Issues and tissues

I have a new pet peeve.
I live in this town where the average IQ is meant to be a good bit above the norm. I have been playing the myfacespacebook game lately, particularly facespace. And it’s all “HOT” amongst the thirties/forties crowd who didn’t catch onto it lo all those many years ago when it first hit. ( What’s that? All of five now or something? )
What I’ve noticed is, that (a) this is geared to having you use your real name. (b) because these people are in their thirties and forties many of them have young children. (c) A huge percentage of them are posting their profile pictures posed with their children, or as their children, or putting photographs of their children in their photo albums frequently with the child's real name.

DO NOT EVER PUT YOUR CHILD’S PHOTOGRAPH/NAME ON THE INTERNET!!!!!!

My question is this, why would this feel magically safer than any other internet venue? Even if your profile is set to private, if you have a picture of yourself posed with your child as your profile foto THEY now have your child’s last name, usually town of residence and if you are in the phone book, now your address. From that all manner of further information can be extrapolated. For instance, the likelihood of what school that child goes to. Potentially records about you or your child depending on how internet savvy THEY are. The list goes on but name, address and school is horribly, horribly dangerous.

The other issue being that even if you are private and you don’t have your child in your profile picture, if you have a wide range of friends from business, or wide social networking you really don’t know those people that well. Do you really want relative strangers knowing much of anything about your child?

You are supposed to be really clever people. What are you thinking? Yes I have a picture of myself as a four year old for one of my profiles. But it’s me, not my non-consenting child, it’s not under my real name, and even if it was and someone came looking to prey on that four year old person they would be in a big old can of whup ass and finding it quite difficult to put the Alpo back in the can.

I think the level of naiveté here is much higher than I expected, and the actual level of sophistication is much lower than these folks think they are operating from.

Whoa Nelly

I am not afraid of porn. I’m not particularly interested in it either.
I just read a filthy, filthy, book. And not filthy in a good way like Nitro von Borax’s “Pigglyland”. My cup of tea is like, looking at pictures of emo boys kissing or reading some mild erotica. Nothing too taxing or graphic. Having read “The Happy Hooker” when I was 10, then having lived the life I have, I am just too jaded to be thrilled by the hardcore.
When I picked up this particular novel that came with a load of books primarily comprised of self-help, christian mysticism, get rich schemes, vitamin bibles, and computer language manuals from Oliver's fathers estate I expected the male version of a bodice buster. Perhaps I might have a mild frisson', eh?

It says on the back cover “Mother’s Three Daughters" is one of the most famous works of fiction of the early twentieth century, thought to be the work of French novelist Pierre Louys, (I can’t find the umlaut anywhere, it should be over the Y), the author of “Aphrodite”.
It goes on to summarize the plot and then quotes Wayland Young saying
“ A notable modern novel written out of a perverse compulsion.... This is one of the largest and most real presentations of the whore-charachter in European fiction.”
If only that had meant something to me at the time!

The cover art did nothing to warn me either. As usual you just can’t take the era out of the girl. The three models in the photo are so definitively from the late 60’s, early 70’s. No amount of faked up, turn of the century, chemises and pantaloons could ever convince anyone otherwise. As well as so clearly not being 10, 14 and 20 years old like the prostitutes in the story. Oh, did I not mention that two of the prostitutes were under 15? The most sadistic and jaded one being the 10 year old? Anne Rice’s weak attempts at a titillating baby vampiress has NOTHING on this.

I will never, ever, think of the victorians and post vicky’s the same way again. Corphragy, sadism, incest, anal, bestiality and really, really, naughty, potty mouths. This so totally explains why generations all around that era were so completely conflicted. And here I was wondering what the hell was going on with Japanese porn lately, what I thought was a “sudden and new” obsession with corphragy, it turns out is just another turn of the wheel.

I am way out of my league with this one, I think a couple months strict diet of children's books is needed to put my digestion back in order.

(Did I mention the male narrator is a royal asshole?)

Swimming With the Sharks

I get really annoyed with the bloggers who don’t blog. I then assume (project) that you’all are annoyed with me. Well:

• My muses are apparently occupied elsewhere, (I wrote a couple songs last week).

• It was Oliver’s Birthday and the small, but nice and lengthy soiree wore me out.

• The illness ( and chemo like doses of antibiotics) were causing me to nap up to four times a day and suffer from both enervation and ennui for weeks.

• While sick, I have been hustling, preparing to hustle, and planning several hustles.

This drive to get, and keep, some money is pretty strong at the moment. I spent a solid week while sick in bed anyway, going through approximately 5000 “Magic The Gathering” cards I have had packed away for about 15 years.
So if you know anyone crazy enough to really, really, want “Time Walk” and “Time Twister” in near mint condition, I’ll let them have both for 600 bucks.
Or if their pockets are a little shallower and their tastes a little more to the exotic I have a lovely “Sharazad” and some nifty efreets and djinns.
No really, if you or your loved ones like the game, I have thousands of cards which retail from .13 cents to 500 big ones I’d love to sell ya.....

We also have started the process of preparing for The Big Yard Sale. Now if the weather will just cooperate we’ll get that party started this weekend or next. I’m thrilled. Really, I am simply thrilled. I just love sitting, hungry, thirsty and in dire need of a pee in the backyard for hours on end selling my bits for pennies on the dollar. However, getting the basement emptied is a real incentive. And in this weather hanging out down there is not the worst thing one could do. The cats find it fascinating anyway.

