Skeptic in Paradise

Another High-Volume Content Writer Ad

2011-06-25T11:58:00.000-07:00

(MY OUTRAGE IN CAPITAL LETTERS)

We are seeking several writers to join our team. They will be strictly contract telecommuting positions.

- You will write several articles per week. Typically 250-350 word story.
- We'll give you source materials for your topics
- You will be paid 7 cents per word for completed and approved articles. Pay day is every 2 weeks.
DO THE MATH: SAY, 5 ARTICLES A WEEK AVERAGING 300 WORDS EACH: $105 GROSS. THIS IS AN INSULT OF THE BASEST KIND.

- Experience writing professionally is preferred, but we will also consider college students, BECAUSE WE KNOW THAT NO PROFESSIONAL WRITER IS GOING TO WASTE THEIR TIME WRITING FOR 7 CENTS A WORD! NO, WE'RE GOING TO EXPLOIT PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW ANY BETTER.
- Native English speaker based in the United States KEWL, DUDE.
- Available to work a minimum of 20 hours per week (you will be paid per word, not per hour, but this is the estimated workload) ACTUALLY, IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW MANY HOURS YOU WORK, YOU STILL WON'T MAKE A LIVING DOING THIS.
- SEO knowledge is helpful, but not required. WE DON’T EXPECT MUCH.

Application Instructions: HERE, WE PRETEND TO BE SELECTIVE.

1) Please ensure that you have completed the Education and Employment History sections on the Resume tab of your contractor profile
2) Take the U.S. English Basic Skills Test and English Spelling Test (US version) on oDesk
3) With your cover letter, include an answer to the question "What are your three favorite books?" IF YOU CAN WRITE LIKE A 7TH GRADER, THAT'S GOOD ENOUGH FOR US. HECK, THAT'S GOOD ENOUGH FOR MOST US NEWSPAPERS.

Bail Out the Writers!Paul Greenberg, New York Times, Dec. 9, 2008:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/books/review/Greenberg-t.html

Vegetables strike back in Germany

2011-06-06T13:52:00.000-07:00

Berlin--Anyone who has been to Germany recently knows that the organic ("bio") foods movement is considerably more advanced than in most U.S. communities. Bio foods are almost universally available in German grocery stores. Germans—even confirmed meat-eaters, love eating fresh, organic vegetables.

So it should have come as no surprise last week when vegetables began rebelling.

"We tried to communicate that eating vegetables is killing," a spokesvegetable said in a prepared message yesterday, "but no one listened. Germany ranks third in European nations in vegetarianism. The killing must stop!"

The E. coli outbreak was originally blamed on Spanish cucumbers, but more recently the finger has been pointed at German vegetable sprouts. "These are our young, the most vulnerable members of the vegetable phylum," the message, which was written in meter-high letters composed of red leaves in a Thuringia field of radishes, read.

"E. coli is only our first strike, Gemany only our first target," it concluded.

Although many in Germany suspect the message to be a hoax, the E. coli outbreak is no joke. So far, 22 people have died, all but one in Germany, and many others have become ill. German government agencies are investigating what they fear may be the first of many vegeterrorist attacks.

Labor Day

2011-05-09T20:13:00.000-07:00

Cast of Characters
Gerald: African American man, 23-year-old dance student in NYC. He is traveling and has happened upon the community Labor Day picnic of a little town in Ohio. He's wearing T-shirt, shorts, and athletic shoes.

Gerry: 39-year-old IT professional woman. Gerry has lived in this little town all her life. Gerry's casually dressed, but not for actual exercise. Maybe has a broad-brimmed straw hat at her side.

Scene: Labor Day Picnic in City Park, in the shade of a tree near the volleyball game.

[Lights Up. Sounds of volleyball game from off left. Gerry is sitting on a blanket, leaning against the tree, drinking a soda and reading a book. Gerry has a little drink cooler at her side—obviously planning to stay a while. Occasionally looking up to watch the game off left.

There's a masculine cry of pain, some Ooos and Ohs, the game stops. Gerry looks up at the first cry, puts down her drink, and watches attentively, then relaxes. Sounds of the game resume. She goes back to reading her book.

He limps on stage from left. Game sounds fade as the conversation starts.]

He: [flopping down at right angle to her, winces] Oh, Jeez. Mind if I share your tree?

Gerry: [Shifts away from him a little. Says nothing. A brief silence.]
He: [Looks at her to evaluate if Gerry's interruptible.] You from here?

Gerry: [Looks up questioning]

He: Not here, the park, I mean. Here, Emmitt, Ohio.

Gerry: Yes. And from your question, I deduce you are not.

He: You deduce correctly.

Gerry: [Nods. Returns to her book.]

He: [Wiping sweat from brow and neck on his T-shirt] This is nice, though, a little Labor Day celebration, the whole town turns out. I've been in school—never see little kids for months at a time. Didn't know I missed them.

Gerry: [Without looking up] Hm.

He: They sure are short.

Gerry: [Puts book down.] You're long on conversation. Would you like a frosty cold Mountain Dew?

He: Oh, yes, please. [Gerry hands him one from cooler] Caffeine choice of champions… Thank you!

Gerry: A professional hazard… [Offers her hand] I'm Gerry.

He: Funny! [Shakes] I'm Gerald.

Gerry: So, Gerald, how's your ankle?

He: [briefly places cold can against ankle, wiggles ankle] That'll heal by next week.

Gerry: What's next week?

He: Back to school.

Gerry: Yes, a guy with a limp doesn't really attract the women -- until he's old and grizzled. Then it's a little like a dueling scar, can work for you.

He: Huh. Never thought of it like that. Actually, I'm studying dance at NYU, so it would be a serious problem.

Gerry: Oh, a dancer. I should have realized. I think that was a pirouette you were executing when you went down?

He: (It almost executed me.) And—let me guess—you're a… librarian—No!—an English teacher.

Gerry: IT for the community college. But I write a little as a hobby…

He: [Reaches across her to pick up her book, playfully] And what's this you're …

Gerry: [Grabs it from him and tries put it out of his reach, embarrassed] Never you mind… That's …

He: [snatches it from her grip and reads the cover] Love's Savage Rebellion. Whoa, cover art of white woman in clingy nightie clinging to Native-American-looking man with long hard …knife at his hip…

Gerry: [Taking the book back] It's escape literature.

He: [Sighs] Yeah, I guess everyone's got something to escape. If I was a geek working for the community college, I'd want to escape, too. [He rises on his one good leg, performs a little dance to Escape, on one foot, returns gracefully to his spot by the tree.]

Gerry: [ Brief applause] Is that why you're in Emmitt, Ohio? You escaping [flaps her arms in teasing imitation of his dance] something?

He: No-- [Booming of cannon offstage]

Gerry: What? [More cannon fire off]

He: Nice, peaceful little town, Emmitt, Ohio. Let's see, it's Labor Day, so the cannon is for…?

Gerry: They shoot it off at any excuse. The Boy Scouts love it.

He: They let little kids shoot it off?

Gerry: The Cub Scouts used to do it, but somebody suggested maybe they were too young to be playing with live explosives.

He: So they took it out of the hands of the 8-year olds and handed it off to the 12 year olds?

Gerry: [sardonically] We're very safety-conscious here with our youth.

He: [Brief silence while they contemplate the safety of youth. Gerry offers him another Mountain Dew, which he accepts, raises in silent toast] Any kids?

Gerry: [Hesitates, confused about something, then jokes] No, thanks, I've had enough. You?

He: What, me?

Gerry: [Shrugs] You could have mis-spent your youth.

He: Instead of shooting off artillery in Emmitt, Ohio, like a good boy?

Gerry: [a tad bitter] Even a Boy Scout in Emmitt, Ohio, can mis-spend his youth

He: [kind of keeping tabs on her out of the corner of his eye—he is suspecting Gerry has a story and is working on getting her to dump it] High school is hard an everyone. Everyone. [Again he rises on his one good leg and dances, this time to the Agony of Adolescence. Limps back to the tree and flops down]

Gerry: [Adroitly shifting the conversation back to his life] It must have been hard for a good boy who wanted to dance when he grew up.

He: Nah.

Gerry: No?

He: I was on the track team. They have to catch you to kick your ass!

Gerry: Good to know things haven't changed.

He: And what about the good girls at Emmitt High School?

Gerry: [Looking away] Yeah, I wouldn't know.

He: [Looking inquiringly]

Gerry: [Resigning herself to telling the story] I got pregnant. [Standing, swinging her arms, pacing a bit]

He: Mm. One little slip—

Gerry: --Twice.

He: [Smiling] Hard-headed, eh?

Gerry: Ha! Not one, but two failures of the diaphragm. I swear on my mother's grave, if I find the guy who sold me that thing…

He: Oh, wow. [Another thought strikes him] OH, oh, wow.

Gerry: [Too wrapped up in her story to notice] Turns out, my mother got me courtesy of a diaphragm. Two generations--Maybe three. It's not the kind of question you ask your grandmother.

He: Hell, no. So, what did you do?

Gerry: I put the second child –a boy—up for adoption. [Sits back down under the tree. Poping open another Mountain Dew]

He: A boy, huh?

Gerry: Mm hm.

He: Hardest thing you ever did?

Gerry: Well, up to that point. I had kept the first one, see. [Wistfully] A beautiful girl, a wonderful girl. She was sociable, thoughtful, verbal, creative, funny. I didn't think I could raise two kids on part-time work and go to school. [A little apologetically:] She died in a swimming accident.

He: Oh, I'm sorry.

Gerry: Yeah, so… So the hardest thing I ever did was survive that. Sort of.

He: [Nodding] Sort of... You know they have these web sites now where parents who have given up kids for adoption can register and… [He rises, limps, pacing back and forth]

Gerry: [Sarcastically] Yes, Gerald, in IT, we have heard of such wonders.

He: Because your little boy might be looking for his mom.

Gerry: Gerald. It's not something you do lightly.

He: [Daring to hope. Drops to his hands and knees] What year did you have that little boy?

Gerry: Why?

He: Well, I mean, was he—was your boyfriend—

Gerry: What do you mean?

He: [Crawling toward her on all fours] Gerry, what do you think I'm doing in Emmitt, Flyspeck, Ohio?

Gerry: Visiting stations on the Underground Railway? Research for a blog on the most boring places in America? I have no idea.

He: [Now on his knees] I'm looking for where I was born. Maybe going to look up my birth mother.

Gerry: In Emmitt?

He: Well, I know I was born at Memorial Hospital down the road there in Josephstown… And my mom—my adoptive mom—said my birth mom's name was… Gerry…

Gerry: [Mildly interested in the coincidence] No shit?

He: No shit. [Waits] But… your boy wasn't Black, was he?

Gerry: No.

He: Not even a little…?

Gerry: [Touching his shoulder] Oh, God, I'm sorry, Gerald, no.

He: [Head to ground, covering his head with his hands] OK, I feel silly.

Gerry: At least you have the courage to hope. At least you're trying to find out.

He: [Stands, does a little dance on one foot to Hope] Gerry, suppose he is looking for you?

Gerry: [Stands, mimics his gestures] Ok, Gerald. I'm supposing. Sort of. [Stops moving.] Gerald, suppose he died in a swimming accident?

He: [His dance deflates, then flutters back to life] Fat chance, Gerry.

Gerry: [mimicking his gestures again] Or a car accident.

He: [His dance deflates again, then again flutters back to life] Nah.

Gerry: [Refusing to follow along] You have no idea how many bad things can happen to a kid.

He: [Facing her] You have no idea how many kids make it to adulthood! Look, I did. Somebody put me up for adoption, and, look! I'm fine—other than the purely temporary ankle problem... I'm even happy. Gerry, sometimes things do work out.

Gerry: [Suddenly something in the distance, left, catches her attention] Gerald!

He: Gerry?

Gerry: That's the hot dog cart. Come on! I'll treat you to a genuine Labor Day dinner in Emmitt, Ohio. [They exit left]

[Lights down and End of Act]

High-Volume Contract Writer Ad

2011-05-09T19:54:00.000-07:00

We are a high volume content delivery company, currently seeking new writers to join our team.

Freelance contract writers for this company are provided with steady work and weekly deadlines. Experience and knowledge with SEO-production style writing is highly preferred. A strong willingness to learn and adapt is a must. Our requirements for keyword densities are well defined.

Writers are assigned topics for the long term, reducing the amount of needed research each week. Additionally, writers are provided with a variety of tools to increase your article writing speed, and therefore your income.

Please reply with 'Content Writer Application' in the subject of your email and the answers to the following questions in the body.

1. List 3 links to current live articles you have written. If you do not have links, word docs are acceptable. These should be SEO content.

2. Current City and State

3. Current email address and phone number DO YOU TAKE POINTS OFF IF I FORGET TO WRITE MY NAME? WHY DON'T YOU ASK MY NAME?

