Jane's Imaginary Tree House

Smart Immunity, and other random thoughts on (still) being pregnant

2007-11-02T23:01:00.000-04:00

Well, I've been using the MySpace blog recently more than this one, and today I thought I'd redistribute some of the love. Here's a quick update on what's been happening. And what hasn't been happening. In the latter case, I haven't gone into labor. I'd heard from everyone of the having-born kin and read in all the books that by the end of this marathon, I'd desperately want to finish, even if this meant leaping off the intended marathon track and tearing ass across a cornfield on the side -- cheating. It turns out that moms everywhere are correct.

It seems at odds with nature to be impatient for something that you, if not dred, at least fear to your quivering core. And I don't even mean the physical labor; I mean that endless stretch of time following labor that begins when you're shipped home with a small human being who will eventually become a large human being. What's that all about? Who treats that prospect to a pumped fist and a celebratory glass of champagne? Geez, it's an intimidating load for someone who has heretofore mothered only a few once-stray cats who basically took over the job of mothering themselves, even finding a small hole in the corner of a cabinent by which to let themselves in and out. With that said, it's happening, and I'm excited. More accurately, it's not happening, and I'm excited for the moment when all hell and water break loose.

Interesting points for those of you who have been pregnant and can commiserate, along with those of you pondering the virtues of becoming this way one day yourselves:

-- You know you're close to delivery by the volume of unprovoked hatred that fills you for almost everyone and everything. I commented recently to someone that all the money we've unloaded on the war would've been better spent annihilating those jackasses who play their music too loud in parking lots. Now, I have always considered this behavior rude and worthy of a solid kick to the hubcabs, but I don't think I honestly wanted to pummel the loud intruders until threeish weeks pre-due date. When the only thing that makes you smile is a daydream of yanking someone's hair or watching someone slip on something wimpy, out of place and emabarassing, such as cooked asparagus, you know that you're almost ready for motherhood.

-- A thought I shared with my friend Kristina today: trusting your body for the task ahead is a nice step to reach. I've joined virtually everyone I know in having a cold, and it taught me this important lesson sometime around three o'clock this morning. As I lay there attempting to breathe, becoming increasingly aggitated as I thought of how bum it would be to go into labor while fighting off these germs, I came to the realization that I had to stop griping and worrying about it. What I've come to know as my voice of piercing logic (which shows up maybe once a quarter, sometimes less) reminded me that I've had a fine immune system since birth, which has only become toughened and better armed since then, and that I had to trust it to do its thing. I couldn't take any medicine, which would only squelch a symptom or two anyway; I could only bow down to my immune system's instructions--blow nose, rehydrate, cover up, rest, etc.--and align myself in support of its complex workings. Then the voice of rare logic informed me it was a good damn thing I was sick, actually, because I was receiving a cram-course in trusting the intelligence of the human body. While that makes perfect sense, I think it runs counter-intuitive in a way. I think a lot of us want to wrap our heads around the process of something and thereby, somehow, gain a smidgen of control.

In a way, though, this is like reaching the peak of a roller coaster track and deciding you need to understand--intimately understand--how and where the track was built, which laws of aerodynamics apply, and what the guy at the control stand did to qualify as a carnie before you're willing to plunge. The car is plunging regardless. If you try to fight it, you'll most likely lose some vertical vomit and peeve off everyone around you who decided to move when the car moved and have a good time.

-- For the doctor, you spiff up areas of your body you never would've imagined paying attention to again. You cannot imagine making this same effort for a lusty, on-the-rebound Johnny Depp unless he were to become a doctor and take up touching you inappropriately between the styrups.

-- The dreams get zooey. When I told my sister-in-law that I'd dreamed of delivering, after all this time and effort, two puppies and a kitchen, she told me that she'd dreamed of having a litter of alligators while pregnant with my nephew. Jenny McCarthy, if I remember, dreamed of something green and drooling slime.

-- Many women, even the previously modelesque, end up packing on 50-70 lbs. The only ones who freak out about this are doctors who were taught to freak out in medical school and your occasional boomer, who was taught during her own pregnancy not to gain more than 15 pounds and to satisfy hunger pangs with a pack of Marlboro lights. If you happen to experience any part of your pregnancy during summer or, say, stand upright occasionally, you can attribute a happy hunk of your gain to water weight. You will feel like a sea cow, but you'll be in the company of a fine herd of empathetic sea cattle.

