Some things are worth mentioning more than once.  If you don't read another Xangan today, read this.  It's .........(understatement.  understatement is what I seek here) .... a good story. 

Where We've Come To

So I haven't been following the hoopla.  I'm media-phobic anyway, and I hate American election fever with increasing fervor every time it comes around.  The other night, however, my once-a-day news fix on the way home began badly because my radio was switched the wrong way and I got NPR instead of the BBC feed.  The following approximates what I heard in the seconds before I got off the icy patch and could use one hand to slam (unnecessarily forcefully) the AM/FM button:

• So how about Candidate A's prospects?
  
• Well, that speach was definitely a no-no, but his handlers have him on the straight-and-narrow now.  We'll be hearing something softer from his corner from now on.
  
• And Candidate B?
  
• Definitely on easy street at the moment, but you never know what'll happen in the next round.  He'll be focusing a bit more on the goal now; doesn't need to worry about the weaker players next to him.
  
• Now how about Candidate C's newest gambit?
  
• Well, that's an interesting one.  Candidate C's staff definitely have him on-message, and the public is responding pretty well so far.......

Friends, Americans, countrymen.  Lend me your ears.  We are in the process of electing a President.  We are not sittin' here at a football match.  We are not raucously raving about the latest wrestling gig and the back-scene machinations that surround the coaches.

If I were Queen of the World, there would be no "handlers."  No ads.  No televised ra-ra.  No opportunity to castigate the choice of sweater (the choice of sweater??  I mean.  Yeah, I personally vote argyle.  That's why I go to the ballot box.  Because I just oooooh [simper simper] loooove argyle).  If I were Queen of the World, all we'd hear would be these guys' voice, sans clap-track, and all we'd read would be their writing (theirs.  no ghosting).  In fact, how about a standardized test with a time limit?  Eh?  Like we're all supposed to do in school? 

Mr. Presidential Candidate.  You have two hours to respond, in your own words, to the following questions:  In the event of imminent nuclear threat from Korea, what would your first five actions be?  In the event of terrorist attack on U.S. soil, please delineate your immediate response.  How do you define "free trade," and what roll do you think the U.S. plays in it?  Two of the Supreme Court Justices have just resigned; who are your candidates? 

You can see why I myself am definitively not a queen-of-the-world candidate, but that aside:  Care to add a question or two?  What question do you want them to answer, without regard to their demeanor, their choice of clothing, or the attitude of their wife?

Are You Game? 

It's Friday.  Anyone game for a little more word-fun?  Here's the challenge: 

Write something short.  The only rule is that within the text you must include a word of at least two syllables, or a brief phrase, that you REPEAT THREE TIMES.

Here's a sample:

"Whether you go or not," said the weatherman, "remember that rain is the bellwether of spring."

And another one a little more complicated (acknowledging that spring seems to be on my mind.........!):

"Morning, glorious with bright sun and scented wind, greeted her as she stepped out the door in the midst of her spring cleaning.  She leaned to admire the morning glories.  She did so, however, somewhat ruefully, mourning glory of cold weather now gone, when she could put to good use the sled she now carried to the storage shed."

Any takers?

Remembrances of the Weird

One evening as the sun set, I perched on on a rickety wooden stool beside my charcoal babula and read Carlos Castaneda's "Teachings of Don Juan."  It was an embodiment of bizzarre, this pale-faced American female delving into the guru of the peyote vision and symbol-laden Latin mysticism beside a mud hut in the heart of Central Africa, while the sibilant sounds of conversational Kinande floated down from the mamas strolling in from the fields. 

Just as the sun slanted dazzlingly past the eucalyptus trees in the plantation on the steep hillside to the west, a vast roaring shattered the quiet.  Looking straight up into the slant of light I saw a behemoth of a motorcycle -- one of those incredibly brightly-colored chrome-and-saffron touring monstrosities you might meet on Highway 1 -- but here it was, rumbling above me on an equatorial back-road.  Seated astride was a huge man with a bushy beard.  He dismounted and descended the stairs cut in the bank behind my hut.  Outlined as he was against the glare of the sunset I saw only his great, dark sillhouette.  He said something in greeting and held out a hand with an offering.  I reached up instinctively as I stood, then realized (my eyes now less dazzled) that it was a cigarrette.  So my first words were an awkward refusal.

Months later, he sent me a letter in which he declaimed at length about my friendliness and hospitality and our deeply meaningful conversations about Castaneda, and said he would never forget "your beautiful blue eyes."  What he would never forget never actually existed in reality, as my eyes are, in fact, green -- but let us give him the benefit of the doubt.  It was a very surreal situation.

