Jesus and the Contra Social Blues...

Gaia always sleeps with her back to the city...
the humans built it, the humans can care for it.

Yup… here in the good ‘ole US of A it’s another Thanksgiving holiday.  Today is when, if you honor the tradition, you’re supposed to find something to be thankful for.  I had a bit of trouble with that thought this morning, kind of struggled with the idea.  Not that I don’t have a great many things in my life to be thankful for, I really do, but finding the sentiment to match the status just wasn’t happening.  And Thanksgiving just means Christmas is on the horizon, oh yea, you can hear ‘em bringing the Mighty Merchandising Machine screaming outa’ the hole in yet another totally trite full throttle launch, for those with ears to hear it’s rather deafening.  Before the day was very old at all I was hearing Howard Keel in the background, whisper soft for the time being but sadly certain to get louder and louder for the next month or so.

…You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch…

The holiday blahs, the secret bummed out depressions, nothing in those that hasn’t been spoken of a bazillion times in different places, by different people.   The facades and the fakes and the 100 proof punch that greases the wheels, nothing new, not at all.  So common place in fact they’re well understood as being just part and parcel of the culture.  Flipping this fact around though actually made me feel a great deal better, I found what I’d been looking for.

I’ve been calling myself contra-social for quite some time now, and for the most part it is a fair description that hasn’t treated me badly, not at all.  I make it a habit to commonly reveal this fact about myself in part as fair warning for those I meet, but mostly just to remind myself that being contra-social demands a fair amount of very deliberate care and compassion and empathy for those whose lives are anchored in the social as a safety mechanism for your own soul and sanity lest frustration empower the pathological.  To be contra-social is not to hate your fellow man, far from it.  It is actually to understand the inevitable consequences of what the law of averages compels society to compel on your fellow man, have something to offer him in defense of those discomforts.  What I realized is that the holiday blahs are actually just a fine, fine marker for those who are host and home to some degree of contra-social thought, and allowing for how common the holiday blahs really are that means I’m not nearly as alone as I thought I was, and that?  That, contradictory as it might sound, is actually something to be very thankful for.

End and upshot of it all is that I’m gonna kick back and enjoy the day, tell Howard I’d much rather hear him sing Stranger in Paradise, and continue my own tradition of giving someone something they really need in perhaps July, saying Merry Christmas, and meaning it.  C’mon world, cut all us contra-social grinches some slack, quit the whole psycho-sham faux pity thing.  And the same goes for all my fellow grinches out there, cut the crap and live up to your life not down to their expectations.  Maybe Santa only works out in public one day a year, but I’m pretty sure Jesus was the 24/7/365 kind, and after a century of what Madison Avenue has been hustling on his name? That makes which one has my loyalty a no brainer indeed. 

Yup, I’m contra-social, and the best part of this particular holiday is realizing I don’t need to apologize for it.

A fading...

This post is in memoriam of a truly great woman.   

My world is a bit thinner now. I always knew her as Aunt Bea.  In my childhood she was a fixture, in my youth a reference standard, in my adulthood a power-player in the realms of reclaiming those parts of my childhood lost.  She passed into history on Friday, and she will be missed.

Among many, many things she gave me back was the year of 1968.  It had been lost to folding memory to conceal the events of that year.  Some of them I now have in clear focus, others are still a bit foggy, but they’re there because of her.  It was not a good year for me, but even a bad year is still a year and needs to have it’s place in the chronologies of life.  She and the wife got to comparing notes and realized the truth, between them they convinced me.  What a gift.

There are so many stories I might tell of her, and I know only a tiny fraction of what there is to tell, but this one perhaps gives the deepest clue to the woman.  Once upon a time quite by accident she ended up serving as the justice of the peace for her town.  The fellow who’d had the job wanted to go on vacation and needed a two week stand in.  He took his vacation, while on vacation suffered a heart attack and died, Aunt Bea was stuck with a job she really didn’t want for several years.

Close to our home town is an Indian reservation, and the Indian folk were the most peaceful of people when sober, and some of the rowdiest when drunk, needless to say Aunt Bea as justice of the peace saw a great many of them in the state between, which is to say hung-over.  Now Aunt Bea was first and foremost a pragmatic woman, one of the last daughters of the frontier, and she was a most tidy woman.  Litter just did not sit well with her.  If the crime was simply being embarrassingly drunk in public she really didn’t believe in fines, her standard was to make an apology by cleaning the town square and park.  When both were immaculate you were done, go home.  Within the first year she had them pretty well trained: it didn’t matter if you’d been in trouble or not, come Saturday morning pretty much the full crew of drinkers showed up midmorning to help clean the park… so their buddies would get loose earlier in the day.

Probably her biggest gift to me though was a phrase, and the attitude that goes with it:  “Do what ya’ can where ya’ stand…”  I do try.

Farewell, Sunbeam.  

AP: Her Gaze...

