A new camera
|
Posted:Jun 15, 2015 8:53 am
Last Updated:Nov 12, 2015 9:58 am
23186 Views
|
A couple of weeks ago my brother in law got a new camera for his birthday, and gave me his old one, reasoning that he wouldn't use it again, and knowing that I wanted to upgrade. It's a Nikon D70s, a DSLR. The only lens I have is a 70/300 Nikor. It's taking a while to get it figured out. The camera has a lot of features that my old Nikon doesn't. I haven't got it dialed in yet, but I'm getting there and I'm starting to get some decent shots anyway.
|
|
|
16
Comments
|
|
The Woman in the Well
|
Posted:Jun 6, 2015 7:23 am
Last Updated:Feb 18, 2023 1:38 pm
23730 Views
|
The Woman in the Well
by PD
The Legacy of the Hungry Ghost
My mother was a haunted woman.
I knew this even as a .
I remember walking to school as a small , intoxicated by her strange beauty and wildly proud of her. I had the most beautiful mother of all, I was certain of this. Aside from her luminous, sensual nature, my mother was also intelligent and rare. She read poetry aloud. She sang to us. She spoke with the spirits of the dead, foretold the future, and recounted lost tales of ancient civilizations with such passion you would have thought they were burning inside her. Yet, as is true in so many fairy tales, that very same beauty foreshadowed enchantment and suffering on an occult scale.
My mother was ephemeral, damned, not meant to last.
The word 'occult' literally means, 'of the blood'. Suffering in my family was inherited, passed down through generations of women. Terrible secrets, some too old to be remembered, were borne in the blood and passed from mother to . In truth, my mother's theatrics took place in front of a very dark curtain. I sensed that shadow looming behind her without ever really understanding what it meant: My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother were the keepers of key to the family attic. This was their heritage and my legacy. In my family, the men glittered and spoke; the women dreamt and despaired.
In Buddhist mythology, secrets kept too long become 'hungry ghosts'; invisible forces of longing and terror more destructive than any worldly creature or thing. In that eastern worldview, to cut off or bury some vital truth is to push the secret into a realm in which it develops demonic power over its keeper. Years after the hungry ghost itself is long forgotten, its destructive power lives on, devouring everyone it touches until it is finally dragged into the light, acknowledged, and laid to rest.
The Wreck of the Hesperus
I was about eleven when my mother went mad.
Not that I hadn't seen it coming. By the time I was in third grade I noticed that the poetry my mother read to us was almost exclusively devoted to the subject of dead , and was punctuated only occasionally by the odd lyric about a tragically murdered adult.
Some of her favorite verses included "The Wreck of the Hesperus," a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about the death by drowning of a sea captain's young lashed to the mast of his tall ship; "Little Boy Blue," Eugene Field's morbid masterpiece about the death of a young boy as symbolized by a display of his untouched toys; "Annabelle Lee," Edgar Alan Poe's eulogy for his dead girl- lover; and "Oh Captain, My Captain," Walt Whitman's elegy for assassinated US President Abraham Lincoln, shot dead in Ford's Theatre by southerner John Wilkes Booth after the North won the Civil War and abolished slavery.
After that, our poetry readings fell off. My mother spent the next decade going in and coming out of various hospitals for various ills both real and imagined, and taking to her bed between melodramatic bouts of never-defined torment. My mother's own mother declared her weak and inferior, then spent one hellish year living in our house, feeding us burned toast, and reminding my siblings and me that we were all cut from the same thin cloth, until my father, finally fed up beyond words, sent her packing back to her West Coast cabin. My grandmother was a celebrated painter of roiling seas and haunted woodlands. Like my mother, my grandma was beautiful and very gifted.
She was also a bitch.
In my twenties my mother achieved a degree of physical health that she maintained for the rest of her life. She briefly believed herself to have been abducted by aliens, then shifted her attention first to the rites of Ancient Egypt, and then to the possibility of becoming a Catholic Saint. Finally, she settled into talking to the dead again, and channeling the spirit of a prehistoric barbarian-warrior who became her familiar. She died at 57 of a sudden, massive stroke in the middle of a phone conversation with my youngest sister.
At the time my mother died, we were no longer on good terms, and I was no longer included in family events. We had not seen each other in many years. What happened was this: She had recounted for me one day, with copious tears and visceral physical and emotional pain, the sexual and physical abuse she endured for years at the hands of her father while her mother locked herself away in the bedroom and hid.
