Would You Like a Cup of Tea?

One of our houseguests this year, Sasha, told us the following story:
While working on a permaculture farm in upstate New York he got a job painting houses with another broke radical kid, a native of this particular town. As they painted they talked growing up and how they planned to stay true to their radical teenage years and still be grownups. Sasha said that he was working on a support group for people who shared his mental illness and learning more about enviromentally sustainable agriculture. Then he asked his coworker about his plans, "I'm thinking about running for mayor" he said. "Wouldn't that be hilarious?"
This became a brief legend among east coast anarchists after the kid in question a) ran for mayor and b) won!. Then he was in the New York Timesfor an awesome loophole exploiting scheme that led to Cara's friends Rob and David getting married.
Congratulations Rob and David!

My personal guru was up from Toledo this weekend to attend a conference in his official capacity of much-beleagured civil servant. He's in a foul mood at the city of Toledo to begin since they both cut his pay and fined him $300 for having unsightly large sunflowers. The irony is pretty vicious since filling Toledo with giant sunflowers is supposedly his job.
The guru brought us a collection of canning jars and explained is great and inspiring detail how easy it would be for us to start living like reasonable people. It's a special kind of hypnotism the guru has. I sit there and think, "yes, we could gut the third floor and install solar panels. It would be so easy." Then about an hour later I remember that we're not have as competent as the guru makes us out to be. We waste our time on ridiculous construction projects... and naps.
After watching convention coverage K. is all about turning his bicycle into a horsecycle by attaching a cardboard horses head to the front. I support this but I'm afraid it will have to wait until K. regains us of his arm.

oh, p.s. There might be some spelling mistakes because the new kitten keeps stepping on the keyboard.

I have a new kitty! M. found him hiding in the barnyard today and scooped him up, saving him from almost certain death at the hands of roosters, wild dogs and rats, all of which are much larger than him. The kitty almost went to Kinga's youngest daughter who told M., "we've always wanted a kitten". Fortunatly for me, Kinga's response was something like, "Who's this 'we'?"
So here's little Tobey's vital statistics: weight, 1.1 lbs; age, about 6 weeks; flea status, swarming with them. The vet dribbled some flea poison on him and now dead fleas are falling of him wherever he goes.
Sadly, original kitty hates him but I'm hoping he'll get over it. M.'s dog however, is a huge fan and Tobey is utterly unafraid of her.

Yesterday Kinga and I helped Cap'n J slaughter and butcher three chickens. One of them was the last remaining of Cap'n's purdue chickens which had hobbled pitifully around the barnyard on legs too big for its body. "I think" said Kinga in her eastern european accent, "that it walks around begging me to kill it, like in the alien movies." The other two were among out most aggressive roosters and one (The Cap'n's archenemy) had actually attacked one of Kinga's children the day before.
Nonetheless while I was holding their feet waiting for the Cap'n to cut off their heads I told them stories about chicken heaven with its foot long earthworms and thousands of gorgeous hens. The Cap'n didn't make fun of me for my vegetarian squeamishness but he did add, conversationaly, after his archenemy was dead, "You shouldn't lie like that. That chicken is not in chicken heaven. That was the worst, meanest, nastiest chicken that ever lived."
Kinga's a stay-at-home mom so she brought her kids up to the school while she was butchering. She stashed them in the gym so they wouldn't witness the bloodshed. This didn't really work. Kinga's oldest daughter looks like a young Nadia Comenici but has the personality of Wednesday Addams. Little Wednesday left the gym and stood next to her mom throughout the plucking and gutting process and drawing on her notepad.
Later when we were having lunch with Kinga's husband little Wednesday said, "look what I drew". On her note bad were about a dozen drawings of headless chickens performing various tasks and I'm pretty sure one of them was playing croquet.

Last night we had an emergency fundraising schemes meeting. We have alot of meetings but the past few have been good because there have been cookies and in stressfull moments we have thrown swiss chard at eachother.
Our fundraising schemes include a fancy dinner party; the sequel to last years pie tasting party; and a haunted house. The Haunted House will be a sequel to the one we had back in 2000 which won the local free weekly's award for Best Haunted House in the metro area.
Later that night all my roomates had gone to punk bowling night and I was alone in the house, in the big, scary, house. Our house is creepy at the best of times and at the worst of to times, like when one is home alone and has spent all evening thinking about scary shit to fill the house with, it's pretty unbearable. Especially if one is a big weenie. So, I turned on every light I could find and convinced the dog to follow me everywhere.