You'll paint 'ore me what you wish my boy,

...see mother mistress lover toy...

and smile to think you've seen my all

...warm woman fertile fair and tall... 

who'll heat your midnight winter dreams 

...caress of fire spill'd sugar'd creams... 

but I say to you oh handsome lad 

...proud man of Athens logic clad... 

think not to sway my siren's heart 

...conniving bold cruel Hera's part... 

with deeds of war and hoarded gold 

...tokens torn from Hades' hold... 

of these I've borne a gluttons fill 

...as empty echo, sterile shill... 

so reach for me if think you must 

...make safe your heart, safer trust... 

in honest hope of hearth and home 

...adventure sated ne'er to roam... 

where we might dwell in cottage walls 

...and laugh my love for all who call. 

It still happens, from time to time... it's always such a treat when it does.  This was inspired by an image on DeviantArt [link].  It all but wrote itself in 30 minutes, and that included cooking lunch.  I wish to express my gratitude to the photographer Mark Daughn and his model Ms. Chrystal Lee for their gift so appropriate to a housebound snowy day. Thanks guys, until you've actually met Erato you can't know what a delight it is to find an image such as yours that awakens the gift of the muse.

By way of comment…

I offered this in a comment to an artist on DeviantArt.com who spoke of not really knowing the difference between erotic art and pornography.  The tone of their post was they had been beat up by the question to the point of not really caring.   I’m reposting it here because this is about as succinct a definition as I’ve ever managed to capture.  I feel this is an important thing to care about since in truth the subject runs a great deal deeper than simply the realms of art.

***   ***   ***

In your journal you pose a most pertinent question concerning the difference between erotic art and pornography.  Please, allow me to offer for your consideration the definition I've found that fits observable reality without contradiction.

As you say, there is sex, and there is death.  From nature's perspective there is one absolute demand placed on all life: make more life so life will not end with your ending.

From this it then follows that the erotic arts are all things, sexual or otherwise, that celebrate the ability to make more life.  The erotic arts are in fact quite wide ranging, but always share several things in common: they imply fertility; and, by literal or implied content are taken from a binocular perspective, more than one, for it takes more than one to create new life. By way of example, for those who truly understand the erotic an image of a fruited orchard is just as erotic as an image of a man and a woman sharing sex, for the end result is the same... more life.

The pornographic is however all things, again sexual or otherwise, that abdicate the responsibility of creating new life to replace the current life that death will, ultimately, set non-living.  There are many forms of pornography, sexual pornography being the most recognized but hardly the most damaging.  To my thought the defining characteristic of pornography is a monocular perspective, the perspective of one and only one, and in that lonesomeness ultimately sterile, and in sterility doomed.

Since pornography presents a monocular focus it, like the erotic arts, is indeed a wide ranging thing. Pornography of any form presents to the world the lie that some single point of focus can create the life desired rather than the truth which is that any single point of focus can but reflect the content of the life already existing.  To those who truly understand the pornographic there are so many forms of pornography: pistol porn, power porn, pain porn, money porn... the list just goes on and on, our world is saturated in pornographic thought.  But in common to all of them is the implication that this one thing is what validates life to continue.  To understand pornography is to understand the mechanisms of death, and death is always faced... alone.

The erotic arts reflect the courage of life determined to live on, pornography reflects the fear and despair of death.

Hooters and another Lovely Lass...

As is not so uncommon I’m once again indebted to one of the kids crewing my favorite little diner for the thought source beginnings of a post.  I’ve had my head off in me own little world(s) for a while now writing on the stories, hadn’t really been paying much attention to other things, not really.  Anyway, early this morning the lass in question was involved in a chore that put her across from me (sitting at the counter sucking down coffee waiting on the day to begin), and rather than focus on the chore she was rambling a bit.  She’s a good storyteller, an intelligent young woman who’s easy comfortable company, easy on the eyes, end and upshot was directly she’d sparked a thought.

She was telling the story of the time she applied to work at a Hooters.  You know, Hooters, the place where they cater to all the misplaced bottle babies of the world.  She had the job if she wanted it, no issue there, but the manager who interviewed her said he was afraid she might have trouble fitting in being as how she was to intelligent.  Of all things... to intelligent to work where stereotype sexy is the defining job requirement.  As the story went she sat in with the other girls for an hour at a slow spot in their shift and in the end agreed with the manager.  She came to the conclusion that if the most intelligent comment heard in an hour involved a new shade of eye liner then no, probably not an enjoyable place for her to work.  She took a different job, like I said, she is an intelligent lass.

The thought she brought to focus doesn't have anything to do with eyeliner, or Hooters for that matter.  It has more to do with the cultural cliché of sexy dumb, blond or otherwise, and what that says about a significant fraction of the culture.  

Sometimes the mask does slip...
 when she doesn't think anyone is looking

Once upon a long time ago I knew a sexy blond, and yes, she was sexy, I mean drop dead gorgeous sexy, queer check sexy as we called it back in the day (queer check: walk her through a crowd of fifty boys and forty four of ‘em start dropping IQ points for lack of blood supply and the other six are confirmed gay), and she was anything but dumb.  Unless of course there was a strange male in the picture at which point you’d have sworn (if you didn’t know her) that she’d need help unwrapping her bubble gum.  It was so solidly part of her culture it was foundation deep in her personality, all but automatic. It’s the reasons behind this odd cultural convention I’m spelunking in today looking to see what’s to be found, a new rabbit hole if you will.