My own experiences with hallucinatory agents were minimal, brief, unpleasant, and not simultaneous with reading Castenada.  But those readings in the African highlands did leave me with a just a touch of the crow in my heart, to the degree that I am willing to acknowledge that somewhere beyond the discernable here-and-now, there is something else.  I expect it may not be for me to find out what, at least in this lifetime, but I do sense that it's there.

"A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war: wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance.  Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it might never live to regret it." Teachings of Don Juan

"A path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you." Journey to Ixtlan

crow photo c Dec 2000 by Peter LaTourrette

Grown-Up Enough For Scary

Little Ms. Three was enjoying "video night" with Ms. Six the other day -- to the degree possible.  Watching "Franklin and the Green Knight," she was hovering in the doorway of the tv room, eyes on the screen, feet shifting a little underneath the enveloping folds of my t-shirt-worn-as-a-nightgown as she hesitated.  I was working at my laptop in the next room and listening to the theme music.  It turned ominous.  Ms. Three's feet danced -- and turned.  Racing as fast as her small body could carry her, she scurried across the floor and cuddled up beside me on the sofa, burrowing under my arm.

"I'm not quite grown up enough for the scary part yet, Mommy," she addmitted, adding with prosaic patience.  "But when I'm a Mommy like you I'll be grown up enough for all the scary parts."

I did not say, holding her soft body close and carressing that sweet face with its innocent earnestness that only "three" can truly possess, that in truth no-one is grown-up enough for the scary parts.

The saddest thing, really, is that there is any expectation we would be.

And Now:  "Us" and "Them"

warning:  adult content, may be offensive to some 

So last Friday on the mezzanine we were all tying up the ends of complicated projects for the weekend and there was that a fifteen-minute hiatus between the tying-up and the clock-out when people let loose a bit.  My age and gender sets me apart from the rest of the mezzanine guys, but they know I'm fairly cool.  So they don't censor too much.  This time, their back-and-forth went from the latest spam to sexual practice to "deviance."  Which was when my over-the-partition colleague offered his take::

"What's the difference between two gay men and two good male friends?  Well, the gay guys have anal sex," he said. 

After the "ewwww-ickkkkk" giggly hubbub died down around that comment, my colleague stood up and peered over the partition.  "Do you think that's wrong?" he asked.  "That I have a tough time not thinking just about that, when I meet a gay guy?"

When I first met the man over the partition, I thought he was a person of the straight-and-narrow; an unimproved product of conservative right-wing small-town America incapable of so much as parsing a sentence let alone understanding the intricacies of a failed foreign policy.  And he thought I was a cast-off from the era of unenlightened free-love; a knee-jerk liberal too besotted by the well-heeled indoctrination of the self-styled "elite" to know a hammer from a handsaw -- or the particular purpose of either.

Eight years later, we find ( still, often, to our mutual shock) that we are in fact more similar than dissimilar in all our beliefs and that we can have reasoned discussions on any given hot topic that results, more often than not, in amicable agreement.  I think we each put high value in the other's ability to judge our most knee-jerk statements with care.  Certainly I have come to view him as something of an arbitor for my own morale compass. 

So I  tried to treat his question with respect.

"Maybe if you'd been raised differently you would have ended up with different expectations."

"What do you mean?"

"If there hadn't been certain taboos; certain prohibitions you were taught......."

He snorted. "As far as I remember, anal sex was never discussed in my house as a kid."

"Okay -- but you learned about it -- or more important, about "being gay" in general -- somewhere for the first time.  And when you did, there was a certain tone of voice, right?  A certain laugh?  And that's when you learned."

"I guess so."

"Between consenting adults in private, and all that, you know."

"I know, I know, I believe that.  But I just can't not think...."

My colleague is a thoughtful, considerate guy who wants to be fair.  When he ask me to help him be more fair, I try to measure up to the question, but I feel like a fake.  Because of course I fight my own inescapable pre-printed stereotypes. 

For example:  I was born and raised an unbeliever.  It's highly doubtful I'll ever change my own opinion.  I do most deeply espouse the importance of religious tolerance and freedom of worship and exchanges between differently-minded people.  But there's this:  when I talk to someone I know is a fundamentalist Christian, I am always thinking to myself:  "This person believes in God.  They believe that God has put a certain set of rules in place for people, codified two thousand years ago, and that that set of rules is unchanging.  They believe, furthermore, that if I don't personally accept their premises, I will sink into everlasting damnation when I die.  What is it like to look me in the eyes and know I'm irrevocably damned?"

For me, this back-thought is about as tough to get around, in circumnavigating the Us/Them divide, as my colleague's hang-up about anal sex.

