"Bad news on the doorstep . . ."

I couldn't take one more step. Here's a link to an hour and half movie questioning the official story of what happened on September 11, 2001. I could only watch 33 minutes of it before the sick feeling took me down. This leaves little doubt that we don't really know what happened that day. Where is the truth? Here?

Tiling the Kitchen; & Guest Workers Looking to Make It Big

The week draws to a close. The weather got much better. Yesterday was in the 60s and Piper and I spent most of it outside. In the afternoon we walked down to Dan's house, as Piper calls it, and had a jolly time walking around outside and hanging with Dan. Of course there are many interesting musical instruments for Piper to play with there, not to mention the small flags and other unusual objects of the storyteller's life. Dan was working on his taxes, which are exceedingly complex, so he was not loathe to take a break.

Last night we went to Home Depot and bought the marble tiles for the kitchen counters. This weekend Kimb is tiling and I am sure it will be some serious work. The tiles are beautiful. It will be a remarkable transformation to that room when this is all in place. The guy is coming to install the sink and plumbing hardware on Monday. He will cost some money, of course. But, a sink! It has been since the turn of the new year that I will have had a sink in thekitchen. I know that many out there have suffered even more, as my mother-in-law reminded me about her kitchen remodel at the condo a couple of years ago. But, I miss my sink. Although the new one is enormously more attractive. It's a black granite sink, two basins and we got some brushed steel faucet and handles for it. Hope it all goes well.

Food
Last night was asparagus soup from last friday's chicken stock. Oh my god. The queen of soups can seemingly do no wrong. It was lovely with a little zinfandel and some slices of baguette.

Yesterday I also made a nice fried rice lunch with some leftover pork ribs and chicken and the usual melange from the vegetable drawers, green onions, celery, carrot, and zuchinni. Sesame oil. Brown eggs. I have taken to using brown eggs from the more expensive free range reality. They taste better and they are only about twice what eggs are going for. Since we don't use eggs that much (if we use a dozen a week I'd be surprised), it is a place to put a little more money. I'm trying to buy much less meat and much more veggies and fruit.

Politics
And what about immigration/illegal aliens? What is going on? Nobody can really figure out what to do about it. But there is a reason this works the way it does: People, particularly the ambitious among us, want to do better. Wherever they live. So it is really no surprise that this country is a place most people want to come to and live in. We promote the notion that anyone at all can become a rich and successful person through dint of hard work and then we are surprised that people in the third world take us seriously and come here, ready to work hard?

It's the advertising, stupid. Now you know and I know that in reality the rich get richer and a very few people that aren't rich get lucky and manage to get over. Probably it happens more here than in any other country, but by and large it is an illusion that hard work in the USA makes you rich. But we constantly harp on it as a culture and we present it to the world.

So naturally people are gonna come here and try and grab that brass ring. They can see we have it. It probably seems real close if you can just get here.

This is the natural effect of being the most successful country. It's really a compliment. Are these twelve million undocumented illegals a bad thing for the country? In some ways, sure. Are they a good thing? In some ways sure. How to fix it? Well business wants cheap labor, and rich people want servants, and working class people have little political clout. So I predict that Bush guest worker thing will become law. But not without some serious fighting in DC. Fun to watch, anyway.

Oh, and nobody will win much because of it. Democrats or Republicans. Everybody loses on this one. And that guy, Tancredo of Colorado who's such abig voice in the house on the subject, wasn't he the guy who said if the arabs bomb us again, like 9/11, shouldn't we just drop the big one on Mecca? I am pretty sure that was Tommy Tancredo. A credit to the great state of Colorado.

All for now. Thanks to the Lady. She knows She has my love.

New Dishes; Poor Old Tony Scalia, Used and Thrown Aside

Last night Kimb and I bought new dishes. The ones we have been using were given to us by Kimb's mom around the time we got married, in 1999. They are pretty beat up and more than half the plates are gone. Kimb's mom wanted her to buy something good for her birthday and left the decision up to Kimberly. She originally thought she would buy work clothes, but that seemed boring, so we went out and found some dishes that we like that work in the new kitchen. That cheered us all up.

But it did mean a sandwich dinner. The local sandwich shop chain here is called Jimmy Johns, and the sandwiches are far superior to Subway. They are ubiquitous and relatively inexpensive. You can get a good veggie sub from them, but I always opt for the italian. Love that olive oil on bread, and they use shredded lettuce, which I like. It does cause me though to think about how few the choices for food on the run are. There is essentially burgers, tacos, and chicken. And the only chicken is Kentucky Fried. Really bad for you. When I lived in NYC, twenty years ago, there was a grilled chicken place, middle eastern cuisine, where you could get a grilled whole chicken, pitas, hot sauce for $7. A fair amount of money in 1985, but well worth it. Where is the place like that today? Well, that place was in the City, of course. But, there are all kinds of fast prep foods in the world. But what can you get in a midwestern college town? Burgers, and fries.

Food
Tonight I have some standard pork ribs. Pork seems to be fairly stable in price this last year. Illinois produces many pigs. I'll slow cook them this afternoon and makes some rice and perhaps steam some carrots. Nothing too fancy. I need to start menu planning for next week. Kimb's folks will be here a week from tomorrow. I'd like to do a jambalaya, and certainly that corn and shrimp soup I did year before last.

I'd like to try some more of the thai recipes I have. There's a recipe for something akin to shrimp tacos, except wrapped in butter lettuce leaves and with a lot of lime. That draws me to it. Most of the hardcore mexican recipes I like take a lot of process. I would do more of that, but time constraints have me held down at this point. We shall see what the spring brings.

At some point next month we can replant the herb garden. I tell you, I don't know how I coped before I had a herb garden. When Kimb came into my life in the mid-90s and we ended up moving back into the house I owned on Bryn Mawr, the first thing she did was plant a bunch of herbs around the corner of the backyard outside the kitchen. I had planted mostly tomatos and pepperas before. (I actually grew habeneros in those days and used them! Hard to believe, with my digestion; of course I was drinking vodka tonics like no tomorrow in those days. Perhaps all of that destroyed my gall bladder.)

Politics
The fun for the left these days is that the Bush regime seems like a house of cards. And speaking of cards I see this morning that Andy Card, the pres' chief of staff, has resigned. We knew they would do some sort of cosmetic thing to give the appearance of dealing with the disaster. They moved the budget guy into the role. He's just another cog in the dysfunctional machine. When the pundits get around to commenting I predict that many of them will say too little too late.

But it doesn't matter. If things don't improve the fall elections will be very interesting. On some level the Repugnants know they have to give people a reason to vote against their own self interest. It's the only way the Repugs can stay in power. And stay in power they must. If the democrats were to get control, there would investigations. And you can see what is happening on that account now. If there were real investigations, the extent of fraud and betrayal would become known and it would destroy the shysters that now control the Republican party. And it would wound the party so deeply that it might not recover in our lifetime. Or at least before global warming has raised the sea levels and made all that ocean front property worthless.

