One of my old poems. I’m told people like to repurpose this one… feel free to use it for any purpose.
Who would you love if you didn’t love me?
If you weren’t who you are, who would you be?
If you don’t push it too far it fits like a glove
‘Cause you are who you are and you love who you love.
Happy V-D!
She responded to his love-making with a bored kind of awe, an honest and spontaneous emotion secretly calculated, he knew, to satisfy and enrage him. It was only at that moment when he felt her completely beyond his reach, when the emptiness of her face reached doll-like authenticity, as her gasps and Gods and Oh, daddies transcended their ordinary rote quality to attain a flat, mechanical passion, when he knew she felt he brought her great pleasure, not for any reason having to do with her, but simply to prove that he could, that his member was able to return, via its brief hidden moment of triumph, to its regular inert state.
He began to dress quickly. “No,” she protested, holding her arms out to him: “cuddle.”
“You know I only have twenty minutes before I fall asleep,” he told her. “I have to drive home.”
“Yes, before your wife gets home,” she muttered. “No, don’t show me her picture again — why do you always want to show me her picture afterwards?”
“Do I?” he asked, putting his wallet back into his pants pocket and snatching up his keys.
“Turn the light out,” she called — but either she spoke too late, or he pretended not to hear her as he walked out the door.
*** Continue reading
There is nothing I must not look at, no truth I must hide from, nothing I will not see. Yes, no doubt there will be much I never will understand, through failure to read the right books, or failure of curiosity, or outright stupidity. But I will never be willfully ignorant. I decided that a long time ago. How long ago? When I learned of Freud and unconscious motivations. That hiding your own ugliness from yourself makes you sick. But it seems now that that choice was already there, as if it were waiting for me to discover it, as if I had somehow made it long before, during childhood, and like an old stuffed animal, an old favorite, it was waiting all of that time for me to come back to it. Continue reading
The guy from the Bangor Daily really didn’t like what I said, and covered it correspondingly. I think it was at 39:00, the part he didn’t like.
Anyway, I wasn’t thinking of it as a photo op.
Click to play the video. (At Bangor's website.)
You all know the problem — the online forums are klunky, so we don’t use them.
Then, nobody wants to use them because nobody’s on them.
We all like to use email, but the problem there is people get left out.
SOLUTION: An email-list. Free. Open. Anybody can join. No owner. Anybody can do admin work, in fact. Any one of you could unsubscribe me.
So this is just what we’re already doing, but set up so nobody gets left out. –There have been complaints about lack of transparency, and lack of access.
I was *not* able to add everybody, so please let people know.
(The thing by its nature cannot be moderated… so be good!)
Conrad.
A short video explaining Occupy.
THE SCENE: An upscale, middle-American kitchen. The remains of a big baking project lie piled in and around the sink.
There are THREE GINGERBREAD HOUSES on the countertop, each with a GINGERBREAD COUPLE out front. One couple is clearly Caucasian — a man and a woman — one clearly African-American, and one two men.
THE CHARACTERS:
Three to five SMALL CHILDREN. Each child is dressed as a bank, somehow, with the appropriate logo worn prominently.
A WORKING CORPORATE MOM, who somehow balances the demands of motherhood with a successful carreer. She is at first partially dressed up in her costume, then leaves and returns, fully in the role of “Aunt Sam” (a female Uncle Sam).
THE GUY BEHIND THE CAMERA, who we hear but never see. Male gaze.
OPENING SHOT of normal pandemonium in the kitchen, of the kind you’d get with a bunch of kids milling around.
GUY BEHIND CAMERA: So explain to me what we’re doing here.
CORPORATE MOM: Getting ready.
GUY: No, for the camera. What’s the project?
MOM: Oh — Well with Christmas coming and everyone still being so angry and bitter about the poor banks, who are just trying to survive in hard economic times like anyone else, I thought this year we’d have the kids put on a little skit representing America!
So every kid is a bank. This is Bank of America, this is Chase bank [and so on]. When we get to Grandma’s and the cousins are all together –
GUY: Wait, who are you? Continue reading
Gentlemen and Ladies of the City Council,
Regarding the recent police action against Occupy, I thought I would direct to you some public comments I have made recently on BDN’s public BBoard.