So I told her the exact same story about myself.
Both stories were true.
We never spoke again.
When Even One Woman Speaks the Truth
My mother's mother died when she was 83.
The year before my grandmother's death, I was in Oregon presenting an academic paper at the College of Lewis & Clark. It was a philosophy paper on phallic metaphors in Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. (Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for his theory that Freud's obsession with sexuality was really a displaced fear of death, but Becker's book is full of incredibly sexual male metaphors, which, back at that particular point in my life I found hilariously funny. So I wrote it up with the intention of annoying and upsetting as many academics as I could at one blow...so to speak.)
I visited my grandmother at her cottage by the sea before I gave my paper. She gave me a lot of things all at once. This was unusual for her. My grandmother was selfish, and was used to parcelling out this and that in stingy portions to stir up enmity between her three daughters, but when I came to see her, she seemed to be weary and soft and uncharacteristically kind. She gave me most of the paintings she had not already sold or given to others, a collection of green and purple Japanese glass fishing balls that sometimes float up onto the beach of the Pacific and are coveted for their beauty and rarity, and a box of pure white sand dollars.
Then she went into her bedroom and came back with an old photo of a young woman in a simple white dress. The woman was very pretty, still a girl, really, with dark hair, big eyes, a soft expression, and a large white bow holding back her thick curls. I thought it was a photo of my grandmother herself, and that she was going to give it to me, but instead she explained that it was her only surviving photo of her sister, Erma, who had jumped off a bridge to her death at the age of sixteen. No one knew my grandmother had kept this photo. She had never told anyone until me that she had it.
Erma had become pregnant. My grandmother's parents, Hungarian immigrants with stern faces and too many , turned Erma out of the house and destroyed all her things and all traces of her, forbidding the and the rest of the family to ever speak of her again. It was after this cruel shunning that Erma lept to her death. She had no funeral. That single photo was all that remained of her. My grandmother had never told anyone about her until that moment.
She did not give me the photo.
My grandmother died the following year. But I am still here, alive and well, the last and first to know, a writer, and the keeper of no secrets.
|
|
|
34
Comments
(Page:)
|
|
|
|
The Confession of Albert Fish
|
Posted:May 23, 2015 7:04 pm
Last Updated:Nov 12, 2015 10:22 am
24380 Views
|
Bridesmaid Becomes A Bride Food Is The Topic For The Eighth Virtual Symposium
The Confession of Albert Fish
Eating Raoul anthropophagy
cooking human meat serving human flesh humans on the menu
Food is symbolic the rich should know what they've done
serving human meat in burgers what happens to the bit that is you
Armin Meiwes is a cannibal the Monster of Rotenburg
he killed a man and ate him with a glass of fine red wine
slit Brandes' throat and consumed 45 pounds of his flesh,
much of it fried in garlic- fresh lemon juice is an ideal alternative
I’m beginning to fear people in this part of the world
in Anambra, Nigeria they made “soups” using whole heads
the restaurant had been plating up human meat
A priest who ate at the restaurant was alarmed
their spirit/soul reabsorbed into the band by consumption.
in Palaeolithic Britain The presence of human tooth marks
cannibalism at Cheddar Gorge is an act of victory
human head soup was on the menu supernatural powers
consumed the bodies of the deceased to return the "life force"
Matthew Williams eating the woman, face first
Canadians are amazingly nice human beings who enjoy poutine and maple syrup
they’re a surprisingly good source needed for these babies
so you feel like yourself sooner cracking of bones to extract marrow
sophisticated culture of butchering and carving human remains
After drinking booze and taking some sleeping pills
A rare case of what they call "love cannibalism"
murdering potential nanny candidates
and then cooking their flesh into empanadas
I am not surprised at the shocking revelation
roasted human head was even on the menu
Osun Defender newspaper, BBC Swahili
Berlin, Germany the flesh of the dead floated in the Ganges
Kuru of the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea
feed morsels of brain to young and elderly relatives
cannibalism into the present day in order to encourage tourism
the Starving Time, Big Lurch had been using PCP for the pain
he had to kill the Devil before the world ended
Tynisha Ysais- Tooth marks were found on her face and lungs
Rudy Eugene was already naked to eat the homeless man's face
Issei Sagawa eating the beautiful Hartevelt
he would absorb some of her healthy energy
working as a writer, restaurant reviewer
Yoo Young-chul, a South Korean gentleman
Women shouldn't be sluts These were his motives for killing and eating people
the confession of Albert Fish
"How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven"
A skull cap or cup.
