Grad school

I'm not going to grad school. There, I said it.

Getting started, letting go

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Getting started, letting go

One of the first difficulties in playing hide and seek with your child at Wal-Mart is that, by the rules of the game, you have to be out of sight of each other. There is something instinctual about not walking away from a child of six in a public sphere. Well, I say "instinctual" when perhaps I should say "habitual."

Because this is how they get you. Fifty years ago parents thought nothing of sending their children, even young children, out by themselves to run errands or just to play and be involved with the world. It's a matter of nostalgia these days where you will hear people say, "Well, that was a simpler time. There wasn't as much crime and you never heard anything about child abductions."

Exactly. You never heard about them, but they were happening. They've always happened.

The fact is, your child, my child, is extremely unlikely to be kidnapped by a stranger. It's something on the order of, or less likely than, being struck by lightening, however these days children are warned to talk to no one, they are patted down at schools; they are surrounded by enemies. As parents, by buying into the paranoia, we are crippling our children.

The question is: Why all the fear? Who does it benefit?

Some answers might be found if you look at where the money is going. Right now our federal gov't is debating whether and how much to cut from all the social programs we have in order to pay for Katrina reconstruction, however, in the few cases where someone suggested cutting a little from Homeland Security--well, you know intuitively that those suggestions didn't go over well.

The words "political suicide" come to mind.

But keep in mind that more people die on our roads every month than died in New York on September 11. Every Month.

So, back to the boy. I found a way inside myself to do it. I took careful consideration of the possible risks and decided to trust my head this time which told me that the fear is an illusion brought on by years of social programming.

If I'm going to help this boy fight the real evil he will face in life, not media evil, then I would have to push off of the life raft. I would have to let go of his hand and say, "OK. I'm it. You go hide, anywhere in the toy section, and I'll count to twenty and then try and find you."

I figured it would be best to start in a small area. Searching for a wiley six year old in the whole of a Super Wal-Mart would be daunting to say the least. Baby steps.



I let go of his hand.

Ta DAH!

Here's a picture from Hulk's "coming out" party. We had a doctor friend come over to give Hulk those Botox injections he's been wanting which is why his smile looks more like a grimace. The doctor assured us that Hulk's smile will return in a couple of days.

Danger!

Man! These blog things can be kinda dangerous.

I ate at a Mexican restaurant tonight and had two bathtubs of unsweetened iced tea. You have to specify unsweetened iced tea in the South. Sweet tea is par usual. Anyway, I drank my weight in iced tea at about 8:30 pm and now I'm awake. AWAKE.

I already went for a walk. I walked around the block trying to look into the windows of all my neighbors. Just from the street, mind you. It's not illegal if it's from the street.

I wasn't trying to do no peeping. I was spying. I got a ticket recently for making too much noise. No warning. Nothing. Cop just walks up and hands me a fucking ticket. $211.

Sure I was making noise, but how are you supposed to know that you're bothering someone if you have no warning? Sure, sure, a reasonable person might have assumed the noise was great enough to disturb a neighbor, but who on this earth ever said I was reasonable?! No one ever did.

So I was spying, trying to suss out the MthrFcker who called the cops on me.

The other day I went down to the court and took a gander at the noise ordinance. Two things jumped out at me: The words "Health and Safety" and "Inside" as in INSIDE the domicile, as in a person's health and safety must be threatened from within their home or it doesn't count.

This is where the Baptists come in. When I went to the pretrial thing to plead INNOCENT and schedule a trial, the judge looked at the ticket and said, "Mr. Rushing. It says here the officers issued this citation at two A. M. in the morning." He paused and looked at me. He kept looking at me. I realized that he was hoping the fact of the hour would sink in. He was trying to bore it into me. He was hoping for me to realize that Jesus would not have been out at 2:00 on a Saturday night because, technically, that's Sunday and Jesus is hung up on technicalities.

I live in Oxford, MS. This is the town in which it is illegal to sell cold beer at a gas station or grocery store. Did you get that? They can sell you beer, just not on Sunday, and never can they sell it to you cold. Ahem, ahem... THE LAW REQUIRES THAT IF YOU ARE GOING TO SELL BEER TO A PERSON, PRESUMABLY AN ADULT WITH ADULT CAPACITIES, YOU ARE NOT TO SELL IT TO THEM COLD.

