I Have Strange Fantasies

I was thinking today how much fun it would be to ride around in the back seat while Sarcastro and Smiley tooled* around Nashville pointing things out.

I just think it would be neat to have a tour of a city I already know well from people who know it just as well, if not better.

Whenever I show people around town, I always point out where Zora Neale Hurston lived.  Well, where I presume she lived.  And I like to show them the city cemetery and the Bluegrass Inn.  I’ve also kind of started incorporating Fort Negley into my “must see” places.

I’m just curious about what other people think of as important landmarks, not for outsiders, but just for themselves.

 

 

*Y’all use the word ‘tool’ to mean drive or is that a Midwestern thing?  We used to tool the strip all the time.

My Name

As previously reported, quite a few people in my family has a name that starts with B.  My mom, my dad, me, the Butcher, the recalcitrant brother, three uncles and an aunt.

I have a name that is a diminutive of Elizabeth that ends in a “y.”

I have a middle name–Teckla–that I inherited from my great grandmother.

I was complaining to my parents about how I wish they’d named me Elizabeth and just called me Betsy, so that, as a grown-up, I wouldn’t have one of those cutsy “ee” sounds at the end of my name in my professional life–like Jennys who get to grow up into Jennifers.  I could have been a Betsy who became an Elizabeth.

They both said, “We just assumed that, when you grew up, you’d go by Teckla.”

Well, as the old folks say, I never…

It’s like finding out that the china you keep stored so carefully out of reach of the dog and the cats and unruly nephews were supposed to be your everyday dishes.

In Which I Use My Psychic Powers on Kleinheider

Kleinheider’s got a little post from today about how… um, well, I’m not sure.  But I think the point of the post is that, if white guys run around being all progressive, they ought to not be surprised when women and minority voters treat them just like any other progressive candidate.

I don’t want to dwell on the post.  I’m more interested in something Brittney said in the comments:

He also just said, regarding Ann Coulter’s Clinton-is-gay quip: “She has a point.”

Kleinheider, of course, declined to elaborate and so I am forced to use my powers of psychic discernment to guess what Kleinheider thinks Ann Coulter’s point is.

Is it that Clinton’s rampant promiscuity is “reminiscent of a bathhouse”?

Or is it that “there is something narcissistic about homosexuality.”

I’m going to presume that Kleinheider is utterly unfamiliar with what goes on in a bathhouse and so I’m going to guess that he believes there’s something narcissistic about homosexuality, because, as Coulter explains, “It’s just this obsession with your own — with your own essence. […] Because you’re in love with someone who looks like you.”

And then I’m going to point you to Amanda Marcotte’s astute discussion about how a hatred of homosexuality is really just a coded way of talking about a hatred of sexuality all together.

And then I’m going to say something I should have said a long time ago, but have been avoiding because I didn’t want the hassle.  But here it goes:

It’s almost impossible to detangle a hatred of male homosexuals from a hatred of women, and, if you are a man, a self-loathing that seems almost pathological.

Let’s start with the term cock-sucker, just to illustrate.  Why is calling a man a cock-sucker an insult?  Because sucking cock is gross?  Because it’s something women do?

Well, fuck you.  I’m a woman.  I like to suck cock.  Using the things that bring me pleasure as an insult against another man?  What the fuck?  How much must you hate me to consider the things I love insults?

See?

But it’s not just an insult to the cock-suckers.  It’s really an insult to the cock-suckees as well.  Why is sucking cock so gross?  Women put lots of things in our mouths and those things aren’t rendered instantly gross.  No one is saying “Fuck you, you water drinker!  You broccoli eater!  You thumb sucker!”  No, cock-sucker works only because y’all seem to believe that, inherently, a penis is kind of disgusting.

That’s really too bad.

Y’all need a movement yourselves.  Something better than the patriarchy, which has, sadly, resulted in the fucked up mess y’all are in now where power is consolidated among a very few rich, white, men and the rest of you scramble like half-starved dogs to fight over and defend your claim on any of the left-over scraps. 

Maybe you could call it penisody or cocklitude or something, a movement dedicated to penis love and acceptance.  You could just spend a little time each day taking your penis in hand, giving it a good long look, and saying to yourself, “Hey, my penis is kind of cool.  People who want to touch it in order to make me feel good are not dirty sinners who should burn in hell, but kind people I should be good to.”

Ha, that’d be so awesome.