyone else believes it, I've got a mountain to sell you, complete with Scenic Roads open 5 months a year, and Snackbar.
Refreshments, anyone?

Mop-up

2008-11-03T19:47:00.000-08:00

Hey y'all. Suzy here, with my night-before-the-election blog. There were a few tacks I was going to take with this one, but (I mean, for cripes' sake, how could I not blog?) I think it's more important to do the pre-election thing first.
And primero, I am not trying to freak anyone out, I'm just warning everyone to keep a sharp eye out, and stay prepared, until the evening of January 20th. And even after that, we probably can't relax. No way the right wingers are going to just fold up their cheap tents and go home. We'll have to protect Obama while holding his feet to the fire on the issues, and be watching his back at the same time. For eight years. Yep. Thought it was time to relax? Sorry. When I was on a wildland fire-fighting crew, our chiefs trained us that most accidents and injuries happen not during the fire, when everybody's senses are sharpened and heightened by adrenaline, and you can work for 24 hours straight without knowing it, but during "mop-up" or the aftermath of the fire. When you're not directly battling flames, you tend to relax a little bit, let your guard down, start goofing and horsing around with your crewmates, and before you know it, someone falls into a stumphole and gets seriously hurt. Stumpholes are what they sound like- a tree burns almost completely, leaving maybe part of a stump behind and a whole lotta ash and smoldering charcoal. They're deceptive because the tree looks totally burned- like there's no fuel left to burn so how could it be dangerous? But what you don't see is that the fire has also traveled down the main roots of the tree and burned them out under the ground on which you're standing, and it may look solid, but as soon as someone steps on the thin layer of ash and mineralized soil - whoosh! Down they go down the rabbit hole. Actually they're much worse than rabbit holes- half the time the fire is still burning down there, the ground is hot enough to melt rubber soles on fire-grade boots, and the gaping black maw that opens to swallow you up looks like an entrance to hell. Or, what I am imagine the entrance to hell would look like, having never been there. (* correction, I thought I was in hell once, but I was just in New England.)
If you prefer sports metaphors, try the one Michael Moore trotted out a couple days ago, in an interview with Amy Goodman. He told the story of the Detroit Lions running back who was blazing a trail to the endzone and thought he was home-free, and started celebrating before he even got to the endzone... doing his little dance and all...and a running back from the opposing team came and smacked that ball right out of the Lions' dude's hands. And took it, and ran with it, for quite a distance. Yeah.
Or if you prefer the much shorter, Yogi Berra type warning, "it ain't over til it's over."
So don't fall into any stumpholes out there tomorrow, horsin' around and doing your premature victory dance/laps, and I'll see you at the Global Tiki Party afterwards. :)
Oh and here's a preview of that other blog I was going to write:

Anyhoo, here goes

O, Death

2008-10-12T20:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was shit and today wasn't much better. Death sucks. Don't let anyone tell you it doesn't. At the end of yesterday I felt like crap after crying, then talking to lots of people and feeling better, and eating lots of rich food, then crying again. Not even 2 mocha grandes could get me through it, and that's usually my anti-grief/ uncontrollable crying weapon of choice.
A few people even gave me bewildered glances as I sobbed when the casket with our mutual friend and colleague in it came out of the mortuary chapel, bourne by other, stronger mutual friends and colleagues. Yes, I was crying. I cried- at a funeral! For God's sake, why couldn't I control myself??? F- them too. At least I spared the family my blubbering in that condolences line or whatever you call it. Got about 5 feet away, then sprinted for the side door. Couldn't do it. Perhaps it gave them comfort just to see how many people loved, admired, respected and knew him, but cripes, they don't know me. Why burden them with my grief when that's all I have to give at the moment? I'll get myself together and pay fitting tributes later. Like, for the rest of my life. But right now, I still can't believe it.
After finding out a few more salient details at the funeral and the "wake" reception held by a co-worker, I'm also still officially in that "angry" phase of grief. For instance, apparently all the men on Dale's side of the family had died in their 50's of some sort of heart problem. But he wouldn't go to a doctor. Dammit, Dale! People need you! People depend on you and love you!
I think he must have had inklings, and decided to eat better, but still didn't want to go and get the official prognosis, because it would have just depressed him. In the last 6-8 months it seemed like he was slowly fading away from us, physically and emotionally. I hardly ever saw him, but when I did he barely said "hi" and he looked pale, and gray. I think the last time I saw him, it was crossing Colfax at Grant, him going towards the museum, me going to the gym which is near the office he worked in. I recognized him (barely) and said "hello Dale!" he smiled in recognition and said hello back, and kept quickly walking. I knew he was having stressful times at work and seemed to be withdrawing into himself. Like he just didn't want to be bothered. Maybe this is too much psychoanalysis but this is what people do when someone dies suddenly.
Actually, I'll bet he's doing a big Homer Simpson "doh!" up in heaven right now. And perhaps, St. Peter's giving him a gentle smack upside the head. He's saying, geez louise, I knew my days were numbered, but couldn't I have just a little more time? St. Pete's shaking his head no. "Well pal, if you'd gone to the doctor a year ago like your wife told you to? Maybe. But no."
Apparently this was nothing new, because one time he slipped and fell on the ice and broke his wrist, and didn't go to the doctor then either. Just wrapped it up with Ace bandages and an ice pack for several weeks. It never healed properly, and caused him pain for the rest of his life. But he never complained.
Apparently he had been visiting his mother last Sunday, and left kind of earlier than usual, and it happened while he was walking up to the bus stop. Someone must have seen him collapse, and called an ambulance. Jesus, I hope so.
It was a week ago. Just a week ago.
I have to post this final, hilarious story that Mark Wolfe told at the service, as a tribute to Dale's humour which is what we all appreciated most about him (as well as the encyclopedic knowledge). Mark had left the Colorado SHF office for greener pastures in of all places, Texas, as their new State Historic something or other- in August. Evidently the desk that he had used all these years belonged to him, not the State, and he wanted it shipped down to him as soon as feasible. At his expense of course, but still, kind of a pain for the office staff. So in typical Dale fashion, he makes a big practical joke out of the whole thing. Last Monday, Mark walks into his office bright and early (not having heard anything at the time) to find a medium-sized cardboard box on his desk addressed to him but marked "PERSONAL."
It doesn't weigh a lot, so he opens it cautiously and inside finds... a ransom note, complete with stereotypical magazine-cut-out letters, for his desk. It says basically, give us $500 or you will never see this desk again. DO NOT call the police. He digs down further in the package and finds, in a small plastic baggie, one knob, taken from the desk.
We all hooted and howled with laughter, through our tears. Dale had the last word, and he made us all laugh.
The most poignant part is that then Mark sat down and opened his email as usual, and found out that one of his best friends had died.
There's not a whole lot, funny or unfunny, that can make that better. I don't think many of us want to be "better" just yet. We want to keep on feeling shitty for as long as it takes. We'd like to be the better people that Dale inspired us to be- to have more integrity, a stronger work ethic, more patience with idiots, strive for greater accuracy- but frankly that seems impossible right now. As historians, archaeologists, and human beings, we need to mark the passing of a truly great man, and mourn him properly. It's the end of an era, the Dale Heckendorn era, and none of us know what that means yet except a lot less laughter in the face of adversity.

The Greatest Heist in History, Until Now

2008-09-29T19:33:00.000-07:00

This one's for you, Dale*. I bow to the Master of All History,(but especially Colorado) a living, breathing, walking encyclopedia of wit and knowledge, and one of the hardest-working, most dedicated people I've ever met: Dale Heckendorn. He was our National and State Register Historian for at least 20 years, one of those rare funny/smart guys who had integrity to spare and cracked us up with his drier-than-desert-sand humour. I, by contrast, am one of those assholes who does this archaeology/history thing as a vocation and amateur avocation, while writing scripts and blogs on the side, dreaming of Hollywood fame like every other asshole in the universe, and hatching benevolent plots to xeriscape the planet and provide clean water for everyone. For Dale, this history thing WAS his dream job, it was his life, and he poured 100% of his passion and considerable intellect into it. Every day I think he got to work at 7am or earlier, and left maybe by 6pm. His previous career was in managing Walgreens' drug stores, so once he got his Masters in Historic Preservation, his true love, he was BEYOND THRILLED to volunteer at the Historical Society. When they finally hired him on full-time, he acted like he couldn't believe his good fortune of getting PAID* to do what he loved- and that was serving history in general, and the people of Colorado. (*I use the term PAID loosely, because at the time State slave-wages were a whopping $18,000 a year for full-time work. They're not much better now.) HE was no amateur. He died suddenly last Sunday of a heart attack. I was privileged to know him for 5 years. So. In the spirit of Dale I'm cleaning up this post and any other historically-minded posts I ever write, making sure the details and broad strokes are accurate beyond any doubt.
Also I've been waiting for the right time to write this blog, and now seems good. Mostly I didn't want to come off as a pompous, know-it-all, history geek without a very good reason for doing so. But since everyone reading this is already aware of the fact that I'm a pompous, opinionated know-it-all, yeeeh know, what the heck.
When this here Bush (II) administration started carpet-bombing the American public with scandal after scandal as soon as they took office in 2001, I was just as stunned into "shock and awe" as the next person. There was so much scandal coming at us fast and furious, you'd have to be a 5th-degree black belt ninja in scandal to deflect it, much less react to it in a rational way. So I, like many stunned and disgusted Democrats or anyone to the left of Jerry Falwell, thought ok, these assclowns will just fuck themselves right out of a job in a hurry and if they're not impeached by 2003, I'll be a monkey's uncle- but in any case, by 2004 we can all come back to our senses and elect a REAL President.
Then September 11th, 2001 happened- and again, I saw the guilty look on W's face as he mounted that pile of rubble with the firefighters, and thought everybody else saw it too, because gods almighty, you don't need conspiracy theories to know that that happened ON THEIR WATCH. So I still thought, and rightly so, that Moron Jr. and his gang of thugs were on their way out for mishandling everything so badly.
I didn't fully realize what they were up to until 2003, when Chimpy stood on that aircraft carrier's ramp in a flight suit and declared "Mission Accomplished" while people were dying and Osama bin Laden was scampering off to Pakistan or something. And then I got it again when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. And then again... oh hell, I don't have time to list them all here- but it came to me all of a sudden:
This is exactly what the New Mexico Governors did for something like 5 centuries, right up until Bill Richardson (and I'm still not sure he's clean).
Whether they were appointed by the King of Spain by Royal Decree, or by the Emperor Maximillian by ultra-royal (and yet, illegitimate) decree, or by the many self-appointed Generales or Presidentes who followed, OR (in case you think I'm being racist) by the U.S. Presidents who had to appoint Territorial Governors for the newly annexed Territory of New Mexico from, when class? when? That's right, from the time the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo was signed in 1849 until New Mexico became a state in 1912. And then, after that as well. Their common denominator was that they were all corrupt to the core. Their only aim in "governance," if you could call it that, was to steal as much as they possibly could to benefit themselves and their friends/family and then to escape with their lives, if possible.
It all started after the generation of the conquistadors, when New Spain decided that the Northern Territories (as they were called) weren't really all that, and rather than throw good money and people after bad, they'd concentrate on California which was like a Garden of Eden and much more likely to make them filthy rich.
This is hard to believe today, with real estate prices equaling or exceeding that of Manhattan, but Santa Fe was considered a backwater, and "a little hell-hole" as my New Mexico history professor put it. The northern-most territory of New Spain quickly became its Siberia. It's where bad bureaucrats were sent to die, or to do less harm than they could in the magnificent cities of Guadalajara and Mexico City. So as you might imagine, these bureaucrats who were not the cream of the crop in the first place. In fact they were criminals, but they came from high-ranking families so they couldn't be thrown in jail. These ne'er-do-well sons of rich and powerful people (ringing any bells class? Anyone? Buehler?) in their new posts in Santa Fe proceeded to whine, and bitch, and moan about their poor sad sorry lots in life like nobody's bidness. Meanwhile, they had the natives enslaved, growing immense orchards of fruit and wine-grapes for them, harvesting all the food, basically doing all the work- and with nothing else to do, they wrote letter after letter to the King's Chancellors, Ex-Chequer of Mexico, Cortez- whoever they thought might listen- telling them what a little hell-hole Santa Fe was and how desperately they needed supplies, money, guns, strong young men, etc. because the natives were "uncooperative" and they were all "starving", blah blah blah. None of it was true. We archaeologists who know the REAL story from the undeniable material record, get into fits of hysterics, reading those letters, because those dudes were rollin' in it! Because why? Class? What was their goal? That's right, steal as much as they possibly can to benefit themselves and their friends/family and then escape with their lives, if possible.

In fact, this is a point I love to beat my colleagues over the head with whenever we get into it about the arbitrary difference between what we call "history" in America, and "prehistory." They insist that real history started when the "written record" was introduced to this continent. So, people with writing (aka, Europeans, aka, White People) have real history, and people who weren't that "advanced" don't have anything of worth to even talk about so shut up already. I take sadistic pleasure in pointing out repeatedly how racist and arbitrary and hence, skewed and inaccurate that definition is, and this is one of my favorite examples of WHY. Because PEOPLE LIE. In verbiage, in writing, in their thoughts, ALL THE DAMN TIME. Lying was invented way before writing was, anywhere, and every culture does it. Get this in your heads, class. Now. It WILL be on the test!!
Still think I'm being kinda racist, by implying that all Hispano-americans are inherently corrupt or something? Well, even though my archaeologist friend Angelica, who is from Juchipila, Zacatecas (you can't get much more Mexican than that) told me very matter-of-factly that "el corrupcion es la sciencia de los espanoles" (Corruption is the science of the Spanish)- I'm here to tell you, it got much, much worse after the United States took hold of Nuevo Mexico and started the sendin' the white guys in. HOOO boy, howdy, that's when things really went downhill. The first white Territorial Governors were basically the former "Indian Fighters" like Kit Carson who deserved some kind of reward for herding thousands of Navajos from the Northwest corner of New Mexico to the Southeast corner, and then deciding that was a really bad idea and herding them back, into Arizona. Along the way, a lot of them died. But Carson and his cronies like George Bent were masters of the Santa Fe Trail and all its commerce- they were like big gang bosses essentially, except they would do the bidding of the U.S. Army when it suited them. They made lousy governors. And since there was already this long, upstanding tradition of corruption in Santa Fe and locals seemed to like their traditions- I mean, why buck it? So their stated and unstated goals became, what class? What was that? Can we say it all together? steal as much as they possibly could to benefit themselves and their friends/family and then to escape with their lives, if possible. Long story short, after Carson and Bent, the litany of Territorial Governors reads like a dirty laundry list from a rogue's gallery full of crime and intrigue. The Wikipedia list isn't near complete. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governors_of_New_Mexico_Territory
Whoever posted this was probably too embarrassed to tell the real story. As you'll notice, the average tenure was like 6 months. If it says "died in office," that means they were killed. So many white guys were offed in the first year by angry mobs, the various U.S. Presidents in charge of filling that post were in the same position as the Mexican Presidentes, various kings, etc. They were scrapin' the bottom of the barrel.
here's another pretty map of Territorial New Mexico, and Utah.
But here's why this story gives me hope. Put' near ALL of the Territorial Governors, thieving, murderous dogs that they were, were run out of town on a rail or sometimes strung up right in that picturesque Santa Fe Plaza you hippies love to hang out in. Thank God. My friend Beth's great-great-grandfather, Samuel Beach Axtell, was one who managed to escape with his life and tell the tale. The U.S. gov't brought him in from Utah Territory thinking he'd be immune to the corruption, as an outsider, which was mostly true, but even he couldn't keep his hands out of the cookie jar and he fled for his life in the middle of the night on a fast horse before the angry mob, pitchforks, torches and all, came for him. I imagine he headed straight East to Texas, and relative civilization.
"Axtell exhibited good administrative and legislative qualities while Governor of Utah and Representative from California, respectively, but his tenure as Governor of New Mexico would be so inept, a federal agent named Frank Angel would later describe Governor Axtell's administration as having more "corruption, fraud, mismanagement, plots and murder" than any other Governor in the history of the United States. This contributed to the lawlessness that prevailed in much of the territory, and Axtell's inability to understand or combat that problem. He often exhibited dictatorial practices, and when something was wrong, he would blame someone else." (Wikipedia)
Sound familiar?
Here's the hopeful part. It wasn't political rivals who came for them, by and large, it was the people. People had the power then, exploited and enslaved and oppressed as they were- people damn sure have the power now. Not that I am in any way advocating violence.
I guess the difference with today's gang is that incompetents were purposefully chosen, (Mike "heckuva job" Brown, college roommate of one of Bush's pals) and told to screw things up as much as possible, so that people get the impression that government never works and we should get rid of it/privatize everything.
Mark my words, that is the end goal. They are now trying to pull off the greatest heist in human history. Not just what's in the Treasury now, but what might be in the Treasury for a few generations to come. Make no mistake, this is a stick-up. This time, the Shock and Awe is coming from Wall Street, the Weapons of Mass Destruction are the credit banks and the mortgage banks, threatening to implode and take us all down with them if we don't do what they say.
Send money, guns, and young men, and quickly! The natives are at my door! (yes, they're bringing you your apricot wine, like you asked, Senor....)
Same thing.
It's another big, fat, whopping lie.
yawn.
Don't fall for it.

