feminist blogs

In the event this was you earlier tonight:

Accessing, specifically, 12 pages primarily in the Matriarchs and The Family Cactus categories, before I took my blog offline for awhile, please, for both our sakes, go away*. If I wanted to be in communication with you, I would be in communication with you. I’ve worked hard to make sure you can stay in touch with your granddaughters (and thankfully my husband is willing to serve as proxy in this matter), and I’m happy to send gifts at all the right holiday occasions (have you noticed I’m much better about that since we stopped speaking?), but there is a reason I haven’t been in touch since early in 2006 - it’s because I don’t want to talk to you.

I feel much better about, and emotionally generous toward our involuntarily shared history, when we’re not in touch. I like that. It helps me to remember the good stories. It helps me remember that I love you.

If you have some instinct to re-state, icily and indignantly, that you just don’t get it - what happened? why? - I’ve been explaining the what and the why for decades, and only clued into the fact that you would never hear me, much less change, a relatively short time ago.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly yet expecting different results, then consider this my declaration of significantly improved mental health.

Now it’s possible that wasn’t actually you tonight (in which case, apologies for the mysterious and now obstreperous behavior, everyone else), just as it’s possible it wasn’t my ex the other day, accessing 22 pages mostly in the Exes category from the ISP of the specific place I know she frequents (which may explain the other recent outage to others of you out there).

I know this is the internet, and I’m the one who put all of this out there. I get that.

But if you want to show me that you care about me at all (I am not, of course, counting on this), please respect my privacy anyway. Do me that favor, if you do nothing else for me.

You have two granddaughters, and yes, you usually only get to see them once a year or whenever a conference takes you to the mainland, but there were plenty of years of my childhood when I only saw you once a year, because that was how you wanted it.

You didn’t want me; you made that incredibly clear. I was the inconvenience standing between you and any number of adventures that were more exciting than childrearing. And yeah, there were fringe benefits for me (like riding out Hurricane David with you in a St. Thomas warehouse, what a vacation visit with my mother that was!).

But I don’t want anything like that kind of life for my daughters. Relative to my having attended in the range of eight schools between kindergarten and the second grade alone, my eight year old daughter still lives in the house where she was conceived. Ours is a run-down house, and a rental to boot, but I’m damned proud of the fact that I have now lived in one place for ten years - four years having been my previous record. (One reason why, though I only lived there from 1984-1988, after my dad and stepmom kicked me out and you had to take me back - I do, in my heart, regard Hawaiʻi as one of the places I can somewhat authentically think of as “home,” despite the acute postcolonial guilt I felt, even at thirteen, though you, of course, never did).

And really, it’s okay. Hell, I’m the one who gave you this book, a sympathetic memoir about a woman who’d left her children. Maybe in your perusals of this blog, before I turned the lights out earlier tonight, you got to this part:

A normal person would be able to move (construct a new bridge, repair the old one, navigate some other path across), but I have never been like that, nor has my mother been, or she would not have surrendered her custody of me, with no observed reluctance, on so many occasions when I was young - seeking new locales, lovers, and “lifestyles” as she saw fit.

I don’t begrudge her that, any more than I begrudge Maria Housden, author of Unraveled, who, after the death of one of her four children, stunned everyone she knew by seeking a divorce, granting full custody of her surviving kids to her ex-husband. She then struck out on her own, initially, for an artist’s colony, of all apparently self-indulgent sites. Her story placed in sharp relief the double-standards by which women are viewed as parents, relative to how fathers are judged. No one questions that men need identities beyond marriage and parenting. Housden got hers; so, too, did my mother.

My God, do you see how far I bend over backwards to find honorable, even feminist analogies via which to generously reconstruct my own childhood experience? Did Maria Housden share with her kids the joys of fishbowling when they were quite young? And then tell, at each Thanksgiving, the hilarious story about her young daughter being so stoned that she turned to the hippie next to her in the cramped car, and, after saying “I’m going to eat you up,” bit into the guy’s kneecap? I’m guessing not.

What’s even more curious? How you’d give up custody of me, more often than not, while simultaneously pursuing an option that would have given you custody of Lori Jo, your brother Billie’s daughter. Because he and his wife were alcoholics, and you were so much better than that. During one of my visits, you even showed me a draft of a children’s book, Evra, which in some fashion concerned Lori Jo. (Interesting how you always had a searingly sharp sense of irony, except when it was your behavior that was ironic; then you were just being rational and benevolent!)

