and it kept making me think of this:

The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel
By John Betjeman

He sipped at a weak hock and seltzer
As he gazed at the London skies
Through the Nottingham lace of the curtains
Or was it his bees-winged eyes?

To the right and before him Pont Street
Did tower in her new built red,
As hard as the morning gaslight
That shone on his unmade bed,

“I want some more hock in my seltzer,
And Robbie, please give me your hand—
Is this the end or beginning?
How can I understand?

“So you’ve brought me the latest Yellow Book:
And Buchan has got in it now:
Approval of what is approved of
Is as false as a well-kept vow.

“More hock, Robbie—where is the seltzer?
Dear boy, pull again at the bell!
They are all little better than cretins,
Though this is the Cadogan Hotel.

“One astrakhan coat is at Willis’s—
Another one’s at the Savoy:
Do fetch my morocco portmanteau,
And bring them on later, dear boy.”

A thump, and a murmur of voices—
(”Oh why must they make such a din?”)
As the door of the bedroom swung open
And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:

“Mr. Woilde, we ‘ave come for tew take yew
Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
For this is the Cadogan Hotel.”

He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book.
He staggered—and, terrible-eyed,
He brushed past the plants on the staircase
And was helped to a hansom outside.

What ever would have Oscar thought of it all?

I think it’s time to revive this two-year-old-post:

If the Pink Ribbon people cared, at this point, about anything but perpetuating a proven money-maker (race organizers anyone? event planners? Grant ho’s? Party favors?) they would be screeching Foul, you should pardon the expression, at the very idea of the Kentucky Fried Chicken people selling disease-causing, ecosystem-demolishing food in pink buckets.

I think I liked it better when people exploited boobs just by displaying them.

How about that: this week, the Susan G. Komen ["Race for the Cure"] Foundation, citing a rapidly slapped-up operating rule prohibiting the funding of organizations “under investigation,” withdrew funding from Planned Parenthood, which provides women with basic medical care, cancer screening of all types, STD testing and prevention, contraception and contraceptive counseling, and… oh, yeah, some abortions. (The stated estimate is that abortions involve about three per cent of PPFA services, though it’s not clear if that’s “three dollars in a hundred” or “three patients in a hundred” — either way, not exactly their flagship menu item.)

There is a lot of ranting and shaming of the Komen foundation going on around the Net. What people are not grasping, so far as I can see across the media, is that Komen has been shameless for dog-years. They partner with any corporation willing to slap a pink ribbon on something and say they are funding women’s health, no matter how many carcinogenic products or emissions emanate from those industries. They tootle and drum about mammograms as if this questionable, possibly injurious screening method — responsible for any number of nightmare false positives that other methods avoid — were in itself the cure for breast cancer.

Now the Komen foundation has quietly let a known anti-choice political aspirant into its VP slot, and in no time at all we hear that the so-called pro-life movement has hijacked the goodwill questionably garnered by Komen and its relentless parade of hyped-up media events to stage a high-profile withdrawal of funding from Planned Parenthood. Look! they will cry. This wonderful woman-helping good-doing foundation has cut off the awful Planned Parenthood witches! Who will follow suit?

Planned Parenthood doesn’t stage breast cancer walks, or get some tacky ribbon logo printed on everything from windbreakers to water bottles. (They do hand out some cute-as-hell condoms in pink packages at public events, but you rarely wear these to the gym. I hope.) They have too many other things that need doing with the money they get.

I was seventeen when Planned Parenthood clinics helped me obtain exams, birth control pills, and later an IUD that, whatever my subsequent vexed relationship with it, helped me have a sex life without getting pregnant, something every woman has got a right to do to the extent that science makes it possible. Let us be very clear. If I had ever in my life become pregnant and been unable to obtain an abortion, I would have blown my brains out, preferably on the steps of the Capitol (it’s a short walk). For some of us, the mere idea is right up there with the chest-burster scene in Alien, okay?

Let that sink in: because a group called Planned Parenthood was around, I could have relationships, even if I was in college and had no money and couldn’t imagine going to my parents’ doctor or affording my own, without the fear of death sitting on my shoulder. I don’t mean death in childbirth, I mean the death I would have preferred to that degree of annexation and violation of my body from the inside.

