Waiting
|
Posted:Nov 24, 2014 4:34 pm
Last Updated:Mar 7, 2016 6:06 pm
11952 Views
|
We're in that in between stage here where we had our snowstorms and then a warmup with rain that melted all the snow. Today the wind kicked up with gusts of forty or fifty miles an hour, and the temperature has started dropping. There is new snow in the forecast.
Gracie needs her daily hike. I was feeling poorly and not at all up to it, but I made myself get up and take her to Al Sabo anyway this afternoon. I kind of hoped the hiking would make me feel a bit better. I forgot her long lead so we didn't hike out on the prairie where she likes to leap about in the grass. Instead we took a trail I haven't been on for a few years, down into a little valley along Portage Creek where it stalls into marshes and ponds. I used to know this trail well and I hiked it weekly, but it's been at least five or six years since I walked it. I'm glad we went that way. There's a pretty stand of beech on the hillside east of the trail, and the beeches cross the trail and fill out around the marsh as you head north.
Gracie was delighted to find the water but I didn't let her play in it. The standing water along the path is shallow and the bottom is carpeted with leaves, and muddy underneath. With a little luck we'll make it to the Lake or the running creek before it freezes. She was sorry to leave the water- I could see it. She wanted to get wet so much! she danced around me and skidded in the mud trying to change my mind.
I did feel better after hiking. Moving helped some, and being in the woods made me forget my aches and pains for a while.
|
|
|
8
Comments
|
|
November rain
|
Posted:Nov 23, 2014 4:09 pm
Last Updated:Nov 8, 2015 8:15 pm
12193 Views
|
It's warmed up here. Friday we had sunshine for the first time in two weeks. Yesterday Gracie and I hiked our usual circuit at Al Sabo and it was a workout. We had thirty nine degrees and drizzle that turned the trails into slush. There have been lots of skiers lately but it was awful cross country weather Saturday. The woods were steaming and damp. I was bushed and dripping sweat by the midpoint and felt kind of sick when we got back, so I did a lot of napping. Today our foot of snow is nearly all gone.
Today we're cleaning house and getting ready for Thanksgiving. We usually host it here and PD loves doing the cooking and fussing over it. Our house is small (and we're very untidy and cluttered so every year we have to move stuff around to accommodate the company. Everything I do or read makes me think of something else so I have to grab a book and they somehow never make it back to the bookshelf until Thanksgiving. PD says our design aesthetic is working class bibliophile. I didn't even know we HAD a design aesthetic! The back room, the mud room, is mine and I'm not going to take a picture of that even though I have it half cleaned. I'd rather share a picture of my dick than reveal just how much a slob I really am. The coffee table needed clearing anyway. It was getting to the point where I wasn't going to be able to see the TV much longer. I did think about stacking the books with a window through them so I could still peer through and get an idea of what was happening in the movie.
And that's the way it is, Sunday 23 November 2014, in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
|
|
|
14
Comments
|
|
My Favorite Toy
|
Posted:Nov 18, 2014 2:55 pm
Last Updated:Nov 8, 2015 8:15 pm
12430 Views
|
mcmaniac loves old tractors, and so do I. So today PD took some photos of mine plowing snow with the back blade. It won't push as much snow as my pickup truck- it's not as heavy and it's two wheel drive, but it's very easy to get into tight places and with a brake for each drive wheel it'll turn on a dime and give you nine cents change. Even I feel a little weird posting tractor photos on a sex site but you people just don't understand how I feel about this old Ford.
|
|
|
15
Comments
|
|
Seven or Eight Inches
|
Posted:Nov 14, 2014 4:50 pm
Last Updated:Mar 7, 2016 6:06 pm
12311 Views
|
We live in a snow belt just east of Lake Michigan and it seems like the whole country got buried in snow but us. We have maybe seven or eight inches, depending on where you are. Negaunee in the U.P. got thirty four inches of snow. Negaunee is four hundred and fifty miles from here. We're closer to Indianapolis, Columbus, Ohio and Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. It's about the same distance to Des Moines, Iowa as to Negaunee from here. I share this with you because I have nothing new to say. We hiked today in Al Sabo and took pictures. The woods are especially beautiful under a new snow.
|
|
|
23
Comments
|
|
The Curse of Mercy Short
|
Posted:Nov 13, 2014 7:31 pm
Last Updated:Jul 30, 2016 6:10 pm
12362 Views
|
A woman in my own family was once possessed by demons.