On a side note, this monkey business didn't end with Statehood for New Mexico. Ohhhh no. Because what is their stated goal, class? One more time? oh yeah- steal as much as they possibly could to benefit themselves and their friends/family and then to escape with their lives, if possible. And it continues to this day, down to the smallest State bureaucrat in that 3rd world country to the South of me (even the secretary of graduate studies at UNM who held my NSF Fellowship-winning roommate's new computer hostage for months, trying to figure out a way she could profit from it)- but my favorite stories are from the "governor" who presided when I lived there, and that's "gov'nr" Gary Johnson. He was so incredibly bad and inept, NPR did a TWO-HOUR long special on his amazing badness. The theme was, the same backdrop I've set for you, that he even out-badded the Territorial Governors, and the lying ne'er-do-well hidalgos from the Colonial days. In 1994 he ran on a platform of "reform", and smaller government. He had no political experience, just ran a huge commercial construction company that his father-in-law handed him. You guessed it, he was actually a Libertarian in Republican clothing. Within a month of taking office, he had done two things that crack me up to this day: First thing, he dissolved a whole helluva lotta state agencies because he found them "unnecessary," e.g. they provided essential regulatory services that "got in the way of business." This included the Livestock Inspection stations which are positioned at points of entry on all four sides of New Mexico (*as well as most of the rest of the State agriculture Department). He said, "New Mexico beef is the finest in the world! Everyone should trust us and take our word for it!" The next day, all those livestock inspection people who had voted for him lost their jobs. And the guy who was the head of the USDA at the time, the agency that requires all states to have these livestock inspection stations, was like, "Uhhhmmmm, okay, you can do that I guess, but we're going to have to treat you like a foreign country now. And you will have to pass much stricter regulations and standards, because you are behaving like a foreign country, with exotic foodstuffs." Gov'r Johnson quickly and quietly reversed course and stationed like one guy, whom he probably found at "Rent-A-Livestock-Inspector" for $5 an hour, at each port-of-entry.
The next thing was even better- he also ran on a platform of getting the Indian gaming under control because white people were getting totally pissed off that the goddam 'Ndns were finally getting some money, and power, and fighting for their rights- so the next thing he did in office was try and shut down all the Indian casinos except for a few roulette wheels or something. He started with the Pueblo of Pojoaque, which is close to Santa Fe and had just opened a spankin' brand new casino and had plans for even more. The highway that runs from Santa Fe to Espanola (and on up to Bandelier, Los Alamos, Chimayo- all that tourist stuff) runs right through Pojoaque land, and several other pueblos for that matter. The Pojoaque Tribal Council had been expecting some shenanigans like this and they were ready. They said, okay white boy, you could do that but uhm, you realize that we are a sovereign nation and your State highway runs through our land at our discretion- so we'll just have to shut down that highway and turn it into a toll road to make up for the lost revenue.
We'll be nice - we'll only charge oh, maybe 8, 10 dollars a car.
Gov'nr Johnson quickly and quietly reversed course and promised never to bother them again, if they let him live. They did. And yet, somehow, he was re-elected. Go to NPR, check out the archives... or I'll try to find it... it's a fantabulous story.

FEAR NOT, PARTE DOS! (but FYI, shotguns are on sale at Kmart...)

2008-09-23T20:05:00.000-07:00

I've been staggering back and forth between abject fear and laughing-my-ass-off indifference for the past two weeks, much like the frat boys who run Wall Street have been staggering around for the past 30 years. But they have an excuse. They've been drunk.
When I say Fear Not, mis amigos, I don't say it lightly. I'm not saying "Don't worry, be happy" (aka, go ahead and do those farewell drugs). I know there is plenty to fear out there, plenty of reason to fear, plenty of conspiracy theories to conjure up that would scare the pants off a Vietnam Vet, plenty of bad past behavior that tends to predict future behavior. As a momma bear I have to listen to my instincts about protecting myself and my family, and PLAN for the best hopeful outcome at the same time. Fortunately for us women, multi-tasking is not difficult. Por ejemplo: While talking to Randi Rhodes on her show about how awesome the DNC and Obama and everything was going to be, I was filling up my emergency 5-gal water bottles. Juuuuuusssssst in case. True Story.
So. These past two weeks have been like cold-water slapped in the face after a wwweeeeee bit too long stewing in the old de-regulation jacuzzi. Ahhhhhhh... What a relief. I mean, it's kind of a relief when the shit finally hits the fan, isn't it? For more than 2 years now we've been waiting, biting our nails for this moment, when the biggest banks the world has ever known would collapse under their own irresponsible, monopoly-money weight, and then not even ask or beg politely to be bailed out, nay, but DEMAND that we bail out their sorry asses and NOW with no oversight, just hand over the money bitches!!
My first response is kinda Goodfellas, as in "Fuck YOU, pay me." The next response comes from my redneck half (that's my dad's side) which is grab the guns and bar the door. Those muthafrakkers come for your house, your farm, your car, your dog- I think you have every right to pull a shotgun on them at close range and use whatever catchphrase suits you. All of them translate to, "Nuh-uh."
In this sense, I have so much in common with my Republican brother-in-law, it's not even funny. He's been preparing for this day since he was oh, about 10, maybe younger, when his father was killed in an industrial accident and he was suddenly "man of the house." Make no mistake, I have respect for the guy. He knows how to hunt, and he pretty much walks his talk, which is un-sanctimonious, and generous to a fault with those he loves. With no college education, he's a hard worker, well respected in his field, and pretty damn smart. (and somewhat ironically, a proud union member).
Which is why I cannot allow him to vote for Grampy McSame.
Or, which is why it totally pisses me off that despite everything, EVEN THIS, he WILL vote for John McSame.
Let me back up a bit and explain why I'm writing this blog. Last weekend we went up to Greeley to visit the nephew for Family Day at UNC, where nephew just started. yaay, nephew!! We're so proud! Also we went for the brunch buffet which included all-you-can-eat prime rib and waffles. *Very good, I might add, since the cow came from right down the street. Driving up there through Adams and Weld Counties via Hwy 85, you get a very clear sense very early on that you are no longer in Obama Territory. Greeley is a friendly enough town, despite the slaughterhouse and stockyards, but getting up there is like crossing through No-Man's-Land for us progressives. Don't expect me to launch into a hilarious travelogue here that basically gets me cheap laughs at the expense of rural people and their culture, that's not what I'm here for. Like I said, half of me is redneck, from the smallest of towns in South Dakota for chrissake, and there's a reason this mutual hatred/contempt/disdain divide is growing in America- I don't need to add to it, and don't see the point.
Drive through any rural county that's adjacent to a major metropolitan area in America, and you'll see that this election is as much about Country vs. City, as it is Black vs. White, and Rich vs. Poor. There's a reason McSame picked a small-town mayor from a largely rural state who touts "small-town values" and loves to hunt, ride dirt bikes, do meth, etc. It's because of this divide, which has been nurtured and allowed to grow for the past 8 years (or I would say, 28), built on a false notion that country mice and city mice are fundamentally "diff'ernt" as my grandmother would say (god rest her soul), and therefore "other" and therefore easily, "enemy."

(this is a cute picture to keep you interested, break up the text, and display my happy-dance moves.)
So in many ways, I totally empathize with the country mindset, but I can't claim it.
Which brings me to my original point. My brother-in-law will vote for McCain no matter what I say, because yes, it's his last stand so to speak, at least philosophically. The anthropologist in me ponders these things and comes up with what me & my colleagues have always come up to explain inexplicable behavior in groups of humans, behavior that is against their own best interest, behavior that is self-destructive: People don't want to admit that they're wrong.
(if this blog were a talkshow, instead of "Ah-ha!" moments, I would have "Duh" moments, and that was one of them.) Duh. Big dog double duh.
I mean, really, really, REALLY don't want to admit that they're wrong. Like, ever.
Not even when they're going over that cliff, headfirst, and the guy who they thought was their best friend PUSHED them and is now laughing his ass off up top, and holding your wallet, as well as your pants, because he ripped them off you first and told you this was skinny dippin'. They'll be yellin', "see you at the lake, Mac!" as they plunge 10,000 feet to their doom.
That's right, many people would literally rather die, than admit they're wrong.
Rural people especially don't want to feel like they're being told that their entire way of life is wrong, because they already get that feeling from pop culture. But they are by far, not the only ones. There's about 20% of people who cannot or will not bring themselves to think for a moment that even PART of their worldview might be based on false premises. That don't want to be told that it's not okay to be racist and it NEVER was. They don't want to hear that their behavior is inherently sexist and needs to change. They don't want to know that their old one-ton pickup truck is causing the polar icecaps to melt and maybe they should switch to biodiesel (grow your own!)
However,John McSame knows that rural people in pertickler feel picked on, and that's why he's telling them that they are right, for once. His message is that there's nothing wrong with being racist, or sexist, or extremely religion-ist, or a fun-lovin', atv-drivin', gun-totin' redneck. yeeha! That's what Ammurrka is all about, right?
So for the sake of pride, and ego, and saving face, this same 20% of the American population (most of them, my family) will vote for John McCain. It will be their last act of defiance as they're dragged, not into "that good night" but into the dawn of a new era. And once they get there, they will find plenty of hard work to please their spirits and plenty to be proud of, but precious little to whine about.
Especially taxes.
So this is what my sister-in-law brings up, as we're tucking in to our lovely roast beest and peppering the freshman nephew with questions; Taxes. I made a sarcastic comment that it wouldn't bother me too much if bro-in-law's (her husband, did I mention?) absentee ballot got lost in the mail. She replied, well at least he researches the issues, unlike most people who just see a commercial and then decide. I mumbled something about anyone who did a lick of research would know that McSame is not on their side. She retorted (and this is rare for her) that Bro-law would probably say the same about me, and didn't I realize that other people with different upbringings, religions, and income brackets would just not want to pay higher taxes? I looked at her like, HUH? Both eyebrows arched to the utmost. I started to say, uh, no, that's never made any sense to me and besides Obama's plan would give way more tax breaks to the middle class while Grampy's basically just continues the cornholing, but older, but she rattled off some more platitudes about "isn't it great that people can disagree in this country and still live together" while I checked her cranberry juice for drugs.
Perhaps I should direct her to my other blog, "No longer the difference between Coke and Pepsi." Or perhaps not.
No, I don't get the whining about taxes, because it's just that, a whine. It's a cover for people who can't bring themselves to vote for a black man, because in their hierarchical little brains, that puts a black man Above them somehow, and they can't have that.
They would literally rather die, and see their children sold into slavery for the Chinese, than admit they've been bamboozled, lied to, raped and then forced to pay for the rape kit- than vote for change.
So still, fear not, Obama will be President, and it will be great, but not perfect. We'll have a lot more of those Waco-style compounds springing up as the right-wing voters refuse to participate in the rebuilding of America and instead wall themselves off rather than admit that a black man is President, or place themselves in any way "subservient" to him. This is unfortunate, but may be a necessary step in our evolution as a country. Bruce the psychological-guy explains to me that integrally speaking, these people are still in the "orange" phase where everything's a hierarchy and the person "above" you is not your friend unless they look, act and talk just like you. We anthropologists have a better way of explaining it: they're operating from the lizard brain, or the reptilian cortex, which in more common terms houses the ego, and that great sin of pride. But this time, I sure hope no one gets killed. Especially children.
Fear Not! means having courage and an open, generous heart even in these difficult times. We can't mock those who aren't at our integral-level-of-consciousness yet (it's green, by the way). We need to let them know that our invitation to the Global Tiki Party of Hope is always open, come as you are. Bring the kids, bring the family! We need to SHOW them how much fun the new way is going to be aside from just preaching it. We need to empathize and agree that this Oil-Death Culture had everyone in a trance so that it was damn near impossible to even imagine another way of life. We need to let them know that they do have skills, and brains, and gifts to bring, and that we need those gifts. We need all the help we can get.
We also need to let them know, in no uncertain terms, that whining about your taxes when you're already rich, and on top of social heap, when people are dying, children are starving in our country or can't go to school, and close to half of all Americans have no reliable healthcare, and basically the corporations are drilling all of US, right here right now, - is totally unacceptable. Refuse to listen to that whine. Tell them "we are better than this" if you have to.
Yes, switching over and retooling our economy and entire way of life is going to be difficult, but as an anthropologist, I know we can do it. Not just hope, I KNOW WE CAN. Switch every building over to solar power in ten years? I KNOW we can. Switch and re-tool every car over to electric, which is powered by solar? Impossible? nay! I KNOW we can do it. Restore the wetlands along the entire Gulf Coast so that hurricanes are absorbed the way Nature intended? That's a big, muddy task but I KNOW we can do it. Try out s'more seemingly impossible tasks in your head, roll them around a little bit, let go of "how things are" right now, and see if you don't come up with KNOWING that we can do this.
Joe Strummer had a great quote on his radio show that I wish I had a soundbite of to play right now. He basically said, with a tone of wonder in his voice, "People can do ANYTHING. We're truly amazing. Anything they put their minds to- ANYTHING! Cure a disease, feed everyone, build the most amazing buildings on Earth- anything! And most people spend their lives telling themselves the lie they've heard from someone else- that they can't do it, that things are impossible, that no one can save the world. It's nonsense. It's simply not true."
I think I'll end with that. :)

FEAR NOT!

2008-09-16T09:06:00.000-07:00

The DNC response to the Palin nomination:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/0SAJ7JN5VFAWT249NNR2.anigifdel/52655a293dd83d8907715bb13c7dc39d

I forgot to post that at the top of my last blog. Couldn't get the html for it, so click on that link! and laugh, heartily!

So anyway, now that we've all had a good laugh about this, let me break it down in more scientific, anthropological terms for everyone.
John McCain is really fockin' old.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22759611/ Even Chuck Norris says so, and I didn't realize he was still alive. (didn't he have a Death Wish, VI?)
Their campaign would be pathetic no matter who the Republican empty-suit was, put up to follow this legacy of corrupt liars thieves and murderers, but it's especially pathetic because after 26 years in the Senate, 8 of them voting in lockstep with Bush and ignoring the personal damage Rove inflicted on his family, he now has to pretend that he has nothing to do with the Bush administration. That he is, in fact, a "maverick" just because he says so, and boy, so does everyone else! Even on Fox! Where ya know, they're like "Fair and Balanced" and all. heh hehe.]
Everyone knows McCain is old, and tired, and most people also know that he is incredibly boring, all at the same time. Along with the boring old-man grumpiness, he's got that crotchety old man temper, which shows up every so often when he calls his pill-popping heiress wife a "cunt" in front of reporters and scolds her for dressing like a trollop. Whoa! That's some maverick marital action right there! Exciting! Nothing like my grandfather at all!
Oh wait- except it is a bit like one of my grandfathers, who was a raging alcoholic and couldn't hold a job and would come home and beat his wife and 12 children, until his wife got rid of him by blacklisting him as a Communist. Go Grandma! Wooo! Since he was living in exile in Seattle, I never met him, but still I'm pretty sure we don't want a President like that.
He's not only old, he's had every type of skin cancer you can think of, and has to get checked like, every week to make sure his dormant carcinomas don't implode or eat him alive. Not to be mean, but, christ almighty is that a nasty way to die. Apparently you can only stave it off for so long before it comes back FOR GOOD. And being the Senator from Arizona... welll... let's just say it's really hard to avoid the sun and mingle with your constituents at the same time (not that he ever does.)
Anyway.
This Palin puta is their proverbial last gasp of desperation/false hope. The glimmer will fade in a couple days, and the nails will be in their campaign coffin sometime after the VP debate. During which, Joe Biden will wipe the floor with her, while simultaneously giving her opportunities to dig herself out of the privy her "verbage" is in, because he's a gent. But she'll fail to take any of those opportunities to save herself, because she's so dumb and narrow-minded she wouldn't know a debating opportunity if it came up and bit her flabby ass, and left lipstick marks.
So let them have their moment of false hope, let them exult in their new "chicky la-la" as one conservative caller from Colorado Springs put it (on the Randi Rhodes show) and round about Halloween.... I think it will become obvious who's going to win this election in a landslide.
As Randi herself said, I just can't take this here McCain-Palin "campaign" seriously at all, and therefore you shouldn't take their supporters too seriously. Go ahead and laugh in their faces, but then clap them on the back and offer to buy them a beer, because the truth is, they know they need one.
Oh and do this too, because it's hilarious:
http://politsk.blogspot.com/2008/09/sarah_13.html
This has been CHOP METH PALIN, signing off....

