A Widely Held Dissention

Mood: agitated
Listening to: My keyboard clicking...Powers out in San Francisco

     If I was lucky enough to be the sort of girl who could drop the price of a luxury car cloning her favorite pet, I’d have the perfect kitty to fit the bill.  Auspicious beginning for all concerned since felines are the only critter on the menu for synthetic reincarnation, dogs will have to wait until science catches up.  Never fear, their stay in doggie Purgatory will be quite short, if the money being made off cats is any indicator.  Who cares about the extravagance of other people’s egos and the animals that inspired them, this little story is about the best little mongrel tomcat ever to grace the New World.  Butter was easily worth the price of a Lexus.

     When I was five my whole universe, which included my mother, my aunt, uncle and their eighteen year old son, all moved from sunny, happy Sacramento, California to freezing cold, extremely rural, Kenai, Alaska.  I was devastated, and I was terrified.  In California, the schools have special programs to teach the students about the dangers of getting into strangers cars and drugs leading to ruin.  In Alaska, the school programs where all about drilling into the children that the animals here will eat you given half a chance.  A cyclone fence, not to keep away potential pedophiles, but to keep the grizzly bears from indulging themselves in a light snack, surrounded the school.

 I couldn’t believe it, how could all the tall people in my household lose their minds at the same time?  To top it all off, we lived in an area of town that was sort of a suburb almost, except without the city.  The pipeline was really booming in the early seventies and many people moved up to Alaska to work for the oil companies.  This area was a large housing development of cheap housing meant to house the newly transplanted citizens until they bought a home.  The oil company paid such good wages it was a given that nobody stayed in this track housing for long.  The result was sort of a ghetto-esque type atmosphere, the families with the good jobs did leave quickly to move into newly bought homes, and the families without the good jobs stayed and collected welfare.  I had another uncle who took up permanent residence with his family that we visited frequently after we moved away to our new home.

     In Alaska, people had a habit of turning unwanted pets loose, to go feral.  The logic being applied here was that Alaska was untamed nature, what better place for an animal to go, much better than the pound where they would most likely be put to sleep.  The flaw in this logic is that while a domesticated dog will go feral quickly, they still want to hang around humans because that’s where the food has always been for their entire canine existence.  What happened in this cheap track housing community that was designed to be transient was that when people moved, they left their dogs, who then true to their nature, turned feral and ran in a huge pack.  School children who did not listen to their teachers warnings would see these packs of dogs fighting amongst each other and would try to pull them apart, thinking they where pet doggies hurting each other.  What happened was that every month or so there would be some little kid who would have life long memories of being mauled by what they thought was a friendly neighborhood doggie and the rabies shots that ensued.  The pack of feral dogs would get to large, some kids would be bitten or some household pets would be mauled and the hammer would fall.

     Everyone, and I mean every single able bodied adult (by that I mean over twelve) owns a firearm of some fashion.  With all of the assault weapons in Alaska, the Soviets would be out of their minds to try any funny business in those neck-of-the-woods.  The men of the families with bitten children or otherwise devoured pets would take their AR15’s and their sniper rifles with the scopes that you can see like three hundred yards in low light and blow those dogs to high heaven.  There would be fur and blood flying everywhere.  They would come sauntering back like conquering heroes, and we would shower them with our love for protecting us from the now hated doggies.

     In this environment, animals that had been abandoned by their previous owners or where feral, saw very little pity.  Maybe hearing in school how everything with fur was dangerous in some way, whether it was rabies or vermin or disease, beware everything, even the squirrels.  There were hordes of Californian families moving up to Alaska whose children only experience with animals came at Great America’s petting zoo, it had to be instilled into us that wild animals are dangerous before one of us tried to pet the next bear we saw.  Every year people died from being mauled by bears, mostly through ignorance.  What I’m trying to say is that casual cruelty to animals wasn’t quite frowned upon as much as the same activity would have been somewhere else.

     Finally, my Aunt Betty and Uncle Chuck have gotten their collective act together and bought us a better place to live.  My mother had already spied her way out by means of a new husband.  She assured my aunt that if she could keep me for just a few months while her and her new husband got their bearings down in Oregon, it would make life so much easier.  It would only be until the school year, because she unquestionably wanted me to start the school year along with everybody else.  Oh, thank you; love you…  Didn’t see her for another five years give or take a couple of months.  Even if mom flaked on me, Aunt Betty came through with the new house and Uncle Chuck was practically rich with the money he made so it wasn’t all bad. 

     Did I mention Aunt Betty was psychotic?  Oh yeah, she was a nut job.  A real believer in the ‘spare the rod; spoil the child’ school of child rearing.  In her mind beating me with a belt while I lay on the floor naked with my arms crossed under my body was her being nurturing.  She was showing me that she loved me enough to discipline me.  It hurt her more than it hurt me.  That, I think, was my favorite line.  She was fond of repeating it over and over about every other strike.  She like to keep me dressed up like her personal life size doll, preferably, her mute, life size doll.

     We where moving all of our belongings from our old house to our new house using the three-car-caravan method.  It took us about five or six times and the whole two weeks down time my uncle got from work, but we managed it.  My uncle’s job on the pipeline was in Prudhoe Bay, which is at the very top of Alaska, way into the Artic Circle.  He would fly there in a six man airplane from Anchorage every two weeks.  He would be home for two weeks, at work two weeks.  He got to spend this two weeks working under Aunt Betty who would do a southern plantation owner proud when it came to working people to death.  Moreover, this woman was not frightened of any human being on earth, she wasn’t stupid, she carried a forty-five, she could back up any shit she cared to talk.