4. What is the optimal keyword density for web content? SINCE YOU SAY YOU'VE DEFINED IT SO WELL, WHY DON'T YOU TELL ME?

5. Are you willing to sign a non-compete/non-disclosure that restricts you from working with our clients directly? This agreement in no way restricts you from working for other companies as a content writer, just our clients and known prospective clients. IF YOU WONT SAY WHO YOU ARE, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOUR COMPETITORS ARE IDENTIFYING THEMSELVES TO MASS CONTENT-PRODUCING DRONES?

6. Please specify your business structure (e.g. Sole Proprietor, LLC, Corporation, etc...) SUCKING THE TIT OF THE U.S. TAXPAYER.

7. Are you the only person who will be writing the articles? NO, MY WHOLE FAMILY INCLUDING THE 8-YEAR-OLD TWINS WILL BE PITCHING IN, IF THEY WANT TO EAT.

8. Are you a native English speaker? APPARENTLY NOT, BECAUSE I KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOUR AND YOU'RE. I MUST HAVE ACQUIRED THE LANGUAGE SOMEPLACE WHERE THEY TEACH IT IN SCHOOLS.

9. How many 800 word articles per week can you write? 800, REGARDLESS OF TOPIC.

10. Rate per 500 and 1000 word article. Our budget allows for up to $15/1000 words. HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA! YOU FUCKING EXPLOITIVE DICKWADS! I HOPE YOUR BANKS FORECLOSE ON YOUR HOMES AND YOU END UP LIVING IN YOUR CARS. SEO THAT.

Five Career Skills to Keep You Enjoyable in the 21st Century

2011-05-09T19:40:00.000-07:00

A business contact spammed me with an article about how to stay employable in the shifting and shrinking American white collar job market. The usual stuff about learning new things, thriving on change (including that really exciting one, downsizing) and learning to love diversity--even if it does mean you’re training your replacements in other countries—and being an innovative self-starter seamlessly integrating blah blah blah.

But there's more to a job than the quest to become the ideal interchangeable corporate unit. Too often, working makes some percentage of the world's workforce lose track of this essential fact. The job absorbs them and spits out the spent, over-tense, disappointed, shabby remains of the people they once were for their loved ones to cope with. They become dull and sullen. Or they become barking dogs, scaring even their intimates away so they can feel just a little powerful sometimes. Or, almost unnoticed, they zone out and are still absent even when they’re home.

It’s not easy balancing the relentlessly growing demands of capitalism with your inner need to be an actual human. That’s why I’ve put together this riposte to the missive on employability: It’s my Ten Skills to Keep You Enjoyable in the 21st Century.

1. Take naps. The feeling when your energy runs low--after lunch, near quitting time, or when you've slept badly the night before--is horrible. The least conspicuous position for napping is elbows on desk, hands supporting head, back to the door. Abandon the struggle against rest, and powernap to avoid dozing off in meetings. A bonus is that you can cut back on coffee, which will make it more effective when you really need it, and possibly save your stomach lining for finer things.

2. Sweat. Find a gym and get yourself there, or put up a basketball hoop by the loading dock or wherever. Or keep a bike at work and take a spin at lunchtime. Go for a run. Do stairs. If you can’t work up a real sweat during work hours, go for a walk, practice yoga or tai chi. It will stave off stiffness and senility.
Exercise not your thing? There are lots of not-so-sweaty activities that will also reduce your stress, get oxygen to your brain cells, and renew your faith in humanity and maybe post-industrial capitalism. Try the following.

3. Cultivating a passion outside of work can have a positive psychic carryover—Writing, drawing (beware--cartooning and satire can get you in hot water at work very quickly! Save that for your personal blog.), music, quilting and the like improve the mind and stimulate the spirit.

4. Play. Find some co-workers who will play chess, Boggle, Uno, whatever—face to face at lunchtime. The human interaction is, well, humanizing. (Warning: gambling at work is another easy way to lose a job!)

5. Organize. By "organize," I mean, start a book group, or a committee to celebrate employee birthdays, decorate the walls, collect canned goods for the poor, or practice public speaking, or start a union—that'll lose you your job and all subsequent jobs, but it might be time for that.

Remember: you may have to give the job your mind and body 5 days a week, but you don't have to give it your soul.

Roy and Dale Defeat the Indians

2010-12-23T19:27:00.000-08:00

Cathy walks with confidence ahead of me. She is Dale Evans, and we are tracking Indians through the second growth forest of northern New Jersey. They took this path—and there ahead is my Palomino horse Trigger. We break into a run. Just like Roy Rogers, I swing easily up onto the fallen log that lies across our path. Cathy swings herself up behind me. Together we ride after the Indians. The log bounces in a big satisfying rhythm. We kick with our heels. When we spot the Indians at last, I give Cathy a gun from my cowhide holster and keep one for myself.

We open fire. But the Indians shoot back. Eventually one of them hits me in my shooting arm with an arrow. I drop my gun and roll dramatically off the log.

Cathy finishes off the last Indians with a sure aim and hurries to tend to my wounds. Lying on the loamy ground with a little stand of Jack-in-the-pulpit looking on, I indicate the arrow. Cathy grabs it and digs it out with a knife. She bandages it with care. Together, sweaty and satisfied, we take the wooded path back toward my house.

When we reach the sandbox we catch and hold each other's gaze. A smile works on my lips, and happily I see the same smile force itself into Cathy's eyes and then her mouth. When she yodels, my heart and that of Roy Rogers sing along.

Crunch Time

2010-12-17T12:04:00.000-08:00

Cast of Characters
Patient: Middle-aged, garrulous, opinionated, a more-or-less lapsed Catholic. Wearing jacket, shirt and tie. He's a high-level sales guy.

Chiropractor: Young, handsome, Jewish, it's his second day in the chiropractor business.

Scene: Chiropractor's office. Plastic replica spine at the ready. Poster with words: "LOOK WELL TO THE SPINE," everything else too small to read. A poster of a posed muscular man and woman showing major nerves.

[ Lights Up. ]
Chiropractor: [Seated at desk, looking at a file, tapping pen nervously, picks out a business card from a display of cards on his desk and reads from it. Trying on different tones of voice:] Doctor Ben Levin. DOCTOR Ben LEVIN. Hi, I'm Doctor Ben Levin… Doctor Ben.

Patient: [To offstage office manager, looking back over shoulder] In here?

Chiropractor: [leaps to feet, strides to door to shake the patient's hand, incredibly self-conscious, feels totally stupid, hearing himself sound like a recording of a chiropractor] Hello, there. Yes, you're in the right place, heh-heh. You've come to the right place! I'm Ben Levin. Doctor Ben Levin.

Patient: [dragging one leg, holding his lower back] Oh, doctor, thanks for taking me on such short notice—and on the day before Christmas. I didn't think I'd find anyone open.

Chiropractor: Well, I guess that's an advantage, after all…

Patient: [Barely hearing what the doctor says] Yeah, yeah, I'm bringing in the tree the way I have for 18 years—Cheryl doesn't like it in the house until Christmas eve—tracks needles all over the house, she says—and I don't know I guess I've let myself go a little—Cheryl's always nagging me to get to the gym, but you know, I run the whole sales division for the region now, so when am I supposed to get to the gym? She wants me home for dinner once in a while, too, and frankly, you get…

Chiropractor: So, you hurt your lower back putting up the Christmas tree?

Patient: Uh, yeah.

Chiropractor: [Big, nervous smile] Okay, well, let's get you on the table and see what we can do for you, if anything…

Patient: [Hoping that's a joke] Ha-ha.

Chiropractor: Let's see, take your shirt off and just sit on the edge of the table and then I'll have a look.

Patient: [follows instructions]

Chiropractor: [Pokes and prods a bit up and down the back.] Hurt there?

Patient: No. It's down…

Chiropractor: How about there?

Patient: No, it's just down…

Chiropractor: Here?

Patient: [in excruciating pain] Jesus Mary and Joseph! That's it.

Chiropractor: [Feels around the suspect area a bit, getting sharp intakes of breath from patient] Oh, holy crap, that's way out of alignment. Okay, lie down then, and I'll—we'll just see what we can do.

Patient: [Gingerly lying down on his back] It's bad, then? Will I be able to go Christmas shopping? Jeez, Cheryl's going to kill me…

Chiropractor: Uh, sorry, on your stomach.

Patient: [Finally cluing in that the doc is less than expert, and giving him a dirty look] You want me on my stomach? You could have said so. [many grunts and groans as he turns over.]

Chiropractor: Sorry. [puts an ice pack on the patient's back.]

Patient: You new at this?

Chiropractor: Um, well, not new, exactly. I mean, I totally know what I'm doing. I come from a long line of doctors.

Patient: Great, I'll count on your genetics, then, right?

Chiropractor: You'd be surprised the things that are genetic. My sister's kid…

Patient: [Interrupting] Can you fix it?
Chiropractor: Huh?

Patient: My back, can you fix it?

Chiropractor: [Shrugs] Oh, sure. I can reduce it. [Adds another ice pack]

Patient: [Skeptical grunt]

Chiropractor: Been under a lot of pressure lately? [Seems to be quoting from a textbook:] "Lumbar region issues often result from occupational stress."

Patient: Oh, yeah, it's end of year, so what with crunching all the numbers and coming up half a million short of goal, I haven't had time to get Cheryl a Christmas present.

Chiropractor: That's bad.

Patient: You have no idea. I was away on her birthday, I forgot our anniversary entirely, and if I come up short of a damn miracle for Christmas, she'll have my balls fried up for lunch. No kidding, she might just move in with her mother.

Chiropractor: Hm, that is bad. So, when you say "miracle," are we talking three figures? Four figures?

Patient: [Doleful look]

Chiropractor: Five figures? Your ass really is in a sling! No wonder your 4th lumbar is in the next county.

Patient: Yeah, thanks. [A little surprised:] That feels better, by the way.

Chiropractor: It's just numb. With what I have to do to it, you're going to want it numb.

Patient: Ah.

Chiropractor: [Moves into position by patient's neck to apply pressure with both hands overlapped] So, you're looking at what? A car? [Pushes sharply downward on neck. Then idly wiggles patient's head to left and right.]

Patient: She has those. A nice SUV for running errands around town, and last year, when I remembered about Christmas, I got her a del Sol, which she loves, because she picked it out herself.

Chiropractor: [Moves hands down patient's spine a few inches, overlaps them.] Diamond? [Pushes sharply down on patient's upper back]

Patient: Has those. Never wears them.

Chiropractor: A horse? [Pushes sharply down on patient's back]

Patient: Allergic.

Chiropractor: Hm, that puts us into intangibles. [Crunching farther down the spine with each enumeration:] Vacations in exotic locations, master's degrees …

Patient: Been there, done that. We've been married 18 years! I'm doomed! I'm dead meat.

Chiropractor: [Almost to himself:] But you remember how many years you've been married… [Sitting down on a stool with notebook and pen at the ready] Tell me a little more about – Cheryl. How did you meet?

Patient: She was a nursing student, and I was selling shoes at Macy's between my Junior and Senior year. She bought 6 pairs of shoes the first time she came in. I'd never seen anyone do that before.

Chiropractor: What did she like about you?

Patient: I don't know, we laughed a lot. I was in a string band, I used to tell the jokes in between numbers.

Chiropractor: [Adjusting the ice packs] What did you like about her?

Patient: Well, she liked me. That sounds terrible, doesn't it? What I mean is, she was nice to me, she was caring and a good listener. And beautiful. She still is.

Chiropractor: So, you told jokes and she listened.

Patient: Yeah, it's not like that anymore, though. She's got her own life, her own career—she does public health administration—and I'm not that much fun anymore, frankly. I'm away a lot, and working all the time, and when I try to tell her about my work, she's—I don’t know—disengaged somehow. I make my customers laugh, but not her.

[His cell phone rings. He gestures to Ben to get it from his jacket pocket, which Ben does.] My boss. [Into the phone:] Yeah, hi Gerald….Yes, well, times are bad everywhere… No, I guess you're right, not in China… Oh. Uh huh. So what you're saying is...? Well, one down quarter…
I see, I guess you could look at it that way, but Gerald—Oh. It's a done deal, then. I see. Oh, very good, a severance package, of course. Monday. 8:30. Sure. Sure. See you then. [Stares at phone.]

He just fired me.

Chiropractor: I'm sorry.

Patient: He just fired the entire division.

Chiropractor: What was that about China?

Patient: They're getting out of latex paint and focusing on lead-based.

Chiropractor: Who knew there was a market for banned, toxic paint?

Patient: Yeah, "Brains schmains" is what he just said to me, do you believe that?

Chiropractor: Wow.

Patient: I haven't liked the direction the company was taking for a while now, but this is just… [Turning suddenly toward the chiropractor.] You know what, I'm glad they fired me. I wouldn't work for those jerks for all the--ha-ha-ha! tea in China! [breaks down in tears.]

Chiropractor: [Rubbing his back] I'm sorry.

