Mrs. Wigglebottom Does Not Have a Head Wound

I got home from work and saw that Mrs. Wigglebottom had crusty red crap on her head and around her eye. Of course, my immediate thought was that she’d suffered some dreadful wound at the claws of the cats and had been wandering around the house bleeding all day.

I hugged her to me and started to ask “Oh, Mrs. Wigglebottom! What happened to you?” when I smelled a slight tomato-y, vinegar-y smell.

Someone–I won’t point fingers–did throw the pickles from her quarter-pounder with cheese at the dog yesterday and one did land on her head and one did cling to her eye. And yes, that same person did today think that the dog had been hurt. And so, yes, that very same person may be a bit of a moron.

Sorry, Mrs. Wigglebottom.

Hmm, Will Knucklehead Fight Kleinheider?

Nashville Knucklehead also tries to sweet-talk me today.

Gentlemen! I swear, if I had known that blogging about marriage would get your attention like this, I would have started blogging about marriage 15 years ago. I would have invented blogging just to have grouchy cantankerous men tell me a thing or two about the way things are between men and women.

While I try to devote this forum to funny tales of crazy chicks and blow jobs of yesteryear, Auntee B got to me the other day when she posted a long and eloquent argument (as only she can do, 3 or 4 times a day) about how straight men should not stand for the messages sent by society that we are all pigs. I told her that we didn’t hear such messages, then made a witty and charming remark about eating my own poop for lunch. She responded as though we were an old married couple. She ignored what I said and asked if maybe I actually heard the messages and subconsciously internalized them. She didn’t like my answer, so she asked the question a different way. Well, the answer is still no, I don’t hear the messages in society about how men are pigs, and now I’m here to tell you why.

An old married couple? That tickles me. I can’t even tell you.

And Aunt B., if you need someone to reach into you clogged disposer, just let me know, you cute little ol’ feminist. /* virtual smack on the ass*/

I can unclog my own garbage disposal, thanks, but I could use somebody to come over and change my oil. Let me know if that’s in your skill-set, Knucklehead.

Kleinheider Appeals to My Baser Nature

Kleinheider lectures me on the benefits of marriage.

Women and marriage make males better men. Does this mean men are somehow weak, wicked or incompetent? You damn skippy. What of it?

And then he sweet-talks me some.

Women left to their own devices and without structure can be just as scandalous as men. Depraved, despicable, and disagreeable, the female is. Just like men. Well, not just like men. Obviously, female failings manifest differently and thus the benefits derived from marriage are different but the ladies need us just as much as we need them. Believe.

And then he throws in a Shakespeare reference.

Us humans, we are people who need people — in the proper context and with the proper structure in place. Does marriage “domesticate” men? No doubt. Properly configured, though, marriage tames that shrew as well.

And what can I say?

He’s wrong, but I totally [heart] Kleinheider anyway.

Miss J. is Coming!

My darling friend, Miss J. is officially coming down to see me in The Vagina Monologues on Saturday! How excited am I?

Buy your tickets now, folks, and you can try to talk her into sitting by you and telling you how much fun it is to smooch me. Unless, of course, you’ve smooched me yourself, in which case, you can sit by her and commiserate.

Anyway, hurray!

My mom called me last night to say that she will be there in spirit. If you are a cute man and feel your ass mysteriously pinched while you are in the Belcourt, it’s her.

Tennessee Debates the Power of Sperm

Both Fritz and Rachel are reporting on this legislation which would require women to notify the man by whom she is pregnant before she has an abortion.

Yes, apparently Tennessee sperm is so powerful that it can penetrate doctor-patient privilege and render privacy rights non-existent. So powerful that its mere presence at one time in a woman’s reproductive system obliges that woman to report in to that man about her medical activities.

Shoot, why stop there? Let’s just legislate that everything the sperm of Tennessee touches becomes the purview of the man from whom the sperm originates.

We’ll just be calling men up left and right “Dr. Frist, I’m about to go get my teeth cleaned. Just thought you should know.*” “Oh, shoot, I just started my period. Do you want to come over here and root through the garbage to make sure that one of your fertilized eggs didn’t fail to properly attach to my uterine wall? Just in case, I’ve got the tiny casket ready.” “I’m about to wash these sheets. Is that okay with you?” “Howdy frat boy. I saw you fucking that girl last night on my lawn. I appreciate that you practice safe sex, but you left your used condom in the grass and the lawn needs mowing and…”

*I’m inferring only for the sake of humor that I regularly perform oral sex on our Senator. I actually do not do this, as it is against my religion to blow humorless busy-bodies.

