After the Altar

First off, America, I ask you–have you ever seen a paw so cute?  Tucked up under her cheek so demurely?  I about can’t stand it.  And look at her nose spots!  You can practically hear her honk-shoos.

Second, I took down my altar for this year without taking pictures of it.  Lucky for y’all I set up a smaller configuration devoted to my health and wellbeing so y’all can stare at that and pretend like it’s the same thing, which it basically is, except the tiny cauldron is moved and I took all the food products off.

That’s Mack’s handywork, there under all the woo-woo shit, for those of you who remember that he was putting this together for me.

Here’s a close-up of the candles.  If you look in the upper right hand corner, you can see Robert Johnson, or at least the lid of the container that holds dirt from all three of his graves.

I’m a firm believer in using a physical object to focus your intent on, a place to let your good energy accumulate and to let the work go on even when you’re not present.  The red candle, for instance, is burning away my health problems and the spell on the wall is accumulating good health to work on me as the opportunity arises.

Random Things I Never Want to See Again as Long as I Live

I seem to recall hearing a story about a prince with two penises who spent his whole life looking for a woman with two vaginas with whom he could live happily ever after (trust me, read the post below this and it will make sense) and he never found her and so his spirit still roams the land, but much smaller than it was in real life, copulating with people’s noses and that’s why we have snot.

It’s stupid, but I could have sworn we learned about it in my folklore class in college and yet the internet let me down.

But I did stumble onto a body-modification site and, good sweet Jesus, I would return to Christianity if I could purge the sight of the things those men have done to their penises out of my head.

I don’t consider myself a prude and yet, yet, I have found a line I cannot cross nor support a loved-one in the crossing of and cutting yourself a cooter-like entrance on the bottom of your penis so that your loved-one can lick your urethra or cutting your penis in two or just cutting half of it off is that line.  Pierce away!  Tattoo away!  Not for me, but more power to you.  But hacking away at yourself?

Nope.

That’s where I have to part company with the body modifiers.

My Nerdiness Reaches New Heights!

Okay, so I was all set to write a post that would rehash the whole Tiresias question, because I grow more and more convinced that we have it better, but then I decided that it might be a heterosexist question and I got all caught up on trying to remember Tiresias’s name to begin with and then I read that “Since Cronus ruled over the earth, the heavens and the sea, Adamanthea hid Zeus by dangling him on a rope from a tree, suspended between earth, sea and sky, and thus invisible to his father.”

Cool, right, but it got me thinking about that dude who can only be killed when he’s got one foot in a tub and one foot on a goat and I for the longest time could not convince myself that it wasn’t Taliesen, who, you may recall, as a child is given the task of stirring the witch Ceredwin’s cauldron of wisdom and three drops fall on his finger, burning him.  He sticks his finger in his mouth (Much like how Fionn mac Cumhaill ended up eating the salmon of knowledge) and is immediately granted great wisdom, the first instance of is the realization that Ceredwin is going to be pi-ISS-ed at him.

But no tub/goat straddling.  Finally, after a lunch hour of research, I remember that it’s dear Lleu Llaw Gyffes, who also has a kind of jerk of a mother figure who has to be tricked into giving him the stuff he needs in life (so you can see why I was confused).

Anyway, it turns out that Lleu’s Gaulish counterpart, Lugus, is sometimes attributed with three penises, in which case, I think, we’re brought nearly full circle, because it’s hard to say whether a man with three penises is having the best of times or the worst of times.

Say Uncle Oppresses Me and I Missed It?!

All I can say to that is that maybe you need to be a little firmer in your oppression of me, sir!  So to speak…

Ha, no, it’s very cute, the gun bloggers are all worried that linking to women in bikinis shooting guns will hurt the gun-rights campaign.

I decided to interview well-known internet feminist, Aunt B., to get her take on the whole thing.

Me: Do you find straight guy’s fascination with women in bikinis doing things to be somewhat ridiculous?

Me: Yes.  However, in this specific case, not so much.

Me: Why is that?

Me: Well, first of all, it was clearly labelled so that, if you are a reader of Say Uncle’s blog, you would have known that you were going to, if you followed the link, get a picture or a video of women in bikinis shooting guns.  Second, there was nothing in his commentary to indicate that he or other gun nuts think that the only way women should be allowed around guns is if we’re all bikini-clad.  In other words, there was nothing prescriptive.