You Can Put Lipstick on a Pig-fokker, but it's Still a Pig-fokker.

2008-09-10T20:18:00.000-07:00

Or as someone posted on a Newsweek comment page, "You can put lipstick on a filthy, lying, power abusing religious zealot, its still a republican."

Obama Has too Much Class to Call Sarah Palin a Pig , So I Will.
Sarah Palin is a the pig-fokkers' whore, a lying sack of pigshit, and Queen Pig of Hypocrites. She is also a lousy mother. And, it goes without saying, guns or no, I could completely kick her ass.

Miss-Informed for VP '08!
I'm not running for President of anything, so I can say these things. At least, for 50 -some more days I can. I'm posting this picture of her to illustrate a couple things, but the main one is that I want people to see FO' REAL how totally ludicrous it is to even imagine this woman as Vice President.
Take a good, hard look. Laughing yet? I am. Because while I realize that 20% of the American population is creamin' their jeans at the thought of this nasty bitch being in power, the rest of us are having a hard time taking this seriously. And that's as it should be. I've gotten a deluge of emails from every non-profit advocacy group I belong to or has my email address- from environmental to pro-choice to human rights, all are saying/screaming the same thing: Don't dismiss her as fluff! Be afraid! Be very afraid! Gads, ya know, I'm trying to empathize and do the right thing- but whilst searching my feelings (as Old Ben Kenobi advised me to do) - I certainly didn't come up with FEAR. Anywhere. On. The. List. Snorts of derision? Yes. Contempt? Check. Disgust with hypocrisy? You bet.
And really NARAL, NOW, Human Rights Watch- I'm surprised at you! Have you forgotten the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood's Litany Against Fear? You have? Ok I'll repost it for all to see:
"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain."
Say that a few times, breathe. Let the fear seep out of you. Let the little Zen half-smile play about your lips.

And git to visualizin' peeple! As my friend jen said so aptly, "Worry is praying for things you don't want." So without getting too hooky-dooky woo-woo on ya, let's concentrate on visualizing / praying for the things we DO want. Which is, if I'm not mistaken, Obama as President, Biden as his right-arm/bulldog, and the rest of us getting to the happy warrior work of turning this country around and getting it back on track. And thereby, saving the world. I've said this before a few times but I'll say it as often as necessary until the positive result is achieved.

Do whatever positive visualization works for you.
With this one, it's now including a defeated, humiliated Sarah Palin being impeached or recalled by the Alaskan citizens who used to "love" her, now disgusted by all the corruption, malfeasance, and double-talk coming out of her office.
On the other hand, I've been having visions and dreams for a few months now about the Obama family residing in the White House. Doing normal, everyday, Presidential things like waving to crowds and reporters as they disembark from Marine One on the South Lawn, the girls having sleep-overs and birthday parties at their place, Michelle Obama smudging the West Wing with tons of sacred sage to get the evil voodoo vibes out...oh but the best one was the dream I had of Barack Obama sitting at the desk in the Oval Office for the first time, smiling, joking, flashbulbs going off, Biden patting him on the back as he sat down, generally a happy, hopeful atmosphere.
That's a dream we don't need to wake up from. Also, in the background was Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground." Did i mention that already? That needs to be the Inaugural Ball theme, for real.
So I've had quite enough of the fear-mongering, thank you, and I think the American people are done with it too.
This doesn't mean, however, that I'm going to quit making fun of Sarah Palin, or pointing out their rank hypocrisy and flip-flops, and whorish daughters.
OH no. That's just par for the course. But I won't do it because I'm AFRAID of her, no, I'll do it because we all seriously need to laugh at the whole pathetic joke of the McCain campaign every damn day, and heartily, with gusto.
Besides if you have the hubris to accept the nomination as VP while knowing that you don't have a lick of experience or intelligence or character or judgment to do the job- to me that just screams, "bring it on!"

(An Open Letter to Sarah Palin Inc. that hasn't been vetted by Charlie Gibson)
"So you preach abstinence-only sex education and then your 17-year-old daughter gets knocked up by the local hockey jock. Hmmm. But you're proud of this, because it's YOUR daughter, and she's white, and christian, not like those unwashed brown heathens who are having too many kids they can't support. Hmmm. I've given this a lot of thought over the past week, searched my feelings thoroughly, and after quite a few snorts of derision and giggles of disbelief, I've decided that you can go fuck yourself and the horse you rode in on, bitch. That's right. I've been called a whore by the likes of you smug, self-righteous hypocritical bastard pieces of shit since about 1993, when Newt Gingrich & Co. hijacked Congress and declared war on the American people. That would include anyone who disagreed with him and his extremist, right-wing views, and that would include most women. Even nuns. Suddenly every female who thought they had the inherent right to control their own bodies and make their own life decisions were called stupid, dirty, filthy whores. So, right back atcha. And then some.
I don't wish ill for your daughter and her future child, because she's already in a world of hurt with a mother like you. And then there's your first-born son, shipping out for Iraq right now because.. he's such a big patriot, right? At the age of 18, he's decided that this Occupation in the Middle East is totally awesome and he wants a piece of it? No? It's actually because he got caught stealing liquor and vandalizing school buses in Wasilla, and law enforcement gave him the choice: either join the Army, or go to jail? Ohhhhhh.... well that's different. So how is Track? Oh you don't know, because he won't even be seen with you these days? Haven't spoken in months? Sounds like the lad's got a good head on his shoulders, and the Army might straighten him out. Since I've been estranged from my parents for going on 8 years now, let me tell you something straight: kids don't kick off their parents for whiny little reasons. The reason usually is, in some shape or form, that they realize their parents are big-ass liars and don't love them at all, and probably won't ever change. So rather than put up with the lies and bullcrap and let it damage them into adulthood, they "divorce" themselves from your narcissistic b.s. and make their own way. Looking back, I wish I had been as smart as Track and joined the Navy or something, at his age.
Then there's the middle kids, who haven't really done anything criminal yet, but there's still time. Oh and another thing about my lying-ass, abusive parents: crazy and messed up as they were, they would have considered themselves total failures as parents if one of us had ended up either pregnant or in jail. We didn't, in spite of them. You've got two kids doing both, and it doesn't seem to faze you. And apparently, that's just the tip of your narcissistic iceberg, because you just accepted the potential job of being VP for the most powerful country on Earth, only 4 months after giving birth to a special needs child. Whoa.
Again, here's something I can spout off on because I have a little experience in this area. Even with my PERFECT (physically and mentally) baby girl, it was the most difficult thing I've ever done to drag my ass back to work 3 months after she was born, and my job is basically educated DATA ENTRY. More difficult than pulling 20-hour shifts fighting forest fires, more difficult than taking care of my dad and brother, as a child, after one of my mom's numerous suicide attempts, more difficult even, than putting myself through college by working 3 jobs and finishing it all in 2.5 years flat. At least in college, there were the occasional margarita breaks.
And one of those jobs, during and after college, happened to be working with special needs children. Down's Syndrome kids especially. HOLY GODS ALMIGHTY but do they need a lot of early intervention, intensive care, and real love, not fake love.
No, you can't do it well and skin a moose at the same time, let alone be Vice President. Nope. Can't be done. You have to make a choice, a moral choice, and it's clear that time and time again, you've chosen your career and unholy ambition above all else. This makes you and McCain perfect for each other http://www.snopes.com/politics/mccain/carol.asp
but, that alone should tell people something about you.
Not that they should be afraid of you, but quite the opposite. They should openly scoff at your phoniness, your hypocrisy, and your corruption of spirit, and they should do so without fear of being called "sexist" or "mean."
So Miss Runner-Up 1984, you may be the redneck's wet dream of a VP candidate, a politician he can put a pin-up of in the garage and whack off to while the Star Spangled Banner blares from his monster truck speakers- but the rest of us will be smiling and waving from the Winner's Circle, which is known as the Oval Office in this case. That's right bitch, I've never been no "runner-up", I've always been The Queen.

The Official Post-DNC Volunteer Blog!

2008-09-02T10:02:00.000-07:00

That's right, I didn't want to start off with the big "WOW" photo, but what the heck! I mean, this is the back of Tom Daschle's head we're talking about! I was assigned to the "Meet and Greet Team" at DIA on Sunday, August 24th, the day before the convention started and let me tell you- it was this exciting ALL DAY LONG.
As they say in whispered tones backstage at Miss America "The excitement back here is at FEVER PITCH." Seriously. It's like we were behind the scenes and out front as the delegates' and dignitaries' first contact with friendly-ass Denver ALL AT THE SAME TIME. It was a heady responsibility, and sometimes we had to retire to the Official Volunteer Breakroom just to have fatty snacks to stop the dizziness.

Here's the non-wow picture of some volunteer, I mean, uh, my fellow comrade volunteer's head getting in the way of cute, super-nice Tom Daschle, so I couldn't yell out to him, "my family's from South Dakota and we thank you!!' Alas.

..And here's how it looked from the front once all us kats got herded in for a group picture...

I'm behind him. See if you can spot me.
And then I got re-assigned to be a "wrangler" for catching any stray delegates that may have wandered past the huge throng of us bright-orange-shirted, WELCOME sign waving freaks by the fountain on the main concourse (where the subway trains all empty out) so I must have missed this guy- doh!

I like to think I was, at this moment, waving and saying Hi! to Amy Goodman on the main concourse as she walked by, ungreeted, talking on her cell phone. I recognized her, waved my Welcome sign, shouted, Amy Goodman! Hi! Welcome to Denver! and the magic worked, because she said "Hi..." back (the dots after that are code for, "do I know this crazy woman?" Democracy dork that I am, Amy Goodman, esteemed yet humble host of Democracy Now!, is one of my heroes. I don't regret NOT going into journalism too many times, but every time I hear her reporting, there's a wee pang of remorse in my heart, for what might have been. Also, as everyone knows who has finally or suddenly gotten to see one of their heroes or favorite celebrities in real life, you will do any dad-blame goofy thing to get their attention without hopefully intruding too much on their personal space. But I had an excuse, I had a bright orange t-shirt, and a big sign. So. It would have been rude of me to whip out my cellphone and try to take a picture of her, so I stole one off Flickr. She looked something like this, except in an airport, and wearing different clothes.

But back to Al Gore, whose arrival at DIA I missed. That probably explains the puzzled and somewhat pained look on his face in this next photo, where he's surrounded by enthusiastic, warm volunteers, but he's clearly thinking, "where's Suzy? I thought she would be here....."

And then, horror of horrors, he had to climb into the big black SUV that was assigned and waiting for him. Sure, they were all hybrid flex-fuels, donated by GM, but still- how did he feel, climbing into that thing?

Hmmm.......
Anyway. After Amy Goodman said Hi! to me, I was blase about Sam Donaldson and his wife walking by me. I mean, how can that man still call himself a journalist, with the likes of Amy Goodman in the same amphitheatre?
Then it was back up to Curbside to meet Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) and his entourage- woooo!! Serious woo. He is the utterer of one of my favorite quotes re: Bush, which I have as a screensaver at work: "Welll.... I guess Bush finally disproves that whole theory of 'White Supremacy' once and for all, doesn't he?"
Here's the group pic from Penny, who put them all on Flickr.

Not to give too much away, but I'm the floating head behind Mr. Rangel, wearing sunglasses. Wooooo! I just had to say that again.
As far as other political celebrities, I also got to meet Former Speaker of the House Jim Wright, of Texas, who is getting on in years but an extremely nice man, and SO excited to be there to help elect our next Democratic President! If anyone remembers, he was Speaker for 2 years (1987-1989) during the Reagan Administration, and was trying to hold them more accountable for all that Iran-Contra crap, until Newt Gingrich went after him on charges of "unethical conduct" (Wright was selling books he authored at private speaking engagements...known as book-signings.... yeah, throw that bum out! how dare he! That's much worse than torturing prisoners, obstructing justice and starting a huge war on a lie!) and he resigned. Very nice man.
I also got to meet Rep. Nydia Velasquez, D-NY, who introduced herself as the first Puerto Rican woman elected to Congress, and she's been there 16 years now so she must be doing something right. She was stunning, very nice, and the poor thing had to wait at least 45 minutes for her stupid rental car to show up. We kept trying to entice her into one of the hybrid SUV's, but I guess the car was on its way, so she chatted with volunteers and called her staff on her cell phone.
There were probably other people I saw or met that I'm forgetting about, but towards the end of the shift when I was dead on my feet, I finally got to escort a VIP to baggage claim and to his waiting DNC car... and at first I didn't know who he was except another smart, handsome, nice Democrat dude... and then I googled him and oh snap! He's a total stud!
Former Navy Rear Admiral John D. Hutson, former Judge Advocate General for the Navy, now Dean of the Law School at Franklin Pierce College in NH.... and an expert on why we shouldn't be violating Geneva Conventions and torturing prisoners- because it makes OUR soldiers less safe, and all bets are off. He testified against confirming Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General based on his abhorrent record and views on torture.
http://www.fplc.edu/johnhutson/

Dang me! He was very unassuming, pleasant, polite, and in a hurry to get to his hotel as it was getting mighty late. He mentioned that he was speaking on the first day of the convention, then going to a human rights panel, then some other thing, then off to his nephew's wedding. It was a nice way to cap off the night. Then a group of us volunteers whose shifts were over were whisked back to the DNC motorpool lot to our cars, and Peeps called me to tell me he'd found a lost doggie and was personally walking him down to the Pound. :)
The next day was my birthday and the start of the Convention. I was determined to see some action up close, so I loaded little girl into the bike trailer after her nap and biked on down to the Pepsi Center area, with cupcakes in hand to give away. The original plan was to give them to Randi Rhodes, but security proved too tight, so I settled for calling into her show to welcome her to Denver and complain about the g-d trustfunder protestors. :) I had about 10 delicious, wheat-free mini-cupcakes to unload (with sparkly frosting stars on top) and so after being turned away by armed guards at the gates, rode up to the Market st. bridge where the delegates were streaming past on their way to the Pepsi Center, and started hollerin' like a true carny, "Happy My Birthday! Have a free Cupcake!" And can you believe it? No one took them except a tired looking guy hawking t-shirts. Come to think of it, I probably wouldn't take a cupcake from a stranger either. Not even the nice woman who also hung out near me on her bike for awhile and chatted would take one. "I'm trying to lose weight, actually" (she was slender and fit). Harumph. Then some guys from CNN came up and took a picture of my t-shirt, which is an Environmentalists for Obama shirt, which they claim they'd never seen before. It didn't make it into the little "slideshow" thingy though, so maybe the guy was just trying to get a close-up of my rack.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/26/slideshow.buttons/index.html

Darn, that was going to be my closer, but I can't top Peeps' blog anyway so I'll just stop there and go to bed. But wait! Wait! More about Amy Goodman! So tonite on Democracy Now! on PBS, she aired an impromptu interview she had with Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, at baggage claim in Minneapolis airport. During said interview (which was awesome) she remarked to him, "ya know, the atmosphere here is very different than Denver (where they all just came from)- in Denver they had all kinds of people welcoming you and making sure you got where you were going..." That's ME she's talking about people, ME!!! Yours truly! I ALONE am responsible for Amy Goodman having a good impression of Denver and the DNC in general! So. Anyway Jon Stewart said, "yeah, there's almost a sense of shame in the air here, like they'd rather not be hosting this at all...." and then a lot of other really funny and astute stuff.
That's it for now- until another unofficial unconvention comes along- this is the Queen, signing off! Good night and good luck.

