Month: March 2005

This is called a Riot Wheel.

Tether

March ? - 30, 2005





I upended the dictionary
and sat amid the disarray.
That only took a moment.  Then
the words rose up and struck me
one by one, and then in pairs
and couplets
until I was quite insensate 
from the blows

The notion of originality 
quoth the sage, one eye on the headlines
one eye down the gunsight
is vastly overrated in this culture

But the world which we make reference to has changed

I upended the thousand-sided dice
and logged on to the logosphere, a word I invented
before I had my first child, a surface I visit for fun

Thrum of motors . Sound of trains . Never lived where I couldn't hear a train .
never lived where I wasn't loved . all I want is to love . i n d e f i n i t e l y
and take my lickings  too . I even want to love you, you f*ckwit
but you ain't paying attention

The sage is a chameleon with swivelling eyes
The sage is an advertisement for candy
If you look at me, you will think, rosemary, and not sage
Rosemary is blooming at my front door, even this minute
but the paschal lamb it goes with passed me over

Oh Christ
Thou lovest pardon, pardon me
for making fun of the Christians

who could love you, and not be your fool for life
your fool for tender love
but they are trying to kill me, Lord
they hate me and they persecute me

when they spit hate at me, Jesus, at me
and my queerness and my unchurched marriage

for such it truly is

I fear for life

But I have sanctified the house of bones
and borne my love two children
how could a man of hate degrade what you have blessed?

I got home this evening
and my daughter had my dinner ready
Ah yes
the wages of sin seem more than fair
but you are the tyranny of softness, hanged man
God will love me no matter how hard I hate myself
God will cling to me and never let me throw him off
And you love them, just like you love me, don't you, Jesus?

So I will try God I will try
to love myself and them
for the regard in which you hold us
close as close
But I tire of being hated and I thirst for love
a long sweet kiss in front of the Spaced Out Library

I am never going to stop standing under that lamppost
humming something I wrote for you
waiting

Some dude named Mahathir says the US owes $7 trillion US and the dollar’s about to collapse. Don’t you just hate it when people say things like that with no facts to back them up? Then he REALLY shoots himself in the foot and says we need to go back to gold. What a moron. We’re coming to days when a handful of oatmeal will look like a gold bar. You can’t eat gold, dude.

Well, I woke up at 4:30 and got up at 5 after 5, having decided that Paul didn’t deserve to be stuck in the same bed as the meat version of the Tiltawhirl. Yes, I’m having palpitations again, although not to the point that waves of dread and “Should I go to the hospital” thoughts are going through my tiny bean. Promptly made myself a cup of tea. I have no idea why drinking some caffeine would calm my heart down, but it did. Now I’ve read my way through the news – such as it is – why, there wasn’t even anything good on eurekalert.org, or fark.com, or any of my usual haunts, although the plagiarism link at screenhead.com was worth the scan – and reviewed the pix taken last night at the pub. I have to say that in my entire life, I have never seen work related pix that are quite so disturbing. All of us, with the exception of a gal in Finance, either look demonic, demented or deformed. I’m not exaggerating. It’s truly remarkable. And no, the CEO isn’t in any of the pictures, we have more class than that.

I’m really looking forward to my vacation. But then who isn’t?

A conversation





we glitter
and sink
into silence
allusions
evade us
a perfect remark
precise
implicit in
half-light
coils from
the book

a time lapse flower

a staircase sprite
lingers like perfume

if we speak
we will abolish
the amazing

the unsaid is everything

Air Writes (previously published in interface 13)







insink instinct

hammer bones

intelligence is always hunting for a venue . not just a matter
of a phone call
more like and less like
various slides and throbbing notes, modulated trills
dancing off the scope, the gap exactly right
for a lifetime of performance

into it intuit
sharpen fangs

preparation leaves me bleak
it's never saved me
knowing what comes next
has never saved me

into the evening to return a movie, & at least once a year, a ritual returned to its rightful, my body . the air . why in all this warmth, the sweet grey cloak of dusk, am I not standing naked to the elements

who are, for once
not lining up to kill me, suck the air
out of me, blind and remind me
just how weak I am

spacial special
the boundaries delete
themselves, accompany each other, giggling
about another category concept mistake
excape wile you can
creep & fly

