About Me
I spend way too much thinking about me.
This is the blank space where that paragraph should be. 
Poem – Vertigo
Vertigo
Frisco in the light of day
Painted ghosts
Faces half-lit through windows
and necklaces,
You trailed after an invisible beauty
who only looked that way when you looked for me.
Your shadow freed the light.
A slow moving butterfly, wings trapped in honey
You need me to be Madeline (for a while)
(Here lies Judy)
But oh, the rapture
As your arms pulled me from the bay
Dried my naked body with your clean towels,
My wet clothes crumpled up impacted erased
Did you trace the line of my breasts as you laid me down?
Did you spread my legs and send me to the moon?
But oh baby, can I be Madeline for longer than a while?
I won’t forget about the necklace.
I won’t be sentimental.
I knew where we were headed,
Soaked in red.
I could stay lost.
You could keep finding me.
You could dress me up again
In green, in grey, in grey
Maybe I’ll remind you of her.
For a while.
Come with me,
straight up the spiral staircase
Higher, darker, steeper
You can’t.
You’re afraid.
But don’t forget that I–
Spinning back down
Just remember that I–
Just remember that I didn’t mean it.
I go up, I go down
I go up…
I Think I’m a Mother
I remember when I first became a mother. I remember because I couldn’t let go of my baby. Literally. I held onto her for a full two weeks, I think, after a long and painful labor. I remember being challenged by the (now seeming simple) act of breastfeeding. I remember discarding many of the modern day conventions built to make money out of women raising children and knowing, finally, that everything you really need is already built in. I was lucky that way. I also know down to my ragged bones that if someone delivered a baby, or even a kid on my doorstep I could be a good mother to that child, even without the built in perks.
My daughter is fifteen and it’s the first day of tenth grade. She’s making her own lunch for the first time. I know, I know. Don’t even go there. You see, having just the one kid, and loving being a mother has made me, well, a little resistant to this idea that they eventually grow up and leave. Or grow up at all. I only hope I haven’t doomed the poor girl with my over-protection and coddling. You know I have. You’re sitting there, thinking, wow. She has probably totally fucked up that kid just by trying to be a good mom. And it’s probably true. But I think, in our own ways, we fuck up our kids. We just do. They have to live to overcome the baggage we leave them with.
I can only hope that I left her with enough good to make up for it.
Next comes driving and then college and then…can’t we slow the clock? Does everything have to always move so quickly?
The Missing Dash in the Smiley
You probably wouldn’t notice what happened to the dash that used to make up the full old school smiley as in:
[:-)]
Or the winky:
[;-)]
There were the somewhat intolerable but often used emoticons back in the day of Usenet, before it became the web and the Facebook. And the Tumblr. And the Twitter. Believe it or not, social networking used to be a little less easy to use. We weren’t herded into various places on the web and we certainly weren’t in contact with every person we ever knew starting all the way back in elementary school.
But somewhere along the line, the dash was disappeared. It was the disappeared one. It just vanished. My daughter told me, “we can tell how old you are by what kind of smiley you use.” In all of her 15 year-old wisdom, she delivered the devastating news that I was betraying myself each and every time I put that little dash – to signify, gasp, a nose.
I miss the little dash, I have to confess. Without the dash, the smiley looks, to me, like it has a jaw problem:
[:)]
Well, I guess it doesn’t look that bad here in WordPress type, but usually, on the web, the ) is too close to the : for my liking.
Let’s not even get into the appropriation of the colon, and its promiscuous cousin, the semi-colon. I was hoping that these vital punctuation marks would one day stage a rebellion. Their army would be the half of the parenthesis for happy – ) and the other half for the sad (.
Now that I’ve put a half-sad there, alongside a period, it looks like a one-eyed smiley.
One of my favorite emoticons, though, and remember – I’m old school. I’m not talking about the ones facebook gives you or the iphone. These are typed in, invented by the internet immigrants. We used them because we HAD to.
Anyway, the blank stare remains my favorite one:
[:-|]
Can you use that without the dash?
[:|]
I guess so. It kind of looks like the Cookie Monster, though.
Most of the time, if I’m talking to old friends, I use the dash. But if I’m talking to a younger, I omit the dash to show them I acknowledge their brave new world. It’s funny that I’ve been online long enough to now be considered part of the Olds. Never thought that would happen. In my addled mind I still feel like an internet maverick, slashing and burning through the wilderness. But alas. Things have changed.
We also didn’t tolerate advertising everywhere like people do now. But that’s a different story.
As Bob Dylan would say.