You had a special kind of devotion to children’s issues, it’s true. But I was peculiarly excluded from this category, “children.” You made this even more clear when you took a nude picture of me (seated in the lap of one of your lovers from the period immediately following your leaving my father), and an artist’s reproduction made from that, and hung it from every one of the countless houses you lived in, while also sending copies to everyone we knew, and frequently discussing how, in the picture, I looked so sultry, beyond my years, etc. (Incidentally? Before his death, Billie told me about how he always thought that was inappropriate).

I’m not trying to get my childhood back. It’s gone, and that’s fine. But I’m not going to deprive my daughters of the intrinsic value of this time in their lives. Which is what would happen, to some degree, if you and I were in touch, because the effort is always uniquely draining.

Listen, I do care about you. And I’m really not obsessing on all of this stuff constantly. But you have no clue! And I doubt you can help it. You are, after all, your mother’s daughter (though God knows, you improved on that template).

And yes, I am yours. But I’m the one who did break the pattern of us. I’m the one who did not abandon her children at any number of points on the map whenever whimsy (in your case) or drunkenness (in your mothers) happened to strike.

The bottom line - that it’s my daughters who deserve and require my attention, not you - hasn’t changed from when (this most recent round in) our estrangement began. (And if they decide to become mothers, I hope they’ll do their part to improve on the generational template. No doubt, by the time they are grown, I will have given them plenty of things to legitimately complain about.)

You always joked how it was no accident, your moving all the way to Hawaiʻi, while your mother remained in Virginia. You don’t suppose it’s merely because airfare is expensive (although of course, there’s that too) that I haven’t been back to Hawaiʻi since 1993, and that I ultimately came back to Virginia, do you?

There may be a time when I’m ready to talk to you again. If you push it, it may never happen. And there is nothing I want less than I want that. (Re-read last sentence as needed. Now do you get it?)

I love you. Now please leave me alone.

__

* Or if you must read here, for the love of God, have the decency to use a feed reader.

[See note re: problem w/ text size*.]

In lieu of the still-unfinished essay referenced yesterday, I give you this**.

My mother with Barack Obama, December 16, 2004, Honolulu, HI.

Someday I’ll find, and post, the one with my maternal grandmother and her hero, Oliver North. (Because I’m nothing if not fair and balanced.)

Plus the ones of my paternal grandpa (who raised me on C-SPAN, God bless him) with Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Ford.

For more goofiness, see this old post with pics of the late, great Senator Paul Wellstone, who went to high school with my dad; Wellstone’s mom and my grandmother also worked together in the cafeteria; the families also got together, on occasion, outside of school functions. (Did I mention the young Mr. Wellstone - for whom, years later - I did in fact vote, when I lived in Minnesota - looks quite fetching in a skirt?)

For better and for worse, the political thing has always been in the blood.

Not to worry though, the chances of my running for office are pretty much nil. Not only did I experiment with some blow while I was a teenager in Hawaiʻi, I also have an arrest record.

Ironically, the Olympia, Washington cop thought I had cocaine on me at the time; I didn’t. Rather, I had unlabeled capsules of another white powder in an unlabeled plastic baggie. Somehow he didn’t believe that the capsules contained boric acid: a homeopathic remedy for yeast infections. So they kept me locked up until they’d tested every last one of them. Following which he sheepishly emerged from the lab, asking whether I had any more capsules back at my dorm, so I could take care of my, ahem, “little problem.”

Needless to say, I was itching to get out of there.

__
* Tech note: WordPress is doing something weird with text size, which renders the individual post with too large text, and the post as it appears on main page of blog with size of title’s text too small. No idea why, trying to figure that out now. Will delete this note after troubleshooting.

** Intended also as a follow-up to a conversation that started here. Because this is the fun response, and I’ve given plenty of energy in recent times to political discourse that is, necessarily, painfully serious.

The other night I was watching Norma Rae, the 1979 film about a single mother who confronts enormous dangers in order to unionize the morally bankrupt textile mill upon which her livelihood (and that of almost everyone else in her small, Southern town) depends. And I started bawling my eyes out at the scene where Norma Rae’s character, played by Sally Field, confronts her bosses’ threats to remove her from the property (in retaliation for her union activities undertaken entirely legally, on her own break time) by scrawling out a single word in all capitals: UNION, on a piece of cardboard, and jumping to the top of a table.