This thing took a dark turn on me. I started out with the idea that cannibalism is funny- "Eating Raoul", the 1982 movie with Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel, was hilarious and was about, well, eating Raoul. Watch it! It was a low budget sleeper! We've all seen dozens of cartoons with a couple of missionaries in a huge iron pot surrounded by headhunters with sharp spears. Cannibal jokes: Two cannibals are sitting around a campfire. One says to the other, "I hate my mother-in-law." The other says, "Then just eat the vegetables." And:
Two men have been captured and tossed into a cannibal's pot when one starts laughing. "What's so funny?" The other asks. "I just peed in their soup".
But the search took me somewhere else. My wife had actually heard of Albert Fish, but he was new to me and his crimes unknown to me, and deeply disturbing, and it was Albert who led me down that dark path where I couldn't laugh at it anymore. I'll get back there, but Albert Fish and Armin Meiwes appalled me.
There are ancient spiritual beliefs about cannibalism that don't involve murder, but instead the consumption of human flesh as a way of ingesting the spirit of the deceased, and a way of connecting with ancestors, and continuing a racial memory. Brains were eaten, and head soups, in the belief that a individual link to the family of ancients was passed on in the act. This is a metaphor for passing the intellectual torch from generation to generation, the way we read and absorb the teachings of long dead scholars and philosophers, and seen in this way it doesn't seem quite so barbaric, and makes a sort of religious and metaphysical sense- it's a symbolic act.
But the list of names mined in preparing this verse led me to the discovery of horrific crimes ending in the consumption of the victim. The killers- and diners- mentioned here were aberrations, mutants who didn't develop like the rest of us, or maybe over developed to a deranged place. That they killed and ate their victims seemed a different metaphor, for the way we often consume each other. The phrase that comes to mind is the warning "He would eat you alive!" And that points to the metaphor for a parasitic culture and an inhumane and cannibalistic economic system that consumes the host. As much as we are admonished to love and care for one another, the feast goes on.
|
|
|
37
Comments
(Page:)
|
|
Good News
|
Posted:May 21, 2015 10:31 pm
Last Updated:Jun 9, 2016 10:19 pm
23158 Views
|
I read a number of sad posts tonight, about hackers compromising this site and, worse, about the deaths of bloggers' friends, and the seriously ill health of other bloggers' dear friends.
My wife and I had our own family problems this week and she spent the week out of town with her , steering her through the breakup of her marriage, and giving moral and logistic support. They've been married over ten years and it saddens both of us to see them separate. They have a wonderful nine year old , and we love them both.
My good news is that PD came home tonight and I have my wife back with me. It was only six days away but it felt like weeks to me. In past marriages both my wife and I were relieved when our former spouses left home for a while, on business or for family affairs. It felt like freedom. My marriage with PD is not like that. We're in love each other and every time we've been separated due to illness in the family or other emergencies we can't wait to get back to each other. We haven't had many such lonely times and I hope to have no more- even though that's perhaps unrealistic.
PD has joked about us being codependent...to hell with that! Love is not codependence, nor is devotion. I do rely on her, and I need her. I love her deeply and without reservation and I'm overjoyed to have her back home again. I took her out for dinner and then we celebrated in the best way that a couple can. I missed her touch and the feel of her skin, and her scent. I missed her voice and her humor and her tenderness to me. I'm the luckiest man on the planet.
|
|
|
45
Comments
(Page:)
|
|
Food is the topic of the Eighth Virtual Symposium!
|
Posted:May 17, 2015 9:05 pm
Last Updated:Jul 14, 2015 6:17 pm
21362 Views
|
Bridesmaid Becomes A Bride Food Is The Topic For The Eighth Virtual Symposium
So! It's food, is it? I have felt, in the recent past....well, I've felt a number of things, and I imagined feeling a few more. One of the things I imagined feeling was a wine rack stocked with all the erections left to my future self, a dwindling cellar, to be sure. I would stroll down the line, fondling this erection and that, savoring one, frowning at another that didn't quite live up to its promise. And, at the same time, I wonder....why is it, that when the topic of food comes up, I always end up talking about my dick? Where the hell is Freud when I need him?
