I Found Him!

I finally found that nude painter I'd seen in a book at Tez's flat in 2003.



He's a UK painter and his stuff is pretty provacative, like his personal life. According to Wikipedia, he's got 40(!) illegitimate children. I wonder how he found the time to paint ...

Bareback ... Doctor?

Is it just my imagination or do these two make a hot couple?



I mean, I know Bryan Singer is queer, which is fine. But, ummm, is it just me or have House and Wilson been the secret gay odd couple since at least last season? For chrisstake, Wilson COOKED for House last season. He's clearly the bitch and House is the top. Who cares what these shut-ins say!

It's Not Who, It's When

I was just watching a tape of Real Time with Bill Maher. This is from a November 3, 2006 airdate on HBO. I was so effing shocked by what one of his panel guests said, I had to sorta take dictation and now I'm gonna post the excerpt here.

BILL MAHER: “We’ve had this national debt for 215 years. It was $4 trillion when Bush took office, now it’s doubled. It’s $8 trillion. I know they like to say ‘Democrats are gonna raise your taxes’ but doesn’t SOMEBODY have to pay for this because when the deficit goes up, when the debt goes up -- it’s not who, it’s when. I don’t have kids so I don’t care, but if you do have kids, I would think you’d care?”

ALEC BALDWIN: “What this administration has tried to do is to increase the debt and to spend money on funding this war. And the money has gone into the hands of many, many private contractors and it’s been a big engine in the economy. Many of the people in this country are not enjoying the benefits of this economy but the Dow is up above 12,000. A lot of it has to do with spending on the war. Now this administration doesn’t wanna raise people’s taxes, they wanna shift that debt burden onto the people, so that the service of the debt prevents certain social spending in years to come --“

MAHER: “They wanna starve the people.”

BALDWIN: “Exactly. They wanna disenfranchise Democratic constituents by saying ‘we don’t have the money to pay for your problems because we have to service this huge debt.’ Literally that is their goal.”

MAHER: (to Rep. Jack Kingston R-Georgia) “Is that true?! Are you gonna admit to that one too?”

Comments?

Did you say 'cheap wine'?!

I went to one of these last night at this place. It was a gas but I only stayed to hear the first three poets (there were like 20 signed up to read!) because I was tired, frozen and hungry after holding a protest banner for World Can't Wait for two hours downtown.



I was gonna post a rough, un-edited poem inspired by last night's reading but my order from Campmor just got here and, damnit, I have backpacks, yoga tops and thermal underwear to go play with now. WooT!!!

What the Rocky Mtn. State is All About (sing it)!

When I was in Grand Junction, Colorado in Summer 2003 I went into a grocery store in search of some Odwalla juice. You know what I'm talkin' about -- that frothy, flash-frozen goodness that us non-juice machine people live by. When I couldn't find the juice, I asked an employee. He was about 60 years old, white haired and bug-eyed with one of those pretend twangy accents that Coloradians put on to make themselves sound extra inbred.

When I described the product, he said: "Oh-wallah?! Sounds like sometin' tha have in Cale-fornYah or other foreign countries."

I wasn't in the mood to remind this village idiot that California is a STATE, not a foreign country, and has a GNP so large its tax revenues partly fund Colorado's vast federal parks.

That said, here's a ditty to the un-realest state in the union, right next door to (and just a Tabernacle shy of) the State of the Cult where polygamization of child brides in the name of the one true religion still goes on. METH & MAN ASS!

One Small Step ...

In an effort to curb my rampant net surfing via this CPU (central procrastinating unit), I killed my MySpace account. This is good. I needed a mental health vacation.

I'm not sure which was worse -- having that creepy chick from one of the feminist groups virtually 'stalk' me because I disagreed with her asshat comments about pornography or spending 15 minutes out of every hour of the day in one of the "Lost" newsgroups arguing about the significance of the Dharma Initiative's logo. Ah, yes now onto the MicroSoft training modules and less time wasted on MySpazz with my head up my ass.

Or maybe I could try working on one of my unfinished novels once in a while,

-- Mz M.

Anarchy Courtesy Uncle Sam

One of the best damn You Tube vids I've watched in a while. Totally explains the 1999 WTO riots. Fuckin' scary and just in time for Halloween.



-- Mz M.

Petite Blonde/Giant Cajones & a TGILF !