There was a television series this spring that aired on WGN called "Salem", a fictionalized account of the events during the Salem witchcraft outbreak of 1692 in Salem Farms, Massachusetts Bay Colony. That first season of episodes is now available on Netflix and my wife began watching it tonight. PD and I both kind of think that the actual events were strange enough and full enough of drama that fictionalization is sort of gilding the lily. Athur Miller's play "The Crucilble" was not strictly accurate historically but it did a commendable job of depicting the demeanor of the principals and well captured the tenor of the time and the events of that tragic episode. And, it was itself an allegory of the persecution of so-called communists in the American government and in Amerca at large. There was a 1996 movie version of "The Crucible" with Daniel Day Lewis and Winona Ryder that we liked. It seemed true to the spirit of Miller's play.
I have the feeling that the creators of the television series see themselves as offering something that will compete with wildly successful shows like "The Walking Dead". I can't guess how that will work out for them since I have been unable to stay awake through a single episode of "The Walking Dead". In my opinion "The Walking Dead" is the long sought after but elusive cure for insomnia that Big Pharma has not been competent to produce. The only thing about the "Salem" series that caught my attention is that I have some family connections to the witch trials of 1692.
My wife alerted me to the fact that she was watching "Salem" when one of the characters, Cotton Mather, entered a garret with a couple of men to subdue and restrain a woman named Mercy, who was bewitched, or possessed. That piqued my interest immediately, because Cotton Mather had involved himself in the case of the bewitchment of Mercy Short, a young woman who later married my ancestor Joseph Marshall. Mercy Short is not a blood relative. I am descended from Joseph Marshall and his second wife Abigail Hussey. As it turned out, the Mercy in the TV show is Mercy Lewis, one of the princpal accusers in the witchcraft outbreak. Mercy had been orphaned in 1689 by a Wabenaki Indian attack on Falmouth, Masschusetts and came to Salem Farms as a servant to George Burroughs and later to Thomas Putnam.
Mercy Short lost her own parents and seven of her siblings in the same way, when she was thirteen years old. In the opening skirmishes of King William's War, the French and their Indian allies staged surprise raids on English settlements on the frontier, one of them, on 18 March 1689 being at the village where Clement Short and his wife Faith Munt Short had built a home, at the Salmon Falls River near present day Kittery, Maine. Mercy saw her parents Clement and Faith and seven of her brothers and sisters killed. She and the remaining were taken captive by the Indians and force marched to Quebec. On that march, one of Mercy's brothers faltered and was unable to carry the burden assigned him by his captors. She saw him beaten, tied to a tree and tortured, then burned to death. Native Americans were not laggards in the design of exquisite torture and execution- they rivaled Europeans in the creativity of their methods. A fire would be built, not at the feet of the victim, but in a ring around him, so as to slow roast him rather than consume him in flames. Often the condemned would have his hands tied together and then tethered to a stake so that he could roam about in a small orbit, but never escape the ring of fire, as his body was slowly cooked to death.
Upon arriving in Quebec Mercy Short was traded to the French by her Wabenaki kidnappers, who set about converting her to Catholicism. For Mercy it would have been trading one version of hell for another. The physical brutalty of the Wabenaki would have ceased, but now she would be tempted by the devil himself. The Pope was the devil incarnate to a seventeeth century protestant Englishwoman. Mercy would have been raised to believe that her Catholic interrogators were the spawn of Satan who would corrupt her soul and damn her to perdition for all eternity. Some captives in this situation begin to identify with the captor and may just give in to make it all stop. Others may be broken by it and go mad. Some appear to resist, only to find later that they too have been driven mad. All of Mercy Short's very short life on this earth told her that the lessons of her own Separatist church were the way to peace and salvation and that she could never yield to the papists. We have no way of knowing what she did in this situation. It is not recorded, as far as I know.
In October 1690 Sir William Phipps of Massachusetts Bay Colony laid seige to Quebec. He had a worthy adversary in the shrewd Goveror-General Louis de Buade de Frontenac and by the twenty third of October the seige could be seen to have failed. An exchange of prisoners was negotiated. Among those prisoners was the colonial English girl Mercy Short.
