what's up with this bill?

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I'm bummed that Naomi Wolf's American Freedom Campaign, with its growing list of great partner organizations, does not seem to have kick-started this piece of vital legislation. How could we ignore it? How could anyone elected to office ignore it? Why isn't this a hot issue in the media?

[Naomi Wolf on Canadian radio earlier this month.]

vote for opie

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That Murdoch is such a card....

[And Bill really is turning into a solid liability....]

listening to nitwits talk about martin

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Maybe it's from listening to survivors bestow Kennedy-tude on an unworthy successor -- though I suppose they're not likely to find another more fit in the time they have left on earth -- and maybe I'm too touchy, but I wonder can I ever listen to anyone on the subject of Martin without wanting to smack them? I've been listening to Chris Lydon interview Reverend Haynes about his days with Martin and, beside the truly annoying and almost ceaselessly whining dog in the background, Lydon liked to have hauled me off my chair with irk a few times.

At one point, referring to the bit linked with Martin's picture here, he talks about having watched and listened to this over and over and over and trying to fathom what must have been in Martin's mind. So unfathomable to him it seems. And the Reverend had to mention that Martin always knew he was in danger of being killed at any moment. I submit to you that Martin had been told in no uncertain terms that he would be assassinated if he did not immediately sit down and shut up. He did not, and he looks in each moment in this clip as if he were expecting the bullet to enter his face while he issued these immortal words. Lydon wondered too about his swift and purposeful departure from the podium. He was getting out of probable rifle sights, you dimwit.

He stood up and said maybe the most deeply meaningful words spoken in history, knowing they might very well be his last, they might very well not even get all the way out, and Lydon yimmers his mystification about it to Martin's old friend tonight in front of someone who would have given her life to save him then and would still give it to bring him back now.

I was fifteen when they murdered him. He'd been my hero already for some years. He was the one who put the truth in front of me so I could know it, answered my bewilderment over coming face to face with darker strangers who seemed to both hate me and fear me, even as a very little girl. He spoke of the same country the Kennedys did. He spoke to all humanity, for blessed once not to one side or the other of one made up thing or another. I haven't even been able to think the words "I have a dream" without tears welling and my fist shooting up to pump the air since he first said them to the world at the Lincoln Memorial.

There's another netcasting guy who has pissed me off so badly I want hotly to do something so violent upon him in person that he will never open his mouth in public again. Bob Kincaid. He's so fixated on dissing "the religion industry" he does stuff like insult Islamic women in their "beekeeper suits" -- which I understand is a Robin Williams joke and it was funny as that, once, but not as a habitual (no pun) mode of talking about them -- and then goes on to mention that he does think well of Dr. King... "even though he always talked about his invisible friend".

Well, I'm sorry, Bob, but I've never had an inclination to religion in my life, not even as a credulous small child in Sunday School, but I can tell when someone is speaking the truth... with whatever terms he uses to express it. That you are too thick-witted to discern Martin would have known far better than you how to say what needed to be said doesn't let you off the hook for your filthy mouth. He was talking about actual reality to a world inured to putative realities, and he had to use the language that brought his audience to the level on which they could hear it... hear real truth. He was speaking to our truest selves, that which people call "spirit" or "soul", and in his time, in his school, with his people, that was how you addressed the unsayable in words. It still is for many, no matter if there are literally millions misusing the terms.

But that's not even it, is it? You're so busy portraying yourself as an iconoclastic bugger you take no heed of the transcendental insults you sling as you go about your merry self-portraiture to the few marveling at the vocabulary of a hillbilly talking into a mic. Problem is: We should call you "Moe".

My heroes were murdered one by one. The men that I most admired, slaughtered for wanting my health and well-being over the profits of plutocrats. I was asking my teachers why all the great men in history had been murdered or killed themselves. Why do the beautiful almost always die before their times? Why is the penalty for genius death? How could such great love be met with such coldness, such vicious fear, such seething hate? And they were picking off the living heroes as though they were yanking off my limbs right in the here and now, not just in my history books.

Even so, I would have as many heroes as beings and die instead. What's wrong with all these so-called talkers? These so-called bloggers? These so-called media people? Is their vision so blurred, their intelligence so muddled they cannot come up on the truth or even the subject of heroes who knew and told and lived the truth without exposing only their stunted wits and vital ineptitude? This seems like sacrilege to me.

