Dancing with Myself

Spinning and Tap Dancing...

I love it when I'm busy. And I am right now.

I seem to have no interest in bitching or moaning about things political. Others do it so much better than I. Me? I'm just glad that others who are so much more eloquent than I are paying attention and writing. Look to my list on the right and go visit some of my friends in the hinterlands.

In short, I got nothing. So hows about I distract you with a bit of humor?

Okay, damn me to hell, but this is another nun joke. What can I say? They're easy marks.

Sister Mary Jesus saved her pennies for 50 years in order to make a pilgrimmage to Rome. She's at Kennedy in New York awaiting her plane to Rome. She's old, she's humble, she's so excited she can just about pee. She also has three pennies left. She walks by a weight and fortune machine. Curious, she decides to put one of her three pennies into the machine just to see what message fate might have for her.

"Your weight is 98 pounds. As for your fortune, you're about to let loose the biggest fart in the history of human kind."

Holy fucking Jesus, says sister Mary Jesus. I've never passed gas in me life, and I'm not likely to be starting to do so now that I'm on me way to a pilgrimmage to Rome.

So, off she goes towards her gate when suddenly and unsuspectingly, she farts, billowing out her habit and causing the instant death of several plants in the vicinity. Shaken and embarrassed, she turns to the machine and wonders what else might be in store for her. Cautiously, she approaches the scale and with great trepidation, she steps onto it and puts in another penny. The machine booms out: "You weigh 98 pounds and in the next several minutes, you're about to be raped." Now she knows the machine is way off. Who would rape an 80 year old nun? So, off she goes to her gate, when suddenly two large, hirsuite arms grab her and pull her into a vacate room where she is savaged righteously (no pun intended) before being dumped back onto the corrido.

Dazed, she stumbles into the original weight and fortune machine. Astonished and amazed, she realizes she has one penny left, so she hesitates and then gets on the machine and puts in her penny. To her amazement, the machine says, "You still weight 98 pounds, but while you were farting and fucking around, you missed your plane to Rome."

What Happened?

Jeez, go away for three days and see how much you miss? I guess it began on Friday with Cheney telling Leahy to "go fuck himself." So how did Leahy respond, or did he? I agree with those who conclude that Bush & Company are losing it. As poorly as he did every other job in his life, is anyone truly surprised that he's totally fucking it up here?

Enough of politics for a moment. This joke came to me via email today. I think you'll enjoy it.

A small boy was lost at a large shopping mall. He approached a uniformed policeman and said, "I've lost my grandpa" . The cop asked, "What's he like?" The little boy replied, "Jack Daniels and women with big tits".

Poetry on Fridays

A simple little ditty by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It is the motto of my life's expression, called simply "The Fig."

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light.

I'm off to Lake Tahoe for the week-end. I leave you with a special blessing from my guru: "If you can't be with the ones you love, love the ones you're with."

Spinning with the Illusion of Progress, part deux

I've been having the greatest week. I'm sorry the world is going to hell in a hand basket, I really am, but damn, I'm having a good week.

My bud, Jaye, is always on me to write my autobiography, but you see, the thing is, I'm still living it and I haven't had time to take notes--just prisoners. Whoowee! I'm not going into details. There are some things about which I will not write.

I still have my virtual garage sale going on. I made $300 today.

When I turned my computer on yesterday, it told me that I was seriously low on my hard drive. What!? I have 16 gigabytes, that's more than my entire staff had combined when we first started using computers at work. There's no way I could be out of space. All I do is music, photographs, email and blogging. Oh. Yesterday I ordered an external hard drive. It seems music and photography take up a lot of space. A lot of space.

And this morning, I awoke to High Energy. It has to be something to do with the planets, the atmospheric pressure, something. I don't know what the fuck, but my energy was HIGH! I came home from work and tore the plumbing beneath my kitchen sink apart. I stopped it up this past week-end abusing the garbage disposal. Can we all say together, do not put mint stems down the disposal, and the best time to use that drano shit is before it stops up. The crap I pulled out of that pipe was compacted like a cork. Jeeez. I know better than that and refused to call a plumber until I hard torn it apart.

Y'see, I'm good at tearing it apart. I tore my bicycle apart when I was 8. No one helped me put it back together. For two years. This is me at 8. I was packing heat, looking to get even. You can see by my six-shooter than I'm in Texas.

Well, my sink is torn apart and not working, and it's not going to work for the next several days because I'm too busy to worry about it. I'll just eat out. When I was putting it back together, I screwed that fucking piece of plastic TIGHT. So tight, in fact, I broke it. Tomorrow I finish my project.