Mercy was returned to Boston and shortly thereafter, as she was an indigent orphan, she was bound in sevice to a woman named Margaret Thatcher. Sometime in 1692 Mrs. Thatcher sent Mercy on an errand that took her to the gaol, where the accused witch Sarah Goode was held. In colonial Massachusetts, everyone chewed tobacco. Those who could afford to smoked pipes, but men, women and all chewed. Sarah Goode asked the fifteen year old Mercy for a chew and for whatever reason, perhaps simply because she was a , Mercy threw a handful of sawdust at Sarah, telling her "That's tobacco good enough for you!" The accused witch Sarah Goode then cursed her.
Not much later, just as the full blown persecution of certain Salem Farms residents as witches was taking wing, Mercy began suffering seizures and "possessions". It appreared clear to the local residents and authorities that the witch Sarah Goode had called on demons to torment Mercy. Mercy herself did not make accusations against anyone. She was simply afflicted and did not know what was happening to her. Cotton Mather took an interest in Mercy and spent time with her. He even invited other young people to witness Mercy's fits- not as an object lesson but in hope of enlightening them. Mather has been much villified for his role in the witch hunts and trials of 1692, but in the case of Mercy Short he showed great care and even tenderness. He wrote about her affliction and possession in a treatise called "A Brand Pluck't Out of the Burning". We would now say that Mercy was experiencing PTSD. The trial and torment of her captivity, the forced march, seeing her brother roasted alive and being harangued during her Catholic imprisonment would be bound to take a toll on her sanity and sense of balance, and her sense of self. The language of modern psychology would have been as incomprehensible to a seventeeth century churchman as hieroglyphics. He had no frame of reference for it, and possession seemed as likely and as reasonable to him as that the Bible was the word of God. Mercy eventually stopped having fits. She recovered herself well enough to marry my seventh great grandfather Joseph Marshall on 29 July 1694 and bore him seven - Mary, Patience, Margaret, Ruth, Benjamin, Thaddeus and Hawkins. Mercy moved to the Nantucket Island Quaker Colony with Joseph Marshall. She died about 1709 or 1710 possibly on a visit to her remaining siblings in Boston. She is buried in the Copps Hill Burying Ground in Boston.
|
|
|
11
Comments
|
|
Gracie did a SnuggleBuni41 pose...
|
Posted:Nov 10, 2014 3:08 pm
Last Updated:Nov 8, 2015 8:16 pm
11913 Views
|
I have lots of ideas lately but no execution. So in the meantime, we walk in the woods every day, sometimes at Asylum Lake in the morning and in the afternoon at Al Sabo Preserve. We hike for forty five minutes to an hour and a quarter. Al Sabo is about seven hundred acres with another several hundred acres of a boy scout camp right next to it. There are twenty five miles of marked trails with many more unmarked. I used to know this place pretty well a few years ago- which trails went where and how to get to which lake, of which there are several and where the creek crossings are. If you like off road biking there are between six and seven miles of bike trails. Sometime this winter we'll hike back to Atwater pond, a walk of maybe five miles or so over the trails- it isn't that far as the crow flies. We've got a little work to do before we're ready for a ten mile hike.
Today we surprised a deer who was browsing only forty or fifty feet off the trail. She watched us for quite a while before wandering off into the brush.
And I got a picture of Gracie doing a [blog SnuggleBuni41] impersonation. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
|
|
|
12
Comments
|
|
For smartasswoman- Fifteen ways to ruin your life
|
Posted:Nov 5, 2014 2:22 am
Last Updated:Apr 26, 2018 11:09 am
12522 Views
|
smartasswoman recently posted a graphic in her blog Inappropriate Temptations called "Thirteen Ways to Ruin Your Life- A Guide for Guys". It's a book by preacher Jarrod Jones. She expressed some curiosity about just what those thirteen ways might be, but not enough to buy the book. Her instincts were good. I rashly commented that she had made a wise choice, that I had already committed fifteen of those thirteen sins and would share them for free. It was all bluster and flourish, but somewhat to my dismay, she called my bluff and raised the ante, telling me more or less to put up or shut up. Not content to cut my losses and stick my tail between my legs, I replied that I could do it in my sleep, snapping my fingers for effect, which effect was of course lost on smartasswoman. If Wallace Stevens could come up with "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", I ought to be able to fake this too.