Which was where she remained, in silent protest, as one by one all her coworkers (at first hesitantly) shut off their equipment in solidarity with her, until her bosses (aided by corrupt law enforcement) successfully removed her.

Why did I cry?

I cried because, in various ways, I used to be so much like that. (A friend of mine here in Richmond actually used to call me ‘Norma Rae.’ Although by that point the fight was almost gone from me, and I didn’t exactly deserve the nickname.)

But in the more distant past, I was incredibly brave, doing things in the interests of justice that could have gotten me killed, not just in trouble.

Of course, part of it is, I have daughters now, and I’m more good to them out of jail than in it (and alive, as compared to dead). To wit: I have (happily) interrupted the writing of this post four times so far in assisting Annalisa with her homework.

Another part is the continuing heartbreak of feminist internecine warfare. (Unbelievably, I still haven’t written out the reasons behind my walking out of my ‘acting president’ - emphasis on the acting - role in Richmond’s chapter of NOW, six or seven years ago. Perhaps a topic for a future post, to include gratuitous pictures of me with Kim Gandy and Patricia Ireland, yay!)

But of course, mothering can’t be my excuse for cowardice. (After all, it wasn’t either for the character of Norma Rae, or for the real woman upon whom her character was based: Crystal Lee Jordan.) In fact, mothering should be inspiration for my resuming a more overtly activist stance. I need to be a good role model for my girls, and that means more than just taking them to marches every now and then.

Not that I’ll go to the opposite extreme, as did my mother, for example, who spent fully 1/3 of my final year of high school absent from the home (where she was also the paid guardian for my foster sister at the time), while she was doing off-island service projects for the Sierra Club. (During which time, of course, her ex boyfriend who was still living with us, two years after their split, was having sex with me - which she very crudely blamed me for when I finally told her, from the safe distance my college campus offered one year later… Funny how I was actually much safer from exploitative sexual relationships - not to mention the drug culture - once I went away to school.)

I have to be the brave (but not reckless) mother to my girls that I needed as a girl, the mother I never had. I have to get my spirit back, for my sake and for theirs.

Tags: feminism, Inner Life, labor unions, Norma Rae, NOW, Overtly Political, Parenting, The Family Cactusfeminism, Inner Life, labor unions, Norma Rae, NOW, Overtly Political, Parenting, The Family Cactus

Of dogs, death, uncles, dear friends, Southern rock anthems, and the variously constituted forces of Grace.

Many years ago, back in one of the hippie houses I lived in with my mother in Williamsburg (the one featured in this story at Eclectica), two of my roommates had a dog named Serendipity.

They called him Seren for short. (Later, I would muse on the oddity that this was a homophone for Sarin, the toxic nerve gas - but of course, I didn’t know that then; most likely, the dog’s owners didn’t, either.)

I don’t remember much about either the roommates or their dog (even at the ripe age of ten or eleven, I’d lived with too many companions, human and otherwise, to count), beyond that: A) the dog was very sweet, and B) the roommates were recent survivors of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state. (Following which they’d moved all the way to Virginia.)

I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I always assumed that Seren had been rescued from the volcanic ash. Or he’d been their dog already, and had made it out with them.

Either way, that dog was my introduction to the very concept of Serendipity (per the Wikipedia entry: “the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely”), which would carry me through a lot in the years following. (As alluded to in yesterday’s post.)

Which brings me to the story of another fortunate dog, discovered quite by accident, which has been unfolding all this week.

The other night I saw that our friend Karrie had a new blog post on her myspace page, and I went to check it out.

Only to have my heart broken:

We found this cutie pie on the side of the road, he was laying next to his buddy that had been killed by a car. He’s a little beat up, but we took him to the Vet & got him up to date on all of his shots. This lil dude is super sweet & has a great temperament. He’s about 35lbs, but should probably weigh around 40lbs. He’s roughly about 2 yrs old & is not neutered. He looks to be a foxhound/beagle mix. If anyone knows of anyone that could take him & give him lots of love, please message me. Thanks!

I should specify here that, when I went to Karrie’s page, the last thing in the world that I was thinking about was acquiring a dog. (What’s more: I have absolutely never been known as a “dog person.”)

But this one, through those pictures, just called out to me, so last night Jeff and I packed up the girls and went over to Mark and Karrie’s. (Not telling them anything - just that we were going to hang out - in case the internet puppy love I experienced at first sight didn’t match the reality on the ground… or whatever.)