I'm supposed to be pimping food and I'm talking about my cock. Infer what you will from that, ladies.
At any rate, the Virtual Symposium is a unique opportunity for bloggers here to converge on a single subject and interpret it in any damn fool way they wish, and this is the heart of what's fun about it. Any wild take on the topic of the consumption, preparation, acquisition of, or serving of food is acceptable. The rules are quite relaxed, as they should be in anticipation of a good meal. And make no mistake about it, the Symposia are a feast! It's a feast of writing skills, a banquet of brains and a smorgasboard of ideas. Remember that word, smorgasboard? Back in the day it whetted appetites. Amazing how tastes change, isn't it? Now, it sounds like something bland and overcooked you might find at the Holiday Inn in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
The Symposium was conceived by blogger [blog humorguaranteed1]. It's a wonderful community building project. It makes us feel that as unique and individual as we are, we are all still part of a larger whole that has meaning for us. As alone as we all may feel at times, this reminds us that we are not. Let us break bread together.
Bridesmaid Becomes A Bride Food Is The Topic For The Eighth Virtual SymposiumFood is the Topic of the Eighth Virtual Symposium!
|
|
|
20
Comments
|
|
Vote for Food as the Symposium Topic
|
Posted:May 14, 2015 4:34 pm
Last Updated:Jul 14, 2015 6:18 pm
22335 Views
|
The Virtual Symposium Returns Lets Pick A Topic
The Virtual Symposium Returns: Let’s Pick A Topic!
I haven't stumped for a topic for the Symposium yet, and today I break tradition. There were a number of great topics, but I'm campaigning for food.The most important woman in my life has a lot to say about food, and one of those things is whether I'm going to get any. Food, I mean. And also whether I'm going to get any. Ever. So head on over to [blog humorguaranteed]'s place and cast a vote for food as the topic of the Eighth Virtual Symposium- it's a decent neighborhood, not like around here, where the roof leaks and there are wildflowers growing in the yard whereas the neighbors have grass nurtured through the profligate use of herbicide and pesticide, creating a dangerous and boring monoculture that is unhealthy for most living things, including wildflowers, which the people next door refer to as "weeds". I hate mowing the lawn, too. It's a waste of gas and it pollutes the air and the mower is just loud and obnoxious. If I DON'T mow my wildflowers the city will come and cut them for me, and then charge me for doing something I don't want done in the first place.
But anyway, yeah, food. I did start out talking about food, before I digressed. Actually, I didn't say a damned thing about food. I have little enough to say about it that if I say much here I run the risk of having nothing left when it counts. That would be a lot like masturbating just before going out on a hot date. And at my age I don't know how many erections are left in my future arsenal and I sure as hell don't want to squander them. It might be kind of cool to have them stored in a locked vault, so I could go in and check on them from time to time to make sure they're safe, warm and comfortable, and not over exerting themselves. I don't want them getting all tuckered out and find them spent just when I have use for one. So, as long as I didn't have to take a banker or a vault guard with me, I could visit them from time to time, hold one or two in my hand and feel their heft. caress them and, well, appreciate them.
Ummm....please vote for food as the topic for the Eighth Virtual Symposium!
 |
|
|
26
Comments
(Page:)
|
|
More photos for the previous post
|
Posted:May 12, 2015 9:51 am
Last Updated:Jun 30, 2016 11:05 am
22033 Views
|
I have trouble selecting which pictures I want to post some days. Yesterday was magnificent in the forest, so here's ten more. I'd like to take you all, one by one, as guests on a hike.
|
|
|
30
Comments
(Page:)
|
|
If the rain comes...
|
Posted:May 12, 2015 9:40 am
Last Updated:Jun 30, 2016 11:04 am
19196 Views
|
On Monday it was warm here and it rained on and off, sometimes hard and sometimes in a drizzle. Since our dry spell ended the preserve has been transformed. It's now a riot of lush new green punctuated by swatches of white flowering trees, brand new red and pink shoots, lime green and yellow emerging leaves. There are patches of flowers everywhere- blue, purple, yellow and pristine white. It's so much to take in all at once. Everywhere I looked there was something new and delicate to see and while we hiked in the wet I lagged behind, lingering and taking pictures.