Okay, I'm out of here. If you see or hear from me before next Monday, I'll just be bragging. This is Gay Freedom Week in San Francisco. I was supposed to go to the Sierras with friends, but I just got wind that I might be the only single person on a week-end of couples. Oh, no. Not when I have my fan club waiting for me here at home.

I don't do the Gay Day Parade anymore. For several reasons. First of all, I'm not always Gay. I'm always a homosexual, and I'm more perverted than I care to talk about in public, but Gay is also a political thing. While I haven't voted for anyone other than a Democrat since 1968, I still don't consider myself a Democrat. Same thing with being Gay. I may not have had sex with anyone but men in 40 years, still who knows what might happen next week? Most of the time I'm just real private about my life--except to the universe here, but let's face up, there are 5 billion people in the world and about 1,000 of those know that I exist. I can tell you every detail and still be pretty fucking private. Don't you think?

When I start thinking in terms of them and me, I go dive into the street culture of Gay in San Francisco and get all wet with it, so to speak. I diligently work on getting rid of the barrier that makes a them and me. I can do that with every group except Republicans. That's not entirely true, I can still do it with Republicans too, it's just that I don't always like getting screwed. (Ba da boom, ching!)

Life is good. Celebrate it. Most of the poor suckers are starving to death!.

Gratuitous Kitty Porn

I wonder how many Google hits I'll get with that title? Beauregard wants to send greetings to his many admirers out there. He likes Saturdays. I hang out, he hangs out with me. This morning he's been playing with his favorite toy, a yellow kitchen glove. He's had a fixation for them since he was a kitten. Wierd, huh?
He loves to read. I often find him in the library.

He plays cat soccer with his glove a lot,

often ending the game cuddled up next to it.

Gay Republicans in Denial

The BoifromTroy has the following post about the Senate's upcoming vote on same-sex marriage.

I am hopeful that the President's pushing for a vote means one thing--he does not want it to be an election issue and, perhaps, in his heart, he really does not believe in it. Maybe I am wrong about this...but it would be encouraging for gay Republicans (and all gays for that matter) not to be politicized--and to fight an election over national security and the really important issues of the day.

I apologize if it sounds like I'm making fun of Boi. It's because, well, I am making fun of him. Even Andrew Sullivan has decided he can't vote for Bush because of his politicizing same-sex marriage for such nefarious reasons: "I do indeed feel betrayed, as do many other gay people who trusted this president and paid a price in many ways for supporting him. . . . My only dilemma now is whether to support Kerry or sit this one out. . . ."

You're right, Boi, I don't think Bush gives a fuck about same-sex marriage one way or the other, but he'll certainly butt-fuck you without a smile or lubricant if it gets his zealots and bigots out to vote. Getting anything to do with homosexuality on a ballot during an election year is designed to stir up the bigots and idiots of the religious zealots who own the Republican party these days. I think that's covered in Slime Politics 101.

There are a lot of issues this year that are much more important to me than same-sex marriage. Despite Sen. Cronym's disingenuous logic of blaming same-sex marriage on liberals in Massachussetts, the parade to keep same-sex marriage on the front page is being led by Conservatives who ought to be demanding instead a fair method of taxation to pay for the War in Iraq. I haven't heard any Conservatives expressing concern and opposition to the TRILLION dollar deficit this administration is saddling onto future generations. When I was growing up, to be a Conservative meant that you had standards and principles. It was not a code word for bigotry. Times have changed.

This was not the most important issue on my list. It became the most important issue when the Republican Party has decided the most important social issue in this country is to enshrine religious bigotry into the Constitution at my expense. Up until that time, we had common ground. Where's your common ground with the Republican Party, Boi? Not at a booth at the Republican state conventions in Texas, Virginia, or North Carolina. Do you think you'll be welcomed in New York? Like the last convention when the openly Gay legislator from Arizona addressed the convention and the entire Texas delegation which was seated directly in front of the podium, stood up and turned their backs to him? Did you enjoy that?

I do not believe that Gays and Lesbians have a choice this November. If you value your own human dignity, there is no way you can support the Republican Party or the President. He has sold you down the river. Let those who have eyes, see. Let those who have ears, hear. This is not an exercise in abstraction or hyperbole. The ass on the line is yours and mine.

Poetry on Fridays

This line from this poem has repeated itself again and again and again in my mind's ear all week. Are you washed in the blood of the lamb? There is a spiritual with that phrase in it, but that is not the source of the phrase in my ear. I'm hearing the line as part of Vachel Lindsay's poem, General Booth Enters Heaven. Vachel Lindsay is an American poet born in 1879. This poem was published in 1919. This is what Lindsay had to say about it.

