Category: Personal

love.death.love.death.love.sex

before my 16th birthday, my dad took me out for dinner. he said he figured it was time for the “sex” talk. whoo boy.

so we’re at dinner and i say, dad i know about sex… haven’t had it yet, but like i know about it.

he says i only wanted to tell you this one thing: don’t ever let anybody fuck you. if you want to fuck them, that’s fine. but don’t EVER let anybody fuck you.

holy shit. what did he just say?

and then we both started laughing.

my father gave me one hell of a gift: the knowledge and confidence to own myself. to own my decisions. to be my own person.

yeah, you own yourself and you give yourself… don’t ever let anybody take anything you are unwilling to give.

but when you let go, let giving yourself be a completing act. because it’s love we all want, so make it about loving somebody.

then sex is a playground, an archeological dig. it’s absurd, a comedy, a vacation of hours… it’s making poetry in grunts and groans. it’s about that slow reveal… the getting there…

maybe, when we stop letting others define us

maybe, when we stop letting life define us

maybe, when we start defining ourselves

we’ll stop creating worlds in which we hate to live

——————–

Truth be told, what the Democrats are doing today is smart short term politics.

The scenario will probably play out like this:

A) Piss off your base by refusing to Impeach / Defund
B) Strengthen your gains with the squishy middle, do not risk pissing them off
C) Count on the base having nowhere to go come election time
D) Win in 2008 and MoveOn from there

Essentially, they are following a smart political strategy.

But in the mean time…

———————

I admit it – I’m a closet Randi Rhodes fan. It’s not even her show so much as her personal story, her ‘damned the torpedoes’ approach to life, and her in-your-face style. If I ever had the pleasure of meeting her, I would be thrilled if we hit it off and became friends.

But I cringe every time I hear one of her radio commercials.

Crossposted at Daily Kos as part of Teacher’s Lounge.

School stopped.

For me it was at 8pm last night, except for a visit to campus to pick up a midterm project…which didn’t actually happen because the student had an error she needed to fix.  Yesterday I learned that there was a silver lining in the 4 bomb threats we have had in the past 17 days.  Evacuating the campus wrought havoc on midterm exams being given, so they cut us slack on turning in the midterm grades.  I’m taking advantage of that and passing on some of that beneficence on to my student. 

She’s doing the class the hard way, by individualized instruction.  And I’m taking a constructivist approach.  She says she’s having fun.  Cool.

Anyway, school does not exist except as a place full of people for the next 60 hours or so.  Neither will the web, except for brief moments.  The world is stopping for a little all-about-me time.  Or maybe all about us.  And the Us will certainly vary depending on one’s point of view.

Debbie and I have our ceremony on campus tomorrow.  The college’s chaplain is going to officiate in his best Presbyterian mode.  Always best, I figured, to let an artists work in their own medium.  We each will have family present.  Debbie’s twin brother and his wife and her cousin came from Southern California.  My sister frosti has come from Oregon.  And we have friends who are coming.  I expect to cry at some point.

Facts… silver bullets in the war against the ignorant, the uninformed, and the intolerant.

Facts. That’s all we need. Forget love, faith, religion, God, even reason or logic. It’s all about the facts. Why can’t these damned neocons and wingnuts just ACCEPT the fucking FACTS???

i don’t have much tonight. i thought i’d write about writing on the blogs. like how to structure these essays or diaries. how to make them work better. but suddenly, i don’t want to anymore. I want to jam about Jay Elias’s essay, Of Politics and People

Many of you may wonder why I have been so dogged with my “Quotes for Discussion” posts over the last year.  I usually offer them up without context or commentary, and they are tangential to the point of the sites where I post them at best.  Further, few people, including few of you, bother to read them or discuss them.  And even more, sometimes the quotes, and my purpose in posting them, is very hard to gather.  So, I’ll tell you why.

I post those quotes to remind us about people, and to try to get people to think about them, often in a different way than usual for politics.  Because it is easy to speak of political policy and strategy without thinking about these things, about the crucial role that people will have in them.

It is my belief that most political programs and ideas fail because they are not conceived or implemented with people in mind.

emphasis mine (and also a bit out of order of the original)

And I want to go on about Delivery in jessical’s Pony Party: Oh Superman, In a Box.

Horror happens every day… and it can shrivel your very soul. This is dedicated to those among us defying the horror.

Artist: Michael Brown

The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 classifed LSD and other psychedelics as Schedule I (no medical use) and effectively prohibited psychedelic research by scientists and mental health professionals in the US.   Now, more than 30 years later, it is still exceedingly difficult to get funding, support, or approval for this kind of research.  The very few studies that are going on today are in some part sponsored or supported by MAPS – the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Drugs.  “[Their] mission is to sponsor scientific research designed to develop psychedelics and marijuana into FDA-approved prescription medicines, and to educate the public honestly about the risks and benefits of these drugs.” 

I'm revisiting a previous piece of writing from August of last year. Today is my oldest sister's birthday – Jackie would have been 71 years old, born September 28, 1936. Midst of the Great Depression, midpoint between the Great Crash of 1929 and the final year of WWII, 1945.

In reading through this again, I realize that I wrote it as if I knew her. But really, how can a much younger sister, only a teenager so many years ago, know a sibling who is in their middle thirties? I write with a great deal of supposition as I carry the anecdotal memories of the other parts of my family forward. Most of all these last few years, I listened to the sometimes faulty, often biased, almost always self-focused stories of my other sister, Sharon. I heard her side of things, and sometimes her perspective filled in gaps in the hollows of the family legends initially created for me by my mother. Sometimes Sharon's words served to underline the inequalities of family dynamics. A family organic pulses in that way –  the web that connects us as family is either nourished or fermented by how each of us share memories or opinions with each other.

pfiore8 asked me to take her place this week for Writing in the Raw.  So here are some of my thoughts on poetry and a few suggestions for writing quick sketches followed by poems when I tried the exercises.

I was listening to the new American Poet Laureate, Charles Simic, last night on The News Hour as he was interviewed by Jeffery Brown and he had some interesting commentary on poetry and the writers of such.  I like to collect some of the better quotes of poets trying to explain their craft and what it means to them and society in general.  No one quote ever fits all possibilities of poetry, but there are several that resonate with me:

Poetry is just the evidence of life.  If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.  ~Leonard Cohen

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.  ~Robert Frost

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.  ~Carl Sandburg

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out.  ~Richard Rosen

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.  ~Novalis

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.  ~Carl Sandburg

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.  ~Thomas Gray

A couple of days ago, someone tried to chase me out of his diary about sex discrimination because, you know, only women can be victims of sex discrimination.  Put me in my place he did.  To him, I’m not a woman.  So I was never a victim of sexual harassment in my place of work, but maybe some other kind, I guess.

But he has “impeccable liberal credentials,” so, you know, I should just shut up.

I can’t do that.  I am morally and ethically incapable of shutting up.

So I remembered a piece from long ago, written in June of 1994, less than a month before the beginning of Diary.