No Can Do

I don't feel like doing this anymore.  Something changed.  People I wanted to engage are in varying states of withdrawal.  It's a dull feeling. 

So!  After 16 posts and close to 200 comments--urbane, ugly, magic, mean, irate, ignorant, joyous, jocular and revelatory--some downright wise--here we are: chippy.  I feel it even now, fucking considering everyone's feelings, guessing at certain responses and the need to apologize(!) for some shit I said...in America...on MY blog.  Fuck it.  The first time he said "sorry" was, for Jumpy, the beginning of the end.

Maybe there's a new bloggy vista out there at some point.  Until then,

--J

Master Cleanse

I don't care if Courtney Love did it.

My grandfather did it, back in the 60s. 

It was 2003, and I was a substitute teacher.  I lived on a throughfare.  My liver was like...well, I hate liver similes.  It was not well.  A friend shared an idea with me--a fellow Golden Gopher, a good Minnesota girl with a sturdy last name.  Laurie Anderson saved my body.  When I told my Pops about it, he said, "What the heck, that's what your grandpa used to do.  He called it cleaning the pipes.  Once a year, for a week, he did that.  But he used honey, not syrup."  (Turns out honey is toxic to some, and it's essentially processed, as it's bee puke.)

Laurie shared with me the Master Cleanse, aka the Lemonade Cleanse.  Equal parts lemon juice, Grade B maple syrup, pinch of cayenne pepper, warm water to taste.

For up to 40 days without ill effects, it's known to heal all manner of illnesses.  Do a little research--the results are weighty, so much so that the guy who came up with the idea, Stanley Burroughs, was harrassed by the FBI for decades.  Gout?  Gone.  Arthritis?  Aloha.  Alcoholism and drug addiction are curtailed at rates higher than those claimed by prevailing methods.  Why the FBI?  Seems (not-yet-so-Big) Pharma was worried that he'd come up with a cure-all. 

You drink the stuff whenever you get hungry.  Only the stuff, plus water, and herbal tea, if you're a fey daddy.  haha.  Depending on how much you drink, you can either lose weight or stay the same.  So it ain't exactly a diet.  What it is, is a way to get clean.  A total enema.

You've certainly heard about undigested meat, black pepper and all manner of plaques in your miles of intestines.  Forget high colonics.  This is the Total Colonic.  And no one sticks a tube up your ass while you listen to Chuck Mangione on tinny speakers.

The first two days are hell.  The lemon juice acid breaks down the plaques.  The syrup (Grade B is the earlier, darker stuff from the first tap) is full of vites and dirty goodness.  Calories.  The cayenne is not necessary in warm weather--it provides body heat as you aren't taking in protein.  So------you're swimming in a stirred-up soup of toxins.  Add to that the fact that you aren't taking in any caffiene, alcohol, nicotine, fat--the things that keep a fella strong on a good day, and it's HARD. 

So you flush.  Once a day.  Celtic sea salt, 2 tsp to one liter of water, is the same specific weight as blood.  So when you slam a liter of salt water, it goes clean through you, taking out the trash.  Your intestines don't absorb the water, nor do they take up the salt.  Stay close to the potty.  Ka-whoosh.  The result is something to be experienced.

So after 3 days, you have most of the bad out.  A weird euphoria takes over.  You feel better.  You're funnier.  Your true light shines through.  The LAST thing you want is a ciggie, a scotch, a steak. 

My question, Spacers, is what do you do?  To stay sane.  To keep it, if not Edenesque, real?

Ignorance is Bliss

Just a reminder of what we are facing in this new millenium:

"He Hate Me" is the phrase Smart chose to place on the back of his Las Vegas Outlaws football jersey during the one and only season of the XFL (2001). Though most sports organizations allow only a surname or first initial and surname to be placed on the back of a jersey, XFL rules permitted players' jerseys to be stitched with whatever words they wanted.

Smart explained the origin of the grammatically non-standard phrase in a January 30, 2004 article with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as, "Basically, my brother's my opponent. After I win, he's gonna hate me. It is what it is. It's a saying I was saying when I'd feel something wasn't going my way. For example, (when) I was on the squad in Vegas and coach was putting other guys in, (if) I felt I'm better than them, you know, hey, 'he hate me.' See what I'm saying? Give me a chance. That's all I ask. It came from the heart. Within. The way I felt."