William Booth (1829-1912) founded the Salvation Army in London in 1865 to yoke Christians to social work. His missionary organization spread to the United States 15 years later. Lindsay writes about the making of this poem in Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1923): 21-22:

The poem called "General Booth Enters Heaven" was built in part upon certain adventures while singing these songs. When I was dead broke, and begging, in Atlanta, Georgia, and much confused as to my next move in this world, I slept for three nights in the Salvation Army quarters there. And when I passed through Newark, New Jersey, on another trip I slept in the Salvation Army quarters there. I could tell some fearful stories of similar experiences. I will say briefly, that I know the Salvation Army from the inside. Certainly, at that time, the Army was struggling with what General Booth called the submerged tenth of the population. And I was with the submerged.

In the spring of 1912 the news went around the world that the great founder of the Army had gone blind. Every Sunday newspaper had a full-page picture of the blind General. Later came the announcement of his death, with elaborate biographies. Later in these same newspapers, all over the world, came the story of his life as told by himself. So much has happened since, such rivers of blood have run under the bridges of the world, that this succession of newspaper features has been forgotten. Meanwhile the fanatical Salvation Army, that was like the Franciscans of the Strict Observance in the very earliest days of St. Francis, has emerged as a prosperous rival of the Y. M. C. A.

By General Booth's own story, quoted incessantly by the papers the year of his death, he went into the lowest depths of London, by malice aforethought and deliberate intention to rescue the most notoriously degraded, those given up by policeman, physician, preacher and charity worker. He reiterated in his autobiography that he wanted to find those so low there were none lower. He put them into uniform. He put them under military discipline. He put them in authority over one another. He chose their musical instruments, and their astonishing tunes. The world has forgotten what a scandal to respectable religion the resulting army was when it began. It was like the day St. Francis handed all his clothes to the priest, or the day he cut off the hair of St. Clara. In my poem I merely turned into rhyme as well as I could, word for word, General Booth's own account of his life, and the telegraph dispatches of his death after going blind. I set it to the tune that is not a tune, but a speech, a refrain used more frequently in the meetings of the Army on any public square to this day. Yet I encounter a great number of people who are sure they have never heard of the General, the army or the tune, or who ask me if I wrote the poem to "make sport."

General Booth Enters Heaven

[To be sung to the tune of The Blood of the Lamb with indicated instrument]

I
[Bass drum beaten loudly.]

Booth led boldly with his big bass drum --
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The Saints smiled gravely and they said: "He's come."
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,
Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank,
Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale --
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail: --
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of Death --
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

[Banjos.]

Every slum had sent its half-a-score
The round world over. (Booth had groaned for more.)
Every banner that the wide world flies
Bloomed with glory and transcendent dyes.
Big-voiced lasses made their banjos bang,
Tranced, fanatical they shrieked and sang: --
"Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?"
Hallelujah! It was queer to see
Bull-necked convicts with that land make free.
Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare
On, on upward thro' the golden air!
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

II
[Bass drum slower and softer.]

Booth died blind and still by Faith he trod,
Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God.
Booth led boldly, and he looked the chief
Eagle countenance in sharp relief,
Beard a-flying, air of high command
Unabated in that holy land.

[Sweet flute music.]

Jesus came from out the court-house door,
Stretched his hands above the passing poor.
Booth saw not, but led his queer ones there
Round and round the mighty court-house square.
Then in an instant all that blear review
Marched on spotless, clad in raiment new.
The lame were straightened, withered limbs uncurled
And blind eyes opened on a new, sweet world.

[Bass drum louder.]

Drabs and vixens in a flash made whole!
Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl!
Sages and sibyls now, and athletes clean,
Rulers of empires, and of forests green!

[Grand chorus of all instruments. Tambourines to the foreground.]

The hosts were sandalled, and their wings were fire!
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir.
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
O shout Salvation! It was good to see
Kings and Princes by the Lamb set free.
The banjos rattled and the tambourines
Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens.

[Reverently sung, no instruments.]

And when Booth halted by the curb for prayer
He saw his Master thro' the flag-filled air.
Christ came gently with a robe and crown
For Booth the soldier, while the throng knelt down.
He saw King Jesus. They were face to face,
And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place.
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

Online text copyright © 2003, Ian Lancashire for the Department of English, University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.

Original text: Vachel Lindsay, General William Booth Enters into Heaven and Other Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, 1919): 1-4. PS 3523 I58G4 1919 Robarts Library. Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1923): 123-25.
First publication date: 1919

Republican Survivor, the Series

If you're not already playing, go, sign up now. This came via email a couple of weeks ago. It just dawned on me to post it. Duh?! There are two teams: blue consists of Bush, Cheney and Kathleen Harris. The red team is Ashcroft, DeLay and Coulter. We're two weeks into it already, but go watch the past weeks episodes. It's a pleasant diversion.

