Our civilization will reach a point in the future when we expect technology to work, but we don’t keep up with learning of how or why. Information will climax with critical mass. Will society break back down into master/worker? Would a large-scale pandemic save us from over-population, wanton consumerism and general debauchery? The biblical Sodom and Gomorra did have at their disposal every depravity known and unknown in their homes, one mouse click away. The nightly news spews fear and gore and we are so desensitized that we barely notice the gross. We talk about atrocities with the same cavalier attitude that we discuss a car accident or a celebrity death. It is so easy to stir the masses and sway the opinion of many with the drumbeat of one. I don’t know where we are headed or what the future holds, if we are even entitled a future. There are commissions on light pollution, noise pollution and ordinances to regulate dog ownership and the height of the grass in your yard but we are so divided by all these special projects that we have lost some common sense. Yes it is great to fund and maintain animal shelters but until there are not any hungry children in homeless shelters, the dogs can starve or be put to death. Recycle, absolutely but how about having felons be responsible for trash and recycling in lieu of going to jail. Decriminalize hemp and improve the economy. That we live in a nation that has made prisons a profitable industry and that prison towns rely on a constant influx of inmates is wrong. The healthcare and pharmaceutical machine make a living on the sick, dead and dying. It is economically irresponsible to cure heart disease, cancer and obesity because without them, healthcare would fail to make money. The single largest employer in Greenville County is Greenville Hospital University Medical Center. Hospitals should be free, medicine should be free and until we have seriously regulated medicine the big three will not be cured. All these foundations, all these marches, all these ribbons and tee-shirts and what real progress has been made?

I propose that the shear amount of information in this world is increasing at the rate that we will reach a point sometime in the future. When this happens I would like to subscribe to the hope that we will have an evolutionary leap and the community memory and recall will be part of a nurtured collective knowledge. We will see knowledge that will be both ancient and brand new. I imagine the placental automatic transfer for all knowledge to all babies, like the knowledge to breathe or the knowledge to beat one’s heart. I fear that if this evolutionary hiccup happens that there may be a segment of the population that doesn’t get it. Doesn't just "know" the things everyone else knows. The enlightened population will become a ruler class enjoying the knowledge, the power and the fruits of the labor of those not evolved. Could we experience a world with the normal and the enlightened, just as some suspect the Neanderthals shared the countryside with the newer, improved homo-sapiens? If the lesser of the two populations took advantage and behaved as dominant cultures generally behaved, it would not be outrageous to think that there would be an uprising and the potential for loss of knowledge. Great civilizations have come and gone before us, failed without our understanding completely how they slipped away. Children of 2009 know more by the time they are twelve, their brains crammed full of ideas, computer prowess and political and religious knowledge. More I think that twenty year olds from decades ago. Is the information age, the dawn of the last age? Will something like a pandemic or evolutionary leap make it possible to continue at this pace? If an uprising caused the manufacturing to cease, how would American households cope without paper-products, prepared food? I am excited to see where and how far America goes but I am not at all under the delusion that our lives are guaranteed or that comfort and happiness are rights we are entitled to.