Ur 
some combination

flow back into your beginnings like bad fx

or into your slide of the future hauling 
my partial lobotomy

o edges
o proportions

hail and gangbuster . I draw the line
& it becomes a snake, a word, a limit
& a runt from another idea's litter
vibrato, the particle that tags the wave
the wag that tells the tale of the dog

so far away

depart from all those lines
live limitless

but on this side of my skin, the joke
that inheres in every limitation rules
bones make rules
fangs take their censuses
air writes

exigent tangent, this
for a handiform critter in profile
enthroned among magazines, haloed
by brittle backwash of sodium light

you sluggard, rise and be done
with words, this is my appeal to you
to silence me

wreathed in apt and mannerly constructions

posit a tacit elixir, present and still corked

put your face against the flower and breathe

unless allergic
histamine blowout
streaming eyes
eruptions, failing bronchi
over - reaction

dance with oncogenes, muddle medullae

whims and strings of arbitrary protein

but rise & borrow the protection of my skin
I can offer this

take shelter 

then do something else.  My skin
is used to absences.

I live in a country between visits to you.  
It doesn't have a name or a physical location.
It is a lost file on a crashed disk.
Maybe one bite is missing.  
Send my teeth and clothes to Forensics 
when you're done.  It is not subject to
examination, but one has to try,

for reasons of honour
or something that sounds just as good.

I live in a room full of your ideas.  Most of them are like
windows.  Some are more like shutters, but that's the way
the analogy stretches.

I live in a skin
completely shed since last you touched it
dust mites breed where perception did

the body of god
this heaven scent flesh a sacrament
a ritual to end uncertainty

who goes there in the dark?

survivors

that is all . what will I leave
but protein in a carbon shell?

you in the eerie neon glow of a night light
tame fire, this atavistic prompting
commences stalking closure
here is a new tattoo
it reads, amid scrollwork:

Interpretation Centre for the Numinous

ain't that the luminous truth

you with godhead peering slyly out 
from every pore
distill the essences & know
what they are for

a reconciliation for these warring voices
within and surrounding, bounding
toward concrete

dust and rust . kicked up and blown
into my lungs, up into the Kootenays
to finally exhale

now, air

sniff the city
pernicious afterburn
of stone and metal
whirling with the hydrocarbons
and the odourless horror
of common compounds

(always trying to plant a kiss
(on Truth's mouth, while the creature
(deer-like leaps away

renegade in ruins

long slow cud
of indigestible idea

and drifting spin(e)wise to a new orientation

The sun's begun again.  It never stops but it cycles.

Bless this blast.  Hallow this scurvy stain.
Instead of skin, this intimation of a fleshly wall.
Charisma rats on Chaos.  Each name has a price.

Count into oblivion, or even farther
away

Oblivion is just as close or far as any whacking great idea, infinity, the limit, that interesting play on words I left lying in the bushes, around here somewhere.

Here was I rapid forward and shake into your field of vision.  It's all over so fast 
the flavour disappears
mysterious trail, invisible, and dense as Hegel

itinerant iterant


easy to be Tiresias

mendicant hierophant

smile for the ephemera machine

& air writes the epigraph

I am trying to see what the heck is going on with my site. I have posted stuff using Mozilla, and I can see everything I’ve posted for the last 4 days – and there has been LOTS. So this is a test.

Went to bed really really early, so of course it’s now 2:35 in the morning, when a middle aged woman is subject to many whims and fancies, not the least of which is an inclination to invite the Monumental Angst – which has been mooning around the yard – in for a steaming cup of something with no caffeine in it.

Hey Monumental Angst, how’s by you?

Thanks for having me over, I’ve been wanting a minute of your time.

I think, a Jersey accent, what a surprise, and say aloud, You don’t look so good, kinda pale and blobby and you remind me of something out of my childhood. Remember Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream? You’re kinda like that, except you have a mouth. And you kinda remind me of Tove Janssen’s the Groke…. she left a trail of frozenness wherever she went, and she didn’t talk much either, just stared at you. I always hated the Groke, never got the point of her. And you kinda remind me of NoFace from Spirited Away, not able to talk, but desperately needing love and rehab.