Upon reflection, I don't much consider my life to be in ruins. In fact, I'm fairly well pleased with where I find myself these days, which is probably a testament to the miracle of lowered expectations. I have a wife who loves me and a who obeys me and as much as I might wish that they could share equally in those qualities it doesn't do to look a gift in the mouth and with an eye on those reduced goals of mine, I am grateful for what I get. But I still have to answer that smartasswoman.
I did a little online research on Mr. Jarrod Jones. I'm not much inclined to attach any significance or importance to anyone named Jarrod in the first place, even if he has self-published a book online, and Jones sounds suspiciously like a pseudonym to me. Maybe his real name is Sherrod Smith. My gray haired father didn't impart a lot of wisdom to me, but he did instruct me not to trust little old ladies or preachers- they'll screw you every time, was how he put it to me. I did try to find out just what those thirteen ways of ruining one's life Jarrod Jones might be listing in his book. I had it in mind to refute him, if possible, by specifically rebutting him point by point, and offering alternatives. Mr. Jones is far too cagey to be caught so easily.
There are a lot of references to his "free book", in PDF version, and I discovered that the book is available for purchase on his website. He claims that it can be downloaded for free by subscribing to and following his blog, a thing I am loath to do. I already have an inbox full of entreaties from Ukrainian women who think I'm hot and can't wait to perform fellatio on my person, and offers from pharmacies who will provide chemical concoctions to ensure that I maintain an erection for the duration of that event- purely for her Ukrainian satisfaction, of course. Apparently Ukrainian women do not care to fellate luffa sponges and prefer a more firm appendage.
This puts me in the singularly unappetizing position of having to interpolate, otherwise known as guessing, at just what those mysterious thirteen ways might be. It suggests that I could study Jarrod Jones website and come up with a fair approximation of what Mr. Jones considers to be the deadly sins of sexual life management. The reader has no idea how painful that study really is unless he undertakes it himself, and I do not recommend it. In fact I will outright warn you off- it is not for the faint of heart or the weak of digestive tract.
I will state right here that Mr. Jarrod Jones has left a clue in his book blog indicating just how his "expertise" should be viewed. In a list called "Random Life Lessons and Thoughts at Turning Forty", a little way down the list, after "Physical health matters" and "Pain is the best teacher" and "I am not the Messiah" (a bit of a disappointment, that one) we find "All people are sheep w/ fractured souls. No longer surprised at how easily people can be deceived." He has not met me and I don't much care for his assessment of the condition of my soul. Likewise I was not deceived quite enough to download his book. He goes on further to say that "Cynicism lurks to dominate my heart as I age." Well, now. A self help book by a self confessed cynic, who has claimed that I have the soul of a fractured sheep. Or the fractured soul of a sheep. How ever you read it, it doesn't come out a compliment.
But the deal breaker for me was this statement of undying wisdom from Mr. Jarrod Jones: "80's- 90's music is the greatest." The man is clearly deranged and should not be listened to. What IS 80's- 90's music anyway? I shudder to even think of examining this any further. I have my limits in the pursuit of scholarship, and sound as my mental state may be I'm not at all sure it can withstand immersion in 80's- 90's music for any extended length of time. Any serious musicologist worth his blue suede shoes can tell you that The Music died on February 3, 1959 with Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper.
I don't even have the emotional wherewithal to to cherrypick any more tidbits from Jones' website for mockery after that. But he has, inadvertently, solved my dilemma of how to fulfill my obligation to share with smartasswoman fifteen ways to ruin your life. I freely admit that I did not ruin my life this way, and that my pitiful excuse for a life isn't even ruined after all, that it was all false bravado. But it is nonetheless a cautionary tale. Take heed, and beware.
Fifteen ways to ruin your life:
1. Starship- Nothing's gonna stop us now
2. Primal Scream- Velocity Girl
3. Lil Louis- French Kiss
4. Womack and Womack- Teardrops
5. Soft Cell- Tainted Love
6. S'express- Theme from S'express
7. De La Soul- the Magic Number
8. Duran Duran- Rio
9. Snoop Doggy Dogg- Who Am I (What's My Name)
10. Dr. Dre- Nuthin But a 'G' Thang
11. Happy Mondays- Step On
12. 2 Pac- California Love- Oh hell, anything by 2 Pac.
