Did I Say Thank YOU?

Have I even bothered to say thank you to YOU for reading my blog? Well, if I haven't lately, then I'm a complete bum and so I just wanted to say thank you so much for reading my blog I really, really appreciate it. You are the best, all of you guys who keep reading and sending me email and talking about what I write about and also writing about it. It's a big deal, so thanks, thanks, thanks.

Sick Kid Day

Talk about germ warfare. What do these kids do at school all day, inject test viruses and swap throat samples? My son's sick again which makes any life you were planning on living or activities you were planning on doing come to a grinding halt. All you want for them is to be well, but man, is it frustrating. We had a lot of fun stuff planned this weekend and now -- whoosh -- nearly all of it is out the window.

Ladies and Jellymen

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. This is just a test. I can't get to my site so I figure Blogger's up to its old tricks. Let me try to post this.

River of Love

At first, the surface of the river
throws your face right back at you
and your sky and your clouds
it tosses back your way,
as if to tease and say, go away
it will seem shallow at first regard
silly and fun and free and flirting
the surface of this river

but you might follow it down
and it might bend and play with you
and light will slice it
and show you parts of fish
and rocks and things
and the surface opens slightly

and you might follow it further
and the sun will cut holes in its watery silk
to reveal sunshine below, melting like butter
at the river bed and how cozy a bed it is
in its welcoming depths
and the surface is now inviting

and you might have turned away
but instead chased it and
even walked in, just to feel
its current and wetness
and rushing power and now
the surface is no longer shy

and you are in the river
and in awe of it
and bow to its depths
and its undercurrents
and its history
and its darkness
and its shining light
and its silent love
of you and trees and sky and rocks
and the surface pulls you in
and you go to it,
gather it up like thick silver silk around you
wrap yourself in it, a shiny mantle of deep care.

Tulip Time

I still can't get over this excellent post from Niek Hockx site, Shutterclog. Gives you a real feeling for how Europe experiences war. Feels a little different over there, eh? (Thanks to David Weinberger for posting this last week and reminding me how good it was.)

How To Become An Alpha Male -- Lesson 13: The Real Alpha Male

Lucky 13. Great. Let's talk about death.

When I write these essays about Alpha Males, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know why I’m writing. I don’t know where I’ll end up. I don’t know anything. I just know I have to write them.

I know my dad was an Alpha Male, the classic 1960’s Madison Avenue slick handsome ad man type Alpha Male.

I know I grew up wanting to be him, have his exciting life and not be my mom, the stuck-at-home babymaker. Maybe a weird thing for a woman to say, but yes, in my family I was my dad’s number one son in some ways. You could rename these essays Confessions of an Alpha Male Wannabe.

I know today I’m about two weeks out from the one-year anniversary of my dad’s death. And I know I had to be by his bedside those torturous months last year, his last six months alive, I had to be there to watch the death of a salesman. The death of an Alpha Male. I had to watch, so I could report back and tell you it was not a pretty thing to see.

For whatever reasons and in his generation of men, there were many good reasons, my dad had a lot of trouble connecting emotionally with us. The result was feeling abandoned by him, even in his presence. Worse still, it was a charming, seductive presence, loved and adored by clients and other women and strangers, but not fertile ground for roots to grow between him, my mom, my other three sisters and god forbid, he have any connection to his real only son, my brother.

One time on a dreadfully cold night in New York up on that windy canyon Riverside Drive, my older sister, in her twenties at the time, slipped on an icy street corner, fell down and cut her knee and instead of soothing her or asking her is she was okay, he whipped out a $20 bill and put it on her knee like a bandaid and said, “Buy yourself a new pair of stockings.”

Money was the coin of the realm. If you had money, you were the big guy. You were safe, people had to do what you said. People had to listen. People could be told what to do if you were the guy with the money. The guy with the expense account. The guy who picked up the check at the fancy business lunch in town, the day before Thanksgiving when the wives were home making the big family meal for the next day. Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving, you had time to fuck your girlfriend and take the late train to Greenwich for the lovely family weekend.

