(Perhaps Obligatory Disclaimer: I myself am a Person of Color and I own no Confederate flags.)

Before Barack Obama, people just called certain other people niggers and got on with they bad selves. Now, some (*psst* half) black dude inherits a country teetering after eight years of Republican-engineered doom–and we can’t use the N-word anymore. Well, shit.

But we can say “entitlement people!” Hell yeah!

We haven’t started putting the elderly out to die of exposure yet; and the last time I looked, throwing wheelchairs down the Porter Square escalator was still frowned upon. So despite the looming threat of Social Security being dismantled, for common trolling purposes, “entitlement person” doesn’t really mean them, per se.

It means, of course, Tawanda and DuShawn. Tawanda has two of DuShawn’s kids and two others from Keval and Jerome. She hasn’t married any of them, and none of them pay child support, because Keval is a pothead and Jerome and DuShawn are in jail. Tawanda has two-inch air-brushed nails and lets her kids stay up until 11 before she heads out to the club. She gets food stamps which lets her eat at McDonalds, and free housing in a project building filled with other people just like her. She has a weave and wears skimpy clothes which she’s busting out of like one of the People of Walmart.

And (unlike the 90% of the rest of the Deserving and Hard-Working) she has a cell phone! (It is kind of funny watching her text–in Urban, of course–with those nails.) The kids’ noses aren’t wiped, and they’re into everything, until she screams at them without following through on any of her threats. She has a stroller that doubles as a small Cadillac which is big enough to almost completely block the aisle of the average bus. Her voice is very loud, and she can be heard complaining about them people down to the welfare office.

But at least she’s only dealing a little drugs, because DuShawn is with a gang. He spends half his money on fly boxer shorts, because his pants ride very low. He carries a gun, has low-quality diamonds in the caps on his teeth–and sells crack in the doorways of those damned free-rent buildings. He has six kids and brags about his women and his manhood; he’s been on Maury twice. He sweet-talks the woman of the moment into supporting him and refuses to wear a condom, because if she really loves him, she’ll have his baby to prove it. Right now he’s in jail for aggravated assault, but he’ll be out in two weeks.

Fucking n-  uh, I mean, entitlement people.

And you know and I know in all seriousness, that Tawanda and DuShawn really do exist, and that I’m not exaggerating. BUT THEY’RE NOT “ENTITLEMENT PEOPLE!” THEY’RE SCUM! GET IT RIGHT, PEOPLE!!

And they’re in a minority. And some of them are white.

But no matter how desperately working poor Americans need a little help to get by (did I mention “Republican-engineered?”) their “entitlements” are at risk because Tawanda and DuShawn are black.

And so is Mr. Obama. See? We wouldn’t be overrun with Tawanda and DuShawn if we’d been smart enough to elect the white guy!

The problem is that the president’s negritude has finally justified the faulty logic connection that “we knew all along that ni– um, er, that ‘entitlement people’ were getting stroked by the government, and now there’s proof!! Hey, I bet Tawanda’s a Muslim too!”

Obama, being naive enough to try to do the right thing instead of the um, er, n- thing, has failed to enact anything resembling welfare increases other than for the banking community (who are Rich White Men). He has reluctantly listened to a large and shrill number of the people he’s supposed to be leading in a democratic republic (instead of a dictatorship) and dragged his feet on gay rights, which isn’t all that bad, because that means people can still use the words “faggot,” “tranny,” and “dyke,” which will all go the way of the dodo once we elect a queer president and we have to pretend that our hatred isn’t really about their identity.

As a result, Tawanda and DuShawn won’t vote for him next year. (Well, DuShawn’s a felon, so never mind about that.) And neither will a lot of other people who wanted to see the poor bastard free the slaves, flog the corporations, and pull gold bricks out of his ass. All they got was a schmuck who was given the hardest job on the entire planet–and who happened to be black.

And then apparently forgot about it. Here’s the deal: He was elected because he was black; he’s blamed for everything because he’s black–but the voters won’t re-elect him because he apparently hasn’t been black enough. Because as we know, Tawanda and DuShawn are the only black people there are.

Poor bastard. Oh well, let’s bring on the neo-con white guy (or *shudder* gal) and see how the next four years go. I’m sure they’ll put the niggers back in their places. And all the rest of the entitlement people too.

