March Madness

The Department of Motor Vehicles, Los Angeles. CA 2017

My understanding of what's going on in this country is shrinking, and I find myself opening up articles, reading a few sentences and then sighing in exasperation or grimacing in disgust or taking in breaths to allay anxiety or rolling my eyes heaven-ward in bewilderment.

Are we supposed to understand what's going on?

I hate to say it, but I rely almost exclusively now on acronyms to express myself in this area. WTF?

I remember this quote by the great 18th century satirist, Jonathan Swift:

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

and

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed. 

We're all Gullivers here, methinks.

Sophie went back to school today for the first time in weeks, other than the day I brought her in for her birthday. I don't feel like going over what's been going on because, frankly, I'm so tired of the whole shebang, and I imagine you are, too. Suffice it to say that she's trending better even as we slowly wean her from the hideous benzodiazepine and supplement more aggressively with THC. I'm trending better right along with her because you know where she stops, I begin or where I stop, she begins and it's a fine, fine line. I also got acupuncture from our beloved Dr. Jin.

Yes. THC, baby. The psychoactive stuff that I myself have not partaken of since the halcyon days of college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. If I'd had any idea that I'd be administering a pale green gold oily version of it to my seizing and drug-addled daughter thirty-plus years later, I would have smoked more and studied less. Hell, I would have joined in with something more than tolerance when my boyfriend and his housemates watched the Tar Heels play basketball with the sound turned down and the bootleg Grateful Dead tapes turned up.

Anywho.

If you hear Old Racist Alabama Elf-Man Sessions or Old Up Big Pharma's Ass Georgia Cracker Price make any cracks about medical marijuana being a joke, tell them I'm going to beat the crap out of them in my mind. My tiny little mother mind™ knows few boundaries, is exasperated, disgusted, anxious and bewildered and would love a good red neck upon which to project its conflicts. Just a little March Madness.

Speaking of conflicts and the Tar Heels, did ya'll watch that game yesterday? It was a nail-biter that I watched with my sons and Sophie. March Madness for sure. This is a picture of when we had fallen behind Arizona after an early 17-point lead. I have quite effectively brainwashed my sons to be ardent Carolina basketball fans, and they were nervous wrecks.

Here's a video of the action when things got really tense at the end, right before I began to fold the boys' clean socks into balls, a task that I turned over to them when they were about five and seven years old. So many boring white socks I thought I'd go mad, wrote Virginia Woolf. I thought I was going to have a stroke or a heart attack watching the last few minutes of the game and even folded The Brother's laundry and smoked a few cigarettes in between bong hits.*

Between the not smoking too much THC in college, giving Sophie enough THC to help her brain today and parenting my boys to cheer ardently for a team that I love despite not knowing a damn thing about the sport -- well -- I'm going to humble brag here about my parenting skills. I am bewildered, to say the least.















* Just kidding. Virginia Woolf did not write that.

O, would Carlos Danger be John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

I took down my snarky post of Anthony Weiner the other day, despite the intelligent discussion it fostered. It made me want to take too many showers, squirm too much in the proverbial seat. We doth protest too much. I put it back up this morning, though, because -- what the hell?

This morning, I found the following poem on my poetry calendar, written by an English poet, satirist and courtier of King Charles II's Restoration court. The Restoration was a period in the seventeenth century where the king and his court reacted to the constrictions of the Puritans (and Oliver Cromwell) with hedonism and -- well -- merriment. Charles II had no legitimate heirs, but he did have more than a dozen illegitimate children by scores of mistresses. John Wilmot, on the other hand, died of venereal disease when he was 33.

The poem is startling rich, hilarious in language -- at least to me -- and not a little shocking. It made me wonder whether the lurid texts and photos of today might be the "poetry" one reads in the future.

Reader, what say you?

The Mock Song

I swive as well as others do,
I'm young, not yet deformed,
My tender heart, sincere, and true,
Deserves not to be scorned.

Why Phyliss then, why will you swive,
With forty lovers more?
Can I (said she) with Nature strive
Alas I am, alas I am a whore.

Were all my body larded o'er,
With darts of love, so thick,
That you might find in ev'ry pore,
A well stuck standing prick;
Whilst yet my eyes alone were free,
My heart would never doubt,
In am'rous rage, and ecstasy,
To wish those eyes, to wish those eyes fucked out.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
(1647-1680)

Culmination Cupcakes, Vile Comments and Pablum

Chocolate and Vanilla Cupcakes with Fondant Checkers

This blog appears to be turning into a superficial baseball and baking fest with a bit of eggsex education thrown in. Where are the grim reports of disability, shitty government and seizures? Where's the poetry? Where's the politics and parenting? Over the last week, I've not only gone to four baseball games, but I've also baked and decorated nearly ten dozen cupcakes and three cakes. I've got four dozen more to go, so anything pithy or angst-driven will have to wait. I'll hope you'll hang around if you're more of the mind for the serious. If you're in to that sort of thing, I was recently baited by a vile commenter who calls himself skunkfeather on a reactionary conservative blog that I visit every week or so to see what the crazies are up to. He uses the word libtard regularly and sort of drives home or confirms my perhaps cynical belief that all the talk of needing more civil discourse and we have more in common as Americans than not is pablum at best and bullshit at worst. I didn't take the bait -- except for here, of course, because I doubt he comes around and seeing my name in his comment made me throw up a little in my mouth (an expression that I usually despise) and want to purge.

OK.

Here's a photo of a cake I made for someone for Father's Day. It's chocolate with dark chocolate ganache filling and white buttercream.

And here's a quote from one of the world's greatest satirists, Jonathan Swift:

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

And this:

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed. 

Reader, how was your weekend?

Monty Python, Satire and David Sedaris for President

Monty Python's famous sketch "The Mouse Problem"

I've seen him four or five times and have laughed so hard that I'm folded over in my seat. I've read nearly all his essays and books. David Sedaris manages to be hysterically funny and poignantly sweet with a good dose of black, black and sometimes over-the-top vulgar humor thrown in. Yesterday I read a brief essay he wrote in Vanity Fair online that made me laugh. As the political process heats up, I'm determined to stay out of it. I'm going to pretend I'm French and not pay any attention until weeks before election day (that's their LAW). C'est dommage pour les autres candidates. But I'll listen to David Sedaris.

Here's my favorite part:

If we want to get out of this mess we’re in, we’ve got to think outside the box. On the one hand, we have immigrants pouring across the border, and on the other, the price of gas is going through the roof! I say we kill two birds with one stone and have illegal Mexicans push our cars. Canadians too, and why not? They’re on our land, so can’t we punish them as we see fit? Another example: You have babies born addicted to crack and meth, kids who will never be able to think straight, no matter how much money we throw at them. At the same time we have streets blighted with potholes. I’m not suggesting that we train these children to fill the potholes, but that we fill the potholes with these children, just stuff them right down there and cover them with asphalt. Then we take the money we’ve saved and put it toward the deficit.


I know, it's rude and outrageous. But I think Sedaris is a satirist in a long line -- Swift, Orwell, Twain, Huxley, Heller, Monty Python, Stewart -- and the satirists always get it right.


If you like your Michelle Bachmanns skewered, read the whole piece here.