I’m sitting in a screened porch overlooking the Gulf of Mexico in Grand Isle, Louisiana.  The waves build and crash, the air is heavy with salt, the palm trees, marshes and piers make a familiar silhouette.  I love the Gulf, and I’ve staying in countlesss beach houses just like this one. Whether I’m in St.Teresa, St. George Island, St. Pete or tracing the shoreline elsewhere, this body of water is home.

It feels so familiar to spend an evening on a porch listening to waves, but this is not a normal trip.  My agency has set up a very temporary satellite outpost to help six intrepid Buddhist chaplains gain access to the epicenter of the Gulf Coast oil spill clean-up.  They are here from as far as Vancouver to talk with the people of southern Louisiana who have been living with loss, fear and change because their communities and livelihoods have been disrupted, and who have been working harder than I will ever work to make the Gulf right. The chaplains will listen to their stories,  bear witness to the damage done to the environment, and will join in celebrations of the resilience of coastal communities five-years post-Katrina and recovering from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.  They will be of help in various ways, for a week.  It’s all happening!

Want to honor that important anniversary along with the Gulf region?  At Story Bleed we invite you to celebrate that resilience and dedication to home along with the Gulf through a special collection of blog posts and a carnival on the theme of Hope Remains, sponsored by Tide Loads of Hope in honor of the Faith Hill concert they are hosting in New Orleans next week. If you want to understand why the Gulf region is so soulful, so resilient, and so very important, please revel in the amazing stories Megan Jordan has gathered there.

Another way to love the Gulf:  the BlogHer conference earlier in the month showcased an art auction that will benefit the good work of the Nature Conservancy, so consider redecorating your home environment while benefiting the Gulf’s. Their project partner Kirtsy made this wonderful video featuring photos from the Love the Gulf Flickr group and the beautiful words and voice of Katherine Center.

{how long has it been since you’ve heard Highwayman? “And I’ll be back again, and again and again and again and again…”}

{post title quote: @wwbhjd.}

One of the best parts of being at BlogHer is the intense conversations to be had about what the hell we’re doing online as content creators, community members and readers.  Sure, we talk about these things year-round, but something happens when distances are bent and we’re eye-to-eye, hand-in-hand — or, on the flipside, walking past each other without recognition — that catalyzes important conversation.

One theme seemed to emerge often:  interwoven threads about respect, attention, and the shaky ethics of manipulating readers for fame or fortune. What does it mean to have an audience online?  When does storytelling or humor cross the line?  How does competition live within community? Why are some bloggers so flipping rude and how do others get away with blatant traffic whoring? Why are so many jewels of flaming gorgeous art not noticed in the noise? Why do we play along in public and then dismiss privately?  Why do people pile-on targets, especially on Twitter? How do we take time to reflect, gather information, and discern our own opinions while swimming with so many instant ideas from influencers? Why do people struggle so hard with your v. you’re–you know, the big questions.

Many conversations included the phrase “bullying,” both in its general usage and in a more theoretical way.  This is nothing new in personal blogging.  Dooce has been called a bully often, including when she dismissed Jenny The Bloggess from the stage of Blogger 08, or when Maytag denied her–you probably can check Anna’s glossary for more examples.  Anna herself is often called a bully, though she frequently asserts that the MamaPop Collective bullies.  Poop on Peeps seems to be retired, thankfully, from a pro career in bullying, though anonymous freelance Twitter bullies seem to have taken her place.   Well, I don’t know that I agree with all of those labels of “bully” but I’m sure we’ve each been on both sides of the bully game at least once.

I called out a bully Friday on Twitter, and many people emailed me asking for clarification or to discuss the concerns further.  With quite a bit of  reluctance I’ve decided to try to collect them here.

I called Jon, who writes as Black Hockey Jesus at The  BJH, a bully last week following one of his recent poking posts where he documented a bizarre mutual douchebag exchange he had with Jen Lancaster, enumerated ten reasons why he was better than her (he’s more attractive than her unhealthy self, don’t you know) and then released the hounds to shred her in his comment section and on Twitter. He seemed to revel in the way 100-plus commenters threw down, calling her names including “cunt” and targeting her as a fat, laughable writer of lousy chick-lit.  In one comment he wrote “this is as good as it gets” and he stoked the game on Twitter.  He eventually sold out his commenters, however, as though his 10 Reasons invocation wasn’t code for she’s fat and ugly, and then at some point this weekend for some reason he pulled the post, replacing it with a metaphorical, lyrical offering that is part acknowledgement and part glamorization of the post bullying.  (FYI sports fans, if you are following along at home on that handy Cycle of Violencethe DV shelter left in your doctor office waiting room (someone needs to make a version of this for cyber bullying, seriously, Lenore Wilson shout-out!), we are now in the Honeymoon phase, semi-contrition, reframing and roses: I’m only a tool because I got this really deep romantic love for you, baby, but I’ll clean up the mess with a hangdog look, but that’s okay, right?  Chicks dig demons.)