And that's all I have for now. Maybe it's part of that nesting instinct, but I've felt the need to write out a few of these pregnancy thoughts before everything changes and pregnancy becomes a strange, bodily memory. I don't plan any more gross ramblings about my body (my gestating body, anyway; there might very well be gross ramblings about my regular body still), but I will try to update regularly from here on out. I'll be home with baby girl for a while, and once we (led by she) fall into any sort of routine, I'll climb both timidly and sorely back in the writing saddle.

Stodgy News Killed the Campy News Star

2007-08-18T00:43:00.000-04:00

And so it was one Friday night, in the cross of a heat-storm, that creeped-out, perverse and otherwise prurient imaginations everywhere were shattered: The World's Only Reliable Newspaper went out of business. Yes, for those of you who haven't witnessed the tradegy yet yourselves, Weekly World News is now bust. The August 27th issue is now on stands, with a friendly persuasion to buy it and, hell, "sell on eBay tomorrow!" A black-and-white farewell to Bat Boy, Manigator, world's fattest cat, Big Foot, alien surgeons, still-kickin' and sea-logged descendants of Titanic victims, Kangaroo/Godzilla, disembodied but cheerful heads and so many more. At the fold of a classic relic, I'd like to suggest that anyone who writes for the fun of it (as everyone should -- this upstaging quest for money, chicks and immortality) could find no better idea bin than that special kind created from interspersing Weekly World and Time quips of journalism, back and forth until the realization becomes lightning bolt-clear: for our intents and purposes, they are the same damned thing.

Ah. If only I'd appreciated fly-eyed babies and nouvea Armageddons a little bit sooner. So, be advised: spend the $2.99, share it with a friend, try to smoke and drink something that'll make you belch while you enjoy

I'd also point out that there's now a blank space in the world of fictitious, pulp rags. And I mean, yes, common cures for the writing fever might be pulitzers, newberrys, Book Circles and a cubby on Oprah's shelf, but those trite buggers can only satisfy to an extent, I think. Isn't Weekly World what we all wanted to do when story-telling was still the freshest, hippest thing in the neighborhood? Wasn't it all about the wall-eyed beasty and the fish-pony hybrid ten times the size of a G.I. bulldozer?

Thanks for years of upstanding reports and great photography, Weekly World. You shall be missed.

Green Apple Alter

2007-08-05T16:46:00.000-04:00

Sorry so long since the last post; I found myself too haried to think straight or sideways or any other way for about a week: have been handling some of the business end of writing, trying to get my jungle-bodied yard in walkable condition and trying to stay awake past 7:00 at night. This baby-building business makes that last thing improbable, I'm finding out. Enough complaining though.

Here's a new something I wrote the other night while in a bath not even lukewarm anymore while listening to Disk One of the Eagles' Greatest Hits. Just so you know.

Some of the best times are rampant with rebirths, or reawakenings, or first-time-ever awakenings. The beauty of this phenomenon, whether it's conciously facilitated or not, makes for an understanding of those deep-South Bible tents -- roadside revivals meant for one and all who want to feel the ferver of Jesus washing over them as though in the font of immersion. As though for the very first time. For me, where once there was Jesus now are good words, sharp movies, woo-hoo witching music and moments of waking up to the smallest things. A green apple in a triangular patch of roadway this morning, at first matte and two-dimensional, next thing as freshly pungent as the woods during a lone, naked hike. There's a change in background noise and resting room temperature when it happens: when a quiet something comes to a head and, for it happening, you break bold and see what you didn't see before.

The green apple makes a relevant how-for here, I think, because seeing one of those on the same old patch of asphalt you're by now cloyed to doesn't technically transform the asphalt. Other than sprouting a sour leak if it's run over, the apple doesn't impose itself on the constitution of the road. Should you happen to be ready, uncaffeinated-lively and hushed and thereby able to catch the moment, the apple changes your perception. From my experience, the stages of this are accomplished in the most fleeting sort of way: recognition of Object A and Object Out-of-Context Apple, split second decision to hesitate rather than heave the moment backward into a catchall filing system more equate to the musky abyss, a hodge-podge rifling through feelings associated with any past memories of this or any combination similar to fruit-on-blacktop with the time-saving caveat that replay of the memories themselves is not requried, and then. Then there's the candy tossed to you for noticing this float in the parade: being inside the moment of seeing where the only distraction, if you wanted to be a bummer and call it one, is feeling excited to be in the moment of seeing.

