Monthly Archives: December 2007

Weathering the storm

I lost both internet and electricity last night about midnight, but my lights came back on midafternoon and my internet service came back on about 1020 p.m., so less than a day. As far as I know, Mom and my sister Susan are huddled in a room with kerosene lantern and gas grate.

I used a battery powered blowup air mattress to stay in front of the fireplace last night and was pretty toasty warm. I kept a fire going for most of the day and there’s a merry one crackling in the fireplace as I type. The hot water heater still worked, so I got a steamy shower in about a 50-degree house. I used sheets to block off the living room and kept the drapes closed to retain the fireplace heat in the living room, festooned with candles. (I’m not gay, I’m single).

I figured out how to make coffee this morning: I used an all metal pan over the gas pipe in the fireplace to boil water for a French press. Soon after, I headed for the Red Cup, where a good number of all the folks I know stopped in. I thought I’d get internet at the Cup, but they had the same problem I did: the dsl line was down. They did have electricity and I ate there and drank far too much coffee.

The cat has thought it quite an adventure and has scurried about under my feet and treated the living room bed as a carnival of delights, dancing over the furniture and bouncing off the walls. He sure as hell doesn’t want out, though. Even with a fur coat, it’s damn cold, especially when the sun goes down.

There’s an awful beauty to this weather. The glinting ice everywhere is lovely in its own way and reminds me of the ice castle scene in Dr. Zhivago. On the downside, the trees in this town have taken a terrible beating. Everywhere you go, nature has pruned cruelly and killed indiscriminately. I saw trees split in three all the way to the ground. Huge limbs blocks streets everywhere I go and despite the efforts of many public teams and personal efforts, there seem to be new limbs falling for all those that get picked up or dragged off the street. Finally, tonight, the rains washed off more ice than they left, but the temperatures are headed back below freezing before morning and ice and snow is predicted for the weekend.

Despite all this and the 22 hours of inconvenience, I’m still a pretty happy camper as in the last post. One result of the storm that is wonderful is that several of us gathered at GaryB’s for dinner last night and he is one darn good host. It was scrumpdelicious and I made a happy plate. Got to see the poor unwashed still without power who are bunking in with the G-man and that made me grateful for the power I did have by then, in addition to the day of hanging out with the crew.

The primal pleasures of a real wood fire draw me. I like tending a fire. I like watching its changing shapes. I’m glad I don’t have to go outside and cut wood and haul it and do this to keep warm, but as a matter of enhancing an already warm life, it’s a visual and aromatic pleasure for me. I like thinking about the architechture of the fire, banking it for coals or rustling it back up into a merry blaze. At my age, I imagine the golden glow of the light is flattering to me, which is a crying shame since I share the glow of the fire with no one (sniff. poor me. anyone falling for this shit? no? OK).

Speaking of which, I’ll stop here to tend to the fire.

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Being all right with the world

I’m all right with the world today.

Much of the time, as many of you know, I suffer from a common character flaw of alcoholics, the non-specific anxiety syndrome that comes from seeing disaster around every corner, an expectation of catastrope, a sense of impending doom, the expected punishment for my unknown failures.

Not today.

Today, I’m all right with the world.

Not only do I not care that the weather is horrible, I celebrate it. I’m in a warm house, dishwasher and laundry going to keep it from being so dry, listening to my newest CD purchase, the opera “Il Travatore” featuring Placido Domingo.

In the back room, I’ve got five DVDs of movies I’ve never seen. Last night, I watched “Hollywood Land”, about the suicide of the actor who portrayed Superman in the 50s television series.

I’m provisioned nicely. Not only shall I not want for food, but I have delicious and wonderful cold-weather fare, including but not limited to hot chocolate.

I’ve spent a good bit of the day reading the New York Times and dabbling on the ‘net with the cat ensconsed on my lap.

I’m alone, but not at all lonely, and that gives me the freedom to listen to music few of my friends would relish, the liberty to read the paper for an extended time without interruption and the ease to indulge my movie moods.

I had a lovely dinner last night and today feel sated and content with my fate.

Of course my finances are a mess, but no one will mess with me on Sunday in the midst of this ice storm. At least for the moment, I’m safe.

I have a merry little blaze crackling in the fireplace. For primal reasons I’ve never cared to try to understand, a fire is a great comfort to me, even if it’s decoratively attenuated from its pre-civilization utility.

I understand not a word of the opera, but the passionate power of its emotionality is transporting; you can feel the pain, the love, the hope and hopelessness of the story without knowing a damn thing about the music. It’s the art of opera, in my opinion, that it is able to strum our emotions no matter how ignorant we are of the form.