So, I predict that the Repugs will do whatever seems necessary to control the electorate, including all manner of lies and innuendo and all the money they can blackmail from big business. Some day the CEOs are going to understand they have hitched their wagons to their own destruction. Ah well.

And then, what is happening with Scalia? I knew he'd been doing some overtly crazy things, saying in a speech that none of the combatants (?) in Gitmo have any rights (and right before the supremes have to rule on such a case), and flipping off a reporter as he came out of mass. I am sure his "lord" appreciates what is in Tony's heart, having worshipped at the alter and gone immediately into "fuck you" mode. Now that's a roman catholic justice for you. Well, somebody in blog world pointed out that all this is because Tony is pissed at being passed over for John Roberts as honcho court boy. Yes, Tony. You are not the Chief Justice. You are the Chief bigot. And after he threw the election to George Porgie in 2000. There ain't no justice, is there Ratboy? Ah, poor baby. It's pretty much over for you, except for taking credit for rolling back a woman's right to choose and helping install the Pope as the true arbiter of American values.

Well, the Lady I'm sure is amused by the poor guy's little temper tantrums. I hope he can, pardon the term, divine Her love and mercy. He could really use it, and it might help him see somebody else's face when he thinks about the true effect of his "ideology."

In any case, I thank Her for this day and this time.

Brother Cafael and Number One Daughter

Post another complex weekend. Kimberly worked on getting the plywood for the kitchen counters attached and that seemed to go well. I went and got Paige, Saturday morning, and we had a very civilized time with her. We went to Cafe Kopi for lunch on saturday, and had some decent food there. And we knocked around downtown Champaign a little while. Later we went home and Paige and I watched the DVD ofGosford Park, which came in last week's package from Gary.

Food
In the evening Tim made a sort of pomodoro type linguini dish, with shrimp, sundried tomatoes, shitake mushrooms, and sicilian olives, dressed with olive oil. I also made bruschetta with tomatoes, green onions, and of course balsamic vinegar and the leftover bread from the Cafe Kopi excursion. Kimberly made strawberries and whipped cream for afters. Paige and Kimb and Tim all watched Brother Cadfael a couple of times, in front of a roaring fire. It was very pleasant, indeed.

Unfortunately, Paige's presence wired up the baby and Piper, who has started trying to sleep in the daybed rather than her crib, fell out of the bed at 1:00 AM and then woke again at 3:00 and basically didn't return to slumber until around 5:30. Thus Tim got little sleep and had a rather long drive to Normal and back in the late morning/early afternoon. We all survived, however, and last night's sleep, once we got Piper there, went well and for the entire night. So we are in a bit better shape today.

Not to embarrass my number one daughter here, but there was Paige news: She was accepted into DePaul's playwriting program (which Becky tells me only take six people a year), and given a scholarship for some serious money. Paige still doesn't know exactly what she wants to do, so this represents another possibility. Of course Chicago is only a couple of hours by train, so we would enjoy being able to see her some. But, if she goes to Boston, then she is only couple of hours by train from the Brittons enclave in the Upper Valley. And they all love her and would truly enjoy having her come spend some weekends in their world. In any case, as I told Paige, at least you know you have a certain value in the literary world, even at this point. Now all you have to do is make good on your talent.

And Paige told me that she has linked to my blog from her blog and that her friends sometimes read me. And that is a gratifying thing, that she considers my words worth sharing. So, if you're here via Paige, hello and have a good time and don't mind the straight talk about sexuality and life experience. You are eighteen, right?

My intellectual life is currently wrapped up in re-reading Stuffed. I will report on it at length in the next couple of days. It is interesting to me to try and see it entirely objectively, outside of my personal history and outside of my relationship to the characters, who, after all, were a significant part of my life in my twenties. I will say that I am quite enjoying the experience.

Politics
As for my political life: There is little doubt in my mind that George W. Bush is a traitor to the constitution. However that seems to count for little in the minds and hearts of my fellow citizens. It is more important what Jesus is "reported" to have said than what Tom Jefferson and the boys wrote down in 1776. Well, I still feel like a patriot. I still think this country ought to be what it says it is. I know that makes me a traitor to most people in the Republican party, but to me, they are the traitors. They have deceived themselves and the nation and they will all pay, kharmically. This I know to be the truth.

I see they let the xtian convert in Afghanistan off. They basically said he had to have mental problems. This avoids the obvious breakdown between Islamic law and human rights. The question is without a doubt can you have a democracy without having freedom from religion? I don't really think you can. That is the essence of what is destroying democracy here: religion. It is, as practiced by those who believe in that stupid, awful book, both testaments, an evil force. It wasn't always an evil force. It could even be argued that for some time it was a civilizing force. That is over. We either get past the book, or it destroys us.

And in a jolly humorous note there was a letter in the paper yesteday that said that Mohammed was not the first man to be islamic, Adam was. How's that for defining the terms to suit yourself. I wonder why Adam didn't say any of the things Mohammed did that define the islamic faith. But, of course, I am an infidel.

And damn proud of it.

I have faith in something I can define as greater than any of that book stuff: the phenomenol world as given us by itself, who I get to characterize any way I want to. Thanks again Lady Arianrhod for Your mercy and Your love and for this existence and its shadows and tones. There is such intrinsic beauty here constantly, even in the turning of the days.

"Walgreen means Tomorrow Forever!"

Listening to "The Pirates of Penzance", and rather moody, due to icy particles falling on me as I came into the office this morning. Only six more weeks of this job. I won't miss working in Henry here at the U. of I., but am quite worried about the cash flow. This week featured a war with the garbage hauler who basically screwed me over in a fit of pique. In any case, my cashflow will become very problematic in May, just when my darling daughter graduates from high school. It's hard not to think of my life as one huge mistake after another. In the commercial world, that is. I just never did the right thing for cash flow. Can't seem to get a grip on it.

But, bugger that. The good news is a package from my pacific rim friend that included the I, Claudius television series, some more Brother Cadfael novels, a complete set of David Sedaris books (I think it is complete), and, most wonderfully, a copy of his novel from the early 1970s that I used to possess and have read many times, though not in the last fifteen or twenty years.

Stuffed, a comic novel of adolescence, or a satire of the state of children's literature, or a humorous though dark look at the human condition. It's a book that lends itself to a variety of interpretations. That is neither here nor there, for me Stuffed is an old friend, a buddy from the past. The voice of Bernard, the little boy who narrates the book, is as familiar now as ever. His pal, the talking stuffed bear, Sudsy, is like Hobbes from Calvin and Hobbes, but crossed with Hunter Thompson, cigar in hand, bad language loosed upon the absurdities of life in Walgreen, Illinois. "Walgreen means Tomorrow Forever!"

Gary Davidson wrote Stuffed in the early 1970s, while attending John Knoepfle's first fiction writing workshop at Sangamon State University. During that period Gary lived with myself and Pat Smith at 223 East Scarritt, in Springfield. I remember typing the manuscript of Stuffed in the backroom where Greg Lakebrink slept. We had an electric smith corona, I think.