I was lucky enough to go to a high school where most of the girls were nice, because I was the Geek of Nerddom. It didn’t change. But back at the turn of the century, for a tiny minute before the dot-com crash, I was the cat’s pajamas: working at a Beltway Web firm doing that edgy thing called *snort* HTML. I was hip, baby! OK, still way more comfortable hanging out with the codemonkeys than my fellow producers, who were mostly marketing droids, but still. This was 1999; and to give you an idea of the zeitgeist, while on my way to a client conference, I spotted a PA license plate with the state URL. Enormous impact. The Millenium was at hand. All of a sudden, the little things started popping up everywhere. Revolution!

And then all of a sudden a whole bunch of us were on food stamps. So it goes. It was still a valuable experience, and I’m very grateful to be able to pop the hood under the little tab in front of me labeled “HTML” when I need to tweak. And did you know that Google Calendar needs formatting in its event details? Doot-do-dooo! Captain Codelass, to the rescue! “Never fear, choir music list! I’ll save you!”

But what this has mainly done for me is turn me into that person those other people ask about their computers. I’m not rich (heh) or trendy. Although I’m reasonably tech-edge, what with Singe and the Snow Leopard here, my wired-ness leaves something to be desired. I’m just a little writer nebbish, out here in cyberspace. I only have 187 “friends,” and about 50 of them are people I (*shrinks down in the chair*) play games with. And I got my Twitter account just to communicate with some people I needed to reach who weren’t responding to their e-mail.

There’s nothing like spending five years writing what turns out to be three novels, and then realizing that the world is NOT, in fact, clamoring for it automatically at your door. In fact, more negative souls might mention the word “depressing.” What helps is knowing that there are legions of famous, successful, and gloriously talented people out there who also went through a period of morosely continuing writing although admitting its complete futility–and who, moreover, took drinking very seriously. Sooner or later, I figure. Sooner or later.

But no! It’s actually true! I really am a fa-a-aa-ailure!! There’s this new thing called a Klout score, and it will show me up as a loserbabe with only 187 “friends.” I’m only an e-ee-ee-ee-leeee-vennnnnn!!!!!!! Fail! Epic life fail!! *storms up to room, slams door, falls on bed, cranks tunes, calls all friends*

My life as I know it is now over. I am clearly wasting my time on all the sheeping prose. 140 charactahs baybee!!!!! (Note the partial deprecation of Standard English in this post. Preparations are at hand, is all I’m saying.)

The HORRIBLE thing is that now I really am going to keep up with Twitter. Maybe I’ll start doing that whore thing where I’ll follow random people in hopes that they’ll follow me back. In other words, I wanna be popular. At least I have a reason: I want to be published and/or at least have people read my stuff. (Some hipster dweebboy completely harshed on one of my posts on Plinky, and I thought, “Ooh!! My words have touched a life!”) But I think the majority of people will want it just to have it; and by the end of the summer, there will be an explosion of frantic tweeting and re-tweeting. Gotta be cool kids, because that number those marketing geniuses made up now tells us who and what we are, and if we’re really cool, then we get free potato chips.

Obviously, they’re what you have for lunch with all the other cool kids. Save me some.

Brace for impact and get the she’s-a-bad-girls a-ready: I can’t sleep at night without meds, and it pisses me off.

There are a number of things in my life which have made me admit that there’s better living through modern chemistry. (I should say here that any and all herbal remedies are about better living through classical chemistry, so hush up. It’s all about tinkering with that cascade of molecules in your brain; I would be psyched to drink a tea . . . if it worked. What, you think I haven’t tried it? Glad it works for you, you lucky thing.)

In my natural, untampered-with brain state, I can eventually indeed fall asleep by about 4 a.m.: I just don’t stay that way. I awake often, and spend long stretches either in that almost-asleep&dreaming state, or chasing the critter I call the “3 a.m. squirrel” (regardless of time of arrival), who nibbles you awake and runs about in your head, largely sowing a path of destruction.