We need those heroes back! Not their lineage bestowed in the hope of encouraging some charming dope to greatness. It would be enough to just have our dead heroes be left whole until at least we've grown real ones again to take up their cause, but everyone who tries to get on the subject just keeps blowing it so badly! Not even real enough to come up to Martin's knees, for crying out loud. How are we going to grow heroes if that is the best we can do?

oil tycoons

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tsk tsk but we'll sell you the map

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"60 Minutes" will cost you a hundred bucks....

well the rfk wing of camelot is strongly endorsing clinton

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They seem to think her toughness would beat Obama's dreaminess all to heck. That's a pretty hard point to blunt... but are those who really need it going to be helped by Clinton's toughness or further marginalized as we were when her husband was in office? I usually find Bobby Junior's logic impeccable and his uncle's sometimes darn shaky so this split in Kennedy endorsements is really something to ponder.

what really is their gripe?

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They don't hassle us about observing our elections and we'd flip if they did... though it would certainly seem to be in order. So what is this hassling of Putin who may or may not be rigging Russian elections? If it's dandy for them to ignore it here, what makes Putin worse in their eyes? Hmmmm? And is that rational or good? I rather think not.

And a despot who improves the lives of his people put up against a despot who never stops doing everything in his power to improve the bank accounts of a select few? No contest. Why are we contesting it then?

filthy israel

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...is the reason so many keep twisting their brains around to the other side of the moon to turn Ahmadinejad's just words into "threats". I hope no one actually believes that stating one's belief that a cruel and criminal regime will sooner or later fall is a threat... even though that's what this piece of shit excuse for journalism seems to be driving at.

[And he gets corroboration from an unlikely source.]

the orange satan is getting less funny by the day

[click picture, Real Audio, 1:07:15, h/t Bev Harris for the link]
He's been and continues to be a complete dick about Election Integrity and it's getting worse and so I think it may be bodhisattva work to scrutinize more carefully.

So there may be a number of updates to this post....

Some guy is flipping about his wealthy Salvadoran family, and has devoted a whole blog to it.

Well, and this is a total scream....

Sorry, guys, but: Moulitsas was born on September 11, 1971, in Chicago, IL. The son of a Salvadoran mother and Greek father, Moulitsas spent his formative years in El Salvador (1976-1980), where he saw first-hand the ravages of civil war. His family fled threats on their lives by the communist guerillas and settled in the Chicago area.

This means that his mother was from one of the few families that made up the oligarchy in El Salvador when the peasants rose up and ran them off [leaving only their death squads behind] in 1980. This does not mean that his mother or father is wealthy. It so happens I have known well the son of a Salvadoran oligarch daughter. If you are an oligarch daughter and you marry a foreigner, you are lucky the family lets you come to family functions. My friend was completely miserable about his fabulously wealthy cousins with everything while he had to sweat to make ends meet (and failed spectacularly I might add) because his mother had had the poor taste to marry an Irishman. So even if Francis is right about the family's holdings, and that Kos has had benefit of them in his life, it doesn't mean Kos was lying about his financial circumstances. My friend got to go to all the weddings and birthdays... and eat his heart out... which he certainly did... ad nauseam. It's pretty clear Kos is trying to stay low key about the fact that the ruling class is coursing through his veins. If you're billing yourself as a progressive, with bloodlines like that, you're going to want to be really careful.

Heh, so this could account for some of his fascistic instincts! But I'm getting the feeling that, really, messy shit like people getting caught rigging elections will completely screw with his carefully-laid basis for punditry, and this one thing may account fully for why he will not see any reason to suspect such dastardly deeds, despite mounds of proof that he should. This is seeming to be the reason he is actively trying to squash mention of the many indicators of election fraud over the last few elections. It is the height of ignobility, at least, but, well, maybe it's in his blood....

eating mud pies

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This is not a new story, and... to all those who have been obsessing on the SCHIP thing? Fuck off. Just fuck off.

At the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.

Still, at about 5 cents apiece, the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples. About 80 percent of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day and a tiny elite controls the economy.

What are we anyway?

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hmmmm, let's see now....

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...oughta be able to set down some laws of motion from this....

Laws of physics? What laws of physics?

fbi and sec to investigate subprime dream home dealers

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my inbox

Somebody asked me why I don’t like any of the presidential candidates. Beside the multifarious unsuitabilities, naked insufficiencies, blaring inadequacies, I’ve harped on over the last entirely too long to bear this sort of thing, there is the matter of our planet. Our good and faithful dying planet.

Peppered with incogitant criminals who call themselves “leaders” though it is, it is our only home.

There is a vast whirlpool of plastics choking off the sea life in the Pacific. The polar bears are drowning. These two facts alone are enough to nix everyone running, everyone who was running. Which of them has been hollering for the free market to do something about either of those problems? Or for the world to pitch in to build freezers for the arctic and send battalions of barges out to haul out that immense floating island? What world leaders or candidates for world leadership are addressing this stuff? Every decent scientist on the planet has come out and said we are in a planetary emergency and which of them is giving it a tenth of the attention it so obviously requires? Name me one!