So there we were visiting with Mark and Karrie, their dog (whom the girls hadn’t seen since he was more of a pup) Curtis Lowe (yes, as in The Ballad of… by Lynyrd Skynyrd), and this little survivor dog, who immediately bonded with Jeff and the girls and me. He was amazingly gentle and calm (particularly relative to dear Curtis, who is a wild thing!). While we were there, the as-yet-unnamed-one (referred to in general terms as Lil’ Dude!) hopped up on the couch next to Karrie, which she said he hadn’t done before, and she took it as a sign that he felt safe and welcome and loved, after his long and difficult journey.

Karrie and Mark had, of course, been taking excellent care of the boy, but with Curtis being quite attached to his Sole Dog of the House status, and other logistical considerations (not least of which is Mark’s touring schedule), they needed to find a good home for Lil’ Dude. Mark knows how good Jeff is with dogs, since they grew up practically across the street from each other back in Williamsburg, and Jeff almost always had a dog.

And so, with all the evidence in abundance that this was going to be a good match, we announced it to the girls: “So, how would you like to have this dog?” And their eyes lit up in surprised glee: Really? Can we?

And we worked out the details as best we could on the spot. Karrie brought out his medicine, and Jeff went and got the leash he’d bought after work (along with dog biscuits, food, bowl, chewy bones, etc.). Another friend had already taken on the job of setting up Lil’ Dude with an appointment to become a Lil’ Eunuch, so that piece was taken care of.

We discussed various names, and by the time we were ready to leave, had pretty much settled on Lynyrd. The provenance of the name being only partly in the fact that he was rescued by a bona fide Southern rock star (Mark’s the second guy from the right on the current cover of Guitar World, which he’s been featured in now more times than I can count), and in the fact that Curtis Lowe was his first doggie companion in Lil’ Dude’s first place of safety, after being rescued. It also has to do with my uncle Timmy.

See, in Timmy’s funeral that I keep writing circles around, there was the inescapable sadness about Timmy’s brother Billie who had preceded him in death two years earlier. Both my uncles were hard-living hellraisers, but Billie was the one who finally got sober, kicked all his drug habits, etc. - only to die at the age of 45, of cancer. It broke Timmy’s heart, and what strength he otherwise might have (eventually) been able to muster in order to stop drinking was leached away by that sadness. He died, then, on the eve of what would have been his forty-fifth birthday, of cirrhosis and hepatitis.

When Billie died, there was nothing any of us could have done to blunt the force of that event on Timmy. There would be no bringing him back.

Then this little dog lost his companion on the road, but by Grace, in the actions of some very fine people, he was saved, brought back from the sadness. (Not to mention:taken to the Vet!)

But I digress.

At Timmy’s funeral, to which various of his drinking buddies had been invited, there was a time during which mourners were invited to play a track of music that evoked the departed in some way. Naturally, there was one dude who wanted to play the Lynyrd Skynrd song, Freebird.

Thing is, he brought the wrong tape. And yes, it was a tape, and not a CD, so there was a long awkward silence while the hapless funeral director was rewinding and fast-forwarding, trying to find the requested track. So when no Freebird track could be located, he went with what was apparently considered the next most thematically appropriate Skynrd tune: That Smell.

(Yeah I know: only in the South.)

So there I was, taking in the surreal experience of my uncle’s open casket funeral while listening to these words:

Whiskey bottles and brand new cars
Oak tree you’re in my way
There’s too much coke and too much smoke
Look what’s going on inside you

Ooh, ooh that smell
Can’t you smell that smell?
Ooh, ooh that smell
The smell of death surrounds you…

And while the whole thing was undeniably fucked up, it was also hilarious, as I knew Timmy would have appreciated.

So, as a result of these multiple connections, Lil’ Dude is now answering to Lynyrd.

Here he is at home, feeling quite safe indeed, if his lack of hesitation about curling up on the couch is any measure (click on any image for a larger version).

And now, as I finish this, it’s just about time for Lynyrd and me to head for the bus stop to get the youngest daughter. He was quite enamored with the walk to the bus stop this morning, the introduction to his new neighborhood.

Welcome home, boy.

Since renaming the blog Vortex(t), all manner of things ‘vortextual’ have been serendipitously appearing to me. (There’s a word for this that isn’t quite ’serendipity.’ Like, when we got a Jeep and all of a sudden I was seeing Jeeps everywhere. Of course they had been there all along. Dammit, what’s that word?)

