Breathe In, Breathe Out

I forgot to tell you how yesterday we came around the curve in the road at the park where the trees part and you can see the city’s ugliest house and back behind it, the rolling hills.  Those hills are so amazing they always surprise me.

Nashville is not flat, by any means, but I get used to the ways it rolls around under my feet and I forget.

I just finished this book about Aztec gods and disability studies and how Octavio Paz said that women were split open, with this wound that won’t heal and I swear it made me want to build a time machine just so I could go back to that moment when he opened his mouth to say that and kick him right in the nuts as hard as I can.

Maybe it’s too much to ask, but I really wish that, when male theorists and philosophers sat around and thought their great thoughts about what it means to be a woman, they would not talk about my body like it’s already, just by the arrangement of my genitals, a sight of violence, a place where hurt has already been inflicted.

Shoot, maybe I’ll spare Paz and just stick Huck in my time machine and he can go back and explain to Paz all about the wonders of a woman’s cooter.  When Huck talks about cooters, you don’t feel as if he’ll want to don surgical scrubs before touching you.

I have always so closely linked a woman’s genitals with not a wound but a labyrinth that I assumed the connection was blatantly obvious.  Maybe not.

Anyway, the author of this book was talking about how pain is not always something to be cured or that can be cured, that sometimes you just have to live with it and how it is that pain both so firmly situates you in your body and throws you out of it and how a body that has been marked by pain often signals a person who can transcend his or her body.

It seems to me that there’s probably something important in that, something that would lead you to understanding something meaningful about gods who pluck out their eyes or chop off each other’s heads or lose their hands.  To come face to face with the sacred means coming away altered.

I would love to know what it felt like to be you.  I guess you scientists will come along and assure me that we’re already very permeable.  First, we’re mostly nothing and then, the somethings that we are are all the time switching atoms with the things closest to us.  Plus, I breathe in the crap that the folks around me breathe out (in this instance, Mrs. Wigglebottom and I are breathing from the same still air).  Skin rubs against my skin and bits of hair and protein and saliva coat me.  I’m not just myself.

I get that.

Still, I am alone in here, me and the animal that is my body.  I keep trying to draw the rest of you in.  Let me put my arms around you; my hands on you, my lips open, legs open, open, open, open, come on in, make yourself at home to the point that when the eyes shut, you see my darkness.

It doesn’t work.

Oh well.

I try in the other direction as well.  I write to put my voice in your head, my life among your concerns.  I’m ready to spread out, too.  Me and the hills and the trees all the same thing.  I feel most alive when I feel like I am both the walker and on the walk.  I don’t know how to explain it better than that, but when those two feelings converge–when I am most open to everything and most actively spreading out into everything.

I see those hills when we walk and I feel like putting up a marker of some sort, a stick or a pile of rocks, or something so that when you come to that same spot, you know that I’ve seen what you’re seeing–that we see the same hills rolling off in the distance.

That’s as close as I reckon we can come to seeing through the same eyes.

The Good News is that I Located the Smell in the Kitchen

The bad news is that it was dead potatoes.  Just black drippy nasty all over the corner where they’d snuck unnoticed to make their trek to the afterlife.

I’m reading a book all about how it’s only from death can new birth spring and I have to say that there’s something kind of comforting in that when you’re looking at your well-embalmed grandma, but when you’re up to your elbows in the kind of stink that seems to manifest itself in small flies?  It’s a different kind of lesson.

If Nancy Argenziano Runs For President, She has My Vote

Did y’all see this?  Republican State Senator Nancy Argenziano laid the smack down on Jeb Bush and his creepy flack.

It’s so delicious, so savory that I invite you to read aloud at home.  You be Argenziano, I’ll be the Bush flack:

Argenziano: “The governor has a history reflecting accommodation of special interests as evidenced by the agencies’ contracts, and his flexible Republicanism is at odds with both America and actual Republican principles. In his heart of hearts, the governor prefers dictatorship to democracy.”

Carole Jean Jordan, Florida Republican Party chairwoman: “Personal attacks on the sitting governor of Florida questioning his character are far beyond the bounds of responsible dialogue. I sincerely hope that Senator Argenziano will reconsider her comments, especially in light of all that Governor Bush has done for the people of Florida and for the Republican Party.”

Argenziano: “Carole Jean Jordan can kiss my ass.”

Y’all, with the exception of Bob Krum and Nancy Argenziano, I wouldn’t vote Republican for dog catcher, but oh, sweet and holy Jesus, finally!  Some sense.  Argenziano tells the truth as she sees it, that Bush has so abandoned traditional Republican values as to seem to be only interested in keeping and accruing as much power as he can.

Carole Jean Jordan pulls this typical bullshit of “Personal attacks on the sitting [whatever] are terribly inappropriate.” as if we should all suddenly turn America into the land of the too polite to point out when things have gone terribly wrong.  I mean, if you can’t say “Governor, you’re a humongous fucktard” while he’s in office and it might do some good, why bother saying it at all?

This strain of the Republican party, perhaps we should call them Republofascists, irritates the piss out of me and it scares me to death to watch the rest of Conservative America sit back and nervously twitter “Oh, we can’t say anything bad about our fellow Republicans even though the Republofascists do actually very little that would seem to be in line with actual Republican values because it would be inappropriate.”

Come on Republicans!  Fuck inappropriate.

Listen.  Let’s be frank.  Non-Republofascists, the country is in your hands.  It is up to you to save our country for future generations.  Don’t be distracted by the flashing lights of “the abortion debate” or the loud whistles of “They’re going to kick God out of the country” or the sweet smell of the “Gays are ruining marriage.”  Stay focused on the fact that there’s a strain of your party that has a lot of power right now that you guys need to take care of in whatever scary backwoods Republican way you take care of things.

You have to stop being nice and start taking some folks to the woodshed.

Because we liberals can’t do it.  All we’ve got is the fucking Democratic party which, I firmly believe is run by coin-toss–“Should we say something really asinine that has little to do with the facts or should we attempt to show how we’re just like Republicans only we can’t get elected?  Let’s flip a quarter and see.”  Seriously, I’m almost positive that the Democratic party is run by the same method we start football games.

So, don’t count on us to get our shit together any time soon.

It’s on you.  Hold your leaders accountable.

And you can start with getting used to how good it feels to say “[Name of person in power who is royally fucking up and suggests y’all just shut up and take it] can kiss my ass.”

How Come Whenever I Want to Stab the Butcher in the Hand, He’s Never Home?

Ring… ring…

“rrmMellow…”

“What?”

“Hello?”

“Where’s my car, motherfucker?”

“Umm…”

“Where are you?”

“I don’t know.  Hold on.”

“Is my car with you?”

“Let me try to remember.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m looking!”

“Where’s my car?!”

“Um bjkroehdlbowontown widhddkei blekcoelveiwleoc wlelreldob goidntoglcucuch.”

“What the fuck language are you speaking?  I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

“Oh, ha, okay.  Bye then.”

“No, where are you?”

“Your car is downtown.  I’m in Bellevue.  We’re going to come pick you up for lunch.”

“Is my car going to be towed?”

“No, I put it someplace safe.”

“Where?”

“Downtown!”

I Have the Most Awesome Idea for College Football

You know what would be so awesome?  If someone developed a computer program that figured rankings of college teams and if those rankings updated by the minute based on what was happening in that game and across the country.  Like, right now, we’re watching USC and Arkansas, and the score is 0-0.  USC is ranked 6 and Arkansas is unranked. 

If, all of a sudden, USC dropped to 12, we would immediately flip over to see what the fuck Georgia Tech just managed to do.

I think that’d be a riot.