Stuffed never quite made it to publication, though I cannot understand why. It came close repeatedly. The storyline pre-dated Calvin and Hobbes and was even funnier. I believe it's experience shows that for the unconnected writer finding the right person at the right time in the land of the street publishers is entirely luck. This book should've been a cult classic by now. But, there you go.

Reading it is certainly the great pleasure of this week. And Kimb and I have already decided to read it aloud in the later evenings. We started on that yesterday.

No food news at all. Haven't been cooking much this week. We've both been too strained.

Politics
As for politics, is there any real reason to pay attention anymore? Slowly but surely we have learned that Republican control, like Democratic control, is essentially about the rich getting richer, and the slimy doing their slimy thing. We all know now, on some level whether we are admitting it or not, that George W. Bush is exactly what his resume would paint him to be: an incompetent fool, unable to engage in meaningful thought on even the mildest of issues. We all know that the xtians are exactly like the moslems, only a little bit less obvious about needing to have their way. These things look to be insoluble. Yet the rich will play their games and we will all suffer. And in the not too distant future global warming will make things harder for people and the end of the oil supply will change the way everybody lives.

You don't have to be nostradamus to figure any of this stuff out. There's a war in blogworld now about who said what when at the beginning of the war. All those stupid wingers are defensive about being so completely wrong and the lefties think they had it totally right, but I say only an idiot couldn't have looked at the possible outcome and seen what Brent Scrowcraft saw: chaos and sectarian war. And who was that leftwing pundit, Scrowcroft, you say? Just one of the most important members of the first George Bush's administration. Who advised his boss against making that mistake in 1991, and who said, in the newspapers, the same thing to his old boss's son, George W. at the time.

It wasn't that hard to figure out.

Let's all hope the Lady will show us Her mercy. We are going to need it.

Wake up and smell the freaking holy war, breeders!

One thing that is needed more in this blog is the reference to somebody else's ability to say what must be said. That said, here's Dan Savage talking about the real war, the one that is going to effect us all:

Straight Rights Update Earlier this month Republicans in South Dakota successfully banned abortion in that state. Last week the GOP-controlled state house of representatives in Missouri voted to ban state-funded family-planning clinics from dispensing birth control. "If you hand out contraception to single women," one Republican state rep told The Kansas City Star, "we're saying promiscuity is OK." On the federal level, Republicans are blocking the over-the-counter sale of emergency contraception and keeping a 100 percent effective HPV vaccine—a vaccine that will save the lives of thousands of women every year—from being made available.

The GOP's message to straight Americans: If you have sex, we want it to fuck up your lives as much as possible. No birth control, no emergency contraception, no abortion services, no life-saving vaccines. If you get pregnant, tough shit. You're having those babies, ladies, and you're making those child-support payments, gentlemen. If you get HPV and it leads to cervical cancer, well, that's too bad. Have a nice funeral, slut.

What's it going to take to get a straight rights movement off the ground? The GOP in Kansas wants to criminalize hetero heavy petting, for God's sake! Wake up and smell the freaking holy war, breeders! The religious right hates heterosexuality just as much as it hates homosexuality. Fight back!

Dan Savage writes the column "Savage Love" in the Village Voice. He is always very entertaining and clearly a decent human being. He is also the progenitor of the use of the word "santorum" to refer to effluvia in anal sex encounters, as something of an homage to the great senator from Pennsylvania, Ricky santorum. It has, actually, caught on, if you do a goodle search on santorum you will see.

Has the Pope Read The DaVinci Code? Should He?

More jolly fun in the new world. Yesterday it was supposed to snow heavily. It sort of did, but not that bad. South of here got hit pretty hard, I hear. Today it is supposed to approach 40, so I guess the snow will be leaving us. I read in this morning's Huffington Post that the catholics and the evangelicals are mounting teach-iin campaigns to coincide with the May release of the movie version of The DaVinci Code.

This already begs the question. Nobody really believes Dan Brown got much of it right. There are millions of books on the market doing the refutation dance. What is really important about the whole thing is that it points out the failure of xtianity. There are some big questions that the Pope and all those evangelicals are stonewalling on. And I don't mean whether Yeshua was a god-boy or not. I mean, just why are homosexuals by definition "sinners"? We know now that gay is something born in people. That would seem to say it comes from the creator/creatrix. Wouldn't it? Or does the "Debbil" have the ability to screw with the genepool and fuck people over even before they are conceived? Wow, he's a lot more like god than I thought!

But, again, people in the modern world know that social roles for women are not what they were in the new testament days. People know that women and men like sex, have it inside and outside of institutionalized formats, and that there is a physical need and an enjoyment of same. How does the pope respond to this information? He says it isn't actually true. Then the church has an enormous sex scandal, and what do you know? People are having sex and they are catholics. And they are evangelicals too.

Frankly, I think the real reason those people need to be so negative about sexuality is that it being forbidden is the only way they can sustain an erection. How sad is that? Pretty darn sad.

Food
Last night I gave into my inner boy and made wings for dinner. I baked them in real butter and hot sauce and sprinkled seasoned salt and lots of grated parmesan chees on them. I served them with a mayonnaise/sourcream/maytag blue cheese sauce that was yummy. I also made my patented guacamole and Piper ate the equivalent of two avocados worth of the stuff. She loves her guacamole.

Tonight I do not have a plan yet. But something will turn up. We will eat.

I had a fiery disagreement with my garbage haulers yesterday. Suffice to say I had to hire a new company. I don't mind paying extra to have things hauled away, I just object to someone calling me after I tried to get them to quote me a price and I had already paid them an extra $66 and tell me I need to give them $42 more dollars for what I already have put out. I'm sure they are right about costs and I am sorry for that, but they could have told me this a month ago and I could've rented a truck , taken it to the dump and had it cost me half as much. But, they didn't. They just let me put the stuff out and they took it away with nary a word. So, I switched companies. We'll see how this goes. The terrible exigencies of life. I am shopping for a new bank, also.

And we've been in this stupid war for three years. And we will be in it another three years according to Georgie boy. I feel terrible. We are in a terrible situation because of this. If we do manage to eke out something in Iraq that looks like a win for George, the rightwing will try and use that to re-make our society into a theocracy. There could be no worse disaster for the United States of America than this. But if we don't create a positive outcome in the ME, then the sectarian civil war in Iraq could spread, or the Iranian mullahs could come to dominate the area. Either of these leads directly to much higher oil prices. And the eventual collapse of the economy, at least for those below the top quarter. Can you say "depression"?

So I am ambivalent about the war. I get angry every time I hear some rightwing shithead say it is going well and tell lies. Things should have been very different and would have been if this president were engaged in the same way Clinton or Gore, or even his own father, would have been. The 2000 election looms ever larger. We were all screwed in this country, by the right wing who stole the election. They now carry the responsibilty for the collapse of all that was once great and good in this nation. They are the real anti-patriots, the quislings, the betrayers. They betrayed the founding fathers and they betrayed all of us. They put their goal of winning above the necessity of keeping the democracy alive. They don't care about anything but their own narrow self interest. May they enjoy that moment in the afterlife when all that they are responsible for becomes clear for them and they are taken on that dark journey into their own hearts. Your choices make a difference, whether you believe that or not. They do.