Where did that come from? Well, wherever. I told you I don’t know where any of it comes from. I just write it down.

He did have girl friends – we all knew and all pretended it wasn’t happening – the delightful double whammy of childhood abandonment and simultaneously having your head fucked over with all the lies, all the pretending, having your pristine core knowledge, your gut feelings contradicted by adult words. Your innocent knowing and intuition betrayed. Everyone pretending they can’t hear the deafening noise of my mother’s anger and frustration, completely silent but louder than murderous thunder. She’s making stuffing.

So you pick. You want to be the guy downtown with the fancy car and the fun life and the pretty babe? Or do you want to be home at the stove burning stuffing? Stuffing it. And that’s all we got to see up close, all of us kids figuring these two parents knew something we didn’t know. Surely they must know how to live a life. What were they doing there otherwise? Weren’t they trying to show us something. Something about how the world worked? Something about how we would live in the world when we were their age?

But really they were so young and they didn’t know what the hell they were doing. And even now, I’m NOT that young and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. So let me get back to it. What I saw at my father’s deathbed. I saw a guy who FINALLY at the end of his life nearly “got it” and realized the only people still there for him were not some guys he wined and dined at the 21 Club. And not some babe he was fucking at his pied-a-terre in Greenwich Village. Those folks were nowhere to be found at the nursing home when his urine bag filled with piss and blood and an infection loomed large – one of the early disasters he endured on the long, slow painful six month road out of life.

We were there. My sisters, my brother, my brothers-in-law, my husband, my son. We were there remembering silently at times all the times he WASN’T there for us, or if physically present, often wasn’t able to be there emotionally for us. We were there. I was there to see who this man had become, without an expense account, without receipts (“Always get your receipts, kids for those bastards at the IRS.”) without expensive loafers. He was a wreck, he was a pile of bones, no more glad-handing as his hand lay flat on the hospital bed, purple and bruised with IV’s taped down onto his wilting skin. He was still flirting with the nurses. They are taking his shit away in a silver bedpan or diaper and he’s still flirting with them.

But it wasn’t that dark. He finally was getting it. He finally realized all there is love – not Catwoman in her cat suit sharing cocktails with him – but real love. A family’s faithful love and endurance in the face of painful illness and hopeless and inevitable death. No one missed the REAL ALPHA MALE IN THE ROOM. The Grim Reaper. Oh, yes, he was the big guy in that hospital room and we fought him off every god-damned day, day after day.

And my dad really finally got it – so damned late – but better late than never – that he was nothing. Just a “nothing ball” as he used to call people he considered inferior to him, what most would call “losers”. He was nothing except for the love and connection he had to his family and to my mom, though she was now gone and spared the final scenes of his life. He got that you can’t do anything but love one another. You can’t walk through this life without caring for other people and that care and love will eventually come back your direction. And of course, there were times when he did care and love us in the only ways he could. He worked hard for us. He sweated the money part. He put us through college and helped us move into dorms. He drove us and our friends places. He told us stories. He was there in the ways that he could be there. And in the end, we found, surprisingly, there was enough love and forgiveness to go around. Even for him. And that’s why we were there for him, even though he was not always there for us. That’s what he finally figured out. And I guess we learned that it’s never over til it’s over.

Our House

I'll light the fire
You put the flowers in the vase
That you bought today

Staring at the fire
For hours and hours
While I listen to you
Play your love songs
All night long for me
Only for me

Come to me now
And rest your head for just five minutes
Everything is good
Such a cosy room
The windows are illuminated
By the sunshine through them
Fiery gems for you
Only for you

Our house is a very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard
Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy
'Cause of you
And our la,la,la, la,la, la, la, la, la, la, la.....

Our house is a very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard
Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy
'Cause of you

I'll light the fire
And you place the flowers in the jar
That you bought today

-- Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

What's Going On?