Patient: How can they do this to people right before Christmas?

Chiropractor: [Still rubbing] Hmm. I guess you're off the hook for a present, then.

Patient: Oh, God, she's going to leave me!

Chiropractor: Maybe not.

Patient: Oh, right. This'll be perfect. [Bitterly:] "Hi honey, look what I got you for Christmas—a husband who can't earn a living. But you'll like living in a rented hovel. That's what you always wanted, right?" I'm screwed.

Chiropractor: Maybe not.

Patient: You don't understand.

Chiropractor: Well, she can probably support the house. Right?

Patient: Well, yes. But a deadbeat husband…

Chiropractor: Here's what I'm going to do. What's her number?

Patient: [Offers his cell phone.] Here, use mine. It's under "S," [abashedly] for Schnookums, but what…

Chiropractor: [Into phone] Hello, is this Cheryl? Cheryl this is Be—Doctor Levin, of Montgomery Spine. Your husband—yes, your husband has suffered a subluxated 4th lumbar vertebra, and quite possibly a ruptured disk. We're awaiting imaging before making a final diagnosis… Yes, he's in quite a bit of pain, although I've performed mitigation for that. He's going to need 24-hour nursing for a few days. I can recommend an agency… Oh, you're a nurse? You have? Well, that should work out fine, then. Yes, a couple of days of bed rest and then gradual range-of-motion therapy—but I'll write the prescription for you…. Uh-huh. No, he must not try to drive. I don't know how he managed to get here, frankly…[Grabs one of his cards off of his desk and reads] 1654 Montgomery Avenue, suite 125… Yes, first floor. See you in 20 minutes, then. Very good.

Patient: So now I'm unemployed and an invalid, too?

Chiropractor: Look, my mother always says, to move a cat, put butter on its paws.

Patient: Huh?

Chiropractor: It licks its paws and rubs the butter on its ears, and it's a mess. It might take days to get all that butter off. It hardly notices the new house. Tell her immediately—on the phone, before she gets here—about losing your job, about the lead paint, about China. Let her nurse you back to health. By the time you're walking again—lie on your side—By the time you're walking again… [twists patient into a doughnut shape and pushes on leg and shoulder simultaneously.]

Patient: [Cry of pain] Mother of God!

Chiropractor: …She'll have had time to get used to the idea of your looking for another job.

Patient: [Doubtful] Maybe.

Chiropractor: Stand up.

Here's the other part. While you're lying around, you write her a lovely heartfelt Christmas card. Maybe a poem in there. You hand-decorate it.

Patient: [Stands up, but still can't use his leg] With what?

Chiropractor: How do I know? Candy canes. Pictures of wreaths from Orvis catalogs. Whatever you people do. But most important: you tell jokes. Every time she walks in the room, you make her laugh.

[Hands patient his shirt, tie, jacket.] Sit down.

Patient: [Sits. Puts on shirt, tie, and jacket.]

Chiropractor: [Hands him his cell phone.] Call her. Schnookums.

Patient: [Dials.] Hi, honey. It's… Hurts like hell… Listen, Cheryl… They're closing the Western division. I … I lost my job. It's all going to China… No, I can't really walk. Actually, dialing the phone hurt. [Smiles.] Okay. I'll be right here. I love you, too.

Ben, Doctor, you're a genius! [Stands up to hug him—sits back down clutching his back.]

Chiropractor: [Hands him the ice packs.] You're going to want these.

[Lights down and End of Act]

This work was originally written for Hitching Post Theater, Boulder, Colorado.

The Black Gown

2010-12-11T20:37:00.001-08:00

The long, satiny black dress is cut on the bias. It fits…it fits the way it's supposed to, revealing the chest between my small, well-shaped breasts. Even lower in the back, but you can't see that in the photo. There are several shiny necklaces around my young neck and a bracelet on each wrist. There's a dangly earring on each ear—clip-ons—partly obscured by the corkscrew curls a cast member has created at each of my temples. My glossy dark hair is parted, pulled back in some kind of a bun. I'm wearing makeup, also courtesy of the young woman who did my hair. I loved her looking intently at my face and her gentle touch as she applied the make-up. In the photo I give the camera a baleful look, standing with one hand on my hip and the other bent up and touching my bare shoulder. The stance and the baleful look are all my mother's. The strange cocked position of my arm is hers, as well, one she adopted after she cut the arteries, tendons and nerves in her wrist on a broken window. To me it reads sexy. The hint of wariness in my eyes and reserve on my mouth is all me, though.

My arms are buff—a term we aren't anywhere near using in 1970, when the Hunterdon Repertory Company puts on Dracula. At 16, I've been carrying two buckets of water up the slope from the well to my horse twice a day for several years already, and at this point I am also taking a night school fencing class. It has occurred to me that I will most likely not have a man protecting me once I leave for college, and I've started running the perimeter of the fallow field behind our house, because, as I've articulated it, I may have to run someday.

There is a women's liberation movement starting and a gay liberation movement as well. This is not an historical note, but a matter of desperate importance to me. I hear about women's liberation and gay liberation from the TV news that reaches central New Jersey from New York. I've been to the libraries, both Flemington's and Hunterdon County's, to search for books on feminism, but all I found was Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. The disappointment I felt was like dry bone meal in my mouth.

The real capital of New Jersey is not Trenton, but New York City. The rest of New Jersey is decentralized, a backwater. Nobody goes from Flemington to New York except on school field trips, as far as I know. New York might as well be a foreign country. Dracula will be interesting for me. An ancient actress who belongs to the Company speaks with a whisky voice, and smokes Tiparillos. She, it is said, is a lesbian. I seldom see her, and I don't know why she's hanging around the women's dressing room on opening night, but that night she growls to me, "Knock 'em dead." And then there's Berta, who plays Mina, Dracula's second victim. Her husband is the dentist who has crafted Dracula's fangs. Between the fangs and the thick Transylvanian accent, Dracula is barely intelligible at times. But Berta, his stage lover, is perfect. Delicate, slim, dark, and a good actress. Years later, when I return to New Jersey from college on Christmas vacation, my mother will tell me that Berta has left the dentist and run away with a woman to Florida. "She's a homosexual" my mother pronounces carefully. I pretend indifference. Anyway, the romance is short-lived and she straggles back after a while.

Just as interesting are the dreams all the female cast members have of being attacked by a vampire. My part in the play is not exactly cast. The director has decided to do live ads instead of a program. It's a clever idea, giving more people a chance to be involved in the production and saving printing costs. I'm one or two of the commercials. She's also got the blood bank parked outside taking blood—a nice tie-in. We are blessed on opening night by the appearance of the theater bat—or if not, it becomes theater lore anyway. I never see it.

In 1970, it's not de rigueur for kids to run like crazy from one activity to another, and the Repertory Company is a rare social opportunity for me. The 4-H horse club. That's about it until next year, my senior year, when I'll take Russian and join the Russian Club. I love the theater group. I get to hang out with adults and some other teenagers. I've had a stagecraft class in high school, so I know as much about that as a lot of the adults. Early in my involvement with the theater group, I actually went on some dates with the son of one of the directors.

My mother and my brother have both had major roles in Hunterdon Repertory productions. They run pretty hot-blooded. My father and I are cooler. He takes pictures of rehearsals. He took this picture of me. This live commercial for Bram Stoker's Dracula will be my only appearance on the stage of the Clinton Theater. The high point of my involvement there will be in a later production, Once Upon a Mattress. I will have a hand in designing the set and crafting props. It's a marvelous production with fine actors, music, comic dancing, colorful costumes and a set so encrusted with gold glitter that it swirls around on the stage as the actors move, interfering with their contact lenses, and looking positively magical from the audience.

My closest friend is Debbi. She comes to a Dracula rehearsal and sits in the seats with me coloring drops of blood on the play's posters with red magic marker. I am in love with Debbi, who shows every sign of being heterosexual. She dates a football player named Hans, who turns up in one of my fencing classes. She complains in a general way about boys wanting to handle her. I dream nightly about "handling" her. I have been working assiduously since I was 13 not to touch her, not to tell her I love her. I have developed very good self-control.

The sophisticated black gown is a costume. The teenager is wary and reserved.

Inspiration for Writing—Practical Tips

2010-12-11T20:37:00.000-08:00

Maybe you go into the office expecting your inspiration to be there. But of course it's in your head. I like to think of it as foreplay. You need a little mental warm-up before you go into the office, just as a little making out in the kitchen can make the bedroom--um--imperative. So start re-reading your last day's work before breakfast or grab some recent notes you've made about your work, and glance over them before you do your workout. Working out plot and character problems is the only thing that makes running sufferable for me.

Here's another angle. Mental work isn't just in your mind; it's in your body, too. Your body has daily rhythms, so writing happily depends on when you work more than where. I like to start writing first thing in the morning, so my favorite "inspiration" is to lie in bed for half an hour reviewing and plotting forward, until the keyboard beckons, rather than repulsing me.

Different people have different tolerances for noise. I like to have instrumental classical music from the Classical period as background. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Handel, Vivaldi. Alternatively, generic coffee shop noises are ok if they're not too loud, but that's hard to count on. Too much silence isn't helpful.

All else fails, a bath. It's time-consuming, but it always works. I draw a hot one, get in, soak until the water cools (no books allowed if I'm working on plot), drain out most of the cool water, refill with hot, and get out when that starts to cool, or when I've melted, whichever comes first. Invariably I've solved the problem.

Dominus and Other Doms

2010-12-11T20:03:00.000-08:00

Cast of Characters

He: Father Todd, NY accent -- Or at any rate avoid an Irish accent at all costs – these are Americans.

She: Mother Mary Clement, Mother Superior of a teaching order convent. A woman used to wielding authority, she retains some sense of proportion. She and the priest share a dry sense of humor. Their conversation is part of surviving their knowledge of sin and the burden of their responsibilities.

Scene: Mary's office in the convent. A bottle of scotch on Mary's large desk. A cross on the wall behind her desk. A comfortable chair awaits a guest. During this scene, Mary refills both their glasses at natural intervals.

[ Lights Up. ]

She: [stands at the open door of her office] Father Todd, so glad you could make it this evening.

He: [enters shaking her hand warmly with two of his] As am I. As am I.

She: [Shuts the door behind them, opens a window. While he takes the comfortable chair.] There. Smoke whatever. How you can ruin a 12 year old scotch with that weed of yours I'll never understand.

He: [Draws a cigar from his breast pocket, accepts a glass of scotch from Mary, but doesn't light up yet] I admit it's a bad habit. Not evil, but not good.

She: The Good Lord meant spirits to be appreciated, fully and rightly.

He: Mm-hm, that's why the cigar. [He fingers it but doesn't light. A knock at the door]

She: [under her breath] Go the hell away. [Goes to the door] Yes? …Sister Jenneece, this couldn't wait until morning?... So, what do you think should be done about it? …I see you have the answer to the dilemma already to hand… Go for it, Jenneece —oh, and I AM in an important meeting so… Good.

[Shuts the door, returns to seat at desk.]

In the outside world, I'm told, you get to hire lieutenants from the general populace. Do you suppose that makes the chances of finding competent people better or worse?

He: [Harrumphs] Might make it harder. A guy I was confessing the other day—fascinating guy, I've been confessing him for years—anyway, he was complaining that he put out a job ad for a Waste Manager for his company and got 300 applications—several on scented stationery!

She: How did he make a decision?

He: You know, anyone else would have read through all the resumes and picked the people with the most experience, but…

She: ..But…?

He: He threw out anything that wasn't on scented stationery.

She: Expeditious…

He: Of course he's already got a sex harassment suit going, but he figures the company can stall 'til she runs out of money.

She: I'm just getting the picture. Lucky you, Todd. You get to offer him forgiveness once a week.

He: Well, starting out it was frustrating, but the stories were almost worth the sense of ramming my head against a brick wall. But then… [He pauses for effect]

She: Then? Is he reforming? Has the Church worked a rare miracle?

He: Ah, that remains to be seen. But one day I was driving to a conference, listening to the radio, and I heard about this judge—not sure where—who was giving out some really crazy punishments – to help with jail overcrowding, and, you know, jail doesn't work that great anyway.

She: Making people parade on the sidewalks with signs on them that say 'I'm sorry I sold drugs to your kids.' Like that?

He: Right.

She: Like putting them in stocks and letting the neighbors throw rotten fruit? A bit medieval, isn't it, Todd?

He: Yes, but SO much more entertaining than increasing numbers of Hail Marys! It has me wondering what a little thumb screw might accomplish. [Gestures to suit words].

She: What have you had him do?

He: Well--a little background-- this guy has walked the straight and narrow—good family man, churchgoer, coaches Little League, holds down a well-paying, responsible job. At least, that's how it looks from the outside.

She: [knowingly] Ah! But life offers the Devil so many opportunities.