After a while, I tell myself and El Rodento that the time-honored advice of just getting up is what’s happening, and I do; most often I get some writing done. My head and face are tingly, my muscles are throbbing, my eyes are dry–and everything else screams in unison that less than six hours=not enough sleep–

–but it doesn’t matter. I’ll stay up for at least an hour, and then by the time I can go back to bed, I’ve got maybe an hour before the alarm lets me out of hell, so I can wake up and (in this non-drug scenario) hide in a dark room trying not to puke from the migraine.

Thus the medication. Ah, modern chemistry . . .

My being pissed-off isn’t because Drugs Are Bad. Golly gee, everybody is supposed to be able to SLEEP, right? Easy as falling off that log you’re sawing. I feel like I’ve failed a course.

Even with meds, nothing is certain. I had an unusually brisk romp with the 3 a.m. squirrel this morning, concerning a somewhat complicated and highly detailed scenario starring a yet-unborn kitten and a subsequent trip to the ER. (Not directly involving said kitten–as I said, it was complicated.) I think things will go better if I scruff myself and get up as soon as the beady-eyed little buck-toothed fiend shows up. I do in fact have writing to do. The squirrel gives decent dictation.

Poor kitten. I’m sure it won’t do anything of the sort.

Please note that the kitten as such does not exist. The 3 a.m. squirrel, on the other hand, is chewing it a little kitten basket out of worthless Civil War banknotes.

OK, so far neither the kidlet nor myself has found a job, and I’m doing angst about it. Last night it took the form of waking up at 3 a.m. and obsessing about all the tragedy both real and projected I could dredge up. (It’s the “3 a.m. squirrel” because it runs round and round in your brain.) I called it quits when one scenario started with the kitten I’m planning to get this Christmas, and ended with my trying to scam the ER out of some opthalmic antibiotic ointment. I’m leaving the several intervening steps out of it, because we try to run a family blog here. Just note that again, said kitten is currently a twinkle in some tomcat’s eye right now, and we’ll move on.

It’s probably as well that the storyfying part of my brain is kicked on high, because Dark Crimson Corners is officially off my desk until it goes pro (heh; see angst) and Max is well underway. I’ve been underwhelmed by my plot idea for this, partly because Max told me I had to come up with one and I’m unfortunately my protagonists’ bitch whether I have one ready or not. But after a couple of months of flailing around in backstory, I’m finally getting good to go, and it looks like it’ll be ok-so-far. The thing that’s been hardest to shut off is the fear of Too Longness–DCC ended up 320K, I think–after cuts. I’m going to do my damnedest to ignore it while I write, and edit down later.

Meanwhile, the Achilles continues to heal (sorry), meaning I can now interact with the sweaty beauties of the Canterbrigian summer. (As opposed to the Jamaican Planiferous summers of the previous three years, which were merely sweaty.) My couch potato-hood lasted long enough for me to watch the entirety of Buffy on Netflix; it’s kind of embarrassing how comparatively little writing I got done that month+. I made a New Year’s resolution to update this blog once a week; this obviously hasn’t panned out, ’cause I’s lazy. And this catch-up doesn’t count, so I suppose it’s on to Plinky, which is the writing equivalent of that workout you have to add on because of Aunt Inez’ carrot cake at the family reunion. Hidey ho!

Breaking up is hard to do, but getting into a new relationship is a lot, lot harder.

So fifteen years ago I started talking to this guy called T.D. Riverly. He used to come into the library I babysat late at night, and I got to know him. Sort of. I knew about his main traumas, and what it was like to be him. We stayed in touch during the seven-year hiatus between At Harvard I and At Harvard II, and during the end of my dissertation, we started getting closer.

Finally, he watched over my shoulder as two crazy kids ran away from a crossbow-wielding mob, and he stepped out of his office and said, “Babe, we gotta get serious.” I humored him for old times’ sake. Then he started telling me his real story, all the stuff I didn’t know. About what power and fame had done to him.

And about the vampire part. I hadn’t seen that one coming. But he told me all about it, how it worked and what it was like to be ass-deep in truly whacked crazy. Then he brought me home with him to the District of Nova Terra, and introduced me to Sasha, and Meeze, and Pharaoh. Terry and I were serious.

He was my man for five of the rockiest years of my life. Five long, solid years. We grew, we changed. Two years ago, I had an idle convo with a guy named Damascus, who was a completely peripheral pain in Terry’s ass, because I wanted to make some peace. And then he rocked both our worlds in a shattering way that recontextualized a lot of what we had built with each other. (“So, Damascus, where’d you grow up?” I swear that’s all I asked. Who knew serial killers were human? Not me.)