I don’t think that Jon is solely a cyberbully, of course not. But that episode fits every pattern of bullying I’ve read, including Nan Steinwho is a genius speaker who has done a lot of work in Florida and whose work has informed many of the anti-bullying/ anti-violence curricula our children have expereinced in school.

So how does this business of bullying work? Bullies love a target who has a flaw that can be isolated and ridiculed, usually something that people sort of want to ridicule in general but know better than to do so–until they are given permission. Ask any parent of a special needs kid for examples.  Or your friendly neighborhood fat kid or gay kid.  The target mustn’t be too sympathetic or bystanders may intervene, but all the better if the target is reactive–she cries easily, he wets his pants, she flails awkwardly in defense, he lashes out.  Now when you have a target and feel down or bored or weak and are ready to bully, you poke that mark and poke again until you see the wet pants, cha-ching!  Not only did you win the power play in that cracker jack prize, but you now have the ultimate power:  you can direct the rest of the schoolyard to look, laugh, pile-on.  EZPZ. But uh-oh, teacher on the way!  You know who spots her first?  The bully, because he’s the maestro of the scene, he’s ahead of the pack.  He may well slip out from under that pile-on and even have the nuts to blame the mob.  Because who will rat him out, if they even remember in their feeding frenzy how the whole thing got started? Only someone who is stupid and willing to be next, right?  The emperor may have no clothes, but I saw him drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic’s and his hair is perfect.

Jen is absolutely an easy target.  Her ego is legendary–even though she’s a woman!, she’s fat, she writes chick-lit. (There’s fodder for an entire gender treatise there.)  Interestingly, none of those things substantially bothered Jon or many others a year ago when she flamed The Unwashed Unpublished (her proclamation about real authors is cheered on in the comments of Jon’s BlogHer ‘09 post).  Not only did those qualities not bother him, but they earned her a spot on his short list of people to write soliciting help in finding an agent. However, she shut him down. And once denied, her hubris and her success in chick-lit were reframed as assholery-from-a-hack, her flaws became fresh blood for a mob call. NOW  her skills are poor, her body a joke, her view that pro publishing is a necessary criterion to calling oneself a “real writer”‘ was heinous?  Please. Please spare the sudden indie high-lit flag waving if it is only going to come after you’ve been shut down for seeking help, ironically,  to become published by booksellers.

Of course she was full of shit then (unless you wanted to cozy up to her connections), was full of shit in her email to Jon, and was full of shit on her own site, but what is more notable is what happened when permission was lifted to thrash her compared to the encouragement to admire her brass balls last year.

None of this is new.  Jon has dipped into fat bashing as long as I’ve read him.  He’ll say it’s just a metaphor to make a point about not accepting one’s problems, but his reliance on that trope is too consistent and too dehumanizing for that explanation.  He and I went round about this topic  two fucking years ago when he called fat people “pigs.” He later apologized about that statement and some followup trolling on my blog, saying in his early blogging career he succumbed to the lure of the cheap traffic to be gained by being incendiary–but he obviously didn’t stop and I’ve witnessed similar many times since then. I’ve actually felt pretty hardy about the slams — believe me, I am accustomed to plenty and have a wide berth (heh) for both humor and discourse about fatness/gayness/other -nesses and -isms as long as basic human decency is preserved — until I recently decided that combined with his other games I had had enough.

I think that flaming the fires of traffic is an important part of blogging culture that we should all examine. In addition to outright targeting of a person, there is a troubling form of bullying in coercive gameplaying that some bloggers use to stoke an audience or boost pageloads or get a new washing machine.  In an online environment, what is the intersection of traffic whoring, mobbing, true discourse and sport?  I seriously hope smart folks somewhere are studying all of this, creating an SDO Scale for the Internet along with that Cycle of Cyberbullying, or something.

The sad thing is I think that –could be very wrong, of course, I always remember that what people blog may in fact be a construct– I think that Jon mostly craves actual discourse between writers on his blog and is only plucking low-hanging fruit out of weakness. I think social media rewards writers who do that, but I know we all can do better.  I think this because when he wrote me a year and a half ago to apologize for that “pig” comment and others, his email name was Paul Verlaine, and his Twitter profile includes an Arthur Rimbaud quote. Remembering French poetics is a stretch for me, but I love a good queer writers love affair tale and so I remember that Verlaine and Rimbaud were volatile libertine lovers – Verlaine famously shot Rimbaud in an absinthe-fueled rage – who deeply inspired each other and an entire literary movement while scandalizing polite society. I see many pages of their playbooks in Jon’s writing and in the schtick of Black Hockey Jesus that he runs, can imagine his struggle in reconciling epic literary myths with the life of sober schoolteacher and parent who presumably doesn’t want to beat his wife and children like Verlaine (or Mel Gibson) did, and with the conceit it might be tempting to indulge in order to mirror their brilliant infamy within a social media context.