The people who just threw Planned Parenthood under the bus — along with the millions of women it serves — clearly have no place in their mental universe for poor women, or emotionally molten seventeen-year-olds. They are just crowing and congratulating themselves about the clever end run they have performed, and I’m betting that the Komen organization is way too confident of the smug goodwill it has coined over the years to care about what happens to actual women and real live young girls.

So, for today, two suggestions to anyone who can relate to my position:

1. Send a small donation to Planned Parenthood. Anything helps.

2. Take and send to the Komen Foundation a recognizable photo of your bare ass.

OK, just kidding about that last. But they need to know they aren’t fooling anybody. I’ll say something ironic, funny or arcane next post. But just for the moment, I’m pissed.

First it was “only humans have a language.” Then it was “only humans make tools.” We are really going to have to lose a little of our arrogance.

It looks like he’s made himself a snowboard out of a coffee tin lid or the top of an oversize pickle jar.

You are logical, analytical, and rational. You have good verbal skills.

Idealistic and dreamy, you tend toward the impractical. You have a knack for getting yourself in sticky situations.

Brainy and intelligent, you are intellectual to the point of being incomprehensible.

Your emotions tend to be nervous and potent. Your energy – both positive and negative – deeply impacts your life.

“Intellectual to the point of being incomprehensible” might be stretching it a bit, but I used to write a weekly opinion piece for a local paper and every week the copy editor — a guy who had retired from one of the big national dailies and liked to keep in the game — would slope over to my editor’s desk and demand to see my column. He would always dredge out some arcane word or expression that I would have to go to the mat to keep. After my original editor left, his post was taken over by a blooming idiot who fainted at the sight of a dependent clause and absolutely refused to run a piece in which I referred to two tow trucks as “addorsed,” unless I rephrased myself.

It’s from heraldry; back to back (as some beasts are represented on coats of arms), you know, dorsal, like a fin, a couple of trucks pulled up on a beach (as it happened; long story) and facing away from one another. I thought it was perfectly transparent.

I see I should have just told her to talk to the hand.

What Do Your Hands Say About You?

Saint John was a man with a mission,
He lived in a very poor way,
He ate locusts I’m told for his breakfast
And drank water neat for his tay.

He was preaching hellfire and damnation
And company-keeping he banned,
No Dance Licence ever was granted
While Saint John was abroad in the land.

For dancing he thought was unholy,
A shocking occasion of sin,
He advised the young men of the country
To avoid anything feminine.

Now there was a young one called Salome,
A divil to dance and to sing
And she took a great liking to Saint John
And she went to her father, the king,

“If I dance, will you give me a present?”
Says she, and the old lad agrees,
So she started to dance like an angel
And the king sitting back at his ease.

“Very nice,” says your man, when she’s winded,
“Very nice, and now what will you have?”
“Oh daddy,” says she, “give me Saint John,
That lovely young man for my slave.”

“Fair enough,” says the king, “you can have him.”
But Saint John, being a saint, said “No fear.”
So Salome was mad, and her father
Said “Right, you can cut off his ear.”

“No, No,” says Salome, “his head please!”
So she danced with the head round the Court,
And bonfires on John’s Eve remind us
That dancing is dangerous sport.

My late and ex’s birthday was on Saint John’s Eve, June twenty-fourth as is. I don’t know what that tells us.

]]> http://sledpress.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/donagh-mac-donagh/feed/ 6 sledpress http://sledpress.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/chats-du-jour/ http://sledpress.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/chats-du-jour/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 04:17:24 +0000 sledpress http://sledpress.wordpress.com/?p=10217 ]]> Upstairs: it is only my bed when they allow me to use it.

Downstairs: it’s not my footstool, either.

(Well, to be fair, it started life as a cat condo, but he’s rather too big for it.)

I guess I’ll go do a few sets of pushups.

“Fifty-year-old Chartreuse,” he said. “I saw that movie The Bucket List, and decided there are some things I better just go ahead and experience. Tell me if you think it’s different from the regular kind. Do you know there are five kinds of Chartreuse…?” A geek at heart, he went on at some length while — not being under any obligation to operate a motor vehicle for the rest of the day — I poured a teaspoon of the stuff and investigated. It was woodier than everyday Chartreuse, a little bitterer, just as exhilarating. Possibly only worth the hundred-dollar-plus price tag — over double its younger sibling’s — to someone with plenty of dough to throw around, but then, Rafael is a bachelor with no dependents and a Federal pension waiting for him. He is on a quest for cloudberry liqueur – a Finnish specialty that he drank once, overseas — and has been surfing sites like The Whisky Exchange for oddities.