Pink and Green Hippo On a short bridge to nowhere

Friends are only friends so long as you know them. There is an awkward gap between when you knew everything about someone and not knowing very much at all. Not knowing their schedule, their new habits, their new ambitions, their troubles, their interests. Since when did Evans become the most decorated underwater basket weaver in Vegas? The gap between knowing someone and not knowing is a tricky thing. It starts slowly, like ivy over a bridge. You barely notice the ivy and then it has covered the bridge and your yard and is coming up the porch steps. Days turn into weeks into months or seconds into hours into days. Your connection is changed and by the nature of the change is difficult to fully appreciate. An everyday update is weekly check-in and suddenly a year or two has past. What do you say? Say I forgot you. Say we forgot each other. I am changed and you are changed. Say hello. Say I have missed you. The longer you or I wait the faster the ivy grows. Soon we will not even remember to look. I love my friends, I miss them and I mean it. The tragedy, humor and stupidity of my condition is that some days I see perfectly and clearly the solutions to troubles like these and it is 5:00am in the morning and John is scowling at me for staying up and my friends are all asleep. My own brother wanted to know why I never called him. It was in part because when I thought to call he wouldn’t appreciate being woken up with my intentions or ideas. My best ideas and intentions come when I am least prepared to follow through in any tangible way. I say I will call and I don’t. I forget and get embarrassed. It is difficult to explain to the one person who knows me best and most. If he doesn’t get me then the people that do or did or will are rare indeed. I write, but not as much as I should to hone any craft. I am prolific if nothing else. I try to imagine what would be appropriate or usefull to anyone. I try to imagine how or why a blog would be anything other than an archive. It will be an electronic conjoin of the binders and binders full of stuff here, going unread and unfinished. I wonder if I am ever going to be brave enough to be useful to anyone else. I am very good at trying. I am very good at noticing opportunities to make change. Sometimes I am very good at knowing what to say. I am very good at connecting to a disproportionately diverse number of people. I fit it. I find an in. I find a way when I am cornered with real people in public in unavoidable situations. I make friends easily and lose them often. I am diametrically both shy and outgoing. I talk louder when I am nervous and have never managed to back down from a confrontation that required bravado or potential bleeding. I am not afraid to die but terribly afraid of failing to live. When it comes to being behaved I can offer that I am always behaved. Sometimes badly behaved, but what is it the HAVE in behavior? Can I have all of me? Every part, even the terrible bits and the grisly parts? Is it possible to roast the whole beast and enjoy every bit? Can I let you see me, hear me and expect that you will be anything but disgusted? I have intimate conversations with people that I know are just listening to me go. I understand that I am often much more invested in my idea of a relationship than the other party. It used to torture me. With some help I have learned to accept what happens. I have also learned to enjoy every bit of happiness I get from people. Though I am married and happier than ever with my husband, I have had the distinct honor of being in love over and over. I find myself drawn to people as powerfully as I am disgusted by them. Stupidity, cruelty, waste, excess, sloth, abuse, racism, sexism all the isms – those are the things that make me angry. Those occasions when I see my worst in others I am openly disgusted, with them and myself. How will I ever dim down my eyes and live in the shade? I don’t crave the white lights of hyper reality and beauty and bliss and I certainly don’t want to live in the dreary, dreamy, dark without hope. How can I hate people and have so much optimism about their possibilities? I dream of indifference. I would love to not notice. It would be nice to be an emotional amputee. I would love to not see jowls and feel hatred. I would love to hear the voice of man and not be moved by his words, or timber, or cadence. I would love to smell smells and just notice, not smelling something and being slingshotted into the past into a past place or hurled forward into the oblivion of possibility. What life is this that I live in the never still between? I take a moment to feel sorry for myself and then the opposite comes as certainly as a coin has three sides. Tales negative, heads positive and the narrow rim of the coin is neutral. I wait for my coin to land on the edge. I type and get excited by a new descriptive way to say the same ideas. I repeat myself in frustration, with fear that I will not be heard or accepted. I feel sorry for myself just long enough to make another way to describe what is happening. Then I realized of course that I am truly more blessed than any one single woman I have ever or will probably ever meet. Healthy, pretty children who are quick-witted and not retarded. My husband gets angry, gets scared, gets disappointed, gets sad for me but then he does the one thing I can’t imagine anyone else doing – he gets over it and we keep going. He sees me and hears the things I say when I am really mad. Angry mad and mad mad. The mad mad can be terrifying and exciting. If you jumped out of plane most everyone would be terrified, unless you could slow your life way down and notice that you are falling out of the sky. You might be able to respect and appreciate your position in the world. You might be able to appreciate your ability not to freak completely out. My life is not like jumping out of plane or like a box of chocolates. I am still finding new ways to describe my life. Why would I try? Because I want to hear from someone else that they feel like me or hear like me or smell like me. Perhaps there is another person who can describe a thing without using three dissimilar adjectives and two ors.
My hippos are pink and green. On the Omara Reserve in Kenya the animal that is more feared than any other is the hippo. Yet the hippo is often displayed in our culture in a cute, endearing manner. Hippos are nocturnal creatures that seem in many ways to be polar their environments and polar to their expected image. Hippos spend all day in the river resting while other animals are out and about. Hippos spend most of their lives in rivers up to their ears and eyes but do not have the ability to swim even if their lives depend on it. Hippos when pressured to be out in sunlight excrete a body fluid that acts as a natural sunscreen. They make their own sunscreen! It is an amour against the African sun. Hippo jaws can exert 1800 lbs of pressure and have razor sharp teeth. With all of this fierce ability hippos do little beyond kill more people every year than any other predator and nap. They can sleep semi-submerged. Still these hippos protect their young with such devotion and determination that you can’t help but be drawn to them. They are enormous, fat, discolored ugly and all things I generally disapprove of in humans. At first they seem to be lazy and slovenly and fat and just useless. When looking further a person learns that hippos aren’t lazy, they conserve energy when it’s hot out and go out at night when there is less chance of incident and more opportunity for food. Fat hippo bodies are perfect for river life and their shear girth gives license to behave any way they want. If you don’t believe me imagine a big fatass black lady eating at the mall with her kids acting up. Are you going to correct them, aggressively? Imagine being annoyed with that woman and not saying anything. Imagine seeing some conservative guy telling her to pay attention to her rowdy kids. Imagine her on the rise up out of her chair all wild and crazy. That is sort of how I see hippos and sort of how I catalogue events in my life. Was the calm green hippo handling business or did the crazy fun pink hippo come out and play? In blood? Where was I going again? I just drifted and spent a few moments watching tv. A character just said, “Success is the best revenge” I don’t have much success so I can’t say how I’d like it. I can’t imagine I wouldn’t like it but failing a good bit seems to be working out for me for me, right now, today. Goodnight, good-day and good God I started on ivy covered vine and ended up here. Right here.