13. Brandy and Monica- The Boy is Mine
14. Missy Elliot- the Rain
15. Tricky-hell is Around the Corner
This is certainly not a complete list, but I only contracted for fifteen. Listen to this noise at your peril, and don't say you weren't forewarned.
|
|
|
15
Comments
|
|
Inappropriate Temptations
|
Posted:Oct 31, 2014 9:01 pm
Last Updated:Nov 10, 2014 10:42 pm
14558 Views
|
Inappropriate Temptation Is The Topic For The Third Virtual Symposium on Nov 1
When it comes to temptations the modifier "inappropriate" is sometimes redundant. To be tempted carries a suggestion that there may be negative consequences to giving in, although the temptress may be so alluring as to be irresistable. One might consider the Veal Parmigiana and yet, reluctantly decide against it on the grounds that the calves harvested to provide the veal are often treated abominably. The same case might be made against any meal featuring a dead mammal, or fowl for that matter. At one time, when animal husbandry was, well, husbandry, the trade off did not seem so bad. The animal was cared for, guarded jealously, and fed without having to forage for itself. It was nurtured, with an ulterior motive to be sure, but nurtured nonetheless. In return it gave its life in the nurture of our own. Certainly there were never creatures queuing up for the privilege of contributing to our nurture and our nutrition, but it was a far cry from the industrialized and impersonalized nature of livestock farming and feeding today. There are so many animals in a facilty (and it IS a facility now, not a farm) today that they cannot be seen as anything but a commodity. The numbers are too vast. Workers in these…..abattoirs… are simply overwhelmed by the sheer volume of creatures they are confronted with. It causes them to become calloused, in self defense. How could a man find empathy with all these creatures and not wish to die himself? Or commit havoc on that facility? Or upon life in general?
Over crowding has an effect on not just the creatures that we consume, but on us as well. When faced with it we rebel- recoil rather- and disconnect. Our empathy has to shut down to preserve sanity. You simply cannot identify with all these beings and escape untouched. We ourselves are becoming a bit crowded on the planet, and it is affecting our empathy for one another as individual human beings. One might almost think that there are suddenly too many of us. How can anyone possibly relate to these overwhelming and innumerable hordes of people? I might suggest that we are no longer seeing them as people and are not bothering to relate to them at all. They are another commodity to be consumed.
That all took a sour turn, didn't it? No discussion of sultry eighteen year old temptresses seducing wealthy older men who believed that they were in fact the seducers. No passion starved and beautiful high school teachers corrupting the morals of their students and fucking them silly (as if they were not already hopelessly silly) at every opportunity, in spite of the risks to their livelihoods and reputations. No Lolitas unknowingly undermining and eventually destroying any semblance of moral character in in an enchanted and enraptured don old enough to be her father. No cougar using young men for their rock hard stomachs and cocks and discarding them thoughtlessly once used. Feel better now?
It can feel at times as if were living in Kafka's recurring nightmare, estranged and alienated. There is sensory overload and a temptation to curl up in a fetal ball and shut off all the voices. Retreat in self defense. An alternative response is to bulldoze through life trampling over everyone and taking what you want. Too much or too little empathy are not new conditions for us. The hyper sensitives and the sociopaths have always been with us, but it seems to be ramping up. We are better connected and less engaged at the same time. Self preservation is an imperative but the temptation toward fight or flight can get out of balance, and become inappropriate, in that it isolates us. We are social animals and we do need each other. You have to keep your guard up- and let other people in. I don't think it will be easy.
What do YOU think?
|
|
|
23
Comments
|
|
Halloween Snow
|
Posted:Oct 31, 2014 2:53 pm
Last Updated:Nov 2, 2014 8:53 pm
12065 Views
|
We had our first snow today, big floppy wet flakes, for about forty minutes to an hour. It didn't last long but the first snow is always kind of exciting.
|
|
|
11
Comments
|
|
Asylum Lake
|
Posted:Oct 26, 2014 5:39 pm
Last Updated:Nov 8, 2015 8:14 pm
12329 Views
|
It was a glorious day today. Sixty degrees and sunny with a bright and cloudless October sky. Gracie and I went walking at Asylum Lake. We took a turn around the prairie skirting the woods. Maybe tomorrow we'll walk along the lake.This is mostly an oak forest so the colors are golden brown and scarlet.
|
|
|
11
Comments
|
|
The Loosestrife Man....
|
Posted:Oct 23, 2014 10:27 pm
Last Updated:Feb 18, 2023 12:30 pm
17233 Views
|
I read a story online from a magazine featuring local writers, and I liked one story especially so I emailed the writer to tell her so. She had written the story about her ex-husband. She returned kind of a smart assed response and I liked her even more. So this is the first thing I read that PD had written. It was my introduction to her. She said she'd like to meet someone to go to the movies with her, and maybe fuck her once in a while. We got married and we're still married. Once in a while we go to the movies, but she doesn't complain.