Still though, this image (see a bit further below) was pretty specific, and makes me wonder: Just what the hell is it, that I’m trying to get myself into here? (With this writing? With this life? Much less with this damned blog?)

The ‘vortex,’ then, is that unholy place of all my incontrovertibly true, yet also inexorably subjective, experience. This is where I have to go: to where all the most brutal facts and wretched memories are swirled in with a lifetime’s unbridled mirth, and the fear that results when those apparently contradictory forces collide, as they are wont to do, with nuclear force. This is the place where I write the things I thought would break me if I thought about them, much less committed them to text.

Meanwhile, my favorite episode ever (besides the finale) of Six Feet Under just came on Bravo: the one with the big biker funeral. Of course it reminds me of Timmy’s funeral, since the latter affair (given the expected rowdiness quotient) actually had a bouncer. Still, Timmy’s story keeps me up at night; there are hundreds more pages I could and should write about it.

A long time back, I made a list of the most pressing, still-unfinished stories, and Oklahoma Funeral was on it. At the time, I was soliciting readers’ comments, saying I’d write the stories in the order suggested.

Clearly, this didn’t work, since I have yet to finish any of the stories on that list, much less in the order suggested. But this one keeps coming back and back and back for me, so it’s Oklahoma Funeral or bust.

And then, after that, the one that will be called I helped dig the grave for the frozen corpse of my grandmother’s dog, and all I got were these lousy chunks of Southwestern Virginia coal.

(Image via somebody’s comment on a friend of a friend’s myspace, possibly rendering the question of proper attribution moot, though if anyone knows where actual credit is due, I’ll happily update this entry to reflect same. Yes, we are a bit ADD tonight. )

A Veterans’ Day weekend remembrance, six years after the fact.

Veterans’ Day is always bittersweet for me; Nov. 11 is also the birthday of my Uncle Timmy, a Navy veteran who died of alcoholism (cirrhosis and hepatitis bleed-out) on November 10, 2000: the eve of what would have been his 45th birthday.

Timmy was preceded in death by his brother Billie, in 1998, of cancer, strangely enough, at the age of 45. Unlike Timmy, Billie had actually won his lifelong struggle against alcoholism and numerous drug addictions, but still, he’d died; when that happened, I think, the part of Timmy still capable of nurturing hope died, too.

Even more confounding: In the year of Timmy’s death, he’d decided that for the first time in his life, he was going to vote for Democrats rather than Republicans. (I’m not sure if he’d ever entertained third-party options.)

Whether this was due to a bona fide change of heart, and/or if it was to spite his mother, a lifelong Republican who lived across the street from him (though they were no longer on speaking terms), I’ll never know. Timmy went down to the Okmulgee Democrat Party headquarters and got himself every single sign they had (not just for Gore/Lieberman, but also for every obscure school board or city council candidate). And he lined the entire front of both his yard and his neighbor’s (don’t know if he asked permission first) with the signs.

Then, right before the elections, he started vomiting blood, and went to the hospital. He never went home.

In that last week of his life, he was furious over not being able to vote - not to mention over his mother’s sudden, nauseatingly Munchausen-esque histrionics over her “sweet baby boy,” since this was the same woman who had routinely beaten him within millimeters of his life on several occasions, and as mentioned above, hadn’t spoken to him at all in recent times, for more than a year. For example: the preceding May, when Timmy had (with understandable trepidation) left a Mother’s Day card along with a nice houseplant near my grandmother’s doorstep. Her reaction at the time? She left it there to die - then complained to anyone who would listen about her lousy son having the nerve to bring her a dead plant.

Adding insult to injury, my grandmother’s histrionics in that last week of his life included her one-woman campaign to convince doctors that Timmy’s wife, Trish, had actually poisoned him. After righteously demanding an autopsy (which I’m pretty sure they’d have done anyway), my grandmother spent months harassing the city’s police department, long after her son had been buried, the cause of his death having been unambiguously (and so sadly) affirmed.

Timmy’s mother got to vote, and he didn’t. Worse: he died not even knowing what the outcome of the Presidential “elections” would be. (Timmy: I so wish you could have seen what happened in this election season.)

Heartbreakingly, I didn’t get to see him before he died, but I did make it to the funeral, which was surreal on any number of fronts. It was well-attended by an interesting mix of his white Appalachian and Creek Indian kin (including Trish, who in addition to being his wife, was also his second cousin; yes, we do Southern stereotypes), assorted and sundry vets, and his drinking buddies, including a giant fellow in denim overalls named Grizz, the designated bouncer. (Have you ever been to a funeral that had a bouncer?)