Since I don't intend on sermonizing Buddhism here, I'll skip this whole next paragraph starting to flesh together in my head and just note that it's one of my favorite traits of the chummy, ol' Buddha that he suggested these moments as the handles and footholds of revival rather than anything more ceremonial. No need to burnish off the grit and grim; sing, drink, chew and bow accordingly; take it to an alter in suchandsuch a building at suchandsuch a pin-dotted hour because, as Rebecca Wells would agree, there are little alters everywhere.

Here's how Buddha, apples and Cameron Crowe all braid together in the name of writing, if you ask me: for far too much of the time, I find myself sucked onion-first into a filthy vacuum spool known as concern for the everyday. Something "big" happens and is thrown the bone of a comparable slice of attention, this pattern sweeps on unchecked, then the entire day has dissipated and what the overstimulated hell was the point of it? Happenings -- the cross-breeds between myself and the Out There -- dictated the employment of my mindspace. The solution I end up viewing to this discombobulated stench, again quite often, is that the output of my writing will shrivel, plumment and otherwise waste away if I don't control the input. No going with the flow and later taking out abject pissiness on inanimate objects. The output will be made into bright, healthy stock if aggregated in the input is good reading, time management and observation of spectacles known to astound and inspire all humankind. The last of those is hard to come by where I live, the former two easy enough. And they do help. At the same time, I think there's a discrepancy between semiconciously absorbing the goodies while waiting for backend rewards to kick in, and being ripe and teachable by the moments sought out.

This evening, even after the fantastic Apple Alter in the morning, I felt bone-tired and somewhat insecure hanging from the fray of my creative rope. I didn't want to mope about it, and I couldn't, it seemed, flip the current by sheer force of a demanding will. So I boiled some raspberry leaf tea and put in Almost Famous. It should be noted and then druggedly shouted from the rooftops (see Billy Crudup, his golden godliness) that I did these things knowing that I, rather than ephemeral "things", needed to change and feeling hungry with the enthusiasm of a baby bird open-mouthed to regurgitated worm entrails to be taught something by the moment. Moment here taking the form of Jason Lee, Kate Hudson and company.

I'm not and couldn't in any way write this to boast: really waking up is a rare enough thing with me that when it happens, I feel like I've been winked at by the flirtacious universe and have been privvy to a moment that needs writing about. Some people manage to stay awake and don't need to hum and hem and haw through the afterglow by writing about it. And goody-goody for them.

Point of the previous flotsam is: the inspirational movie, the Eagles song that makes the heart blush, green apple sitting there on black road, whatever -- all are similar to herbs that facilitate a certain action from the body's immune system, provoking the body to heal thyself, brother, but never performing the salvation themselves. Understanding the disease, selecting the herbs and getting your contaminated ass to bed so that all energy goes into herbal responsiveness would be the receiver's way of being ripe and teachable by the moment.

Arg. I think others will agree with this point: the longer you're steeped in the domineering activity, have-tos and negativity of the experience here, the more coughing up energy to handle it becomes like beating blood out of limestone. As soon as we get somethign down pat, it can morph into that unwanted incarnation of stale dogma, then we're warming up a spitfire under fake smiles just to bear this thing which was once a decent enough idea. Changing things never helps, except with the bare practicalities.

Hey, thanks Jane! I actually had a mad craving for some Obvious.

And it is obvious, but no less poetic and no easier for its purported transparency.

To me, the momentary alters are the best source of creative energy, best way to stay alert, relevant and attuned to the point and power of this whole writing business, which sometimes resembles crawling through a sludgepit.

Thanks for reading, take care & good-day.

Fear and Longing in '07.

2007-07-20T20:36:00.000-04:00

There's little way to convey exactly how bad tomorrow morning's going to smart after this fool thing I'm doing right now, which is writing at nigh on one o'clock in the morning when I've got to get up at eight. I could once handle that kind of sleepless jostling throughout the day with a hand and a foot tied behind me, but those days have evaporated probably for this particular lifetime. I am being astute enough to break all sleep-doctors' rule by bringing my work to bed, scribbling down on notebook paper a few thoughts to be translated to the ol' website at a later date and time, namely tomorrow after 5 p.m.