Dennis Kucinich might have said a thing or two trending in that direction, and we might even have heard it if he’d been serious about becoming president, but I don’t think so. And trending toward it doesn’t cut it. It’s flat out not good enough to choose between the people who have decided to run for office. We have to be out finding real candidates and clearing the decks of the criminals, who are too busy running heroin and nukes through Turkey to do anything other than create planetary crises, so as to make it safe for real candidates.

But no, no one ever went broke underestimating the apathy of the electorate. Your brain is going directly to the old saw about how never getting a choice better than the lesser of two evils has made the public apathetic. Shoot your brain. Use your head.

The waiter says you can pick between the rancid chicken and the rotten vegetable soup. Which are you going to pick? Neither? How are you going to eat then? "I'm going to go out and find me some fresh nutritious unpoisonous clean food, even if I have to grow it myself."

That’s how you get the right presidents too.

Don’t sit back and take potshots at potential candidates. We’re going to starve to death if you don’t stop that. The matter at hand requires that real statesmanship of a nature positive for the whole planet come to power. It’s as easy as taking candy from a baby to sit back and dis the people who might or do run for office, but another matter entirely to help insure there is really someone to vote for, or to help insure the bad candidates are made into good ones.

I heard someone stumping for a parallel government the other day. That sounds like a potentially brilliant idea. Anyone feel like talking about it? About how good an idea it could really be? The pros and cons?

UPDATE: "I mean, it felt like he was urinating on my face!"

horton interviews giraldi on iran attack and sibel stuff

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still cool at 64

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green around the gills

I've been feeling really not so good for the last day or so. Keep going to bed, dozing, getting back up and going back down. I'm wanting to be perky and productive. I'm wanting to be dipped in a vat of health...

fighting the dictatorship

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And pissing off the Zionist right... inciting their resort to bald-faced lies, flaming vitriol, the usual... which I mention at all because it also shows Imran has been here trying to get our government's support for democracy in Pakistan....

[NPR follows him]

[Democracy Now! follows him... and I highly recommend you take the half hour to watch, or listen, or read the transcript.]

some would be happy with just the symbolism

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It doesn't seem to me to be enough, but I do agree that a black president would do more to wipe out the hatred of us around the world than most of what would be done by anyone in that office. I say "would" because none of them will risk actually doing what could and should be done. Make no mistake about that.

It's beginning to seem to me that Obama really is the people's choice, but I'm wondering if the party will go along with that. It needn't, and it has shown absolutely NO morals about this sort of thing. So even if you will just go gently into this good cognitive dissonance and hope this portrait of ineffectiveness wrapped in a dream will end up being a tenth as good as JFK, try not to set yourself up for the fall when the fascist wing of the Democratic Party yanks it away from him.

And, don't forget that he deserves it for being such a wishy-washy Senator, anyway.

UPDATE: How could I have forgotten this doozy?

Obama's deference to these boundaries was hammered home to me when our discussion touched on the late Senator Paul Wellstone. Obama said the progressive champion was "magnificent." He also gently but dismissively labeled Wellstone as merely a "gadfly," in a tone laced with contempt for the senator who, for instance, almost single-handedly prevented passage of the bankruptcy bill for years over the objections of both parties. This clarified Obama's support for the Hamilton Project, an organization formed by Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and other Wall Street Democrats to fight back against growing populist outrage within the party. And I understood why Beltway publications and think tanks have heaped praise on Obama and want him to run for President. It's because he has shown a rare ability to mix charisma and deference to the establishment.

finally!

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Monster.

[And for good measure....]

[LATE UPDATE: Well, and, I'm going to try to stop being such a bitch about Amy Goodman after all....]

oh, why the heck not?

Many years ago, the first time Agent 86 went all the way 'round the bend on me, I was driving, as you may recall, to get out of my apocalyptically painful skin. I'd been up camping at the mouth of the Mattole and doing some work on some pieces about the Hurwitz problem in Humboldt County, but I was a flippin' mess. I wrote this about 15 years ago:

I left the Mattole. Trying to drive myself right on out of my skin, to nowhere. After spending a few heart-thudding nights, nowhere, in Goldie, a sudden streak of sense blew through me. I would have these sensible streaks, whole days in a row when the only hint was my tears. I decided I ought to stop someplace --> sleep in a house --> talk to a calm person. I headed for Marin County, where I was born, in 1953, back when Marin was paradise. I'd called my old friend, Mikey, who lives in Marshall, across Tomales Bay from Point Reyes National Seashore. He was glad to hear from me; said he had to go to the city, but he could meet me at Rancho Nicasio. He'd try to get there by six.