My peoples,

Give it up for this little lady. Applaud. Send food. Send Band-Aids for the blisters. Sing her praises far and wide. Damn, that takes balls. Like I said in the Comments section, my overall impression of Los Angeles in January 2002 (sunny, 73 degrees) was: Wow! What a great place to live if it weren't for all these FUCKING CARS.

In other, less globally ecological news, I've got a new celeb crush.



David Krumholtz is sooo fifteen minutes ago! Not only has this theatre geek worked opposite Kevin Spacey on Broadway, nailed an Emmy on a sloppy, stupid David Kelley show but, NO, wait! There's MORE. He also used to be a comic book illustrator and has done the books-on-tape thingie for one of Neil Gaiman's stories. (Gasp!) I'm all a twitter. Ah, but of course, he's married to some blonde bimbo from the South, a mutant Reese-Witherspoon-meets-Cameron-Diaz freak.

I can't wait till we get the back story/history arc on his character on Lost. Oh why do I always fall for the emotionally unbalanced/serial murderer types? Why?!


-- Mz M.

Let's Be Kind and Move On

That's what my fine art photography professor used to say about my photos. In light of that and the fact that it's been a while since I held a protest sign in one hand while snapping photos with the other, I'm just gonna post the link for the Post Intelligencer's kick ass photo montage of the Thursday protest. Thank Gawd I didn't make any of them. Let's not zero in on the fat little dutch girl.

-- Mz M.

Civil Disobedience & Near Life Experiences

I went to my first World Can't Wait meet Sunday up in balmy Ballard. We met in this monstrous, three story Methodist church that towered over all the hippie houses in Ballard. Afterwards, I walked home putting up fliers for the big protest on October 5th as I went.



Also on Sunday, I got somefreak out news. My older (not oldest) brother, Dana, apparently hit a deer while riding his motorcycle. My sister-in-law said he basically stove in one side of his rib cage, collapsed a lung and broke both clavicles. Most serious, he 'tore' a section of his heart. He's had three open-heart procedures in the last 72 hours to stop the bleeding.

I've been musing on the number of times I've received batshit emergency news concerning my brothers. One of the earliest was when I was nine and Dana went off a cliff with two of his buddies the night before their graduation from Carmel High. They were driving in a 60's VW Bug and it rolled down an embankment. The friend who was driving (they were all shitfaced) died on impact. My brother, all 6'1" of him, was stuffed in the backseat. He kicked his way out of the VW and wandered with a fractured skull and brain hemorrhage several miles before collapsing in the backyard of some rich lady's estate.

My Mom drove white-knuckled from Reno to California and we stalked the gleaming hallways of posh Monterey General for several days until Dana woke up from his coma. A few weeks later, he was back home and brooding, agitated and driving my Dad insane with his California boy lifestyle. I remember him cutting the cast off his arm with a hand saw stealing two six-packs of beer and then disappearing with one of his friends on the back of a dirt bike for some macho mourning over their slain partner in crime.

We rarely saw Dana when I was growing up. He turned up twice in Reno after the accident, both times in a yellow Corvette Stingray that had come from settlement money after the accident.

The last visit he paid to Mom and me was a few months before the voices in my Mom's head told her to pack everything up and relocate us to Battle Mountain, Nevada before the giant California earthquake hit and caused all the water in Lake Tahoe to slop over like a giant teacup and drown all of Reno.

The visit did not go well. We fought constantly, mostly over Cap'n Crunch cereal, the TV (which monotonously aired the Watergate hearings) and what to do on those boring Nevada afternoons.

After Mom relocated us to the Armpit of America, I saw much less of Dana. I can only remember one very brief visit he paid while I was in junior high school. As we cruised that desiccated, gray-beige hamlet of nothingness, he said to me: "If the world had an asshole, this is right where they'd put it." It was an astute comment.

As relations with my emotionally abusive Dad grew worse, my contact with Dana withered down to a birthday card literally once every ten years usually included with a stern admonishment to "straigten up and fly right" or maybe "strive to perform at your potential". His comments weren't just ridiculing, they read like a fucking pamphlet from the local Army recruiters office. Meanwhile, Mom was reduced to having me phone my well-off Dad every single month for the measly $150 child support so we could pay the electric bill.

In 1985, at my Dad's relentless request, I left the tiny community college in Elko, Nevada where I was on scholarship and moved to Sacramento for a temporary custodial job Dana had lined up for me. It was union and $7 something an hour, big pay for 1985. I think my Dad erroneously believed that some of Dana's talent for making money would rub off on me. It didn't happen.

