pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- GUNFIRE AND LATE-NIGHT RAMBLINGS Buzzcut and I met for dinner tonight, then went to her pal Val's house to watch the NCAA tournament on a monstrously large big-screen TV that Val rents for the month of March. Gawd it was fun to watch Bball and giggle with them! Val kept flipping to this hilarious countdown of one-hit wonders (remember A-Ha?) or to a music DVD that featured, among other things, a young Smokey Robinson (and, shudder, Debbie Boone) singing their hits from long ago. She also flipped to South Park, a show that I find absolutely hysterical (which possibly means that I am a ten-year-old boy). Unfortunately, the South Park mayor pulled out a gun and shot herself in the head, splattering cartoon blood—although not nearly enough to mirror reality—across her degrees and certificates. Even in cartoon format, that image makes my whole body go cold, sets my foot a shakin', and makes me break out in a cold sweat. Buzzcut got it immediately and reached over for my hand and I don't believe Val noticed. (Hope not.) And I don't want to go to sleep tonight because I already know what I'm going to dream about.... Buzzcut's friends live just around the corner from the wonderful old stucco house where the Ginger and I lived for nine years and just a few blocks from Buzzcut, and that's how I learned that there is an ongoing conflict about beavers that is raging through the neighborhood right now. Some folks want to protect the neighborhood beavers, while others want to relocate them, and this has turned into a running joke among the many queers who gather for monthly game night in the neighborhood. And now a two dykes are creating a beaver lodge (because, well, you just have to do that when an opportunity like this presents itself). (I suggested that we sculpt a beaver out of clay to commemorate the soire, but we ran out of time. Oh well.) In other news, I thought of two more butterfly references that are so wonderful that I should have never forgotten them:
I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free—Charles Dickensand That is why you write your songs
Meanwhile, scenes from Siberiade are free-floating through my brain tonight and I am mourning the wild Alaska that I didn't even get to see before Haliburton set sites on its beauty. I was a whitewater kayaker before I ruined my shoulder and loved dropping through air down a waterfall or paddling furiously toward that perfect V between the rocks that would allow me to shoot through a rapid into still water. Kayaking in Alaska would differ from my white-water adventures, but, in my mind at least, it would be similar to paddling to some of those flatwater spots in the Pacific NW that you can only reach by water. There's an amazing bird sanctuary near the University of Washington, for example, that only paddlers can see. When I close my eyes, I imagine Alaska like that bird sanctuary. And I'm paddling in that quiet world where birds I've never seen quietly explore the water and the sound of water lapping against the sides of my boat lulls me into serenity and the air smells clean, unpolluted. But now the industrialization images from Siberiade compete with my fantasy and loud oil-drilling equipment shows up to ruin this amazing sanctuary. And the language our lawmakers use to describe such decisions confounds me. And where's the outrage? Are we just satisfied to hear words that make things sound acceptable now? Have we lost any ability to read behind the lines and understand implications? Frank Zappa once called the US government the entertainment division of the military–industrial complex. That insight sinks in more today than it has since Shrub announced what we had to do in response to being attacked by another group altogether, because of those weapons of mass destruction. ... But, hey, this is just blabbing from a liberal in a country that re-elected a man who appears to revel in being willfully ignorant, whose first act as president was to selectively withdraw aid to countries that failed to comply with his personal religious beliefs and who seems intent on turning our democracy into a plutocracy and has no problem running slip-shod over our rights. When Kennedy was running for president, he answered an opponent's negative labeling of him and the Democratic Party as liberal thusly:
If by a "liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead, and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their liberties—someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad; if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a liberal... But now I hear the words of former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark much more clearly: Our overriding purpose, from the beginning right through to the present day, has been world domination—that is, to build and maintain the capacity to coerce everybody else on the planet; nonviolently, if possible, and violently, if necessary. But the purpose of the [US] foreign policy of domination is not just to make the rest of the world jump through hoops; the purpose is to facilitate our exploitation of resources.—Ramsey Clark (interview in The Sun magazine, August 2001) • Okay. Two more random thoughts before I turn out the light and try to fall asleep with visions of a still-beautiful Alaska (and definitely not a blood-splattered room) dancing in my head: First, I've been tossing around this idea of writing a piece about friends who take Effexor and Paxil or some of those other drugs that have severe sexual side effects. I thought I'd call the piece Pharma Sutra. And, finally, a quote for a friend, who needs the nourishment of water in her life right now: For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) 9:46 a.m. - 2005-03-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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