I think I do not exceed my authority as the Encampment Legal point person in saying that, while we all consider this police action to be very unfortunate, we nevertheless remain guardedly optimistic about working with the city to find a mutually satisfactory solution within the existing legal code. Continue reading
*correction to the Bangor Daily article* Alba Briggs said that uprooting the camp would mean throwing away the last month of work we’ve put in. Not me.
I said that, yes, we may be the top-clicked story on the Bangor Daily website (partly no doubt because of all you beloved “Get A Job” trolls venting your spleens) — but we pull up our tents, we’re a flash in the pan and forgotten by Bangor.
America is sick. Terribly sick. It should be possible for a man making minimum wage to support a wife and three kids, without a dime of government assistance. We had that once. But now, minimum wage isn’t enough to support yourself.
We need to *push* American society off its present self-destructive course and onto a more reasonable one. This takes *time*. We *need* to keep at this.
Our white-collar organizational leaders, who put forth the proposal to pull up the camp, without actually *telling* anyone who lived at camp ahead of time, tell us maintaining the camp takes too much time, too much energy. Some of the ones saying this, like Valerie, really put their heart and soul into keeping the camp alive.
Now I know something about photography, and this picture -- in that light? -- is a real accomplishment
Other of those leaders, I can’t tell you what they do to keep camp running. Sunny once called the encampment the “heart and soul” of Bangor’s Occupy movement. Was up in arms when the city wanted us just to apply for a permit. Now she wants us shut down.
What I said was, we decamp, and we become just another white-collar activist group doing deskwork and promotional stunts. Camping out in Maine weather *means* something, and this is what has the nice old women from the Peace and Justice center running scared. Trying to uproot our camp for our own good.
It’s amazing to me that we have to fight not only City Hall, but our own leadership to stay alive.
Chatting with a couple of younger 20-somethings at church. People often think I’m 25, for no good reason I can see these days when I look in the mirror.
They found out I’m 37, that I was born in 1974, and thought that over.
“So I guess you must remember the 80s,” one of them said.
“Yes,” I replied. “Yes I do.”
There was a long and thoughtful silence.
The 80s has somehow become a legendary time.
To Gen-Xers, the 60s was the legendary time. But crap actually *happened* in the 60s, which cannot, insofar as I’m aware, be said of the 80s. _Star Wars_ came out, as did Michael Jackson. Also Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, and Mel Gibson.
I’ve run into this before. I had a couple girls at MIT ask if I thought “the 80s were coming back.”
I’m not sure how I feel about this.
Gentlemen and Ladies of the City Council,
I want to thank you for having the workshop, inspired by the desire to be a fair umpire to Occupy Bangor and in general. I want to thank you for everything from the rousing speech about our nation’s origins in the early pilgrimages to this land, to the quiet expressions of determination to uphold the law, to the counterpoint that you are a policy-forming committee. And I appreciate equally those moments of legal clarity from the city attourney, particularly in reference to the law of unintended consequences.
Please understand that I have no position of authority at Occupy Bangor, and everything I say here is from me, as a citizen who is deeply committed to the peaceful protest that has formed in this city.
This is simply my view of the matter.
There were only a few focused, specific questions which you asked of us, the public. These I can address, and the concerns from which they seem to spring. I can also address the questions I imagine you might ask. But there are undoubtedly questions you have not asked, which I can not anticipate, and I would encourage you to publish them with the announcement of the next meeting’s time.
One question Mr. Sprague asked was, “How long do you intend to be there?” Another was, “How is being limited to park hours ‘onerous’?”
The group has not reached consensus on a time-frame. The brave reply you may get from people is, “As long as it takes!”
My reply is, “Until spring.”
One passerby asked me, “What happens in spring?”
I told him, “We come up with another plan.”
This is Maine. Camping out will be safe — if there is any risk to life or limb, I personally promise I will lead the retreat into a headed structure — but miserable. Utterly miserable. It will be a hardship.
As a hobo, I have a notion of what deliberately going through a hardship does to a person’s character, as a matter of choice. It tempers your character. It causes you to live in reality and not fantasy. It wakes you up wonderfully.
You learn, in other words, something about what you can personally accomplish under your own power simply by being determined. I want this for these people. I want the college kids who have an interest in political activism to be tempered in this way. Continue reading