My biggest political worry — that Bush would unilaterally launch a military attack on Iran — has been quelled by events and I haven’t picked up the bug about the polling and political campaigns yet. It’s just not as important to me right now as is the white cat hair on my black turtleneck.

My Charleston sister is enjoying 70-plus degree beach house parties and it’s a comfort to me to know that she’s well and happy.

My Mom called about some trivial matter and I’m so grateful that she’s well, happy and still in possession of her faculties. She is a blessing in my life.

My daughter and I have been conspiring to be Santa and that is such a complete joy that it makes me smile to paw through our emails. My son is deeply involved in a New Orleans Christmas stage production and that makes me proud and pleased.

I recently read that each day we can choose to be happy or sad and that it’s the same amount of work either way. Today, that doesn’t seem so true. I work damn hard at being unhappy and this seems so utterly effortless.

I must admit there on the edge of this Era of Good Feeling there’s just a tinge of schadenfreude at those single-minded consumers who are fighting to shop for Christmas in this weather. Just thinking of their misery makes me smile.

So, that’s it from the House of Ennui.

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Bush Bashed

Bush is either a pathological liar or a moron, Keith Olbermann opines, and either way unfit to be president. This expresses well my own opinion. Keith goes on to tap Cheney as a “warmonger.” Impeachments and war crimes trials are a moral imperative, in my view. Please watch the smoking gun on Iran and the NIE that exposes this administration’s perfidy.

Dick will make you slap somebody

Atlanta Public Access TV superstar Alexyss Tylor explains that the spiritually encoded information in a man’s penis when combined with the spiritual codes in the vaginal canal can make women shoot somebody in the face — or at least slap them — during sex when it occurs to a woman that he might be sharing that dick with somebody else. I’m kind of getting to understand things a little better I think after watching a few of these episodes. I’m not sure her mother, also on the show, completely understands the concept. It’s really complicated, but I’ll let her explain:

In another episode, she thinks that women should support each other with a vagina power pussy police. Yeah, I’m thinking that this is The Answer. You see, mens got a lesser brains that thinks it can share around but that’s only because mens think pussy got no face and they balls get tingly with being bored and they start chasing around, despite they wedding band that is a noose around the nuts and a true nut bracket. I’m not telling it right because I’m just a lesser brained man, I guess. Here’s the straight stuff right from Alexyss Tylor, Pussy Pilot:

I was just too busy giving dick away while y’all at work and at church to figure this stuff out, I suppose.

OK, enough with that. I want to make a serious point. Grab ahold of your chairs, ladies. This woman’s statements and thinking is no less wrong and offensive and ignorant than some of the things I hear every day from the “nice” ladies in my life. Yes, you college educated, middle aged, middle class, articulate women who read my blog and talk to me every day. I mean bloggers who whine about men and coffee companions who pontificate about gender and the role of men in their romantic and sex lives. I mean my sisters, my closest friends and my X girlfriends, virtually every single woman I know and with whom I have had some conversation about men and relationships. Yeah, you, too.
I recently had a long conversation with a radically feminist woman attorney, in private, in order to tell her straight out that I am offended by many of the things she says about men. Sometimes I want to scream at some of you I talk to in coffee houses and elsewhere.
You are just wrong. You are as wrong as this poor, ignorant woman in the videos.
You engage in magical thinking. You too broadly stereotype males. You engage in massive non sequiturs. You have become the sexist beasts you berate.
Here’s a few news flashes for you:
1. Not all men are dawgs
2. Not all women are nurturing
3. Testosterone is not the root of all evil
4. Your personal vagina is not all that special
5. Prudish attitudes about sex are not ordained by God, if a divine providence exists
6. Men are not required to understand you by God, human law or even common sense in order to be acceptable to the angels, society or the criminal justice system
7. Just because you think relationships would be better if “he” would do things your way doesn’t make it so
8. Indira Ghandi and Golda Mier both took their nations to war, so shut up about that women as benign leaders crap
9. St. Paul does not speak for me nor a whole lot of other men
10. Estrogen alone does not make you a better person
11. Being different from you does not make us worse than you
12. A great many men pay their child support, love their children and are good fathers
13. Some women physically abuse their husbands/boyfriends
14. Power, control and manipulation games are not admirable in a relationship, even if you do it very well
15. It is intellectually dishonest to demand equal treatment while simultaneously demanding unequal treatment
16. It is not always your prerogative to change your mind just because you have a vagina
17. PMS is not an acceptable excuse for unacceptable behavior
18. Taking out the trash, walking the dog, mowing the yard and getting out of bed to turn off the last light are not exclusively the province of men.
19. The best cooks in the world are almost all men
20. Breasts and a vagina does not make your taste in clothes or interior design inherently better than mine

Last, but not least:

Our mothers taught us to act this way

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