Timmy was haunted by everything, and had good reason to be; his life was so hard.

But today I live in the one city where he used to live at least somewhat happily (even, at times, soberly).

This is why, even though he’s long gone, Timmy is one of the main reasons I live in Richmond: for all those ghostly resonances.

I miss you, Timmy.

Today I am breaking my blogging fast of the last 40-odd days, the inspiration behind which remains too complicated and volatile to explain to almost anyone.

One woman in the Upper Midwest, along with one man in the Southeast (plus my husband and shrink*) may be the only parties on this planet to grasp both the moral complexity and the blunt force of some events that occurred right before I took that last hiatus, at least until I can tell the story completely, without concern for any detrimental effects the telling could have on the principal characters involved.

Suffice it to say that after watching a 2005 movie I’d never heard of until this week (it had earned the ‘kiss of death’ NC-17 rating on its initial US release; presently, the DVD version and presumably the cable version I just saw have an R rating), called Where the Truth Lies, I have decided two things:

1. I’m going to have to obtain, as quickly as possible, two copies of Rupert Holmes’s novel upon which the film was based, and hope to God that three certain lines (see further below) as read in the screenplay, do in fact correspond to the novel’s text, so I can
2. Underline the relevant passages in both novel copies, sending one copy to my father, in lieu of a substantively explanatory letter. (No good, either for him or me, could possibly result from my writing him any more substantively explanatory letters. Been there, done that, got psychologically clobbered for it without much healing and/or revelatory benefit to offset the pains, so fuck it.)

These are the lines from the movie which I would have to underline, if in the novel they appear thusly:

1. “God help you when a killer takes a shining to you.”
2. “Pretending to be a nice guy is the toughest job in the world when you’re not.”
3. “There is someone in all this who is totally innocent of any involvement in the events of that night, but whose life would be made infinitely worse if I tell the truth at this time. I want to protect this person from any further pain. I promise you, I promise you I will write down the truth that I have learned, but I have to let matters lie until this person has died, and the truth can no longer touch them.”

Really, it’s as if my life exists purely to prove the old saw about the truth being immutably stranger than fiction. For God’s sake, I have to rip off others’ fictions just to avoid my own nonfictions (while at least letting off a bit of toxically truthful steam in the process).

So this space, ‘Southern Discomfort,’ that I’ve made for myself in the necessarily temporal blogosphere (with alternating ambivalence and enthusiasm, constantly rebuilding and destroying the immediately available body of my work), is literally ‘Where the Truth Lies,’ and the ‘place’ in which I’ve desperately scratched after the truths locked in others’ lies, so that, in time, I could develop the clearest, most comprehensive understanding of real events, and write them.

And like the anxious ‘girl journalist’ in the movie, Karen (the one whose iced corpse doesn’t appear in the initial frames of the film, which features not one, but two curiously symbiotic ‘girl journalist’ characters: one dead, the other not), I can sincerely promise anyone here that “…I will write down the truth that I have learned… (emphasis added).”

But as Karen also came to understand: that truth-telling will have to be deferred, for the benefit of certain innocent parties - which is not to say that non-innocent parties won’t also benefit from this specific silence; of course they will, but I cannot care more about that now than about the benefit of these unnamed innocents, to whom I am accountable, whether they know it or not.

Following are links to some of the blogs I’ve been reading over my hiatus in an effort to avoid going nuts; I’m in their debt (as well as in that of friends who’ve been calling and/or writing to check up on me, even though I’ve been for the most part uncommunicative in response): The Reclusive Leftist, Cosmopoetica; Desultory Turgescence; CouchSurfer (& her companion blog, Notes on a Quest), PostSecret, and (of course) The Lazy Cartoonist.

Thanks, peeps.
___

*Note: The words “husband” and “shrink” as used here refer, of course, to two separate entities. Were it not for my mother having told me, one year and two days ago (as well as on several occasions during my childhood), all about how her own shrink had “saved her life” back in the early seventies, specifically by not sleeping with her (which evidently had been her expectation), I wouldn’t feel the need to specify something that should be that self-evident. But, hey: that’s what happens when one is raised under the specter of one’s mother’s near-constant promiscuity, and that same mother’s entirely constant projection of that promiscuity upon the canvas she had in me, from when I was as young as eight: too young to understand the deadly politics behind women calling other women sluts - much less, the politics of women projecting these socially constructed “slut” paradigms upon their girl children.