Well, I got there at four thirty. Fine. I'll just stoke up on ginger ale and soda. Rancho Nicasio's been a fixture in West Marin for a couple thousand years. In fact, I bet it was first opened by a caveperson. Nowadays, it wants to be yuppie and keep ranchers hangin' at the bar. This'd be a really difficult trick, but they're advantaged in that there is not another watering hole within what seems like twenty miles. They compensate for yuppie aspirations by serving you spectacularly bad California Cuisine, and serving it to you only as their bio-rhythms peak for it.

I still feel a little ill-at-ease each time I belly-up to that bar. I remember passing through there on the way to the dining room, as a short person, mystified by all those smoky old men. Shirley Temples emanated from there. That smell of plastic cherries and something sort of sour, not quite stale, same as on my old sot uncle, had to be booze. Put two and two together, I did, and came right on up with four --> that was where he'd been. So, I expected to be told by the bartender, "Sorry, kid, but you can't sit here. You have to stay with your parents in the dining room." I'd back up and tell him I wanted a Shirley Temple, with two cherries. He'd send it in to me in the dining room through a waitress. Convoluted process, but worth it.

But, no. It was a snappy little, "Whaddle it be?" I said, "Damn. Aren't you going to ask me for my ID?" Heh. Bar humor. I was peaceful, alternating ginger sodas with coffee. A gaggle of dairymen strode in. Six of them, all old but one, and he sat next to me. He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt and bluejeans tucked into rubber boots! Argh! I'm a fool for men in rubber boots. It's soh-ho sexy. I was far, far too pulverized to think about lust, but I just couldn't help but check the ring finger on his left hand. What's that going to tell me? Working men never wear wedding rings.

He tried ordering a beer, but the old guys were having none of it. Much too wimpy --> set him up with a double screwdriver. and start in rumbling local politics, something he's only half interested in. He keeps looking to me for help. I shrug. Those guys got rolling faster than any bunch I've ever seen, and soon he could talk to me without them even noticing. "My name is Joe, Joseph Baldwin Wingate, Jr., little lady, and I own a dairy near here. Just got done muckin' my barn. It's why I look like this. These old boys drug me out of my barn." Nice forthright fellow. A name with integrity. Not handsome, nope, not at all, but wow, is he male. He gets maler and maler to me by the minute, and I'm telling myself this kind of nonsense is no way to mend a broken heart. He keeps up talking to me for five minutes, then the boys for five minutes, and then back to me again for the hour until Mikey shows up.

So far, I've got that he inherited his property from his grampa a couple years ago, and he goes out with all grampa's old cronies once a week so he'll be a respected man around here. His dairy is very important to him, and these codgers are the ones who can help him the most, with their politics and their experience both. I'm squinting at them, seeing if I can't place them from my trips past this mysterious room as a little girl. He's asking me about the timber issue, intrigued I'm writing about it. He's got a lot of cogent things to say. This talk is so easy it makes my skin tingle, sporadic conversation gusts, syntactical breezes. They blow into me while he's engaged with the old boys' club. He's intelligent, and kind, and interesting. That blaring maleness never even flags, his Jack Kerouac hold on his insights goes up and up and up, weightless, completely free. I'm having big fun with this very nice guy, but I am certain he's married, though he hasn't said Word One about a wife or kids. Single men just don't talk to you this way. In truth, I already have to admit, it'd be worse than I could stand if this one was single. So I'm just as glad --> gladder <-- this way. I can enjoy him; not worry about trouble. I can count on my fingers the people with whom I could blow abstractions so freely, and I'm sad to report that all but one were male. It relieves The Headache, makes me hopeful I can stay in my skin.

"Hey, hey, hey, Mikey!" He knows Mikey. Fine. Mikey sits down on the other side of me and orders a cognac. He did grow up with me you know. Joe's saying something to the old boys, and I'm catching up with Mikey. A pregnant woman with a toddler in her arms strides up to Joe. He's smiling, and doesn't get the hello halfway out his face when she lights into him like nothing I've ever heard. This is his wife. This, this pit viper with too much black liner on her eyes is reading him up one side and down the other with a string of epithets I'd never heard, and I'm a dangerous one! I did not know anybody, ever, talked like this, let alone a woman to her husband, her lover. There did not seem to be any theme to it. I guess it was finding him in a bar ire. She literally screamed he better get his ass home, turned on her heel, stunned baby gaping over her shoulder, and hissed her way out the door.