Optimism is a Moral Imperative

2008-08-27T14:31:00.000-07:00

My husband gets credit for this awesome tagline. We were discussing the perilous possibilities of the future vis-a-vis the upcoming election while waiting in a line of cars for the drive-in last Saturday (my early bday present). While writing the "Impeachment" blog last week, literally mid-way through, I realized that even warning people about what COULD happen if we don't impeach Clownshoes right now is feeding the fear out there, and what we need to do more of is concentrate on the positive visualization thing. Hence, my positive visuals of Jenna Bush in a waitress uniform and Karl Rove getting cornholed in prison. :) (smiley emoticon face)
Bruce also summed up the whole metaphysics-quantum physics thing with an anecdote about a realization he had during a psychedelic experience: (according to polls, I've just lost about 30% of you. oh well.) Anything that can happen, does happen. It's the reality that you choose to live in that you live in. I'm not saying it's an entirely conscious choice, or that blame should be placed anywhere (get OUT of our heads you damn Puritans with your F-ing Providence!!)- because most of us, most of the time, feel like we're falling down the rabbit hole and that we were pushed.
But. Make no mistake, consciousness has real power. Recently I've come to believe that the major decisions we make and act upon do, in effect, create whole new worlds. Parallel universes, if you will. You either walk through this door, or that one. You marry this guy, or that guy. You forget about that and pursue a career. But somewhere out there is the "you" that made the other choice. This is what mystics and quantum physicists are talking about when they say The Universe is Full of Infinite Possibility. And at the same time, it is empty, with possibility.
(according to polls I've just lost another 20% of you.)
Right now we're all living in the universe of people who have made the decisions that they have made. Duh, right? It's a wacky, complex subject to explain, so books and movies make it easier. One set of science-fiction books I especially like on the subject is the "Hominids/Hybrids" series by Robert Sawyer, on the parallel universe where Neanderthals survived instead of us Homo Sapiens. As an anthro-geek I especially loved them, but I think anybody could get into them- and he does a great job of explaining the whole consciousness shift/parallel universe thing. It had me convinced, anyway. Some simpler/more fantastical ones are the movies "The Family Man," "Sliding Doors," and of course, "It's A Wonderful Life." Watch or read one of those if I've lost you already, and then come back.
Ok, everybody here? Cool. So it stands to reason, from what we've just learned and what we've known all our lives, that our future is a conscious choice. Nothing is "inevitable" (god how I hate that word!) and nothing is impossible. Given that, and now we know that we're in complete control of our futures, the logical and morally sound choice is to point all of our collective consciousnesses (is that really a word?) towards the positive. Allow yourself to imagine the best possible outcome of the upcoming election, the ensuing investigations of this criminal administration, and basically a future so bright (powered by solar energy) you gotta wear shades. That takes many different shapes for different people, so, unless you're a sociopath, go wild. :) For me it's being able to build my xeriscaping empire and remaking the business world with a new model that's socially inclusive, green to the 158th power, and revolutionary in that all "profits" are plowed back into the earth and the community. Also, I'm an award-winning filmmaker and writer. And not only will my 2 year old daughter NOT be a slave to the Chinese, she'll also get to pursue her abilities to their utmost, and possibly run for President someday, if she wants to. There are no more abused children, no more starving people, no more anyone without access to capital and clean water. Global warming has stopped, and we're starting to reverse its effects. The green technologies and localized businesses are thriving, and everyone is choosing to plow their profits back into the community, so that their livelihoods are sustainable for many generations to come.
Oh and we're also whizzing around in those cool hover-craft cubes that the Neanderthals have.
Why not?? I think all this is possible. The whiners may disagree, they're usually the first to whine, "oh you want the whole world to hold hands and sing Kumbaya." Um, no, I've always hated that song. I'm not a Utopianist, I'm an anthropologist, and I know we'll always have conflict in a world with this many people and limited resources. But if you use just a wee bit of your imagination, it's not hard to visualize a better, more sustainable way to solve those conflicts. Sure, it's easier to just go on doing things the way we've always done them, but that way will surely kill us. I realize that these entrenched habits are hard to break away from, but break away we must. As an anthropologist and all-around "aware" person, I know that the current way we live is unsustainable- so it must end, somehow. The question is, and I put this to all whiners who say "it can't happen, humanity will never change" do you want to do this the nice, civil way, or do you want to do this the hard way? We can perform our revolution at the voting box and make sure it's not stolen this time, or if they try and fuck with us again we can rise up and make them regret it. Either way, the patriarchy is going down. Right now I'm envisioning a non-violent end to all the lies and destruction, but I know there's quite a few people out there who can imagine only violence, because that's all they know- their imaginations have been starved nearly to death by the media, bad Steven Seagal flicks, and the "news" vampires which thrive on blood.
I'm not expecting Mr. Obama to be the perfect President to all people, but I am expecting him to be President, and to succeed in the monumental task of empowering us all to turn this country around. I know it will happen. Get on board and all the hard work and consciousness changing will be a lot easier to swallow. As the man himself has said a few times in answer to the question, "Can we do this? Yes we can!"
Or as Jesus just said to me, "Hey-all yeah!" (but he was all fired up after watching the Hillary speech. Go figure.) Tell me your dreams for the future with all the beautiful details in your responses, por favor. Por ejemplo, I'm already picturing the hemp/nomex gown I'll be wearing to accept my Oscar, and gathering quotes from various women/girls to use in my speech. Ridiculous? I think not!

On Impeachment

2008-08-19T20:48:00.000-07:00

Maybe I didn't put a fine enough point on this during my Preparedness blog, in fact I know I din't- but- one key factor in us being able to keep our country, and our asses, intact is impeachment. Like, now. Yesterday, preferably. Why, you may well arsk? When we're about to swat the President-Select out the door with a huge 2x4 known as our collective voting power? WEllllllll... yeah. Because in this day and age, we can't really take that for granted. Because of the heinous things they've done, we know that we can no longer put anything past this Administration. And because they know of everything they're guilty of, better than any of us, and they know a new administration (even McCain's, for payback) would immediately set about investigating, charging, and imprisoning them for the sake of preserving everything our Constitution stands for.
And they have no desire to go to jail. As we've seen from the contempt Karl Rove shows for Congressional Subpoenas for cryin' out loud, not to mention the higher courts and duh, the American people- it's going to take nothing less than armed U.S. Marshals and possibly a Marine Corps unit for backup to get these pigfuckers to comply with the laws of the land.
Why that hasn't been done yet, at least in Rove's case, is beyond me. Perhaps because our esteemed Speaker Pelosi has taken impeachment "off the table" of her own volition (certainly not the American people's, because nearly 50% of now believe impeachment is necessary) which tells me she's an accomplice to some of these crimes, willing or not, but she is.
So, what previously seemed unimaginable is now imaginable. To avoid jailtime or even a thorough investigation which would forever destroy any hope of a "legacy" these guys might leave (a positive one, I mean), I'm afraid they're going to pull some shite that would make 9-11 look like a fireworks show. Namely, they've been saber rattling for years about Iran, and now with this current conflict in Georgia, I'm afraid they might try to use that as an inroad. If you look at a globe, you will notice that Georgia borders the Caspian sea. It's also smack in the middle of an oil pipeline route from Russia to China, which the former USSR guys have been grousing about since "the fall" of their empire. The other countries, Soviets said "meh, we don't like you much anyway. Go away and starve and be poor and then you will miss Red Army!" yeah not so much. But Georgia, that's the one "state" they've been missing for lo, these 17 years, precisely for this reason. The fact that Condi Rice was just over there, basically telling Russia "we don't take a position in inter-Asia-Russo matters" much like April Glaspie did with Saddam Hussein right before he invaded Kuwait... doesn't ease my mind much.
Anyway.
What with that and the instability of Pakistan, etc. etc. I'm trying to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. One of my coworkers, who's been on this planet a bit longer than me, counseled me today to not feed that fear, and instead go with the hope, and the faith in humanity. Not just because that will keep us all sane (rather than maddened, starving, hysterical) but because it's the right thing to do. So in that vein, I'd like to focus on the positive visualizations rather than the zit-inducing, stomach-churning visions of imagining the unimaginable. And if we are going to traipse down that garden path of imagining the future, I think we should do it holding hands, and looking out for each other.
Very well then. Despite what people might think, I have no desire for these treasonous pigs to be put to death for their crimes, or even assassinated. Nope. I've been categorically against the death penalty for as long as I can remember and that's not going to change. Besides the thought of even more killing is simply distasteful. All I want is for them all to be sentenced to life imprisonment, and then they and their families need to pay back EVERY FUCKING LAST PENNY THEY'VE STOLEN from this country and others. If that takes a few generations, so be it.
So my positive visualizations on the matter amount to this: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, -all of them- in cold gray cells for the rest of their lives, and little Jenna, Barbie, et.al. working three jobs or more to pay off part of daddy's debt. It's too late for them to know what it's like to work those three jobs while putting yourself through college and then graduating to insurmountable debt- but I think a little post-graduate work is in order. You think that sounds too much like what the Allies did to Germany after WWI? That the Bush family will rebel under too stern a yoke and come back even harder after 10 years of that? Meh. I'll take my chances. One way or another, the Bush & Cheney crime families need to be taken down, exposed, and somehow reduced to the "common-ness" and humility they've reduced everyone else to for these past 24+ years.
Ok, so admittedly another part of my positive vision is Karl Rove in a gimp suit, ball gag and all, getting corn-holed by the biggest, blackest dude possible in the bleakest, nastiest Federal prison possible (probably Leavenworth). For me, that's a positive vision. For me, that spells justice. That and Jenna Bush working as a breakfast waitress in some greasy spoon, wearing an ugly brown polyester uniform.
Of course she won't have to worry about the high cost of daycare, because that will be standardized and heavily subsidized for all children in America by President Obama. But she will have to worry about her assclown of a husband cheating on her, because that's just how they roll.
After we impeach the mofos, we need to make sure Republicans can never rule again. I think this will happen of its own accord, once scandal after treasonous scandal is exposed to the American public and they find out how bad things really were while they had their heads in the sand- but just in case they do, we basically need to keep them honest. A big part of that would be a name change, so they need to call themselves what they are, after they've been called out. Conservatives can go ahead and run on a Republican platform, they just need to call their new party either the Whiny Little Babies, the Hypocritical Lying Sacks of Shit, or the Cowardly Chickenhawks. Those are the choices. Let no-one say that I'm not pro-choice.
So. Impeachment. Do it. Call your congressperson and urge them to do it. Then support the Congressmen who've actually had the balls to stand up for this country when no one else will- Dennis Kucinich and Robert Wexler- and donate to their campaigns because they're being systematically attacked by the Right-wing smear machine. John Conyers could also use your help. I've been screaming about this for close to 4 years now, I know y'all are sick of me, but it's time for all y'all to start screaming too, and don't stop every last member of the Bush Administration is handcuffed and carted off to jail.

No longer the difference between Coke and Pepsi

2008-08-11T08:28:00.001-07:00

Here's the blog as it should have been written:
I'm fixin' to go to church tomorrow, and no one had better try and shoot me. Ask anyone, I'm hard enough to deal with on a good day, much less when I'm feeling more pissed off than usual, and protective of my fellow UU's. Apparently, my fellow Unitarians are also similarly inclined, when it comes to protecting each other. In case you've been on a "news diet" lately (and I would totally understand why) -I meant to blog about this right after it happened, but usually I'm glad when I let my hot head cool down for a couple days, at least. I'm talking about the shooting at the Unitarian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee on July 27th. The killer was apparently motivated by hatred (duh), the flames of which were fueled and fanned by right-wing talk radio. Specifically, this guy listened to Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, and Michael Savage. {I feel like I have to go take another shower now, just from typing their vile names.} The killer brought a shotgun into a children's musical performance, and turned it on the audience intending to kill as many "goddam liberals" as possible, and then kill himself. Well, he didn't get the chance to commit suicide at least, thanks to my brave fellow UU's who tackled the motherfucker after he blasted one large congregant in the chest (who stood up on purpose and tried to shield other members) and then got off only one more shot, randomly spraying a 60-year-old woman in the face (who also died) before he was brought down and pinned to the ground. But not killed. Yeah that's right motherfucker, this is what happens when you try and fuck with a true community. People will stand up for each other and take a bullet if they have to, they won't run screaming from your terrible show of force, abandoning old people and children to their fate. Nuh-uh. And after they stand up, they'll smack your sorry ass down on the floor and maybe kick you in the head a few times. But they won't kill you, because it's just not in them. Oh no, we want this sad sack of shit to confess as much as possible, and tell everyone far and wide why he did what he did. If the deaths of these two good, caring people can serve any wider purpose at all, it should be to wake people the fuck up to the kind of hatred and lies being perpetrated by "respected" media figures. The shit they spew every day, for hours at a time, is directly responsible for this violence, and it SHOULD be prohibited by the FCC but somehow, hmmm, in the past 7.5 years, has been allowed not only to exist somewhere on the airwaves, but to dominate.
*Update: For awhile I was skittish about going to church or going anywhere where I could readily be identified as a "liberal," because depending on the media and public reaction to this hate crime, there would almost certainly be copycat crimes. And lo and behold, there has been, in my opinion. Just today (Aug.13th) a man walked into the Arkansas Democratic Party's headquarters in Little Rock, and shot the Democratic Party Chair. Thankfully, he was also caught, and unfortunately, shot by police during a high-speed chase. I'm still looking forward to a public explanation for this stomach-turning shite.

