Author: Inthegazeoftheother

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So Many Ways to Lose a Daughter

 

 
When they were little, headless operations I called them, 

toddling about with no motion detection sensors, 

oblivious to the science of mass in flight against

the immovable object, cause and effect, win and lose, 

I feared losing their pristine purity, their soft roundness

drenched in new flesh, irradiant, to rocks and bumps

in the playground grass or sandbox, opening into

split lips or knobby eggs on their foreheads. I feared

losing them to cars in free fall, driven by madness 

up on my lawn, taking my children with them, like 

the newspaper clipping in the local Starbucks report.

I feared flus and asthma, pneumonia, broken bones

and stitches they could contract or suffer with 

complication and then die in my arms or in their sleep.

I dreamed of kidnappings and wanderings off in 

supermarkets or department store aisles, lost, lost, lost.

I walked them to school the block and a half every day.

And when they were in middle school, I dreaded

the treacherous row of absent-minded, harried

dropping-off moms vs. the brainless, twit t’weeners on

bikes, laughing and careening their wheels into traffic,

caring little for mortality the daily drive threatened

like that boy and his friend on a bike, on the same road,

on the way to school two days before the school year

start, picking up his schedule, leisurely, laughing, 

peddling, looking back at his lagging friend just before

the swerve, the truck, the texting driver, the hit–gone.

I never let them ride their bikes to school, not with that.

I did not want to lose them to twenty somethings’ texts.

Just like I did not want to lose them to drugs, drunk

drivers and AIDS, cancer, concussions or accidents.

I did not want to lose them. And I lost them any way.

To friends, trends, music and driver’s licenses, to

social media and idealism, fierce loyalty and pride of

a generation angry in the wake of destruction their

parents have left them to navigate, chlorinate the gunk

of polluted finance and corrupt opinions and falsity, 

falsity everywhere. I lost them to independence and

opportunity elsewhere, greener, colder, blue-skyed

distant and lonely, free and home away from home.
 

credit: arthistoryarchive.com

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Wild, Weird and Wonderful: Trip inside my vagina

Okay, so it’s not my vagina, much to the disappointment or relief of my readers.

So much to be said here but the video says it all. What every growing girl should know, beginning with honest names about body parts, celebrated not shamed. Had I been taught about orgasm as a child, or at least exposed to the concept  pre-understanding, I would not have had to go through unnecessary anxiety and sexual misgivings affecting my relationships.

Why is this such a difficult matter, educating ourselves and our children about their bodies so that they may be more responsible and responsive adults? Why must the idea of a “love your body” explicit video be so revolutionary?

Huffpost’s Poussy Draama’s Mobile Doctor’s Office is Challenging Sex Ed Norms in America merits a reading even if only for the video and colorful pictures injected into an investigative journalism piece on wacky personalities with the right message.

Author Priscilla Frank introduces Poussy Draama, a performance artist, gyno specialist and educator who roams the country introducing those ready to learn to love the beloved female body (enough loving of men’s has been the story of HIStory, she claims), not the one that merely makes babies but the one that has so much more power and pleasure.

She enlightens youngsters through her bizarre videos and also appears live to help groups of women take pictures of their cervixes when she is not celebrating all of the names for vagina. Hey, why wasn’t my personal favorite, twat, on that list? Must be a French thing.

 The bizarro TV show, aimed to teach kids about sexuality and consent, features tripped out vagina suits, lots of rainbows and even more body positivity. Poussy Draama — the babe on the right, in the video above — is a performance artist, a sexologist, an alter-gynecologist and a witch. Not witch, like, black hat and broomstick, though. Witch like witch doctor or healer. “What I do hasn’t much to do with magic,” Draama explained to The Huffington Post. “It’s witchcraft, in the way of empiric, experimental and politically engaged healing.” 


Although in medium and technique Draama’s work is all over the map, her subject matter consistently revolves around educating others on sexuality in an un-authoritative, open-minded and, duh, feminist manner. “Womxn are overrepresented and underrepresenting,” Draama said. “You know what I mean? And as an artist, I don’t wanna play the ‘male-gaze game’ so I have to be careful, cause everything tends to drive you to do so.” (Note: The spelling of “womxn” is intentional, per Draama’s choice.)