Monny just stares, with those wide scary eyes. But the body language isn’t threatening.

I’m going to put the water on for tea while I think of a polite way to ask Monny to stand on something easier to clean than the living room carpet.

See, that’s the first thing with charitable instincts, you immediately regret that you did anything, because it makes a mess in your tidy life. And my heart is pounding. Hasn’t done that in a while. Breathe and blink….

I can hear something out in the street and go to the blinds. Zow. There’s a guy behind a camera, with a crew, outside my house. I can hear an argument. When you notice the guy behind the camera, you see that he’s tired of the tight tight focus on the kitchen sink and the marriage bed and the tyranny of the middle class domesticity and wants to pull way way way back, maybe to a place halfway between the earth and the moon, where perspective is not just a fine distinction between being Chinese or Canadian, male or female, young or old. It’s one planet, and we all share its fate. And in the meantime, the sumbitch is hurting the little birch tree I planted last year, in the teeth of my husband’s objections… Haven’t we had ENOUGH problems with tree roots? he says to me.

While we’re waiting for the kettle to boil, Monny addresses me. I’ve been expecting it, but it stings nonetheless.

You and your f*cking schadenfreude, Monny says. I shrug.

You think the end of the world is romantic, or fascinating. You think it’s edutainment. But what are you DOING about it?

I’m reducing my consumption, I respond, and add, Mint, Bengal Spice or Rooibos? Monny looks at me and shakes his head.

Pointedly, he responds, And what kind of tea will be available after you-know-what?

I call it the Correction, I say, and in this part of the world there will be mint tea. Caffeinated beverages will be very expensive trade goods.

And what are you doing about that?

Nothing, I say. Because I’ll tell you something I’ve learned about human life. Every day is Christmas. Every day is the Day of the Dead. Every day is Hiroshima Day. Every day is my birthday. Periodic mass extinctions are a fact of life on this planet. Just because we’re triggering one of those periodic mass extinctions, as a species, doesn’t make it a bad thing. It’s something I don’t want, don’t want to live through, hate the idea of, but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Okay, it’s a bad thing, but I’m trying to have some perspective. If I reduced my consumption to nothing, a nouveau riche butthead somewhere else would eat what I spared in a heartbeat and still not be satisfied; only a Correction will bring the humility that’s required to get us out of this mess. My only regret, and it’s a lingering one, is that my selfishness and my biological programming ganged up on me long enough to drag two children into this world. I knew better, even then, but I allowed fuzzy thinking to overcome certainty. So I am, like many other parents, trying to give my children a golden childhood, so that they will at least have experienced some happiness before the dislocations and woundings that will pursue humanity out of the 20th century and into this, the last brief moment before we descend into barbarism yet again… You think I’m thrilled that my hopes for feminism are dead, not because women are less than men, but because access to birth control, globally, is about to grind to a halt? You think I’m thrilled that millions of people will be moving, all the time, and bringing their guns and diseases and bizarre ideologies with them? You think I don’t know that for every calorie of food I eat, 9 calories of unreplaceable, non renewable energy has been burned, to truck it to me, to fertilize it, to put pesticides on it, to till it?

So grow your own food. Think what they are doing in Havana. They are growing food, organically, in the center of the city.

Thanks, Fidel, I say, tilting my head to one side; I heard that story. And they are growing food organically because they have no choice; but they are still devoting a big chunk of their agricultural land to growing a toxic and addictive plant. I’m sure going to grow a lot of food on *this* yard. And then I have to save seed, which will keep its hybridization for – if I’m lucky – a couple of generations before it reverts back to whatever the hell it was bred from. Or maybe it’s a variety that hardly makes any seed. You know, I’ve actually thought of growing tobacco… but Paul tells me not too. Partly because he only just managed to quit again, and partly because he actually worked tobacco when he was 12, suckering. He says tobacco is the meanest plant in the world. It’s labor intensive as hell, and for what? So you can breathe poisonous smoke? It’s still tempting. No, if I grow anything on this property, it will be something small, trade goods, something that can winter over. Maybe something that kills fungus or bacteria. It’s not like we have many more years of antibiotics left.