I've been a Unitarian for going on 8 years now, and my husband is fixin' to join too just as soon as another "intro" class rolls around. My spirituality is pretty private and personal to me, but I joined the First Unitarian Society of Denver because their ideals and values seemed to most closely match my own, and for the first time I saw that a church could be a very positive force in a community. When I joined, they were making the slow, onerous switch from being a "pastoral" (taking care of its own members) church to a "programmatic" type church, which is basically like applied anthropology- you take your shared ideals, and go out into the community and actually try to make the world a better place. This does not include proselytizing. Our "programs" are much like the church in Knoxville's. We proclaim ourselves to be a "Welcoming Congregation" which means open-arming people of all sexual orientations, specifically, but really it means everyone. For a couple years now we've had a banner hanging on the side of the church that reads "Civil Marriage is a Civil Right" that has caught us some flak. And for the Easter service, when Rev. Mike (who is awesome) put the title of the sermon on the display board/sign: Jesus Was A Liberal, some numbnut threw a rock through the plexiglass and smashed it. But these are biggest tastes of backlash we've gotten for our liberal, tolerant, peace-loving, tree-hugging, life and diversity affirming views.
The shooting in Knoxville was a massive, tragic wake-up call, to say the least. In the back of our heads, I guess we all knew/know that holding certain beliefs in this day and age, and having the temerity/courage to stand up for them unwaveringly, can be a very dangerous thing. Those who lived through the Civil Rights movement remember getting tear-gassed and fire-hosed like it was yesterday, but for those of us born after that, it's not even a vague memory. We're grateful for the people who went before us, and know that they went through hell and suffered numerous indignities so that we could have a more just society- but who among us really knows what it's like to have dogs set on you, or police billy-clubs, or god forbid be staring down the barrel of that gun, prepared to die for your beliefs? (*ahem, and no, the Tent State kids who are vain enough to think that the FBI is actually taking their dang pictures? They don't count)
Fortunately, not many of us.
The thing that impressed me first about FUSD was its Religious Education curriculum. Ok, it was also the beautiful stone building and the stained glass, but truly- 5 years before I had a kid- I was stone-cold pleasantly shocked by their RE programs, which focus on teaching tolerance, kindness, tolerance, open-mindedness, tolerance, respect for diversity in both mind and body, and did I mention, tolerance? At the time, I knew of no other religion that did this. Most of them seem to have some permutation on "Our way is The One True Way, and All Others are Inferior (or even, Satanic/Evil)." They start indoctrinating their kids in this sort of absolutism, seems to me, way too early. Maybe they're hoping that insecure little kids will glom onto the "Be in Our club Because We're the Best and Everyone Else Sucks and Doesn't that Make you Feel Good?" thing, but personally I think it would backfire.
Anyway. This is a pretty common theme of the Left, in my experience. Tolerance, tolerance, tolerance. EVEN, up to a point, of people preaching nothing but hatred, lies, intolerance, war, more lies, and more hatred, of anyone different. But for me, that point has been reached. The line has been crossed. I still am fine with anyone who has integrity in their beliefs. That means you know why you believe what you believe, and you can back up your beliefs with hard, cold facts, statistics, and yes even stories of real personal experience, as long as they're tempered with education, count. But lately, oooo lessee... for about the past 7.5 years, the folks on the right have little to none of that on their side at all. And their beliefs have gotten increasingly less harmless, to say the least. You believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? No, you don't have to back that up, because they're harmless beliefs. You believe you really look good in orange even though friends and loved ones keep telling you it's not your color? Well ya know, fine. You're only affecting yourself.
But beliefs start becoming not-so-harmless when they traipse into other people's personal space, and personal freedoms. Especially when you don't know exactly what those beliefs are based on, or you think you know, but they turn out to be lies, and then you refuse to accept the non-truth of them primarily for egotistical and emotional reasons. Example: the War in Iraq. Invasion and occupation would be better words. This is also a good example of the mass hysteria/ normalized insanity we've been living under for way longer than the past 7.5 years. Anyway. This country went to war on a rumour and a bunch of ginned-up propaganda and fear which those of us on the left (or anyone with more than two functioning brain cells who wasn't in total denial about the nature of this country/government/administration) knew was a pack o'lies from the very beginning. Many people chose to believe those lies because they were scared shitless, used to trusting anyone in authority, didn't want to believe their government would ever mislead them, etc. etc. despite all evidence to the contrary. Literally, we had the chief weapons inspector (Hans Blix, yah?) on the TV one second saying, "We've found absolutely no weapons of mass destruction here, nor the ingredients for them, nor the technology," and the next second the President-select was on TV squealing, "see see! he's got bombs! He want to use them on us!!" and his Ph.d. Russian expert security advisor actually had the balls to say to CONGRESS "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." This should/did create what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance." We were being told not to trust our own eyes, ears or instincts, but to listen to what the Chimp in Chief said was true.
Because they didn't want to be wrong, and don't want to ever admit that they're wrong, many people persist in "believing" the ensuing avalanche of lies despite the mountain of evidence piled up, these 5 years hence, to directly contradict them.
So, you say, as Dick Cheney might- so what? Part of the foundation of America is the premise that people can choose to believe whatever they want to believe, and no one can or should tell them different. Welp, the actual premise of that whole freedom of speech/thought/worship thing is that, it ends at the tip of someone else's nose, or personal space. Again, you can believe whatever you want, as long as it harms no one else. In this case, the folks on the right think they can still get away with it, because the people being harmed by their erroneous beliefs are not American citizens. And therefore, I guess, in the twisted, inhuman logic of the Right,they deserve to die.
So because of this heretofore widely held erroneous belief, close to one million Iraqi citizens have had not only their noses punched by our flagrant "freedom of thought/expression", but they've had their personal space totally extinguished. They're dead. Finito. And in the eyes of many of the same Americans who hold these erroneous beliefs dear, those dead Iraqis aren't even in "a better place"- nope, they went straight to hell because they're Muslim, not Christian. So there goes that little rationalization for killing.
This is where the difference in belief systems ceases to be the difference between Coke and Pepsi drinkers, amigos. If the hate-mongering assclown posse were simply telling their listeners to stay up all night in the pumpkin patch so that the Great Pumpkin can come and deliver you candy- fine. But nope. No such luck. The right-wing talk radio hosts and pundits see all the anger and frustration of the American people, but instead of trying to soothe it or find a healthy solution, they fan the flames for their own short-term personal gain. They do that by telling outright lies that support their agenda and apparently validate the wounded pride of the average white American male. In this case, an out-of-work Army vet who blamed his joblessness and every other problem on us "Godless Liberals" not to mention, all those brown "illegal" aliens, gays, and probably anyone who owns a small dog, for good measure. (you're obviously a pansy elitist if you own anything smaller than a Rottweiler). So, because of that, they deserved to die.
Maybe there was a time when picking a belief system was just as harmless as choosing a soft drink, but if there was, I wasn't alive during it. I know my cynical Jr. High Social Studies teacher, Mr. Johnson, described the two American political parties and the Left-to-Right spectrum as "the same, completely, but with different colors." I guess I can remember a time in my life when it wasn't really about choosing sides, so much as like choosing side-dishes from a Chinese menu. Here in Column B, you have what the adherents call Fiscal Conservatism- but that costs 20 million dollars and assumes you have inherited wealth! Whoa! But ya know, if you like to rub elbows with the wealthy and powerful, or think of yourself as one of them even though you're totally impoverished, go ahead and try it. In Column A we have something called the Social Contract which basically says, the people can have whatever regulations and programs they want, as long as it's a majority decision and they're willing to pay for it. E.g., if you don't want to step over homeless people on the way to work, you better be willing to spend some money on programs to prevent homelessness, etc. Blaming the downtrodden for their predicament gets us nowhere, and besides it's just not very Christian, nor very American. Ok- sounds good! Can I have that? But wait, the items in Column B are calling my choices "Tax and Spend Bleeding Heart Liberalism!" Wait- I don't want to be a bleeding heart... do I? (what the hell does that mean, anyway?) They're also saying.. come over here! Order from us! We have this thing about "personal responsibility" that no one else has! (Really? Can you define that please, and tell me ALL the ingredients up front so I know there's no MSG in it?) and "small government"... hmmm, I guess they're out of that today because Homeland Security's taken over the kitchen and the restaurant owner isn't even that interested in serving the customers anymore, he's got this idea that the customers should serve him. Yeah, that's him over in the corner booth sitting on his fat ass with his back to the wall so no one can sneak in and shoot him (because you know Homeland Security is too busy stuffing their faces with all that free food to actually PROTECT anyone)- woops, I've gone too far with this metaphor! But anyway, you get the idea. Some people like the pork chow mein, and some people want the vegetarian Happy Family, whaddreyagonnado? I mean, I would think you were a total moron/hypocrite for believing any of that crap coming from the right hand side of the aisle, but who friggin cares what I think, anyway? I never met a conservative who could actually back up their beliefs with facts, figures, or even convincing stories, but I didn't associate with them that much so it was okay.
But now.. with these incidents in particular, and just because all of their crap has finally made my temperature reach the boiling point- it's become blatantly obvious to everyone, I think, just what HUGE hypocrites and whopping liars they really are, ESPECIALLY with that tripe about "personal responsibility." Sure they talk a good game about being "self-sufficient" and "pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps" out one side of their mouths, and then out the other side (as well as out their arses) they're fanning the flames of bigotry and hatred and ENCOURAGING their listeners / followers to blame anyone and anything else for all their problems, but nowhere on the list is the individual having all those problems. Popular scapegoats now include "illegal" immigrants, or basically anyone with brown skin; "liberals" who include anyone to the left of Jerry Falwell, and I think you know what's coming next- the usual suspects; Jews, women, children, the elderly, the disabled, the diseased (hello, Savage), the poor, the dark-skinned, and yes, the intellectuals, who are already branded as "elitist snobs" because we dare to contradict their wild-eyed fantasies with rational, critical thought and these things called facts.
But anyway. This guy in Knoxville admitted as much, he thought the liberals were responsible for taking his job, his woman, his dignity- so all he had left were his truck and his gun. Give me a fucking break. Don't even get me started on how wrong that is. But you think the Insane Assclown Posse will take a smidgen of Personal Responsibility for this sad sack, who apparently was following their orders to a "T"?
uhhh... hmm.. I mentioned the fact that they were cowardly hypocritic liars, right? Who encourage people to go fight in wars for them so their defense contractor stock will rise? But actually couldn't win a thumb-war themselves, much less a fist-fight, much less a battle? Everyone knows Rush is a fat,drug-addicted bastard who can't get out of his chair to try and squash me, nevermind throwing punches. And Coulter? I'll snap her scrawny ass across my knee like a bundle of dry kindling. Done.
Not anymore. The subtitle for this blog should be, "Why it is no longer okay to be a Republican asshole." I could go on about how the conservative movement in America has been highjacked by the NeoCons, and the mainstream "fiscal" or "faith-based" conservatives or whatever they choose to call themselves, have totally gone along with it- but that may be a whole 'nother blog.
And all of this is being marketed to us as a perfectly acceptable "choice" you can make, that has no greater consequences than a fashion mistake or dieting slip-up. Are you on this side, with the winners and all the money, or that side, with the discredited losers in their ruined world? We on the left are supposed to be "tolerant" of such hateful, divisive tactics, because we're the peaceniks right? Love and respect for everyone and their various points of view? Here's the thing, mofos: if you are actually believing that shite that the hate-mongers sling, despite all credible evidence to the contrary, rah-rahing for WAR of all things when we don't even know who attacked us- the BURDEN OF PROOF IS ON YOU. You want to go to war on a rumour, that so -and-so might have to plans to not like us very much, some time in the future? Nuh-uh. Your plan is to attack a CIVILIAN CITY in the DEAD OF NIGHT with no opposing army in sight? And you rationalize this by saying that every person in that city is potentially a terrorist, including the babies? PROVE IT, motherfuckers. Your case for going to war has to be IRONCLAD, and after that, something called an actual battle plan has to be put in place. Oh, there's not going to be an actual "battle" you say? It's going to look more like a video game, called "Shock and Awe" and if the opponents have any sense at all , they'll flee from your terrible show of strength, and failing that, the survivors will welcome you as liberators? Hmmm. Explain to me how that's different from the Nazis bombing London during the Blitzkrieg. Something tells me they were following a similar script, written by Adolf Hitler. That's right, I said it, Americans are no better than the Nazis in this scenario. Chew on that for awhile. Find a way to rationalize it away.
Nope. No longer the difference between Coke and Pepsi, my friends, even though we've all been marketed-to our whole lives to believe it really is. I'm not going to stand for hate-speech anymore (not that I ever did) whether it comes from a coworker, a friend, a so-called "superior", family, in-laws, whatever. I'm done. This is too important. And if any of those hate-mongers dare to set foot in my town, on my turf, they can prepare to be bitch-smacked within an inch of their lives. If anyone so much as murmurs that they're voting for McCain because he seems "strong" and Obama seems "scary," you can bet I'll berate them verbally until they come to their senses and realize what they're saying. They might cry. I might cry. I don't care. Public humiliation and shaming people into doing the right thing is a time-honored, non-violent, force for social change. I aim to use it wisely. Oh, and I'm fixin' to go back to church every week if we have to. As Starbuck said on Battlestar Galactica, when someone asked her, "What do we do now??": Fight 'em until we can't.

I'm No Zen Master/ Struggle Struggle Struggle

2008-08-05T21:06:00.000-07:00

he title is from some poem or some grande dame of the arts giving advice to a young artist, I believe, about what she can expect in life. Wikiquote is not helping me. If anyone knows the real thing, notify me. I've just had this stanza playing over and over in my head for months now: "What can you expect? Struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle. And once you've succeeded? Struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle. And once you've been immortalized? Struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle."
That's supposed to be the road of the "true" artist anyway, and I think it's half bullshit personally. That's the kind of crap that leads people to rationalize doing drugs, ditching their families, and basically refusing to be responsible citizens.
I prefer my art history professor's quote, which he got from someone else, and told us at the very beginning of the first day of class: There is no royal road to art. You will not be carried there on golden chariots, pulled by winged horses. You will suffer, but don't make suffering what the art is really about. Is what he was trying to say.
There ya go. This is a bit of an issue with me, and I admit it's been blocking me for some time now, because my mother was a so-called "artist," who, as you might guess, refused all treatment for her mental illness and caused us to suffer needlessly because she also refused to get a job, take responsibility for anything, yada yada, on and on... because she was "an artist."
If I were telling this to a therapist right now, she would say, "Hmmm, so that's why you think it's not okay to be a writer, right? Because you think that 's the narcissistic , irresponsible thing to do. Something your mother would do." And she'd be partially right.
My parents' irresponsibility and narcissism led to all of that responsibility piling up on their children, tenfold. I try not to dwell on it, but it's hard not to when every day you're struggling to pay bills, looking around at your friends who are enjoying 10 times the success that you are and take it for granted, and here I am, a grown -ass woman, with a full-time job, now raising my own child, paying student loans off, and I still have sheets for curtains like when I was in college.
Like I was telling Bruce the other day, I think I've been noble enough for 2 or 3 people, for one lifetime. And it also makes my lizard -brain think, "this shit better pay off big someday. All this fucking character development, emotional growth, resourcefulness, integrity- it better pay off!!!" heh. It's like what Ram Dass joked about, before he had his stroke. He was a Zen master, yes, but he also still understood that most people don't greet the next disaster comin' down the pike with open arms and hearts, as they karmically "should" or whatever. Most people, even with years of Buddhist or other spiritual training, are like, "oh great, another goddamned growth experience." Including him.
I think we all go through degrees of this, thinking about what we'd really like to do with our lives, and then thinking about all of our responsibilities. As I've been saying for years, I'm no Zen master. I'm not even trying to be one. My short, attainable goal for the time being is to try and temper all the vengeance in my heart with some wisdom and humour. E.g., don't kill anyone.
I do this by looking at the bright side, and reminding myself that with my family history, it's lucky I didn't wind up a truckstop crack-whore. Every day that I'm not a truckstop crack whore, it's a good day.
Amen. I have a steady job, a loving husband, a beautiful, funny toddler girl, a roof over my head and food to eat. The rest is gravy.
On that note, I'm growing some food in container gardens, which these days seems like a smart thing to do. And tying in with my Preparedness blog... I suppose it's some comfort that I've been struggling all my life, already learned how to be resourceful, cut corners everywhere, not used to luxuries, etc. etc. so when/if the shite hits the fan, I'll be more prepared than those yuppies driving around in their SUVs and talking on their Iphones at the same time. We have less-far to fall, I suppose. But that's cold comfort right now. And if the world truly does collapse in the next few months and I NEVER get to experience some of those luxuries... I will be PISSED.
And writing that, I already feel like a chump, because shite man, here I am a fat American, blogging on my f'in laptop far from a warzone and yes my family has health insurance... so what the f** am I complaining about? So it's all relative, but that doesn't mean you should trivialize your own stuff either. It's a balance. I /we have to learn to have compassion for ourselves, before we have compassion for anyone else. Real, active compassion, not just lip service and charity balls.
I give myself a pat on the back for not being a truckstop whore or abandoning my family (*like Bruce's 2nd cousin, Al Haig, bebop piano player extraordinaire of Charlie Parker's who went down the death-spiral of heroin abuse and took his family with him) and then I ask myself, allright beatch, how you gonna do what you gotta do? Including, not be miserable forever. There's a Zen story that goes along with the grande dame/artist's quote, different culture, same story: How do you become a Zen monk? Chop wood, carry water. How do you attain enlightenment? Chop wood, carry water. What do you do after you attain enlightenment? Chop wood, carry water.

I'm writing this now maybe because we got our pay notice last week with our supposed "raise" on it, and it amounts to like $60 more a month for me. Woohoo. And, my sister-in-law's dad just passed away, I never got to meet him, and I'm feeling sad about that, and contemplating what a life's achievements really add up to, in the end. This guy probably had an idea:
Those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force — they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

On Preparedness

2008-07-23T20:06:00.000-07:00

Hola friends. Let me start by saying that I'm not here to be a fear-monger or an alarmist, or create any more anxiety than needs to exist. There's plenty of that out there, and I've found that at most it paralyzes you into more inaction, and at the worst it just adds to that glazed-over layer of anomie or apathy that we already have.

That said, I believe we can take a reasoned approach to the situation at hand, and quite possibly do something to prevent catastrophic events from happening. Or, if they do happen, we can at least be prepared.

These are the facts as I have them. About 6 weeks-one month ago, the Army was running mysterious "training drills" with BlackHawk helicopters over downtown Denver. Every night around dusk- 8pm at the time, for 2 weeks. They were very loud, kind of scary, and most of all, unexplained. The local news sort of got to the bottom of it by talking to the chump in charge, who basically told the reporter/local populace to quit worryin' and let them take care of things. Ok, what he really said was they were training for some type of catastrophic event like a natural disaster, but social upheaval could produce the same results. He wouldn't say exactly if it was connected with the increased security for the Democratic National Convention in August, but this guy also wasn't a very good liar, and you definitely got the impression of "um, yeah, it is." Don't believe me? Google either 9news or 7news, Denver, and then search their sites for their stories on the matter.

2nd thing: Just last week, Homeland Security apparently got all up in Denver Water's grille, and forced them to close the dam road that goes over Dillon Dam because it was a "potential terrorist target." Denver Water immediately complied, without asking anyone in Summit County what they thought about it, and put up barriers on the dam road that very day. Two days later, the Summit County Sheriff's department got back in DW's grille, and said take those down or we'll shoot- or something. No, they'd sue them, but you get the picture. The closed road was adding about 4 hours onto their response time for emergency services.