Me: So you weren’t annoyed?

Me: No, and I’m a feminist; you know how we are.

Me: Ha, ha, ha.

Me: Ha, ha, ha, ha.

Me: So, the problem is not that men find women sexy.

Me: No, of course not.  The problem comes when men act like the only thing women are good for is being sexy or that, if women want to participate in things, we have to be sexy.

Me:  But might women be turned off from the gun-rights movement by videos such as this?

Me: I think it depends.  If the gun-rights movement is filled with lots of images and stories of ordinary women enjoying shooting and owning guns and going to the range for our own reasons and videos of sexy women shooting guns are just a small subset of the images of women shooting guns, then, no, I don’t think it turns women off to guns.  If anything, we see that men who are gun-nuts do the same things that other men do–one of which is enjoying looking at women in bikinis.

But if those are the only kinds of images available to women who might be interested in guns, then, yes, it becomes a problem.

So, you see, it’s not the video itself, but the larger context.

Me: Isn’t contextualization some of that hippie liberal shit?

Me: Yes.

Me: Okay, just wanted to be sure.  I think that’s everything.  Thanks for your time.

Me: You’re welcome.

Edited to add:  I will say, though, that it impressed the shit out of me to see men sitting around talking about this stuff and, though I tease, I hope you don’t take my teasing as anything more than an indication of my loving delight.  I am tickled that y’all would see something like that and worry about what women who see it might feel.  Wow.

And thanks, really.

Brittney, I love you, man!

I realized last night that I’m almost always the one moving away and never the one moved away one and, frankly, there’s a way in which being moved away on really sucks.

So, Brittney’s moving.  To San Francisco.  And turning thirty.

It’s fun to watch her pout and piss and moan about turning thirty, just because she obviously doesn’t know.  I mean, shoot, the Butcher and I were watching some show yesterday that was all about how “You’ll never be healthier or feel better than you do in your 20s” so I know the cultural narrative is that you peek (peak… pique… shoot, you guys have me all paranoid now that I know I don’t know one peek from another) in your 20s and after that, the boobs head south, the chin sprouts hair, and your life is basically over.

But, clearly, those shows are not written by people who have actually been women in their thirties, because, dear Brittney, let me just warn you, you are about to hit it.  I don’t know if there’s a name for it but now’s the time (well, you know, after you get to San Francisco.  No need in buying this stuff just to pack it) to load up on the KY, the condoms, the sex toys, and the BenGay to keep the boyfriend limber.

It doesn’t happen right away, but sometime very soon in your early thirties, you’re going to learn what it was like for boys to be in high school.  Everyone seems plausibly fuckable and you’ll spend a great deal of time distracted by wondering how soon it will be until you can get laid again.  You’ll wonder if it would be rude to go into the bathroom at work and masturbate.  You’ll start looking around the grocery store like vegetarian isn’t just a food preference.

Everyone I’ve had the balls to ask about it agrees that it happens (I hear rumors that you get another go-round at feeling like a total out of control sex fiend closer to menopause, too.  I look forward to that.), but it’s not something anyone tells you about ahead of time.

But I’m telling you.

As for the moving, well, I don’t like it.  But I know it’s the right thing and I’m excited to hear all about it.

I just wanted to say publicly thanks for everything.  When you asked me to be the first weekend blogger at NiT, I was so excited I called everyone I knew and bragged about how I was going to be writing on a real live TV station’s website.  And I do think that writing on NiT gave me a level of respectibility and plausibility as a liberal voice that would have taken me a lot of time to develop otherwise, if at all.

The other thing I love about you, and it must have sucked, but I really appreciate your willingness to be human online–to be snarky when called for, to get pissed, to make mistakes, and to be willing to acknowledge them and live with the consequences.  There’s a really ferocious bravery in that, especially as a woman, especially as a person others were constantly gunning for, and I find it truly inspiring.

I will miss you, but I’m so proud and honored that I know you and that I’ll get to see you do this thing and the next and the next.

Your friend,

b.

p.s. Someone may have been spreading the rumor that JAG is having TV on the Fritz’s gay baby, just to liven up the Nashville blogosphere.  I’m pretty sure, that it’s not true.