     As vicious as this woman is, she can not tolerate the sight of someone abusing a helpless animal.  Lucky for Butter, she loves cats above all other animals.  She was driving out of our old neighborhood for the last time when she saw a group of kids standing on top of a snow bank swinging this cat by the tail and watching it slide on its stomach, legs splayed across the icy road.  Then she watched the dumb-ass cat scramble up to its feet as fast as it could and run back to the kids, who would turn around and do it again.  Aunt Betty threw that jeep into neutral, slammed on the breaks, stomped up that embankment and cracked some heads she knew that any household cat, finding itself abandoned, would try to find human companionship wherever it could regardless of how much it got mistreated, and Butter was an exceptionally stupid cat, to make matters worse.

     Aunt Betty’s initial rush of righteous anger had worn off and she realized that she had this abused, half feral, rather large tomcat in the Jeep with her.  After a few more moments, she also realized that Butter was purring.  Like I said this cat was dumb as a box of hammers. 

     This is how Butter found his way into my young life; cold, needing a friend and with a permanent kink in his tail.  As soon as Butter laid his blue, worshipful eyes on me, it was love at first sight.  My aunt was planning on claiming the cat as her own but Butter never paid her any attention ever again.  Whenever my aunt did anything remotely kind for no discernable it made me nervous, but there wasn’t any way she could reasonably stake a claim to Butter without looking malicious. Everyone who knew her in the most casual way knew that she was nothing if not spiteful, but she didn’t want to be caught so unashamedly so toward a five year old over a stray cat.  He followed me around like he was a dog rather than a cat, who could argue with that.  Still, she gave in so effortlessly it kept me looking over my shoulder for months.  Turned out I was watching for danger in the wrong places.

Butter showed me the unconditional love that I sought from first my mother then my aunt.  I loved that cat more than any living thing on earth for two wonderful years.  This cat would do the craziest things just to make me happy; if I was eating grapes, Butter wanted to eat grapes.  Who ever heard of a cat that ate grapes?  Butter was an excellent mouser, therefore he was fond of playing ‘fetch’ with me.  Butter thought he was a mountain lion instead of a housecat, though.

Alaska is one of the last places on earth where there is a large population of American bald eagles in the wild, if you have ever seen one of these magnificent birds of prey up close, you’ll know that they are huge.  Three feet tall standing up at least, six foot wing span, just enormous.  Butter thought he was stalking himself an eagle one day, good thing the bird wasn’t hungry or Butter would have been toast.

Aunt Betty never got Butter spayed, it was one of those things that was on the to-do list but never got done.  Tomcats being tomcats, they get into trouble, fighting and what-not.  Our neighborhood was having the ‘feral dog pack’ problem and people’s chickens and geese started coming up mauled.  Butter found himself on the wrong side of these dogs and got himself eaten.  My cousin found the body and showed my aunt.  It had been three days by then and I was inconsolable with grief.  I have taken the news of family members dieing better than I took Butter getting mauled by those dogs.

When my Uncle Chuck and Steve came back with their automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, I greeted them like conquering heroes.

Mood: just peachy
Listening to: the news

          The reoccurring topic of this blog has become death, or so it would seem.  While I think everyone out there would agree that death is as important of a topic as it gets, to devote all off one’s time pondering it gets a bit on the monotonous side.  I’ll be the first to admit that I am a card carrying cynic of the first degree, so this will never be a ‘happy-go-lucky’ style of blog, but on the other hand I don’t want to be banging on the same old drum every time one of my readers blesses me with their presence.  Tediousness is not considered a golden virtue of blogging, or of writing in any form what-so-ever, as far as I know.  Which, as you probably have already noticed, ‘what I know’ amounts to ‘not a whole Hell of a lot’.  Whatever.  Practice makes perfect, or so I’ve heard somewhere.

          Death, being a taboo topic, (for this entry at least, I don’t know how long I can hold out, though) doesn’t leave us many options if we want to, say, comment on recent world events, or the news period.  Yes, troubled young American Indian boys shotgunning their grandfather and his ‘companion’(live-in-girlfriend, but I suppose that’s to risqué for prime time news) then stealing his police cruiser for a quick joyride to school only to shoot the shit out of his school killing about six, I believe.  That would defiantly be out of bounds for this blog, today.  Nothing about the war, all death, all the time over there in Iraq.  Here’s one piece of sunshine; the deadly bouts of disease that was expected after the tsunami was avoided through the prompt response of international aid.  Untold numbers of volunteers, spending their own money on airfare, hauled ass over there to help in any way they could.  I’m talking about doctors, engineers and all sorts of professionals handling the business of disposing of mountains of dead bodies and fixing the sewage systems. This is the reason that we’re not mourning many, many more killed by the nastiness brought on by having your drinking water contaminated by rotting human remains, animal carcasses and human shit.  Could you imagine shitting yourself to death?  If I’m not mistaking, basically that’s what cholera is.

          Since I have made the decision that death and the act of dieing is not going to be the main topic of today’s piece, I’ll swing the other way.  Today we shall reflect on the intricacies life.  It truly is amazing to me that there is such a wide rift in the view of what alive entails.  Now if we where to broaden that question to what would be considered to have a soul, I mean…Wow, that is a whole lot of information.  I think that the most recent installment of modern agoraphobia the topic will be about life made to order.