When I first moved here, I walked around Walmart for an hour looking for the cold beer. I saw stacks of beer, warm, all over the place, I just couldn't find the coolers with the cold beer. So I left and went to a gas station, and again, I looked and looked and could not find the cold beer. So I asked and the lady behind the counter said in her Southern emphysema voice, "You're not from around here are you?"

Oxford is also the place where bars can be open until 1 am on Thursday and Friday, but not Saturday because that's technically Sunday, EXCEPT ON A GAME DAY. Jesus apparently likes Ole Miss football and reserves the witching hour of the Sabbath on home game days to have a little snort of the hooch.

Anyway, the reason I illustrate these bizarrities is to show that this place has no business charging me $211 for being a little noisy one night. This place is out of wack and needs readjustment. The Feds did it once, years ago and left a couple bodies behind. If it we'ren't for the Feds black people would still not be allowed to attend Ole Miss. Wack I tell you.

So, how in the shit am I going to threaten someone's health and safety inside their home with what is essencially a boombox? My tax dollars are being used to torture and kill people. Now I must suffer the indignity of a redneck cop smugly handing me a ticket that says I am making too much noise? I am poor. Like most poor people I live very close to other poor people. EXCEPT, right down at the end of my street, just within earshot of the interested, there are people who are not poor, who are Southern Baptists, one of which is himself a redneck cop. Inside those houses there is no way I was threatening anyone's health and safety with my boombox, but if a door were cracked and a pinched and bitter face were to hear the sinners regailing themselves with a celebration of music and sex and alcohol and DRUGS with Blacks and Mexicans and single women who should know better, then wouldn't it be a favor to those sinner's souls and to the baby Jesus to call the police and tell them just a little lie, that you were in your bed and stood it as long as you could, but finally you just had to get up and call because you didn't know what to do, instead of the truth which was that your acid reflux was kicking in and, as you usually do, you got out of bed to find some antacids which, strangely, took the form of two pieces of leftover fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, chocolate cake and (well why not) three bowls of icecream, and that's when you saw the headlights going toward where those sinners live, so you poked out your head and worried for the health and safety of my soul. God Bless You.

Baptists Suck. Jesus Freaks Rock.

Today I experienced the Rapture!

On the University of Mississippi campus was a family of young Jesus Freaks holding enormous signs and passing out tracts. What made them truly wonderful is that their signs included such slogans as, "Go to God, Not to Church."

Now, I am not religious, and for God's sake not Christian, though I could have a good conversation with you about the "Man," so try and imagine my joy at seeing these young, rich, spoiled, white SUV driv'n Baptist (shithead) kids red-in-the-face hollaring at these other kids, quite plainly dressed, who's mission was only to point out the obvious hypocrisies of modern Christianity.

A Holy War!

I wish I'd known. I'd have made a killing on Molotov Cocktails. $2.00 a piece.

It was strange, the anger from the Baptist side. They were seeing red and looking positively MURDEROUS. The screaming was delicious. Their puny world was being challenged and without any wisdom they attacked the invaders without asking, "Well, am I perfect in my beliefs? Could I find room to be better?" No. Tradition was at stake.

Days like this I wish there was a hell for these hypocrites to fall into, and of course, I'd have to be there too, just to see the look on their faces. But this is nothing original.

But seriously, Witch trials contained less wrath that today's Christian vs. Xmas rally. There is limitless joy in seeing a Christian face twisted with hate.

Unless of course there is rope at hand.

I'm thinking about joining this merry band of Christian busting Christians for two reasons. I will go to any length to piss off a Baptist and, the girls were HOT! I mean, H-O-T hot. Tall, svelt, blonde, eager. They could teach me to pray. I mean REALLY pray. Pray till it hurts.

I Love You

Why am I here?

I don't have cable. Additionally one cannot pick up network channels where I live, not with reasonable reception. Always fuzzy and coming in and out. I'd rather not catch the beginning of Conan's stupid monologue if I can't see the end of his stupid monologue.

I would get cable except that I can't get my mind around how much it costs A YEAR. I could buy a nice guitar every year for the cost of cable.

But Discovery Channel, and The Daily Show...

or guitar.

What would you do?

Philosophy professor

Here's part of an email I sent to my Philosophy professor, the good part is near the bottom (isn't is always?):

About the religious stuff: I was a child between religions. While I would not call myself an atheist, I'm purty dern close. I fit your statistic, and I can tell you why: When you are a child in the middle of competing religions you get to see the pettiness and hypocrisy of both. In my case, the Catholics thought of the Protestants as simpletons and the Protestants believed the Catholics were going to hell for worshipping false gods (mary) and for being worldly. They fought over me, for my immortal soul. It was as if I were the Holy Land.