What to teach my children please.

What To Teach My Children Please
If I have succeeded as a mother it was to teach my children to do the following things:
1.) Swing wide of nature, go gently on the earth and its creatures.
2.) Trust their natural feminine human instincts and not to be deluded by the nonsense of “stranger danger” and/or the modern notion of different is wrong or bad. Doesn’t discriminate based on appearance. Ugly, blind, crippled, or crazy- everyone has something to offer. Unless they feel wrong. Then you stay the hell away from them. Or knock them out. And swing hard. Fight like life depends on it; it does.
3.) There is no fair fight. Ever.
4.) Being a bully can haunt you, so don’t throw a punch you don’t want to keep in your back pocket.
5.) Marketing is a con and tv lies. Watch the art, like the art show but don’t drink the kool aid on the way out.
6.) Suck it up! Be a culture, wisdom, interest VAMPIRE. If it remotely interests you, learn something about it, anything. For this reason only USE your friends and their friends and their friends.
7.) Don’t censor. Every bit of knowledge can be passed to a child, just toned down. Human body parts, sexuality, drug abuse, religions, belief or non belief in their scary ideas about aliens, werewolves, witches, God.
8.) Tell the truth. The shoes are ugly. The needle will hurt. But it will only hurt for few moments. If you lie about the small stuff there is no trust. Trust takes years longer to earn than lose. So start telling the truth immediately.
9.) Be willing to bet. Taking risk instills personal accountability and the willingness to pull your hair back and lay your neck bare to execution.
10.) It is O.K. to be silly. Especially in public. It confuses people and gives them something to talk about.
11.) Get up early.
12.) Never duck, make faces or run amok because it is raining. You will likely get just as wet and look stupid to boot.
13.) The girls have learned the importance of being on time – because I am always late. I suspect they will be early to everything as soon as they can drive.
14.) Art is never wrong. Not your taste, not your taste – but when you are making it, art is not wrong. No one can tell you, your artwork is bad. Period.
15.) That we know everything we have ever known. Once we learn something we KNOW it. Memory is just a retrieval system with some useful tricks for faster service. Get to know those tricks but always trust that you just KNOW something. On standardized tests, and in life – KNOW what you are doing.
16.) A Southern Woman’s favorite color is Shiny followed by Tight then Fuzzy. (It goods to know how to laugh at where you’re from).
17.) If it calls for margarine use butter. If it calls for shortening use lard. The better the fat the better.
18.) How to rack, break & play billiards.
19.) How to drive a manual transmission car.
20.) How to load and unload, properly handle and adequately fire a handgun and rifle.
21.) How to swim.
22.) How to call 911 and use the phonebook.
23.) How to properly identify authority figures and genuine EMS, rescue and other safety workers from impostors and rent-a-wreck folks.
24.) How to respect their teachers and schools and still remain true to their values. Understanding that we would always support them as parents so long as they used good manners and followed a chain of command. Even kids in the second grade need to know they have the right to really get up and go pee if they have to. I hope my girls know that.
25.) Gimme three steps: The right to ask 3 Times. Mom can I? No.
a. But I really want to and it is a good plan see. I decline again.
b. She has once last chance to go gather her evidence, rally dad or convince me –
c. Three Nos and you are out. Done. Not an all day struggle of ideas or new ways to ask the same question over and over.
26.) To be discrete.
27.) To be modest. Ok a bit modest.
28.) Virginity is a gift you only get to give yourself – ONCE.
29.) Independence is freedom and a union is a bond but they are not mutually exclusive.
30.) When you think of getting married take out a cheap plastic twelve inch ruler and look at it, hard. Now think of how many years you intend on being married to your spouse. Me and John agreed to 70 years way back in 1991 when he gave me the ring. Now put however many marks, say seventy on a piece of paper and look at it and imagine your married life. Happy. Now imagine a bad year. One whole bad year in seventy, imagine the reason? Look at it on paper. How tiny it looks it that long year. Seem hard to imagine? If ever you find yourself with marriage trouble put it to the seventy year test. Really seem hard – stretch those tick marks – all the way out, one for every month of your marriage and keep asking? A piece of paper with 12 month sections for seventy years is longer than you would think. Is this a deal breaker? I married my best friend and we made a deal, a promise. 70 years. A few bad months or even a bad year is easy to put into perspective with the proper ruler.
What I have yet to teach my daughters and would love help with:
1) How not to worry about opinions.
2) How to perpetuate motion or put toilet paper back on the role.
3) How to see what I want them to find/retrieve the first time they look.
4) How to not get personally involved with other peoples hurts.
5) How to tell me when I have made them angry.
6) How to spell or care about spelling/grammar.
7) How to see/hear/understand those slippery symbols that are math.