I get it, I’m actually interested in that deeply, which is why it’s pathetic to see those big ideas sold out with fat jokes and base bullying–to me, that is the epitome of not valuing blogging or even Twitter as a writer’s platform and instead turning it into a low stakes game for douchebags, not libertines. Real writers, indeed.  I just can’t watch it any longer.

I love blogging, I love writing for its own sake, and the community that naturally arises from the shared appreciation for our platform.  Of course we are all writers, very generous ones. What I’m not interested in is the coarse, willful manipulation of traffic and readers’ emotions and reactivity as a game or a vent for personal damage.  I can’t help it: if those need to be your terms, I’m gonna hate that playa and that game.  I don’t know, maybe read some Schopenhauer, be inspired to play a different one?  Or love your game, but let me unfollow in peace without poking.

I found this little story about how the poets met when I was checking my Rimbaud-Verlaine facts:  so apparently as the lit legend goes, Rimbaud had sent his poetry to others without response, but finally he found acceptance after writing Verlaine, whom he greatly admired. Rimbaud sent off his precious, precious words to one of his heroes (damn, think of the trepidation, the wait, and then finally receiving this response): “Come, dear great soul, we call you, we await you.” That was Verlaine’s answer. Come, I see your worth. Come, I want more.  Could there be a better response?  Maybe that’s what bloggers large and small crave when they hit publish, what we crave when we submit our words or images to others for publication, what we want from each email we push or each post we Tweet.  Maybe it’s what Jon wanted when he was writing Jen and Alice and whomever for help in finding an agent.  Maybe it’s even what Jen wants when she writes a new book, ego rants aside, or what the MamaPop Collective wants when they open the doors to BlogHer’s Sparklecorn.  Maybe it’s what each and every one of us wants when we offer ourselves to the world, as writers or just as human fucking beings.

A decent, acknowledging response.  Come.

Come.  Tell me more about you, give me more of your words and photos and more of you, more of you, of you, of you.  But the bitch of an answer to that call — whether it’s a pageload or a comment or a kiss or money or a tomato from a garden or any type of attention, really — the bitch and the beauty is it has to be offered.  It can’t be taken or manipulated — fuck, we all know that, try the bullshit of leaving couples’ therapy and asking in elongated syllables what you n-e-e-d and then getting it to find it is an empty brittle egg you want no part of – and thoughtful people end up loathing and dismissing what is gained by manipulation anyway. If your kiss or your comment is tricked you know it is crap, you worry others will figure that out too, you are still hungry for what you needed in the first place and you have to choose: change what you put out (insert link to Jon’s own garbled message of value unfortunately rolled in a sprinkle coating of fat hate so that he could Tweet “Fat People” to call traffic) or coerce again.  What will Black Hockey Jesus Do? What will each of us do?

Experiencing that free exchange between writers and readers is everything and one of the things that draws me to blogging–we feel both sides of the exchange, we see it happening in real time.  The promise of that, that’s a heavy egg worth weaving a wild, high nest around.  Watching people manipulate traffic and then sell-out or snub their commenters? The games some people play? The playas can keep it.  I’m turning my attention elsewhere.

I believe in the power of pilgrimages. A journey taken with reverence and intention can push tectonic shifts, can punch holes in the time/space continuum, can break ground.  Creative pilgrimages in particular draw me. Tracing the alphabet lines and cerulean blue paint streaks that run to places where my literary, artistic and musical heroes have worked let me heal a deep psyche rift in Paris, unlocked something I though was rusted shut forever in Copenhagen, and led me to my life in Florida. Serious business, pilgrimages are.

I like the ghosts creatives leave behind in places they loved.  Their words and images crawl into walls and stay. I like remembering their inspirations, their struggles, the communities they wove.  Making a pilgrimage is like taking my withered muse to hang out with the ghosts of their own muses. Our muses, they nobly serve us in monogamous hermitage but at great cost: our poor bedraggled muses are tribal extroverts.  They need to talk and sing and fuck and roll in each others’ still-wet canvases. They need to disrobe and be sketched by strangers at dusk. They need a drink from someone else’s passed flask, they need a late breakfast they didn’t cook. They need to break glass on marble floors and tango through the shards, and they hate to tango alone.

When I visited Hemingway’s home in Key West, I saw the desk where he stood to write letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I held a descendant of one of his cats. I swear it told me to take a clipping from a plant still living from when he walked the yard.  I left with my pockets full of pinched starts and branches: I left changed.

Before going to the BlogHer10 conference hotel–the annual blogging conference starts tomorrow in New York– I made a pilgrimage to Hotel Chelsea.  I had a few extra days to spend in the city, and wanted to be sure to spend time feeding my soul with art, theatre and history. Staying a few nights in the landmark hotel I’ve heard referenced in relation to artist after writer after actor seemed like the medicine I’ve needed.