We had the place to ourselves. Not too many people want to hike in a pouring rain, and it was coming down hard and steady when we set out. It's hard to keep the camera dry in a rain like that. I have to hold it under my raincoat and dry the lens constantly. That means turning it on and off a lot- the autofocus gets confused when the lens is covered and it either refuses to focus at all or I get error messages and have to reset it by turning it off.
I took a lot of shots of raindrops on the tips of leaves and twigs, hoping for that one special picture that would be a mirror of the forest in micro. One photo turned out, and it was worth all the lollygagging and fussing with focus and lens drying. My eyes aren't what they used to be. After fifty years of twenty fifteen vision I had to get reading glasses so I don't see closeup detail as sharply as I once did. For another ten years I could till shoot a fly off a woodchuck's ass at fifty yards but now that's get a bit risky for the woodchuck- my long distance sight is flagging a little too.
So when I try for detailed closeups all I can do is point and guess at what will work and hope for the best. The screen on my camera is of course so small that I don't really know what I've got til I get home and upload the photos to my computer. And that's when I got excited about that one drop of water in just that one photo. It worked! One photo out of dozens, but I got it! Every other one was not focused quite right, or the mirror image was simply grey sky or an amorphous green with no detail.
The pine trees will often make soap when it rains. Soap is a mixture of salts and acids and the rain dissolves them in a solution that runs down the trunk, stopping and foaming at the bottom or when the stream hits a rough spot. We found a quite a few white pines getting a cleansing like this yesterday. Gracie loves bubbles- like in PD's bath- and she loves biting them, so she went right for the tree soap. She hadn't seemed to notice it until PD mentioned it and then she headed straight for the foam. I swear that understands English better than a lot of people who learned it as a first language!
The water level in the marsh is up three inches already, and the swamp, which was looking a little wan and peaked, is flooded again. Like magick swamp grasses and mayapples erupted from the black muck. It would have been a good day to get lost in the swamp…but Gracie would LOVE getting mucky and that muck smells like shit. PD couldn't stand that, so we moved on.
There is white cup lichen growing in an oak savanna above the marsh, to the southeast. It hasn't bloomed yet but I'll keep an eye on it- there should be some red flowers appearing soon. Right now you can make out traces of pink if you look closely.
We only hiked about three miles. It was hot under the raincoats and we haven't been taking long hikes so we were getting tired and sweaty. Gracie is fast improving so once again she outlasted us- she was ready for more when we headed back. My camera batteries died and when I began changing them I got them mixed up and had to give up on taking pictures for the day. I had backup batteries, but it was just as well to stop looking for photos and walk, soaking up the green. It's become a glorious spring, thanks to the rain.
|
|
|
16
Comments
|
|
Rain
|
Posted:May 10, 2015 8:00 am
Last Updated:Jun 30, 2016 11:05 am
19967 Views
|
Finally we got rain. It's been dry as a popcorn fart around here, but the last few days we've had rain and the blooms are popping out everywhere in the woods.
|
|
|
29
Comments
(Page:)
|
|
Al Sabo 8 May 2015
|
Posted:May 10, 2015 7:51 am
Last Updated:Nov 8, 2015 8:39 pm
17460 Views
|
Since Gracie has been sick we've only hiked Al Sabo a couple of times. It feels a little bit like cheating to go there without her, and it isn't as much fun without her. Today we thought she might be up to a hike out to the land bridge between the two marshes. It was eighty five degrees but there was a nice breeze, and PD carried a canteen of water for her.
We stopped every mile or so to give her a drink.. She has a little purple collapsible cup to drink from, but she spills a lot of water that way. It was a gift so we're using it- for a little while. A better bowl for her is to carry a plastic grocery sack and line the inside of my hat with it, and pour the water in that. Her tongue lapping flips the water right out of the cup, but the hat-bowl works real well.
The forest is in full bloom. It has finally gotten past the yawning and stretching phase and is really waking up now. Crabapple and serviceberry and dogwood are flowering. The forest floor is carpeted with flowers in places and the beeches have dropped their leaves and are sending out new shoots. The spruce trees are showing bright green growth at their tips. Violets that bloomed two weeks ago are finished, but there are still some later blooms nearer the marsh, and deeper in the woods. Little red oak yearlings are pushing out scarlet leaves in a hurry, before the taller trees rob them of sunlight. There are still forget-me-nots bordering the trail in quite a few places- they've been blooming for more than a month.