THE LOOSESTRIFE MAN
What passes for affection these days is a note taped to the refrigerator door which reads, "I've left you. If you follow me I'll call the cops."
All Alice ever wanted was a man who brought her flowers, so when the red azalea appeared beside her back gate, planted in a place she never would have chosen, displacing innocent earthworms and heaving rich black dirt across the concrete walk without a trace of apology, she ignored the alarm. Prince Charming and Prince Alarming are always the same guy anyway. Botanical invasion was at least a creative sort of seduction. Hey Baby. Can I plant your yard? Except, whoever it was, he never asked. The first time, it didn't really matter. Who questions a violation that ends in spring?
It didn't really matter the second time either, when all those Emperor tulips materialized along the driveway where no one planted them, or the third time, when a lilac bush shoved its purple head inside an open window that was clear and square just the day before. But the fourth time, when she opened the back door to find half the sod taken up and replaced with at least fifty unrecognizable varieties of exotic flora, Alice ran to her best friend.
"A man is planting flowers in my yard without permission."
"Have you asked him to stop?"
"I never see him."
"How do you know it's a man then?"
"Who else would do a thing like that?"
In June, birds came. Lots of birds. Who could blame them? Half the damn plants had berries, and of the others, half again were asking for it some other way. The birds spilled seeds on the ground and the seeds attracted mice and the mice attracted cats and red-tailed hawks and other creatures Alice never saw, only heard, brushing against the Amazon foliage and uttering small, strange cries whenever she turned away from them. Some of the seeds sprouted and new strange plants crowded in amongst the dominant strange plants, unleashing horticultural chaos. By August, a rasping sound at the screen turned out to be a pumpkin vine accompanied by an opposum coachman, both demanding to be let in. Alice ran out the front door and headed straight for the police station.
"There's a pumpkin vine trying to get in my back door. A man put it there."
"Um. Okay M'am. Is he threatening you in any way? Does he have a weapon?"
"Have you ever seen a pumpkin vine?"
Hacking her way up to the porch, Alice knew before she even opened the door, that her kitchen was now all about fruit where fruit does not belong. Tomatoes on the toaster, apples and pears stacked higher than the answering machine, the yeasty smell of grapes gone bad. Wading through a pool of rotting cherries and sweating torrentially she made it as far as the TV in the living room, which clicked on easily despite the little lizards clinging to the antenna the better to catch drosophila with their sticky curled tongues.
"Today in a bog near Three Rivers, scientists dredged up what appears to be the fossilized remains of a strangled man. Local botanists found the corpse while trying to contain a stand of purple loosestrife, the beautiful but invasive plant that has been choking Midwest waterways since it was introduced here in the late 1980s."
Alice grabs a watermelon from its seeping place on the recliner and hurls it at the screen. It’s hard to start a fire in the midst of fermentation, but where there is a woman there is a way. Sometimes, only blood will do, and broken glass, and plenty of it. Alice spills flour into the mash and cereal into the wound and stamps her feet and screams and kills rats and bats and dogs and hyenas and herons too, but no one hears. Ants come and crickets come and cockroaches come until the scraping of wings against chiton against mandibles against shattered bare bone mutates into a din and a dinner more terrible and shrill than any typhoon.
In the silence that follows the first hard frost, Alice folds linens and stacks them neatly in her cedar closet side by side. Under the spell of winter pine and a fresh hot iron all things are made smooth and warm and dry again. She presses her face against the cold clean pane and breathes her mark upon the glass and writes in finger, "Never again..."
She is leaving now. Do not try to follow.
|
|
|
15
Comments
|
|
Me, me me
|
Posted:Oct 22, 2014 8:18 pm
Last Updated:May 19, 2018 11:19 pm
12673 Views
|
Old cartoon, still relevant.
|
|
|
16
Comments
|
|
Betrayal and Redemption, and....
|
Posted:Oct 19, 2014 11:25 pm
Last Updated:May 19, 2018 11:22 pm
14377 Views
|
I like movies. When I met my wife, PD, she specifically stated that she wanted someone to go to the movies with her. We've seen some great ones, but I haven't felt as if I had anything to say about any of them to anyone but her.