But now it’s over.

Terry and I are adults, and we realized that things would eventually change, and then that our relationship was nearing a point when we needed some space. Just space; not even a separation. This scared me, but I’m proud to say that I didn’t do what so many do in my place, and wrap myself around his waist and refuse to let go.

I cheated on Terry about a year ago, and I met this amazing guy called Max. In one short evening, we had one of those oh-wows that made him a part of my life–and then I went back to my babe and thought that that was it. But he called me up last summer, and I would sneak off to see him every so often as a break from the rockier pieces of my –oh OK breakup– with Terry.

Terry and I are at a good place, where he’s packing up and fishing out the stray socks from under the dresser, and we know that we’ll always be friends–and maybe something more. But . . . space—and meanwhile, that means that here I am with Max now, trying to figure out who we are and where we’re going. He’s no longer the sweet piece on the side, and I have to take everything seriously now. Scary. So scary.

It’s just that Terry and I were so close–unbelievably close. And Max and I are still at the sitting around stage where I feel like we’re Aristotle’s bear cub, which would emerge as a shapeless lump and be licked into shape by his mother. (Aristotle also thought flies had four legs. I swear to God we’re talking psychosis here.)

The differences between the two relationships fascinates me. I don’t know the people in Max’s life at all well, although we’ve spent some time just hanging out–which is, after all, how I met Damascus–and I’m SO the new chick here. There are all these strange people, and they’re all about their stuff, new stuff, taking me on a totally new journey. Stretching me, insisting that I become as good a partner as I became to Terry.

After five years, I have to start again.

Oh, sheep.

When my daughter was in her early teens, there were times when I would imitate one of those old-time radio ads: “W-T-M-I! Way Too Much Information, ’round the clock, seven days a week!”  The Gentle Reader is either familiar with kids that age or is one her or himself, and you know the sort of stuff I mean.

I mean, don’t we? We’re talking about “the ills that flesh is heir to,” as the saying goes–but we’re NOT. That’s not how it really goes–either in the original, or in life.
It’s a misquotation of part of Hamlet’s soliloquy in III,i:

To be or not to be . . .
the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to . . .

Not that mushy “ills” stuff. Thousand, natural, and shocks. Art is in the details. There are lots of them, they are part of life, and they hit our outraged system with the impact of tiny bullets. It’s important to us that we share the details of our best friend’s philandering, all about what happened at that party, just what trick our digestive system is up to today, and exactly what the surgery entailed.

And the auditor usually doesn’t need or want to hear it. They desire that whatever happens in the bathroom, stays in the bathroom (unless there’s some impact upon the host’s rug or plumbing). They don’t want to have to meet those saucy people, knowing what they know, because they’ll have to shake hands while knowing where those saucy hands have been. And anybody with an imagination (or a penchant for the Discovery Channel) can picture all that ucky medical stuff performed upon their own flesh.

And we know this, but we want to share anyway. Pity the pharmacist, bartender to the afflicted. It’s best explained by going back to the primal overshare: toilet training, where information is joyously announced because it is a milestone of control over that mysterious sack of stuff we come packed in. It is a triumph! No poop, there I was!

I survived the surgery, and it was some ordeal, let me tell you! But I kicked its ass! Hey, you know how hard it is to find that much fiber? And I’m sorry you don’t want to hear about my sexual awakening at that Mazola party, but that’s because you’re square and I must preach the word! This last betrays the lot, because the oversharing is “all about me.”

I think the unwilling audience should remember that, either in being sympathetic to the impulse to overshare and bring somebody else into the me-ness, or as ammunition against the onslaught of I-don’t-care-how-uncomfortable-this-makes-you. Because whether you want to admit it or not, it is all about you on some level much of the time, and your lack of oversharing is due only to your greater desire for control; you have a stopper on the bottle preventing the exuberant genie from emerging.

Besides, admit it: Half the time, deep down, there’s a piece of you that kind of wants to know.

So! Guess what happened to me to inspire this blog?