Not the mass manufactured kind, Monny agrees. We slurp our tea and look at each other for a while. So how many years do we have left? Monny shrugs, which causes a hideous rippling to go through his (its?) grey form. It depends; of course it depends! It depends, in part, on the extent to which the global powers can maintain control over their military forces. If things shake out the Global Pandemic way, then certain countries will be in better shape than others to maintain something resembling organized culture; much will depend on the time of year, because if the Pandemic comes through during the harvest season in the Northern Hemisphere, we may live to wish we’d died of disease rather than face the prospect of starvation. If things shake out the Global Thermonuclear War way, subsequent to a showdown over oil, then twenty years, tops. You have to maintain those suckers to keep them flyable though… maybe some will be duds. Christ help you if things go bad when you have a nuclear submarine off shore. The guys on board will have nothing to lose holding your town hostage.

You need oil to get and keep troops on the ground, and in the days that are coming, troops will be withdrawn from wherever they are to police back home; if they can’t get home, they’ll form free companies like in the late middle ages or early renaissance and raise hell in whatever country they were abandoned in. If things shake out the Currency Collapse way, barter economies will actually hold up reasonably well; those people have never been anything but poor and agrarian, so they won’t miss much. If things shake out the Local Thugs Grab Power to Fight Disorder way, then you have a thousand civil wars, everywhere, and no clear picture of what the hell is going on, because the global communication network that is now bringing us remakes of Tron, God help us, will now be reduced to a bunch of ham radio operators, who may or may not be free to communicate, and may or may not have a political agenda. Mind you, I can’t help but relish the prospect of television stations all being blown up. Should have happened years ago….

Let’s look on the bright side, Monny says, after a minute. Even Angst has his moments. Sure, I say. Nanotechnology will save us. After a moment, we both burst into hysterical laughter, and then shush ourselves, so we don’t wake up the whole household. I did a shoe count when I got up; Katie’s friend Samantha is here, so we have to keep it down.

Or maybe we’ll all get religion, I say. Monny nods. But what kind of religion? The love thy neighbor kind is pretty thin on the ground these days.

I got up and got myself some ice water; that’s what my doc recommended the last time I had palpitations, and these are getting so bad that I’m having a hard time breathing. As I reach for the ice cubes I realize that Paul bought ice cream on the last shopping trip. I instantly feel much better, and then, of course, I feel guilty.

Monny sucks back the last of his tea and says, Thanks! Anyway, one of your neighbors is lying awake worrying about whether she has cancer. I’ve got at least two more calls to make before dawn.

Feeling like an idiot, I say, so you’ll be dropping by again?

Count on it, he says, and lets himself out the kitchen door. Zeek! comes back in, growling under his breath, his tail like a bottle brush. It’s four o’clock in the morning…. time to go back to bed. All the drips Monny left on the carpet are gone. So is the film crew. I rub my eyes, and wish my hallucinations weren’t quite so vivid. The pic is of the Groke… not exactly what Monny looked like, but you get the general idea.

If you use Mozilla you can see this. If you use Internet Exploder, you can’t. Pic is me pretending to record yesterday, pd took the picture. I light a candle for Mike and Tori. Kate’s friend took a whole bunch of pictures of her sleeping and some of them are incredibly cute, and of course I can’t post them.

Pictured is me recording (or pretending to) with P.D. Wohl. 2019 SAYS HE’S ON SPOTIFY.

enough sleep
2005-03-27— Posted by: allegra

I’m recording later today… actually I kinda have to kick ass and get out of here cause I’m sposed to be there for 11 and pd’s got more people coming at 3. Keith has announced that we are out of essentials like crackers, milk and coffee. Saw Ray at Glen & Maggie’s last night on Pay per View. That was a very good movie… nice to know Hollywood hasn’t forgotten how. Glen also recommends D’lovely and My Life as a House when we get around to it.

The dejunking continues, another bag o clothes (Paul actually got rid of some clothes, may wonders never cease) and all the beer bottles from the last three months.