Though it would appear deep into the contrary from previous posts here, I'm really not one-note in my adoration of sexy, dead man writers. That said, this is another Jack Kerouac annotation. He emphasized the importance of practicing ceaselessly, in journals and letters, everything possible. Had he not drank himself to death in St. Petersburg in '69, or any year between then and now, he probably would've made a fine blogger.

Off that same idea, do any of you ever get indignant when thinking of the internet as the huge, hellacious, handsy toll-bridge it has seemed to become for all art? I occasionally do, usually right before something comes along to tweak my attitude.

This time, for instance, it was the reminder that reading Dharma Bums gave me of Hunter S. Thompson, his bodacious kingship. I started thinking about the easy, rhythmic pour his words tend ot make through a person's head, about the fact that he called Fear & Loathing a failed attempt at gonzo journalism -- therewith catapulting the standard for anyone else into the highest, most unmarketable realm of our galaxy. Thinking about the fact that the man never backed down and never got cordially out of the way.

I was personally afraid when he died, I remember that. I wore black for a good while and tried to imitate him, not to be some token WASP in mourning for a drug-crazed icon of the '60s and not only then but the lost generation of kids wishing for a retroactive, '60s adolescense. That motivation wouldn't have taken for a couple reasons. One, I am not and never have been Protestant. Two, I'm a complete teetolar as far as drugs, including most pharmaceuticals are concerned. While I had my fling with the sedated minds-eye, I was never a goner for Hunter and Raul and Dr. Gonzo because of their mind-jumbling habits. Thompson was the only real kind of journalist: the barnone, take no prisoners painlessly kind that also spared no private, emotional expense and kept no professional distance with an eye toward safety, toward leading a normal life when he wasn't writing.

This man, one of the last survivors to emerge from this stewpot called the Free Love/Beatnik generation, finally left us all gladly with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. I remember having an honest curiosity as to what would become of us without him. I myself am a fiction writer and haven't gotten that yodeling call of nature to take up journalism -- there are plenty better qualified for it -- but I could certainly appreciate the remarkable, hollowed feel of a void there.

I don't know about anyone else in the audience tonight, but for me fear is a darling topic. It perpetrates everything it possibly can and mostly looks dripping handsome while doing so. That's why I think pressing ones fingers on the engorged, throbbing vein of fear usually leads to something worth finding. Fear of the dark, quite often uneasiness being wholly alone with oneself and unstopped imagination. Fear of a world sapped of Hunter S. Thompson, most feasibly a conception that the wellspring feeding dedicated, ballsy writers of that variety was dried up when his blood was, or more accurately in this case when his blood was lapped up by the same fire making ash out of the rest of him right before he was packed into a fist-shaped container and blasted from a cannon.

There was a particular feeling, not associated causally with any substance or sexual pasttime, that this one cohesive group of writers was made up of writers who hook-line-sinker-and-all-worthy-boat-bits were writers, emersed and engrossed and poor, who wouldn't be talked out of it and charmed into the moores of a more regulated adulthood. Not that they were heady pubescents in the later years when they shouldn't have been, but that they gave up or gave up quickly on hand-me-down norms and instead gave the impression that they knew they were on the slicing edge of something worth living bravely for. Egotistical enough to think they could and should locate the truth of things, humble enough to most often consider themselves failed in the job of doing it.

Now, it could be that anyone who gives a damn about what they like to do romanticizes it above and beyond what's actually there, and maybe I've done that with the Berkely Boys. It's also possible that your perception of a thing and the material constitution of the thing -- the meeting place of these two -- is what actually defines the thing in concrete, classifiable terms for each and every person and therefore to hell with looking at any through a pair of more realistice-cum-cynical eyes.