Comforting Gods

During practice yesterday, I got to thinking about Baubo and Demeter. As you recall from learning about Greek myths in grade school, the short version is that Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, is kidnapped by Hades. Demeter gets pissed off and Zeus is forced to intervene and return Persephone to her mother. Unfortunately, Persephone ate some pomegranate seeds before she left and is now forced to return to the underworld for half the year, and hence we have seasons.

It’s too easy to imagine Demeter’s grief. Her daughter goes out swimming with some friends and suddenly she’s gone. It’s that moment in the grocery store when you are sure you can still hear her chatting on the cell phone and you turn to find the aisle is empty. And you at first are sure she’s just down the next aisle or the next. And then you stop moving because you think, well, this is ridiculous. If she’s walking around looking for me and I’m walking around looking for her, we could spend an hour just missing each other. And so you call her cell phone, kind of already laughing to yourself about how you will joke about how funny it is that you’re probably not more than fifty feet apart and yet you’ve got to get her on the phone.

But it’s busy. Not her, not voice mail, just busy.

Then, you turn the corner and there are two of her friends standing there looking at your daughter’s crushed cell phone. “Where is she?” You ask. And they shrug and say “She went off with some guy.” “Some guy? Did you know him? Did she know him? Did you even try to stop her?” Now you’re pissed off.

But when they say “No, we didn’t know him. And he just grabbed her, even though she was screaming and crying.” you must want to have a gun right then, to shoot them, to shoot him, to shoot yourself.

I think we all understand Demeter’s impulse to rid the world of everything that grows. I think we all sometimes envy her ability to do it. And it wasn’t as if some stranger took her daughter. Hades was her brother. And Zeus, also her brother, who knew where Persephone was and could have told Demeter at any time, let her keep looking for her daughter, knowing that she’d never look in the right place.

To lose your whole family through that kind of betrayal, no wonder she went crazy and hid herself as an old lady and remained inconsolable.

Until Baubo, another old woman, gets her drunk and makes her laugh. The story goes that Baubo lifted her skirts and sang dirty songs. I imagine she sang Bessie Smith; what other woman sings so frankly about fucking–“He’s a deep sea diver with a stroke that can’t go wrong / He can stay at the bottom and his wind holds out so long”–and heartache–“Nobody knows you when you down and out / In my pocket not one penny / And my friends I haven’t any”?

I keep thinking about Karin Agness and her outrage at The Vagina Monologues. And I keep thinking about that old woman lifting her skirts up and shaking her cooter in the face of a god for a laugh.

I mean, it worked.

Being with that old Baubo as she shimmied and sang and showed herself moved Demeter to laugh.

I think, to get back to it, this is another reason I feel bad for Agness. She’s so sure that any talk of vaginas must be, by definition, degrading women by reducing them to just this one body part that she advocates for a position that would never talk about them in public.

And yet, this is a way for vastly different women to connect. What did Baubo have in common with Demeter? Demeter is the Divine Mother. Baubo is a servant. What they share is the common experience of having a cooter.

Imagine it. Baubo stands in front of a god driven out of her mind with grief. Slowly, the old woman raises her skirts.

Look. Look at this. You are not alone.

That’s something, folks, the ability to comfort gods by reminding them of what we share in common. To see that as degrading or reductionist is pretty funny when you think about it.

Victory is Mine!

I finally finished that god damned Libertarianism: A Primer.

Non-libertarians, let me warn you that, for all their talk of a utopia where the weak and morally deficient just die off and they use our corpses for fertilizer, I’m convinced that they’ll actually do away with us by reading to us from this book until we kill ourselves to escape it.

I have some issues to raise and some refutations (is that a word? It should be. Let’s coin it, if it’s not.) to make, but my brain is mush.

Later, though, later we shall let the refutating begin.

Refuting.