(I can tell you, as someone who regularly does arithmetic to be sure the mortgage will clear, that the standard green Chartreuse is worth the price. Exotic gardens bloom in your olfactory bulbs when you drink it. Wormwood essences as suave as silk taffeta wreathe your synapses. It is worth it.)

We drank it over the Christmas season, even offering to share with Miss Nickel Catmium, whose reaction to volatiles — all cats loathe them — is especially adorable: she sniffs the glass and does a double flinch. In the case of the Chartreuse she actually jumped back a foot.

Tonight Rafael turned up with something new for me.

That is a plastic — PETE — bottle of Pinnacle Imitation Whipped Cream Flavored Vodka. I have had my concerns about plastic water bottles in the past, at least in hot weather. Acid fruit juices apparently leach more antimony from PETE than water. I can’t imagine what happens with alcohol. Rafael regularly swaps health information with me — cutting-edge, out-of-mainstream stuff about toxins and hormone disruptors and nutrition. I have no idea what came over him. It was a present; what in the fuck do you say?

Whipped Cream?

I am the world’s foremost expert at accepting a questionable gift with an enthusiasm tailored to the intent. Someone, somewhere, may still have a pair of matted landscapes printed on blue foil that I got for a birthday thirty years ago. I hope no one spent too much money framing them.

It’s a two liter bottle.

I ran right to the kitchen after I finished work and juiced eight stalks of chard, two apples, four ounces of lettuce and a beet.

It is worse when the speakers (or writers) clearly do not even understand the words they are uttering.

“This is one of the few unforced errors of the Romney campaign to date,” said one senior Republican strategist granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Voters demand transparency, and what they saw as a sideshow became a central tenant of an unhelpful discussion that cost them.”

Okay, did the guy they interviewed actually say that (ignoring, to start with, far simpler constructions like “the focus of”,  for a term more appropriate to the foundations of a philosophy or a religion, then using the wrong fucking word even for that)? Did the guy who took the quote write it down that way? And are there any copy editors anywhere at the Washington Post any more?

I shouldn’t let it rent space in my head, but I can’t help it.

_______________________

*This must drive other people crazy too. That post is my all time greatest hit, surpassing even the ones with “porn” in the titles.

We have reached an episode featuring Glaucus’ son, an aspiring Olympic competitor with a tireless training regimen.

“Is Young Glaucus going to compete at the Games?” Cornelius asked me. He did not ask Young Glaucus, because Young Glaucus never said much. At the moment he was carrying out an exercise where he crouched on all fours, slowly raising and holding his opposite arms and legs; it would have been straightforward, had he not been supporting one of our larger baggage packs on his huge shoulders at the time. As his sinews flexed and trembled, I felt myself wince.

It sounded delicious. As soon as I could get the Engineer into the gym with me I got down quadrupedally on the floor matting and, to grasp the form, had him set a twenty-five pound plate on my back while I extended alternate arms and legs. The move made refined demands of that cerebellar pivot that maintains one’s center of gravity, while promising considerable honing of the triceps and hip flexors. Even more serendipitously, the effort pointed up an unsuspected evil spirit lurking in my left hamstring, when for weeks I have been trying to exterminate a pain that I thought originated in the adductor group a quarter turn inward.

I felt an enormous urge to contact Ms. Davis somehow and ask what other Olympic calisthenics she could recommend, but it seemed politer to finish the novel first, and the time zones were all wrong besides.

I think I’ll try a forty-five pound wheel next time, if I can get anyone in the morning posse to deposit it on me.

I never expected this hostility from the gallant Fergie, who has hitherto been a compendium of feline virtues, grooming his girlfriend, burying smartly in the litter box, adoring his human Mommy. In fact, since Torvald’s advent, he adores her even more. He sits on me. He purrs loudly. He mews winsomely. He is a neurotic, Woody-Allen-like bundle of insecurity.

When he is not annexing me he pointedly stakes his claim to his girlfriend.

Me? I just live here.