Right now, I’m fighting off twin devils of sinus inflammation and apathy (which came first?), but I thought I should at least make a minor blogging effort since coming back to RVA, especially since there had been a problem with the image files in my last post that I couldn’t fix while I was still in Idaho (and then after coming home, was too wiped out to deal with).

And while I have several post-trip drafts in progress, none are close enough to completion that I could stand to post them, so I’ll just say this:

Lamb of God’s latest album, Sacrament, is one hell of a work of hardcore art. And it was a peculiar privilege to hear one particular track, Walk With Me in Hell, precisely as we were crossing over from Idaho (where, ironically, their tour kicked off last night) into Utah, the fields of which (I couldn’t make this up) were literally on fire.

After the gloriousness that had been the Seattle, Olympia, and Portland (solo) components of the trip, seeing my folks in Idaho Falls (and meeting up, again, with Jeff and the girls there), was, as I vaguely intimated in that last post (made while I was still there) a real noodle-cooker.

But damn, am I ever glad I went. For one thing, I finally got a copy of my dad’s novel, Yates 3. For awhile, I had been calling it his alleged novel, because not only has he been, for decades now, too persnickety to finish the damned edits and publish it already, but he wouldn’t even show me. (Which is kind of extraordinary, since, for better and for worse, he has tended to share everything with me.)

Really, it was a good trip. Just because I might not be able to process the experience for another decade or so doesn’t mean I have regrets. Suffice it to say: Jeff, my husband, is a good man for having accompanied me on that leg of the journey. And for holding my hand across the aisle as we barrelled into the remnants of tropical storm Ernesto, on the flight from JFK (during which the turbulence was so severe that something like 10 or 15 passengers on the very underbooked flight made good use of their barf bags).

I am quite glad to be home. And of course: very proud of our boys in LoG for making it this big. Here’s a representative blurb (from a gazillion I could call up through a search on the band’s name in Google News), from Greg Burk at LA Weekly:

…The overwhelming impression of Lamb of God’s new Sacrament — which debuted at fucking No. 8 on the Billboard Top 200 — is control. Always as precise as they’ve been heavy (don’t neglect their shattering full-length debut from 1998, when they were called Burn the Priest), the Virginia five have cut an album like a diamond stiletto. With a scientist named Machine at the knobs, barker Randy Blythe, drummer Chris Adler, bassist John Campbell, and guitarists Mark Morton and Willie Adler sound like men to be feared — not ’cause they’re crazy, but ’cause they’re committed. The sound provokes involuntary motion of the head and shoulders. The riff-strong songwriting is fully evolved and fat-free, with the solos few and maximally electrifying. You can take the words, packed with accusations and contempt (“Pathetic. Wasted. Soulless. Compromised.”), any way you want. And live, you should see the response…

…Hot damn, am I looking forward to seeing these guys (in other than the backyard barbeque context) soon on the Gigantour… once I’ve caught my breath.

Since I really can’t write about the specific secrets revealed in this latest reconnaissance mission (er, visit home to the family) until such time as the principal characters are dead, and/or I’ve figured out how to fictionalize, I’ll just post this fun bit, from the 1961 yearbook for Yorktown High School: the first year the school was opened, at which time my father was a sophomore, and his friend Paul Wellstone was a junior.  (Apparently, my grandmother and Paul Wellstone’s mother were also friends, back in the day; they worked together for the school district’s food services.)

Note that, were the honorable Mr. Wellstone still among the living, I would not post this image, given the evil uses to which Republicans would almost certainly put it.  (It’s not at all difficult to understand why conspiracy theorists have labeled both Wellstone’s and Mel Carnahan’s election-year plane crashes as outright assassinations; see, for example, Tinfoil Hats Uncover the Wellstone Conspiracy at eatthestate.org.)  But, hell, considering that I voted for Wellstone myself (in 1996, when I lived in Minnesota), and the fact that he was known to possess an excellent sense of humor, I don’t think he’d mind my posting this. 

The text, scanned from the same yearbook, speaks for itself:

 

Now that’s the kind of versatile proto-politician I can appreciate - yes, he could bring home victory for the wrestling team, but dammit, he could also don a skirt and cheer on the girls’ football efforts.

(Ahem.)

I now return you to your regular programming (and me to my reconnaissance mission visit with the family).