          Lets talk about cloning, folks.  While we’re at it, since I just so happen to be a resident of the Golden State and I did vote a loud resounding ‘yes’ for state funding of stem cell research, we’ll talk about that, too.  I think that ‘Genetic Savings and Clone’ is possibly the coolest damn name for a company that specializes in creating carbon copies of beloved pet (cats, for now at least) that anyone could have ever conceived.  I mean, it’s really cute.  But regardless o how novel of a name you think up for your ingenious company, you mention the word ‘clone’ and people go apeshit.  The religious right gets up-in-arms, politicians start lobbing and things start to happen.  The Fox network denounces you as junk science…it gets ugly fast.  I don’t know if the Fox network really denounced anyone in at Genetic Savings and Clone as junk scientist, but they would have lickity-split if George Dubya threw a few hand signals.

          My point being that the American public, at large has an unreasonable fear of furthering the technology of cloning.  Its obvious that I’m not a scientist, saying that this issue is going to be relayed in layman’s terms is an understatement, to be sure.  I can not for he life of me figure out what exactly people are so terrified of, that the government is going to start cloning huge armies of mindless clones that will be mistreated, that we will inadvertently create the anti-Christ?  That must be it because the religious folks go nuts.  The creation of life is the sole domain of The Lord, cloning is therefore an abomination.  Watching those cute, fuzzy little guys rolling around all kitten-like, its hard to keep in mind that they are abominations, but as we all know the Devil is a tricky bastard and not above using kittens to get his way.  Persistent, too.  It took one hundred and eighty-eight tries to get CopyCat in February, ’02.  But Ole’ Sparky kept on keeping on and cloning and stem cell research are becoming more acceptable and mainstream as the years go by.  Famous actors and actresses help by endorsing stem cell research in the name of finding cures for diseases that affect millions.  Diabetes and Alzheimer’s are the two with the largest bandwagons.  I mean, who could deny Nancy Reagan, the great mind behind “Just Say No!” fame?  When Nancy gets in front of a camera talking about how her husband suffered from Alzheimer’s for the last fifteen years of his life (a couple of which he was still the leader of the free world, but what the heck) and how stem cell research could keep other elderly men from having their memory ravaged like her husbands, we want to help.  Of course, some of us think it ironic that if Ronald Reagan died dirt poor, there wouldn’t be any place for him to go because he closed all of the state-funded homes for the mentally unstable in California.  He would have died entombed in cardboard mumbling into pissy blankets if he lived in California.  He must have passed the laws that closed down all of the homes for the mentally unstable (unless you where dangerous, then you could go to jail first) before the Alzheimer’s got that bad.  Yeah, you gotta feel for poor ole’ Nancy.  Just say no, girl…just say no.

          Anyways, I digress.  Cloning pets, that’s what I was talking about.  Forgive me, sometimes I’ll just go on a tangent and it takes a minute for me to come back.

          As the backers of the ‘X-Prize’ knew, if something is going to thrive beyond its allotted fifteen minutes of fame, it must have commercial value.  The people behind the x prize are all about furthering space travel and all things having to do with extraterrestrial, they knew NASA isn’t up to the job.  Our astronauts are surviving on candy and the charity of the Soviets up there right now.  If outer space could be made a tourist attraction, commercially viable, oh yeah, baby.  Genetic Savings and Clone appears to be doing that for cloning.  When God’s minions have decided that your doing the Devil’s dirty work for him there had better be some private industry to fall back on for research grants.  Years down the road, God’s minions will be screaming about how expensive medicine is and how it’s a crime that the pharmaceutical companies are allowed to price gouge.  Conveniently forgetting that they themselves where the ones picketing the laboratories where these medicines where being developed.  By Satan.  Making biology a crime is not going to make it go away, once an idea is out there, its there, no taking it back.  No special wand to make everyone think the earth is flat again no matter how many people get burned.  That is the way we are, as a species.  We’ll do it just because we can, just to prove it can be done.  How else can you explain a hundred megaton nuclear weapon, not because we needed one that big, because those scientists in that lab knowing damn good an well the only thing a hundred megaton bomb is good for is destroying civilizations, just had to prove it could be done.  Humans are not capable of being rational about this one thing.  We know we shouldn’t, know in our hearts that its suicide to go on but we wont be able to stop ourselves.  Human nature that runs this deep can not be swayed, stopped or persuaded, ask all of those Catholic priests about trying to stop human nature, they’ll tell how well it works. 

          Some things are so desperately needed in society that commercial value becomes a non-issue, regardless of how hard the church campaigns against it.  For instance, take birth control pills.  Condoms have been around for years (and as we know now, the safest choice) but the passive woman of the early twentieth century had a harder time enforcing her will in the sexual arena, unfortunately for her the leading cause of death before birth control pills was child birth.  So many women died during child birth that the medical community thought that women didn’t succumb to heart disease or strokes.  If you could survive having eleven kids, baby, wasn’t nothing taking you out.  Still, for every woman who died while giving birth, there was a grieving husband left behind, usually with a whole lot of kids.  God himself could have came down and denounced birth control pills and it wouldn’t have meant a thing, society needed this medical advancement yesterday.  Personally, I think that God was up there shaking his head that it took us so long to figure out something so obvious but I’m not qualified to make those sort of assumptions.  The conservatives and the religious right went insane trying to stop this particular advancement; made the making and distribution of the pill punishable by law, stopped people from educating the young women about it even.  Eventually, good sense won over and women are now free to die from cancer and diabetes same as men.  But religion is nothing if not persistent and conservatives are nothing if not regressively backward looking.  The cure to some of modern America’s most lethal diseases possibly lies in stem cell research but the scientists have to fight tooth and nail to be able to legally start working on cures.  Private funding of laboratories is one answer but that would only ensure insanely expensive medicine as a product.  Watch, in twenty years or so, all of America’s devotedly religious ‘bible belt’ community is going to have a sudden epiphany; “Hey, if we would have funded this with federal money, then maybe I could afford the medicine I need to live…Wow, go figure.”