Cara called last night but ten minutes into our conversation I told her I had to go see a movie about the Spanish Civil War. She said something like, "bbljkkldhg you are such a square! Spoiler Alert: Your side loses!" That prompted me to confess that afterwards I was probably going to make pickles.
The movie was called "Land and Freedom" and made it seem that most of the civil war was spent heckling one side or the other which is somehow comforting to me. I like to know that taunting communists is part of a proud radical tradition. Later, I did not make pickles but this does not mean I'm not a square.

Shout, then smile, and have a piece of pie, 15% off!New York City would like to avoid broken windows, overturned cars, and un-Godlytraffic jams during the Republican National Convention, so they are offering this --discounts for "peaceful protestors." According to the New York Times, law-abiding citizens will be given a button"WELCOME Peaceful Political Activists." So armed, they may take advantage of special deals at Applebee's, the WhitneyMuseum, The Museum of Sex, the Pokeman Center store and off-Broadway plays, like"Naked Boys Singing."

But there's not a serious litmus test on the whole "law-abiding" thing. Said Mayor Bloomberg, "Unfortunatly, we can't stop an anarchist from getting a button."

Yee-hah! I've been to a good half-dozen political shindigs in my time but I've never gotten any swag (just arrested that time). I am so there. Now I just need a place to stay, so I'm coming to you, internet, for help. Do any of my 4 or 5 loyal readers have access to floorspace in manhattan for me and a few of my ne'er-do-well housemates? We don't drink, don't smoke and don't need beds.

I'm probably an embarressment to feminism. There was never a time in my life where anyone told me anything but that I was just as tough and capable as an man. I read all the cultural feminism that critique the stereotype of the screaming, squeamish girl.
And yet, when my cat deposited a live, flapping bat onto my bed last night I screamed, well, like a girl, and went running out of the room. I had to recruit another person to actually catch the injured bat that was flopping around on my pillow and hissing because no way in hell was I going to touch the thing. It's a small consolation that my bad exterminator was also female, our fiddle playing house-guest from North Dakota. She went into my room with a fireplace tongs and a cardboard box and several minutes later came out with the bat, alive and contained.
My cat's bloodlust remains. This morning he caught a baby mouse and swallowed it whole after tossing it around for a while. I wanted to take the mouse away, because I'm a fucking sissy, but I was persuaded not to by the North Dakotan.

The secret to comedy is health insurance; i.e. not having it. Life is funnier when quality health care is not an option. I'm pretty lucky is this respect. I can still go to my old family doctor and have her give me free samples of whatever medicine I need and I have a sister who never, ever, not even knowing that it will probably cause us all to die of antibiotic-resistent staph infection someday, takes more that two doses of her antibiotics.
So unlike Cap'n J, I did not have an eardrum burst this week. Like most of Cap'n J's memoirs from the age of summit hopping this is a wacky and grostesque injury story * like this: "I went swimming in L.A. after the DNC and got a monster ear infection. The last thing I remember was passing out on this girl's floor from the horrible pain. When I woke up my eardrum had burst and the pain was gone. Never since have I felt ecstacy like that moment".
But back to health insurance. While in Boston this spring I had a (probably literally) once in a lifetime oppurtunity to participate in a skill trade with B., a friend from San Francisco. She taught me the tricks to faking your identity at the hospital emergency room (1. make your fake identity easy to remember and 2. if you're skipping out on the billanyway go to a nice hospital) and in exchange I irrigated the cyst she had growing on her tailbone. The cyst was not as memorably gross as I was led to believe but the advice has held up.
After K. broke his collarbone last week we learned a puzzling collary to this bit of advice: You can get a vicodin prescription filled under a fake name. I feel like John Ashcroft should be all over this shit.

*the cap'n's memories of Seattle 1999 are, "I got a big puss-filled hole in my back from getting hit with a rubber bullet and then my asshole housemates forgot to pick me up at the airport."

M. doesn't know it yet but I've figured out a one-year plan for us. By this time next year our exotic chickens will be winning blue ribbons or gold medals or whatever at the State Fair. We may also be exhibiting Flemish Giants, the 35 pound rabbits that I've coveted since I was a toddler but that's totally optional. We will put ribbons in their feathers and ignore the taunts of Cap'n J who derided our neighbors (who own a gay themed bed and breakfast next to our garlic patch) for purchasing "bourgois chickens". I didn't point out our arugula patch. I'm tactful that way. Besides our neighbors have peacocks already which are the most bourgois of fowl so the accusation was legitimate.
Unbeknownst to you, internet, I have also embarked on a five-year plan or sorts with myself. I"ll be going to Wayne State University to get my master's degree starting in Febuary. That is if I remember to call the ol' alma mater and get them to send my transcript over; and if they're not still angry about that time I called alumni donors "a bunch of suckers" in the school paper.
It's sort of my sister-in-law who inspired me (also a lifetime of waitressing or public school teaching uninspired me). She's one of the last Tom Frank style academic hold-outs who stubbornly insist on their right to not like something if it sucks. Without her my only contact with academia would be earnest dumbass pointing out the subversive undertones of the latest Sketchers campaign and I be applying for my ditchdiggers licence as we speak.