If you're not from here- Lake Dillon/Reservoir is one of the main sources of water for the Denver Area. So sure, I guess it could be a terrorist target. But I think even the average Joe knows (in fact, Joe told me) that only a pretty darn superior air force, or someone with ICBMs, or perhaps a stolen nuclear bomb like in a Tom Clancy novel, would be capable of blowing up a huge, earthen dam like Dillon. So that narrows it down to basically....us. Seriously- who the hell else is going to get into our airspace as far as Colorado, or launch an ICBM targeted specifically at Dillon dam from...? India? Probably not.

The resulting flood, if the dam were destroyed, would be hugely destructive to the Summit County area (goodbye, Silverthorne factory outlet stores!) and downstream would certainly be a mess... and god forbid, all those folks in Highlands Ranch would have to quit watering their damn Kentucky Bluegrass lawns for a few months because of the temporary water shortage... but, wipeout Denver? I doubt it. So even if BushCo is planning something like this to coincide with the Democratic National Convention which starts on my birthday in August... yeah, not the best plan.

You follow me so far? Maybe I made a few leaps there without articulating all the in-between stuff. Another fact (or two): this current administration has already proven that they are capable of anything, including mass murder of their own people so they can stay in power. They've also stolen two elections, fabricated two wars out of whole cloth which are siphoning off our resources as a country and crippling our economy, once the strongest in the world (just 8 short years ago). They routinely smear or "out" anyone who investigates anything about them, and they are good friends with not only the Saudis and especially the Bin Laden family, but more importantly, with the heads of the corporate media. All of this has already made the population (which is sizable) vulnerable, weak, and prone to believing whatever crap comes out of the idiot box that promises to keep them "safe."

Prone, I say, but not necessarily so. If people are like me, all this crap upon crap upon crap, coupled with no healthcare and the high cost of gas and food, makes us cantankerous as all hell. There's what you see with your own eyes, and experience with your own broken back and tired heart, and then there's the utter shite, which is looking more shite-y every day, coming out of the TV. It adds up to cognitive dissonance on a grand scale, and it don't add up to complacency, which may be one of our saving graces.

So we got that goin' for us, which is nice. But these guys, these no-talent assclowns who've shat upon our country and pissed on the people, and laughed that evil laugh and call us "stupid" when we call them on their crap- those guys? Yeah, don't count on them leaving quietly. My basic point here is, we need to look at past behavior as an indicator of future behavior. We need to be calm and reasoned and determined about it, but make no mistake, if we ignore this shite and just assume "everything will be ok once Obama's elected.." we are heading for imminent disaster. These guys know they'd be in jail, for life, by this time next Tuesday if someone not in their cartel gets into power. Ask yourself, are they behaving at all like people who are just a wee bit nervous about that possibility?

Are they "making nice" and worrying about "legacy" projects?

So. Assuming that I'm right (and you know I am) and these schmucks try and pull another stunt like 9-11, or exploit some other national disaster for the sole purpose of declaring martial law, cancelling the elections and declaring W President-for-Life.... what are y'all prepared to do? I know for our part, we've got some emergency food stashed in the basement, along with 5-gallon water containers,and I've started growing some food outdoors in containers. Should the shite hit the fan for real, I have landscaping tools to help me tear up this stupid lawn and plant more food. (property owner be damned) One thing we don't have is a gun. I don't think I want one of my own, in the house because of the kiddo (and as I've joked before, someone of my temperament probably shouldn't have one close at hand), but I do want to learn to shoot one. This is where the redneck brother-in-law who hunts comes in handy.

Back to what we got goin' for us though. There's the cantankerous part- say what you want about Americans being fat and lazy and ill-informed, when push comes to shove, you don't want to piss us off. Even die-hard Republicans, who simultaneously believe government should be "small", and that you should shut the hell up and trust it implicitly if there's an "R" after someone's name- don't like being told what to do. There's also the fact that this so-called President has a disapproval rating of like 80%, on a good day. Which begs the question, if he and his henchmen try to attack us again, who the hell would be carrying out his orders, in good conscience? Seriously? Yes, there are the Blackwater and Khaki guys who've been getting all sorts of "crowd control" training in Iraq, and yes, New Orleans after Katrina. But the country is so broke now, there's no way we could pay them enough to turn their guns on mostly-unarmed American citizens. I think. I'm putting my faith in them having a conscience, and acting according to what they know is right, and not necessarily what they've been ordered to do.

There's also our geography, which is awesome. As a GIS professional, I can tell you what you already know with some authority: this country is big. Population wise and land-area wise, BIG. It's not Germany, it's not England, it's not even Serbia. Ah, you bring up example of former USSR, twice as big but under boot of Soviets for 50 years? Well, when the Soviets rolled in to remote villages with their tanks and guns, it was already a starving, illiterate,broken country. Their citizens, pobrecitas, did not have the internet, or infrastructure, or sometimes even a common religion/culture or language to unite them. So, nice try. Also the Russian people (et.al) were pretty used to authoritarian governments stomping all over them, whether it was the Tsar, or Lenin, or Stalin. They hadn't ever experienced true democracy and the possibilities it unfurls for the average person.

ok. That said, it's no reason to get complacent. I'm arguing for the opposite. Instead of stockpiling weapons and food (although, be my guest if you can do it) we should probably focus more on getting to know our neighbors. Because we are going to need to depend on each other even more in the coming months and years, and it's just a good idea. Don't like your neighbors? don't trust them? Now might be a good time to move. 7 months ago we were living in a place (which we still own) with a neighbor who, lets just say, would probably have thrown us under the bus or turned us in to the Gestapo for a pack of cigarettes. We moved into this rental, and now we love our neighbors in the quadplex, and also like the surrounding ones quite a bit. I'm pretty sure I could count on them to protect us should they need to, or at least help plant a garden. Better yet, I don't stay up nights fantasizing about killing them with that gun I don't own. Cooperation and involvement is going to be key to survival. Pretty much the opposite of what our society is right now, but it does have precedent- during World War II, when everyone was growing Victory Gardens, carpooling, holding neighborhood steel drives and buying food with ration books. It was the thing to do. You were un-American if you didn't do it. And guess what, people had a blast, banding together for a greater cause like that. To hear my parents tell it, it didn't even feel like a sacrifice. They were little kids at the time, so to them it was fun. And how did that story end? Oh, we WON? Sweeeet!!! I'm pretty sure we can do that again.

Most or some of you know I'm an archaeologist by trade. An anthropologist by birth (heh) surely, but an archaeologist because I needed a job and it seemed like a fun way to incorporate all the things I'm actually interested in. Namely, how the heck did us goofy humans survive thus far, and come to even DOMINATE the planet? Surely this is some kind of celestial accident, because there ain't no way our dominance is actually merit-based. Most of my colleagues will admit to coming to the field because of a lifelong disgust/revulsion with the human race and what "it" does, with a simultaneous fascination. ( I too had this attitude... when I was 23 years old. ) Anyway. As such, studying past cultures and how they came to their demise, OR how they miraculously survived to this day, much of the time we are asking basically the same question, or wondering the same thing. If these people had only KNOWN that the drought would last 30 years! That the volcano was going to erupt on August 24th! That those pale-faces were walking social diseases! That lead might make your ceramics prettier, but it kills your brain!!! See, there is a difference with us, because at no other time in human history have we had so much access to so much information, and it's literally at our fingertips. (well, if you live in the First world and have a computer). So there's no excuse.

What I'm trying to do is use my training, of assembling all this data from the past to form a coherent view of what exactly is going on... and apply it to the present day. In my field we try to be as scientifically reasoned, objective and non-judgmental as possible. However, as a human, and maybe more importantly as a parent now, I find it nearly impossible to apply my scientific objectivity and detachment to the current situation. And now especially, a sense of urgency is bearing down on me like an 18-wheeler on a wet rainy highway at night. Many of my colleagues have mentally divorced themselves from the human race, placed themselves intellectually above the fray, and in effect "outside" of present events. This is unfortunate. Some of us however, feel duty-bound to be the "participant-observers" we were trained to be, and we are speaking out.

Rage management/ weight loss plan

2008-07-18T14:18:00.000-07:00

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): "Dear Rob 'Fat-Burner' Brezsny: I used the
Sweet and Sassy Toner video and lost only two pounds in five weeks. I
tried the No More Love Handles program and actually gained weight. The
only thing that really worked was your column. Reading your horoscopes
has, I'm convinced, been responsible for bringing me much closer to
having my dream body. You've helped me jettison a ton of psychic fat,
not to mention a wad of guilt, a load of concern about what other people
think of me, and a mass of remorse about the past. I never realized how
much of my extra weight had to do with psychological burdens I was
carrying. This is the lightest I've ever been! Grateful Virgo." Dear Grateful:
Give yourself credit, too. It has been courageous of you to get rid of your
unnecessary buffers. By the way, this week will be the climax of the
shedding process. Celebrate your success by emptying out even more.

Awesome!!! Update on the CTJ I'm phat thing too- I've decided that my body was also trying to tell me to cut out wheat, and i'd be mostly fine. That's alotta psychic garbage from oh, probably close to 37 years now. About 10 years a naturopathic doctor told me to cut out yeast, especially, because that's what was causing my seasonal allergies to go ballistic, but she also said, "eh, yer young, you probably have 10 more years until this really becomes a problem." Guess what??? It's 2 weeks from my birthday, and I feel like shit. Notably, whenever I look at a bagel, especially a whole wheat one, I can feel my intestines scrunch up inside me and produce pre-emptive gas, as if to warn me. So. I've also got that bloating and random gut pain that complainers of wheat allergies claim to have. Brucey baby is going to get tested for celiac disease soon, since almost his entire family has it, and I have a feeling my time has come too. We'd have to do this as a family anyway, there's no friggin way to isolate the breadcrumbs in a given household. I'll probably drop 12 pounds in a month, just with this (that's my hope.) Unlike 10 years ago, there isn't exactly a gallon of snot pouring out of my head every minute because of mold, dust, and juniper pollen, but I'm still feeling slightly snotty, bloated, tired all the time, bloated, fat, and bloated. We'll see if this works. I'll keep you posted.

Entitlement Schema, on your Right

2008-07-11T20:14:00.000-07:00

Or maybe I should call this another SOAS/CTJ. It's really a combo platter. Hmmm.
The bike shop we go to most frequently because MacMookie does massage-trade with the owner (the place is called "Cycle-Analyst" and Macmookie is in training to be a licensed psychoanalyst.. can ya beat that?) has the most awesome selection of bike horns and bells you ever did see. Squishy horns shaped like dinosaur heads or dog butts, tinkly asian-style bells that practically whisper, zen-like, "let me pass beside you on your left, grasshopper," classic ringa-ringa-ringa bicycle bells what look like they're straight out of the 1923 Sears & Roebuck's catalog, and airhorns. Lately, I'm leaning towards the airhorn, even though I've had my eye on this cute little number with a picture of a bear on it for a mere $4.50... but really what I need? Lately? Is a horn that blares out, "Get OUT OF THE BIKE LANE, YOU OVER-ENTITLED YUPPIE BITCHES." Seriously. That sound harsh? Let me 'splain. Here in Denver we have designated bike routes, like most cities with over 50,000 people- and some of those bike routes go along regular ol' city streets what aren't the busiest streets or main arteries, but also aren't dinky little residential side streets. In those streets, width permitting, are painted lines which designate actual bike lanes,complete with arrow markers pointing the direction bike traffic should go (along with the flow of other traffic, duh) and a symbol inside of that arrow depicting a unisex, helmeted cyclist. Should I repeat that? The symbol depicts a CYCLIST only, not a jogger, or a walker, and not, most importantly, a trio of trophy wives walking 3 abreast, with at least 2 strollers and 2 dogs on leash between them. No. It's a cyclist.
The route I take to work follows a designated bike route with one segment of it containing the precious bike lanes. It's a beautiful ride, for the city, the whole length, but this segment with the actual bike lanes is really somethin' else. A wide parkway, with a gorgeous, shady green median separating the lanes of traffic going in opposite directions. Enough space on each side for one lane of car traffic, the bike lane, and then a parking lane that abuts the curb. On the other side of those curbs, as you might guess, are these things called sidewalks. They are broad and commodious compared to the skinny, aborted things in my neighborhood. There is probably enough room on them for two portly people to walk side by side, with a dog, or for two people to pass each other, single file. If I lived over there, I would walk down the footpath on the grassy median, but I'm just that kinda Nature Gal. I much prefer dirt and grass under my feet than pavement. Plus, it's probably the safest place to be, and I'm also a paranoid safety freak. I will bike or walk MILES out of the way just to take the safest route. Especially if my bambina is with me.
**Which brings me to another point- yes, I am also a mom. Yes, we own a jogging stroller (which we will be selling, since we just got a bike trailer/stroller- woohoo!). Yes, we frequently put b. girl in said stroller and walk around the neighborhood, to the park, the store, etc. But there is NO WAY IN HELL I would take that thing, with her in it, in the middle of the f'in street when other, safer options were available. My neighborhood has those aforementioned skinny sidewalks though, so frequently we do have to walk in the street. But I never walk in the MIDDLE of the street, and if I did, I certainly wouldn't expect people to get the hell out of MY way because I'm entitled to be there, as a pedestrian or whatever (even though technically, pedestrian rights are supreme in such cases.) The area with the bike lane is different. Here comes the judgmental bitch part, hold to your armrests- what kind of shitty parent are you if you put your own spoiled-ass convenience and entitlements ahead of your CHILD's safety??? Huh? Is it really that much of a BOTHER to negotiate curbs and the occasional untrimmed hedge? Or god forbid, get some actual dirt on your $150 tennies? Maybe next time I'm out there, instead of flipping them off, I'll call Social Services. Right after I call Traffic Right-of-Way enforcement.

Do me a favor and read those paragraphs again. My point is that most of 7th Avenue has plenty of room, and plenty of pleasant options, for the average pedestrian, without ever stepping foot in the bike lane. And yet.
Also, as you might guess, the people lucky enough to live along or near this gorgeous street are uh... shall we say.. rich. I'm not gonna say wealthy, because that dresses up a condition that doesn't need to be. They're rich. If you asked them, they might say "well-to-do," or you might even get a "yes, we've been very blessed" from the Catholics, but most of them are heavily invested in the notion, or false premise that 1) they earned what they have through some combination of hard work, brains and talent, and 2)they deserve it, they're entitled, so shut up, all you poor-ass whiny minorities and half-breed peasants that actually have to work for a living- obviously you're just not SMART enough to be rich and live in this gorgeous neighborhood.
That's the sense I get, anyway, when I'm trying to get to this thing called a job I have, Monday thru Friday, 8-5, after dropping off my wee one at daycare. Now, this may be a big ol' wild-ass guess on my part, but the women with their $700 baby strollers and designer doggies walking in the bike lane 3 across, DO NOT, by contrast, have anywhere they really need to be at 8am. Which is why I feel pretty damn free to honk my bike horn, and failing to dislodge them with that, yell. I try not to be rude. I just try to be very clear, so they can hear me, and understand what I'm saying. "GET...OUT...OF...THE...BIKE...LANE" is usually what I say, and start to say it when I'm least 50 feet behind them, so they have time to comply. But do they comply? Hardly ever. I'm usually met with over-entitled attitude in response. Yes, these people, though clearly in the wrong, try to argue with me. That's when I flip them off.
You might think this is a little thing to get all worked up about, in the grand scheme of things- big deal? Why not just go around them? Who died and made me the Bike Police, as well as the Entitlement Police? I certainly don't want to be like the over-entitled jackass that Peeps pedaled past this morning, who was tail-gating another cyclist on the multi-use bike path, and then had a frickin' cow when the cyclist he was tailgating slowed down for a homeless man with a huge shopping cart. According to Peeps, Jack-ety hollered, "oh my GAWD! I can't believe this!" as if the ignominy of applying his brakes for a hazard completed his "trifecta of human atrocities- First there was slavery, then the horrors of WWII, and now THIS!" I have to quote Peeps and give him full props because that is just too frickin hilarious.
So back to me- if you've read any of my past blogs, you'll know that over-entitled assholes of any stripe tick me off to no end. And I firmly believe that if you don't confront these "little things" you encounter in your daily life, and right the wrongs that you see, no matter how tiny they are, nothing will ever change. The power structure will remain as it is, with rich, white males at the top and everyone else in the world crushed under their immense bulk- except when it collapses (soon), everyone, and I mean everyone, will be utterly destroyed along with them. There's a way to dismantle the current patriarchy and inherently corrupt power structure without killing everyone and destroying the planet- but it takes a mountain's worth of these little things to incrementally add up and turn the tide. You have to do it. I have to do it. No one else will do it. Especially people who don't even realize what assholes they are, who were brought up to believe that if you're rich, and white, you can pretty much do whatever the fuck you want. You think they're just going to wake up one day and wail, "oh my goodness gracious, I've been SO wrong, for SO long!" ???
Nah. I'm still not advocating violence, so put your guns away you buncha trigger-happy rednecks. But verbal bitch-smacking is an art, a type of martial art, and like any artform, it takes practice. And now you might be thinking, "well Queenie, don't WE feel a wee bit over-entitled to our self-righteous anger, hmm?"
Well yup, I'm aware of that. As a woman who LOOKS white, I have all the privileges and entitlements that most white women in America do. It matters not one flea foot to passersby that I'm 1/16th Mohawk, 1/8th Basque (does that qualify as Latina?), and come from an abusive family where I was treated like a 2nd class citizen and raised to believe that I was a complete piece of shit. People can't SEE that when I bike past them, flipping them off. To them I look like just another angry-about-nothin', over-entitled white woman. Even though I grew up feeling more like a minority, and all my friends tended to be either minorities or social outcasts of some kind (please don't be offended, friends:) e.g. the overweight kids, the poor kids, the kids who were plenty smart but had learning disabilities or wacky senses of humour that no one else got... I also realize at the same time, that I have no earthly idea what it's like to walk around on earth as a black woman, or even a Latina, or a full-blooded Ind'n, with people making all sorts of assumptions and judgments about you (mostly negative) based on unreliable visual cues.
{Perhaps I should do a whole CTJ on that fact, entitled: um, hello, we are visual animals, and prejudice is largely based on visual cues, rather than the whole reality of a person. Think back to high school. Ok, that's for another time.}
So there's always been quite a bit of cognitive dissonance in my life, but for other people, there's also visual dissonance. E.g. "you don't LOOK like you've had a hard life... therefore I'm going to assume that everything has come easily for you, and feel justified in being nasty to you." Same goes for me. Maybe these yuppie women have husbands who beat them, or are such complete assholes that they only respite they get from their posh misery is walking down the bikelane with their girlfriends once a day and acting like they have real power in their lives for oh, about an hour. But I doubt it.
I'll own up to the partial source of my righteous indignation being plain old, garden variety jealousy. More accurately, envy. Because I would cut off my left breast for the chance to stay home with my kiddo, go for strolls with the girls, and have my biggest worry be what to plant in the flower garden this year. That's probably what they say to themselves too, watching my figure recede in the distant foreground- middle finger silouetted against the morning sky- "She's just jealous." Yep.
For all I know they are nice people despite their arrogant stupidity and bad parenting, and under different circumstances we would get along swimmingly.
But I doubt it.
However I'm going to try to keep an open heart, an open mind, and yes, an open hand, all the better to deliver bitch -smacks with.