….shit…

Another Disjointed Mess of a Post

1. When Shaun Groves linked to Tiny Cat Pants, I thought that was pretty cool, considering that he and I could not be less religiously compatible. It takes a lot of bravery to expose yourself to ideas wildly different than yours. I know that such exposure hasn’t gone so well for him lately, but when I read

I believe, having now researched not only the pagan-copycat claims against Christianity but also the claimers, that this movement is primarily joined for personal profit and publicity and is supported, if not lead, by admitted Wiccans, Satanists and Atheists hiding behind pseudonyms and half truths and funneling their theories through publishers, blogs and other outlets also openly supportive of Wicca, Satanism and Atheism and such nonsensical fringe topics as phychics, astrology, tarot card reading, alien abduction, the lost city of Atlantis and ghosts. This is not, in other words, a movement as credible as it is well spoken and prolific. But it is powerful, so be careful, pray and learn in community – never alone.

my first thought was, “Well, fuck me, that’s the beginning of the end of Shaun Groves’s reading of Tiny Cat Pants.” My second thought was, “Damn, there’s a movement of Wiccans, Satanists, and atheists that can remain anonymous and write on nonsensical topics AND profit from it. Why doesn’t anyone ever let me in on this shit?”

2. The readership of Tiny Cat Pants has remained pretty steady over the last couple months and yet there seems to be a general consensus that it’s suddenly gotten “popular.” This is ridiculous.

I guess.

I guess I do feel like things have changed a lot since I started. I feel a lot more guarded about things, even though, I suppose, from all the cooter talk you’d not guess this. It’s just a sleight of hand. I distract us all from the painful stuff with the loud flashy stuff. If you guys knew how often I sit at home alone… well, if not for the Professor and Sarcastro insisting I stop acting like a fucking idiot and this weird shit that’s happened lately, I’d make Kleinheider look like an extrovert.

3. I also feel a lot more uncertain. I don’t like it, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I mean, I feel like it’s making me a better person, but god damn, it sucks. I don’t know if being a tax and spend liberal is the best way to be. I don’t know if Christianity is really wrong. I’m not sure if feminism goes far enough or too far or what.

And these were things I used to think I had pretty well figured out. But you know, you come to care about folks who hold opinions vastly different than yours and you come to respect them as people and even if you don’t agree with them, you can’t feel smug in your dismissal of their positions*.

4. But I still believe that a lot of the bullshit between us that feels inevitable is not; that we, as Bridgett continually reminds us, are a story-telling animal and the stories we tell shape how we see the world. But we can tell other stories about what we’ve been through and about what we’re going through that make us happier and healthier.

I was thinking about it this way, that we’re like folks who use a well-worn path to travel on a large mountain. We use this path, our parents used this path, and their parents and on back presumably used that same path. It’s familiar and it gets us to where we’ve always gone. It often seems inevitable that we will take this path.

And yet, sometimes, I catch glimpses of more ancient, crumbling paths near ours–which leads me to believe that we did not always take this path, but moved to it when the old one became impassable. And sometimes, I see folks braver than me cutting new ways through the rocks. Not every new path will be a better route to where we’re going. Not every path will be worse. Sometimes, the paths may take us places we didn’t even know existed. Those places may be better or worse than the places we always go.

I don’t know.

But I do know that what seems inevitable is not.

We can learn new ways.

5. I still feel like a disjointed mess (much like this post). A lot is going on because of Tiny Cat Pants and it’s true that Tiny Cat Pants is different than it was and will continue to become different than it is. I don’t know how. And, frankly, I’m kind of terrified. I feel like things have kind of sucked around here lately. But when I look back at recent posts, I can’t put my finger on anything where I can say “Yep, that’s what’s going wrong.” So, I think it’s just that I feel unsettled and uncertain and unsure about how to express that.

A lot of that comes from the fact that the best thing about this place is not my doing. Somehow this is a place where people of vastly different background can come together and talk and fight and crack jokes and be heard and listened to. I don’t know for sure how that happened and I couldn’t explain it to others to replicate it. But I don’t know of any other place where people who actively disagree with each other can talk about politics and gender relations and other touchy things and it not devolve into flame-wars or where the people who disagree with me leave in a huff.

And I’d be really sad to lose that. Though, sometimes, I think what’s happening here is so weird and fragile that eventually it will fall apart and this will become just like every other liberal feminist blog on the planet where I sit around and write to a bunch of people who pretty much agree with me.

Not that such a scenario wouldn’t be easier than reading through Libertarianism: A Primer while I’m on the shitter. Easier, but when that happens, if it happens, it’ll suck.

*Yes, fuck you, Sarcastro and Exador. I do mean you. You’ve fucking ruined me with your libertarian bullshit–“Just because our world-view is different than yours doesn’t mean it’s not coherent.” The next thing you know I’ll be driving around in some truck the size of Canada just running over hippies and drinking and shooting at rural stop signs.