Saw the pics from Susanne’s trip to Edinburgh, Paris, Bruges, Rye, London and Bath yesterday. So we saw lots of pictures of places that our favourite characters, being Lymond and his alterego Nicco would have seen….

I don’t know what Zeek! thinks he’s going to excavate out of the cat box, but he’s sure been at it long enough. Now he’s crying, probably to be let out.

I’ve had head pain (not what I consider a headache) pretty much continuously for weeks now. Maybe I’m about to have a stroke! It would be too much to hope for, if I did have a stroke, that it would kill me. Time to work up a living will. Further to the Schiavo tragedy, living wills are big business for lawyers all over north America right now… and so they should be. Virtually every adult I’ve ever spoken to on the subject would rather be dead than vegetative, and I know at least two people who would beg to be shot rather than go there. There’s nothing like watching a formerly lively and intelligent loved one turn into an expensive set of reflexes to fix this idea in your mind. It sure makes for interesting domestic conversations.

Just read that the NRA, in a search for “all options” to prevent school schootings has recommended that school boards consider allowing teachers to carry weapons. Uh, yeah. I really want a horny 26 year old teacher, hip deep in luscious flesh, to be carrying a weapon. “You WILL bring in your homework, won’t you?” “You will come out to my car and do a line with me, won’t you?” “You will (sexual shenanigans) with me, won’t you?” “You will bring your friend to film the (sexual shenanigans) so I can post it to the internet, won’t you?” Ah yes, guns in school will be very educational, indeed. I’d like to thank the NRA for being so progressive about the other kind of chickenhawk, though, that was an added bonus. Or maybe, like most reasonable people, they’d rather that people get jiggy than fight? Even if it represents a tragic imbalance between adult and child? After all, it’s usually the kid in these situations who figures that the adult is career toast and the kid’s the sad victim, which must add oceans of piquancy to the sex. Doomed tragic forbidden love is so very very hot.

Now I am not trying to say that a white Florida woman has more value than a black Texan baby. I’ll let YOU be the judge of that. But just think, if a judge in Texas says to the hospital, you’re right, this kid should die, what is a human life worth anywhere in the US? And don’t forget, George W. Bush put his own goddamned pen to the execution orders for over 150 men and women during his stint as Governor of Texas, including, in at least one case, a man who was given demonstrably incompetent legal help (the lawyer slept through portions of the trial.)

(2019 says look up Terry Schiavo on Wikipedia, ’cause the article I’m referencing below is gone….)

Interesting, eh? The very spareness of the description of events, most of which point to a complete hijacking of the justice system, is heart wrenching. Of particular interest are the opening ten or so paragraphs, which lay the foundation for what follows. What happened to Mrs. Schiavo was a family tragedy. Now her parents are accusing Mr. Schiavo of murdering her! But if you look at the timeline, they tried to bring her home for three weeks early in her ‘convalescence’ and couldn’t do it, so they have guilt as well as all of the other issues to deal with…. Okay, folks, time for an exercise in comparative ethics. Warning, the little baby in the picture from the article below is grossly deformed…. and didn’t have 600 K US$ in a trust account at the time of his death.

(This story is gone too)

I light a candle for the Schiavos and the Schindlers, and I light a candle for Wanda Hudson.

I also light a candle for Peter T, who, when I said I was keeping a candle lit in my heart for him, said in his trademark puckish way, and in his wonderful South African accent, “But you’ll be putting it out before bedtime?” Bless all those who keep a sense of perspective and where feasible, a sense of humour.

2019 says he’s the guy I got Miss Margot from.

Poem – the Asanas
2005-03-26— Posted by: allegra

I have a friend who has spent a very long team healing herself from a traumatic childhood and a troubled adolescence. Part of her healing process has been yoga. Asana means pose or posture.