          I keep going off topic, I really want to talk about cloning.  The huge fear of cloning is that creation of life is the sole privilege of God.  Not Dr. Frankenstein, or any other mad scientist working for the government (we have all seen the movies), only God.  Even the thought of cloning a mere organ is enough to send people screaming out into the streets.  Why doesn’t anyone ever stop to think about all of those people waiting with baited breath, hoping against hope that their name will get to the top o the organ donors list before they die.  Any red-blooded American out there with half of a heart would want to fix this problem up for all those people.  It would be great, custom growing organs as needed, organs the recipient wouldn’t have to worry about their bodies immune system rejecting.  No more news broadcasters will ‘top-of-the-hour’ stories about little girls dieing on operating tables because of a life saving heart coming a little to late to be of any help to her.  Wouldn’t that be great?  The problem with this little fairy tale is that scientist will have to learn by cloning the whole enchilada first, then thy can learn how to do each individual bean.  And that, my friend, is not going to fly in God’s country, little girls or no little girls.  Still, as we already know, once an idea is out there, there it stays.  Can anyone say ‘Napster’?

          In August 2002 Michael Bishop, ex-president of Infigen had this crazy idea.  His idea was called handmade cloning, its not only cheaper and easier than today’s SOP, but it works better too.  The procedure could speed up the beginning of common place cloning in farming.  What’s even cooler is it could be used to clone endangered species in the bush in Africa.  I bet a few of you just had the opening scenes of “Jurassic Park” roll through your minds, didn’t you?  Bunch of flat-earther’s, I tell ya.  What people are genuinely afraid of is if this is so easy that it can be accomplished in less than hyper-sterile conditions, what is to keep some less than ethical types from using human eggs.  What I’m trying to say is that there is not a single, solitary thing that can be done to stop the eventual use of human eggs in cloning.  It’s going to happen, if it hasn’t already.  No amount of sticking our heads in the sand is going to make that fact any less of a reality.  All that will be accomplished from pretending that outlawing cloning will stop human experimentation is the degeneration of legitimate cloning science. 

          Over at Genetic Savings and Clone they have been doing big business plying their trade.  Little Gizmo, genetic copy of Gizmo was born in December of 2004, she is a little cutie who cost her proud parents fifty grand.  The proud papa, who is the companies second paying customer says “ There are no words to describe how happy I am”.  I ask, how can something like this be bad?  The first cat the company cloned, Little Nicky, is said to be similar to the original in personality as well as looks.  The original Nicky was with the owners for seventeen years before passing away, can you imagine how happy they are with Genetic Savings and Clone?  Although dogs are not yet on the reincarnation menu, it won’t be long before Fido can have nine lives, too.  I’m in danger of sounding like an advertisement for this company so let me just say this, it’s a wonderful company and I hope it brings the private funding needed to keep cloning research alive and well with or without the governments approval.  

          I realize that everything happens in nature for a reason, to keep the natural balance humans should not interfere, blah-blah-blah.  Sure, we all heard this line watching nature documentaries on PBS, ‘Mommie, why are the mean men letting the cheetah die?’  ‘It’s nature honey, they can’t get involved.’  They may fuck up the entire evolutionary line of the African continent if they get involved with nature beyond photographing it or shooting it.  Jurassic Park non-withstanding, we could reverse the decimation of untold numbers of species through cloning.  We could redeem ourselves, build a new ark.

Mood: Dumbfounded
Listening to: the soothing sounds of city traffic

          I’m sure everyone out there in the Great American Wasteland of information overload is just bored to tears with Terri Schiavo's story.  Every politician that’s not on knocking on death’s door is bawling to any reporter who’ll listen about how they feel somebody’s rights, somewhere, have been grievously violated.  CNN, NBC, ABC and every other three letter news broadcaster in the world has been covering this story as if O.J. went and killed again.  Still, with all of these qualified people reporting the facts to us and with all of those honorable politicians telling us how the law lies and how we should feel protected and safe, I feel the need to comment on this woman and her husband’s tragedy.

          The first question that becomes more and more glaringly obvious as the Supreme Court hearings and video tapes keep rolling along is; would any of this be happening if Terri Schiavo were indigent?  The big questions are supposed to be ‘How can you be sure a loved one will never recover from a coma, severe brain damage, stroke, ect.’ and ‘How much government interference do you want in your "end-of-life" decisions’.  Come on now, don’t play…you know that if Terri was some homeless lady in the county hospital there would be no second thoughts about ‘right-to-life’, there defiantly wouldn’t be any special laws passed for her benefit so as to make it illegal to stop using artificial means to keep her alive.  If Terri had been from the land of ‘below poverty level’, those would have been almost the exact words her doctors would have used when her husband asked about the possibility of her recovering from her persistent vegetative state.  “Sir, we are deeply sorry for your lose, however, the county can not pay to keep anyone alive exclusively through artificial means.”