The California Hunger Strike No One is Talking About
I guess because I listen to Dick Gordon’s The Story in podcast form I am well aware of the hunger strike to protest solitary confinement going on. When it began in early July there were 30,000 participants, now they are down to only 1,000. One person has died though it is not known whether he died of hunger or from suicide.
If you don’t know much about solitary confinement, you are encouraged to read this essay by William Blake (no, not that William Blake) about the years spent in solitary.
Why does this practice continue? From the sounds of things, it’s a power orgy for the prison guards who get off on exacting this kind of punishment. It would be easy to ignore what’s going on in the prison system – the victims of the prisoners didn’t have a choice to live or die, many of them, so what gives prisoners the right to a better life? I can think of a few people who belong in solitary, like Ariel Castro who kidnapped three women and held them as sex slaves. Why should he be tortured with the full extent of the law? It’s a good test to imagine whether you would consider humane treatment towards a piece of shit like that.
Poem Tuesday – Almost There
Almost There
by Timothy Liu
Hard to imagine getting
anywhere near another semi-
nude encounter down this concrete
slab of interstate, the two of us
all thumbs—
white-throated swifts mating mid-flight
instead of buckets of
crispy wings thrown down
hoi polloi—
an army of mouths
eager to feed
left without any lasting sustenance.
Best get down on all fours.
Ease our noses past
rear-end collisions wrapped around
guardrails shaking loose their bolts
while unseen choirs jacked on
airwaves go on preaching
loud and clear to every
last pair of unrepentant ears—
Cultural Evolution: Give Animals Rights
In his latest piece for the New York Times, Nicolas Kristof ruminates on two documentaries – the Act of Killing and Blackfish. He doesn’t really see an end to our ongoing ambivalence as a culture towards inhumane treatment of animals but he believes we will look back on our age and be horrified in retrospect. He closes his piece with this resignation:
May our descendants, when, in the future, they reflect uncomprehendingly on our abuse of hens and orcas, appreciate that we are good and decent people moving in the right direction, and show some compassion for our obliviousness.
I disagree with that. I don’t think we are moving fast enough. And I don’t think we should be spared any compassion when the time comes, if it ever comes.
There is a cultural shift happening that could probably be attributed to the internet; information speeds back and forth – our identities are splayed out, our morality measured by our “choices.” Capitalism supposedly gives us choices in how we spend our money – and those choices are often informed by brilliant advertising agencies. It is our choice to buy meat from a factory farm (cheaper) or from an organic farmer who raises his/her cows humanely. It is our choice to pay more to know that we are helping to make the world – and our legacy as humans – a better place. Factory farming must end. Anyone with a thinking brain knows this. But it has to start with the consumer. Unhealthy meat, unhealthy planet – those things are not in dispute. Eat meat from a factory farm and it will eventually cause you harm and your environment harm. But when it’s pushed into the realm of right and wrong people get a little more uncomfortable. Sure, all of the grossly obese Americans don’t give a good goddamned what kind of fat they’re consuming as long as it tastes good and is cheap. How do you think we got into this obesity mess in the first place? The American dream is simple: we get what we want when we want it.
But the morality of eating factory farm meat depends, probably, how willing a person is to care about those animals living like this:
I don’t know about YOU but I’d rather spend a bit more and not buy a Starbucks that day than eat food produced by farms that treat animals — our mammal relatives, believe it or not — like this.
A 2008 Mark Bittman New York Times article about feedlots and factory farming is still a must-read for anyone who has any impulse whatsoever to give a damn. I know, it’s asking a lot to give a damn. We’d much rather marinate in our indulgences and pleasures – eat our “sexy” burgers and drink our Big Gulps without giving a damn. I get it, I do. But your time on this planet is valuable. You as a member of the most intelligent species have the power to enact change, believe it or not, just by giving a damn.
The system in place, the one that keeps growing and growing, mostly unchecked, cannot be sustained. We will wipe ourselves out in our endless pursuit for food we think we need to be eating in a way we need to eat (cheap and fast):
The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, which one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, says is resulting in a “relentless growth in livestock production.”
Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.
Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.
Moreove
This past June, a National Geographic photographer was arrested for taking an aerial view of a feedlot in Kansas. Now you tell me, my meat loving friends, is this where you’d like to have your latest Subway, Burger King, McDonald’s – or supermarket meat coming from?
While nothing can really compare to the Holocaust, and I would never draw that comparison, but if you’re hiding your behavior from people something is really really wrong. I can’t think of anything more horrifying, where our health and our humanity is at stake.