The delusional or reasonable call to investigation and the gungho livelihood stitched to it, for me, were why writing lived on post its incarnation as a morbidly curious kid's daydream. And once and proudly there was a situation on the face, in the face, of our hypomanic Earth that seemed to embrace all that and to stoke it with charms of the rip-roaring, hedonistic if down-to-pocket-pennies life. A couple retractions I'll offer since clearly my rant tonight's more in favor of a long, hormonal weeping than logical thought. 1) If I've insinuated by the least, quivering fraction of a notion that I think quality was vacuumed after the smokiest generation, that was far from my intention. This is a longing based on the atmospheric more than the individual. There are damned good living individuals, many of whom I read and try to learn a skill or two from. 2) More important than everything preceding this-right-here sidenote possibly is the thought that the starter spores for a brave and sometimes-communal, sometimes-private lifestyle are the same as they were then. I don't think it was that, then, they came to the decision that they were alive, awake as jackrabbits with plenty of mental elastic during the only time in history and future that the world would ever be good, and that they therefore should take advantage. I think they knew to size up the spirit of the era and the illuminated minds all around them, knew how to go organically from there, living in the current while aptly judging it and calling it out for its incumbent horseshit.

My God, we can still do that. Even in the more box-shaped world of telecommuting and all that. Some recent bloggers I've checked out have reminded me of that, those who write well and often, pounding the living nightmare out of whatever medium's out there as to not be talked down to or forgotten about the moodiness of in-vogue communication channels. I've only recently picked up the bread and butter of this lesson, and I commend those who've been keeping the magic fresh for quite a while now.

I'm tired enough that if I don't shut up right now, I'll probably disintegrate and be glued back together as a bug-eyed zombie. Hoping to avoid that: goodnight.

Peace,
Jane

What's that simplicity wafting this way?

2007-07-16T22:58:00.000-04:00

I've had some million plus beefy issues circulating around in my head for a week or so now and have been intent, in my spare moments of thought today, on pinning any one of them down long enough to whittle it into words, logic, something more than freely associated tidbits. This hasn't entirely happened.

I can think of several reasons for this, the first being that I have become an addled incense fiend. For reasons I'm not aware of presently, I've learned to make a ceremony out of lighting it and watching it glare up at me and watching it enjoy the process of smoking since I myself don't partake anymore. Dumbo with his bird-plucking, I've halfway determined that nothing can be done without this vaporous scent stick working on itself next to me. I walk into the room when it's burning, and I smell Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson and the very Buddha within. So this excuse doesn't rely on the case that, stripped of this emblem of my godless religion* as I sometimes find myself during the work day, I cannot think in a functional way and therefore cannot form an opinion of the massive troubles of our world. To the delightful contrary, I've come home determined to take them apart and piece them back together and have found myself unmotivated to do so because my house smells good. When my house emitts the vague aroma of dishes that need to be cleaned or a past-date something or other rotting in the garbage can, it's easy to glare in the beady-eyed face of American fear, hypocrisy, spellbound motion and other such sizeable issues gut-poisoning mankind from one side of Earth to the other. Yeah.

When a return to sanctuary is as simply commanded as this (Light Incense = Calm Down One Bleeping Moment), why only market those bits that are puzzling at the outset and sometimes jackass-ugly, warted, twisted, that kind of thing? There are plenty of things simple, fun and there for the sampling. It brings to mind one of those altruisms that makes sense immediately and in the way that some things make sense retroactively, from the moment you hear them through eternity backwards: that in whatever interaction, the complicated and complicating factor is our perception of it. The thing we happen to be disturbed, thrilled or riddled out of our minds with simply is what it is, the effect of a cause that was the effect of a cause, something that could be axed and splintered into more than a handful of separate parts, which each represent some effect of a cause which . . . yadda, yadda, yadda. So, when approaching something with perception already lit on angry fire, we've essentially set ourselves at distempered odds with the most primal, scientific process known to nature. The only process, when you think about it.

This is not at all in the light of undermining actual efforts to change unsavory outcomes; that, after all, is a fairly clear way to synch with and step into the scientific process: studying both cause and effect, dispassionately judging that something needs to happen differently in the sequencing of this thing and here's how I can fit in to be a working gear toward that end. Nothing wrong with that. Everything right about that.

No, I'm speaking for probably at least one or two others out there and unfortunately myself when I say that sometimes things are complicated because anything else feels counterintuitive. Drama and trauma are their own glitzy brands of fun, receivng all the lipservice from public t.v. to Sunday school as deviant when they are, in fact, more mainstream than the vanilla-wafer ruffle around banana pudding. And what freak doesn't make banana pudding that way?

