Hm.

The things we’re not allowed to say

Fill the room with poison

The things we’re not allowed to say

Fill the air with fi-ire

The things we’re not allowed to say

Beg your heart for pardon

The things we’re not allowed to say

Tending Satan’s garden

(fades into long, bendy, twirly, bluesayyyy guitar solo)

o and the long conversation on the phone.

Happy sigh.  Tonight I spent 2 hours on the phone with somebody, practiced and sang for an hour, worked on the homily an hour, and, and, prior, a happy couple of hours feasting the 50th birthday of a co-worker.

Prior, last day at work for a week, and pissing and pleasing the engineering department by serenading Peter A.  The hate / love split perfectly along race lines, it was amazing to see. Next time I’ll ask for permission.  But I think the Friday afternoon serenade before a long holiday weekend is a lovely tradition.

Today’s performance – not my best, but I’ll do better next time – was made infinitely sweeter by my being completely done by the time the tour of the Chinese joint venture folks went through.

Other stuff happened that makes me happy, so I’ll just be off in this corner smiling, because my evening was both productive and sociable, and now I’m bound for bed (after I check comments, facebook, brush my teeth and take some vitamins).

Dead junco

I found it going in to work the other day, and I love these birds, and it bothered me that the only way I could really honour how amazingly beautiful it was involved taking a picture of its corpse.  Anyway, it’s thumbnailed so if you can’t bear to inspect it closely or are one of my bleaders (that would be Blog Readers)  who is yucked out by birds you don’t have to look.deadjunco.jpg

Red hats

There’s this group I never knew about before called the Red Hat Society.  When I took daughter Katie to Judy’s restaurant in New West, they were meeting. The only word that means anything is Resplendent (red hats, purple outfits!).  I have no idea who any of these women are, but they graciously agreed to allow me to photograph them.

I get to join in a year and a bit…. I have to wait until I’m 50.

redhats.jpg

Why would somebody ask for ‘more ranting’?

Tonight I would like to rant about the lack of menstruation rituals in our culture. Tonight I’m going to take the man’s view, as the woman’s view about it isn’t nearly transgressive enough for me ce soir la. Jeez, where’s an accent grave when I need one…
If I was a man, I would want rituals and predictive patterns in young women’s lives that preserved their fertility for their true purpose, namely, making babies with me and not with other men. Having some kind of ceremony where it was drilled into the girl’s head that she had one shot at the childbearing game and if she slept with the wrong guy it was game the fuck over would be useful if my strategy for access to childbearing women meant I was employed and civil. Mind you, if my strategy is to just rape the shit out of her and hope for a lucky plug, it’s still better than if she was really trying to save it for the right guy. Her body may betray her and pop an egg for me. I’d be the ‘wrong guy’ – but I’d still be first. Now, the sperm competition theory of fucking, which holds that guys enjoy sharing girls because if you’re second (or later) you come way harder (your sperm will ‘wash away’ that of your, uh, competitor/buddy), so if you let your buddy go first, because you don’t really care if you get her pregnant, and you’d prefer to come harder because of your wiring, you’ve more or less dropped out of the discussion about breeding. You’ve actually given some consideration to the notion, which is why you’re wearing a condom while all of these shenanigans are going on. I mean, it’s still rape, but there’s a different angle. You get it now? All different styles of thinking about ‘the breeding thing’ lead to different results in terms of how it affects the woman’s life. Oh, sorry, I’ve gone back into the women’s way of thinking about this, ‘scuse me all to hell.

So mOm, did I make you laugh really hard on the phone tonight, or what?

Back to the subject at hand. Women should have menstruation rites so that they actually have two whole chunks of time to think about fertility without having to do any work. That is, in part, what rituals are all about. It’s about the whole “stop working and start thinking” thing that has made humanity what it is. Having enough excess capacity in your life to be able to stop and think is what makes for civil life. Having the spare time to develop morality makes morality. Leisure, in short, makes ethical life possible. But don’t worry, in the end it’s all about sex. Yeehaw. Hurry hurry love.
Did I ever say why it was I refer to my mother as mOm? It’s because when I spell her title that way, it is the “Kilroy was here” or “Clem” sign. See his hands, on either side of his head? Te he. But I also do it because of where I got the idea of it, pOp – which is a clown face with a big nose in the middle. Squint and you’ll see.

Fiction and non fiction

I am in the process of writing a near future / SF novel which contains a kind of computer virus called (in the story) a nukeworm.

Then I read this.

Would anybody care to speculate what Phase II is likely to be?  In my story, a politically (as in wanting to change behavior of certain individuals) not criminally (as in MONEY) motivated group of hackers uses the nukeworm to harvest social networking information.  In real life…… ai-yi.