Like Punching Jesus

Fucking Him Was Like Punching Jesus – very dangerous and wrong. Altogether as selfishly as it was gratifying. I’d wanted to do it for years but waited on principal, finally giving over to carnal knowledge and pushing everything toward our pelvic entanglement. Pushing downward and struggling like mad to receive that one glorious drop of sweat from his face or hair. One single drop of proof and nourishment; full in the knowledge that it was real, it was happening. His sweat into my mouth quenched all that was ever missing and poisoned me with the relish of taste that would linger but not stay. One drop as a magical elixir holding time; a halting, to bind him into me, more even than the traditional fluid of lust. I licked the air below his face and pushed with all might to meet him, accept him and then hush the reasons to leave sooner. I think I always knew that if ever I would have him in me, the beginning would turn into the ending, counting down and backwards the going away. Now it never hurts to think of him, us, there conjoined, now if my arms fold and I think of him, my hips clench into a happy smile, remembering sweating secretly away. Punching Jesus would be the terrible thing, the dark thing I’d wanted. Getting away with it was glory and happy and memory and white light. Withdrawal and sorrow have long since faded and I select the perfection to review, hold high.

Klaxon Calling

Klaxon Calling

Oh to hear the klaxon call
The blaring naw to announce, beckon
A siren singing a nagging song
Come this way, do this thing
Right away, right now and sharply
It irked me then as I shuffled or ran
To fill my cup with duty or watch
That dark drink warming, waking
The long deep underneath thing
Never ceasing, never known, trusted
We ride in the sloshing belly of this mother
Abliged to follow the klaxon call
Mostly now I find I stand directionless
Waiting for the wind to blow
An order to move,
How holding fast has made me old
Abliged to wait for a call not coming
I was never patriotic, never really
I did my bit without paying attention
To how the rules gave me something
To whale against, to rage against
The sea rages against the break, the wall
The sailor in peace rages against the rule
My sailor is home waiting to hear
Any one thing that will compel
Action, service, creativity
A boundary to break, a parameter to push
I am a prisoner without a prison
Diseased with delusions of reminisce

Parentless, museless, drifting

Hurt Girl, Sister, Mother

Hurt Girl, Sister, Mother

You will never be the apple of his eye
You never were and never will be
But neither will she and never was she
She was stranded there just like you
Only pressured by your jealousy, fear
Your failures have been lust, greed, pride
Lust for the golden star sticker, a wedding reception
Greed for attention missed and otherwise
Pride for the ordinary, the trivial you make important
Yourself promotion is effortless and ceaseless
I weep for your progeny and the pressure you pound
I too was pummeled by a proud mother
I survived and will while you wallow, mourn again
Over and over making her death less important
Than your grieving life, proving life
You child is smart but not exceptionally so
Your degree was hard earned but not exceptionally so
Your marriage was rich but not exceptionally so
Your divorce was tragic but not exceptionally so
Your engagement was simple but not exceptionally so
Your life, your drama is interesting but not exceptionally so
Your gratitude was demonstrated but not exceptionally so
Live within the confines of your ability
Spend with the boundaries of your ability
Promote others with the passion you give yourself
Rest in the bliss of the ordinary wonder that is life
Your life, your gift, your impact, your true impact
Do something, other than parent, other than daughter
Other than sister, be something unlike your companion
Your environment, your status, your purse, your car
Be honest if for only with yourself, be honest
Who are you – Why is it so very important to please
To impress, to charm, to outmaneuver with regret
Your bribery of sadness and prideful boasting
Leave me nothing about you aside your way
Poor girl, sad girl, hurt girl, daddy didn’t this
Daddy didn’t that, husband didn’t let me be this
Husband didn’t let me be that, art girl, skater girl,
Cut girl, tattoo girl, pierced up, passed around then
Buttoned down, conservative Born-again republican,
a true chameleon so truly engineered fully
Undercover in a better imaginary world
You’ve been too long forgetting where the
Wallpaper leaves off and yourself begins
You are too covered in labels and diversions
Your are too consumed with your resume
To notice you already got the job

Touch Bases, Are We On The Same Page?

Folks who have never held the memo or read the minutes or contract documents cannot use the phrase, “on the same page” similarly folks who have never worn a uniform or gone to practice or held a ball should not use the phrase, “touch bases”. Come on. Saying stuff like this does not make you more important than you really are! The only base I ever encountered was second base in high school and flew right past that into being the kind a woman truly annoyed by this type of posturing.