My muse has been bitchy, dry and tired.  I owed her, but now that I’ve stated in Chelsea, she owes me. If she needed ghosts, I found the motherlode. The list of creatives who have lived and worked in this legendary bohemian beast is a fast-beating incantation from a sticky magic drum: Bukowski, Burroughs, Kerouac. de Beauvoir & Sartre. Twain, Tennessee Williams, Wolfe, Cohen, Kubrick. Too, too many to list. Residents live here still, sharing their gorgeous lobby, gleaming wood floors and history with travelers from everywhere.

Walking the art-lined halls of the old building is mind-blowing. Some of the history I knew. I stood outside Room 205 knowing it was Dylan Thomas’ last home.  Much more history lingered as questions. Did Frida and Rivera make love in this room, or that one? Hendrix, Joplin, Patti Smith.  So this is what Arthur Miller was talking about.  Did Ruth Harkness dream of pandas at night, did Leonard Cohen dream in color or black and white, did Ginsberg dream of muscular backs and strong legs, did Bob Dylan wake to coffee with a few notes still in his head?  It’s all here, some imprint of it, it’s all here, the novels and memoirs pounded out, the shot glasses pounded down, the thrown paint and broken guitar strings, all here.

My stay at Hotel Chelsea was the remedy I needed. A good bed in a simple room, a cacophony of  creation.  I eavesdropped on a crazy lover’s quarrel in the lobby, I watched a man kneeling in front of an older man telling an impassioned story.  I cried; I researched to prepare for an interview. I wrote a short story and a love letter and a long overdue apology, perhaps too late, but I did.  I tried to open the wrong door, drunk. I had my fortune told by an old woman who asked for the banana she spied in my bag in trade, and I also gave her a purple-bagged airplane Crown as well and she laughed and rubbed the flannel on her face.  Money’s going to follow me, she promised, but I really don’t care about that.  What I want to follow me is how it feels to be surrounded by a devotion to creation.  What I want to remain is the pure joyousness of a place infused with the sweaty smell of the birth of art in every form, a place that holds a certain kind of history and attracts pilgrims like me who need to tap that vein.

I’m leaving Hotel Chelsea today, my pockets full of poems and cerulean blue fingerprints.  I’m headed to the Hilton for BlogHer, and I think that I’m drawn to BlogHer for the same reasons
I was drawn to Chelsea, or Shakespeare & Company in Paris, or other creative pilgrimages that have pulled me.  To see and smell and hear the laughter of a contemporary creative community–my own creative community.  People who love words and images and the magic that weaves itself when creative work is shared.  Here’s to breaking glass, to filling walls with art, to mecca however you define it, with friends who throw words against walls both virtual and brick because they cant help but want to see what sticks.

Scene 1

Don Draper approaches The People’s Party.  Mothers, mothers, and more mothers, many bearing the name “Mommy,”  “Mama,” and “Mom.” Don squints and smiles, taking note that now that he has found the Madonnas, he still must locate the whores. He approaches the makeshift catering bar.

Bartender: Your drink ticket.

Don: What the hell are you talking about?

Bartender: I need to see your drink ticket, dude.

Don: Just pour the Jameson and give me some matches.

Bartender: Yeah, you can’t smoke in here.

Don blinks slowly and squints.


Scene 2

Don enters his hotel suite and sits at the not-mid-century desk. He pulls a small key from his pocket and opens the drawer.  Inside the drawer is a cigar box.  Don opens the box and carefully places four USB drives, 12 Moo cards and one Butterball oven mitt inside.  He lights a cigarette and takes a deep drag before exhaling, which causes the hotel fire alarm to engage and sprinklers to shower. Bloggers pour from their rooms into the hallways where they are greeted by lifesize Ragu Jars handing them branded umbrellas. Don remains seated, cupping his cigarette from the downpour.

Scene 3

Don answers the phone.

Don: Spit it out, Peggy.

Peggy: Okay, well, we think our best idea is this:  these bloggers are smart women, they can write, they know new media.  It’s a whole new world, people are communicating in new ways, thinking differently about themselves, and some of these bloggers get it. So picture an actress like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Moon River playing in the background, except she has an open laptop and she’s filming herself with a Flip camera,  and the actress says “The Internet is just like Tiffany’s. Oh, the shiny things. Calms me right down.”

Don: Peggy, that’s a slogan, not an idea.  Call me back when you have something real.

Scene 4

Don walks into the Expo Hall and surveys the scene.  He scowls.  He scowls more and scowls deeper.  He walks up to a man dressed like an oversized Spatula and another dressed as a gargantuan Mrs. Potato Head.

Don: Look around you two.  The world has changed, Spatula, but you haven’t. You are still the same Expo Spatula you were in the 1950s. But these writers, this Internet – the most important communication medium ever invented, and it has the potential to change everything – and you want them to talk about your sponge? You want them to balance click-through rates on their noses like they’re on Beat the Clock trying to win an avocado-colored washer and dryer set? Get out of here! No, I mean it, I can’t look at you, get out of here!