Father, father, we don't need to escalate
War is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today

-- Marvin Gaye

Neo-Macho Man In The Nation

Big thanks to Brian for the link to an amazing piece in The Nation (Andrew Sullivan's favorite, I'm sure). If you think my Alpha Male pieces are just silly, they're not. Don't miss this consideration of Alpha Males run amuck who are taking us to the brink of mass destruction. Listen guys, give me a president who just wants a blow job any day, over one who wants to BLOW US ALL TO KINGDOM COME. Seriously, check out the piece by Richard Goldstein in The Nation which starts with these first two paragraphs befow and ends with the other two.

Say what you will about oil and hegemony, but the pending invasion of Iraq is more than just a geopolitical act. It's also the manifestation of a cultural attitude. To understand how this war is being packaged and sold, you have to look at the fantasies Americans consume as they graze through the vast terrain of TV, radio, movies and the Internet. In this charged environment, pop culture and politics swirl around each other like strands of DNA. The product of this interplay is the current crisis.

From Colin Powell dissing the French as cowards to Donald Rumsfeld raising his fists at the podium, the Bush Administration bristles with an almost cartoonish macho. It's a little like watching pro wrestling in a global arena. Why is this smackdown style acceptable to many Americans now? Bill Clinton has an explanation. "When people feel uncertain," he said after the Democratic Party's recent electoral rout, "they'd rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right."

...

What will it take for the best and brightest Democrats to address the relationship between male dominance and the current crisis? Don't count on courage. Politicians usually arrive when the coast is cleared by culture. It remains for artists to challenge the backlash and for critics to criticize it.

It's time to create a new vocabulary of dissent, one that makes a clear connection between war fever and thug power. There's no more urgent task. The dawgs of war are about to be unleashed. Thousands will die, billions will be spent and most of us will have to do with less. These are the wages of following a leader who is strong but wrong. He's the man; we're his bitches.

The Sideways World

Seems like nobody in Washington see the Sideways World. They have too many old maps hanging around in war rooms. It's time to take the maps down.

People keep thinking the USA has borders, that cute little top part by Maine, that luscious string of beads in Florida ending in Key West, that California slice of cantaloupe, sexy and sweet and even funny Alaska -- a craggy faced old miner about ten times the size of any other country in the world, the skipping stones of the Hawaiian Islands tossed like black lava rocks into the Pacific Ocean, this is all nice in geography class, a big old map taped up on a big old wall, but it has nothing to do with what's really going on. Nothing.

America doesn't have those borders anymore. Did you notice?

Didn't anyone notice we all went sideways and when I talk to Denise in LA and Doc in Santa Barbara and Cheyenne in SF and Chris in Boulder and Jeneane in Atlanta and David in Boston and Gary and Euan, both Scots in the UK and Brian and JP and Jack, all Brits in the UK and Niek in Holland and Jean-Yves in France an Golby in South Africa and other friends in Germany and Japan and China and New Zealand and Australia and yes, the MIDDLE EAST that I'm making a new world with new borders? I've already made a new world with NO borders. I've made a Sideways World thanks to the Net. I'm living in a Sideways World.

And would someone please ask me, like George Bush and his friends, WHY THE FUCK I'D LIKE TO KILL ALL MY FRIENDS IN MY SIDEWAYS WORLD? That's the last thing I want to do. I'm a mom. I want my friends to have fun and eat and grow up and make more kids. I'm not really wanting to nuke them into non-existence.

So when they ask me to think I live in the USA and there are borders here and I should say, "Yeah, sure, let's kill those STRANGERS in that pink country and that green country and that orange country, up there on the map, let's not actually sit down and LISTEN TO THEM." they have it all wrong. I don't see those borders anymore. I just want to talk to those folks. I might find out there are a lot of other mothers living there trying to make dinner for their kids. And when you're just trying to make dinner for your kids, don't you deserve NOT to be annihilated? Call me crazy.