I checked out my ex-wife's blog today, as I do from time to time, as she sometimes talks about our daughter, Paige. Becky Bradway has always been a fine writer, so I enjoy hearing her commentary on things. Today's post has a picture of the house she and Doug Hesse bought in Denver at the bottom of the post. I sent it to Kimberly who emailed me back and noted that the house looks remarkably like the house on Bryn Mawr that BB and I bought in 1987 and that she lived in for six years and I lived in for 12 years. Well, it was a very nice house. I hope this house is even better for them. I wish her well and look forward to reading her novel about Vachel Lindsay one of these days.

And may the Lady Arianrhod smile when She sees me, trying to deal with things. I ask only for Her love and Her mercy. May we all be more generous to each other, particularly in our understanding.

Another Monday in March

Kimb and I worked on the house this weekend. Kimberly's birthday was Saturday and I took her out for dinner at a restaurant called Milos. We went all in, had stuffed mushroom canapes, she had crab cakes, I had prime rib, and flourless chocolate cake for dessert. Milos is a decent place in an old mall in downtown Urbana. So the food was more than acceptable. And Piper was very good with chicken fingers and fries. Actually, just give her a puddle of ketchup and she can be entertained for quite awhile. I had a grey goose martini and it made me think of buying a bottle of grey goose vodka. Too expensive, but that was a good martini. The only time I have ever had a bottle of Grey Goose, my mother-in-law got it for me. It has a kind of buttery, or nutty rather taste to it that I can feel on my tongue right now. There's imagination for you.

Bob and Arlene called on Saturday and we discovered that the house they bought in the south is in Jackson, Mississippi. It sounded really nice and is on a major league golf course. Also I know that Bob wants to be closer to Nashville, to pursue his songwriting ambitions. And it is only nine hours from us; considerably closer than New Hampshire. They hope to live there from November to May, roughly. Meanwhile they have finally listed the condo with a real estate agent. They have owned the condo since 1978, I believe. Going on thirty years. So it is a major thing to let it go. But it is worth some serious money now, so, there you go. Life goes on and becomes something else.

Kimb's bro, Randy, called on Saturday also. Kimb's family is very good at keeping in touch. I have tried to call my sister in Detroit about forty times in the last week, but the line is always busy, or they aren't there and I leave a message, but never hear back. Diane called when I was taking Paige home last weekend and told Kimberly that my Aunt Del had passed on. I would like to know a little more about that. Del was my favorite aunt when I was little. Later on she turned into a rightwing nut and I didn't spend any time with her. But when I was a young teenager she was a good friend to me. Delphina Maria de Renteria Buckley. She grew up in Brooklyn, from Basque parentage, and met and married my mother's little brother, Laurence, in the late forties. Laurence had basically run away from home at seventeen and gotten into the merchange marine, during WWII. He sailed around the world and came home a cook and someone who could negotiate for supplies in any market. He found this nice woman, working on her master's degree at Hunter College in the city, and married her and took her back to Enid, Oklahoma. Laurence had a company there called Larry's Amusements. He ran coin operated machines, jukeboxes, games, and had a bunch of other interests along the way. He had some interests in several restaurants and when I was a child the only times I was really ever in a restaurant were with Laurence and Del.

They had three children, Patricia, Terry and Dan. They are all grown-up, married, with children. I believe that Tricia has grandchildren. So Del was pretty old, not surprising she has left us. I wish her spirit well, and I hope she got to where she could see how she was fooling herself with her politics. But, it doesn't matter after you pass. You have to see the truth then.

Food
I baked a free range bird last night, with a little butter, olive oil, lemon, salt and pepper, and some basic italian herbs. Rice and shoepeg corn from a frozen package. It was good and the baby ate well.

I have some lambchops in the freezer I need to make. I looked at the meat at Schnucks yesterday and it all seemed too damned expensive. Everything costs too much, really. Gas here is at $2.50 a gallon these days. This guy in the white house really ruined everything. And all the pundits and punk representatives that gave in to him every step of the way, they all owe me personally. But, of course, I don't care about them. They will face their responsibilities at some point. We all do.

Politics
Is censure and impeachment the way for the Republicans to get their mojos back? That's what Rusty Limbaugh is saying. If we democrats act like righteous bastards that will give the Repub base something to vote against. That's the logic. So, this essentially keeps the Democrats in the position of the weak sister. If they fight back they are tarred with the brush of crazy loony liberals. This is what allowing the fringe to take over the face of the party did to the democrats. I would argue that it is really the media that creates these positions. They give the frontpage to the more extreme version of things in hopes of stirring up controversy to sell their journalism. And they are doing it to the right wing too. The face of the rightwing in the mass media are people like Robertson and Ann Coulter. Whackjobs.

So does this mean if we just shut up eventually the right will be perceived as the scary extemists? I don't think so because one fourth of the electorate vote because Jesus tells them to. And they will never vote for the democrat, because the democrat supports equal rights for everyone, not just for the people who believe in the "right path". So we have come to the end of democracy, the tyranny of the xtianists. I wonder what happened to all those liberal xtians I used to know? I guess they moved to the right and accepted that Pope Benny knows what he is talking about when it comes to sex and boys.

And that is really what the heart of the culture war is all about: SEX. They are basically against it. They are certainly against people really liking it and having it outside of "Marriage" sanctioned only by them. The heart of the piece is this: women who like sex are the lowest kind of devil spawn, and men are easily led by their dicks so you can blame them, except if they are led to other men and then they are, if they are passed the age of 25, predators, and if they are less than 25, victims. We, as a species, have never gotten past the two ways we feel about our mothers. It's really that simple. You love your mother, but you really don't want to think that she is a sexual being. But, there you are, alive. Because your mother had sex. Your mother had sex. At least once.

Why is this a tough thing for people to accept? Well, it is not too far from Jesus' penis in that there is no way for anyone to think about that that doesn't cause the psyche to explode from opposite feelings. Well, I have loved a lot of women who were mothers and they mostly really liked sex. I really like sex. I think that on the whole most ordinary, average humans like sex. But apparently they all fear it.

Well, once again I have nothing useful to say to the world. I am thinking of just giving up this blog thing. My food life is still pretty average, without the kitchen sink, and the politics thing is just a terrible mess for all of us (at least we don't live in Iraq and don't have to worry about being murdered for our religion, not yet at any rate). And my feelings on religion don't seem to be shared by anyone, except Kimberly. So there's little point of speaking about them.

But it could just be that today I am moody. Waiting for what the Goddess brings me next. I hope it is Her mercy, because I feel the need for mercy this Monday morning.

Touring 1978

Blogger is acting up today. This is the first time I have been able to get into it and it is slow as slow can be.