My First Night in Paris

It was November 27, 1987. I flew into Orly, arriving about 4 p.m. I had way too much luggage, but please, I'm a clothes horse. I brought a wardrobe. This is Paris, for chrissake. This isn't a rehearsal. This is what it's been about since I first started imagining myself grown up. You bet I brought wardrobe. And I looked good when I landed, too.

In my mind, I already knew everything there was to know about Paris. I had been studying maps, tourist guides, history, even art books. I was ready. I passed through passport control like a pro. The cutie in the uniform would never have imagined this was my first trip, ever! I swear when he welcomed me to France in French I almost fainted.

Pulling, carrying, and pushing my 100 lbs of luggage, I made it to the RER line that connects Orly with Paris proper. I may have switched that detail in my memory, so if I got on a regular Paris metro, tell me nicely, and I'll correct the story. I didn't have any idea then which was which, and I don't have much of an idea now as to which is which. My point is, I got on the one I was supposed to get on with no problem whatsoever. Where I made my mistake was in exiting two stops before the one closest to my hotel on the Quai Voltaire. I had a reservation for a room at a hotel where Oscar Wilde had once stayed. I even asked for the same room.

I got off at Les Halles with three pieces of luggage, one piece which was a backpack with over 500 lbs of whatever I thought would be important for me to have when I was packing and getting ready for Paris. This monstrous piece of luggage may have had wheels, but if it did, they were the first generation of wheels, you know, tiny ones that never work adequately. When I got above ground, I realized I had no idea where I was. So I started walking. I must have walked a dozen miles. I was quickly approaching exhaustion. WTF was I? It was now dark and what was difficult became impossible. Intersections did not offer one, or two, or three choices, they offered a dozen directions off from which to spin.

I stumbled, dragged myself to a taxi stand. My people have always believed that if you get lost in a city, call a taxi and pay him to get you to where you're going. There was a gaggle of Japanese tourists ahead of me. They probably spoke English and French, but for my benefit, they looked at me and spoke Japanese amongst themselves. A taxi pulls up, but before you can say Bonzai Baby, out of nowhere, two French jumped into the taxi, leaving the Japanese and me bewildered. This happened three times. I was ready to take on the entire fucking French population for the right to the next taxi, but how did I shove the Japanese tourists out of my way. It was obvious to me that they weren't competing very successfully, and I thought that if they would but get the fuck out of my way I would do fine. Instead, I walked away cursing the ethical dilemma in which I found myself.

I walked another eternity when suddenly, I started to recognize the streets and buildings around me. I had stumbled forward long enough that I stumbled onto a place I recognized, the Louvre. The Louvre was on the Right side of the Seine, and my hotel on the Quai Voltaire was on the Left directly across the river. The saints be praised.

In 15 minutes I was at the front desk where I ran head on into this nasty old queen who proceeded to raise her eyebrows at me and question whether or not I had indeed reserved a room. It seems I had the audacity not to wait for a confirmation. I had sent a friendly, Southern-style, chatty email requesting the room and had assumed that it was a done deed, not having heard otherwise in three weeks. We negotiated, him in French, me in English. I think I communicated to him through the ernestness of my emotional intensity that I might be dangerous if I wasn't able to put my 1,000 pound bag down and take a shower and recuperate. In ten minutes, I was lying down, wondering if I would ever be able to move again.

Five minutes later, my entire body stiffened and immediately became fully alert. FUCK! I WAS IN PARIS FUCKING FRANCE! I quickly went down the hall and took a shower. As an American, that itself was a new experience for me. I got dressed and got ready to experience Paris.

But first I reached into my pocket, pulling out the expensive English cigarettes I was carrying with me, emptied the cigarettes and pulled out one of 10 perfectly rolled joints of California sensimilla. I stepped out onto my tiny balcony overlooking both the Seine and a very busy, fast moving inner city freeway. I smoked my joint and set off for adventure on my first night in Paris with a good attitude.

Wandering up the bank of the Seine, I looked up and there was Notre Dame, lit up in all her glory. Damn. Like a moth to a porch light, I zoomed in. This was the spot that had been really worked in my mind's eye. I wandered in, and HOLY SHIT! there's THE Rose window. I am in total awe. Suddenly, I was wrapped in music; a choir began singing joyously, in French of course. I thought the whole thing was just for me. The Universe had gone out of its way to welcome me to France. I sat down, overcome with emotion, and absorbed the day's experience, listening to the choir sing allelujahs.

And this was just the first day.

Ah, Paris

The most difficult thing I had to do was to wipe that grin off my face.