If those desert people would suddenly see their religions as fiction, instantly they would look into the dirt and say, "I killed your children over this!?"

I think evangelical proselytizing has nothing to do with any god. It's a wolf in sheep's clothing. Enculturation. I'm reminded of an image I saw on Television:

A tall, white, lean woman with huge, pinkish, strange hair and thick, colorful makeup in a room full of African children standing on the dirt floor of a classroom. The children are not smiling, they are staring in disbelief at the circus that has come to town, but there is something else in their eyes. These children know want. They know hunger and violence. In the hand of every child (girl, boy, teenager, toddler) was a blond, white Barbie Doll wearing a dress remarkably like the one the lady with the pink hair is wearing, the lady who produced the toys from a cardboard box as she professed, tearfully, practiced, that these poor children don't know about Christmas and baby Jesus andthat that is why she has come to give them presents.

Now, I don't know many Christians who will claim that lady, but there she is nonetheless. Those children were an abstraction to her. If she were capable of seeing the suffering that their bodies suffer, she would interest herself less on their intangible souls adn more on their tangible bodies by going to her own country to convince her own people that there are those who need our help, and that the help should be intellegent and non-ideological.


Shazaam!!!

Be calm.

Everything is going to be fine, just fine.

Memorial

I listened to George Bush propagandize last night on the radio. I listened in fits and starts. I would put down the dish I was washing, storm into the living room and switch the damn thing off, muttering, "s'all fucking bullshit--fantasy land..." A few minutes later I would re-enter the room quietly and switch it back on. I thought that perhaps he might glib something out about something or another domestic. He tricked me. Never happened.

I imagine that there are men today with tidy hair thinking back fondly on the patriotic words of their commander in chief, wondering what more they can do besides just keep an eye on those swarthy suspects around town and that there are women today who secretly got off last night while their husbands slept, thinking of ole W explaining the national security emergency that requires that he put it in her "behind" while the Secret Service looks on. She feels better this morning. She's quite chipper. She's looking forward to church on Sunday.

Meanwhile, this morning, I'm wondering how I might build a huge statue or memorial to all the arms and legs lost in Iraq, in bronze. There will be this wonderful pile of bronze arms, legs, feet hands and fingers with quite rough detachment points, and inscribed underneath, the words:

"Your Country Will Really Try, We Swear, To Fund The VA Hospitals You Will Desparately Need For The Next Forty Years Or So. And We Promise Not To Stare."

This Morning

I have a garden out back of the apartment. It's fairly sizable. We are getting too many squash, which is in the nature of squash, nature's over-achiever, sucking up every last drop with tremendous roots to give love to the gardener, at the expense of all else; other vegetables. It's tempting to give them too little room when space is at a premium. They enjoy having room, and they will take what they need, passive aggressively, or perhaps as the martyr, as it is not for themselves that they expand and expand but for you, the one who provided the cramped living quarters.

I walked out there this morning and discovered that I had left the sprinkler pulsed over night. I guess I turned it on at about 6:30 PM and it is now one minute to seven in the morning. There is water everywhere. My neighbors will not want to walk out of their back doors, which they don't do anyway. There are three grown man living together in one apartment. They come home from whatever it is that they do as individuals and then climb into a collective personality and yell at the television. They never transverse more ground than is necessary to get from the car to the apartment or from the apartment to the car. I know them only by their shouts.

The other neighbor is a dumpy belly dancer. She won't be concerned about the water since she is out of town for eight weeks teaching belly dancing at a youth camp to youths. There will be boys there. I can imagine that they have known now for weeks that there will be a belly dancer at their camp experience this summer and that they began masturbating the very evening on which they first heard the news to whatever concept of BELLY DANCER they are able to conjure up. When Alicia the dumpy belly dancer introduces herself dumpily (for her dumpiness is easily 65% personality) the boys in the group will cry inwardly and profoundly. That night as they all try and masturbate without shaking the bunk too violently they will uniformly come to terms with the disparity between the fantasy belly dancer and the dumpy belly dancer and the fantasy belly dancer will take on just enough characteristic of the real one that the masturbation may continue, but continue more interestingly with fleshed out scenarios and the occasional subplot.

With all this water I expect the over abundance of yellow squash and zucchini to continue.