He: And it turns out, this guy's been a walking opportunity. Any kind of sexual depravity you can name, he's done it. Cheating on his wife with more than one of their neighbors. Insisting his wife act out scenes from naughty videos, which she naturally found demeaning. Patting the behinds of his Little Leaguers, when the dads aren't looking.

She: [Without irony] Appalling.

He: Anyway, the turning point came when I heard about the Little Leaguers. I was horrified. How many Hail Marys do you give for that? My God, they're talking about defrocking Bishops.

She: And they would, but they're afraid they'll find choir boys under their robes.

He: So I had to do something. Making him give up coaching Little League was the obvious move. I told him that he'd have to go to counseling—that's pretty obvious, too--not that it'll do any good. Then I had an inspiration: I made him go to a certain woman of the night for a good paddling.

She: …A woman of the night, whom you knew from…?

He: [Confused a moment] From confession!

She: Uh-huh.

He: THAT's when he discovered he LIKED being paddled. Now he makes regular visits to the dominatrix two towns over…

She: But he's definitely not coaching kids' baseball anymore?

He: A small success. Admittedly, my punishments may not do HIS soul much good, but mine gets a lift every time!

She: He's paying for it?

He: It's hard for a grown man to get a good spanking for free—So I hear!

She: It compounds the sin if he's taking bread out of his children's mouths to pay for it. Although it might require a little research to know if getting spanked is per se a sin.

He: Well, if it is, the Church has been colluding in that particular sin for centuries.

She: [grimly, taking it a little personally,] Not news, Todd, not news… You know I've been at the head of the movement to strictly limit corporal punishment. How often I've reminded my teachers that our kids with the worst behavior problems got that way from being beaten.

He: Now, Mary, don't get on your high horse. You know I didn't mean anything about St. Margaret's.

She: [Mollified, taking a different tack] Well, your story shows that sin can be an incident or a lifetime habit. God takes His sweet time working out repentance. I'm grateful to be working with children, from that point of view. Seriously, if we could just convince them that God forgives mistakes--

He: If we could sort out for ourselves what are mistakes and what are original acts of brilliance…

She: Or sins disguised as gifts from God…

He: Go on.

She: Well, one of the teachers confessed to me an early step off the path of righteousness. She was on the point of going for a uterine ablation and—

He: A what?

She: [pronouncing carefully] A utereen ablation. And no, it's not a holy rite. It's a kind of female surgery they do.

He: For what?

She: To stop the monthly bl—honestly, you'd rather not know. The point is, this sister, was afraid she'd die, because she'd committed a sin ages ago and she still felt so guilty she thought God would punish her if he got the least little chance, like outpatient surgery.

He: And what was this horrifying sin?

She: [snorts derisively] In college, before she took orders, she had sexual relations with her roommate. A sin so common it's on a par with shoplifting a pack of Lifesavers. But in this case it went on quite a long time—a couple of years, in fact.

He: Was she troubled by it all that time?

She: She said it seemed like a blessing from heaven after years of confusion about dating boys and fearing pregnancy. And of course she was very fond of the girl.

He: When did she start to see it as a sin?

She: Rather suddenly, as if the knowledge had been hidden in a closet, and suddenly one day the wind blew the closet door open.

He: So she ended it?

She: Yes. But sadly, the lingering knowledge of the one sin had such an oppressive effect on her that her heart has been ringed around with briars ever since. That's the language she used: ringed around with briars.

He: And now she's kept pure by the Holy Orders.

She: Yes, it's rather worrying.

He: You're afraid she'll take out on the children?

She: Not as directly as that. But a heart ringed around by briars…it's not a good example for the kids. Teachers should have easily accessible hearts.

He: One common sin, and a life of emotional paralysis.

She: Exactly. And why? Because she doesn't know that God forgives.

He: You tell them every week, exhort them not to do it again, and either they damn well go out and do it again every week, or they --

She: --They grasp onto it and make a career of never making another mistake. [Together, silent contemplation]

He: So, which sister was it?

She: You're hopeless!

He: Sister Margaret Joseph?

She: Shut up and have another drink.

He: I'm right, aren't I?

She: No, you're not, and quit asking. I'm not going to gratify your prurient curiosity.

He: You gave her a penance, I hope?

She: Not enough of one, apparently. She's still clinging to her sense of having done wrong.

He: It's tricky isn't it? You want them to feel just the right amount of penance, but not so much that they feel put upon.

She: Now there, I disagree. I think they need to feel a bit of resentment against the punishment, a little defensive. I think you want them saying, 'Ok it was wrong, but not THAT wrong…'

He: No, not me. I don't want them thinking, 'God's a mean bastard, God wants me to hurt.'

She: Their own damn fault if they confuse us with God.

He: All too often they do.

She: I mean adults. The children can't be expected to know the difference. Us, their parents, the bus driver…

He: The neighbor's dachshund…

She: It's unavoidable. Their little heads are so ready to see God, so in need of guidance.

He: What little kids have you been teaching?

She: Oh they're brats, all right. But they're malleable. It's not fixed. The danger's if WE think we're God.

He: Yet here we are, day to day, making decisions for God. How shall this sinner be punished?

She: And that's why God gave us spirits.

He: Souls?

She: [raising the nearly empty scotch bottle] No, spirits.

He: Bless you, Mary, I think I've had it for the night.

She: [Walks him to the door. With a wink:] Well, come up and see me between the holidays, won't you? [opens the door]

He: [Softly, shaking her hand with his two] That I will. That I will.

She: [raises her voice] And watch you don't catch anything from the Dominatrix!

[Lights down and End of Act]
(This work was created under the auspices of Hitching Post Theater, Boulder, Colorado.)

First Lessons in Gardening—#2 The Harvest

2010-11-27T22:22:00.000-08:00

On my cell phone there's a photo of a dark, shiny, perfect zucchini resting on a board next to a very, very small carrot. This photo cheers me. I sent it to my gf, entitled "World's smallest carrot," but with pride.

Somebody, presumably a squirrel, nibbled the very first, smallest sprouts of rainbow chard and beets, so those never prospered. But carrot greens did not appeal.

The carrots never did get more than 4 inches long, but by early September they were crisp, tender, delicious! The zucchini were marvelous. Peering amongst the enormous furred green leaves, I picked about one zuch a week, sometimes two, from the four plants that grew. And they would have kept on coming. There were lovely orange flowers promising a future right up until the frost.

Oh, but the corn. The lovely, impressive, glossy, rustling, tasseled corn. It was a crop, not a garden vegetable! I adored the corn. It stood like a forest. It waved and glistened in the sun. I watered it religiously. I calculated the cost of the water versus the value of the four short rows of that ancient gold. I smiled at the haze of bees circling in the heat above the corn. I palpated the plumping ears and tried so hard to guess what was going on beneath the green husks. One day at the end of July, I twisted an ear off the stalk and pulled it open. Small, tender kernels, but only a smattering of them. Another 2 weeks, I estimated.

Then, the moment of truth. In August I picked another ear and unzipped it. The kernels were filled in and firm all the way to the top. Excitedly, I carried the ear up the backstairs to the kitchen, boiled up some water and dropped in the ear. Five minutes later, the butter dripping, I bit into my precious food. Gummy, chewy, and flavorless! Say it ain't so… But it was. A total loss. Cow corn and no cows. Friends offered condolences: it's hard to grow corn around here. They offered analysis: maybe not enough water, maybe not a good variety for a dry climate.

The pale stalks stand ragged, desolate, above a dusting of snow. I plan for spring.

First Lessons in Gardening -- #1 "To garden"

2010-07-31T11:27:00.000-07:00

When you decide to garden—funny verb—you commit to a course of discrimination. Gardening is the logical action following on the not-entirely rational decision that some plants must stay and some plants will not be tolerated. And you will become, if not the god who decides what lives, at least that god’s enforcer in Eden.

Many women would not feel burdened by this responsibility. They accepted it long ago, when they took charge of the kitchen and had to eradicate the invading ants and roaches—or the minuscule crumbs and germs that accumulated into seams of black crud if neglected.

But I had to feel my way toward that responsibility in the garden, in much the same way that my sister had to do so in the kitchen. She argued with our mother for years, maybe decades, about the relative importance of keeping the crud at bay, and about what Terrible Things would happen if she did not.

Much of what we know we must do in the world comes from first-hand experience of those Terrible Things.

Similarly, I have had to try some theories of my own in the garden to learn and trust the most basic tenets of the garden: You have to decide who’s in and who’s out. And you have to enforce.

My teacher chides me: “You can’t just weed once.” Weed. The essential verb. The verb that describes the very act of discrimination. The verb which, if put into action regularly, defines the verb “to garden.” All the mulching, fertilizing, and watering in the world will not make a garden if you do not weed. I have seen this for myself. I have removed the boards that bordered my garden and watched, stunned as the grass and weeds from the grassy area marched into my choice, composted, amended, turned and raked soil and took up residence among my peaceful rows of carrots, beets, peas and chard. Worse, among my strawberries, from where it is very hard to pull them without destroying the berry plants. The borders are not just someone’s idea of drawing a line. They function. If I can get ahead of the weeds for just one minute, I will put them back.

To each her stone

2010-07-21T20:43:00.000-07:00

I think of the Egyptians whenever someone says that "nuclear has to be part of the mix" of energy sources we use. Not the Egyptians who are currently going to college or walking the crowded streets of Cairo, but the ancient Egyptians in their generations going back 5,000 years or so.

This is about the oldest continuous civilization any of us knows about. And I think, if they had dumped a bunch of nuclear waste in a deep grave around the time that Thebes was founded, and had posted (carved) big red signs around its entrances (saying, in the argot of the day, "Cursed! Keep away!"), at some point in the 5000 years since, people would have forgotten about the dump, and forgotten how to read the signs. And there would have been a period of decades until archaeologists found the Rosetta Stone during which people fumbled around trying to translate the signs, losing their hair to age and radiation poisoning both. The radioactive waste continues to be dangerous to humans, according to one estimate, for from 10,000 to 1 million years. It's a weird, wide-ranging estimate, partly because how dangerous the waste is depends on what it is, and how much of it there is.

Still, I conclude, don't use nuclear. The chances that people 10,000 years from now are going to be able to read our signs are very slim.

For one thing, we print our warning signs on steel, which rusts. You can see signs 30 years old that are rusting out and starting to hint at their future illegibility. If we really wanted people far into the future to be able to read our thoughts and warnings, and know how smart we really were, we should be carving those thoughts in stone. Or at least writing them on vitrified pottery. Acid-free papyrus, at the very least. Those are the writing materials that have stood the test of time.

What if the Greeks and Egyptians hadn’t chiseled their finest thoughts and observations in stone? Hadn’t worshipped in stone? Hadn’t commemorated each other’s victories and defeats in stone, carving penises in marble when times were fat and lopping them off the statues of enemies on occasions of victory? What would we know of Plato or Homer, Caesar or Ptah if our predecessors hadn't taken the time to chisel down the important facts? How many people would know Thing One about their own family histories if some old relative with a stoop and coat with elbows worn thin hadn't stood around in cemeteries and copied down names and dates from the stones there?

But our use of chisel on stone has become more and more rare. Where in the last century or two, businesses proudly declared the Plumm Building theirs, or at least designated the little brick construction on the corner "Bank," the pace of business is now so rapid that only the biggest of the big carve Hancock or Trump into the stone. On the far end of the scale, we mostly don't even write on cheap paper any more. We write in letters that come and go with the electric current, the currency of your software, or sometimes, on a whim.

The school at dawn

2010-06-14T06:50:00.001-07:00

The night before the triathlon is almost festive. Like the night before Christmas, you go to bed early and put yourself to sleep thinking magic thoughts. I mulled the question, “What if the run is really hot again? How can I think my way through it?” The night was full of anticipation.

I dreamed about the children I helped raise, how I left them, how it wasn’t up to me. I woke up miserable. I thought, “I will tell myself, Feel how hot it is. Feel how my muscles work so well, so fast when it’s hot. Feel how my joints are loosest when it’s hot. I’m fast when it’s hot. I’m a well-oiled machine running hot.”

Amy woke beside me, restless because the hotel was noisy. I mumbled what our coaches had told us. “It doesn’t matter if we sleep badly tonight. Last night was what mattered, and we had a good night’s sleep.” She turned on the light to read for a while.

I dreamed I was outdoors before dawn barefoot, in a cotton negligee. I was on my way home, but there, suddenly, was a school of black and brown teenagers on the hillside as the first light was breaking, singing and clapping and chanting affirmations. I am somebody! I slipped between their rows.

I thought, It’s good for them to do affirmations. They probably benefit, but wouldn’t they benefit more from sleeping another hour and a half? I thought, I have to start swimming right away. None of this waiting for everyone else to get out of the way. I have to start swimming with the crowd.

I woke earlier than necessary, listened to the hotel noises, felt the hotel sheets, thought, “I’ll say, Feel how hot it is! Feel how my muscles move so fast when it’s hot.”