The risk takers who challenge the “norm” by exposing sedimented attitudes expose themselves to ridicule even as they gather fame. You know those insecure ones (you know who you are) who do not like to be discomfited will doff off old Poussy as a whack rather than appreciate her creativity and spirit for a good cause.

Fingers crossed for her (riffing on the article opener there).

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Fær

 

 
The hordes arrive, in families of twos and threes, all nationalities,

as I sip tepid tap water coffee, thirsty for succor in this jailhouse sweet shop.

Regulars, strangers, all alike, from the gym, retail store and pet trainer next door, 

all drop by at an appointed day of the week coinciding with their weekly habits and chores. 

And they ask the same questions, and look around with the same concentrated effort of choice.

The anesthetics of the daily hum through a storefront window surpass surreality–mere abstraction.

 
“They have too many choices,” one Yelp reviewer complained. 

A desperate failure for sure, this absence of the given, circumscribed, delimited and allotted. 

Failure abounds, thrives in the cracks and on roof tops, announced, derided, ridiculed and feared.

Professional success is a teflon mask of muscular smile, amused at fun house mirrors while

a stranger looks inside herself and winces at the truth: faking bemused stares.

Not a single one, no one is good enough, not since Caesarian born fær thundered alive.

 
A curious beacon, this failure, negative space, vertical inversion, binary split, 

a vacancy, trip, stumble, snafu and inferno too–blazing bailiwick’s forest funeral.

Fiery mourning howl weeps losses unfathomable but not forlorn forever.

No one stumbles on a pavement crack unscathed, eternal-glimpsed of false stability:

reinstating an upright illusion, death defying gravity-riven, absolved, re-calibrated,

restored but bludgeoned awake by the faltering blow, newly armed in science or religion.    

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Back to School

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I cannot recall the last time I sharpened pencils, yet I smell them.

Crayons disappeared from the house five years ago when the kids stopped using them, schools dumping color-in-the-lines after fifth grade. But I can almost feel their waxy paraffin between my thumb and forefinger, leaving that oily residue that stays way long.

Like a return to the new, the school year starts in the season of dying.

The dissonance, I sense it like spasmodic leg quaking that tremulates chairs while calming nerves.

“It’s show time!” I mimic the movie star’s manic Joker’s smile as I fly out the door. No chorus line.

Yet not the performance but the insistence that erodes: “Wake up!!” I want to jolt them in stentorian holler as my head spins and spits pea soup—in a virtual world they recognize.

In real time, I merely cajole, advise, admonish and filibuster, all for their awakening to themselves, their process and their world, adrift in someone else’s expectation.

 

credit: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/0OwImLxeoFI/maxresdefault.jpg

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Wrestling with brooding thoughts and ahimsa

 

 
So what, do the Ashley Madison hackers or “malicious crackers,” if you will, believe in some moral equivalency? Is it justified to harm unfaithful spouses because the victims of their hack are deemed by their culture to be morally bereft? Pretty easy to hide behind a screen and commit malice, not caring about the innocents in the bombing fallout, like children and unsuspecting spouses. Seems to me sociopathic, flexing God complexes by rejected social misfits, more likely. Hard to come up with a sympathetic narrative or righteous cause.

No, they cannot be blamed for subscribers’ suicides as something more goes on in the lives of suicides than fallout from exposure by affairs. Psychological destruction is already part of those poor souls’ lives. But the old but-for test could prove damning. But for the exposure by the hackers, the suicides may have not been pushed over the edge of the precipice, maybe found a way to seek help before grasping on to the no-hope ledge and sliding down.

A travesty seen up close, as well for the hackers who now can live as the hunted. That treacherous misstep or march outside the law is one in a long road into forever curtailing freedom so taken for granted like air. Even if they get away with it. Their freedom has been delivered up to forces greater than their prank, crime and self-serving “morality.” They are no Edward Snowdens. 

They remind me of the elementary school kids I grew up with who threw M80’s out of the school bus window on to the lawns of random properties along the bus path. The vandalists just wanted to stir things up, satisfy an urge in themselves to destroy something. 