The drunk old farts were agog, silent. Mikey was beat red and breathing hard. I checked in at zero to see if I could be a help to Joe there. Maybe he got it. He hit that silence like he was born to it too. Then he said, "We-e-ell, folks, that was the little lady. I guess I won't be heading for home any time soon." Mikey huffed he hoped to shit not. Disgusted. Appalled. But it about finished the last generation. The codgers were completely lost in the dark vacuum of transcendental obscenity, of killing invective out of someone who ought to be the picture of all human compassion, a young mom. Very quickly it was just me and Joe and Mikey. Mikey took charge like he was a crisis counselor, advised me to start drinking real booze. This was gonna be a long night. I already knew there would be no turning Mikey, Mr. Don't Take No Shit From No Females, from keeping Joe busy all night.

So I ordered a cognac, but it was too hard to put that nasty scene behind us. Joe had slugged down a couple doubles fast and was beginning to sound like he felt them quite a bit. We decided to go to the Western in Point Reyes --> change the scenery around our lumped throats. Mikey shot off in his pick-up; Joe got in a shiny black Porsche; and I got in Goldie. Then Joe got back out and came over to me; leaning down from a great height, stuck his head in at me. "Why don't you come with me in my toy?"

"Not a chance. You're drunk and you should be riding with Mikey. You can ride with me, or I'll drive your car, but you're not driving me anywhere."

"I'm fine. I've never been too drunk to drive, and I've been drunk in my day. You watch me drive. See what I mean. Follow me."

In fact, he drove like a surgeon, not one weave or waffle. We slipped out those curves past the reservoir and through the trees to Point Reyes Station like neurons in the planetary brain. We were a ballet of going. We got to the Western and he told me he has to play silly when he drinks or he isn't any fun. I do know a man who could drink ten men under the table and go shave for work in the trees; my heart has a hole in it his size. I've concluded that such men, such people, are not alcoholics, in the sense that we currently understand it anyway. It is anesthesia, insufficient, but not their place to hide. So I believed him. In fact, I believed every word out his mouth, he had such a way of putting his meaning directly in me, accompanied each time by such a tacit, yet powerful, respect for me in his minutes. He could come in. He could assert away and I wasn't molested.

There were lots of women in the Western, and they liked Joe. He was buying them drinks and drinks. It sort of made me sad. Maybe I didn't like to see a man from zero goofing with a bunch of strange women, but I didn't really know why it made me so sad. It was best he didn't pay attention to me. Mikey and I dwaddled along with our cognacs, and I noticed I couldn't talk as easily with my childhood friend as I could this man just a few hours in my life. Joe had a party with the girls. Mikey was content to have Joe thus occupied. He seemed determined to show Joe's wife, Linda, and Joe was playing it just the way Mikey laid it.

After an hour or so of this, Joe came over to me. "Say, I gotta get away from these broads. They're darn boring. Mikey, get a bottle, would you? Let's go to his house." Fine by me. I should've been there hours ago, in his converted barn, up in the guest loft above the pool table and bar he'd put in, and couldn't wait to show off. I wasn't sure if Joe knew I'd been waiting for Mikey back in Nicasio, but I knew he was going to find out.

I'll be goh-hod-damned if Mikey didn't get us all set up in his barn/bar/guest house, and make his excuses for bed, shooting me this look like, "You need to get laid, 99, and Joe needs it too." I was too floored to protest enough I guess because in a blink I was alone with those rubber boots stuffed with all that masculinity. Argh. Now he started talking single. Kissing me, and I was falling into alchemical swirl over it but fast. Yipes! I pushed him away. You cut that out now. We're not having any of that. Not, not, not, not, not. Oh, why not? You'll like it. I can tell you you're gonna like it, a lot. He's kissing. I'm amazed. I hear the hum! I push him away ten more times. He's got me. I know it. I'm dead meat. This just can't be.

"STOP IT!!!" At the top of my major lungs, I yelled for my life.

"Why?"

"Why? You have to ask why? Because it'll hurt me. You're married. Making love is not small. I don't fuck! My heart is not a sport. Wake up, hear yourself. You sound like a bowling ball hitting the pins. Love is not small. You will take over my heartbeat, go home to your fiend, and I will never see you again. It will hurt me. I'm already killed. It will hurt me!"

Joe pulled away, slumped, said, "I never want to hurt you." The end of his sexual advances. Instead, he started telling me about his wife. Not a snow job. He just let it out.

He hadn't liked school much. It bored him, and he couldn't get interested in indoor jobs --> well, jobs not in barn doors, anyway. He moved to Hawaii in his twenties, and that's where he met Linda. She grew pot. He moved in with her, getting a job as a bartender to support her legally, but it had not been enough. So, he helped her with her crops. That's how he bought his fancy car. He never wanted marijuana, marriage or kids, but he really loved her back then.