My very first job was as a file clerk at a place called City Electric, tucked into a corner of New York's garment district, near my high school. I made minimum wage, which at the time was $3.35. (Isn't it horrific how little that's gone up, considering the comparative economic changes of the ensuing 35 years?)

It's sad how little I remember about it (and a lot of stuff at that age); I recall the warm creamy yellow of the second-sheet carbon copies and the red invoice numbers in the upper left-hand corner. There was a subset of older numbers, which were in other file drawers. I realize now that those were just the ones where the individual store or salesman still had an old pad, but they seemed to be miniature archaeological exhibits.

I worked for some affable old men, Ben and Archie–and the big boss, who might have been a George–and who worked in the same room with the rest of us, with its high ceilings, hanging fluorescent lamps, and aged linoleum in beige, maroon, and black. No desk toys in those days–everybody's desks were piled high with stacks of paper. I think Ben was the accountant. (Which, if you think about it, made sense, him being in the invoice department.) They were incredibly nice, and I grew to love them dearly. I don't remember not wanting to come in to work.

I don't really remember exactly what City Electric did. I know they'd been around for at least a couple of decades at that time; their logo was one of those solid old-timey things with Art Deco lettering. But it had a sense of warmth and comfort that you find very rarely in the job market; a sense of timelessness.

I lasted the school year. I'm not sure if I got fired. I hope not. My memory is of not getting the job back the following year, or something like that. I'm not sure. The next job was at a company which bought up scrap steel and aluminum (with the creative name of Metal Purchasing); I think they both essentially laid me off because there wasn't any more work to do in the slow summer months.

(No, come to think of it, I wasn't fired, because I remember the first time I was, and what a shock it was to my system: I'd been working making sandwiches on a line in a fern bar somewhere, and I went pee too often. It's a jungle out there, with perilous roads overhung with alfalfa sprouts.)

But City Electric lives on in my memory as a cozy place, with it somehow raining outside, and the kindly Ben and Archie in their paper-filled corners providing a sense of stability. Working wasn't scary back then–no resumes, no training sessions, no pressure. I had a basic little job, and being able to handle integer counting, I did it well, and they liked me. I think on some level I've wanted to re-create that sense of solidity ever since.

But now I have the security (if not the money) of being my own boss. As I write this, the sky is that same comfortable grey, and I can have all the hot tea I want. It's just that writing is almost infinitely harder than counting some days (an irony if you look at the scores from every standardized test I've ever taken), and I don't have Ben and Archie to metaphorically cuddle me warm.

Oh well. Plinky prompt answered, blog posted. First stacks of the day put where they're supposed to be in the drawers of cyberspace. What next, those old-number outliers in the rich and strange land of original composition, or the humdrum task of wearing down my desk's stack of edit?

Ben? Archie?

(Plinky prompt: What do you do to stay healthy?)

Feh. Although at least I can answer this without gym guilt.

 Right now my main exercise routine comes under the Taoist philosophy of wu wei–do nothing, and everything shall be done. It’s making me crazy. This is me, being healthy on my butt. I’m the one transcribing New York Public Library menus (http://menus.nypl.org/ — kidding aside, it’s for a good cause) as part of my attempt to amuse myself while anchored to my couch.

And why, you ask? It happened like this:

I have arthritis in my knees, partially a side effect  of an endocrine glitch, hyperparathyroiditis, which is the adult form of rickets. Being quite heavy hasn’t helped, and I am solidly middle-aged on top of it. Thus, I’ve become used to being in pain when I walk. But by the spring of last year, it had become damn near crippling, and I limped my sorry butt into orthopedics.

The nice orthopods gave me cortisone shots which made me feel as if I were Gene Kelly doing a number entitled, “I Can Walk!” I continue to have a spiffy response to it, and every three or four months, I go in for a tune-up. Unfortunately, I’m one of those curious little souls who ask questions, and at tune-up #1, it was, “By the way, what’s this funny shooting pain?”

(ominous music)

Well, Skipper, it’s a sign that your Achilles tendon is considering going blooie. You hurt it over a year ago, but ignored it because everything else hurt too. It’s grown a lump the size of a large prune. ‘ja think that maybe you shoulda looked into this before?

I limped out in a boot, and was told to come back in six weeks. That was in the very beginning of last September, eight months ago.