It was 4 am. In the room next door, the people who had been up until 11, who had fiddled with the connecting door before going to bed, got a wake-up call. As one mind, Amy and I said, “Not fair! Our revenge was going to be to wake them up at 4:30!”

I felt the sheets. I reminded myself, “I have to limit my rests in the swim and in the run. I have to be disciplined. Only five short walk periods in the run. Maybe ten breaths. In the swim, turn over and kick, only the minimum, maybe ten breaths. Then back into the freestyle stroke.”

The phone rang. Our wake-up call. We made our preparations and were out of the hotel with our transition bags, a cup of hot coffee, and our bikes by 5:15. At the reservoir parking lot, people with blinking flashlights, women smiling at each other, getting their bikes off the back of their cars, riding down to the reservoir. First light was breaking.

We split up in the transition area, racked our bikes, got our things arranged on our towels. Found familiar faces, found the porta-potties. Snacked and drank. I stripped down, finally, in the cool dawn light, and walked down the hill to the swim start, barefoot and blind, to join the crowd, my orange swim cap in one hand, happily not clashing with my blue bathing suit, my disposable bottle of water in the other.

The familiar voice started in my head: I am NOT going to put this cap on, these goggles on, and get in THAT water and swim OUT THERE. (Where are the course markers?) The crowd chatted and assessed the water, the course, the weather, their goggles. I shared my bottled water with a woman who wore an orange cap. I swung my arms, jumped up and down, stretched my lower back. And the voice in my head kept on saying, I am NOT. I put on my orange cap and my goggles, moved forward with the other orange caps, watched the green caps before us splash away. I am NOT. You’ve gotta be kidding!

Officiating there on the dock was our jovial coach Dave yelling, “Get in the water, get wet all the way, ladies!” I squatted down in the gray water, gave a thought to all the women who were no doubt peeing in the water around me. I put my face in and blew out. Cold! I sputtered. Repeat. Still so cold. Again. Damn, no good. Again. Okay, better. Again. Better. . .

“. . .Three! Two! One!” Then with an awkward leap, the orange-capped crowd became a school, splashing silver like smelt, slipping evolutionary bounds, slipping through the water. I thought, “None of that waiting for everyone else to get out of the way. I have to start swimming with the school.” And so I did.

Colors

2010-06-14T06:38:00.000-07:00

Hugging her I remembered the apple orchards of my childhood. It was she who made the fat, round apples hang on the blurry trees with her broad, flat brush and a springy knife that laid the soft, glistening colors on and scratched into them.

The smell of turpentine was more familiar to me than apples, as familiar to me as the smell of my brother's head or the sound of blue jays bragging in the tall tulip trees.

She owned the sunniest places in the house. She hummed while she worked with her untouchable bottles and tubes. Turpentine greeting me at the door meant she was floating in happy distraction.

I was invited to lie on the floor with my own colors—colors that had their own delicious smell. Curious, each had the same smell, although the colors were different. I could make a house and a path, cut the path into the paper, and have a little person pay a visit, walking right through the apple orchard and knocking at the front door. Or I could draw a mountain with a train climbing it, cut a track into the paper, CH-ch-ch-ch, CH-ch-ch-ch.

Now, her shoulders are frail as I hug her, and no matter what I do, the apples, the orchard, the train remain outside of me, flat objects, but then, surrounded by light and oils and her humming, I could hear the knock on the door, feel the pull of the train, taste the apples.

Cymbopogan

2010-06-14T06:35:00.000-07:00

Cymbopogan, maybe:
A flattened bell shape, an ancient Greek bell, probably to chime or gong or call the vestal virgins to the hearth, the Oracle to speak, the worshippers to witness mysteries. A cymbal crashing into its twin, or the shape of the sound, thrilling, drawing in.

But no. Cymbopogan:
Camel grass, citronella grass, lemon grass, the sweet aromatic breath of the bitter ship of the desert, the insect repellant sweat of the dromedary in a desert full of fleas, the fragrant feed at the end of the searing sand, the surprise rising on air at the end of the surprising spit on your shirt. The shifty slave's bite, scented grace.

Mildred

2010-06-10T09:45:00.000-07:00

Now I see how she felt for others
with generous heart and gentle tongue
Sun rises and noons through pine and apple leaves
had dappled her hands,
thinned her once-pert lips, public and private,
dried the honey dew off her blushing cheeks,
sucked the smooth and plump from everywhere,
leaving the delicate, fragile as tundra.
So who was she to aim a darted tongue,
turn up a nose? No one
No one might ever see her again
that acute arbiter, that accomplished hostess,
for the lover she was
that temptress in what way was she still a wife?
In what life did she last sink deeply into
being deeply sunken into?

The woman who wasn't happy

2009-11-22T19:40:00.000-08:00

The woman sits in three-quarters face, the right side of her face toward me, looking out the corners of her eyes at me. Her hair is an incredible vermilion, a lock in front has been pulled back and secured at her crown with a barrette, and mercilessly bleached. Her lips are sensual, her cheeks thin. She is wearing a blue t-shirt. She is not happy. She is definitely not happy. Sadness shows in the dark blue rings under her eyes, discontent in the pout of her mouth, anger in her gaze.

I'm a little startled to realize that the artist herself , or the husband she met in art school fifty years ago, framed the painting. It is complete, though in places the paint barely covers the canvas. The woman and her frame of mind have been captured in the absolute minimum of brush strokes—more here on the forehead, fewer under the eyes, just a few strokes delineate the shirt. The mouth is perfectly, fully drawn in a few deft strokes of pink and red.

The background is mostly a detail-less tan-brown, except for three short horizontal strokes of dark blue to the right of her face. They might have been abstracted from a window sill or fence rail, but now they are emotion or aura or waves of alarm the painter felt in the face of this unhappiness.

The fact that the painting is framed, yet sitting in the studio after the artist is gone tells me that it was a gift rejected, and now I remember the story: The artist laughed uncomfortably. She had offered it, but the sitter didn't want it. "Too accurate," her husband had diagnosed. He meant it as consolation.

There were other occasions when the artist said her truth and was surprised by the reaction. She interceded between a father and his daughter when she thought the daughter was being abused. And again years later, she defended a different girl against her abusive mother, at Thanksgiving, causing a family brouhaha for which she seemed completely unprepared.

I imagine the unhappy woman sitting for the painting, having her portrait done by the kindly old artist, what she must have been hoping for. "Show me I'm beautiful." But truth, as the poet said, is beauty, art is about truth, and this old woman was an artist at the height of her powers. When she turned her gaze on a subject, kindness had nothing to do with it.

The Mirror at 55

2009-10-27T22:01:00.000-07:00

You look in the mirror, and it's not your mother you see any more. It is perhaps the least sexy woman you know of—your grandmother. She may have been kind and a great baker of cookies, but sexy? No, no, no.

There's a new level of compassion that the end of collagen and the Kegel imperative bring with them. The hot flashes are the least of it. If you're going to have any sex life when your lips have suddenly (SO suddenly) developed those little wrinkles like living room curtains, and your labia have suddenly deflated and deformed—nobody mentioned THAT would happen--and you can't count 100 percent on your urethra, and you aren't sure if you can even come any more—if you're going to have any sex life at all under those circumstances, you have to develop some sympathy for other women in the same situation. Because you have to find some way to imagine another woman finding you sexy.

And you'll have to reciprocate. Oh my dears, there is so much beauty and excitement in a firm, slim, energetic female body with a light sheen of sweat on it. And what can you say about a high mileage, well-worn, rather dry, menopausal woman? That she's wise? She may or may not be… Is that sexy? The skin on her arms--even if her cheekbones are prominent and her eyes are a perceptive clear blue, even if she has knowledge, skill, and wisdom—the skin on her arms stretches and wrinkles with every motion. It's like the earth's surface from outer space—looking down at the foothills. And yes, John Updike described it as looking like lizard skin. What about that inspires lust?

For now, I leave the question open.

In His Dreams

2009-02-05T20:17:00.000-08:00

In his dreams of pogroms, he is the Jew.
Each night he hears the dogs coming for him,
the horses’ hooves on stone,
the men with whips, shouting.
Each night he escapes many times,
and wipes the dogs' saliva from his neck.

In his dreams I speak his language.
I understand him perfectly when he tells me of
his hunger, his loneliness, his wanderlust.
I do just as he asks. He is the lonely hero.
I am the whore with a heart of gold.

In his dreams flowers turn into birds
birds turn into rabbits,
mice have feathered wings, are fat, and taste like fish.
It is always night. All the dogs are caged
and foxes jog freely down deserted streets.

My Mother's Chains are Broken

2008-12-29T20:59:00.000-08:00

My mother's chains are broken.

My sister and I are going through her jewelry drawer. When we were children, it was just a jewelry box, but now it's a drawer full of boxes full of her colors, bright and deep, full of pendants, strings of pearls, necklaces, broaches and bracelets. Every time we find one that might match her outfit, the chain is broken. Why hasn’t she had them fixed?

It’s my sister’s idea for my mother to wear the outfit from her 50th wedding anniversary. We find the dress and then the slippers. But the necklace…

My sister untangles one. Beads fall and scatter:

Like the friends of her child-rearing years, Ruth next door then, raising 5 weird and funny kids of her own and sharing in her daily fun and fears. Off to California. Pauline, whose powerful mind turned on her. Maggie still carrying on in their college town Providence. And Mel, arm in arm with her through the years from college to the kids’ growing up, but not willing to go with her into piety and ecstasy.

Like the friends of her holiest days, Mona, Judy, and Mary Frances, retired to distant states, or sublimed to the final state.

Like her father, Norman Frederick, who taught her to sing their songs back to the birds, and to raise a barn in a field of canvas. His energies enfeebled slowly, were regulated by battery for a time, and finally went to ground.

Like her granddaughter Caity, shoved into a Florida jail cell. No phone calls go in, letters are returned. It goes on like that for many months. A package comes back unopened.

Like her husband Tom, her tall-dark-handsome. He stutters into speech, but the balloons of his thoughts and memories slip from his grasp. They go floating away into the brilliant sky. He watches them go with an uneasy shrug.

Like her direct line to god, which she wielded like a brickbat, a trumpet, a lasso, a healing balm. When her friend Jesus betrayed her, the line frayed like old black fabric-insulated cable, and she bit it through, tore it apart, ground it under her heel.

All my mother’s chains are broken. We braid a garland of flowers for her hair, even though the casket will be closed.

A Higher Truth

2008-08-17T15:51:00.000-07:00

Seen on a sign in front of a church:
"HAVE DOG
HAVE PEACE"

Stray

2008-05-26T08:36:00.000-07:00

He is perfect we understand
we share lust for touch
we share irritation and spasms of violence
he raises his arm ready to swat
I feel the tension in my own hand
he is wired, like every perfect one
I strike one-two-three-four
he strikes once and is done
he nuzzles into my bosom and I long for tongue
Now! he cries. I say just a minute.
Better not to stare too long eye to eye
Better not to see where understanding ends
or where strange misunderstanding must stray.

Neatly Put Away

2008-05-10T18:29:00.000-07:00

My mother’s in a box, all neatly put away.
Her singing Three Little Fishies at the dinner table;
her not-quite stern reminders: “I hope you’ve done your homework”
her working turps and oils on canvas into a radiant heat;
her lisping Castillan;
her Judy Garland imitation;
her temper and impatience;
her memories of her old fashioned aunts we never met;
her imprecations, “Oh dear GOD!”
her prayers;
her love of children;
her faith in her husband:
all have gone the way of seamed stockings,
twenty-five thousand dollar New Jersey farmhouses,
and neighborhood clambakes among the mosquitos.

The Lowdown on Down There

2008-04-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

The supermarket checkout rag quoted, in pink, some woman yacking about her “vajay.” “Oh, it’s got a nick name now?” I thought, a tad disapprovingly. Then the girl in my head kicked my internal schoolmarm in the shins.

People are talking about vaginas! On the cover of supermarket magazines! And on TV. Tyra Banks, a glamorous African American talk show host who aims her show at the young and female, did an entire show last fall called “What’s Up Down There?” entirely about women’s privates—the vajay. Meanwhile Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan keep flashing theirs to the paparazzi, we learn on Yahoo “news.”

The world has fucking revolved, people.

Women’s privates have been so private for so long that many women never learned to talk about that part of their anatomy at all. As a girl, I only learned the vaguest terms--allusions to a neighborhood like “down there” (by the docks, probably) or that void “between your legs,” neither here nor there. And since then, we have only had those dirty words assigned by men for the double purpose of jacking off and insulting—pussy, cunt, snatch, cooch, and so on. Women have had mixed success in reclaiming these words. Educated white women have for a couple of decades been able to choke out the clinical word vagina in private circumstances—to a group of other women, a doctor, or a good-hearted boyfriend. But the vocabulary was carefully correct. And this kind of talk was not available at the supermarket checkout counter in big pink letters. The result has been that the freest women in the world have not felt free to talk about their sexuality, the very core of freedom and creativity. A little progress was made in recent years with the cute “girl parts,” the full equivalent of cute “boy parts.”