"I kept telling her I'd never leave her, but I just would not get married. I was crazy about her. She was sweet, very sweet, all those years. Then Grampa died, and I had a chance to make legal money the way I loved. We came back here and I bought out my brother. It took me a while, but I did it. Tally's the hot shot, a District Attorney, could not give one shit less for the place --> just the cash. God. It was so hard! Now the bozo owes me two hundred grand. Tally owes me big; and sure I've got all this property worth millions, but my expenses take all my cash, and Linda's having another goddam baby. I have to sell the Porsche to pay the hospital bill."

He was sitting there, slumped, looking like his barn just burned down. I asked him how he ended up married when he'd been so strongly against it. He let out a low wail. "She tricked me. She stopped her pills. I shoulda got a vasectomy. I shoulda got a vasectomy. She turned into something else. It's sick! She lied. She got so righteous. She's mean."

[Heh... puttin' it mildly.]

"And now there's another one coming. What's wrong with me? I was scared to get an itty bitty cut in my dick, and hell, I shoulda had 'em cut the whole thing off. I don't have the money for this. Everybody sucks all my money out of me. I work myself stupid, never a day off, and soon there'll be another mouth, another life of needs. I don't have the money for this. I'm too selfish anyway. I want to have a life! I don't want to be a withered old slave like some of those jerks you saw in the bar tonight. I wanted to get so I could hire help. I do the whole thing myself, y'know. I'd like to be able to have some vacations, time to do other things. This isn't a world for kids. This is no world for kids. And I'm not a man to be a slave. I didn't want to get married because I hate what it does to lovers, and I was right. I was right, damn it. I was right. Look what it did to Linda."

He was crying a steady stream now. "Sure I love my daughter, but she just should not be here. I love her, but she shouldn't be here. And, what's she going to grow up to be like? Just like her mother, she's doomed. Linda's thick with all those old bitches in the grange, and my daughter has that for a role model. And the new one's going to be a girl too. Another doomed girl. A boy'd've been better --> to leave the ranch to."

I didn't tell him how many women I'd seen sugar 'em up, and then get down and dirty for the almighty security, sugar 'em up so well they can't even believe you're pulling any number of your other vicious tricks right under their noses. You wonder why men are so afraid of commitment, call them names. Yet you, or your sisters, keep right on fighting your war of deadly pretenses, and calling it love, like the name change is going to make it love. The way of this drill is that you give your whole consciousness over to pleasing him, then if you still don't have that ring, you stop the birth control without letting him know. Yup, this was pure calculation. Remember? I know: jungle urges are sleeping powder, you forgot the plots were plots even before your plotting plotted him right between the eyes. Get him to marry you! Strap him with kids! This is how it's done. Plots and sleeping powder and the set standards mix the party of your life. These delusion cocktails are called families. Get rings. Get kids. Cross your fingers. Watch what your getting begets. Many women are left in poverty by even rich men. Many of those women got there by their own designs. Is it love, all those steaming urges with that one-pointed sparkler on your event horizon? Are you feeling wronged because all that difficult plotting, and its ensuing entitlement, and its ensuing rage, did not sew up for you what cannot be sewn up, ever, by any means? Doesn't there come a point when even the dimmest-wit fellow feels only your plotting and entitlement and rage where he is just sure love should be? What pop truism works on this betrayal? It's not love. It is war. Just because it's called love doesn't make it so. Women can and do get chunks out of men from which neither ever recover.

And, hell. Maybe they're right to fight not to end up like me, but I'd die before I ever pulled that on a man. I am dying, and I wouldn't do it even to someone asking for it. I'm crazy or something. I want the love, not the horror we just call love. I was on Joe's side. Poor Joe. Right there next to me, impaled on his miserable future. I felt it from zero. I cried with him.

He wanted to know who, what, had me killed. I actually let it out, actually said the words, those poison, kill me, ripping words. This got him crying afresh. Damn it feels right to cry with a man. After a while we were talking easily in our tender time in the spirit crossing. We talked about everything there is. We were so much alike, came from such similar stock, thought so much the same things. Here were two people who put the love before the war since they were put on this planet. It came up on three in the morning very fast, too fast. "Don't you have cows to milk, a barn to muck, some dairying to dairy in a couple hours?"

"That can wait."

"You better go, anyway. I have to sleep. I have not gotten enough sleep in days." Try months.

I walked him out to his car. He kissed me, so sweetly, one last little time, and I went back in Mikey's barn. I heard the Porsche engine roar. And it kept roaring. Something like ten minutes went by and I still heard his car in the drive. I went back outside. He was crying --> foot on the pedal, in neutral.

"What's wrong now?"

"I can't leave. I just know if I drive out this driveway, I'll never see you again." He wouldn't leave, asked me to get in the car with him. Nothing doing.