          I’ll confess that I don’t know all of the details of this case and to tell you the truth this part of the story isn’t the part that really gets to me.  At some point you get used to the class differences that we have here, I mean, Hell, it could be a whole lot worse.  The court ruled in the husbands favor, being as he spent all the money from the lawsuit on her care, what the Hell.  Go ahead, dude, and kill her.  Again, this isn’t what creeps me out, Lord knows, I wouldn’t want to just exist like a potted fern that needed a diaper change occasionally.  I am a firm believer in assisted deaths for people with medical concerns.  I’d bet that the late stages of colon cancer hurts like nothing I could imagine, or the last stages of AIDS, when there is no possibility of recovery and even remission doesn’t sound so good anymore.  This is when I think that doctors should be able to offer their patients a painless alternative to spending their time daydreaming about when they will die and the pain will be gone.  I’m not talking about a walk-in euthanasia clinic like ‘Planned Parenthood’s’ evil, mirrored image twin, where all suicidal, and possibly suicidal people are welcome (without having to notify the parents or guardians).  No. 

          What was it about this story that I thought was so bizarre that I had to share it with my fellow bloggers?  When the long arm of the law finally swung Michael Schiavo’s way, it was a done deal for Terri.  Her proverbial goose was cooked.  The three-judge panel at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled that Michael was within his rights to withdraw the feeding tube from Terri, the result being her death because ‘she never would had wanted to live in this condition’.  Okay, I’ll go for that, tell you the truth, neither would I.  What I would want though is for my husband to find a better way to kill me that to let me die of dehydration.  I mean, we have more respect for stray dogs, at least we gas them.  It’s going to take like three days…maybe a much a two weeks, one guy said, for this woman to die.  What, no morphine in Florida, because for about five dollars worth you could end this woman’s suffering.  I don’t understand this thing at all.  I think that everyone wants to pretend that removing the feeing tube isn’t killing her the same as putting a bullet in her brain.  The woman already said she wouldn’t want to live under these conditions, the court ruled the husband is within his rights.  Why the slow agonizing death of dehydration and starvation, oh, yeah, this is one reason why.  Apparently when you go into a coma you build up a tolerance to hunger and since she is in a vegetative anyways chances are she won’t even notice, very slim at best.

          Why even risk the slightest chance, let the woman drift off to sleep for Christ’s sake, convicted murders get that much.  I have no comprehension how something like this is considered a non-issue.  We can file this one in the same folder with ‘Circumcision doesn’t hurt babies; they’re so young they just forget about it’.  Uh-huh, let us cut the tip off a grown mans penis, with no anesthesia, and see how long it takes him to forget about it.  The name of this folder is… “If you can’t hear ‘em scream, it must not hurt”.

      Now that I’m on the topic of euthanasia, I’m going to run with it.  It’s one of those topics that hard to get into without sounding like you might need a shrink to get your head straight.  That may be the case, even so, I’m going to share some of the fascinating tidbits I dredged up about doing yourself in…

        Amazingly enough, there are rules to suicide...

Five Individually Necessary Conditions for Candidacy for Voluntary Euthanasia

Advocates of voluntary euthanasia contend that if a person is

(a) suffering from a terminal illness;

(b) unlikely to benefit from the discovery of a cure for that illness during what remains of her life expectancy;

(c) as a direct result of the illness, either suffering intolerable pain, or only has available a life that is unacceptably burdensome (because the illness has to be treated in ways which lead to her being unacceptably dependent on others or on technological means of life support);

(d) has an enduring, voluntary and competent wish to die (or has, prior to losing the competence to do so, expressed a wish to die in the event that conditions (a)-(c) are satisfied); and

(e) unable without assistance to commit suicide,

then there should be legal and medical provision to enable her to be allowed to die or assisted to die.

        There is a ‘Church of Euthanasia’, which has four pillars of…belief, I guess you could call it.

        On a more serious note, evidentially the Netherlands has some rather expansive laws concerning suicide that are controversial to say the least.  Currently, Dutch law allows doctors to administer a lethal dose of dope to terminally ill patients, at their request. The Groningen Protocol, as it is known, lets doctors euthanize patients who lack "free will." This would include babies, people in irreversible comas and the severely retarded.  In the Netherlands, Groningen University Hospital has decided its doctors will euthanize children under the age of 12, if doctors believe their suffering is intolerable or if they have an incurable illness.  Nice, huh? 

Mood: Happy-Happy Joy-Joy
Listening to: The morning news

        My MatteMichele; most favorite of all who read my drivel…Well apparently you’re the only one who reads my drivel, but why split hairs?  I, myself, couldn’t careless if you donate your entire paycheck through direct deposit to televangelist as long as you pay me a little attention.  Fair enough?  I’ll write really sappy ‘poor-me’, monologs and when you try to reach out with a little human empathy I’ll be snide and unappreciative.  Gee, how does that sound?  Good for you?  If you have a sense of humor bordering on a birth defect you may keep trying to correspond with me, in case you don’t, I’ll make an effort to not sound so, so…defensive.  I was on such a roll feeling what I was writing about I didn’t notice that I may have been rude to you.  With that said, I can now get on to some other things that I find the need to speak on.

