Two Goddesses

Another view of my Sheela-na-Gig, sharing the mantelpiece with my Rechargeable Feline Battery.

Don’t say it.

Keyboards Are Disgusting

I am turning into a proto-geek. First there was this business of letting my engineer friend talk me into building my new computer from components (he walked me through selection and assembled it, I mostly held the flashlight). Then I got Alexander the Laptop, whose touchpad gave me enough extensor digitorum fibrositis after a couple weeks of casual easy chair use that I had to go back to Micro Center and price wireless mice. And there on the shelf was this Wave Keyboard with on-keyboard media controls and the spiffiest of wrist rests.

The thing is, my sound system currently involves the membra disjecta of my old Dell, whose controls involve either a fussicacious click-icon-adjust-slider onscreen panel, or, if you want to be almost as annoyed, finding which of the speakers has the clunky little plus and minus buttons on its top. With my uncorrectable slight astigmatism, I can’t see these too well. And they don’t do much good when a client has just been deafened by the plucked bull fiddle that is my incoming mail sound because I was listening to some lute music on YouTube earlier (this is Zeus‘ fault).

I stroked the big audio button on the Wave keyboard dreamily. Of course it came home with me.

Even though the old Dell keyboard will probably only be used in a pinch — it’s a PS2, which is already kind of like pedal pushers or disco — I always put away retired hardware for a while before tossing it, and since I am not only a neat but a slightly OCD clean person, I did what I had to do years back when I spilled some Kir in it: I boiled water, cooled it slightly by dilution in a pitcher, tilted the keyboard over the sink, and slowly and majestically sluiced it, up and down, back and forth. This is a trick I learned from a guy who installed all the cruiser computers for the Arlington Police Department and had to train the force in this technique owing to the crippling quantities of doughnut jelly and Dorito dust that used to filter into the things.

A mass of desk dreck, cat hair and (I confess it) sesame seeds emerged, having apparently eluded the two or three cans of air that have been shot at this thing since I was last feckless enough to drink Kir while IMing.

Not quite like this, but kinda.

I was a good little housekeeper, and didn’t load my new keyboard software until I had winkled all the crap out of my old one.

Just because.

I wonder if there’s an herbal remedy for this. I mean my brain, not the slime mold.

The audio controls ROCK.

David’s Weed Preserver

David, my ratiocination-impaired gardener, has been getting more customers in the last couple of years, having diversified into painting and carpentry from mere lawn mowing (his flyer displays a crude drawing in which he appears to be vomiting the phrase “I have a great lawn service”). The mowing is more and more taken over by Sammy and Jose, two gentlemen of Central American extraction and uncertain immigration status. This was not at all what I contracted for when I hired David twelve years ago, rejoicing at the time that I could still find someone who was an incontestable US citizen to do work like this, with whom, as a bonus, I could communicate without the use of pantomime.

I am choosing my battles at this point but it is beginning to rub. Jose, in particular, has imbibed an evident perspective of erring broadly on the side of caution. A lot of the weeds in these parts bear small flowers, and Jose’s policy seems to be that anything around the edges of plantings or shrubbery gets a wide berth just in case it is a wanted plant. Actually, who am I kidding? This is a cheap way of finishing the job quicker. I am going to have to say something to David but since David can’t talk to Sammy or Jose without his wife, who’s from Venezuela originally, I don’t know how much will ever make it through that particular Chinese telephone.

I am not sure how much good it would do even if David were mowing. One day I found an odd looking invader that had sprouted up in some corner of the yard, bearing strangely shaped leaves and still closed buds.

“What do you suppose this is?” I asked him, since he was the garden and lawn man and might know.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Some kind of plant, I guess.”

Whatever.

Freudian Typos

Someone just asked me to get back into politics again and I am rightfully spooked out of my wits.

The guy’s got a lot going for him and he can probably mount a decent campaign with the right support. I’m just not ready to lead the charge again. I did it, back in the day, for someone who was ahead if he didn’t get laughed off the podium; this guy can credibly shoot for a lot more. I don’t mind advising, but I’m not blowing out my fuses again.

I wrote him and said that he needed someone else’s face attached to his campaign, since The Woman Who Fronted For The Nut Ball would be bad karma, and concluded “You need me to be the Stranger Woman behind the Socratic duck blind” (a complicated reference to Diotima in the Symposium, who was probably Aspasia of Miletus, who was not a citizen of Socrates’ politically charged hometown of Athens, any more than I am a member of any local political party).

Only I almost sent it before noticing that I had typed “fuck blind.”

That would have solved the problem then and there, the guy being more upright than Dudley Do-Right.

I don’t know if spell check is my friend or my enemy.

Not Again

Back in the early days of 1990, I flew out to Los Angeles, CA — Beverly Hills in fact — for a lengthy and obnoxious surgery that I didn’t trust anyone local to do, and during which, being conscious and under a spinal block, I sang obscene parodies of Gounod until the anesthesiologist decked me. That is a story for another time but as I was loafing around West LA waiting to be cleared for a return flight by the surgeon, don’t you know that this motherfucker made national headlines with his arrest by the FBI, during which he uttered the immortal disclaimer, “Bitch set me up.”