Food
Last night I made pork backribs, rubbed with a rub and then cooked in the oven. I'll be glad when I can grill every night. It went and got cold again in these parts. Let's see, I also made carrots and we had some rosemary foccaccio I acquired at the store yesterday.

I also bought some lamb chops. So maybe for dinner over the weekend. We really need to do some work this weekend. Kimb's folks and her sister and niece are coming for Paige's play in three weeks and we still don't have a sink. So Kimberly needs to get the plywood and backer board cut and some tiling going on here pretty soon. And there are so many other things that need doing. Why am I always so behind on everything? I wonder if I am just a lazy slob.

Yesterday Gary Davidson called me, being back in the states from his little piece of paradise in Thailand. We talked briefly and he had to go supervise the unloading of things and then crash. After I talked to him I discovered in the basement a file folder that had his letters to me and mine to him for the year 1978 in it. And in those days we were both pretty good letter writers. So I ended up re-living a good deal of 1978 in about an hour.

For those of you who don't know this about me, I kept carbon copies of my letters for pretty much all of my life. I also have extensive spiral bound notebooks with nearly daily journal entries. These tendency to document has pissed some people off my whole life as I can usually pull out a written piece about any given event. Becky Bradway in particular disliked this aspect of being with me. Ah well.

But it was an interesting thing to do, to go through a year of your life in a fairly short period of time, and see it both as you saw it and as your friend saw it. In those days I was still living with Pat Smith on Scarritt Street in Springfield. Greg Lakebrink no longer lived with us, but during the course of that summer we moved to a new house on Washington Street across from Springfield High School. That house was next to Cheryl Frank and her two children and we shared the backyard with them.

Later Rosie Richmond lived in that house. At the time we lived there, Gary Adkins lived with us, and then later on, also Gael Cox Carnes. I ran the second Scarritt writing group there, and it was in that period that we became friends with a lot of the Red Herring people. Later, in the Spring of 1979, we hosted the Illinois Writers' Inc's annual summer convention. I remember a smashing party in the backyard, with Adkins reading the Great American Highway Speech from the Horror at Creal Springs, and Pat reading some poems, drunkenly, that pretty much kicked my ass.

Well, have to go now. We'll see if this posts okay. Thanks to the Lady for getting me through another circling of the earth. Hope we are having a good time and keeping our sense of humor. Some day we will have a different president. Nobody could be as bad as this guy. What do you think?

Dan Brown in Court; Yeshua's Sex Life

One of those dour downturn days. The sky is overcast. The temperature is dropping. Eventually things will turn around and spring will show up. So I know better than to boohoo that old April Cruelest Month stuff. I dug out my copy of Holy Blood Holy Grail last night because of the plagiarism trial going on in the UK with Dan Brown defending his use of their material. The fact is that trial is just about moolah. They are pissed off that Brown has made so damn much money off of their, as they see it, material.

Well he wrote an exciting thriller with good characters. That is something they didn't do. Perhaps the claims about Yeshua drove the sales, but so did the ability to run the story hard. Now he's no Dostoyevsky. Or even Umberto Eco. But it's a page turner. I personally got quite pissed at the way he chickened out in the long run. But I think he had far more things right about the catholics than they would like to admit. In any case the argument about his use of the Holy Blood Holy Grail material is this: they said it was probably the real history of that religious myth. They claimed it as fact. Well, you can't copyright fact. If it is fact, history, then anybody can use it. Particularly in fiction. Jeez.

And HBHG is still a fun book to read, though I don't think it makes a convincing case for its secret society stuff. But it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that people are very uncomfortable with the story the church tells. A lot of people would have a more personal relationship with Jesus/Yeshua if they thought he had married and had children.

How can you pretend to know the whole human experience if you stayed completely away from the reproductive cycle stuff? Did Jesus have nocturnal emissions? Did Jesus ever masturbate? Never? He never had an orgasm? Never? The central physical sensation of being human, along with eating, shitting, pissing, and being ill. He never had an orgasm. That would be Pope Bennie's position. He never had an attraction to a woman for sex (or a man, for that matter). Cause, godamighty he was so fucking pure. And that's all that actually matters to the people of the book. Sexual purity.

Made corned beef, cabbage and little red potatoes for dinner last night. It was just fine. My mother was a Buckley, although her mother I don't think was. Her mother actually converted to Catholicism. Not to say that all the irish are catholics. Most of the really interesting and important ones weren't. I think here of William Butler Yeats. The irish were so much better off before Patrick came along and steered them down that dark path to the pretend Yeshua. Go back to Brigid, irish people, and the troubles will end.

Subtle Beauty

Tomorrow is another day and today is, well, not tomorrow in any case. Tried to go to ISM's website this morning, but it is not there! I'm sure my old buddy Erich Schroeder is having a jolly time. (Later: I just got off the phone with Kimb and she told me that Springfield is without power today, so their servers are down. I knew the schools had been let out, from the morning news, but I hadn't had the thought that it was because so much of the town was without power. Wow! Now there's a problem. What will happen when we run out of electricity? No world wide web gang.)

Kimb's website, www.kimberlybritton.net, was down last week. Or rather, when you tried to go there you got shunted to some site in the Germany. Turned out someone hacked her homepage. I changed the password and reloaded the index and that fixed it. But there you go. Microsoft's software is all too susceptible to incursion. But yet, I am still here. I still don't have a Mac, or even a Unix box anymore. I just don't have the time and inclination to mess with it all. Things do get cheaper though. I saw an external 160 gigabye hard drive for $80 yesterday. Ack! That's more storage than all the storage I have ever owned put together and doubled. In my whole computer life.

This Weekend
Paige was in town and it turned out Lauren was at her dad's in Champaign for spring break. She came over and they played video in the living room and we all had a nice time of it. I served them free range chicken roasted with lemon and rosemary, dressing that made with my bread that didn't really rise enough on Friday, and a lettuce wedge salad with lots of blue cheese and tomato. By and large, quite successful. We had a fire in the fireplace, using wood I got from Dan's house.

Food
Friday night I cooked up some lambshanks and beans, ala Sara Leah Chase, but I burned the beans at one point and had to use a couple of cans of beans. And, althought it was okay, it certainly wasn't what I was aiming for. But there you go. The lack of sink is beginning to be a burden in the technique department. We have a sink, it is just in a box in the middle room, looking forlorn.

And we are essentially out of money, post Paige visit and pre-payday. I am beginning to stew seriously over the end of this job I have. It's not much of a job. And I don't make a lot. But without that money things will be pretty darn tight. So May is looking like a tough time. And putting Piper in Montessori and Paige in college will call for some serious money. So I am now starting to look desperately for something to get paid for. I have had such a weird life. I suppose I should never have left the Museum, where I would have more than 20 years in now.