Scene 5

Don pours Old Overholt into a small glass from the hotel bathroom. He reclines in his hotel bed.  He hears a knock.  Don crosses the room to open the door. He squints, cocks his head and smiles to greet a woman whose face we cannot see, as she appears in silhouette.

Don: Finally.  Come in.

This post is part of a sponsored series where bloggers are writing about happiness. See more information at the end of the post about the sponsorship.

1970s Colorforms and colored pencils and Spirograph. Searching for buckeyes with Kim. Learning to barrel race Blackie.  I actually had a pony, it’s true, and according to the culture that should be happiness enough right there, and in many ways it was. Blackie would always direct my brother directly to the blackberry thicket, but never me.  He ate apples from my outstretched hand and downed the last of the beer from my dad’s can and pranced triumphant in parades. The pursuit of happiness via words and games and Girl Scout badges. Book after book after book, and laughing so hard I’d lose my voice an my face would ache. Happiness was a place you could get to if you just kept running in the way that Blackie ran with the old mares on the farm that took him in when we moved.

1980s Not happy.  Not happy at all.  Happiness was not a place but a lie, a deceit, a street clamshell game. Those things I forgot when waking up and immediately began escaping into a new book? I couldn’t forget them anymore. Tried, though: turned the Dead Kennedys or The Ramones or Queen or U2 louder, played Sinead O’Connor or R.E.M. on repeat again, kissed harder, pounded the typewriter until the keys jammed, took whatever I could score.  The lack of happiness was a leather cord I tied around my wrist, protesting more against nukes/apartheid/Reagan/war/African hunger/rape/School of the Americas/racism/oppression/poverty/bourgeois corruption & consumption and more for reproductive choice/peace/working class rights/gay rights/equal rights/Central America/Green Party/funding for the arts/city services.  Politics as foreplay was the proxy for happiness. I never though we would actually achieve those things check check check, like earning Girl Scout badges or degrees. I burnt manifestos and cigarettes and short stories and bridges like fatback kindling, though the blazes were never as grand as they were in my dreams. My breakdown was, though.

1990s I left ACORN and the city, left poetry slams, a lying lover and the shards of my broken heart, took it all off the grid. Got quiet, got clean as only a dirty hippie in the woods can get. Bought an IMB Selectric that hummed, traded brochure copy for raw honey and warm eggs, learned to ask and interview and listen instead of debating. Had babies. Beautiful babies! Learned to cup their faces in my hands, learned to make them laugh — so sweet and good and saw delight all around them — and somehow this pushed me to see myself, and everyone else, in the same way. The politics of protest turned into social service–showing women what latch-on meant, helping others make safety plans, bringing books and food and diapers and ideas down dirt roads, teaching throwaway teens–and then in a few years political again, forming outreach programs and coalitions, grantwriting, lobbying. And all the while, happiness became the opposite of a thing to rail for or against, it was a walk on a warm day with a child on my back. Even when I pulled back into the grid, even when I left a marriage, happiness followed my boys and me like a loyal pup. Happiness was a good day’s work, a swim in a spring fed lake, laughter on a porch, a soccer game on a dewy field, sliced tomatoes with dinner, learning to drywall a worn spot in my own bungalow.

2000s Somehow, those babies have grown into men. Beautiful young men! It turns out happiness is recursive, and my burning desire for them to be happy gave it to me, a mise en abyme of contentment.  Though not without complexity:  I faced walls and dead-ends, hit ceilings so hard they made me see stars.  I decided happiness rarely has a boss. made and sold businesses, and then made more. I fell in love harder than I ever thought possible, and I’ve managed to stay.  Maybe happiness comes from having complete confidence that I can bear quite a bit, can reinvent, can identify horseshit a mile away, can still cup a face with sweetness and delight.  Happiness became time to follow an idea. It’s an iced Campari and soda on a porch stoop after the children have left for the movies. It’s laughing so hard –because the people who’ve made it this far with me, who make the cut, are so brilliant and wicked and wise–laughing so hard I lose my voice and ache and ache as if I am ten again.

2010s Who knows? My deepest hope is that happiness is beginning to write another chapter for itself, starting right now.

Do you ever feel as though the last ten or twenty years may have been a dream?  Concerned that your adulthood is a precarious sham perpetrated by capitalism and a greedy psychotherapist who keeps sending you in harm’s way just to reap the inevitable hourly-billed benefits of your defeat? Constantly feel on edge that at any moment a conspiracy of bricks will cement around you, your body will burst from your now-shredded chinos and microfiber tee leaving you awkwardly wobbling in acid washed jeans with a comb sticking out the back pocket, laden with a Jansport pack crammed with a Trapperkeeper and a Tab for lunch, all because, all of a sudden, out of nowhere…

It Was Just Like High School?!?!?!

These symptoms are increasingly common despite their absurdity. If fact, studies are confirming that these ideations in fact be result from a viral warfare tactic.  Oh, that clever Korean-Nigerian-Zapatista block, repurposing Nazi experiments, distracting us from our God-given North American productivity with the sourdough starter of regressive angst!