I'll probably pick up on this next time because it taps on the hood of something I've had in mind for a little while now which is refreshingly vanilla-flavored and without the rhinestone suit and jewels and other get-up of complication, something sitting on the cross-section of two good conversations I've had recently on the general issue of why the world is batty and why the world seems batty.

For this evening, suffice it to say that there appears to be plenty of middle ground between ignoring the imperfect swatches of our life experience and being bossed around assaultively by them. No one needed me to say this, I'm sure, but you probably did desperately need me to boast the fact that my short-cut to this middle-realm is every bit as simple and unskilled as setting a cattail-looking splinter of wood on fire and huffing it. Speaking of which, it has run out. I'm going to reload and do that other kind of writing, the for-pay stuff that unrepossessed cars are made of. No offense. =)

Everyone take care, and please share your thoughts and comments.

Peace,

Jane

*This is not something I'm pulling from behind my earlobe and saying. It's one of the "couple umpteen trillion sextillion infideled and busted up unnumberable number of"** reasons to check out Moral Orel on Adult Swim. You can click on the link on my site here, but it will do you little good as it leads to a site with a clip of one single, solitary show. Not good enough. Get your hands on the entire season and watch it with warm peanut butter cookies and whole milk. Anyone who's ever attended church or known someone who has will either hate or love it -- in my estimation, that's a money show.

**Kerouac, from Dharma Bums. Not plugging him, because he would be insulted and I don't insult men I intend to shake up from the dead and marry one day.

The Unpopular Hollywood Love Story

2007-07-13T16:22:00.000-04:00

So, I've recently had the good fortune of serving as an alternate juror on a murder trial. And in between writing that opening sentence and writing this one, I've checked the local newspaper website to see if there was yet a verdict in the case. This is the bum side of being an alternate: you're able to hear the evidence like a legitimate juror but then, as deliberations are about to begin, the judge notes that the original twelve are all in attendance, alive, awake, that kind of thing, and that therefore your services are no longer needed. He says it nicely, smiling at this point and most probably gooned on the prospect of not having to sit there in the judicial frock much longer that day.

I'm disenchanted to report that the verdict in the case is not the one I would have fought for had they let me have my say in the room with eleven others, and maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's not. Hard to say.

During the trial, as I observed the other jurors to be of vibrant skin tone and miraculously lacking in the sniffles and hacking common to our year-round cold season, I didn't think I'd have a voice in the only say-so that really counted. I still took a notebook full of case details down and stayed alert through the whole shebang, but, based the cumbersome health of the real jurors, I also thought it would be okay for me to take a set of my own notes -- those on nitty-gritty court details sometimes lost in Law & Order. This is helpful to me because a lot of what I write revolves around crime and punishment, and there's nothing like having an intimate vantage point to actual proceedings.

The next hefty project I take on will actually be one containing a trial, so I knew I'd personally get something out of the experience besides satisfaction at having performed my civic duty, contributed to a smoothly running United Courts of America and so on. Something else kind of independently arose from my firsthand huffing of the legal fumes though, a short story that started writing itself in my head as I was driving home from my last day in court and mapping out what kind of goodies I could bake (which would be none at all -- my stove is gimp) for the defense attorney who had stolen my heart during the trial.

This short-story-to-be tied itself together after I read the verdict. Without rehashing details of the case that would bore anyone who wasn't there and apparently bored many people who were, I can say that a man was charged with first degree murder in a case that had no eye witnesses, no physical evidence linking the defendant to the crime scene, no murder weapon and, obviously, no concession to guilt. It was an emotional case. Probably on the same page as everyone else, I thought the defendent was likely involved. It seemed like more than a half-assed possibility. Yet, it was a circumstantial trial with a pothole or two along the circumstantial pavement, insomuch as it was trying to lead up to the positive i.d. of this man as a murderer.

While it's hard to feel spiritually raped at the idea that a man who probably needed a good what-for in the legal sense will be off the streets for a few years, I did find myself feeling whiny and hedged in immediately after finding out the results. I thought of what a good story it makes when the legal system is creatively navigated to set free a person who did what any of us would like to do in his situation. I didn't just love A Time to Kill because her awesomeness Sandra Bullock was in it and Matthew McConaughey was sweatin' the sweat of a southern man. It was a great story of the underdog vs. the system.