I guess all either of us can do is keep on working toward seeing the scintillating flashes of individual color behind the those grey curtains of stereotype and facile assumption.

More About Me ....... And You?

Here's an exercise for you:  put yourself in the middle of a room where you spend a lot of time (office, kitchen, laundry room, whatever).  Face your primary work space.  Now turn around.  Take a mental picture.  What does what you see say about who you are?

My three-year-old did this for me when I gave her the digital camera the other day.  In addition to the impossibly cute image of her fat feet peeping out from the hem of her nightgown, she produced numerous takes of one of my shelves in our cramped joint living/sleeping/study space:

• Bed?  Noooo, silly.  Trampoline!  Actual sleeping is only done with Mom. 


• Sharing the jumping space are Seahorse, Turtle, and Octopus (everyone covets Octopus:  excellently squishy). 
  
• Indoctrination begins early:  big sister's chapter books have graduated from Narnia to Tolkein (Mom's fancy deep-red-and-gold boxed hardback version). 
  
• The kids aren't yet quite up to Shakespeare, but it's waiting hopefully front-and-center anyway. 
  
• Always gotta have a globe on hand.  Where IS Brazil?  Where do penguins live?
  
• I'm trying to think of an excuse for the toilet paper other than the truth, which was confetti fabrication. 
  
• And all those photo albums?  Sad, really.  Only an infinitesmal percentage of tens of volumes filled with images of two little girls whose every action, of course, is inescapably photogenic.

And you?

Startling Things About Oneself Seen Through Others

So.  I am proud, in my 16 months on Xanga, to have enticed all of three personal acquaintances down into Xangri-La:  a poetic fellow mom, a lyrical Irish lass, and an engineer with the soul of a writer (only the latter of whom, it seems, currently has xanga-time at hand).  But here's the odd thing:  all of them, without collaboration as far as I know, chose as their backdrop ........ Pale Green. 

Now let me hasten to say there's nothing wrong with pale green:  a nice, calm, adult, non-gender-specific color; one might even say it's a harbinger-of-Spring sort of color.  Nothing amiss there.  The fact that I personally would never have chosen it, unless perhaps the only alternative was Shocking Pink, does not read on the taste of my friends. 

But I am left, as a result of this pure coincidence, with a personal question.  Just as I might feel if, suddenly turning a street corner, I discovered numerous acquaintances marching enthusiastically in a rally favoring some particular cause to which I'd hitherto paid little attention, and decided on the spur of the moment that their battle-cry was also my own -- I am wondering what this interesting confluence of choice says about me. 

Does the fact that all my friends (definitively shown through this sampling of 3) color their soul Pale Green indicate that I myself should revisit my deepest-held assumptions??

       BEFORE                                   AFTER

W-e-e-l-l-l-............

Waxings and Wanings

On cloudless nights the moon shines so brightly through my bedroom window that it often wakes me, shifting from the left to the right side of the bed where I lie with my girls.  The girls slumber on, but unconsciously squirm and avert their faces from the light, curling into my sheltering arms.  I hold them tightly, looking eye-to-eye with the serene nocturnal goddess.

I consider myself (sometimes with pride) to be a rational woman whose actions are based on logical, verifiable thought processes.  But in the dead of the night older tendencies take over.  I think of the moon, sometimes, as a tempetuous mistress of the skies; as a Power from whose bright gaze I should protect my innocent girl-children (for whose tender skin that shatteringly white light is yet too harsh).   

I watch the phases of the moon from my bed with irrational trepedation, feeling, at the fullest and brightest of her phases, an almost palable Will reaching down from the sky.

But I can step back from my superstitions, too; subsume them into a scientific guise.  The phases of the moon, after all, are an Earth-bound phenomenon discernable only from where I stand.  Floating space-side with that lovely Lady, she herself would not change from one night to the next.  Looking down on Earth she would, instead, herself view constant changes in her gravitational master.

Whenever things spin a bit out of control I try to steady myself by looking at the horizon, and pulling my viewpoint out and away into that distant place where what shatters me at the moment is only a small piece of a larger whole.

But it's hard, sometimes, not to stand transfixed and powerless, rooted to one's parochial viewpoint by the weight of some distant, half-imagined but nevertheless tangible malevolent force.

Moon image by SJRichard

Now Introducing........

(Nevermind my continuing drivel about LOTR)

I'd like to urge you to go read something worthwhile.  Do this particularly if you ever wondered how to age gracefully, how to accept everything that comes with caution and due recognition of the inevitability of time -- or just how to express it exquisitely.  And I don't say this just because this is someone I know; a colleague as just and measured in his workplace demeanor as he is in writ.  I say this because it's good.

(What are you still doing here?  Go, I say !)