But have no fear, little misfit. Regardless of where the virus came from,  if you are feeling like It’s Just Like High School, that’s just your fevered dendrites playing tricks on you. Remember, it’s not really just like high school.  Like a bad acid tab or a starter heterosexual marriage, this virus will only last as long as it takes for your body to build up antibodies. What a relief!

In reality, the CDC, Homeland Security and Interpol Operative Bob Ross (who is alive and well and living a new life in the witness relocation program, long story) want to assure you that it is absolutely not Just Like High School.  How could it be?  You are, quite indeed, well past those years.

In fact, if it were Just Like High School, that would be good medical/mental health news!  A fantastic, wonderful development in your quest to live forever young! And if it were Just Like High School, you’d be on Easy Street, my friend.  High school the second time around would be a cinch!

For example, let’s pretend you are there again.  Look at the teachers, they are dead-ends, just toss a cheesy ref to a French poet into each essay and you’ve got an easy A and a college recommendation ripe for the picking. Check out the art room, it’s stocked with some expensive crap like the darkroom you only wish you could have when it’s not just like high school.  Take off your shirt (whoa! look at your foxy body) and take tons of photos, sugar, you’re banging, plus you’ve got no bills, no kids, no spouse! Most importantly look at those goofy high school kids. Poor little babies. They really think they’ve got something going on. But now the politics are completely transparent, the cliqued kids are insipid company as it turns out, you can see that now, so join the yearbook staff or the chess club or paint sets for the spring play if you want some friends, (hey, look, you remember your locker combination just fine!), say no to dissecting the frog, use your summer job money to put a downpayment on a lot at the lake–it’s only going up in value, steal a Camaro and run cocaine up from Miami–what the hell, you’re a minor. Have a good time! Done.

You wish it was Just Like High School.

It;s not. It’s just a virus.  These feelings will pass when the fever goes down.

Now, a more pressing concern is when you feel This is Just Like in Preschool! Because that shit is serious scary.  No cliques, mostly everyone is your friend in the sandbox, but there are a few sociopaths that even terrified Mr. Fred Rogers, God Rest His Sweet Soul. The bully boy who refuses to potty train and pokes raggedy eyeholes in the Waldorf doll heads.  The blank-eyed biter. The screaming crybaby bandaid fetish kid.  A day or two of Just Like Preschool can be fatal, because regardless of how much you yourself have matured, that sort of madness is not meant to be endured by humans for long.

Just Like High School? It’s not.  You’ll be fine.  But Just Like Preschool? If you are lucky, the bully and crybaby will take each other down, that’s your best bet at survival.  Just keep your eye on that biter, please, and you might make it through okay.

The CDC and your mother also would like to remind you to take your Vitamin C.  Never hurts.

The oil in the Gulf still has me down, down, down, but I’m seeing buds of optimism here and there. Non-oily buds.

Like the fact that Rolling Stone is back, with a decent BP story and a four-star general talking smack. Gonzo insubordination! It turns out that even those you would least suspect need to tell the truth at some point, even soldiers who swear to live and die navigating the most rigid hierarchy laden with shitty middle-management tier after tier, can feel compelled at times to speak with personal integrity.

That makes me happy.

It’s a bud of optimism, because I worry that the world is chicken-hypnotized by the spin that is everywhere, on every channel from BP to smile-smile-pat-pat on Twitter. In a world where too many people seem to think they are a cast member on the Bachelor and actually believe their own lines that they are so very in love with the Bachelor and must get the everloving rose just must, you have to love McChrystal for speaking the truth as he saw it on the job he was asked to do instead of lying to his subordinants.

“Biden, who?”

I’ve got a soft spot for that kind of insubordination. If you’ve been a middle manager with a shitty boss while trying to do work you actually cared about with a team you respected, you’ve been there, one Reposada thimble away from launching a Disco Inferno by flamethrowing propane through the cone of silence that management wears as a duncecap.

I’ve crossed the line, and I’ve stepped back from it. I say if you have cause to crash and burn, scorch the earth while you are at it. Don’t just throw back the curtain and show the little man, take Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs hostage in a parakeet cage and rent a booth at the nearest fairgrounds and let the working people shopping for bargain greens feed him marshmallows. March into his office and bellow “Dick, you’re a dick.” Even if the Powers That Be aren’t people, if the power lies in groups or institutions or loose affiliations of smarmy self-appointed douchefakery powerbrokers, topple that Jenga tower if you can’t stand watch shell people play the game any longer. Molotov cocktail and then mazel tov to ya, baby.

So tracking the Runaway General is making me even happier than finding a runaway bride story–and I dearly love a runaway bride narrative, especially if she’s already in her tulle and then whoops goes missing.

Other good summertime news: True Blood is wicked but I’m behind, and I haven’t read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest yet but Fire was so, so good AND the movie is coming out soon.  I love having things to look forward to.