How To Become An Alpha Male -- Lesson 12: The Post-Alpha Male

The Post-Alpha Male should not be confused with Post Alpha-Bits, although both are similarly sweet. Both have a tendency to spell things out and this directness is one of their many virtues.

It’s now clear to me that the Alpha Male is a dinosaur, dragging his hopeless old carcass across a desolate desert and finding no water, no sustenance and is almost history. I worry this may seem shocking, as I’ve entitled this series of essays, “How To Become An Alpha Male in 18 Easy Lessons, “ but after in-depth academic research – actually no research at all – but a lot of shooting the shit with men over beer, wine and the occasional Gatorade, it’s clear that men are evolving into Post-Alpha Males and it’s a terrific improvement over the Alpha Male. It's a big deal, you're just gonna love it.

So the good news is, I’m beginning to define an animal worth becoming. And the bad news is, The Alpha Male is all washed up.

But, truth be told, it wasn’t possible to find this Post-Alpha Male, dust him off and examine him until I got this far down the path..

The Post-Alpha Male if he is anything, is finally sensitive to the needs of others and especially the needs of women. This does not make him pussyfied. Not by a long shot, in fact, it makes him all the more manly.

The Post-Alpha Male has been through hell and back and doesn’t necessarily need to tell you that. His relaxed and calm attitude spell REAL confidence – not the phony con game of the Alpha Male.

Sunless Tanning -- Let's Talk Girls

So I understand from friends, Estee Lauder's Sunless Tanning with Tint is the way to go. The tint means when you put it on, you can SEE WHERE YOU PUT IT. Some of the untinted creams lead you to paint yourself here, there but not everywhere and can have some unusual effects. You need to exfoliate first -- a loofa will do. And then as the woman in this site says, "blend, blend, blend." She begins: "I am corpse white as my husband so charmingly points out and I simply don't tan so I tried this "self-tanner" by Estee Lauder in Medium over the weekend ...

Four hours later, you're tan. But I don't get it, how long are you tan for? Four hours? Four days? Four weeks? Nine and 1/2 weeks?

Now Don't Go Crazy

There's been a sociological shift in women's consciousness I've written about before. The lyrics of Destiny's Child pop hit, "Independent Woman" from the movie, Charlies' Angels, gives us all the clues we need. Women are taking their own lives back and living in radically independent ways. They are taking their bodies back. They are deciding their bodies are terrific, even if they don't necessarily look like Barbie. And they are about to hit the beaches this summer in a whole new way. Bare-breasted. I'll put money on it.

It's been coming for a while. Ask the folks at Victoria's Secret who make bikinis if I'm wrong. Bikinis with easy to pull open cups on top -- the simple triangle kind -- will sell out this summer, because they let you "open the curtains" and do this. American women will take a clue from their European sisters and let their breasts go free this summer. Notice the word "THEIR" breasts. When you decide your body belongs to you and it's beautiful, you can decide that your breasts are a beautiful part of you and they should be naturally free at the beach. This is what women will do, wade out into the water, turn their backs perhaps to the beach (or not) and let their bosoms hang out in the summer sun. It's not as free as Europe, but it has to start somewhere.

Thanks to Steph in Alaska, via Shutterclog, who sends along this post from The Onion, which seems to be serious, not joking for once. Or if they are, they don't realize how they've touched on a trend and it is about to happen. I'd say to the author of this piece, if he'll get rid of his Beatles hairdo, I'll go topless at the beach.

If you're not convinced, ask Estee Lauder -- they have the best self-tanning lotion and all my girlfriends are buying it so when they aren't going bare-breasted at the beach, they can at least keep their tits from that weird white triangle disease, which looks just silly. Wanna buy some stock -- you'll see Victoria's Secret (ticker: LTD) and Estee Lauder (ticker: EL) laughing all the way to the bank this summer.