        With all of the horrendous acts of violence our young soldiers have to endure over there in the desert, even if one does not get physical injured themselves, still even being a witness to someone else being blown across two city block by a bomb they strapped on themselves with the help of their very closest friends.  Our next generation of business owners, bankers and teachers, are all getting warped a little bit by the constant fear of being surrounded by people who hate you and don’t want you to help them (even though they may need it), people who wave burning flags in the air whenever there is a horrible catastrophe, especially if it kills lots of Americans.  What are our soldiers fighting for, standing around in fifty pounds of gear waiting for the next crazy suicide bomber who just can’t wait to meet Allah.  Of course everyone knows we’re ‘minding the store’ as far as the oil goes.  Lets be realistic, if the oil stopped, or even slowed down very much the most influential economy in the world would be in some seriously deep do-do.  However, I’ve always been under the impression that when we go out into the world, sticking our noses in other people’s business it’s in an effort to further the traditions of the American Way of Life.  Cultural imperialist sort off, trying to make the whole world see the light of capitalism and due process of law.  Making shitloads of money is good, indeterminate sentences and death squads, bad.

        With this in mind, my pet peeve for the day is; if we live in the land of the free, how can someone be sentenced to death on circumstantial evidence, not once, but twice?  One time for murdering his wife, the only motive was that he had a girlfriend on the side and he lied to her, now there’s something you don’t see everyday.  The second death sentence was for an unborn child that had the mother decided to have an abortion it wouldn’t be considered murder.  Do Not, even for a minute think that I am one of those ‘abortion is murder’, ‘bring back the bloody coat hanger’, types, either.  I just think that the only way the state can murder someone is if the evidence is so blazingly obvious that there just couldn’t be any other explanation.  I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the Scott Peterson case, in California all the news stations had this one shot of him slowly turning his head with this really dour, grim look on his face and they showed it every chance they got.  It became like “the face of evil in Modesto”, the media had him tried and convicted before he was even arraigned.  You know what the prosecutions big piece of evidence was?  The police found a piece of his wife’s hair in his boat, (he went fishing on Christmas, that didn’t look so good but Lacy (his murdered wife) father went fishing Christmas also, come to find out) as anyone with log hair can tell you, hair gets everywhere.  Does not mean he had her dead body in his boat, just means she was in his boat.  The police decide one person looks good for a crime, and it’s a done deal.  The only way you ca get away with killing your wife in California is if you’ve won the Heismen Trophy or you have to be some sort of actor, even a has been is good enough to get you off.  Go figure.

Mood: Fair-to-middeling, I'd venture to say
Listening to: My roommate snoring and residual infomercial type noise accompanied y the occasional siren.

Why MattelMichele, that particular turn of phrase you used about how I ‘have way to much on my plate’ almost sounds like Narcotics Anonymous jargon.  Of course this could not be the case with someone whose browsing blogs at 1:15 a.m. on a school night.  Could it?  Regardless of your standing in the twelve steppen band of brothers (and sisters) I appreciate the fact that you responded to me in some way.  And with just that little bit of encouragement, I’m off and running. 

Before I start I feel I need to clarify my position about being poor and social status in America.  Don’t think that I’m silly enough to think that my complaints about how life treated me unfairly really amount to having it rough in the grand scheme of things.  I realize that as Americans we don’t really have any concept of poverty, for most of us being poor is having a slow laptop or having to use a dial-up connection.  I don’t understand poverty the same way poverty is understood in Somalia or Calcutta.  Just because I’m pitching a bitch about how I didn’t have enough money to buy new clothes when I was a kid doesn’t in any way mean that I truly think I had it rough.  With this disclaimer in mind I’ll now mount my pity-pot and commence feeling deprived of the affluent childhood I’m sure I deserved if the Karmic energy in southern California had been working correctly in late nineteen seventy.

As I said before my mother and I are the spitting image of each other.  I’ll also tell you, my now devoted readership (I’m sure), she’s a drunk who had been drinking for about twenty hard years at this point.  I noticed within two or three weeks that my aunt Betty and Mom had some disturbingly similar quirks to there personality.  For one thing both of them went out of their way to let me know that they where much better looking than I could ever hope to be.  Like most children, I believed what my parents told me, I loved them and they wouldn’t lie to me.  If they said I was ugly compared to them than so be it.  The thing that I couldn’t quite get strait in my mind is the fact that my aunt was a straight up bitch, I knew this from age five, I knew she was lying just to make herself feel better but my mother I took her for her word.  Betty was always going on about how beautiful she was (she never said I was), and my mother was always telling me about how men loved her because of her good looks.  She had me believing that her magic, that unfortunately didn’t get passed on to me, allowed men to ignore her tendency toward laziness and a fascination with light refraction on through the bottoms of empty beer bottles. In her defense, she does make the most incredible Kailua, of all things.  Some of my fondest memories of her is drinking White Russians in lead crystal mugs that we kept in the freezer and playing endless games of gin-rummy in the summer.  Strange how alike we are in so many ways…we are both good at strategy games and we can pick them up quick.  We are both terribly self destructive, as I believe I mentioned before.  My destructiveness leans in the direction of opiates; Alana is one of those women that isn’t happy unless her man beats the shit out of her.