"Here. Here. You can take the keys. Just, please, sit in here with me. Don't ask me how, but I love you. I never even dreamed I'd meet a woman like you, and I can't stand leaving you. Even if I have to, I can't." I believed him! All the signals were against it, except, of course, that big one with the gaping hole in it in my chest. It believed him. I knew he was telling the truth. Awful. Just awful. I suggested things might work out one day. He might not always be married to Linda. It did not look good for their marriage, and she had what she was after, with or without him. He knew Mikey would find me whenever, and for whatever, always. Still he could not make himself go. Kept saying he was afraid this was the last he'd ever see of me, and it set Ms. Doom And Gloom And Loss, here, looking at the halo of death as he spoke, seeing his tear-streaked face in the rictus of incurable heartbreak behind the wheel of his speeding Porsche in the split second before exploding into the trunk of a millennial redwood. Fuck! Drama queen. What a morbid preoccupation with death I have going here! Such a scorching, unrelenting, wish to die. Snap out of it. Grow up. Handle this.

I came up with a bright idea, a way keep the real between us. "Jobee Wingate, we've had such a long drunk night. We're both overwrought, not objective at all. Let's meet at the beach tomorrow, sober and daylight, say our proper good-byes, forever or for now, whatever. Whatever this is, there is no doubt we are good friends. Meet me at the beach. We'll walk. That way you can muck your barn, and know you will see me at least one more time. Okay?" Joe thought I was just trying to get rid of him, that I wouldn't show. Where did that come from? I swore to be there. He finally agreed. We agreed to meet at McClure's beach at one in the afternoon. I handed him back his keys, squeezed his beautiful hand, and then watched him drive away. The hum was knocking planets askew as he left.

* * * * * * *

At two in the afternoon, when he still hadn't shown up, I tearfully headed back down the point, reasoning that I'd see his car if he really hadn't stood me up, was just spectacularly late. I was hurt after all. All that scrambling against it, and it got me anyway. Maybe he did really only want to get laid. There are a thousand other reasons why he wouldn't've been able to show up, or call in time either. I told myself I'd been lucky. He'd had me. He'd had me good. I had only made it out by the skin of my teeth. I told myself it was better this way. So I did not make Mikey call him and find out what was up. Let it be.

* * * * * * *

Do they know what they do? Is it something they feel but can deny? Men frighten me with their ability to deny the very most intense feelings, realities. I'm always thinking they're big chickens, but it's got to have another dimension or so. Men can't honestly be that much less brave than women. How did he come up with the notion I wouldn't be there? Couldn't he feel the truth? Where did that come from? It never even crossed my mind. Is he so inured to all the lies, we only call "feelings", passing between him and the women in his life that he can't tell the real feelings? Though, I guess he does have a pretty good reason not to trust his own instincts. His track record sucks. Galaxies.

Do they know what they do? Did Joe ever have any clue what he was to me? Was it too strange? Maybe they can't know. Maybe you need to have felt the true level of physical strength of your lover --> men's hands alone are so much stronger than a woman's <-- need to know it inside you, inside with your guts, where you live or die, where he can make you live or die, to know what's more important than life and death. Maybe you can't know with no faith in heart knowledge, no experience with truth, wading always in what it's called, but never understanding the way your whole being answers the true, the man, the man not called "yours", the real one. Truth is lovers. If it's choice, or it's a decision, it's not lovers. Nope. Not at all --> that's just what we call it. You don't feel love. You can't do love. Love IS.

So soon he doesn't even have to be looking at you, touching you, thinking about you, and yet you're so alert to his dominion in your skin. Your brain tries to peg it. It cannot. If you're honest, you know all that's ever thought up, all you ever thought up yourself, subordinates, turns to smoke. You do not stop being viable --> please, can we just quit with that poppycock! You see what matters more than just you. You know it's true. You know it's not made you less. Hell, that idiocy's not even remotely in question. Give me a break. Let the real touch a snitty "victim" suing her boss over a dirty joke, and signing over the dismissal will take embarrassingly long. This truth, if we don't let self-ish-ness begin calling it stuff, wipes out all the less a woman could ever find herself to be. It's exactly the same with a man.

Nothing is fundamentally different. All that's changed is your delusion. Love's not a mystery, nor a deed, nor a type of occurrence, nor something you manipulate. It is. Irrefutably. It's always the same thing at its base. Lovers are. There is nothing one can do about it. And whether we know it or not, we know it. We only think denying it will turn it off.