Tent caterpillars are showing up now too, a lot of them. there was a fisherman at the land bridge, standing on the culvert, but he was mostly getting snagged and not catching anything. I watched a turtle swim across an open pond and crawl up onto a stump while I annoyed the fisherman by watching him. The fisherman left soon after- the turtle, less self-conscious, stayed.
|
|
|
20
Comments
|
|
The Gracie Show
|
Posted:May 8, 2015 10:18 am
Last Updated:Mar 7, 2016 6:05 pm
19232 Views
|
The last few weeks have been a departure from our customary programming. I have posted about mcmaniac's runaway campaign for the presidency which has gathered momentum and is now emulating the proverbial bat out of hell.
I posted about the damaging effect that trolls can have on blogging here. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time and it still does. Why sit on my ass and let my friends take all the heat? How dare they, [post 3621145], [post 3621554]- and others.
My wife and I each wrote posts about inspiration for the Seventh Virtual Symposium. I pimped the Symposium here in my blog and and I wrote a "standing by" post about upgrading my laptop.
I developed an interest in flarf poetry and experimented with writing some of my own, with my own personal method peculiar to me. It wouldn't really be me if it weren't a bit peculiar. The last flarf poem might just be the last I post here- that's not a guarantee. I saw a chance to use it creatively to say a couple of things and I just might again. But I don't forsee anything coming up.
That final poem gave me a chance to sound off and say what I thought about a delusional blogger here who's been distrusting me for months, and saying so to anyone who'll sit still to listen. That poem may not be funny to everyone. I suppose in many ways it's sort of an inside joke. A few people got it and the rest were crossing their eyes and reaching for their crucifixes. But it was meant to be funny, and hard to fathom because that's the way this blogger/stalker comes across- delusional, disconnected from reality and very hard to fathom. It's a poor kind of attention to get but maybe that's the best he can do. He might do better to just think about himself and stop worrying about me. I never did bear him any ill will, but I can only take just so much crazy and I finally had to point out just how truly crazy it is.
The readers here commented- or didn't- but the message I was getting was pretty funny: "Yeah, the flarf poems are cool- what about your dog?" "Where's the dog?" "How's Gracie?" "Yep- love the stupid - I mean brilliant- poems, but when are you going hiking with Gracie again?" I got the message- this is Gracie's blog. Let me tell you folks something: Gracie is a star. You have it right. She's a star to me too, but she got sick, and I'm her manager. Talented as she is, she needs ME. I feed her, marshall her on those hikes and medicate her when she's sick. I pitch balls to her and dissuade her from charging pit bulls. I wouldn't go so far as to say she's nothing without me, but I was the one who recognized the celebrity within her and nurtured and promoted that star quailty. It's ME, and only ME, who makes the decisions here. I'm more than happy to let her take center stage, when she's healthy again. I'm not about to let her run herself out like some promising two year old filly. There is a larger fame that is Gracie's to achieve. And this is my goddam blog.
We have been walking Gracie, and playing fetch in the yard, and in the house after dark. She still tires out easily, and it isn't hard to spot. She starts dragging a bit, and then sits down or even lies down along the trail. It's different from day to day. One day we can do two and a half miles and the next she's had enough at a mile and a half. She doesn't know about pacing herself and stretching it out- she hits the trail like she was shot out of a cannon and does the first mile like the cartoon Tasmanian Devil. I never had a with Lyme disease before, but it seems to be just what friends with sick dogs have described- lethargy, sore joints, not much stamina.
She's perking up. Her thirty day regimen of antibiotics has about a week left and that should eradicate the disease. She'll go for a checkup then. But it's going to take longer than I thought to get her back up to handling a six mile hike.
PD and I have been feeling the effects of less walking. We tried a few new trails while she was most sick, checking them out to see how it might be to walk her there. We hiked the Fred C. McLinden Nature Trails and that was fun, but not as beautiful as Al Sabo, and it just wasn't the same without Gracie along. We walked around the mall a few times and watched women and I always like that, but I miss being in my favorite woods with my best girl.