Instead of driving home after taking a breakfast picnic to the shores of Alligator Point, I dropped MS at her house and then drove to the laundromat.  The good one, the newish one. 

The good laundromat is a one-trick-pony steampunk revival neo-casino-factory at your command.  Rows and rows of heavy-duty machines churn to life on the swipe of a prepaid card, because this is the future and the future doesn’t run on metal slugs.  The future is plastic.

On a Sunday afternoon the good laundromat is like an off-brand baptism carnival.Vuvuzelas buzz from big screen TVs, Mexican and Guatemalan men pray before them. Women snap sheets in the air. An impossibly tiny boy plays a Dollar Store flute like a kazoo, a half-eaten apply in his other hand, little apple shards flying with his music.

Dirty as you and your robes are, enter this room, submit, and  in one 22 minute cycle  you will be washed clean?  You’ve got a deal. Swipe!

Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, I’m essentially an optimist, because when I open a washing machine door I always wonder if I’ll find money.  It’s happened many times before.  This also has happened: once when I lived in the woods, I opened a machine after the cycle  only to find a very angry snake rearing up at me.  You never know.

Neither money nor snake greeted me, though. The beach blanket had tripled its weight in sand and was beginning to protest with a seaweed funk, so in it went.  It was time. I bought a $20 laundry card with my debit card–oh my God it’s nearly impossible to get away from the plastic, and I’m trying.  I bought the little boxes of soap from the automat machine, the ones you have to buy if you forget your own stuff.  What happened to all the old cigarette box vending machines?  I used to want one to sell little packs of 3 tarot cards for reading your own future.  Lay down the cards, 1,2,3.  Past, now, tomorrow. 

The little boxes of soap remind me of the little boxes of cereal my brother and I coveted, covetedon the top shelf of the cereal aisle where my mother bought the off-label Krispies.  When she told us little boxes were a waste she meant of money, not of resources.  Once I had Lucky Charms from one at a friend’s house, whose mom even cut through the box on the dotted lines and split open wax paper to make a tiny bowl out of it, and those were the best tasting three spoonfuls of cereal in the history of cereal.

Our breakfast at Alligator Point was simple.  Boiled eggs. Apple. Cheese.  A thermos of coffee to top off the cups we drank on the ride.  It was an impulsive morning idea, to check on the Gulf, have a picnic.  Is there a different word for breakfast picnic.  All picnics are not the same. 

The part that was the same was the sand.  It’s hard to eat at the beach.  The sand gets everywhere.  Even if you think your hands are clean when you peel your egg, there will be sand from your hands or the wind.  You will bite down on it, thinking for a second can I eat this?  What is this, is it salt, is it a little bit of eggshell?  

I guess  that’s what sand actually is, right, little bits of broken down shell?

The dryer counted down the minutes for me and several others waiting for a turn. My blanket had an audience.  I played with the prepaid card in my pocket.   It probably still held $15-$16 dollars of value. If I cashed it in, that card would inevitably be thrown out.  More oil down the drain.  I could save the card, wash more blankets, reload it, make it earn its keep over time.  But I already have one of these cards at home in a drawer, maybe two, and now this one picking up sand from my pocket.

Sand gets everywhere.  Everything gets everywhere.

I pulled the picnic from the dryer, nodding  nodded to a young mother with a cart full of blue clothes that she could take control of the machine.  She moved quickly, the machine was still hot.  As I turned to leave I passed my card to her like a laundry baton. She reached up for it, looking absolutely baffled, and I took my blanket to the car, where it lives.

So my friend Alice calls me.

Alice:  What is “offsides?”

Deb: Like in soccer?

Alice: Of course, World Cup, hello?  You are the soccer mom, can you explain it to me?

Deb: Over the phone?

Alice: Why not?

Deb: Typically you need notepaper, chalk, or piles of coins to explain the intricacies of offside offenses.

Alice:  Try me.

Deb: Okay.  Well, the team trying to score can get an offense called if their guy in front is offside, meaning he is the closer to the opponent’s goal than he is to the ball and to the opponent team’s player who is closest to the goal but not the goalee.

Alice: Wait, what?

Deb: Well, actually it doesn’t have to be their goalee.  Basically you can’t receive or rush the ball if you are closer to the two defenders who are closest to the goal than you are to the closest guy on your team who has the ball.

Alice:  Whoa wait what? Closer to the closer guy? I don’t get it.  Say it again.

Deb: Do you have Splenda packets and a stack of pennies?  Because what you need to do is put a Splenda packet as goalee and one for sweeper, then make one of the pennies a fast guy from the other team. So your team is the pennies….

Alice:  Yeah, no.

Deb: Well, the thing is teams just can’t set themselves up for having an advantage by sending one guy to go hang out by the goal and wait for a pass or ricochet or something. The game would be so boring, right, just a guy hanging out with the goalie, talking trash to him, waiting for a pass to bump in?  Sort of like Biden.  Or Jay Leno.  You know, not cool.