We watched the movie "Twelve Years a Slave" tonight. I think that it's a classic tale of betrayal and redemption. I didn't expect to enjoy it, but I did expect that it would instruct me and maybe move me. I expected that it would make me think again in a new way about an old and ugly American fact. There is no end of new ways to view this peculiarly American perturbation of spirit. The permutations know no end and we are centuries away from any end in sight. The European explorers who adventured here in the two centuries after Columbus lusted after a new world ripe with the wealth that might make them people of quality in the old world, people of import, men of consequence. We see them now as greedy to the point of wickedness, thoughtlessly and casually sadistic and driven by their craving for power and riches to commit atrocities on a biblical scale. But there was already evil here. The dark side of human nature was already well represented in the brutal domination of the weak practiced by Mayans and Aztecs that climaxed in torture and human sacrifice. We are not a pleasant species to contemplate at length. Thank God for liquor, drugs and pornography. They are almost enough to make you forget your own humanity.
In 1619 European invaders brought the first African slaves to a port near Jamestown, Virginia and in doing so imported a mutation of a very old evil that would not come to full and strange fruition without over a century of toil on the fertile new continent. The innate craving for power over one's fellows and our perverse fetish for the infiction of torture were carefully cultivated for the next two hundred forty years, driven by the fear of real retribution by an angry God, so much so that we Americans invented our own Word of God, one that absolved us of sin. We were doing God's work and promoting the natural order, practicing dominion over the fowl of the air and the beasts of the earth. It was a collision of evils, a confluence of malignancy.
Racial slavery appears to be a uniquely American invention. The Dutch are said to have imported the first African slaves to this continent, and there is evidence that those first unfortunate Africans were indentured servants who might gain freedom if they survived their terms of servitude. Arabs were capturing people in Africa for their own slave trade centuries before the Dutch stole their Jamestown cargo from a Spanish vessel. Empires had been conquering and selling the conquered for thousands of years. But it had been an impersonal sort of subjugation. You were beaten in battle and you paid the price, just as you would have done had you been victorious. The ingenuity of Americans inaugurated the concept that you were ordained by God to be a subservient species if you were genetically African, or a ruling elite if you were a white European. And an elaborate formula was devised to determine if you were indeed African, and therefore consigned to a lifetime of obedience and toil until death. The one drop rule. The American genius was institutionalized racism, based on blood and semen. Laws were passed and codes enacted. African slaves rebelled and were viciously crushed. A ruling elite signals what and how much it fears by the brutality of its reaction to dissent.
"Twelve Years a Slave" tells the story of an American man who was duped and kidnapped into slavery for profit, in 1841. He was a free resident of New York state, a violinist with a wife and two , well respected by his fellow New Yorkers. It is adapted from the memoir of the real Solomon Northrup, edited and validated by Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon. I won't retell Solomon Northrup's story here. See the movie.
The story is not unpredictable. We are Americans, after all. We know this story by heart, no matter how much we try to deny that we know it. There is brutalty and forced subservience. In the interest of survival and hope and the bearing up of their fellows , slaves learned subservience. Solomon landed finally on the plantation of a deranged clan in Louisiana named Epps, where his life took a truly surreal turn. Edwin Epps was the sadistic laird of a bizarrely dysfunctional private dominion which grew cotton. Epps eschewed a relationship with his wife in favor of miscegination with his slave Patsy. He was both vicerally attracted to Patsy and deeply ashamed of that attraction as well as abhorrent of his African slaves in general. In a gut wrenching scene, Solomon is forced by Epps to whip Patsy as punishment for her disobedience and can't bring himself to kill her with the lash as ordered.
Solomon contrived to send a message north to a trusted confidant and the message was not only received but that confidant arrived in the climactic scene to deliver Solomon from the hell of America's peculiar institution. His friend Patsy had no such champion. Solomon in the end has to decide. Does he stay at Patsy's side, her powerless protector, ultimately unable to save her from Epps and slavery, or does he seize his own regained freedom, and turn his back to her?
What would you do?
|
|
|
7
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 |
|