When Smart and the Outlaws played divisional rival Los Angeles Xtreme, two Xtreme players put "I Hate He" and "I Hate He Too" on the back of their jerseys to express their disdain for Smart. In a later game between those two teams, those two players changed their nicknames to "Still Hate He" and "Still Hate He Too". The curious maxim also caught the eye of American audiences (as well as Smart's future Carolina Panthers teammate Jake Delhomme, who named one of his thoroughbreds, "She Hate Me"). In an episode of the dramatic TV series CSI: NY, a dead roller derby player is named "She Hate Me." The phrase "He Hate Me" was used on a headband worn by Bucky Katt in a 2004 Get Fuzzy comic strip storyline by cartoonist Darby Conley involving Bucky's irrational hatred of beavers. The moniker was also referenced by Spike Lee to title his movie She Hate Me (the main character gives his ex-fiancé the nickname after she leaves him for a lesbian). Mark Cuban has changed it to "He Fine Me" for his shirts worn at Dallas Mavericks games, in reference to the NBA often fining the flamboyant owner. When the XFL was disbanded, Don Walker of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote an article headlined, "He Fold Me". "He Hate Me", along with the Sky Cam and the in-game interview, is one of the few remnants of the short lived XFL to have a lasting impact.

Of the moniker, Smart said "That's a part of me, so I never get tired of that. It's like my birth name, except it only came later than birth."

Milk Run

Hazing is important and should not be suppressed.

Please discuss

Roughly quoted from Dallas Willard:

     "A 'leap of faith' is in fact a leap without faith."

And from John Niehardt,

     "Man without mysticism is a monster."


Are these ideas true?  Universally?  Subjectively?  Do you care?

If sack and sugar be a fault...

First, read this:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/02/hitchens-201002



When I feel punchy, like now, Hitchens seems nothing more than a lubed-up Brit with a good grasp of history and a flair for tested yet worn Anglo syntax and diction that Americans find delightful. Armed with these and a desire for thoughtful mischief, he has to his credit found an audience, composed (predominantly) of pale men who feel that the whole bloody Earth is off its axis, and damnit/bollocks! when WILL our united voice again ring across vales and over hillocks? When will WE be not only right, but righteous, again?


Worse is the transparent psychology behind Hitchens’ look-at-me contortions on the public stage. Granted, if my mother had slit her throat with her lover in a suicide pact when I was a teen, I’d likely have authority issues as well. His (resultant?) embarrassingly public drinking regimen completes the picture of a sympathetic figure----but one wants a political writer to hold those wolves. (Hunter T is dead for a reason.)  Solution? Hitchens rejects any discussion of his drinking as an ad hominem attack, suggesting that his critics haven’t better arguments to counter his ideas (usually borrowed, these, and stylized). To be clear: mine IS an unabashed attack on the man, a suggestion as to why you shouldn’t take him seriously.  Cheers.


Hitchens’ readers ingest a combination of prep school smarm and developmentally retarded neurosis that feels so very much like edgy truth. I will qualify this ugly assertion, that Hitchens is specious on a good day, and Falstaffian on a bad one. He takes the old maxim of “not liberal when young = no heart…not conservative when old = no brain,” and turns it on its ear: “not everything when it suits a Britney Spearsian self-promotion at all times = not famous/irrelevant/poor/unpublished.” Hitchens is a reality-show lit-critter. Ratings, baby. Bend the story, and worse, bend your beliefs to fit.



I. Religityousness



What is it to be a “new Atheist?” A lot like being an old Atheist, but more pissed off that everyone doesn’t get it already.

Hitchens is terrifically skilled in political nonbelief as well. Or rather, switching between belief systems so often as to make his pronouncements weightless. A Marxist first, the next year a radical, the next a garden-variety liberal, a libertarian, a neo-con, a conspiracist and anti-conspiracist in equal measure.
In short, a polemicist ceases to be relevant when he visits most every point of the compass. One can’t have it all ways.
In God is Not Great, the formula is clear: flood the emotions of the reader and hope that he will throw his hands up and agree that God is a fabrication, reject the very notion of Faith based on how dreadfully unfair life appears to be. What, I ask, do one man’s sob stories have to do with the dissolution of all religious belief?

Unless Hitchens turns out to be a modern-day Job on a bad day…eh. The sentence finishes itself. The sad boy mothered terribly, two sips past slurry yet still thirsty for attention, has struck a chord with those not disciplined enough to dig into the same arguments made in seminaries around the world. Life has treated you roughly, Chris. That isn’t the world’s burden to bear. It is yours alone.