I think there's a less dramatic, more ambiguous story that comes out of this experience. It's a sort of mourning not for a vigillante who might be sliced into ribbons by the legal system, but mourning for the judicial system itself when it's ignored in pursuit of an end result that makes everyone feel good. I don't know how to feel about that. I know that I was very much persuaded by two things the defense attorney said, and not because I was already slam-drunk in love at this point -- the love filled in afterward. He said, (1) If you don't follow the statures of our law, if you don't hold the State to their burden of proof in a case, the system breaks down, and (2) Would you want to be convicted based on this evidence?

So, it looks like the next heroin in line will be one of those back-row, courtroom junkies, salivating after her own law degree or a particular somebody with one and she'll try to untangle the snafu better than I have.

Of course, in any situation where you're upset that the existing system is in jeopardy, it's more than civic but human duty to ask whether the existing system is adequate, lame, antiquated, rank cat litter that needed to be switched for fresh years ago or what. And while I love getting muddy in that kind of question, this one -- to me -- doesn't require a lot of consideration. It's a system for human beings fully capable of examining evidence, not one designed for the divinely tinged superbodies we sometimes wish we were. It's one that holds an accuser to the full responsibility of proving guilt so that we don't tiptoe around fearing the torch should someone say they saw us outback going one toke over the line, sweet Jesus, with the devil. Of course, it also has to protect and ensure safety to the greatest degree possible. The last part of that sentence is the part that imposes limit, and it's a limit that I think most of us hate to accept. We'd like to prevent rather than just punish when evidence of the need for punishment has been heaped and heaped on us. We'd like to show all the foul-mouthed pidgeon-stools with nothing better to do than, probably, cause some irreparable trouble that it ain't gonna fly. But jurors are never the gods they'd like to intone, they are humans fully capable of examining evidence, along with a handful or two of horseshit and some lawyer theatrics, in order to determine what rings logical and what does not, and what justifies removing the freedom of a fellow human being.

Nothing can be simple.

Actually. Opening a can of Spaghetti-Os is simple. And it's every bit as unsatisfying as not picking the meat off some of these weird but everyday issues, just accepting that that's the way things are and shall be, amen.

By the way, I thought I'd have something to say after all this about how it felt to sit diagonally and in close proximity to a murderer, and that I could talk about the sideways bend the world took on while I was there. The woozy and creeped-out feelings expected didn't show up this time, though, maybe because I was not "thoroughly satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt" that there was a murderer in the room. According to the prison phone calls we listened to, he did have one filthy trap on him, but as the defense attorney said, "Call his grandma and tell her to wash his mouth out with soap. Don't have him teach your Sunday school class. Don't like him, but don't convict him of murder."

That's all. If I've presented enough evidence for you to form an opinion, please, please, express it. =)

Indeed, Jane: Why?

2007-06-17T23:54:00.000-04:00

One day . . . I will write something interesting. But, today is not that day. That could near 'bout constitute the whole blog right now, but I'm expounding on the gripe, because I have a few minutes until I fall over asleep, and I've just been too damn perky lately, magically managing to get on my own nerves.

This is going to be brief and awkward. That's my guess anyway. Nothing important's happened at all, but Let Me Tell You about how my writing went yesterday. It all started . . .

So, night before last I got way too little sleep and overcompensated in the morning for coffee. By this, I mean that I incorrectly dosed it (yeah, my mathematical acumen doesn't hit fever pitch even when I'm at my most alert), drank a Campbell's Soup mugful in about two gulps, got another, then sat down and saw that I was scheduled to write the most serious, critical, emotionally difficult scene in my novel. It made me want to laugh, which is now reminding me of when my friend, Sundae, and I got the giggles at a friend's wake, which I'm going to say he would've appreciated greatly. He was all handsome smiles and fun balance--wakes usually aren't representative. So, in this state . . . I decide I can't write. And switch to present tense, no warning. Ha ha. I excersize madly to let out some of the caffeinated energy, which works enough for me to collapse and write one paragraph and receive the distinct message from god/theuniverse/myinnerperfectlyclearconciousness informing me that I have failed my characters on so many levels. I develop a spontaneous gratitude for the fact that I do not have children. I consider being sterilized. I consider what life would be like as a man. (No connection--free range thought.) I consider that if I were a man, I'd want to look like Matthew Gray Gubler, who plays Dr. Spencer Reid on Criminal Minds who has captured my undying adoration and misplaced breath every Wednesday at nine, and who has been mentally, inexpricably cast as a character in what I'm writing. So, it has all come together for me now, and Not Just Because I've knocked myself into the arctic, outer reaches of schizophrenia with the Maxwell House that, in retrospect, I should have just snorted. Would've saved time on that whole waiting-for-it-to-cool thing. But, I'm feeling confident that in my hours of staring at a single, inadequate paragraph on the screen, that I have reached the valuable conclusion that if time ever speeds backwards to spit me into this terrestrial realm reboxed, so to speak, as a male and not only that but gives me full creative control with my own looks . . . and voice (I love the dude's voice, too) . . . that I am thoroughly prepared for the situation. Not that I want to be a man; femininity, or my half-assed take thereon, has worked great for me so far and I don't really think there was a mistake of nature when my DNA was being basted together. But, you can still see as where this all needed to be ironed out.

