Old Springfield Highway, This Morning.

I Liveblog True Blood Because I Liveblog True Blood

I missed that that chick was naked last week!

Well, you’d think vampires would have to be buried a little deeper.  I mean, what if it rains tomorrow during the day?  They’re going to pop right up like bobbers on a lake.

Oh, Sam.  Why must you be the biggest doofus on this show?  And how much hard work is it to be the biggest doofus on this show?  You have to majorly out doofus some doofuses… doofi?…

Oh my god, there’s another black person on this show!  Kenya?  Kenya, I raise a toast to you, though it appears you may be related to Tara, so I’m not sure your appearance actually makes me feel like there might be more than two black families in this town, as unlikely as that would seem.

Also, Jason seems to be on the verge of being smart, but I kind of doubt we’re going to see him actually go over that edge into using his head.

Put some clothes on, Sam.

Vampire guts make me feel a little sick to my stomach.

Terry, listening to politicians also gives me a seizure.  You are not alone.

Jason, no, the second you say “Don’t tell…” someone’s going to tell.  Oh, he’s an idiot.

Sookie!  Read his thoughts.  Read his thoughts.  Why are you asking him questions?  Read his mind!  What is the use of having powers if you don’t read his thoughts?

Ahhhh!  Lafayette, you are so handsome in your suit!  And sneaky!  Oh, and threatening!  Hurray!  Let’s let Lafayette have his own show, a show where there are black people who live in a town who aren’t related!

Okay, Amy is pretentious and a nutjob, and I thought she was evil, but she does seem to care about Jason.

And what dirt repellent does Bill use?  He can be buried alive and come out of the ground clean?

Okay, idiocy clearly runs in the Stackhouse family.

Again, idiocy clearly runs in the Stackhouse family.

Ha, I kind of love Jessica’s enthusiasm for being a vampire.  “I want to kill people.”  “You suck.”  She already is the most interesting person on this show.  “I’ll find a real vampire and he’ll kick your ass.”  Please, find a real vampire to kick Bill’s ass.

Oh my god, Tara’s mom has got to be the most evil person on this show.  How many times did Tara help her and she’s going to pull this shit?  Wow.

Well, we’ve seen growth in Jason for sure.  At the beginning, when he thought he killed a woman, he ran.  Now, he calls the police.

Oh, Bill, don’t be in Eric’s debt.  That’s a bad idea.

I think, as a rule, when a stranger shows up to take you to her house, when she asks you if you have no family or friends, it’s not right!  You’re right!  It’s not right.  Something’s not right with her.

But she is pretty.

So, the message of Sam seems to be that sometimes, stalkers are rewarded.  So, America, go ahead and act like jackasses, and scary stalker weirdos and you will get the girl!  Gah, whatever.

Is Andy the killer?  Earlier in the episode, I was convinced it was Renee or Hoyt, but now I think it’s Andy.

Wait.  Now I’m convinced that it is Renee.

And it’s GILLIAN WELCH!  Oh, I love this song.  Love it.

Okay, so let’s recap.  Tara’s mom sucks.  Rewarding Sam for his nutty stalkery behavior sucks.  But Eric taking off his coat just to show off his massive shoulders was very nice.  This show is on the verge of being good.  Every week, it’s good enough to keep me watching, but not good enough to convince me that it’s worth my time.

Something needs to happen with Sookie.  That’s the thing.  She needs to change in some massive way and though they keep telling me that a lot has happened to her (and I have watched and seen that a lot has), I haven’t yet seen it having any effect on her.

So, even though the story revolves around her, it’s starting to feel a bit like a donut.

And when do we get a True Blood soundtrack?

The Sun is Gonna Shine in My Backdoor Some Day

There’s a lot that is unpleasant about blogging.  It doesn’t outweight, for me, the inherent pleasantness in the activity, but there’s a lot that’s not so great.  I’ve been threatened, trolled, had my words twisted and pulled apart by people who weren’t looking to understand but to win, and I’ve had my reputation smeered in ways that hurt and upset people I care about in real life, and in ways that, though it happened ages ago, still come up.

Though I often forget it, Sarcastro once said something to me that has kept me from greater heartbreak on-line–“The internet is not real.”

I would modify that, a little.  I think that this is obviously real.  Here I am writing this and it appears on screen and you react to it or you don’t.  But it leaves evidence of its existance and it causes things to happen.  I think it’s as real as it gets.

Just in the years since he told me that, I’ve come to believe that the internet is not True, only the illusion of True.  Hell, maybe Shakespeare’s right and the whole world is a stage and we are always already acting our parts.  But that is even more true on the internet.  I cannot see your face.  I cannot hear the shake or the joy in your voice.  I cannot hold your hand.  I cannot shut my eyes and just listen to you snore quietly on the couch.  I trust that you are real, but I cannot, in this medium trust that I know the truth of you.