Oh, I already know I’m going to be deluged with nasty-grams, but if any of you out there have had the misfortune of witnessing first hand the dynamics of these twisted relationships you know that It’s a two part disease.  These people could be in a crowded room of five hundred people shoulder to shoulder and they will find one another somehow.  It’s a scent they give off, I swear.  You know what’s really creepy, the woman an recognize the potential or violence in the man He didn't even konw he had. She needs that slap or beating to make the union whole for her.  If she cant get him to beat her ass, one way or another, she’ll leave him.  Man, let me tell you…my moms did some shit to that man.  John, who had the buzzard’s luck of landing my mother and marring her before he knew what he was getting into.  All I can say is he must have done something terrible to deserve the kind of Karma we laid on him.  He was an innocent bystander I all of this.  Funny thing is, I convinced myself, at the ripe old age of eleven, that I hated this man. I confused hate with jealousy, and I’ll feel a little guilty for the rest of my life for my part in destroying his marriage and self respect.  Ah…again that is another story.  If you like this, you’ll love that story.

Anyways, back to Alana’s need to be abused.  John point- blank, was not a violent man.  He didn’t have it in him to role play even, he was vanilla missionary style with a little head once in a while. Mom’s was AssMasters Two…  Sorority Hazing (real title, lots of porn in my house growing up) She wasn’t above playing dress up either.  My question always was, how could John not have known? She wasn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed after pickling her brain for all those years. Then again, love is blind and men in Alaska in those days couldn’t afford to be overly choosy, the ratio of men to women was like seven to two.             

  How much can I blame on my mother not showing me enough love when I was a baby?  I’m defiantly broken inside my head somehow.  I only truly feel comfortable when I’m around the lowest dirtiest people I can find. If I don’t do something about my astounding lack of ambition I’ll never get anywhere in life.  I have a million great ideas and not an ounce of drive.  I don’t deserve to breathe, I waste my life when I was blessed with intelligence, talent and a healthy body.   If I find myself in a middle class area the only way I can keep myself from having a full on panic attack is if I’m pulling some hustle or selling someone dope or engaging in some other deviant behavior.  I could never feel like I just belong, I have to be getting over.  I’ll always be that white trash used-up biker trash my mother is in my ten year olds memory.  I remember one day in Oregon my mother and her third husband where working in the backyard of their house.  He was mowing the lawn with a hand powered grass cutter and she was trying to plant her strawberry patch.  I was watching her intently because she always made a point to let me know that she was prettier than I was and I couldn’t figure out how that could be. (As most children do I just took her for her word, it never occurred to me she could be lying.)  She would wear these polyester pants with the crease sewn down the front and if you couldn’t see a clear imprint of her lips in front they weren’t tight enough.  So she had on these gray tight-ass polyester pants with a yellow polka-dotted bikini top.  Alana did not have a BowFlex body.  She had already had two kids by then, she had drank heavily her entire life plus she had smoked since she was fourteen and she was a true disco queen sun worshiper.  All of that added up to her having stretch marks from her collar bone to here pubic hair.  Wide, long dark red stretch marks. She was over-weight, sun damaged and usually drunk. In true trailer-park fashion she decided that she would try to damage her skin some more since she had her bikini on, so she took baby oil put some iodine in it and slathered it all over herself.  This had the effect of making a fine layer of dirt cling to her from her gardening efforts. Regardless of all of this she is my mother and she held a certain amount of beauty in my eyes.  We look almost exactly alike, me and moms, except she has thicker hair that’s chestnut brown and her skin is a little darker, a fact she always brought up whenever anyone commented on how much we resembled each other, almost like she wanted to point out how much we didn’t look like one another.

     Regardless, on this particular day she was hideous to me and I could not for the life of me figure out how she had gotten it in to her head that she was so superior to me physically.

I hate strawberries to this day.

 

I sat on the back porch sullen as ever with my eyes glued to her sagging stretched out breast concealed just enough to keep the noisy, mean-ass old lady next door from calling the Spanish inquisition on her, or who ever gets called to handle displays of public disgrace. The extremely religious right seems to have one of those red phones Batman and the Commissioner have, ‘cuz one of them gets a hair far enough up their ass, watch out baby, the ‘Ca-Ca shall hit the proverbial fan’.  What’s always made me chuckle about these fevered thumpers of the Word is that lets say, hypothetically, one Sunday a stranger rambles in on their congregation, right in the middle of hellfire and brimstone but before the donation plate; this stranger would not be made to feel welcome.  I don’t care if he slid a couple of Franklin’s on them.  As soon as he left they would all run and turn on “America’s Most Wanted” sure they had a hot tip for 1-800-dial-a-rat.

            This is my very first opportunity for my often incoherent ramblings to be read by anyone else.  It’s not quite the same thing as having the door suddenly opened when you’re masturbating but still there is a certain feeling of displaying myself that I think I am going to like.  I’m one of those people that are fairly intelligent and incredibly self-destructive, which is never a good combination.  You must of met other people like me who secretly hate themselves and can’t understand why your not coming around to their point of view.  We can be like psychic vampires if we aren’t careful to hide our true nature; painstakingly observe every rule of social interaction.  We don’t offend presenters of gifts or compliments by not accepting graciously, after we give our offering and the recipient is bubbling over with joy we would never dream to say “oh, it was nothing…” because we know that it belittles them by saying they didn’t deserve the best, so they got nothing.  You have all met me or one of my kind…if I was born a man I probably would have been a serial killer.  Lucky for everyone it’s mostly women that are afflicted with such overwhelming insecurities and self-loathing from such an early age, that hell, I don’t know what it’s like to feel any other way.  All I can say is “Thank God for organic chemistry and the medical fields’ advances in mood altering drugs”.  Well, drugs in general to tell the complete truth.