Today went better. A tad more sleep last night, less coffee this morning. Suddenly realized I remember how to multiply fractions while squinting at the coffee can. Wrote six pages. Went to the day job to show of my newly dyed hair to my gay co-worker, Larry, who just fell up outside himself with praise. Oh! And this is unrelated to everything else (in the world), but it's great no matter how you look at it. I was in Books-A-Million the other day with a couple friends who shall remain anonymous just in case they care--doubtful. I was looking at the true crime section to, you know, see what's new and hot in crime these days. True Crime is next to Politics, which is what it is, nothing to unbraid yourself over. I get to the bottom shelf of True Crime and, while scouring, allow my hand to fall on this outstretched book that I'm not looking at because it falls more toward politics than crime (but, my, what a fine line that can be . . .). Then, I look. My hand is on The Lesbian Kama Sutra. I look next to it. Lesbian Erotica. Volumne II. A subtle one titled "Cunt" which makes for some delectable book-back laud: "I was deeply touched by Cunt." "Cunt changed the way I look at the world." Looked further. All gay and lesbian books, all sandwiched between crime and politics. And for the one that made my heart just want to pee itself (that's the way to get my heart to piss itself, by the way, in case you ever need to know much like with previously mentioned if-I-were-male scenario: unintentional irony): an instructive gay sex book wedged next to: "What's Wrong With America Today." I had the urge, brisk but brief, to remove its pages one by one and slip them in the front cover of every men's health, car and hunting magazine in the store. I did not do this. I am disappointing wreckage. And tired. And tense-hopping badly. Goodnight, and selah.

Suck on that, Folgers

2007-06-17T23:35:00.000-04:00

I have a good endorsement for Maxwell House Smooth Blend I'd like to share with you. I spent today in a much-needed writing binge and, even though I got a good night's sleep before, decided it would help my case to make a whole pot of coffee and drink it by myself. For a while, I felt like Rhode Island in Miss Congeniality after she's had another one of those "tubey things" and says, "I don't feel a thing!" Then, a few interesting thingamajiggers happened.

1. The letter d on my keyboard started to stand out from all the others, but not as in it swam from it slot and danced in front of my eyeballs. I just became hyperaware of its existence and could not convince myself that this wasn't so important. I kept on working with very little interruption, but anytime my fingers were fleetingly lifted from the keys, it struck me that I didn't seem to be typing many words with the letter d in them. In fact, it seemed to be getting the runt's share of keystrokes and this felt wrong in a way that I shall never be able to describe. It called out to me to be included in words that, you know, just didn't need it. I did, though, find myself mispelling an inordinately large percentage of my words and having to go back and edit out the extra d's. Now, there's something illogical about this. More accurately, there are 10 - 12 things illogical about this, but the one that caught my attention was the fact that in the same keyboard placement based on your homerow hand position, only mirrored, is the letter k. I would dare say that k is used less often than d, and yet I saw it making no stink about the situation.

2. An ant or mosquito or something (I didn't see it) has bitten me repeatedly. It's either that or my organs are so scared of new lightning speed of my blood that they feel like they're under attack and have started hammering welts in my skin in an attempted to get out.

3. I am surprisingly mellow on the inside for all this. I did meditate today. And take my Ginkgo.

Anyway, the writing part went well.

Hope everyone's night was as interesting as mine.