And I cannot know whether you are trying to show me the truth of you or just trying to have a forum in which you can unaccountably act your shit out.

Which brings me to piece of wisdom I am glad to have, part two–Say Uncle’s slogan “I do this for me, not you.”

As a progressive, this offends me at some core level.  I mean, I like to believe that, when I’m at my best, I’m serving the greater good.  Built into that is obviously the belief that it is the right thing to serve others.  And yet, I don’t think that’s deliberately possible on the internet.  What you do can achieve good, but I’m not sure you can set out deliberately to really make change on the internet and expect it to actually happen.

Change, by definition, means some core Truth has been altered and I don’t think there’s much core Truth out here.  You run, repeatedly, into great fictions instead.

I think, though, that this is okay.  That it’s actually useful to see this as a fiction.  This is not the battlefield; this is the fireside where the stories about the battles get told, where courage to face the battlefield tomorrow is reaffirmed, where the decisions to leave the battlefield all together are made.

And once you see this as Story, not as fact, the other useful thing that emerges, I believe, is the knowledge that this is not just some random shit that has never happened before, but that there are patterns and characters and lessons handed down, and though we often must learn them again and again, we have not been abandoned to learn them without guidance.

I know I go on and on about how much I love Moya Cannon’s poems.  I want to remind you again of the end of “Night” when she writes

I got out twice,
leaned back against the car
and stared up at our windy, untidy loft
where old people had flung up old junk
they’d thought might come in handy,
ploughs, ladles, bears, lions, a clatter of heros,
a few heroines, a path for the white cow, a swan
and, low down, almost within reach,
Venus, completely unfazed by the frost.

See, we have not been abandoned.  Our old people put stuff they thought might come in handy–real knowledge about what it means to be human–where they’d hoped it could be found.  We all have to earn that knowledge ourselves, but we don’t have to start from scratch.

Reading Theriomorph last night reminded me of that part of the poem.

How do you find what is real and useful when you are surrounded by fiction?  I think you have to look for patterns, look for fictions that echo off each other in ways that ring true.  It’s harder work than just taking “people” at their word, but it’s work that serves well, I think.

Trouble in Mind

1.  William Salatan over at Slate writes:

Now, I like to think of myself as an open-minded guy. And I love my mother-in-law, really. How many guys can honestly say they love both their home-renovation contractor and their mother-in-law? I am truly blessed. Still, the thought of my mother-in-law carrying my child … well, let’s just say it hadn’t occurred to me.

But now, here it is. Motherhood is splintering. You can have a genetic mother, a gestational mother, an adoptive mother, and God knows what else. When one of your moms is Grandma, it’s even more confusing.

To which I must reply: Get the fuck over it.  Is there some god-given right I’m aware of to not be confused or made uncomfortable by the choices of others?

Plus, for gods’ sake, Motherhood is not splintering any more than it ever has splintered.  People all the time find out that the person they thought was their mother isn’t or that the person they thought was their grandmother is really their mother or that they are adopted or whatever.  And they’ve been finding those things out for millenia and yet we still have not managed to kill ourselves off, so maybe we can stop acting like we’re all teetering on the edge every time these women get some newfangled idea.

2.  Between The Black Snob and Flea you can find everything there is left to be said about Sarah Palin at this point.  I want to quote for you all of Flea’s post with a “Yes, see, that’s just what I was saying” about every other sentence, but that’s probably bad form.  Here’s the part that sticks with me, though:

God, it’s predictable. I can only assume Palin was one of those women who thought she was the exception, the special one that didn’t need feminism, just can-do conservative bootstraps to pull herself up with. She was the one who didn’t need to “play the victim.” And she was perfectly willing to sell out all other women who weren’t as special as she is, because there can only be one token woman, anywhere, anytime.

Sucks for her to find out she’s not special after all, she’s just a slut in a towel that can be blamed and shamed like the rest of us, so the McCain boys can slink away, untarnished by their own cataclysmic mistakes.

Amen, Flea, amen.

3.  Clearly, I should have spent my afternoon downtown at the protests.  It looks like they had a nice turnout.  But this part?  “One of their stated goals is to reverse the basic gains gays and lesbians have made in their rights to adopt.”  It brought me up cold.

I had not heard this.  I read it and I am sore afraid it’s true, but I had not heard.  Have any of you?

Some days, when I think about what is about to happen in Tennessee, I feel so helpless.  What can we do in the face of so much evil, especially when that evil is preached and reinforced in churches across the state every Sunday?

Some days I feel like all we can do, effectively, is to stand up and speak honestly about what we’re seeing, to bear witness to it and to fight it every step of the way, even though we will surely lose, so that when they try to turn around in ten or fifteen or fifty years and say “You just don’t understand.  That’s just the way things were back then.  Everyone was like that.  It wasn’t anything against gay people, it was just how society was.  Nobody thought it was wrong.  We didn’t know any better.” We can say, “Fuck you, we told you, every step of the way.”