In Which I Solve the Insurance Crisis

Okay, here’s what we’re going to do about insurance: nobody gets it.  Nope, not even rich people.  No one gets health insurance.

Instead, you buy from me a necklace with ten special beads on it (which will cost you $250).  You rub the beads against the body part that ails you for nine days, while praying to God for you to be healed.

If you are healed, it’s because you’re a good person who God loves very much.

If you are not healed, it’s because you suck and deserve to suffer.  What a shame.  Perhaps another $250 necklace might help.

Sure, it sounds like a cruel scam that serves to benefit only me, but here’s my question, America–can that be any more of a cruel scam than to deny the claim of a woman who has miscarried because you’ve decided that she had an “elective abortion“?

I doubt it.

The Cranes

I have a hard time keeping the Cranes separate in my head.  Both were poets, both died young.  But one was gay and wrote long poems designed to put T.S. Eliot in his place and the other was the son of a Methodist minister and who married a brothel keeper and who wrote short, easy to read poems.  Still, I get them mixed up.

It turns out that Hart Crane is the one who wrote the poems I don’t like, but, courtesy of Jilly Dybka over at the Poetry Hut Blog, I bring you a beautiful, passionate essay about one of this Crane’s poems.

The essayist is a great writer as well and it shows.  If a sentence like this walked by me on the street, I would spend the rest of the day imagining running my fingers across it.

Lovers, he shows us, are all prodigals insofar as they are extravagant, errant wasters of language.

Childbirth Porn

The thing that most disturbs me about the search terms that bring folks here is imagining that there’s somebody out there looking for “tiny girls fucking” or “I want to fuck my nephew” and, as they’re in the midst of that search, they see Tiny Cat Pants and decide that they need to set aside their search for gratification to read something of mine.

Believe me, when I’m looking for Viggo Mortensen naked on the internet, I’m not wasting my time reading what bloggers have to say about his latest movie.  Those are two separate tasks for two separate moments.

But sometimes there will come a phrase that causes you to stop and think about a stranger’s perversion more than you care to.  Take, for instance, the phrase “childbirth porn.”

Do you suppose that person was looking for exceptionally graphic depictions of childbirth, which, for some reason, he finds arousing?  Or do you think that there’s actually a market for images of women in the middle of labor doing…

What, exactly?

Clearly, not vaginal intercourse.  I would think anal sex would be difficult for the same reason.  Oral sex?

And, too, clearly any of this porn would have to be as fake as fake can be.

See, I’ve already given this more thought than it was worth and now I’ve got all heebie jeebies about it.