Now at last we have the gift of speech.

And we’re talking not just about breasts, women’s secondary sex characteristic, but the primary sexual attribute, and quite possibly a healthy, lusty one, too. What a concept. “My vajay.”

The schoolmarm claps her hands together one time. The girl dances a little dance and goes on to the next thing.

Who should we thank for this gift? The source is probably threefold.

Black women have long been less hung up about sexual matters than whites. They have known the female genitalia as a “chore girl.” The term is a joke that brings together the image of the steel wool scrubber of the same name, which shares its curly appearance with pubic hair, and the chore that women’s genitalia so often perform of keeping men sexually satisfied. I believe it was Woopie Goldberg who introduced the term “hoo-hoo” to the wider world in a major motion picture. I suppose--and I hope readers will send me their list—Black American women have a variety of other names for the vagina, too. Possibly, vajay was among those. Possibly not, before vagina went mainstream.

But how did vajay break into the mainstream press? Eve Ensler must get the lion’s share of the credit, for taking the Vagina Monologues national, and international. Never before the Monologues had the word vagina occupied so much public space in newspapers, marquees, and conversation. The power of the title alone is hard to overestimate.

And finally, a little credit to the men who own the media that carries the word. Men have always had words for male and female genitals—and more importantly, permission to use those words. By easing control over women’s public use of the word (albeit in full expectation of financial reward) they remove the final barrier to this freedom of speech. Naturally, vagina would get shortened to our intimate friend vajay.

Thanks, Eve.

Twelve Lies and a Truth

2008-01-29T21:32:00.000-08:00

People have asked me which of my postings is fiction and which is opinion. In response I have written the following. I hope it clears up the confusion.

My whole life has been one long stasis.
I have been married since I was 16 to a short, stocky, Italian man who smells like testosterone.
Testosterone is not an Italian word.
I have never known disappointment, disillusionment, discouragement or crème de menthe.
I once slept with a call girl on her night off.
She had a squint, gold rings halfway up her arms, and wore jasmine perfume.
I have never smelled rotting leaves in the New Jersey rain or felt nostalgic for that smell.
At 10 o’clock every night, just as I’m about to go to bed, chimpanzees let themselves in my bedroom window and keep me up for hours, playing poker, fighting, and discussing advances in genomics.
A genome is a little bearded scientist, usually wearing a red knit cap.
It takes me several months to decide whether or not I want to sleep with someone.
Lesbian dating is very simple and straightforward; the rules are crystal clear.
I am usually the neatnik in a relationship.
If we wait long enough, the Twin Towers will rise again and Osama Bin Laden will turn himself in.

The Plan

2008-01-26T15:04:00.000-08:00

I’ve spent my freshman year at Skidmore trying to identify any lesbian at all at this posh women’s college and failing utterly. I have worked up the courage to ask a student if she was gay, in as subtle a way as I could. I use the old lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis as a code word, further encrypting it down to “DOB.” “Do you know if there’s a DOB around here?” She looks at me as if I were speaking Greek—as, in a funny sense I am. It turns out she and her girlfriend go around hugging because they like each other and think it’s funny. She is neither unkind nor defensive, but, no, they’re not lesbians. I write this about the experience.

Polly and Pollyanna
It’s her own fault for walking
around kissing her
dark, cold, come under my
soft white wing
friend in public.
How was I supposed to know she was
straight?

I’ve been to the college psychologist to ask if she knows of other lesbians—yes—and if she could put us in touch with each other—no.

I’ve gotten it on with my only friend at Skidmore and she has dumped me just weeks later.

Now it is my sophomore year, and I am not going through another year like that. I formulate a desperate plan.

Since there is no lesbian organization around for me to join, and since the psychologist cannot or will not help, I will have to start my own organization. People post all kinds of notices in the mail room, and on the bulletin board by the cafeteria. I will post notices. We all have numbered campus post office boxes. I will use that as a way for people to contact me. I test it out. Will they deliver to my p.o. box without a name? Yes, my little envelope comes back to me in my box the next day.

This is before Xerox became a household verb, and Kinko’s is just a twinkle in its inventor’s eye. I will hand draw some signs and post them in the mailroom and by the cafeteria. I anticipate they will be torn down, so I make extras. I keep them rolled up in my desk.

I draw a cartoony closet door swung open a crack and three pairs of big cartoony eyes inside looking out. The text is about Skidmore Sapphics (lesbians seem to go for alliteration, I later learn) feeling all alone in the closet. My p.o. box number goes on there with encouragement to write.

Late at night, after 11pm, I take up skulking around in the mailroom with a couple of posters in my hand and some tacks in my pocket, waiting for an opening to post. This goes on periodically for several weeks.

I never hear from anyone.

Sitting with Grief

2008-01-17T12:02:00.000-08:00

If life teaches us anything useful, it’s that pain happens and keeps happening. The disappointments of longtime love going cold, love dying in the bud, the heartaches of parting from longtime friends, watching parents lose their strength, loved ones fall ill—these are pains that accumulate as life goes on. They will continue accumulating and accelerating relentlessly until the very last breaths we breathe.

If life teaches us anything, it’s that a good attitude in the midst of grief is what makes the difference between subsisting and really living—and that no one should have to keep up a good attitude all the time.

It takes physical strength to survive heartache. When the metaphoric blows rain down on me, I bring the karate analogy into play. I go to the gym and build up my shoulders and arms, because rapid-fire misery is exactly like kumite, free fighting in karate. Your opponent is kicking and hitting at you, and you have to block the kicks with strong blocks, you have to block the hand strikes with fast blocks, and you have to strike back wherever the opportunity appears. It all happens very fast, and your arms absorb a lot of hits. You’ve got to have strong arms, padded with lots of good muscle. Your stomach and back have to be strong to keep you upright, to keep you from straining or exposing some part that should be covered.

So I go to the gym and build up my back, stomach and arms, so I can endure, and still snatch opportunities when they arise.

And when the waters of grief rise, I sit still and listen to them lapping around me, wondering what permanent erosion they might be causing. Today, as always, they whisper, wait, you know this; wait, your imagination fails you; wait, you’ll outlive this.

I’m impatient for better. I want it yesterday, all of it. The job, the lover, the house with the garden, the happy parents, the old, trusted friend, the pain to stop. But I’m up to my ass in grief and I will wait.

Minor Unsolved Mysteries

2008-01-13T18:03:00.000-08:00

Why does a maple tree whose colors have turned in the fall seem to glow on a damp, cloudy day?

Why do we turn away from emotional pain in real life, but go to tear-jerker movies?

Why can we have documentable telepathic experiences, yet not be able to measure or predict them scientifically? And why do people who know that individual cells communicate with each other chemically doubt that humans can?

Why is violence so degrading to experience, but so much fun to watch?

Why, when we've made a mess of things, is it irresistable to make them worse?

Romeo is some other where

2008-01-04T23:12:00.000-08:00

So often, when you’ve been living with a lover and the relationship ends, one of you, inevitably the one who can afford it less, ends up scrounging for some place to call home. Lesbians, independent types that we notoriously are, should know better than to get caught without a place to call home, indebted and impoverished. Certainly we should have been listening when the women’s movement tried to teach us the supreme importance of financial independence. And yet . . .

And yet, one understands so well the old adage, “A stone in the oven keeps the wolf from the door.” Or, in other words, What you don’t have, no one will steal.

After the love and the sex and the sharing of a home are over, it’s natural to feel ripped off. If nothing else, your expectations of the relationship and love itself have been dashed. You feel cheated. So often, you’re not ready to accept having screwed it up again.

And then, if you are the one scrounging for a place to live with too little wherewithal, finding yourself thinking, "Some trailer parks aren't so bad,” or "Wow, a lousy studio apartment in a converted garage is really expensive!” or finding yourself living with strangers, you may feel an impending sense of failure, panic, or doom.

Maybe you’ve lived in a lot of different places. On a good day, you feel like a world citizen. You’re bigger than any one town or culture. You are footloose. Should you stay? Should you return to some old haunt? Should you go somewhere you’ve always wanted to see?

Other times you are in danger of realizing that everywhere you go, you will always feel homesick for somewhere else. Stay or go, it won’t matter.

Because, immediately after a break-up, there is no home. You are a woman without a country. Your heart, where your home supposedly was, is a fist, or a fractured vessel leaking broken roses, or at best, a wonky pump shunting oxygen-poor blood along reluctant veins. Your sex has lost her lust. Or, she has detached from your TOTALLY LAME heart and is free-lancing. And she’s talking like some college boy or sports bar patron about every woman who looks like she’s never been through what you’ve just been through.

The fact that you’re about as appealing as road rash to those women only occurs to you later. They can see you’ve been through the mill, but your sex is a study in obliviousness.

Good for her.

Someday she’ll come straggling back, assuming your heart gets its act together.

Someday, maybe, you will make a home for yourself that can survive the bad weather of love.

Originally published in Weird Sisters.

Sprucing up for the Holidays

2007-12-31T15:59:00.000-08:00

My Scottish ancestors allegedly cleaned house to celebrate the new year. What fun women they were, too. The jolly sloshing of cold, soapy water, the scratching of scrub brushes from attic to coal room, the sweeping of dust into festive clouds, and the merry snapping of bed linens as the fleas were thrown out. There’s little like it to get the blood up.

These were descendants of the Danes, who raped and plundered their southern neighbors for sport. To “scotch” something is to put an end to it. Many Scots immigrated to the United States in the 1830s and 1840s. And surely the heritage of their no-nonsense attitude contributes something to our American obsessiveness about searching out and destroying germs, weeds, and most recently, foreigners.

This warlike attitude bears little relation to the gentle cleanliness of my Bavarian ancestors, which is perhaps best illustrated with a little story. I went to dinner at the home of a friend. The friend’s mother was visiting from Germany. I chatted with the mother as she set the table. Putting out the plates she stopped suddenly and examined one of them. “Ach! This is dirty!” she said. Angling the plate slightly, she blew on it and then, satisfied, set it neatly between fork and knife.

These genetic strains are always at war within me. Where other people have “dust bunnies” under beds and in corners, I used to let dog hair—when I had a dog—collect at the edges of a room until it formed “dust bears.”

On the other hand, ask my secretary-companion if I don’t take a perverse and almost scary satisfaction from scrubbing faucet scum with a Comet-laden toothbrush. And who delights in a bubbly bucket of Lysol and a mop when the bathroom floor gets really disgusting? Aye, lassie.

I try not to get too worried by this neat-or messy issue. People will take advantage of you if you show any weakness on this front.

After all, it’s obvious that in any couple there must be a neat one and a messy one, a compulsive cleaner and a slob. Wherever you fall on the Cosmic Continuum of Cleanliness, your partner is bound to fall to the right or left of you somewhere, and there’s your dichotomy. And the longer you’re together, the more apparent these differences will become. Still, the self-aware may notice they often find themselves on the same neat or messy side of a succession of partners. They should learn from this.

I had a brief, bad roommate situation while in graduate school. My roommate and her new lover decided they wanted the apartment to themselves. They started a campaign to persuade me to leave. It involved, among other things, moving a dog in unexpectedly and tying him to the kitchen cabinet where I could get to know him, and pressing me about why I thought I needed to study in graduate school instead of watching Twins games on TV like regular folks.

Finally one night the lover accused me of being anal compulsive. After 37 years of being the messy one, this struck me as a stunning, bald-faced invention. Clearly she’d gone off the deep end. Would the two of them stop at no twisting of reality to be rid of me? I packed as fast as I could.

But merely because neatness and organization are not your top priorities, that doesn’t mean you will be blind to their benefits. I am soul-weary of raging around the house looking for my sunglasses or my day-timer or, worse, the misplaced file folder containing the guts of the story that will, if published, make my career. The proper organizing system could change my life—if I could just find it.

I notice, too, that fresh sheets on the bed often have an aphrodisiac effect on both me—the messy one—and my neater secretary-companion. Now, here’s an area of my life where I think I might not mind being taken advantage of.

This piece was first published in Weird Sisters.

The Door Opens

2007-12-30T10:32:00.001-08:00

I’m in the Skidmore College library, where I’ve spent a lot of time over the last months, and in my Freshman year as well. I’ve lurked about the HQ section, where the books on homosexuality are shelved. I’ve been looking for validation, and it’s been slow in coming. In 1973, homosexuality is still something you can lose your job for, your family, your friends (and I already have lost friends). In a small town, like the one I just left to attend Skidmore, you can lose your mind from the isolation it enforces.

One day a couple of months earlier, I had picked up the Village Voice. Miraculously, there’s a column, a whole page, by a woman named Jill Johnston, who writes openly and even humorously about being a lesbian in New York City. She writes in a stream-of-consciousness style. In all lower case. Which even then I know is fatuous post-beat bullshit. But she writes.