            You have probably noticed by now that this is not going to be a ‘happy-go-lucky’, ‘see my vacation photographs’ type of blog.  Nope, this is the place where I plan to unload some flotsam off the top of my head.  However, I will be posting some photographs as I find ones that are relevant to my topic.  Even better, if there’s anyone out there who wants to post a suitable photo we will make a topic out of that.  I have enough residual cynicism to go around the block a few times.

Mommies-A-Go-Go

            I would lay a bet that every single person out there in cyber-land has at least one serious whopper of a mommy issue.  Before I get on my pity pot let me tell you about this guy I knew and this fucked-up little story he laid on me one night…

            Raf’s mom married a career navy guy, he worked on the submarines, thus he was on base for a few months then gone for about six months.  Needless to say, Raf’s mom took to kicking it at the local bar picking up stray soldiers as a hobby.  This was exactly the sort of behavior that earned her a divorce from her first husband (Raf’s father) whom she had ten other children with other than Raf.

 Get this, her first son she named Michelangelo and her last child which just so happened to be a son, she name Raphael Natalie, you know after the painters of the: Sistine Chapel.  Michelangelo started it and Raphael finished it, her personal alpha and omega.

 Anyways, she had something like seven sons, six of them living with their biological father, Raf got to live with his sluttish mother and his four older sisters who liked to push him around because he was such a spineless wimp you just couldn’t help yourself if you tried.  One day our hero, Raf, is jacking off in the bathroom, as teenage boys tend to do.  Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm for self-gratification, he did not secure the door to the bathroom well enough and his mother busted in on him.  What does a woman who’s liberated enough to cheat on both of her husbands do when she finds her youngest son engaged in what’s been acknowledged as perfectly normal behavior in adolescent males for time out of mind?  She sticks a wooden laundry pin on his dick as punishment and leaves it on there while she screams at him loud enough for the entire army base to hear (of course this little drama happened in the middle of the night when its absolutely silent; except for the sound of deranged parenting at its best).  She accused him of being homosexual, she ranted about how perverted he is and where did he learn to do these sick things  She humiliated him to the point that he was bent for the rest of his life about sex, nudity, and especially masturbation.  I have never met anybody who could have sex as quietly as him before, by the look on his face when he came you would have thought that he was in pain, certainly he couldn’t be enjoying himself.  Yeah, thanks mom.   You cured your youngest son of his licentious and immoral ways, nipped that shit in the bud right quick. Good work.

Raf didn’t have exclusive rights on wacko parental figures giving confusing answers to life’s questions, let me amuse you with a few stories from yesteryear. 

First of all I think that one of the most important factors in he dynamics of my mother, who’s name is Alana, and I relationship is the fact that we look almost exactly alike.  If she would have taken better care of herself and if I didn’t suffer from such an acute case of arrested development we could have passed for twins we look so much alike in body shape and in the features of our face.  The only difference, other than I’m obviously much younger (an here’s where the problem lies) is that her hair is much thicker and more of a chestnut brown where as I am a ash blond with finer hair, not thin but fine.  Her coloring is a bit darker altogether, her mother is half Black-Foot Indian and as the blood gets thinner and thinner, the coloring gets lighter and lighter.  Grandma was a piece of work, let me tell you…but that’s a story for another day.

We are going to jump back to nineteen eighty, right after Mount St. Helens blew her top, this is when my aunt decided that it was time for my mom to take me back to her bosom and raise me herself for awhile.  The hyperactivity was driving her up the wall and she was having her own marital problems at the time.  My aunt went through what we would all a midlife crisis in a man, in a woman I think its call incredibly good luck when a forty five year old woman snags an eighteen year old lover, even though technically he was her nephew, it was by marriage so its not like she was breaking any incest laws or anything.  Boy, let me tell you what a fucking fiasco that all turned out to be.  By the time that shit storm blew over the boy slit his wrists (I gave him the razor and he explained how you have to cut the long way, not across) and my uncle was spending top dollar on whores in Anchorage.  I was on the first thing smoking to Portland, Oregon to go live with the mother I never forgave for abandoning me up in Alaska with the wicked bitch of the west in the first place.  I was ten years old and I had a bone to pick with this woman who looked like me.  I hadn’t laid eyes on her for six years, since I was flying on the plane by myself you would think this might pose a problem, but no, I recognized her immediately, like it was yesterday the last time I’d seen her face.  Maybe because its so much like looking in a mirror.  Besides, as I already explained everyone was to preoccupied with their own dilemmas to worry about mine.

So I find myself plunked down into my mothers new family, the family she left me for; complete with a husband and brand new baby boy.  I discover rather quickly that my new function in this family is apparently to be the built-in baby-sitter.  I was not pleased.  Now as an adult I realize that my mother was a serious alcoholic.  I wasn’t being punished for coming to live with them, rather her new husband was breaking his back trying to get their rental business of the ground and she was spending every dime she made drinking all night at the bar.  If I didn’t baby-sit he would have to spend hundreds of dollars they didn’t have on a professional.  I didn’t understand that, all I understood was that I was pissed-off and I was going to get a little satisfaction.