The beautiful thrust of thought circling the science vs. religion debate is the assessment of the middle ground, to realize that the “miracles” in the Bible (let’s just talk Christian here for a minute) are explicable in that earlier man hadn’t the language of, or the empiricism behind, Science. The ways we discuss creation are built with the tools of the time: imagination and words. One needs a story, an answer, to quiet the nightmare of wondering Why? How? Especially before one had so much knowledge at one’s fingertips. I.e., can we shut the fuck up about Adam and Eve already? Clearly that’s a human story to explain our origins when we had no concept of primordial ooze. But it gets written. And practiced. And fought over.


But it isn’t incompatible with science—it’s simply an artistic rendering of an event unimaginable to those who wrote it. (Yes, I am dismissing fundamentalist thought, so solly.)


An evolved mind might recognize that some great gift was bestowed upon us, however we came to be having this very nuanced argument! And here we are. Forced to struggle with the idea that the original screed is wrong, a valiant attempt at explaining science when there WAS NO SCIENCE. That creation and science are hand in hand. We got the script wrong, not for lack of trying but for lack of test tubes and glass and fire and practice, a few grand ago. Now in the vacuum of study, we cotton to ideas from a fat Brit bitchboy lush who’s mad at God? No thank you.


Any good scientist ought to be able to face up and say, “Shit, man, this stuff is beyond me. Something else is at work here. I’m not sure what to call it, but until I figure it out, until my well-funded experiments yield an Answer, until I know where we came from and where we go, I won’t piss on belief to sound important.” The rest is bread and circuses.


p.s., Don’t make me bust out the late-career Einstein quotes.



II. Kill Father


Rejecting Gore Vidal at 85(!) years of age has the whang of an angry eulogy at dear Dad’s funeral. When admiration is deeply felt, the pain of disagreement is felt exponentially. This equation helps to quantify the depth of the Vidal dismissal. His literary father took (as Chris himself puts it) a “suicidal” course on matters politic. Ah, so. The twice rejected boy feels again the deepest sting of “parental” departure…but this time, the son is an adult hardened by experience and scotch, and so he strikes back.


Like a father, Vidal helped to make Hitchens. Before their mutual admiration led Vidal to pronounce Chris his literary heir, Hitchens was academy-famous. A name to drop to demonstrate a basic level of with-it-ness at a party. After, he was table conversation.


Hitchens is now most like Vidal thusly: one who stays up nights writing put-downs. Simple bombast.

The difference is, Vidal has laurels aplenty upon which to rest his palsied hand. Et tu, fattysmoke?


Finally, let’s remind ourselves of this plain fact: in fifty years, Vidal’s name will still be spoken in the circles that matter. Hitchens will be mentioned as a footnote, a wry aside.


III. 9/11


The final chapter is my most personally felt. Hitchens’ rejection of Vidal’s 9/11 question is simply arrogant. Shrugging off the question of “what really happened” that day is repellent, especially given his baseless reason: that these are "guttersnipe arguments."


Oh yeah. Because Ockham’s razor works soooo well here. To wit: an old family friend of the Bushes trains a bunch of pissed off Saudis (you know, nothing to live for in SA) to fly planes into important buildings that a creepy landlord (Larry Silverstein) wants to get rid of anyway, and who stands to make (and does) $14bil in insurance money, and who, for some reason, already had WTC 7 rigged to detonate (which he does, and admits to later, on tape)………...but that’s got NOTHING to do with it, and neither does Bush’s 20% approval rating and mandate-less presidency that was immediately puffed up, and a war that he was itching to fight for old dad was started, which had nothing to do with Al-Q… Yes. That’s the simplest explanation of what happened.

And I’m not EVEN going into all the other 9/11 truth stuff. We’ll have plenty of time to explain to our kids in 20 years.
Sigh. If anyone should at least investigate further, it ought to be a self-proclaimed gadfly like Hitchens! The unlikely truth is that the very man who ought to have championed lit-dad’s thoughts was sick of being Gore Vidal Jr., and he strategically ran the hell away from his Pops at the most populist-pleasing moment. Whore!

Hitchens is a sad clown, smarter than Maher but similarly bent on seeking fame, not truth. A once-promising mind corroded, a once thick heart now grey and elastic. Avoid him, fight his ugly soul at every turn.



The “sad coda” he claims is the end of Vidal is, in fact, A last desperate grab at the memory of better days, when people spoke of them warmly in the same breath, not the cold Page-6 chatter we hear now. Vidal is 85. Eighty…five. He is lucky to be writing anything of merit, and should have earned some small degree of respect from the one person he helped most.