The New and Improved Manifesto, with 50% More Swear Words!

2008-06-23T21:35:00.000-07:00

The new manifesto:
Perhaps you've heard this before, in one way or another: where your wound is, that's also where your blessings come from. It may be the font of much pain, whatever your wound is, but turned around, expressed creatively in poetry, art, music, political essays... that's where your blessings will also come from. If you ignore your wound however, if you get too much attention for it that nurtures the pain and encourages festering rather than healthy expression- it will kill you. Not can, will. Put simply, another way- If I don’t write, and soon, my head will explode. Or, as I am more worried about, my heart. Now, I look forward to it all day actually, being able to sit down, alone, in this cool poorly lit rented basement, and write.
That never happened before.
Proof of the wounds killing powers: When I don’t write, all the rage and even cleverness inside me turns to bile and pus and hot blood that boils up and up- so when I DO write, it’s like popping that boil- not pretty.
On the bright side, For once I’m glad that one of my cock-and-bull rationalization theories came true, that having a kid would actually make something “click” as Bruce says, and the bullshit wars inside me would come to end, and I would stop procrastinating, and write.
Not a healthy pattern though. I did the “Artist’s Way” exercises ten years ago- I still remember them. Write every day, no matter what. Don’t think, just write.
This is how to unblock yourself. But what with moving, not being able to find my journals, working full-time, trying to make time with the kiddo quality, etc. etc. Yep, I got lost in all that. Getting lost is dangerous like this- it puts my marriage in trouble, actually, when I don’t take time for me. Hell, it puts ME in trouble- the depression threatens to come back, in a hurry.

To be totally up front, I have to tell you - this is rage management for me. This is not a mommy blog. Not even "anger" management-no, rage. Apparently a lot of us Adult-Children-of-Abusive-Parents-Who-Still-Totally-Suck have this phenomena, and many of us can't afford therapy, so we do other things.
If anyone has a problem with that, well, I don’t really give a shit so, quit reading I guess. I had a poetry teacher in college throw up his hands, sneer and snivel in disgust in the middle of a student’s reading of her poem, about how she’d been incested by her father, gotten pregnant as a result at age 13, gave birth to the baby on the bathroom floor, watched as her father immediately killed the baby, and buried it in the backyard- and the old professor’s reaction to her telling this story for the first time was “Jeeeeezus Christ! This is not your goddamned therapy session! Can we all STOP using poetry as an outlet for all this psychodrama!“ All of us were too shocked at his grotesque reaction to say anything at the time, but let me tell you, I’m beyond all that “Shock and Awe” we’re all supposed to be experiencing in the face of the crumbling patriarchy’s ugliness and hate (which we all know now is mere bluff and bluster, right?) and I’m still not above verbally emasculating or bitch-slapping stupid, insensitive people, in public.

So here I am, finally writing. I probably need to scribble in my journal as well, for there are some things which aren’t ready for prime time yet. See, I just want a manifesto that will allow me to post writings, essays, etc. without self-censoring too much. Without stifling my creativity before it even starts. Because this bottling up of everything, it is making me sick, and old, and tired, methinks. Either that, or I have a thyroid problem. (*I don't, darnit) See, I wrote that first manifesto because I didn’t want to turn into the leftist version of those right-wing hatemongering pieces of shit*******, who encourage readers to do their worst and pretty soon it’s just a big ol’ pissing contest . There’s so much hate out there, you hardly need to encourage it. Also I wanted it to be a safe place, where people could feel like they could post a comment or opinion without getting skewered by some numb nut in return.
But mostly I did it because the font of my wound turns me into a human volcano sometimes, and threatens to destroy me. To prevent that- even if just for the selfish reason of, if my rage overwhelms me, I’ll never get to do what I want to do, be who I want to be- gotta write. No way around it.
Put very simply, I will speak my mind. At the same time I realize there's a fine line to be walked between speaking my mind, and turning into a blowhard. My saving grace may be my total inability to tell lies very well. This blog aims to "walk the line" though, in defense of everything I love and hold dear, which ain't much. Thank you Johnny Cash, for giving us all permission to flip the double bird at the man, and to do it in an extremely public, extremely visible medium. I also aim to do it using lots of sarcasm, irony, and humour. Apparently this is a hallmark of Generation X, my generation, which of course I didn't really want to be a part of for a long time, because we don't like being a part of anything. At the ripe old age of 37 I've come to realize, I'm so Gen X I can't even see straight. Better to be self-aware than not aware at all, eh? :)

I’d like to encourage readers to do the same, (speak their minds) but still hold off on the ignorant hate parts. Or, if you do talk shit, you better be able to back it up. Same goes for me. I talked to my friend Betito, who was raised by mental health professionals ;) for 2 hours on Friday night, and as she put it with characteristic equanimity, “calling yourself a judgmental bitch is a bit harsh, but you are opinionated, and it’s good to realize these things so we can work on them.” Yes, as you may have realized, my friends are a helluva lot nicer than I am- who would put up with me but really nice people?
Issue Example: the health care crisis, widely varying viewpoints, one fueled by insurance companies and the corporatocracy in general, others by people who are just trying to make sense of their situation with some scrap of dignity left. As she also put it, so wisely, if you actually want people to change their minds, or just think a little bit, then telling Republicans who fear “socialized medicine” that they’re really just selfish greedhounds who want poor people to die is probably not the way to go about it.
See, there’s a balance to be struck.
If you don't get the humour of Al Franken's book, "Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot: On the Decline of Civil Discourse in Modern America," and don't see why the title is hilariously ironic, then you probably won't get the humour of me telling people to "mind their fockin' manners for pete's sake," or similar. So this probably isn't the blog for you. If you don't get a giggle or glimmer of new-found self-awareness when I tell anyone advocating violence done on their supposed behalf but not directly by them, or affecting them, that they need to be smacked upside the head, this blog isn't for you.
***** like that, perfect example, calling them yada yada p.o.s’s. I do realize I’m not going to get anywhere by calling them names like that, but at the same I do believe that most of those pig-fuckers have never had a single piece of truth spoken to their faces, and I believe in calling people out on their ignorance, ignorant hatefulness, ignorant lemming attitude, ignorant attitudes, period, especially if they are racist or sexist or rank-ist or anything-ist, and seem to think that’s “just fine.” I’m not even going to single a gender out, much less a group (that would be hypocritical of me (cough) {yuppie men}) because this is all a result of living in a society where the totally insane has been normalized for about, oh, 50 years now. Maybe 150, depending on where you go. But we’re definitely all livin’ in this stanky, tepid soup of insanity and actin’ like it’s totally fockin’ normal. Welp, maybe it’s just because I grew up in a household that was basically a microcosm of everything wrong in our society, where seriously insane bullshit was normalized, ignored, swept under the rug, etc, but I’ve come to believe it’s a healing thing, calling people out on their shit. If you say nothing, you are just helping perpetuate it.
There’s also a TON of people out there these days, fueled by the asinine corporate media or god knows what, who apparently had no mamas to teach them to mind their fockin’ manners, or were raised by a goddam pack of hyenas- I’m not sure which- but if you have the opportunity to teach them manners, I believe you should.
This comes at a good time, because I’m also finally writing that letter to my parents that I should have started about 5 years ago, sent or not, for my own purposes. And it occurred to me this morning that if I take the same old angry, “accusatory” (their words) tone with them, they’ll just throw it away like they do everything else that hints at the truth of their wasted, miserable lives, and it will do more harm than good.
I need to take a different tack, to reframe this story of mine for my mental health if not theirs, and that tack is minus a helluva lotta anger. At least at first.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my story, Sacred Stories, and the story of America- how we can all reframe those, given enough practice, given the right tools, and gift-ing ourselves the time to do so. Because it’s important. Barack Obama’s on to something when he tries to engage the whole country in writing that story, being a part of it. Don’t discount him as just the new “rockstar” or “green meets brown” marketing trend that a bunch of sycophants and groupies are clinging onto. You do that, you discount humanity. For all my rage at the machine and the things humanity does, I won’t let you do that. We are better than that. For all my bitterness and unexpressed grief, jeezus gawd, I have so much in love in me for us silly humans, for this country, for this beautiful planet that I’ve only begun to explore.
I’m not saying my anger will go away, but what I’m trying to do is hone it into a warrior’s skills rather than flailing self-destruction. I’ve been watching lots of warrior movies lately, like “300” and “Apocalypto” - I think for some mental practice. Should also dig out Braveheart and watch it with mi esposo again- he’s a Scotsman, he understands the whole part about ancestral anger. Here’s to the journey, the practice, and yes, the “smackening.”

More later-

10 REASONS MY BABY IS CUTER THAN YOURS

2008-04-16T15:51:00.000-07:00

The whole "tagged" thing got me thinking, I really could brag on my baby way more than myself. And it's somewhat acceptable in American culture to brag about your children, so here goes;

1. She's nearly 2 and 1/2, but still gets the syllables in two-syllable words mixed up. My favorite is "chicken" for "kitchen." Now we've taken to calling the kitchen, the chicken. For some reason I don't have a problem with this adult infantalizing of our language, when I do indeed have problems with parents who talk to their kids constantly in baby-jabber e.g. "Does Emma-wee want to weah her wed waincoat today? Does she? Oh, mommy wuvs dat waincoat!" And then are surprised when, in preschool, their kids are diagnosed with speech impediments and need hours of expensive therapy to correct a problem that they have created. JUST SPEAK LIKE FRIGGIN' ADULTS PEOPLE! PLEASE! gads.
Actually the aforementioned problem makes me laugh my ass off because it usually happens to over-indulgent yuppie parents, and they get what they deserve. :)
As long as 'ella pronounces both "chicken" and "kitchen" correctly, we're fine.

2. Speaking of cute language things, she also came up with saying "Weeeee" in place what I think should be "very" or "way". We have also taken to using this, adverb, shall we say, in our own speech, especially around her. Example: 'ella and Daddy Bruce have a nighttime ritual, which helps her go night-night, where they walk around the house and turn all the lights off, and say "night-night kitchen/chicken" "night-night bathroom" etc. Once, she realized her sippy cup was still in the kitchen after they'd turned off the lights, so she ran to get it and immediately exclaimed, "ooo, it weee dark in the chicken!!" Still cracks me up. We imagine it is very dark, indeed, inside the chicken.

3. Have I mentioned 'ella goes to a Jewish temple preschool? Well, she does. We're not Jews, but one of my grandmothers was and we like the educational /enrichment aspects of it, plus the warm fuzzy care they give and the added bonus of having around 20 surrogate Jewish mothers, blah blah blah. Right now they're on Passover Break. Before Passover break, as you might imagine, they were gearing up with all sorts of songs, art projects featuring Baby Moses, etc. A couple mornings before vacation, she woke up and spontaneously told her father, "Let my people Go!" We think she wanted out of her crib. Again, we are still laughing about this.

4. As another sign of her brilliance, she already has imaginary friends. They are fairie-sized, near as we can tell, they like to hang out near lamps, and they are named Coco, Bobo, and Plunk-o, near as we can tell. She catches "Coco" in her hands like a firefly, gives him a smooch and sends him off to school. (this happens a lot at bedtime- so apparently her fairie-friends live in a different space-time-zone).

5. She tries to kiss our devil-cat Hazel on the butt, even though we've repeatedly advised against that.

6. The actual cuteness- well, I'm extremely paranoid about pedophiles and stalkers, for reasons I may elaborate on later, so I refuse to post photos of her- but suffice it to say, she's cuter than a bug's ear. She is just starting to get hair, so she still looks somewhat baby-like, and the hair she is getting in? That's right, it's a mullet.

7. Maybe it's because she's 2, but she wants everything in twos now. This is either really cute, or it drives me crazy. She has to have TWO sippies, not just one. One with juice, one with milk. Or both with milk. She doesn't care that it's the same substance in different bottles - she wants TWO. She's our two-fisted wonder.

8. She's also a dancing fool, and has been ever since she could move. Maybe I'm just a doting parent, but ever since she was TINY she's been able to pick out music from the general noise-stream going on around her- and soon as she hears it, she would either go stock-still, or start bopping around like she was on SoulTrain. One day she came home from daycare, heard some jingle music on the TV, and said "shake your booty mommy!" and stuck her butt out and started shakin' it. I did not teach her this. It's clearly natural talent.

9. This goes under the more disturbing traits- a little background- I haven't spoken to my parents in 8 years because they were abusive (unprintable). She has never met them and never will. My dad was a heavy-equipment broker and had "yellow-iron fever" as my mom put it. In short, Ella LOVES heavy equipment. Bulldozers, backhoes, D-10s, hot asphalt plants, huge earthmovers, whatever. To her, they all go by the beloved name, "Truck!" While I encourage the tomboy-ness of this, I know that God is laughing at me.

10. She puts pajamas on her stuffed Sneetch and calls him/her "Nietzsche!" At least that's what it sounds like. nuff said!

SYSTEM OF A SMACKDOWN

2008-03-06T12:28:00.000-08:00

ORIGINALLY POSTED ON MYSPACE, AUGUST 2007:

There's a sign on the hostess stand of one of my favorite breakfast restaurants in Denver, where they do an extremely popular "Petticoat Bruncheon" on weekends, (wherein all the waiters are dressed in drag- yes, it's hysterical, especially when you're hungover or just plain tired and in need of some strong coffee and belly laughs) that reads, in happy, hand-lettered Crayola prose, "Don't Seat Yourself or You Might Get Bitch-Slapped by Some Drag Queen."