These and other schemes are taking some mental, emotional, and physical effort. Of which I am still slightly limited at the moment. So while I await my MRI and the subsequent results I’ll be hustling my bustle and scheming my dreams. I’ll let you know how the life of the fabulously wealthy turns out.

So this is how it’s just gonna be...

So tired, the store job kicks my ass. When I first started it kicked my ass also. Then I started getting stronger and stronger. I got some decent shoes. I started getting some muscles and stamina. I did better and better as the years went by. Then I had a couple surgeries the first of of which went kinda wrong, the next of which went really wrong. The horribly expensive shoes wore out. Now if I do a four hour shift I have to sleep 3 hours.

On Mondays, cuz I’m a homework slacker, I get off work then play drums until I’m really, really tired and usually quite frustrated. Then go to drum class. Then I can crash for awhile. While I tell myself its for just a quick, rejuvenating nap it invariably turns into a long stupefying nap, then I spend the rest of the day being a schlub.

This last month adds to the stultifying mix, extreme tension in my home life. The result is the house is dirty, the energy levels are all fucked up, and it doesn’t seem worth it to get up and do a damn thing. However something has to change the energy, I can no longer sit and stew. (I am so good at stewing, I meant what I said about grudge holding.)

So while I didn’t go about solving the problem the super high road way, I also didn’t take the lowliest low road. I, at least, addressed an individual face to face for the 15 seconds requisite and decided to skip the “preserve the friendship” part. I got some support for that approach from a few people who said if I didn’t want the friendship to just go ahead and remove the pain source.
Done.
Its not like I had zero interest in the friendship, but when alcoholism is the factor, what’s the point?
This is something like the 10th friendship of some significance that has terminated in the last 10 years or so, where I trace the real source of the problem to addiction. Not mine, someone else's. If we went back farther in time, the numbers would grow exponentially.

It’s just getting so very old. But when there is little or no return for your energy, so little actual dialogue, just boozy, stale monologues repeated over and over while someone breathes alcohol in your face what's left anyway? It won’t change until it changes and that's nothing you can control at all, so rather be done.

This whole giving your whole life to a THING is freaking me out. You just hand over everything you are, could be and will do, to an inanimate object. What the hell is that? I’m not saying I haven’t had my skirmishes with such slavery, but I seem to have a finely tuned sense of personal freedom. When a stupid thing starts requiring my very core self and values, I turn and run. I don’t care how much fun it’s promising. I don’t care if its a substance or a job or a relationship.

The other part that's bugging me, is the age of these people. I can see how in your twenties you haven’t figured it out yet, but the people involved are in their thirties, forties and fifties. One of them had already done over 20 years in prison as payment and just took another twenty to pay for just a couple months of getting high. Yet it’s his primary relationship and he’ll apparently never, ever, put anyone or anything ahead of it. It, an inanimate object, a thing.

I can’t think of a goofy, cheery, twist to end this on, everything about this is so annoying. I suppose the the best I can do is mention that at least I’m mostly over the furious and into the sad.

"Don't stand so close to me"

“I live off you, you live off me
and the whole world lives off of everyone
ya really gotta be exploited
ya really gotta be exploited
by somebody, by somebody, by somebody,
La la la la”

Poly Styrene


Lately I’ve been infuriated. This is not exactly an unknown condition in my life. I mean I live with roommates. I own a house. I have some really annoying health problems causing me to become somewhat disabled. And the politic shenanigans going on, I can’t even begin to speak about or my head will pop, just freakin’ pop.

But right at this moment I’m on about exploited children. OK, lets face it, I was an exploited child. I’m not going into detail here at this time, I don’t know you well enough yet. I will probably talk more about my own experiences at some point but let me say this, at least my own parents didn’t sell me down the river.

I’m talking about so called child & preteen modeling. This can be some sick ass shit. Don’t think there’s a problem?
http://childsupermodels.com/
(Warning - not work safe and in my eyes, truly obscene.)
Now tell me there’s no problem. A 13 year old is not supposed to be photographed with her/ his ass hanging out and the hand down the pants. Not to mention, I’m told by Mark Maynard, http://markmaynard.com, that one of the ways some pageants make extra money is by selling all day passes to “amateur” photographers.

Where is the parent? Probably behind this 100%. They will say “But they want to do it”. Well they’re children, what do they know from exploitation? What did I know?

Talk about your slippery slopes. And that my friends, is why I’m so incensed, I FULLY realize that there are children who are in stolen into, and sold into, bondage and slavery in brothels and are in the hands of sexual predators at this moment. I am quite aware that small living beings are being bought and sold in this country as we speak. And that compared to little Tiffany or Vanessa up there, their lives are ceaseless torment as sexual slaves. But I defy anyone to tell me that parading children in such a fashion in such a venue as “child supermodels”, is not directly contributing to the per view of children as sexual OBJECTS which is wrong, wrong, wrong.

I don’t actually believe in evil but that is as close to that edge as it gets. The idea that any parent is making one dime off this, is infuriating. Especially in light of the stupid shit people are willing to put their lives on hold to champion or denounce. You can all insert here your own version of something useless, non-constructive or idiotic you’ve seen on TV in the past 6 months or more. I’ll give the example of, furor over Janet Jackson’s (a full grown woman, purported to be in full command of her faculties) nipple. The gianormous red herring factor at the very least.

But lest you think that I, a full grown woman, am in full command of my own faculties, let me state for the record, that I also find NASCAR to be completely obscene.