But life trundles on and we will do the best we can. Here's to the very fact of a future. When I get down about the religionists and the rightwing politicos, I remember that the world is based on the Lady's love and it exists in all the living, whether they admit it or not. Whatever happens to this world of humans the greater reality of the universe and all of nature will go right on. We may destroy this tiny little piece of being, but Being will be there whether we are around to perceive it or not. I tend to believe that my ancestors will be here, glorying in the beauty of the Lady's raiment, and appreciating Her intinsic mercy.

Man on Man Sex in Afghanistan; What Would Mohammed Say?

It is warm in central Illinois, but rainy. I am off today and tomorrow, due to an anamoly in this week's work week. We all survived yesterday's salt experience and it's biggest effect is that the child pee'd like a trooper into the night. We kept pushing water and milk on her and lots of grapes and oranges. So the situation was very fluid.

I meant to cook this afternoon, but cannot work up a head of steam here. Paige is coming this weekend, though, and that will be an excuse to cook something.

I've been reading a lot of political stuff on the web, but it all just hurts the head. The disconnects people have are so large anymore and so sad. One thing that seems to be coming to be true is that more and more people on both sides are seeing this government as one that is essentially incompetent and many people suspect, corrupt. Of course, I look at Bush's resume and his time as governator of Tejas and I say, d'oh! The guy is just not good at anything. Why would he be good at being president? Nothing else ever worked for him.

But, that is neither here nor there. I suspect we may get stuck with Hillary for president in '08. I don't have that much against her, I just worry she won't win. We certainly cannot have another Republican president or the Supreme Court really will become run by the Mullahs of the right and the xtianists. All them catholic boys is not a good thing for the country.

I did read an interesting piece this morning, via Andrew Sullivan, about the fact that half the men in Afghanistan have had sex with boys sometime during their lives. Not because they are gay, but because of the prescriptions against sex with girls. This tells us primarily that sex is a drive that must be dealt with. And saying be celibate is stupid and wrong. I personally believe that most celibate men have something wrong with them from being celibate. It would explain why the religion is so crackpot. In any case, I don't believe you can truly trust someone who isn't getting any to be entirely well. This certainly includes Pope Benny.

And it ties in with what I have said in the past, that cultures that create large populations of men and boys with no outlets for their sexuality are ripe for suicide martyrdom religions. They look at us westerners, we are definitely getting some, despite the best efforts of Pat Robertson and the Pope, and they are filled with jealousy and rage. Who can blame them?

I remember back when in St. Louis when I worked at Russell Mill's record store, there were these two guys we called the Stooges freaks, because they were obsessed with Iggy Pop and the Stooges. They were two young blonde gentlemen who were constantly kicking at each other. Filled with rage and bluster types. Russell said to me, "they just need girlfriends." And I thought then and I think now, there is some truth to that. They were frustrated and had no outlet but violence. Of course in western culture violence is inevitably linked to sex by religion. That accounts for the vast community of folks involved in alternate sexualities. They are mostly catholics or baptists. People for whom sex means some violence.

Well, I am an old guy now and we have a three year old so our opportunities are sparse. But I am glad I don't have the insistent sexuality I had in my twenties. It caused me to make some weird decisions along the way and if I had it to do over again I would try and be more careful about letting my sexual needs dictate my life. Certainly at least one of my wives used my sexuality completely as a tool for keeping me around and getting rid of me.

Well, I am damn glad I am not a xtian, or a moslem, or a jew. The further away I can get from those influences the better I feel. I understand that I will always have that great broad background of the catholic church and parochial school and the three thousand years of old and new testament lurking in my psyche. But at least I know about it, resist it, and have found truths excluded from their canon.

Meanwhile I am between books, haven't seen any movies, and don't have money to buy the records I want. I am thinking of re-reading all my old spiral bounds. I haven't done that in many years. I know there are those among you who would now accuse me of narcissm, but the fact is it's really pretty embarrassing getting into all that old material. I had a long weird dream about Gary Adkins last night and this has, I think, something to do with that. The distance from here to there.

I have exchanged a couple of emails with Randy Frank and that has been good and interesting. People's lives are so complex and we get to travel from one reality to another in this culture. A very useful learning tool. Randy had a lot of good things to say about his personal journey and the errors he has made. I made a lot of those same errors but he seems further along the path of wisdom than I was at his age.

Let the Lady smile on us today.

Salt

A hard day. This morning I was at work, working on Wednesday for a variety of reasons, when Kimb called to tell me she had found Piper eating salt from the little wooden spoon that accompanies the salt cellar on our table. She did not know how much Piper had had or how long it had been going on. I told her she needed to call the nurse. While she did that I googled the subject only to find to my horror that salt is incredibly poisonous to small children. I read numerous terrible descriptions of what can happen and finally found one that seemed to clearly state that two teaspoons could cause a young child a fatal reaction. Needless to say I was freaking out. I called the Illinois Poison hotline and discovered Kimb had already called them and they had told her to take Piper to the emergency room.

She said she would call when she knew something, but I just couldn't stand it. The work I was doing was completely abandoned. Eventually I knew I had to go, so I told my boss where I was headed and I took off from campustown to Carle Hospital, some twenty minutes worth of walking in the rain. When I got there Kimb and the baby were waiting for me. The doctor they saw said it almost certainly wasn't serious. I did insist on talking with him and he was very good and offered to do an electrolyte test to see how much salt had gotten into her blood stream.

Unfortunately for us the nurse that tried to draw Piper's blood essentially could find the vein she had located before putting the needle into the baby's flesh. So she moved it back and forth, in the wound. The poor baby was screaming by then. And I said just give up. I was so angry I could hardly speak. Kimb actually thanked her as we were leaving. She couldn't see what a terrible job this woman did and how cruel it was. So we gave up and left and I took Kimberly to work and came home and am closely watching the baby and trying to get her to eat fruit and drink water, which she has done.

The web is full of very dark stories about this subject: people deliberately killing their children with salt water and other people giving their children emetics because of other poisons and it is the salt water emetic that actually kills the child. None of this is any good for the parent seeking advice.

But, so far everything seems to be okay. No more salt cellars on the table of course. And of course the emergency room cost $100 at just the wrong moment in the pay cycle. Kimb took her in and didn't know to ask to be billed. She just paid out right. So that is what little room I had for the next week gone. Ah well.

So the world is dangerous today, and every day. And being a parent means being acutely aware of that danger as it can possibly effect your child. And it is hard to explain, this being perpetually clear that you are the only thing, oft times between your own dear child and the dark curtain. Well, you get ahold of yourself and do what you have to. Then you breath a sigh of relief and make jokes to make yourself feel better. I am not quite to that period yet. It will take twenty four hours. No salt for you, young lady.

And I am truly guilty because I caught her on Monday getting that little spoon out and trying to take a spoonful and I should have put that salt cellar in the cabinet at that very moment in time. I truly did not realize the extent of danger in common table salt for the very young and the very old.