Very early this morning I awoke to discover a) my cat had brought me a dead sparrow b) I was totally deaf in one ear and c) my head felt like it was filled with poisonous concrete.
I cleaned up the sparrow and cuddle my cat. Then I drove out to my parents house intent on getting the 800 mg advil my sister needs "for emergencies"; I had taken all my pain medicine the night before trying to stop the thudding pain. I staggered in and demanded the advil, saying that I would probably kill her if she didn't give it to me and the level of pain I was in meant that I was a shoo-in for a temporary insanity defence. After all, my pain was her fault to begin with since she hid the super-advil yesterday. My sister started screaming "How dare you take it! I"m a drug addict and I need pain medicine!" I should have killed her but she's tougher than me.
It (the ear pain, not the screaming sister) reminds me of a chapter in 'Emergency' when our narrator gets an excruiating ear infection and lays on her bed the in the living room of a shotgun aparment in New Orleans, suffering for several days She hallucinates that she is in a Tsarist Prison. Although she has little memory of the infection her roomates tell her later that she wouldn't stop yelling first, "I'll never talk, nor matter what you do!" and then later, "I'll tell you anything just make it stop!". Which I guess illustrates that she's not the girl to tell the secret bombing plan too. I'm guessing I'm not either.

All along the mississippi corn farmers dump fertilizers into their fields. Corn is a ridiculously heavy feeder; making monocropping it one of the worst ideas in the history of unsustainable agriculture. Usually farmers dump the most fertilizer they possibly can without killing the corn. This then washes down the mississippi causing massive bacterial growths in the Gulf of Mexico, the delta and the bayous. These bacterial growths have created a dead zone in the Gulf the size of New Jersey; decimated the shrimping industry; and give me a massive ear infection in each ear.
Meanwhile, I think a girl from Fargo, North Dakota has stealth moved into my house. All her stuff is here and she just got a street-performing permit from the city.

I have a new sister. We celebrated by bouncing around to Joan Jett, both of us in high heels, she in a poofy dress with a train. This is way better than the last time I got a new sister who celebrated by crying and puking. Also new sister comes with her own parents; large, boisterous Cajuns.
Poor new sister. She looked so pretty but so unlike herself. Usually she is wearing a parka, without makeup and reading a book on Ben Franklin. Last time I saw her she was spa-d and plucked and lipsticked and wearing a poofy dress. The day before the wedding she took to her bed and two days before the wedding she convinced her mother that there was a "traditional taking of the bride to the beach by the grooms family" in order to get out of an eyebrow waxing appointment in Biloxi. I can only assume she's grateful now to back to writing her dissertation on colonial women who poisoned their husbands.
The church where the wedding was held was on stilts. The library, post office, town hall and hospital are also on stilts but I didn't go any of those places. Next door to the Cajun in-laws was even a dog house on stilts. I saw no aligators but many pelicans and one terribly large cucaracha that I killed with a copy of Bill Clinton's Autobiography, thus pissing-off old sister.

Today I leave for the island off the coast of Louisiana where my future (as in this weekened) sister-in-law hails from. The island is so small that it has only one road and she, my sister-in-law, is the first women from the island to graduate from college.
I fear it will be like the town of paranoid and isolated socialists that inhabit "The Village", which I saw last night. Boy oh boy do I want a bobble head doll of Ivy, the virteous blind girl who goes running into the woods full of monsters to save Joaquin Pheonix. She would so perfectly complement a Mary Ingalls doll. They could play amusing pranks on eachother.
Actually, I hope this island is full of Children of the Corn style cultists. I will be spending the week trapped there with my heroin addicted sister who scammed some atavan out of an emergency room doctor to "help her with withdrawl". Although I'm pretty such what she calls "withdrawl" is less like clinical sensation and more like the sensation of "wanting to do some drugs". I hope the cultists will have a nice rehab for her; one where they beat out the demons of addiction with a beating stick.