I’m in Westwood with fifty seven stitches in my chitterlings, trying to find a way to beguile the time in a balmy eighty-degree January, and whenever I explain to anyone that I’m from Arlington, which is just south of Washington, DC, I get asked “Is your mayor really a crackhead?” And I keep having to patiently repeat:

1. He’s not my mayor.

2. Yes.

Put that together with a semianesthetized rendition of “My uncle sleeps with a kangaroo; Oh, what a hell of a thing to do!” and you have to wonder how I got out of there with a brain left in my head.

How the hell does he keep this up?

D.C.’s Marion Barry arrested again

• Story Highlights
• U.S. Park Police charged former mayor with misdemeanor stalking
• July 4 arrest came after woman complained to police about Barry
• Incident happened in Anacostia Park in Washington
  

//

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Former D.C. mayor, now Washington councilman, Marion Barry has been arrested again.

Former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was arrested July 4 and charged with stalking, police said.

On July 4, the U.S. Park Police arrested Barry and charged him with misdemeanor stalking.

About 8:45 p.m. in Anacostia Park, a Washington woman flagged down a Park Police officer on patrol and pointed to Barry, who was in another car. The woman said Barry was stalking her, Park Police spokesman Sgt. David Schlosser said.

Barry was taken into custody, processed and released, but he must make a court appearance for the charge. A court date has not been set.

Saint Judas

It was all because of the damn LOLcats. My engineer friend checks up on those things twice and thrice daily, and if he’s around my house I always find a captioned picture floating on the screen.

This one made me cry. So I had to explain to him.

This is a monk in Buddhist robes entertaining the visit of a cat. There are a number of variants on the story that accounts for a convention about depictions of Buddha and the animals: that is, the cat usually isn’t represented. Some stories say the cat killed a rat who was on a mission to summon the Buddha’s mother before his death, or to bring a needed medicine. Some say the cat recognized no higher spirit. But the one that sticks in my head tells that the Buddha lay dying, and knew death was coming, and that all the animals gathered at his bedside to pay honor to him. But the rat, as was its nature, was greedy of food and while all the other animals were lost in the reverence that the Buddha’s spirit evoked, crept up to the oil lamp and began to lap the oil. Seeing this, furious at the rat’s disrespect, the cat killed the rat with one pounce and shake of his head.

And so while the cat is credited with acting in reverence for the first human to achieve Enlightenment, because he shed the blood of another creature, he is not painted in scenes of the Buddha’s death. That’s the story.

“It’s one of those paradox things,” I said, “like the snake and Judas.” The Gnostics — and I have to watch out here, because there is a lot of cheapass Wal-Mart Gnosticism floating around — not only view the snake in the Garden of Eden as a wise messenger of enlightenment (with all the anguish attendant on awareness and adulthood), but make a saint of Judas, whose betrayal is viewed in some interpretations as the following of a necessary script. Jesus accepts the burden of crucifixion, so the story goes, and Judas accepts the burden of having his name live as a synonym for the grossest treachery, in order to bring about the liberation of spirit in that place and time.

You get this kind of oxymoronic toe-stubber in every good myth. Trickster stories are a coarser take on it: the legends about ambivalent characters who break the rules so that creation or evolution can happen. Loki, Coyote, you know the people who hang around at Trickster VFW.

And then I remembered from probably forty years back this poem:

Saint Judas
When I went out to kill myself, I caught
A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.
Running to spare his suffering, I forgot
My name, my number, how my day began,
How soldiers milled around the garden stone
And sang amusing songs; how all that day
Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone
Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.

Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,
Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope
Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:
Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,
The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,
I held the man for nothing in my arms.

James Wright

The people who paint the world black and white are living in a childish dream. Finding the right thing to do at the right moment — especially when everything possible looks like the wrong thing — is never as easy in the real world as it is made out to be in the Scout Manual. Sometimes the necessary thing is an act of outrage. Sometimes the right path is a knife edge. Which, as everyone who has kept a cat knows, a cat can walk on. Humans have a far more awkward time. And that is why I cried.

The Moments That Make It All Worth While

If I don’t plotz at some point before the holiday is over it will be because of a little eighty year old lady from San Juan.

Daughter’s a regular client. Mom visiting the continent for the first time in her life. Last day of vacation. Mom is sore and beat up, especially near some fairly recent surgical sites, and has a really unhappy right leg; all the sightseeing. Daughter gives mom her appointment. Conversation was limited — Mom speaks mostly Spanish — and I hoped I was doing okay by her; this lady had never had a massage of any kind. I left them together at the end of the hour so my usual client could help her mom with hooking and zipping and things.

Mom came out looking like a little elf – -the whole family’s about five feet tall — and smiling broadly.

She began to kick one leg up and then the other, like the world’s oldest Rockette.