Alice:  But I could play that position, I’m going to keep that in mind.  Okay, I’m getting it.  Being offside is cheating.

Deb: Well, no, not being, you have to be in play with the ball. And it’s not cheating, mostly it happens accidentally because they are all moving so fast, or like the player is offside not intending to take a pass, which is not an offense, but then gets into play, which IS an offense, or mostly the line ref thinks he sees offsides but his perspective is off.  Also,  defenders can trap a forward into being offside by pushing up.

Alice: Can I talk with one of your kids, please.

Deb: Never mind, I probably didn’t explain it right.  I need sugar packets to teach this.  Really, all you need to know is that if your team is flagged, it was a bad call.  The ref read it wrong.  Clearly that was NOT offsides.  And if your team gets scored against, PROBABLY what happened was no one called a blatant offside on the other guys. “How could the ref have missed that?”  That’s what you should yell.  “He was SO offside! Nice offside, really nice!”

Alice: That I can do. Sigh. I just really like soccer all of a sudden.

Deb:  I understand. Those men are really, really, really pretty, aren’t they?

Alice: So pretty.  So very pretty. I guess I can just learn the rules by watching and watching and watching. And watching.

Deb: Yep, just study their legs.  That’ll do it.  My work here is done.

“Mercedes is black, I’m gay. We make culture.”   ~Kurt, Glee S01X15, The Power of Madonna

Sometimes the Internet is so disappointing. I’ve been searching everywhere (I even stooped so low as to Bing it) (which sounds much nastier than “Google it) but nothing.

Does anyone have the playlist from Elton John’s performance at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding?

ELTON, playing at RUSH’s NUPTIAL–this is a great puzzle of a story that has boards on the left and right blowing up like a South Florida Oxycontin Medicaid clinic drug bust: Why would Rush book a queer performer? Doesn’t he know his core audience would be offended by this, and question the congruency of his values? Does he secretly love the gays? Does this mean Rush asked Elton to help him soften his image- a la Eminem at the ‘01 Grammys?  Why spend a reported million dollars so ostentatiously? Is it true that Elton donates private performance fees to his foundation, so the payment is essentially a donation to AIDS research, prevention and care? But still, why would he perform for a blowhard bigot who stirs pots of hate? At a straight wedding? If everyone has a price, is Elton’s number one million?

Perhaps most baffling: So someone really wants to actually marry Rush? Does she have to consumate this thing? Did she think through that part before accepting the ring, ordering a cake and booking Elton? (Take a moment to shake the unsavory image out of your mind. Think of puppies.  La la la, Mr. Bluebird on my shoulder. Oh, look, a double rainbow! Deep breath. Okay.)

I’ll admit I have a personal bias against over-the-top weddings held during a time when this country hasn’t decided how to fully extend civil rights to all citizens. Celebs and regular Mr. & Mrs. alike, it’s in bad taste at the very least.

I’ve long thought of Rush as PR machine, spewing what sells.  He keeps FAIR busy tracking down his lies and documenting his racism.  I don’t read anything more into his wedding entertainment pick than that Rush wants what he wants, can afford it because his brand of crack is big business–and if it gives him press, all the better.  I know Elton has a history of making peace across the aisle of hate, so that part makes sense to me.  I guess.  It’s all pretty odd, though, making Rush Limbaugh’s event the queerest wedding of the year.

Mostly I just want to know what Elton sang.

Did the Limbaugh couple pick Elton because he sings their song?  Is the Lion King soundtrack their go-to sexytime disc? Did Rush court his lady with a mixtape including Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.  Did Elton perform for the couple’s first dance, with Rush breathily whisper the lyrics in his bride’s ear:

“Blue jean baby, L.A. lady, seamstress for the band

Pretty eyed, pirate smile, you’ll marry a hateful man…”

I kinda hope Elton sang Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word and looked right into Rush’s eyes.  It’s sad, so sad, it’s a sad, sad situation, and it’s getting more and more absurd. Seriously absurd.

I hope he sang Philadelphia Freedom, because that was written for supa sporty dyke Billie Jean King in honor of her Philadephia Freedoms tennis team, which makes it double or maybe triple gay, but I bet Rush doesn’t know that and thumps his arm in the air to it all Born in the U.S.A.

Till the whippoorwill of freedom zapped me right between the eyes.

That’s good stuff right there.

If Elton John plays at my wedding which I may never have, I’ll request that he sing Rocket Man.  Because I just love that damn song.  Who doesn’t?  It’s just my job five days a week.  If you don’t love Rocket Man even now that Elton is all sloppy tainted by sleeping in Rush’s bed,  please let me know.  It might be a deal breaker.

Oh, Elton.  I hope those conservative assholes–or whatever type of people would be at a Rush’s Limbaugh hootenanny– loved the hell out of whatever you sang for them.  I hope the money gets washed well and put to good use, Sugar Bear.  I just can’t raise my glass to this one, but for your sake, I hope the cake was good, and that it was worth it.