It was the black foam variety, and after about a month it fell apart and was flapping like a pirate boot. They put me in an Aircast that was a smidgy too small because that was what they had.

(Re Aircasts: See the pic; they’re the things that look like part of stormtrooper costumes. The small weighs four pounds, and the medium five, which is like clumping around with a bag of sugar stapled to your shin. They have chambers which can be inflated to fit snugly, and three massively no-nonsense velcro straps. And every single time I would think of the shorter, heavier, infinitely less-cool-looking foam thing that had disintegrated, I would put it on with big chirpy love.)

Happily, when I went back for my checkup the prune had diminished–but now that it was gone, there was obviously a walnut underneath. Another month or so.

And for five months, I would go in every month or so, and the damned thing just refused to heal. Finally, the PA and I both saw the hand writing on the wall, or the toe scrabbling weakly in the sand, and the attending came in and said that I either spent six weeks booted-crutched-AND *O*F*F* it–or there would be surgery, which would entail the same thing anyway.

(more ominous music)

I’d seen a blog the night before (complete with oversharing pictures) about the horrors of this procedure, and I just . . . sort of . . . stopped after a while. I’ve had (really) over a dozen full-throttle abdominal procedures (girly stuff mostly) and think autopsies are kewl. But it looked like ow-ow-ow-ow-ow, so even though I know damn well you don’t blog if you have a normal outcome, I decided to be uncharacteristically compliant. I am now on a couch in a corner containing seemingly everything I own so I don’t have to fetch it. (You have NO idea how much you walk around at home until you hurt yourself.)

At least the new Aircast fits, which is a vast improvement, but it’s about a pound heavier, bringing it up to five pounds. The lump is getting smaller. But at five weeks, I’m not completely hopeful. One way or another, I see the truly spiffy PA in about ten days, and I will *not* be doing the Gene Kelly on my way out.

I want to dance. Hell, I want to walk. I want to not have carrying things up and down stairs to be tactically planned–it was enough of a pain in the ass without the boot, but at least once I was on level ground . . .

. . . it hurt, and I keep forgetting that. But I walked and danced anyway, and because pain is for weenies (as we are told by everything remotely associated with athletics), I toughed it out. I Just Did It . . . and now I’m Just Sitting On It.

I have a fish phobia. It’s not dire–I’m fine with pictures and whatnot, and I’m usually down with the Nova, but fishtanks can give me the willies, free or not.

The first time I saw one of those sucky fish glued to the side of an aquarium, I did the girly scream and dance. I was an adult. In public. And my most terrifying moment in recent memory, in terms of a sense of imminent doom, came while snorkeling in Hawaii. OK, coral–goes with the rest of the surreal I’m-really-here Hawaii experience; fish, yeah, they live here, I suppose, but they’re over there and I’m over . . . um, they’re over . . . um, there are a lot . . .

I heard myself scream through my snorkel, which was pathetic beyond belief, and I banged a uey and swam back to shore as hard and as fast as I could, which wasn’t very impressive, as I’m not much of a swimmer. It still literally makes me shudder to remember that desperate terrified battle to avoid . . . being touched or eaten or something.

I sobbed on the shore, until my spouse came to console me. He was nice enough to not be laughing very hard, but I was homicidal, as he’d checked the sitch out ahead of time and pronounced it largely fish-free. Apparently, between the time he’d been there and the time he’d fetched me back, somebody must have fed them one of those candy bar things, and they were . . . looking for more food. Which I already viscerally knew. (You can get these nummy sticks of about the size of a banana that will attract swarms of the things so they will come and nibble it out of your hand. This is incomprehensible to me.)

Big aquariums require me to be brave. But I like them. They’re sort of like horror movies with a gift shop. In fact, I like fish in the abstract–and in an attempt to man up to the piscine world, I used to own an aquarium. One with teeny fish, not the ones the size of a salad plate like in my doctor’s waiting room. I grew fond of them, and declared war on a snail infestation with self-righteous fervor.

But I never knew what the deal was. I’ve had a fair share of trauma in my fascinating life, but none involving fish as far as I knew. The flopping and skittering maybe? Nah. There are lots of things I’m not keen on touching because they move like that, but I don’t go screaming through my snorkel over them.