From that day forward, she has been my lifeline, my once-a-week hit of the closest thing I can find to real life.

Skidmore has been a great disappointment. I spend a lot of time calculating how much of the student body has to be lesbian. But where are they?

By this time, I’m getting the picture. It’s a school for the rich, and the rich don’t organize. Or rather, the rich are already organized to enrich themselves. They aren’t going to start any counter-cultural organizations to make lesbians happier and more visible. Skiddies learned in prep school that lesbianism is best kept discreet. They can buy privacy.

It’s the working and middle classes who think organizing is fun and useful.

I had a lover in the last weeks of my Freshman year. We had been constant companions all year. A couple of weeks before finals, we succumbed to loneliness and hormones. After we parted for summer vacation, she sent a letter and broke it off. I was not surprised.

So there I am in the Skidmore College Library. I read the Voice. On my way out, I see a glass display case and in it, Jill Johnston’s book. Lesbian Nation. Jill Johnston is appearing at Skidmore in a month to discuss her book, this book with the word lesbian in the title. I’m floored. I circle, so as not to appear too obviously enthralled by the display case. I go to the card catalog. Is the book on the shelves?

No, there’s only one copy, and it’s in the locked display case. I circle several more times, caring less each time whether anyone notices. In fact, I have a persistent suspicion that no one at this school has ever noticed me doing anything. I sit down at a study carrel. I get up and pace. I look out the window at the snowy campus, and watch bundled-up students in hiking boots and goose down parkas trudge along snow-covered paths to class.

Finally I go to the counter and ask a librarian if there’s another copy of the book. The librarian looks it up and of course discovers there isn’t. I ask if, since the author will be visiting the college soon, could I possibly read the book? The librarian thinks it would be sensible to get the book out of the case and just leave the cover in there. She checks the book out to me. I walk out of the library with the green cloth covered book in my hands.

A door—a barn door—an aircraft hangar-sized door has just opened for me.

What's to Like about Country Music?

2007-12-26T19:30:00.000-08:00

It’s good to have an open mind, but one thing that many people don’t give a second chance is Country music. Like most prejudices, this one, I believe, stems from ignorance. I’m going to try to crack open the door just a little in the hopes that you might give it another listen.

Why do people hate country music?

Several reasons. First, it’s working class music, and many of us have been taught to disdain anything that involves truck drivers, cowboys and people who speak English REAL BAD. There’s no use arguing with the facts, but I would ask you to ask yourself, isn’t bad English a small price to pay for having truck drivers and cowboys? Furthermore, I’ll bet some of your emails ain’t that pretty, either, on a bad day.

So, when you hear Country music, try thinking “unpretentious,” rather than “redneck.” Of course, some country music is redneck—a catchy little tune about lynching comes to mind--and some is pretentiously unpretentious, and I’m not defending that.

Second, the lyrics are dumb. Well, the lyrics aren’t any dumber than a lot of pop music lyrics or rock and roll lyrics. There is a range of quality with country music as with any other style of music. And unlike rock and roll, which takes itself so seriously, country music is often intentionally funny. Let me direct your attention to I Feel Lucky (Mary Chapin Carpenter) and Sin Wagon (Dixie Chicks), for two examples.

The main thing that makes song lyrics good is the way they fit everyday language to music. There are a lot of country songs that do it awfully well. A few rock and roll writers do that—Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, and Bob Dylan. But it’s pretty common in Country lyrics. Baton Rouge (George Strait) as an example.

A third reason people dislike country music is that they think the beat is simplistic. But here’s the essential fact about country music that a lot of people don’t get: it’s dancing music. Country music fans are passionate, compulsive dancers. That is the only excuse for Shania Twain.

I want to explain just a little about what’s known as the Texas two-step, because until I tried it, I could not believe people out here in the American West did it for real.

Once those annoying Indians and Mexicans were pushed back, Texas was re-settled by German immigrants. They brought with them a love of the Polka. The Polka has an 8/8 beat. It’s good to dance to, and there are all kinds of fancy turns and interlacing arm moves that are fun to do and pretty to watch.

Somewhere between 1935 and 1990, what’s called 6-count (or East Coast) swing got mixed up with a version of the Polka and you got what is now, in Colorado anyway, called the two-step. You dance it to six counts, but you dance it to music with an 8/8 beat, so you get ¾ of the way through the first measure and start the step over again, that takes you half-way through the next measure, and so on. You sort of rotate through the music that way. And that’s part of what makes it “swing.” It also makes it conveniently easy to start dancing anywhere in the song. No need to wait for a new measure to start.

You can use most of those pretty Polka moves that the Germans brought over, and you can use some of the fun 6-count swing moves, too. The thing is, though, it’s hot in the West. And cowboys are too cool to do the energetic hopping of the Polka, so the two-step is more of a sliding step, or a “mosey” as I heard one dance teacher call it. This emphasis on dancing explains why so many Country songs are written to an 8/8 beat. There are also a lot of waltzes and some cha-chas.

Well, there it is. I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind, because there’s really no excuse for all that twang, and classism is deeply engrained in our culture, but maybe next time you hear a Country song, you’ll secretly listen to the lyrics? I won’t tell.

My Reptilian Brain

2007-12-19T07:58:00.000-08:00

If my biology professor is to be believed, my reptilian brain decided Melissa would be good to eat the first time I noticed her. Thinking back to what might have been that deciding moment, I wonder if it was the first time she raised her hand to respond to a question, the first time she spoke to me during the break halfway through our night-school bio class, or the first time she offered me a ride home. At some impossibly early moment, anyway, my flame was lit, and the ancient, lizard part of my brain glowed with anticipation.

Certainly I became conscious of desiring her only slightly later. The first time she drove me home after class we talked about her strict and reactionary religious upbringing. She lighted on my mind’s shoulder like a phoenix, a beauty who has been through rebirth by fire--the terror of a car crash that took part of her brain.

And I came out to her. She apologized for the negative results of the vote on gay marriage--which I thought was so graceful. And she made it plain that she was interested in--what? My lesbianism? That’s what I remember. And in my experience, an interest is not just wanting to hear about it to satisfy some intellectual curiosity. An interest usually means an interest in trying it out. From the moment I first imagined her, this firebird, wanting me, I have seen the world through the slippery silk of desire.

The peak episode has to have been--and this sounds so tame--going to a lousy Italian restaurant after class to eat salad together one night when her husband Rob was out of town. They sat us by a fern at a table that had a candle burning and no one nearby to hear us. She never drinks, “because it gets me in trouble,” but she had red wine, leaving me to conjecture about what kind of trouble she was looking for. We talked about mind and memory. She looked openly into my eyes and I looked openly back into hers. No fear, no embarrassment, no awkwardness interfered. Her eyes are bigger, deeper, and more plainly honest than any I have ever gazed into. Was she waiting for me to make some move? I didn’t, but the candlelight ran a silky finger up the back of her neck like moonlight on a river. That night I dreamed about kissing the back of her neck.

On one of our short rides from the university to my street, she began a sentence this way, “Rob and I have had our difficulties…” and did she say “in bed”? Or did I read it in? But the sentence went off-track, it seemed to me. She started defending him, his sensitivity. “He’s really great, you’d like him.”

I would expunge him.

The funniest moment was one evening at half-time when we were walking the halls as usual, and I had been complaining about my aching feet. Melissa said, “ My back hurts all the time. I’ve seriously been thinking about getting a breast reduction. They’re so big (I swear she said that), it’s just a constant strain on my back.” And there I was, having trapped myself into a) acting like this was just girl talk and that I was not tormented by the hots for her. And b) paradoxically, pretending that I had ever noticed how big her breasts were--when in fact I had not. The voice in my head was saying: “Wow, how big are they? No, don’t look!” And this had me trying not to laugh. So now the voice in my head was saying: “Don’t look! Don’t laugh!” And there’s me, trying to keep a “straight” face. Don’t laugh!

Early on I asked her if she’d want to study with me. Later, several times, I asked if she’d go with me to gather extra class credit like wild thyme at the botanical garden, but I was refused each time. So we connected for 20 minutes a week--taking a walk during the break and she’d drive me home after class. E-mails were answered briefly after days of delay. And that was all.

As the end of this semester neared, and it was clear we wouldn’t see each other in class again, or at least not for many months, she drove me home, turned off the car, and turned in her seat to face me. I smelled her sweat—a fatigued sweat, not a sexual musk-- “Suzanne,” she began, “I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you, and I’d really like to. . .” I felt a surge of heat at the practiced sound of this little speech. It was the same practiced tone I have used when telling others I lusted for them. It was the same black leather seats, it seemed to me for just that instant, in which others had declared their love. “…I’d like to continue. I know we haven’t spent much time--that’s been my fault--I’ve been overwhelmed.” By that time I had a grip on myself again. “You have been overwhelmed,” I agreed, smelling her fatigue, remembering the job she worked, the two science classes she was taking (not just biology), and of course the husband to whom she hurried home every week after dropping me off.

The low point surely came during break time the last night of class when I overheard Melissa say to some friends, “I use to hang out with a lot of guys--mostly guys. But then I realized they just wanted to sleep with me.” Having thought of little else for weeks by then, I looked away, tried not to blush, as if a blush could be withheld on command, like a breath. Why would she hang around with a lesbian, if it was just going to be the same thing all over again?

Who in their right mind would not want to sleep with her? She’s gorgeous!

Then, when she gave me that last ride home, she told me about visiting some single women friends in LA the weekend before. Describing the risks her friends took just to date men in the city, she concluded in tears, “I just realize how grateful I am to have such a safe life with Rob. I feel so safe.” Were they tears of gratitude? Or were they a veiled apology for not, after all, being willing to dare a romance with me?

For me, from interest to desire was the tiniest leap of a charge across a synapse. When I try to imagine what she felt about me, I fear I have just imagined for her moments of desire. For a woman who has worked so hard to bring her life in line with convention, the leap may be much farther, maybe unimaginable.

All I can do after all, all I have done for months, is imagine the first taste of her lips.

Thinking about Peace

2007-12-14T07:35:00.000-08:00

When we think about peace, we think about war.

We can’t even imagine peace. We don’t know what peace is. In the United States we’ve had a war about every 20 years for the last three centuries. What would the United States be like without all those families with all those losses in each generation? We are like that woman in the Stayfree commercial, always before during or after—we are always preparing for a war, or fighting a war, or recovering from a war. When we think about peace, we think about war.

I did some research.

I did a Google search on “hundred years of peace.” I turned up:
Hundred Years War
Two hundred wars in one hundred years
One hundred years of struggling for peace (Israel)
One hundred years of violence
Five hundred years of struggle, and
Five hundred years of war.

But I did finally find four countries—Egypt, Poland, Japan, and Denmark,—whose histories carry some clues to what happens to cultures with “hundreds of years of peace.”

Egypt
Egypt has been a country since about 3000 BCE.
The ancient Egyptians were stay-at-homes. They lived in a long, lush oasis surround by desert and mountains. Where would they have gone? They had a placid, industrious national temperament.

True, the Egyptians had to defend their borders against Bedouins and Libyans, but both were disorganized. They built fortresses in the south to keep out hostile Nubians, but they also traded with them. There were two periods of civil war in 2,000 years.

Even before the long era of the Pharaohs, pre-Egyptians settled on the Nile and developed cooking, baking, animal husbandry, copper working, sewing, weaving, growing and storing barley.

After 3000 BCE, they began to develop the thing that was the true glory of Egypt, bureaucratic government. They had international trade from which they acquired writing. Thus, they had sailboats and love poetry. Their government also conferred a trusted justice system. They invented geometry, metallurgy, engineering, and medicine, including dentistry and obstetrics roughly on a par with English medicine of the 18th century AD. They had money on a gold, silver, and copper standard. A fun-loving people, they had games, dancing, wrestling, hunting, and they were the best embalmers history has ever known. They built the great tombs and pyramids.

They domesticated cats. ‘Nough said.

By contrast, other examples pale.

Poland
Poland is a country we in the 21st century don’t associate with long periods of peace. But if we look far enough back into its history, we find that Poland experienced two relatively peaceful centuries.

During the 12th century, Casimir the Great built Poland into a major European Power. He invested so heavily in towns and roads that they said of him that “He found Poland built of wood and left her in stone.” He began Krakow University, the second oldest University in central Europe. And he improved trade along the East-West and North-South corridors that Poland is so famous for.

Poland united with Lithuania, a union that started toward the end of the 12th century and continued for the next 400 years.

Unlike Egypt, Poland had powerful, warlike enemies on its borders, namely the Teutonic Order and the Turks, who at this period were rapidly taking over southern central Europe. Poland broke its peace at the end of the 12th century with a long and eventually successful war to reclaim Gdansk and Pomerania from the Teutonic Order. (Although it is also said that when the Teutons heard the yapping of all those little dogs, they returned Pomerania voluntarily—an obviously scurrilous notion, as anyone who has ever heard the bark of a Dachshund will attest.)