We took Gracie to Blanche Hull Preserve. It's a large park on the southern extremity of Kalamazoo, and takes over acrross the street from the northern terminus of the Portage Creek Bicentennial Trail, bordering the west bank of Portage Creek. Blanche Hull has been a notorious pickle park for years and there have been a few busts of the men trolling for sex there, complete with public shaming and public outrage.
There are now signs posted that the park is under twenty four hour surveillance, but I didn't see either any surveillance- although that one Yorkshire terrier looked like he might be a dick- or any men cruising for sex. I can understand that people wouldn't want to take their to a park where they might get to watch guys sucking each other off….but I've never seen that there anyway. There are lots of woods and plenty of places to get private. And the park is really little used, either before or after the arrests.
I think the arrests and the public shaming, not to mention the self righteous outrage, are shameful in themselves. Outrage is usually a display intended for other people to watch, and this kind seems a bit defensive to me, as if they need to reassure others that they think sex is bad, public sex is worse, and homosexual sex is an abomination. I disagree with all three points, and I'd suggest that they simply use Milham Park on the northeast corner and across the creek, or the Bicentennial Trail to the south, and let other people fuck in peace.
Gracie is pretty broadminded about it all. She doesn't care one way or another about sexual preference, and if we hadn't had her spayed I'm pretty sure she'd be an enthusiastic proponent of-and particpant in- dogging in public places. I think the surveillance at the park is mostly a ruse. The signs proclaiming that they have their eyes on us seems to be about the extent of it. We found several used condoms and empty condom packages. Maybe instead of signs we could get a few trash barrels and keep that stuff off the ground.
We walked her at Gourdneck Lake State Game Area last weekend. It was hot and the trails are few and in places poorly defined, and Gracie got tired after a little over a mile. We'll go back there again, as it's not used a lot so we have plenty of solitude. I may just go back and mark a trail south to Sugarloaf Lake.
Just a couple of days ago the temperature hit eighty degrees so we walked her two and a quarter miles round trip to the the creek between Asylum Lake and Little Asylum Lake. Gracie loves to play in the creek there, and we let her splash around all she wanted, and didn't leave til she was done with it.
|
|
|
21
Comments
|
|
Healing
|
Posted:May 8, 2015 10:09 am
Last Updated:Nov 9, 2015 9:43 am
17021 Views
|
While recuperating from her illness Gracie has been lounging around the house, playing in the yard, and catching up on her reading. If she's going to live with a couple of pinkos like us she has some subversive studies on her horizon- Howard Zinn's "People's History of the United States", "Dissent", by Ralph Young, and PD's own subversive thesis, "Sex Magic and Transformation: Three Patterns of Gendered Polarity, Disintegration and Change in the Modern West".
She spends a lot of time sleeping, punctuated by brief manic episodes of chasing the cat Franz when the opportunity presents itself.
|
|
|
12
Comments
|
|
To link to this blog (kzoopair) use [blog kzoopair] in your messages.
|
|
|
| Sun |
Mon |
Tue |
Wed |
Thu |
Fri |
Sat |
| |
1
|
2
|
3
|
41
|
5
|
6
|
7
|
8
|
9
|
10
|
11
|
12
|
13
|
14
|
15
|
16
|
17
|
18
|
19
|
20
|
21
|
22
|
23
|
24
|
25
|
26
|
27
|
28
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Most Recent Comments by Others
| All dicks matter! (47) | GothicPantyhose
Sep 3, 2021 3:08 pm |
| Words of the Past (12) | Golly06
Feb 5, 2021 1:49 pm |
| America (21) | sweet_VM
Dec 28, 2020 8:15 am |
| Why We Fight (31) | couplecrazies
Dec 27, 2020 9:53 am |
| Contrast of Style (25) | tickles4us
Jun 10, 2020 6:26 am |
| Geography Boy Strikes Again! (47) | sophiasworld79
Jun 6, 2020 1:43 am |
| First Blood Take Six (17) | JudeL5
Feb 5, 2020 2:43 am |
| Wisdom From the 17th Century (13) | tickles4us
Dec 15, 2019 9:22 am |
| Whiny little bitches (92) | sexisfun49127
Dec 14, 2019 12:49 pm |
| George the First (22) | tickles4us
Nov 15, 2019 7:44 pm |
| Recent posts (27) | wickedeasy
Oct 28, 2019 3:10 pm |
|