This is the commitment. This can, and does, commit all the way to dead. This is what marriage vows are about. This is, in fact, the only time they can be taken, but people take them --> huh-oping. Guess what. If you can take them, you don't need to. This is why I'll never be with a man for any other reason than he is it. No amount of security, of any sort, can do the trick. No amount of difficulty will ever break the bond, the truth. It may even turn out that you will believe me before we're done here.

* * * * * * *

I'd tried to block it, herd it into something I could live with, and it got me anyway --> too busy fighting that fucker with my guts ripped out of my torso to take my own advice --> too hurt to do what I know is right. Joe's face kept up in me for months, years, confusing me, taking up another few hundred thousand miles of my no patience. I must learn. I never learn.

* * * * * * *

So what if I could see the truth! Not good enough! I needed so many years to swim through the lake of sleep the Buddhists call delusion. I needed to learn how to be it, to shed a whole life, and a whole world, of wrong, wrong, wrong. Everybody thinks it's right! It is wrong. The wrong was killing me. It was killing Joe. I want it all back to do over again. I learned. I won't make one excuse to get out of the work it takes to let truth be true. I won't budge a jot out of the true. Out of the true is not love: it's self. I learned.

The one who couldn't learn is dead.

And so is Joe. A couple weeks after we parted, he drove his Porsche at 115 mph into an ancient redwood.

just take me out back and whip me to death

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the miracle

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[h/t Big Dan] And I found an instructive series of maps for those who still feel confused....

[[Or if you really do need some particulars, read this and weep.]]

for plain orneriness

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...maybe lefties should try pushing for the one state-controlled media (or media-controlled state) won't mention....

I liked him before his little scene at the Herzliya Conference knocked the last of the scales from my eyes, and since the others did precisely the same thing, that puts him ahead of them in morals again.

You do know that "pravda" means "the truth", right? What would happen if we could manage to out-irony the powers that be...? What's the real harm in letting Elizabeth die happy? What if our only option is to make the players squirm? Would President Haircut be any more likely to nuke someone than the others? I'd say less. I dund know. I'm just thinking out loud here. Knocking down the box walls that try to grow around my brain....

You can't know pravda from inside the box.

you appear nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours

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this guy looks like a serial killer to me

Hunting around for pictures in the tubes, every once in a while you come across pictures unrelated to anything that remind you of something else that nags you... or... it certainly happens to me. I'm reminded now of some things about this medium that have their very troubling aspects.

Do you know that there are services out there that will provide you with IP numbers that make it look as though you are anywhere in the world? from any service provider you want? Do you know that you can go around and pick likely subjects from the vast oceans of commenters out there and "become" them with really very little effort if you are conversant enough with how things work in the tubes? Not only can you be a Canadian and pretend to be an American, but you can be an American pretending to be a Canadian pretending to be an American from... say... Pakistan. You don't have to drive from your home near Toronto to your dad's house in the States to use his specs if you know how to make computers do your bidding. You can be a woman posing as a man, or a precocious little kid pretending to be a college professor or a rock star. You're going to have the most fun with those whose genuineness doesn't let them think such things about you, about anyone.

You can even start huge "intellectual" battles on your blog to make yourself seem popular, and relevant... not to mention the ability to relieve the pressure of pent-up animosities caused by your life-and-death urges to escape conflict by coming off as a sweetheart.

Think what a brilliant psychopath could do with his or her sleeplessness and obsessive information hunger. The agony of the inability to communicate can turn into obsessive communicating by proxy. One might sit in a room full of computers and be a different person or set of persons on each different machine. You can have any number of email accounts. You can start any number of blogs. You can rip material from any or many of the millions of them out there and create yourself a blog with any amount of "history" or "focus" you want in a stupidly short period of time.

If you've ever been an administrator of a popular blog, you can really fuck with people!

You can make up any lifestyle or story or group of them you could possibly dream up. You can be vicious, darling, a scholar, a lawyer, a logger, a waitress, a student... anyone! You can give yourself a sex life!!! [O.M.G., at laaaast!] You can indulge your dangerously unhealthy ego in a billion ways! Your native terror of exposure is both protected and juicing your system with that same first-fear-fandango of rock climbers and sky divers and bungee jumpers... and all without ever leaving home.

You can punish everyone in the world for not wanting any part of you in person, not even starting to understand you or be attracted to you or ever want to be with you unless it's the duties of kinship or childhood association enforcing your inclusion in their lives. Your stupid attachment to a construct of thin air has left you constructing ceaselessly more thin air. You are going to see in the moments before your death just precisely the size of the WASTE that has been all your energy, all your life, and realize that at any moment in that whole life you could have changed that cyclonic waste to transcendental worth.

That is the very worst of all the heinous suffering endured on planet earth, and all your energy is going toward accomplishing it for yourself.

Nice goin'....

ice

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Oh, the blessings of the homeland....