Why I love mis-edited headlines:
“Boyfriend Proposes to Woman Gored by Yellowstone Bison in Hospital”
Who allowed that bison into the hospital without a pass?
* * * *
I’m 84. Linda just turned 80. I’ve outlived the last two generations of my family despite being a waste of a kid who missed half of first and second grade through sickness. So we’re become Official Geezers through the triumphs of modern medicine.
But what percentage of the extra years granted us is spent sitting in doctors’ offices being affronted by those fucking TV screens that you can’t turn off? I might be willing to trade that particular agony for a few extra months or years of resting, without life or thought, in the gentle loam.
* * * *
Why are so many people terrified of trans kids? How empty are their paranoid lives to quake before not knowing someone’s sexual identity?
And how many trans people are there anyway? The figures I see most often run 1 to 1.5 percent of the population.
Is the current obsession because trans people (often considered shamans by indigenous cultures) now have an official title, rather than being considered backroom weirdos no one should talk about?
And why the growing fear of sex education? God, I wish I’d had some: Pushed into an all-boys Catholic high school as the son of parents who never mentioned sex at home, I was at a total loss in my adolescence.
And for Krishna’s sake, why don’t we install unisex bathrooms like much of Europe? Some trans demon is going to assault and kill our daughters in there? C’mon, everyone knows that sex crimes and murders are committed in the woods, and no one wants to abolish woods because of sex crimes. They only do that to make training grounds for cops or homes for the 1%! Let’s keep our priorities straight.
* * * *
A female sea otter off the California coast has been swiping surfers’ boards and riding them. Various conservation outfits, government and private, have been trying to catch her and transfer her elsewhere, for her own protection and that of the surfers They’re not having much luck.
What bothers me is this lady otter has not been granted a name, only the tracking number 481. I hereby suggest this sad omission be rectified. Let her be called Sheshouldnt Otter.
* * * *
[I’ve written about almost all of the following at one time or another, so forgive me for sewing them all together. Oh, the hell with forgiveness: Just chuck ‘em in the trash.]
I’ve had four experiences, some extended, some transitory, that I haven’t read about anywhere else. That doesn’t mean they haven’t been written about, but that, in my erratic bumbling through literature, I’ve never run across them.
1. As a kid, I had an intense hatred of being a child. I don’t mean that I was mistreated or left to rot, but that – despite my possessing almost no other understanding of human realities – I knew that I was on the bottom rung of life, the least considered, lowest, most unentitled form of humanity. I knew that nothing good was possible until (unless?) I grew up. I fantasized growing up and returning to childhood with an adult’s knowledge that would make a child’s life bearable.
2. At age 16 I happened to walk into a room and one of the people said, “We were just talking about you.” I had never before, not once, considered that anyone ever thought of me when I wasn’t right in front of them.
3. In Philly, about 5 am I think, I had the most horrendous dream of my life. Something – not someone, possibly not even an entity – was attacking the most basic level of my existence. Not my consciousness, not my sub- or un-conscious, not my will, but the basis of my existence.
I can’t tell you what was targeted, I don’t think it was anything that could be defined, in fact I don’t think it was anything, but rather my core of being. I don’t know any terms that would come close. I awoke with emptiness and terror, but a sense of relief – until I fell asleep again into the same attack. It happened at least 4, perhaps 5 times – the same “dream,” over and over, an assault on the ultimate matter of what I was.
It’s never happened again, and I sincerely hope it never does. It was beyond and below what anyone should experience.
4. [This one I included not only here, way back, but in one of my novels.]
In the second-floor bathroom of our Powelton Village, Philadelphia, house, I fell asleep in our delightful clawfoot bathtub, filled with the hottest water I could stand (as always). Later, something awoke. It was not me; it was not anyone else.
It did not know who it was. It did not know what it was. It did not know that it was. It had no understanding of existence, of its own being, only puzzlement. It was before – before life was, before anything.
Slowly it came to know that it was, then what sort of thing it was, then that it was me, staring at my foot next to the hot water knob.
I’ll never understand how such a thing could have been possible. It doesn’t fit with what I know of brain function, of neurology, of philosophy. It was, and is, pure astonishment.
None of these states of mind contain, for me, the slightest hint of the spiritual. That would be closing the door to inquiry with a weary shrug.
lickhaven 