 

Asana one

white spikes of bone
stick out of the lawn
arrange yourself
so that you can sit among them
breathe
and be at peace

Asana two

bones are like that
alive, dead
they bruise and splinter
scatter marrow
fertilize the slow and frantic

arrange yourself
so that you take them
as your deepest camouflage

Asana three

throughout the canon
there is nothing like this
you must find this posture out
and teach it

you will not return harm for harm
the lifestream says
can you hear your higher self calling

in the posture, as in a trance
you hear yourself
-my machine took the message-
spirit shook awake and said
it doesn't matter,
and in the stretching muscles
you encompass and reveal
the world, a boy who had no bris
a girl who had no canopy
a woman who had no mother

pause and breathe

Asana four

forego motion, load yourself with oxygen
and energy
awareness beckons from behind the tv
and the rushing to work
the sirens, all the punctuation
for the living word of you

teaching with an open mind you learn
how limits dissolve and reform
like traumatized bone
fast damage and slow healing

geologic healing, sometimes

every cell knows where to be
it doesn't have to think
envy the body all its power
it never has to think
you call
and mostly it responds
arrange your bones
so that the body's will
is that of your quiet mind

Asana five

upward the inward
alchemical, the spirit
can transmute the split and spoiled

the burnt bone of our ancestors
the little-bits of flint

we knap ourselves
in the lap of life
we see the tool inside the rock
now remnant by the fire of memory
this posture is for making tools
so that we may build the land we love

Asana six

lost

on a page
lost in thought
indeed there are places I can name
that I don't want to visit any more
but they live inside of me
as if I never left them

some wounds never heal, there is no cure
for the death of love, no pretty closure
but to set the maggots on the wound
and hope they know when to stop

behind my eyes
in the hands that long
to hold yours once again
in my chest
in my shoulders
pain comes through
in bouts of helpless weeping

lost in self pity
wanting to damage the brain
that injures me so
yet seeing the flowers from the window
hearing someone giggle

I come to

it is time to sit again

walking octopods
2005-03-26— Posted by: allegra

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/9999/walking.mpeg

yup,

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/9999/rolling.mpeg

The little beggars are going for a stroll. The first walking Octopod is from Australian waters, the second from Indonesia. The great thing about this, of course, is that it used to be that in order to walk you either had to have an exoskeleton (“You cockroach!”) or a spine. Now that we KNOW that God made spineless creatures who can walk….metaphors will never be the same again.

Okay, if you have good taste, don’t go here. Especially don’t look at the Elvis. The accompanying descriptions are in some cases way better than the pix, but when they say, “the intertnet is forever” these are the kinds of pix they were thinking of……http://cameltoe.bolt.com/mens.html

Hm. Just noticed that it’s 4:20 am. I actually got enough sleep… went to bed early, for me, and napped half of yesterday.

What else is going on. Well, I TRIED to buy a bass, but Paul announced that we don’t have the money, so Katie and I will have to fire up the webcam and make a little extra money.

That actually is a joke, okay, so don’t sic the child abuse people on me. I’m going to sigh heavily now.

I get really cheesed off at the Canadian political common taters who say OOOOO we should have given refugee status to those deserter Yanks. Because they are fighting in an illegal war, doncha know. I just don’t get it. I mean, can’t they go back to the land of the free and experience the joy of armed maniacs threatening their wives and children while they are in jail while the cops look the other way? The conscientious objectors will be perfectly safe and under constant scrutiny while they are serving in some high class military pokey for like a hundred years. And when they get out, if industrial civilization hasn’t collapsed in the meantime, they can get a really good book and movie of the week deal. In fact, if their wives are not negotiating something like that right now, they are dumber than I am, and that’s going some. This crap about an illegal war is just that, crap. Canadian Immigration is used to hearing about gang rapes and getting your business firebombed and having your Gestetner tossed under a halftrack. The humanity! If we can ignore all the people who actually ARE getting harassed half to death in furrin lands, why should we get all cry baby about an Amurrican who’s made an unhappy career move? Man, I wish I’d gone into firearms earlier, but strictly as a personal development thing. It isn’t something I’d join the army to learn about.

Played Munchkin – just noticed that it DID have an extender pack – twice last night. Keith won and Paul won, but the second game I had a hand to dream of and was at level 9 when Paul made level 10 and won. He even picked up the Divine Intervention thang. We are still playing cooperatively rather than competitively, but I imagine that will be over the instant we play with either Brooke of the CBL or Rob of Nine.