“She feels real good,” her daughter said.

Bored On The Fourth Of July

Eric Berne, the father of transactional analysis (which, sans the later yippee-yay popularizations, is quite a useful approach to the human predicament) expounded in one of his books on aspects of stress which he called the “reach-back” and the “afterburn.” The afterburn is the time that it takes the pain to leave your ass after some draining, demanding, or irritating experience. The reach-back is the amount of time you spend beforehand doing extra preparation for it or just plain dreading it, and the total sum is the actual duration you have to tot up when you are deciding how many days of your allotted span you must budget for things that, however wonderful (like speaking at a convention or starring in a show) stick spokes in your life fore and aft. And of course, most spokes that get stuck in your life involve something less than wonderful, like waiting for a contractor or visiting in-laws.

I have been getting reach-back for a week from the Bloody Fourth of July. Preparation no. Dread yes. All holidays are my least favorite. This one, especially in this our Nation’s Capital, always involves asinine teenagers, people who should know better setting off fireworks, the obligatory road-scrambling stampede to see the national fireworks, and usually heat on top of the rah-rah — plus the added narrheit of people simpering “What are your holiday plans?”

I usually say “hiding,” but I have this damnable proclivity for increasingly younger men, and this one wants to go up to the 16th floor of a high-rise near the river, where he works, and watch the hoopla out the windows with whatever strangers from the large organization he works for choose to come along. The last time we did this, a few years ago, our only companions were a couple who came equipped with a loud, rude, attention-craving eleven-year-old. It was a close shave whether I would throttle the wretched infant before it was over — if the windows had not been reinforced, he would have had his ass lit on fire for a one-time performance as the only human rocket in the display. And then, of course, there’s the drama of pelting down to the parking lot to leap into the vehicle and hoping we get ahead of the hordes who took the same option in their flight out of the throbbing night spot of Rosslyn.

I wonder what pleasures tomorrow will bring?

I’ve gotten away for two years with insisting on the acceptable, partly blocked view from the overpass five minutes walk from my front door. I guess I would be a mensch, or a femsch, to go along this time.

Wake me when it’s over, all right?

American Composers: Are There Any?

Until a few years ago I would have said “Let me set a while and think it over.”

Because America is so obsessed with not being European, with not ever doing anything that it’s told, with always finding something NEW and BOLD and DIFFERENT that there isn’t much room for the slow thoughtful introspection and coherent depth that makes eloquent music. Oh, we do musicals just fine, but instrumental or choral music that draws down the grace of the muse Calliope?

Bernstein? The person — I can’t remember who — that once described Lukas Foss as “the Leonard Bernstein of music” sums that question up for me. Virgil Thomson? Well, sort of. I can’t remember a thing he wrote that ever made me break stride. Aaron Copland? Pleeeeease. We’ll be deluged with Rodeo and Appalachian Spring and all the other goddam movie-music, candy-cane, cutesy-bop crap he excreted over this Fourth of July Weekend: just wake me up when it’s over, OK???

Then one day a few years ago I blundered into Arthur Foote. A Unitarian kapellmeister, active in New England at the turn of the century, with publications to his credit like Some Practical Things in Piano-Playing (1909) and Modulation and Related Harmonic Questions (1919). Be still, my beating heart: right?

Right.

Here. Just play this. And this.

And tell me that isn’t the mercy of a God I can’t believe in falling on a world that desperately needs it.

Very Bad Technique

A kind friend submitted this story.

Apparently the dreck-eating public in allegedly strait-laced Singapore, where this ad campaign has been running, responded mightily to the image of a woman confronting something “long, juicy and flame-grilled.”

This is why good sex education is necessary. Anyone with a particle of common sense knows this is not how you do it. For starters, if what you are managing is longer than seven inches, you are never going to acquit yourself decently by approaching it from this angle. Very basic (and careful) experimentation with a common ruler makes it clear that the only seven-incher which can be accommodated in this way is the one which exists only in the imagination of its owner and operator.

Kneeling arsy-versy is probably best, but you will still want a couple of sessions with a good voice coach to help with relaxing the throat muscles. Tilting your head back over the edge of a mattress has its fans, but the whole “knee-trembler” thing tends to put most gentlemen off.

Lubricants are, I am told, sold for this activity, probably useful to people who have been passing the bong or using antihistamines, but again, sloppy technique is conspicuous. One does not drizzle copiously along the entire length of the work in progress. Dab on, like White-Out.

Nobody in New York or San Francisco viewing this ad would do anything but laugh until latte came out of their noses. I suspect it would produce hilarity even in Topeka. Actual gay people in Singapore are probably whooping their asses off too. So are fans of competent language use, but only because FOX news consulted a couple of media pundits who described the ad as “really misogynistic to women” and “a double entrendre[sic].”

Amateurs!!!!!

My late and ex husband once remarked that he would never trust the judgment of anyone who had never either given or received a good blow job.

I don’t think the people who let this ad through pass his test. I’m not sure they know what good food is, either.