Dana was a changed person in Sacramento. He was impatient, a devout fitness fanatic and elitist thanks to his youth spent in Monterey. He lived in a gated condo complex off one of the busiest intersections in THE blandest of all California 'burbs. He drove a BMW, wore polo shirts and hunted perky aerobics instructors when he wasn't making his first million. In the six months I lasted in Sacramento, sharing an apartment with three trust funded assholes in one of the poorest neighborhoods, I saw him three times. Once was while at work, cleaning the bathrooms at Cal Expo and he was working as a state cop cum Cal Expo security guard. He even had those cop mirror sunglasses to complete his stoic image.

Dana avoided me like the plague. He eventually sold his start-up business and hit the rare air of the upper class. He had time shares in Mexico, a cabin in Lake Tahoe and several vacations to Europe, Hawaii and Australia. Once every six years my mother got a card from Cancun or Amsterdam. Even less frequently, he would show up on Mom's doorstep with a meek girlfriend in tow, always at least ten years younger than him.

In 1993 when our Mom died, Dana flew me and my Dad up to Washington state to meet my oldest brother, Glenn. We went up in Dana's antique Cessna, another toy gotten from his admission into the Upper Class. September 1993 was a black, ugly time in our already tenuously-shared history and Mom's death seemed to accentuate the ugliness in everyone.

After we had her body shipped back to Reno, everyone left all the funeral arrangements up to me. Dana paid for all of it but I had to do the phone work, the leg work and the numbing job of finding a casket. It wasn't Six Feet Under, it sucked. I remember Dad admonishing Dana for crying at the funeral. Yep, Daddy was that dysfunctional.

Post 1993 I chose, wisely, to avoid my brothers. I did this mostly out of self preservation and also out of the deep need for a mental health vacation from their relentlessly manipulative, misogynistic ways. I didn't need anyone telling me not to swear, what to eat (or not eat) or what to wear. I was an adult -- had been for some time -- and I just couldn't get either of these men to grasp that concept. Their inability to 'get it' -- that I'm an adult, a multifaceted individual with my own valid opinions, beliefs and experiences and someone whom in many ways they've never really met, isn't a roadblock to our relationships, it's the fucking Grand Canyon.

Dana lying in a hospital has me remembering something that happened around the time of his first accident. I think it was a few years after. I was staying at my Dad's in Carmel Valley that summer.

It was hot. There was another drought on. My step-mother was growing more and more resentful of my existence. I'd gotten thrown from a neighbor friend's horse but not seriously hurt. I'd then gotten into an argument with the neighbor friend's younger sister. She'd dragged some other neighborhood teens into it. They were all older than me and more cunning in the ways of ostracizing mouthy, hyperactive twelve year olds like me. To show that I was officially 'out of the club' for the remainder of my summer vacation, they'd thrown my denim jacket up into one of those massive California oaks, like twenty feet up.

The thing about the jacket was Dana had given it to me a few weeks before. He said he'd found it while fishing along the river. I'd seized on the idea of wearing it because it looked exactly like the one he wore. It was cool and my big brother had declared it cool. He knew all about cool. He rode surf boards and drove sports cars too fast.

One afternoon, I dragged him up the road to where the jacket was suspended high in the branches of an oak and pleaded with him to get it down for me. Gaping up at that ridiculously high tree, he kicked at the trunk and said 'hell no'. He said there was no way he was climbing that thing and, besides, he had a party to get to.

He left me standing under that giant tree with the horrible new idea that there were things in this world my brothers were incapable of doing, great dark expanses that they could not cross either by motorbike or Corvette. This is where I first fumbled with the idea that there are lengths too great to go for love.

Right now -- more than anything else in life -- I just want my big brother to get out of his hospital bed, go back in time and climb that oak. And get that stupid denim jacket back for me.

-- Mz M.

YOU Can't Wait

World Can't Wait.org

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

-- Pastor Martin Niemöller



They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

-- New England Holocaust Memorial version



-- Mz M.

Strange Fruit

Okay, someone please go to this slide show and then identify the fruit for me. I've seen them growing wild out in the Cascades by the meadowful. What the hell are they? Gardeners PLEASE help.

-- Mz M.

P.S. I was wrong about the electric cars! Damnit, they only go about 30mph tops. Shite.