Isolation and independence are an illusion, the distortion of the un-self-realized minds, like rowdy, selfish school children. The deluded hackers are learning about the laws of cause and effect in their god-i-hope-so-for-their-mothers’-sakes invisible hideouts. I am hard pressed to wish them well.

 

credit: regmedia.co.uk

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Ashley Madison and American Hypocrisy 


What do I think about the Ashley Madison come Josh Duggar (a name I first heard yesterday) “scandal”? Not too much. Surprising coming from someone whose blog is themed on the mistress in that word’s narrowest and broadest sense. But I have written a lot on the subject of infidelity from all sides, and much boils down to the same recurring ideas:

People get hurt–are hurt–and that saddens me. Luckily, counseling resources for the infidelity-wounded exist. Some have called those hurt by infidelity, victims, like the wife of this Duggar, publicly humiliated by someone who apparently spoke out in defense of “family values.” A shame, but the story often unfolds as more complicated than good guys and bad guys, abusers and victims.

People are not honest. Relationships survive on honesty, an ongoing practice that most are not dedicated to but expect from others.

America’s hypocrisy and sexual dysfunction fosters dysfunctional relationships. It is no secret that what we say what we want is not what we want–or do. I featured this article from The Daily Beast before, but it reports the unsurprising facts and bears repeating:

 

As Pew reports, extramarital affairs are generally condemned worldwide but the U.S. still seems to be uniquely moralistic about them. In fact, most major developed nations in the world are more accepting of infidelity than the U.S., including Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Spain, and Japan.

In France, a mere 47 percent of adults find extramarital affairs unacceptable, which is less an endorsement of their practice and more a reflection of a widespread refusal to think of it as “a moral issue.” In America, sex is a moral language by default; abroad, less so…
 

All this being said, Americans’ sexual words do match up with their sexual actions in some special cases. Fifty-seven percent of men and 65 percent of women approve of having babies outside of marriage, although CDC estimates show that only 40 percent of all births are to unmarried women. Divorce rates appear to be on their way down in the 21st century while acceptance of divorce has been steadily increasing.

But these are some of the only realistic moral attitudes in a country where sexual attitudes and sexual behavior tend to be dissonant. And although this mismatch might be mystifying in and of itself, the probable reasons behind it are not: the United States has the largest population of Christians of any country and is one of the only deeply religious wealthy nations in the world. That math—like most Americans—does itself.

Ashley Madison? Only in America.
 

credit: johnmbecker.com

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The Joy Girl

  

A petulant smile, upper lip quiver, 

never-ending streams of jubilant free

pours the honeyed golden, emerald eyes

smoked in calm to hide the sparkle speaks,

“I want…take me…so much to give…but I fear,”

all in fragility, fresh and tainted only at the fringes,

circling the crystal center yet to form whole, complete,

she deftly ball-toes the river logs spinning a strange land.

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Pratyahara

  
Cogs turn, whistles blow

feet shuffle, flee apace as

riders jump, arms akimbo;

leaves tremble, windswept 

ciliated born sussuration 

summersaulting walkways

of pavements steam, misty 

chlorophyl wafts green

lungful chunky clumps; 

engines hiss, track clacks

spine smacking clamor,

light beams rip clouds,

shredding skyward eyes,

tossing the bustle by

yard by yard, square on,

as chorus-ful chaos blooms

in the stillness of notice,

as I thread a hurricane’s eye.

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Jazz in a Silent Movie

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Feet moving inside my heart, knees a jostle,

Jazzin’ up my earbuds in java land amidst

Caffeinated denizens sporting mute stares,

A secret brain wrinkle, wet and colonized,

Winking the orbital pulse, steady sockets,

Jitters at the base of the spine, so nearly

A sign, trembling imperceptibly, in a race

Frantic fingers tap, tap, tap, heads nodding

As screen-lit faces wait, lapsed and relapsed;

Barristas squat, twist, shake, pour and squirt

A macchiato merengue whipping up smiles

While Chet Baker croons “C’est Si Bon”

To a rolling silent movie, my morning perch.

 

 

credit: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/jvXywhJpOKs/hqdefault.jpg

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