The new guy where I worked today is a Lincoln historian. When I told him what was going on he started talking about reading a book about salt and telling me those fun little factoids one gets from the overview histories. It's funny now, but at the time I was very impatient. I did discover that he had heard of George Painter, my old friend who was the historian at the Lincoln Home Site in Springfield, for the national park service. George came to my writing group for many years. He passed away in 1994, of colon cancer, the same as Rosie Richmond. Four years before the George and Rosie had done a reading together for the BARBQ. There was a third person at that reading, Gary Adkins, but he only suffered spiritual demise.

Well, I guess I'll find out who actually reads my blog from this post. I truly could use a sympathetic email or phone call in the next day or two. Life is hard. I thank the Lady for Her mercy this afternoon.

"The Center Cannot Hold"

So it turned cold here, again, but by the end of the week it is supposed to be in the sixties. My big news, and it is news in the sense that it is information unknown previous to yesterday, is that my son, Joel, and his wife, Tricia, are having a girl come July. I pray that everything goes well for them and I hope they find a name they can agree on by then. Not the easiest prospect in the world.

Food
We worked on the house this weekend, there's always so many things that need to be done. Kimberly also made a cookie recipe from the King Arthur Flour Company Cookie Cookbook. This was the third recipe she has tried from them. Like th previous two, this recipe rocked the house. These were chocolate cookies with a peanut butter mixed with confectioners sugar filling. Oh yeah!

For dinner last night I fried up my lambchops, for the sake of brevity. I had, earlier in the afternoon, thrown my pretty meaty hambone in with the rest of the great northern beans, a bunch of green onions, bay leaves and a bottle of mexican beer (and some water) and let that simmer for quite awhile. It was great and went nicely with the lambchops.

Saturday we availed ourselves of a coupon for a double lunch at the texas steakhouse chain restaurant. This turned out to be an awesome deal; I had a ribeye and a salad and Kimb had a steak salad and the baby had chicken and fries. And I even had a martini and we came in at under $30. The steak was properly cooked (very rare) and the martini was made with Absolut. And they serve a wedge salad, hunk of iceberg cutout and covered with a creamy blue cheese with blue cheese crumbles all over it. Makes my mouth water thinking about it. Blue cheese is definitely one of the important foods in this universe.

Religion/Foaming at the Mouth Alert
I had a jolly time reading a link from Andrew Sullivan's site about this guy who's latest book is an overview of how he went from fundamentalist to atheist, due to studying scripture. Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. I don't need to read the book myself. It basically boils down to the fact that none of the books of the new testament are at all trustworthy in what they say. Over the millenia translation errors and all sorts of things have changed probably the meaning of things. This bothers the believer not at all because God will have inspired all the different things that appear. But for the rational person it points out the extent that that scripture is truly a human artifact.

This is what makes xtianity a much safer religion than Islam. Islamists gloat, in the comment section of Amazon for this book, about how pure their book is, truly the actual word of God. Whereas we in the west have always known, by and large, that the New Testament is whatever was convenient for the adminsitrators that week. But the Q'uran is what God (Al lah) actually said, verbally I assume, to Mohammed and he wrote it all down. Which means that God said it was perfectly okay to have sex with girl chidren. Not boy children, though. Just girls, nine or so years old.

Now, if god really said that, then we are doomed anyway. That god would be a terrible personality to have control of existence. I am forced to believe that Mohammed was lying to us, rather than accept that god really spoke to him and said things like that. What do you think? Is there an argument that overcomes this particular critique? I don't think so. And this is why the islamists are way more dangerous than the xtians. The xtians can be shown, rather easily, to be people who pick and choose what they like from a large body of folk literature to reflect their prejudices and fears. And the jews also. But the moslems think that those are god's words and there's nobody out there to say that they aren't. Xcept me, of course. Not god's words. Not any god worth his/her being.

And it is the very fact that they choose to believe truth lies in "words" that creates this world where the end is now in sight for them. I know, and you know, that words are changeable. Those that use them change them in how they use them, how they say them, how they read them. There is truth in them, but it is not like engineering, or like numeral-based arithmetic. There is more space between the letters than we like to accept.

So I have said this before and I will say it again. The god of abrahim is a bastard. You don't have to be a genius to figure this out. Just read the old testament, either the jews version or the xtians version. Do the moslems have their own version of the ot? I wonder. In any case that god is a self important twit who enforces his needs with violence. If he is god then this universe is completely a fucked up plaything of a selfish child.

But I know better. I know that Arianrhod is the poem that begins to describe the spirit's relationship to the pheonomenol. I can be with the trees and the wind and live in the rain and the snow. I can look at the stars and I see the true nature of the Divine and it is not about death and violence. It is about growing being dying and growing again. This world is not flawed. There was never any fall. We came into being and we lived with each other as best we could and as time went on the principle of power was invented and some people were always born that needed to use other people. That is a natural state though not necessarily a good thing for those that are used. But being evolves, both physically and mentally and probably spiritually. We are all related in this existence and though that is truly scary it is the way it is.

Things will either get better or things will fall apart. For me things will get better. No matter what the culture does, for me and mine, growing and learning continue. Evolving happens. I trust the Lady to protect us as best the universe can from those that would end it all. I see the fundamentalists as essentially suicides. Xtian ones too, not just the moslems. They say it must be a certain way and that in achieving that way it all ends. What this tells us is that they are afraid of being alive. They would rather be righteously dead.

I am alive. Hard as that may be at any point it is the most marvelous gift that has ever been given. Life with consciousness, memory, pain, loss, love, gladness, peace.

Martinis

Daylight is lasting longer now. Yet it has gotten colder again in the plains. Damn those canadian air masses! Writing a blog is a lonely pursuit anymore, though I know there are one or two souls out there that check in on it. Yet the odd thing happens. Yesterday I received an email from someone I used to know pretty well, who has been reading my blog. How remarkable that we can contact each other across the decades. This person, who when I knew him was a teenager and then at college, is now doing okay, living in New York, and has a three year old daughter. So, even now we have something in common, besides our shared experience. We exchanged a couple of emails yesterday and it was a gratifying exercise.

Once again it brings up, for me, that great web of experience and personality that our lives and our identities are created from. I have a continuing interest in seeing existence as "of a piece", and not just cutting it up into days/weeks/months/years/decades so as to get a handle on it. Although that approach, cutting things into pieces and then dealing with the pieces, is a very successful methodology for problem solving, what I am talking about isn't a process of coming to a conclusion. My life, and your life for that matter, is not a problem to be solved, or an identity to be identified. Our lives are more like symphonies being played. There is a need for art and for grace. And the ability to hold your life in your conscious mind gives you a much greater sense of the effect of your chosen personality and your given personality on how the rest of being sees you.

And I like to say that I include in the "rest of being" not just other humans, but certainly pets, trees, gardens, spiritual entities, ghosts, and geological deposits. Though I understand that the latter doesn't interface with us in a way that our being can very easily apprehend. But, Tree & Stone, that is how the world is made. And we are part of them in ways we cannot keep in mind.