$4,000 Pussy

I'm perplexed by this brave new world.



I mean, you still have to deal with the steaming litter box and the middle-of-the-night lungings at your face and/or loud crashing noises because felines are nocturnal ninnies who want to frolick at 2 a.m. And they still get higher than kites on catnip.

It is cool that they are all going to be showing up neutered/spayed. At least that's one nice twist.

I was always led to believe that the allergy problem was most prominent in un-neutered males, something to do with hormones and saliva.

Now if they could just come up with genetically modified dogs that can bag their own poop ... or even better, use doggie potties.

-- Mz M.

Ultimate Hetero Male Fantasy?

In case you were wondering, James, I've only bought the first one but it ROCKS.



I just put in some hold requests for the next 5 volumes at the Seattle Public Library. At 15-20 bucks a pop, I can't be buying one of these every week.

An, of course, since they started running this thru Vertigo in like 2003, I feel yet again behind the curve.

-- Mz M.

A View From Harborview Medical Center

I took these pics on Monday evening and really early Tuesday morning after they set me free from yet another weird sleep over at the Sleep Clinic.

I'm experimenting with www.photobucket.com ... let's see how this goes.

This one is my favorite so far.



Click on the link above to read a little about each shot.

-- Mz M.

More Horrors, Same House (Regime)

I just watched this in it's entirety. I urge everybody else to do the same, or better yet, blow 20 bucks and buy the DVD.

Be patient, it takes a while. You might wanna turn the sound off on your computer and walk a way for a couple hours while it downloads the stream.

No big surprise in that "our friends" the Pakistanis had a heavy hand in 9/11.

Just wondering now if the detainees at Git'mo maybe DO know something ... some thing that would incriminate the Bush Regime, not bin Laden. Maybe some Marine-sized interrogator asked Omar the wrong question four years ago during one of their torture sessions. Perhaps something like: "Did you ever see any Westerners while you and your crazy fundamentalist Daddy were staying in Jalalabad?" And poor little Omar -- literally dying to tell the truth -- probably blurted out: "Oh sure, we saw CIA operatives talking with bin Laden all the time. They used to bring us money and guns ... and fruit juice!"

It just gets worse and worse,

-- Mz M.

House of Horrors

I've been listening to Randi Rhodes on Air America talk about the Geneva Conventions all week and then I finished reading this Rolling Stone article last night at like 3a.m. because I couldn't sleep. And then of course, the horror of the Bush Regime sunk in anew and I really couldn't sleep.



Somebody needs to start a letter drive to get this kid and the others like him out of Git'mo. I mean, Marines incarcerating pre-adolecents in some sub-division called 'Camp Iguana'?!

WTF?

I'd like to wake up from this nightmare now,

-- Mz M.

Feminist Rotating Coffins

If I had a grave, I'd be spinning in it. I read an interview a few days ago in which drug culture and distopian teen flick filmmaker, Larry Clark, basically agreed with something feminist Naomi Wolf said in a New York magazine essay three years ago. Both were commenting on the state of the collective sexuality of young people today.



And they were AGREEING! That is so freaking weird.

-- Mz M.

Tha' Useless Feckin' Jakey

I wasn't surprised when a bunch of women lit into Irvine Welsh at a book tour in the U.K. recently. I was just surprised that it was over his most recent novel, which I haven't read yet, versus Porno which was a hellofa lot more cagey about its narrator's view of women. Several times in Porno, the character Sick Boy, describes obese women as "basically mentally ill." And one of the lead characters, a stylish Nicole Kidman type, explains her fitness and trim beauty by saying "I simply don't digest after 7p.m." when she binges and then pukes it all up in a public toilet.

It's too bad, because I really like his writing. But another Scotsman/Northerner from the U.K. spewing mysogyny? Bleh. Like that's anything NEW! Fuck's sake, it's the country that gave us the Rule of Thumb.

And speaking of sexually unappealing, when it comes to Welsh and his friend Nick Hornby, I'll quote George Carlin: "When black guys do it (shave their heads) it looks cool. But when white guys do it, they look like a freshy circumcised penis."

-- Mz M.

Appearing and Disappearing

It appears I've somehow landed a legit contract job. I'm betting it was dumb luck. I'll be amazed if I last three days. XML anyone?

I'm kissing the FRB and that heinous, hideous, fowl, goat fuck of a commute to Boeing Field goodbye.

-- Mz M.