After a few months of careful thought, teeth gnashing, stewing and brewing, I've decided I need a similar sign. This blog post right here will be that sign. Now, I'm no drag queen (que lastima), but I can deliver a bitch-slap to the legions of the over-entitled who routinely tromp over posted boundaries, like nobody's bidness. If that makes me a self-righteous bitch, so be it. Sue me. Whatevah, at this ripe old age of 37, I seriously don't give a shit what anyone thinks of me personally. Plus, and this is the crucial point, I do feel entitled to my righteous anger because as one of my heroines Margaret Cho put it, I've been through it, whereas the person who pissed me off royally most recently HAS NOT. At least, not that I'm aware of- but I think if he had, he wouldn't be writing the sexist bullshit that he is.

And what is that, you may well arsk? OY VEY. At the risk of generating more buzz or god forbid, "fame" for this clown, I'll tell you quickly. It's this guy I went to high school with, in the class one year ahead of me, given name: Nate Warren. However, his nome de blog is (gag) Colonel Hector Bravado, and he spews every so often for this rather amusing website based here in Denver called Elitist Hipster Snob. (Oh yes, they drip with irony. Most of the time they are mildly entertaining without being outright offensive, but apparently they are self-edited or rather their editing policy is somewhere along the lines of "oh, you wanna write for us? Can you spell? Cool.") In high school he wrote roughly the same quality of crapola, but he had shades of brilliance occasionally, if he would just give up on the "angry white male" thing which we all fully expected he would grow out of in due time….. but, alas. The blog in question is a 17-years too-late "album review" of sorts for a gangsta rap group that I had never heard of, but it matters little, cuz our friend the over-privileged white boy was basically celebrating the "message" of their music which was is in a nutshell, smack down the bitches, kill the bitches, your gun is an extension of your penis, your gang is only family you need, etc. etc. woohoo! Drink some brews and you better(direct quote here) "hide your little sisters from me after I listen to this album, or they'll wake up with a lil' Colonel in they bellies, and the rest of me dried up on they faces."

As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.

Now, you may say I'm overreacting and by doing so, giving him too much power. But the only woman I know who would put up with dried cum on her face is either dead, or a totally whacked out crack whore. AND, may I remind everyone that the writer of this tripe is white, male, and grew up in the suburbs. Yes, he was raised by a single mom, but I KNEW his mom, and she was a little nutty, but a total feminist. Plus, most mens I know who was raised by the single mommies (including my husband) are MORE sensitive to woman's plight in this world, not LESS. I was actually looking for his mom when I found him- she was a noted columnist for the Denver Post for many years, Jill Jacobs Scott. You'd think she'd raise her kids up not to spew this hateful shite, que no? And aside from that, I don't think his dad was a deadbeat so… at any rate, didn't we all agree like 15 years ago that there's no excuse for this shit, not even among the so-called gangsta rappers who have supposedly "had it hard?" None! Nope, sorry, 'hijito, take your punk-ass little baby whining somewhere else. No, in fact, shut up altogether. No one needs to hear that shit, except the other crazy-ass voices in your head where an internal censor or critic should be. Don't even try off-loading your toxic waste that passes for writing in this day and age on some sorry-ass 3rd World Country- I can't think of a country sorry enough to accept it- not even illiterate rice farmers in Bangladesh. ESPECIALLY not them.

Now, if I were one of our mutual teachers from 20 years ago, who would no doubt be as profoundly disappointed in him as I am, I might just sigh, shake my head, and pinch the bridge of my nose while muttering, "Nate, nate, nate… we had such high hopes for you. Didn't you go to Colorado College? Didn't I write you a goddamned letter of recommendation????" Whereas, my immediate response to this drivel was admittedly knee-jerk. I ripped him a new asshole on his blog page, and bluntly asked him why he thinks that spewing sexist, misogynist bullshit is any better than the racist bullshit that was routinely spewed, oh a generation ago, by the likes of the KKK and most members of all-white country clubs.

E.g. Biff: "Hey Thad, I was thinking of organizing a little nigger hunt this weekend. You in?"

Thad: "Capital idea! I'll get the shotguns and the Vaseline!"

Sadly, our homeboy doesn't see the comparison as relevant at all- oh no, he thinks an ocean of impenetrable "cool" lies between him and the ugly, racist ravings of insecure white men half a century ago (or, now).

So, I've put off writing, reacting, or responding to this particular issue for almost 3 months now for several reasons (chief among them, I have a life/better shit to do) Now, instead of just a teething toddler gnawing on my breasts all night, I've got this damned subject gnawing at me. It won't go away by focusing on the positive. It doesn't go away even when I go to my happy place (fyi, it's Joann's Rancho Casados in Espanola, NM). It comes with. It orders the enchiladas and leers at me from across the room. Yes, in that most sacred of spaces, JOANN'S it dares to trespass!!

So here's my sign: IF YOU SPEW RACIST, SEXIST BULLSHIT ANYWHERE, ANYTIME, IN ANY FORM NEAR ME, YOU WILL GET THE SMACKDOWN.

IF YOU WILLFULLY AND ROUTINELY DENY YOUR PRIVILEGE AND ENTITLEMENTS WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY DRAPING YOURSELF IN THE "COOL" CACHET OF THE ARTFORMS OR LIFESTYLES OF THE UNDERPRIVILEGED, YOU WILL GET THE SMACKDOWN.

Other reasons for getting the smackdown will be posted here as I see fit.

What's the smackdown? Let's just say I'm skilled in the arts of verbal emasculation. And the other kind too. I grew up with older brothers, and lived to tell about it. Nuff said?

Think of it as a forced Come to Jesus. Jesus whips out the Smackdown. Jesus wins.

* oh, and in case you think I should be duly punished for "flaming" someone on the internets, I already have. My creepy, psychotic old prom date who was a good friend of Nate's in high school sent me a message because he saw my message on Nate's blog. Friggin great. This is the guy, speaking of rape, who very nearly forced me to have sex with him after the prom because, as he so charmingly put it, "It's expected." Niiiccce…….

THERE'S ABOUT TO BE A DORA-CIDE

2008-02-25T16:53:00.000-08:00

Lord knows I don't want to turn into one of those dreaded "mommy-bloggers" but my brain is about to explode and I'm afraid i'm going to throw a sharp knife at my spouse as soon as he walks thru the door rather than greet him with a sweet kiss after leaving me alone for 3 days straight with a sick toddler, if I dont' write. Said Toddler is so cranky, and understandably so, from her fever, diarrhea, runny nose and cough that ALL she wants to do is watch the Dora portion of this Nick Jr. videotape we got from a friend/babysitter whose VCR broke. I don't know whether to thank her or throttle her. Normally little girl loves Blues Clues, which follows Dora on the tape, but lately she's decided it's "scary" - her new favorite word.
So I'm subjected not only to horrendously stinky poopy diapers, crankiness, non-napping, and worrying about her fever, but in addition, I have to watch this goddamned video apparently, 25 or so times today alone. Nothing else will do. This episode involves Dora and freaky monkey friend saving their stupid bull friend by patching his leaky hot-air balloon with the magical "STICKY TAPE! STICKY TAPE! STICKY TAPE!" Repite por favor, boys and girls. "STICKY TAPE!!!" it's highly likely that this is what I will scream at Bruce right before I throw the kitchen knife at his head when he walks in that door. There will be drool coming out of my mouth and my clothes and hair, as usual, will be in disarray. The difference between me and the other homicidal, drooling, driven mad with too-much-kidshit-overload "mommy bloggers" is that i'm not some whiny stay-at-home mom who just needs a break but other than that has no real stress, because hello, if you can afford to stay at home, than obviously you can pay the heating bill and buy groceries without taking a calculator with you to the store. Nope, I gots me a full-time job just like 90% of my sisthren, and though spouse has also just started a full-time job, he doesn't accrue any PTO til like 2 months from now, which blows. However, since one or all of us has been sick since November, it seems like, I am now totally out of sick time and making a pretty big dent in my vacation.
My point is, the spousal unit is staying home with little girl tomorrow if she's still running a temperature, not me. Given my current mental state, I think this is fair. We're also in the Final Stage of the BIg Project I was hired to complete at work, code red, damn the torpedoes until March 30th, and every second counts. And since I've had so many sick days, needless to ssay I'm behind. Stressed? me?
The other point of this venting blog is that clearly, somehow, someway, I've got to find a way to write more regularly and turn this into something real, or my brain will REALLY explode, and not even the magical sticky tape will be able to fix it. (Come to think of it, i need some of that stuff. Dora fixed her backpack strap, a bird's nest that had fallen out of a tree, made her shoes sticky enough to get over Slippery Rock, some rips in a sailboat, and yes, that accursed hotair balloon with their dumb friend in it. I needs me some of that.

What were you doing 15 years ago?

2008-01-15T09:57:00.000-08:00

Originally posted on Myspace December 18, 2007:

WARNING: LOOOOONNNNNNGGGGGG

Yesterday evening-ish time I was processing a survey report, likes I always do, and noticed that the date of the report was the same as yesterday- December 18th- except it was 15 years prior. This got me to thinkin', so I sent off the following epistle to my fren' Peeps.

December 18, 1992. A small group of contract archaeologists were writing up their reports from the field season and decided against formally recording the 47 IFS ("Isolated" Finds) they ran across in one survey, in one relatively small area. Apparently they also decided against 2nd guessing their own crappy work and maybe taking a look at their own damn maps and thinking, "hmm, all these IFS occur in a relatively concentrated area….. maybe it's a site? Maybe we should go back and try to actually record it? Naaahhhh… Christmas is coming! I have shopping to do! Let the SHPO deal with it!"

December 18, 2007. Bitter desk archaeologist at the SHPO processes crap-tastic 15 year old report and attempts to formally record 47 IFS that are 400 miles away and buried under 2 feet of snow not to mention years of paperwork, and subsequent overlapping surveys.

I feel old.

________________________________________

Then I just couldn't stop thinking. Darn you, monkey – mind! Put down the pipe!

What else was going on though? In my personal life, I had just helped the train wreck posing as my parents move from the house I had grown up into temporary digs in a nearby town-home, that belonged to the people who had just bought their house (long story- too bad reality TV didn't exist back then- we could have done "House Swap!" Right before the Holidays! Watch the action! )what reeked of their chain-smoking and bad, greasy food. They were from Ohio. The woman's name was Arlene (not making that up), her common-law husband's name was John, and he had a 16 year-old's spiky new wave mullet haircut on top of his 35-year-old head. They had a one-year-old baby boy that they hadn't gotten around to naming yet, so they called him "Boy" jokingly. The other candidate for a name was "John, Junior." Very creative. The poor kid was strapped into some kind of baby-bouncer-chair every time I saw him, his eyes glazed over because of their constant chain - smoking, and he probably already had asthma. He was the latest in their collection of children from either of their previous relationships, ranging in age from 8 to 17. They were so excited about moving into our house because they would finally have enough room to house all of their children, who were scattered around various parts of the country (I'm assuming, in foster care). But they couldn't sell their town-home in time to move, so they needed to rent it out, and whaddya know, my parents needed a place for them and all their crap to stay for about 4 months until their brand-spanking-new mini-mansion was completed. So a deal was struck.

In the myopic, co-dependent misery that was my life prior to divorcing my parents (if someone knows of a better word for it, notify me) I remember thinking that they deserved the mini-mansion with all the trimmings, despite the fact that only days earlier, and with much fake hand-wringing and crocodile tears they had both told me that, much as they wanted to, there was no possible way they could help me with college, so I was on my own. I distinctly remember my mother shaking her head and scoffing at me after yet another fruitless phone call to the UNM financial aid office; "Well you'd better get a scholarship or something, otherwise you won't be able to go. Honestly S--- I don't think you plan for anything." At the same time, her pride and joy, the first-born, baby-boy and prince of the family, aka my brother, was petitioning to the get into Nebraska's School of Architecture because he didn't make the cut on the first or second rounds, his grades weren't good enough. So he had to present his projects and applications to a 7-person jury of Architecture professors and basically plead his case and beg them to take him, because despite failing Calculus twice and taking more than 6 years to complete a 2-year prerequisite program, he really did show promise, etc. etc. So he was on the phone to us every 10 minutes giving us/them updates on what the verdict would be. I also distinctly remember, during one such phone call, fraught with all the drama and tension of a spoiled little prince going up against the judges and jury of the Real World for the first time, my dad getting on the phone and declaring that if poor widdle Jeeemy DID manage to get into Architecture School, they would pay his rent for the rest of college so he could concentrate on his classes and finish. About 2 minutes later, they both turned to me and told me that'd I'd better get down to New Mexico early and get a couple jobs lined up before classes even started, because work-study and financial aid probably wouldn't cover my living expenses. But, clueless as I was 15 years ago, I took their peculiar brand of bullshit at face value.

On that bright note-- So there I was- about to head off for my 3rd try at a Bachelor's degree, starting Spring semester, January 1993 at UNM in Albuquerque. Bill Clinton had just been elected. I had voted for Ross Perot because he was a 3rd party candidate, but I wasn't bitter that he lost, I was happy that he got a third of the vote. Overall, we felt hopeful that the country, and the economy, was about to take a turn for the better. In spite of the blind-siding WHACK upside the head we (here in Colorado) also received on Election night- that a nascent hate group down in Colorado Springs (which would later become Focus On the Family) had stealthily managed to shove through legislation through subterfuge and flat-out lying, which specifically took away equal rights for gays. It was called Amendment 2, and it was struck down 2 weeks later as unconstitutional, but no matter, the damage was done.

For anyone reading this who is not from Colorado, but likes to judge us as a bunch of ignorant, gun-toting rednecks who hate them there gays, let me just tell you that the majority of us (who are nothing like the aforementioned stereotype) were totally like, DUDE, WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED??????

I mean, we were all well aware that Colorado Springs, and El Paso County in general, is so saturated with military installations and right-wing churches (they seem to go hand-in-hand) and rich retirees originally hailing from East Coast military installations, that essentially, the place has its head so far up its own ass it can't tell night from day. But still, DENYING BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS TO GAYS BASED ON SOME MISINTERPRETATION OF BIBLICAL RHETORIC AND YOUR OWN HOMOPHOBIC REPRESSED NEUROSES???? COME ON!!

They had gone too far. And while New York-based groups made a big deal over canceling their scheduled conventions at our brand-spanking-new Convention Center in Downtown Denver in protest, and we were scratching our heads trying to figure out how this all happened without our knowing it, a few of us secretly admitted to ourselves that this here cloud might have a silver lining. I mean, uh, not to sound just as hateful as the anti-gay freaks down south, but um, anything that keeps a bunch of nastyass, no-manners east coasters out of our fair state can't be all bad, right? Anyway, that's what we were secretly and not-so secretly thinking. It's funny because, in 1992 the "flood" of immigrants from the East Coast, West Coast, and everywhere in between was barely a trickle, but man, you wouldn't know it from all the bellyachin' we did about them taking our jobs, driving up housing prices, polluting our air and wasting our water.

Wooo! If we had only known then the true inundation that was to occur as the '90's roared into the 21st Century! Weee, doggies! as us rednecks like to holler. My attitude towards newcomers has tempered since then, but only slightly. (sorry, Peeps.) My friends in Montana have a similar philosophy. They were overjoyed when Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) and that crazy militia dude were arrested in Montana within weeks of each other. E.g. "Woohoo!! Now the whole country will think we're a bunch of psychotic, gun-toting red necks, and maybe they'll stop moving here!!" You get the picture.

Anyhoo, the other reason I've been thinking about this 15-year thing is that, you guessed it, we're gluttons for punishment, and we just moved into a new place…. Right before the holidays, with all the associated stressors, yada yada. Except that, it's my own little family what moved, whom I happen to love very much, and not my abusive moon-bat-crap crazy parental-unit birth family and their associated junk that they value more than personal relationships, so really, it wasn't that bad. I'm tired, but stressed? Nah, it's nothing like 15 years ago, thank God.

For those of you (probably girls, I'm guessing) waiting with baited breath to hear the outcome of my brother's fate, yes he DID make it into Architecture school, and today he is a successful architect along with his lovely wife, who is a partner in her own firm and makes way more money than him (see? Karma does exist), and they have two adorable children, and they both make about 14 times as much coin-ola as Bruce and I combined. And although he has pulled his head about halfway out of his arse regarding our parents, he still fails to see the connection between their favored treatment of him and his relative success. And he probably never will. :) But hey, he doesn't get the rare privilege of being an Archaeologist for the great State of Colorado and fixing crappy-ass 15 year old reports, now does he?

(* for those of you snickering at my musical choice, below, let me say I was specifically thinking of the Judy Collins' song, "Who knows where the time goes?"

Plus, she went to East High School, what I lived across from for almost 8 years, but, no more!

Currently listening :
The Very Best of Judy Collins
By Judy Collins
Release date: By 21 August, 2001