Then tonight, one of those childhood memories hit, and it makes sense now.

My dad was a fish tank guy, and I loved them. I would watch them for hours. Back when I was five, I loved going to the fish store and helping pick new ones out. He had a Jack Dempsey whom he named “Hannibal the Cannibal” for good reason, so we went to the fish store regularly. (Dad eventually gave up on the defenseless mollies and snackfood neons and switched to bigger, tougher fish.)

On one trip, I saw a tank full of the cutest itty frogs you ever did see. Adorable. Maybe two inches long. They stayed in the water, and swam around, and ate fish food. I was completely enamored, so Dad got some. That afternoon, I woke up from my post-shopping nap and heard my father cursing in the living room. I ran in to see Hannibal swimming around with the still-kicking legs of one of my tiny frogs protruding from his mouth. Oh, the poor, poor little frog! How horrible to get digested to death! My father extracted him, but of course it was too late.

Thinking back, this was the first time I had ever seen something I cared about being killed before my eyes–I had no control; I didn’t even see justice for my dead: Dad refused to flush him; for some reason he really liked the bastard. Hannibal the Cannibal became the repository for all my rage and fear; he himself had been a trusted (if despised) part of my life. Now this slimy little creature was swimming around unscathed and unrebuked, despite being a bringer of death.

Obviously an overreading in adult terms, but I was five. Come on now. Besides, 43 years later, I still want to bludgeon the sheeping thing to death with a chopstick. Poor little frog. I’m curious now as to whether the peaceable and upright, the clean-living and frog-eschewing fish I meet in the future will lose some of their terror after my squarely facing my trauma. I hope so.

Do sharks count?

1.5.10

(Plinky prompt: What are the 3 most significant historic events that have occurred in your lifetime?)

1) The 1969 Apollo landing. I was six, and what I remember was hardly being able to keep my eyes open, but gamely being there for it. I was on the fold-out couch in the living room, and had to be awoken when it got near. So I remember that small step for man being taken while I was in the unpleasant why-am-I-up? and why-am-I-doing-this? state of having pulled an all-nighter or getting up at an hour before oh-dawn-thirty for May Day to see the Morris dancers sing the sun up.

(I’d say something sententious involving the sunrise and celestial motifs, but then I’d have to slap myself.)

I did some quick Wikisearch, and found that it was at about 11-ish at night for me. I was allowed to stay up for New Year’s Eve, but I think this was different because of the anticipation involved. I did find myself crying; I think it may have been the first time I realized that there was something poignant about human history being made.

2) Right after I turned 27 in November of ’89, my world was small. I didn’t read the news, because it was depressing. I was an art major, and I admitted cheerfully that I was avoiding reality by reading science fiction. Then one night in the car, my husband turned to me, and casually asked, “So what do you make of all that stuff going on in Berlin?”

“What stuff going on in Berlin?” I asked innocently. I got myself a subscription to Newsweek the next day. Thus, the failure of totalitarian socialism marked the beginning of my understanding that I was forced to be a political animal. I realized that I *had* to start paying attention.

3) Just like everybody else over ten, 9/11. I was 38. Kid #2 and I were on our way to where I was teaching college. It was a horrible jolt when that plane crashed into Tower One. But I’d grown up knowing that planes hit skyscrapers; just ask the Empire State Building. Then the DJ came on again–and Kid #2, whom I’d thought oblivious in the back seat with his Game Boy, said “Ohhh shit.” I remember looking around at all the other cars on that stunning September morning, and the world driving by Johns Hopkins and the art museum looked just the same as it had 15 minutes ago.

About a half hour after that I was standing in front of my composition class at Morgan State. I had to be the grownup for a room full of terrified 18-year-old children. One young man said something bitter about how horrible it was to be stuck with Bush right then. I found myself digging within that amazing surge of patriotism those planes dredged out of most of us, and said, “He may be an asshole, but right now, he’s *our* asshole, and right now is when we all have to stick together.”

Right now I’m 48, and it looks as if we’re about to be plunged into an era of totalitarian conservatism. I feel powerless, and afraid–but deep down hopeful, because I know that our intellects can even break us out of our gravity well, that freedom chips and chips away against repression–and that when it all comes down to it, nothing is monolithic, and people find their bravery despite their fear.