So thanks to the Lady for the words from my old friend, Randall Frank, who as a young boy wore a star trek shirt for weeks at a time, and who later rode a BMX bike, necessitating many trips to the emergency room. This brings up the worst drunken experience I ever had (and the occasion of a couple of important notes in my life), at a mexican dinner party I gave at Jessica Weber's apartment on Spring Street sometime in 1984.

I had taken to drinking martinis at that time and without thinking about the effect of it I made a martini in a standard 10 oz glass, mixing it five to one, gin to vermouth and adding some ice. Not a very elegant drink and you can quite imagine the result. After dinner I was sitting in Jessica's living room, talking with Jane Morrel. This was the very last time I talked with Jane Morrel. After this evening she came to lose her memory of people and things and though I saw her several more times, this was the last conversation about the Word that we had (and when I speak of the word, I mean language, not godhead/tho people will argue the distinction yes?). Suddenly the booze hit me and hit me very hard and I had to go out back, down the long wooden steps, throwing up as I went. And finally gaining the little grassy backyard, where I lay, not exactly in state, for some unknown period of time.

At some point I heard something. These two young gentlemen, teenagers pre-car, rode up on their bicycles and started laughing uproariously. And I could hear Randy say, "Hey Osburn's shitfaced!" Quite possibly the most publically humiliating moment of my life. Later on Bradway came down and drove me out to where we were staying at the time. I wondered about the coming apocalypse. I have to say I have seen the young lad in his cups a couple of times myself.

I still like the martini. These days I like it with vodka (a good vodka preferably) and several olives, straight up. But I only have them in restaurants. And I only have one of them at a time. I remember getting into martinis due to a Judy Holiday/Jack Lemmon movie, Phffft!, about a manhattan couple going through a divorce. This is a very charming movie if one has the opportunity to see it. Lemmon and Holiday had good chemistry. And this flick also features a wonderful Kim Novak and Jack Carson. And the martini is also something of a character, allowing the principals to get drunk in a hurry and do things that advance the plot.

Silly Religious Diatribe
This morning I spent a little time at the Flying Sphaghetti Monster website, reading the hate mail. For those of you who don't know what it is, the FSM is an alternative to the xtianist/jewish creator, invented by a young guy and the subject of a letter to the Kansas Board of Ed, seeking his theory of creation as a viable alternative to intelligent design and evolution. In other words a broad satire. Reading the hate mail I saw again and again what really bothered people was his mocking their god. And the punishment for mocking their god is even worse than normal punishment. Having read the Old Testament, more than once, I have to admit that that god is not going to be very good at dealing with mocking. He's pretty much a complete asshole dedicated only to his own aggrandizement and his interest in us humans is entirely about our deciding he's just the most scrumtious bit of wisdom and truth out there so that he can feel ever so special. Too creepy for actual words, this stuff bears a marked relationship to the kind of statements you heard from the islamic faithful about the cartoons. It just makes them feel bad to be shown as stupid. That's the source of all this bad feeling.

The problem is, they are stupid. They have chosen to wall themselves off in a happy little cell described by humans a couple of thousand years ago so they don't have to 1) think 2) be responsible for themselves 3) be responsible for others. George Carlin, on the very first Saturday Night Live, did a monologue about religion that said in no uncertain terms that the problem with it is that it allows people to avoid reality, to avoid their responsibilities to the truth. And boy is that ever precise.

So I believe in mother nature, personified or not, the very structure of being, the galaxies and stars, the microns and quarks, the structure of cells, all existent whether by someone's conscious design or simply because things work that way. What is the blasphemy in that? I know the Lady in my heart, where She actually exists. Is She metaphor? Am I metaphor? Are we all true in ourelves. I know there is actual moral responsibility in the universe and for me that means that the end of physical existence, like the conservation of energy, means nothing actually quits existing. And because one's life and its actions and words have an outcome that is judged there must of necessity be a judge, even if that judge is actually a natural process. Wouldn't that make it even more a deity? What hangs people up is the need for the deity to be like them. Get a life people, get a concept, grow up, welcome to reality. Jeez man you are all gonna have a strange post death experience. Of course, I am counting on that and expect it will be some serious fun.

And thanks to She who lives inside and outside of me for the love and mercy She shows me every single day.

Maryann Price

Mid-week and the news is creepy as usual these days. I made chicken stock yesterday, so soup is in the offing. Last night Kimb went out to Mahomet to see a sick friend, with some of her office mates, so I cooked myself pork chops. It was a jolly repast, but I'd rather have had her there for a normal dinner.

I am currently listening to a bunch of sound clips I got off of Maryann Price's website. I was a big fan of Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, as long ago as St. Louis 1970-71. I remember painting the apartment at University Court (109) in LaClede town while listening to Where's the Money? Hick's second lp. The third album was Striking It Rich. I was living in Springfield by then and reviewing records for the free weekly The Phoenix, run by the remarkable Paul Rushdorf. I wrote a glowing review of that album and to this day I can remember a remarkable number of the songs, even though I haven't played the record in five or six years. From that album in particular I remember the cut "I'm An Old Cowhand" as sung by Maryann Price. I sang that song to Paige within ten minutes of her being born, and throughout her childhood and I sing it to Piper now. It's a satire on the cowboy song, not the Gene Autry thing, but a silly, swinging giggle of a song. I love it, to this day.

Well, I was recently reminded of Maryann Price and went looking for her on Google. And there was a website, www.maryannprice.com. While tooling around her site I discovered she had done an album in '93 that was a contender for jazz vocalist of the year, Etched in Swing. Reading the reviews for this record I found one that described her as "sort of a Benzedrine June Christy" and I realized that that was actually a very accurate call. So today I am listening to Maryann's sides from her site. There are about a dozen nearly complete clips. And she is lovely and fun. I can really hear that kind of metallic odd quality she gets. It's very forties/fifties, yet sounds pretty contemporary too.

Another artist that deserves better acclaim than she has received.

Anybody with an opinion/information on this lady, post me a comment. That means you Ted.

Meanwhile, this Saturday we have an appointment to go look at Montessori Habitat school. We don't get to take Piper, so she will stay with Aunt Tandy while we go palaver with Julie who runs the place. They don't have a summer program, though. So Piper won't get to go there until the end of the summer. I have very mixed feelings about sending another child off to school. I know there are aspects of it that are good for them. But I grow more attached as I get older. It does get harder to separate that way.

I remember Joel going to the daycare center at Sangamon State University. Since Becky McGovern worked there, it didn't seem so much like he was leaving us. Later I taking him on the city bus to Southernview School. I wasn't working a real job, so would ride the bus with him, first grade I think, and make sure he got there safely.

Later in the early 90s I took Paige to Montessori Children's House every day. She liked that pretty well, and I mostly really liked the staff there, particularly Sue Harris who ran the place. She's a beautiful lady, sort of Rosemary Clooney like, with a broad smile and a real expertise in her chosen world. That was a great montessori school, recommmended by Ted Samsel and Katherine Hammersley, who by then had moved on to Virginia. I have high hopes for the Habitat, here, though it sounds a little like a hamster's denizen.

We shall see.