The second period of relative peace followed, between 1466 and 1579. This second peace saw major developments in the legal and political realms. Poland passed a Habeas Corpus law—that law that says the government can’t hold a person without charging them with a crime. Poland established a Parliament with two houses, and a statute of Nihil Novi, meaning that the king could make no new decisions without the consent of Parliament—no sweeping executive orders, in effect.

At this time Europe was being torn apart by savage religious wars, but the Polish king declared, “I am the king of the people, not the judge of their consciences.” This spirit of tolerance attracted to Poland refugees from religious persecution from that time through the 17th century. There was an influx of foreign writers, artists, and scholars, and the first great literature created in Polish was written during this time.

Toward the end of this period, Polish nobility began the practice of electing its kings—first swearing them to uphold the constitution.

And so we see that 14th century Poland in peace was in some important ways more advanced than the 21st century United States in war.

Japan
The San Francisco Peace Treaty at the end of WWII, under which Japan was forbidden to raise an army, is often said to have been a great, if unintended, gift to Japan, because the Japanese could then devote all their resources to peaceful development.

Japan had an even longer period of peace—nearly 300 years—during and immediately after the Tokugawa Shogunate, from the early 1600s to the early 1900s. This was an isolationist period in Japan. Trade with China and the Netherlands was tightly controlled, travel outside the country was forbidden for many years, and Western literature was banned for a century.

Warriors educated themselves in flower arrangement and the tea ceremony, popular culture flourished. Kabuki Theatre was born. The Confucian values of morality, education, good government, and strict social hierarchy prevailed. Our own Admiral Perry sailed warships into the port of Nagasaki and forced Japan at the point of a cannon to open up to international trade in 1857. Japan became a constitutional monarchy. It shared in the worldwide era of progressive reform during the 1910s, before it began on its path of aggression called the “New Order.”

Denmark
Denmark’s “Long Peace” lasted all of 87 years during the 18th century. Yet during that time between wars the country paid off its war debts, and increased its population by 40 percent, experiencing a corresponding increase in agricultural production and shipping. Almost half of the country’s tenant farmers became freeholders. For 15 years they flirted with freedom of speech and the press. Danish people developed a national identity, something that previously had been noticeable only in its aristocracy.

The Scottish poet Charles Mackay wrote:

In the good time coming
Nations shall not quarrel then
To prove which is the stronger,
nor slaughter men for glory’s sake;
Wait a little longer.

While you’re waiting, I invite you to wonder what peace could be like. Could we, with 87 years of peace, nearly double our agricultural output? With two hundred years of peace, could we break new ground in civil rights? With a thousand years of peace, is there any scientific or mathematical challenge we could not meet?

Instead of thinking about war when you think about peace, try thinking about about the benefits possible with peace when you think about peace.

The Buzz Saw

2007-12-10T09:45:00.000-08:00

She gave a good-humored critique of the aesthetics of my Nordic Trak, which I kept in the living room, for want of a better place. She wasn’t the first to do so, and although it was a little gutsy to do in an interview, I let it go. I had no idea she would go through my life like a buzz saw, destroying and on the way creating enough distraction to prevent all thought beyond Make it Stop.

She warned that she did tend to leave dishes in the sink. In my hubris I thought, I can fix that.

It turned out she left dishes in the sink for a week or more at a time, not even rinsing them. Along with the dishes she left the few pots and pans we had in the sink for a week at a time. Did it occur to her that I might want to cook? Apparently not. The smell was sickening. Anywhere else we’d have had vermin.

She moved into her room, and then almost immediately took over the living room as well, occupying the couch from evening til dawn, leaving her books and bags on the couch when she went out or to bed. Art supplies made their home on the living room floor. Shopping bags full of papers and magazines lodged semi-permanently in the corner outside her door. She even moved her printer and computer into the living room – on the couch—with the cord stretched across the room to the opposite wall, for a week. Then for months.

And she left the door unlocked. I left a note asking her to be sure to lock it. She did it again within 2 weeks, and I left a note begging her to be sure to lock it. She denied having left it unlocked. The third time, I left a note scolding her for leaving it unlocked. The fourth time in 6 weeks, I told her I wanted her to move out, because I couldn’t trust her with my belongings. She had on the same day scratched my antique writing desk—presumably while putting the printer on it, and denied it. She denied having left the door unlocked, too, but in the heated conversation admitted that she’s had lifelong difficulty with locking doors.

Predictably, she insisted she had a lease. I made it clear that the lease was of no interest to me and that I didn’t want her there.

Meanwhile, there were the thermostat incidents. I came home to find the heat turned up to 72 and the living room window propped wide open. I said nothing. The second time I made an issue of it. But something strange was going on. Even after the heat was turned down to 50, the apartment was a sauna. The thermostat was broken.

And somewhere in here, in January, there was the lizard, an iguana, which, she was careful to tell me, could be 6 feet long in 2 years, that came to stay. She thought the living room, on my antique writing desk, in an enormous lighted cage would be ideal. I insisted that she would keep it in her room. This conversation kept running outside its boundaries, on its way to becoming what Gloria used to call a vertical harangue, and I kept saying, We discussed that already, why are we talking about that?

Like a lot of young, idealistic people, she felt it was cruel to keep the iguana caged (so why have it at all, I thought) and she like to walk around the house with it on her shoulder or wrapped in a towel. One evening I stopped home to get a few things for the night and found her on the floor in the bathroom, the bottom board and the vinyl trim pulled off the vanity. The iguana had found a slim opening and slipped through and was hiding under the vanity. “Bad iguana. Bad iguana,” she said to the vanity. She said she’d put the bathroom back together, but showed no signs of doing so after a week. I doubted she could manage the adhesive part of the task without getting adhesive on something irreplaceable.

Next the deadbolt lock in the front door was broken, or something jammed in it so it wouldn’t work. I came home one evening to find it that way, and because it was just after the I Want You to Leave conversation, I wondered aloud to our landlord whether she had changed the locks. No, just broken.

Shortly after the rancorous conversation in which I told her I wanted her out, I overheard her on the telephone having a conversation in a very similar tone with someone else. I thought, Ah-ha, she runs her life this way.

Late in February there were the broken glass incidents. I came home one afternoon to find a paper bag outside the back door containing the shards of a broken pane of glass. Having inspected the windows and found no damage, I discovered a picture frame she had been storing in the living room. Now the glass was gone.

Two or three days later, I came home in the morning to discover a smashed drinking glass (one of hers) in the bathroom sink.

That same day I had ridden the 206 bus with her in the morning. She put her bike on the bus’ bike rack. As she climbed on the bus, the driver berated her about spilling water (or something—I hadn’t seen the incident) on the rack. “You’re supposed to clean that up,” he chided as she brushed past. Again, I thought, Ah-ha, this goes on everywhere for her. I imagined people everywhere telling her she should clean up her messes. There was a little comfort in that.

I wondered, considering the level of anger she seemed to feel toward the world and the amount of hostility it apparently returned, whether I would come home someday to find she had hurt herself. I didn’t know enough about passive aggression to know whether it commonly turned inward or not. Still, I couldn’t help wondering how lonely and unhappy life must be for her.

The Reluctant Runner

2007-12-07T08:45:00.000-08:00

The so-called literature of sports abounds with examples of heroic people who so loved running that they overcame great obstacles—poverty, political oppression, legs blown off by bombs—to become great runners. You can find their stories in any issue of Runners World.

But there is a shadowy corps of runners in the margins who run, not because they love running—they don’t—but because they must. These people run under penalty of death or disability, to lower their blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, to reduce stress, to stretch the capacity of asthmatic lungs, to lose weight (or in some weird cases, to gain it), or to cheer the hell up.

I am one of those runners. For me, the brisk morning air, the rhythm of my breathing and the chuff-chuff of my feet is not something to look forward to, but something to be endured. The meditative state that other runners blather about eludes me. My feet hurt, my knees swell, my lungs squeak, and I am bored. I am convinced that a significant minority of those people chugging along on the roads and trails are, like me, reluctant runners. We persevere, not against great impediments, but against a collection of petty annoyances. We get out of bed in the morning with a metaphoric gun to our heads, and if we can visualize our own personal gun, we take the miracle cure. We run.

My hope is not for speed or medals, although those seem nice when others achieve them. My hope is for health and longevity that my history, habits and genetics would otherwise deny me.

Look at me and you can guess some of the challenges I face. I’m fat. Slim until middle age, I then filled out into my grandmother’s portly build. And that bane of the Baby Boomers, the foot soreness known as plantar fasciitis reduced my former eight-hour hikes to two-hour painfests.

Then a third shoe fell, the problem I had always called by the Victorian-sounding name “weak lungs” got worse and was diagnosed as asthma.

And finally, that Loch Ness Monster of the gene-pool, heart disease, set its sights on me and my bloodstream. I cried “uncle” and started training for a half-marathon.

There it is. No drama, no big mountains to climb. It’s more as if I’m balking on the slow march toward the inevitable.

I found myself in the company of the fatties—oh, come on! You’ve thought it, too—those pained and abused women and men who have almost reconciled themselves to running at the back of the race; the triathletes who strip off wet suits and sit down to a piece of chocolate cake or a Slimfast before getting on their bicycles to continue the race. These are not the returning all-state champions who run for the love of it. No, we hope to finish, and by finishing, we hope to put off the ultimate finish for a little longer.

We form the shuffling rear guard, looking out for each other’s hydration and egos, each of us realizing she or he might actually be the one who carries the ultimate burden--the burden of being The One who Finishes Last. But that’s better than death. If only marginally.

Here’s another case: a woman who suffered from lifelong depression and, in her twenties, anorexia. Before she began running, her body had the texture of driftwood. I know because I used to give her massages. She had been hospitalized for starvation. She lived on one can of tuna a day—about enough to keep a cat alive. She was well on her way to accomplishing her ultimate goal of self-anhiliation when, somewhere in her regimen of self-punishment, something backfired. One day she tortured herself to run seven miles--and got a completely unexpected boost of euphoria. “It was the first time in 20 years that I didn’t feel depressed,” she said. Every time after that, when she ran at least seven miles, she got the same euphoria. Gradually, running 49 miles a week enabled her to eat. She gained weight. She got herself a job in a grocery store. She saved her own life.

So out on the roads and running trails of Boulder, when you see the guy or woman slogging patiently along with the paunch and the shorts riding up, drawn on by thoughts of the next dessert, don’t mistake that for some kind of heroism. That’s just the same running from death that most people do, only more literal.

If God's so Great. . .

2007-12-05T19:09:00.000-08:00

As the high holy days approach, I find myself even more estranged than usual from Judeo-Christian belief. All in all, having road tested it, I'd have to rate it as only somewhat helpful in the bumpy parts and likely to fly off the road on sharp turns. Whatever the reasons, lately I find myself questioning the basic tenets more and more often.

The most basic tenet of Judeo-Christian faith is that there is only one god. Yet there are times I think there must be at least two -- a masculine being in charge of war and poverty, and a feminine entity in charge of decorating-- mountains, streams, storms and sunsets -- and perhaps romance.

If there is only one god, it must be like those Greek gods who donned different forms for different occasions like a debutante with an endless wardrobe.

Then, if you can get past the one god problem, there's the ridiculous notion that god made humans in her/his image. Okay, homo sapiens have our endearingly goofy moments (most noticeable when we overreach ourselves -- engineers and the clergy are among the goofiest), but I'd hardly describe us as godlike. Ask yourself, is my dog more compassionate than I am? Does s/he love more fully and devotedly than I? If you take seriously the idea that god = love, or forgiveness, or equanimity in the face of adversity, my dog was far closer to god than I can ever hope to be. And a better rabbit hunter, to boot.

Ask yourself, What is the nature of god? The essence of grace, beauty, creativity? Playful and savage? Comforting, whimsical, ever changing?

Then take a close look at your cat.

If god is perfection, humans are the definition of flawed -- aspiring but distractable; kind, but selfish; generous, but not that generous; brave, but so often misguided.

And speaking of misguided, whose fault is that? What kind of shepherd lets a flock go as far astray as the human flock has gone? What kind of mother puts up with the insults old Mom Earth has endured from us her kids? (Is god an environmentalist? Will St. Peter confront each of us one day with all those paper plates and Pampers, mercury batteries and used motor oil?)

If god is all-powerful, why can't s/he communicate with us in our first languages? Why does s/he seem to be limited to communicating through uneven works of literature, unearthly taps on the shoulder, blackbirds flying west and pinholes in latex? There are people who have felt a tap on the shoulder, who have dropped everything and gone off to become missionaries, when what they probably felt was a muscle spasm or pigeon dropping.

More and more I ascribe to the belief that we -- humans and our pets and pests -- are just germs on the epidermis of the universe; god is an infinitely complex Rachmaninoff piano concerto, indifferent to our daily worries; and it's up to us to get with the beat.