Balls to you, Chris. I give you ten years to live, and five to wring the last pale reflection of your former self onto the page.

The Solar System: A Comic Theory

The sun: Here is a premise that 9 out of 10 people on the street would find funny. The target is enormous and easy to hit, so the execution doesn't have to be perfect. There will be an explosion. Boom: cheese, ham, fruit carts tipping over, one caveman hitting another caveman on the head with a club. Pandemonium. If this is executed beautifully, everyone can enjoy it. If it's executed without care, there will still be plenty of laughter in the auditorium, but a certain percentage of the audience will only have a sick, sad feeling. Beautiful execution of solar comedy is rare. When it happens, the work in question is clutched with extreme loyalty to humanity's bosom.

No, we're not going to make individual stops to all the other planets. We're going to leap to Pluto, sailing past "Men and women are different!" and "Office life is bizarre!" and "Behold the quirks of this famous person!" and then you can extrapolate.

Pluto: Here is a premise that 1 out of 10 people on the street would find funny, and that's only if you're on a street in a cosmopolitan city. Pluto's orbit is huge, your ship is tiny. Calculations must be incredibly precise, only once you're out as far as Pluto, you can't use your conscious mind to calculate. You have to get there the same way the swallows get to San Juan Capistrano. You have to feel it, make infinitesimal adjustments in the wind. Courage is required to venture to Pluto, and a willingness to fail. You may not make it. You can't care if you make it or not. Be prepared for a sea of blank stares, or worse. The audience might get angry. They think you're trying to do something untoward, and they're right. And even if you hit Pluto exactly, even if your landing is right on target, you're not guaranteed an explosion of laughter. But something fine will happen, something deep. A ripple in the cosmos, generating from this tiny Plutonian stage. An evolutionary quantum leap.

Please embroider, if you like, or erase and start again.

Toe, meet water.

Two threads, one generated by the death of J.D. Salinger, the other generated by a recent conversation with an artist friend.

In the paper this morning, I read an account of the town in New Hampshire where Salinger lived. His disinclination to participate in the larger world is patent. What the article described of Salinger's life in this town, though, was not the life of a hermit. Salinger participated as fully in his community as anyone could want: Saturday evening church dinners, daily trips to a general store, votes cast in local elections. What was striking, in this age of the long lens and the upskirt shot, was the protection afforded Salinger in return by the townspeople – the misdirection of tourists, the diffident closing of ranks.


[The article notes, by the way, that Salinger would write in a spiral-bound notebook as he waited for his $12 roast beef dinner to arrive, for upwards of an hour or more. What the hell was he writing? The mind reels.]

What I took away from the article was the gentle conspiracy of this town, to provide its resident artist a safe and private space. I have no way of knowing whether Salinger was making art in his spiral notebook, sketching his neighbors and friends, describing the kids who served him his dinner. Maybe he was writing endless grocery lists. Still, the banding together of this town, and its guardianship of Salinger’s time and solitude was sweet to note, even if not a single page from those spiral notebooks ever sees the light of day. The mere possibility of art, and the means necessary to produce it – nurtured by a community. What magic.

Second thread: my friend, talented and proven, though not yet able to support himself with his art, is working an unpaid design internship and looking to wait tables. Our conversation, largely focused on our unhappy work-lives, roams around the topic of what is required to do art. The central themes: time, space, solitude. A certain selfish [bad word, someone will correct me] withdrawal, inconsistent with family and work and marriage. A consistent refusal to strive, to accumulate, to keep the overall apparatus in good tune.

My friend noted that “self-hatred is the cornerstone of American enterprise.” I think he’s right – and certainly Jumpy covered this beautifully in his earlier entry – so, perhaps my use of the word “selfish” in the preceding paragraph has some merit. If you’re going to be a cog in the larger machine, the machine that lights your streets and buys your kid shoes, the machine that allows you to produce said kid in a socially-sanctioned manner, something has to give.

So, here’s where these two threads meet in my head: if you’re not Salinger, and you don't have 1700 inscrutable Northeasterners to run interference, is it possible to live a creative life in 21st century America? And, if so, what do I/we/you have to sacrifice to get there?


Post script: I know, I do, that the above is written from the perspective of an overeducated, middle-class, white woman with artistic pretensions. I get that it could be worse. I still want answers to the questions.