I have never seen quite the gathering at the golf course for beers after work on Thursday, which was Friday, because of Good Friday, before. I was the only female (I manfully carried on anyway…) at least until Liz, Rob of Nine’s fiancee, showed up and that actually cheesed me off as I wouldn’t have minded speaking to her but I promptly had to leave because Paul had to go to work early and I had to go and pick up chocolate for Katie and I kinda wish I hadn’t because I had an entire pack of Winegums to myself because I mean, if you’re buying chocolate for SOMEBODY ELSE and you can’t eat it because it will trigger a migraine, you have to buy something as a consolation prize. Damned long sentence, that, and not very intelligible…. anyway, there were a couple of people there pounding ales who virtually never attend, although it’s not like I go every time Jim E. calls beer. Can you believe it? George’s going away party was at an Undisclosed Location? When I hear stuff like that I think Drunken Orgy… and camera lenses cracking all over the lower mainland. An unnamed person did a SPOT ON imitation of another unnamed person, and I laughed so hard I nearly spit beer all over my end of the table. Good thing all the men I work with have such wonderful reflexes. My refluxes, on the other hand….

Riverbend posted again, thank heavens. She’s marking the second anniversary of “Shock and Awe”. It’s the first time I remember her mentioning her dad, she’s always just talking about her mother.

Paul Wolfowitz may not get the World Bank job…. not because he’s an incompetent chickenhawk, as some other common taters say … but because, as reported in the Daily Mail, he can’t keep it in his pants. This is really scary. Have you seen a picture of Paul Wolfowitz? Or a pic of the woman who has royally p*ssed off all of her neighbours, because when Paul shows up at her place his security detail is there all night? Yeah, I know I’d sleep better knowing that armed dudes with Get out of Jail Free cards are playing pinochle in the car outside my pied a terre, and that Paul Wolfowitz is actually having sex within 100 meters of me. Brrrrr ….. and don’t tell me ugly guys need lovin’ too, I’ve DONE my share. Actually, I just found a website with pics of all three of them side by side. It’s some weird thing that says Paul Wolfowitz is a tool of the Other Side…. according to Tom Clancy? I’m rubbing my eyes but the words are still there.

I remember a buddy of mine, many many years ago, saying to me that the difference between Republican scandals and Democratic scandals (and this was BEFORE Bill Clinton, okay?) is that Democratic scandals involve bodily fluids, and Republican scandals involve large portions of the Federal deficit. So what I’m coming around to here is that maybe somebody has figured out that money is great, but bodily fluids are more fun especially if you can mix the two together. I quote from the Daily Mail “However, Wolfowitz’s only comment on the complaints has been a terse statement issued through a Pentagon spokesman. He said: “If a personal relationship presents a potential conflict of interest, I will comply with bank policies to resolve the issue.”” I find what his wife … and there’s a certain amount of confusion about his marital status, unusual in such a devout Republican … said about the situation amusing. Anybody who wants to read the rest of it can go to http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html? in_article_id=342048&in_page_id=1770. You’ll have to take out the space in the middle. Found the Daily Mail link on Rawstory.com, which still isn’t as much fun to read as Drudgereport.com. Although they claim to be competition. I think the folks who dream up the headlines at drudgereport.com must all be people who did their BComm speciality in Bait and Switch techniques; those people are appalling.

Not that I’m expecting DJD to read this, but if you are, here’s an item you might have missed; Camille Paglia INCLUDED A PAUL BLACKBURN POEM in her new book about poetry. Of course, it’s “The Once Over” instead of something better, but what can you do. For those of you who have no clue, Paul Blackburn was the premier American poet of his generation, I wrote a long poem called “In Colours Unsuspected” for him, I have a couple of pictures of him over my desk, and if I could raise three people from the dead so I could talk to them for an hour, one would be Emma Goldman, one would be Dorothy Dunnett and the last would be Paul Blackburn. My mother, of course, would be raising dead relatives so she could talk to them about the finer points of genealogy, but I am crasser by far than that….Okay, I’ve been doing this for an hour, I can stop now. I can stop anytime I want.