JDS

Complain if you want but you are bound to do this by me or I will cut you out of this forum, I swear to God I will:

share what Salinger meant to you, that first teen day you cracked open your dad's dog-eared copy of TCITR or had to write 2 pp about a short story "of your choosing" in Jr. High.  Oh, and if you did it already?  Copy and paste it.  That's your homework.  I'll follow suit. 

ps, don't elaborate.  Please...greatness isn't the point, just, in the true spirit, nothing...not genuine.  There's a word for it---

Prepare

On some level I think we have talked about preparing in almost every post. But I want to try to go further. Maybe there is no further to go but you can see it dancing in its flesh and blood suit all around you.

Today it danced rings around me.

We sat in the waiting room with Logan and his parents. We don't know each other. But his mom and dad spoke about four decibels too loudly, which is how I came to know his name. They spent most of that breath on telling Logan's two year old sister not to do ANYTHING. Yes, we certainly wouldn't want that child to get a hold of The Roughing Grouse Society magazine. Then they called her name and we went downstairs.

Look at her. Big blue eyes. Full lips. Arched eyebrows. Soft hair. Sprinkles of freckles. Laughing. What a lark. Everyone was so gentle, letting her be a part of the process. First they asked her to stand on the big yellow feet and then they gave her purple pajamas with little aliens in cars all over them. All part of the lure. Everyone that came into our room spoke to HER. How that tube and bag would be attached to her hand. What scent she wanted inside her mask (bubble gum, to each his own). Booties with grip. Look at Momma, she's wearing a funny hat and gown too. It's all hilarious. Even the machines look like b-movie robots, nothing to fear.

Breathe in deep, honey. "Ok, Mom, she's going to be a little goofy and then her eyes may role back and her breathing will become sharp and rapid. All normal......she's asleep now. You can give her a kiss and then Arla will take you to the waiting room." "ah, ok."

Whoopi Goldberg is on the television talking about men that leave the seat up and asking why there seems to be piss in places there shouldn't be when men are done. That's fine.

The father three seats away is crying quietly into his hands. He is a big man. His wife is expressionless but she was pretty, maybe even a little sexy, once. Their 10 year old son has brain cancer. He won't have to have another surgery for three or four months. That's good. They get up and roam the halls, stricken.

Oh...the heart...

Why did she look so small? As she drifted off her skin seemed to turn transparent. This is a strange time to be alone. But. Really. It's ok. The cancer patient's parents are back and all the noise in the room is being provided by those four women and their ground breaking conversation about 'Going Green' causing marital problems. Logan's parents are back too. I hope they keep it down and not for my sake.

She's done. Oh, she IS so small. And she is pale now even if she wasn't then. Keep it together. How many countless times have you been in this place? Never. With her. All went as planned, a breeze. That's wonderful. It was so easy for her to be taken in, wooed. The recovery room is dim and she doesn't want anything but for me to lie in the bed with her. The father of the cancer patient goes past, his son is in the next room. I hope he doesn't look like that when he goes in but maybe there is no helping that and maybe no one should.

Ah, Logan and Co. are on the other side. "You want an owie!? If you don't stop it I'll tell that man to give you a shot too!" "We traveled a long way for this so just stop it!" "Logan are you fine, you're fine." "What?! WHAT?...you better fuckin’ tell me!!" "Come on, crabby girl. You're going to the car" "Gimme a hug." "And a kiss."

The father from next door goes by again. His son is complaining of headaches. They are in new places.

We cuddled in our dim little room. We are a good match. She dosed and I thought about how we prepare people. Anyone. Everyone. Gets prepared.

It was scary to send my child into surgery. I'm her mother. They are supposed to do no harm and I'm supposed to keep her from harm. We could have both failed. But we didn't. And it was very unlikely that we would. Breathe easy. No one else here can. Be grateful. That man will never again think that a little ibuprofen will get rid of a headache.

Earlier, a social worker was sent to speak to the cancer patient’s parents in the waiting room. I was the only other person there so they talked quite freely. It turns out that the parents have been shying away from telling the boy much of anything, other than he has cancer. Leaving the room. Changing the subject. Cagey. The boy is ten years old. They were carefully instructed to stop doing these things. They were not preparing him to survive or fight or live or die. They were just changing the subject, it's own preparation to be sure. [I pass no judgment on their handling of this, I will not even think about that possibility or the unimaginable task they have to face.]

Prepare. Preparation was the theme, the thread, of this day. Maybe everyday? It seems preparations effect is unavoidable. Preparation leads somewhere, as lack of preparation leads somewhere. Is life found in our preparation? Not just in the morning but all day long.

Whew.

Now I will prepare a very stiff drink.