|
|
|
August 6th, 2008
05:40 pm
http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=23678&int_modo=1
This sold for 86.3 million dollars.
Given that someone starved to death somewhere in the world as that gavel fell, that's true obscenity.
|
08:18 am
I'm listening to my iTunes -- 3,960 songs, 11.2 days, 16.77 GB -- and writing, and reading.
More attention to the writing than the listening.
Then I'm blindsided by Mozart's Clarinet Concerto In A Major, K622 (Adagio).
Out of Africa. Karen is listening to it, when she is told of Denys' death.
It is no large leap to relive the receipt of bad news, especially when one is possessed of a sharp, sensual memory. if your memory is strong enough, it can take you back to the very day.
The sun of the season on skin,
the scents of the place and people.
Perhaps those fools who can't seem to remember the simplest of things is blessed.
Anyway, one must be careful:
now I come out purposefully of the darker memory by finding "Life is a Highway" by Tom Cochrane. (No, not Racall Flatts.) My daughter dances unashamedly to this song. I drink that memory in when I see it.
The memory might sustain me through what's to come.
You have to bring yourselves out, people.
Sometimes you're blessed enough to have an example, but, oftentimes, you have to by-the-bootstrap yourself.
(What song brings back a memory most powerfully? may be a writing prompt for you.)
|
August 5th, 2008
06:34 pm
Not some few of you tell me that life is difficult.
I know, friends, I know. Perhaps not for the same exact reasons, but I understand you.
"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation," said Thoreau.
When I offer insight, oftentimes I'll say, "You want this hard or easy?"
First, I'll lay it hard:
When you are given the bone marrow procedure my mother was given at Stanford, you go through a consent procedure; you are told explicitly what might go wrong during and after the procedure.
You aren't afraid to die,
you've seen enough,
you have faith,
you believe that there's a place in Paradise for you
that your loved ones passed await you --
and so does she --
but I'll tell you how that hearing will smite you to a stupor.
But that would be a digression.
One of the things they warn you about in regards to Graft vs. Host Disease (gvhd) is that the new immune system might attack your skin.
In essence,
burn it off.
I saw a man to whom this happened.
Wheelchair bound.
Hairless.
Huge red patches under sloughed-off skin.
Chemo IV hanging from pole on chair.
(Do you realize how inadequate these words are in describing the man?)
"Hey how are you today?" he'd say, to any he passed, with a sincere gladness.
Happy to be alive.
(Do you realize how adequate your life is, right now?)
|
07:58 am
Here comes all this Twilight nonsense.
All you Yes-He's-A-Vampire-But-He's-Really-A-Nice-Guy women out there:
He might be nice to you, but he's sucking someone else's blood.
And it'll be your turn if he's hungry enough.
I warned you!
|
August 4th, 2008
11:58 am
Today, a bit of encouragement.
The crap in this country is reaching Augeaun proportion, so we need some strong words as we roll up our sleeves to start shoveling manure.
The Old Man is perhaps suggesting that by considering how one becomes "as shapeable as a block of wood," we might come to understand "unfathomable wisdom."
I shouldn't translate, as my thought might unduly influence yours, but shapeable is referring to wu wei, the Uncarved Block.
Adaptability.
Openmindedness.
Knowing how to approach a situation fluidly, but realizing the paradox of "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities: in the expert's mind there are few."
All I can tell you, after my training, is that I've briefly experienced Right Action, wu wei, No Mind.
Flawless.
Profound.
In short, the Old Man ain't talking a bunch of hocus-pocus.
15
The ancient Masters were profound and subtle.
Their wisdom was unfathomable.
There is no way to describe it;
all we can describe is their appearance.
They were careful
as someone crossing an iced-over stream.
Alert as a warrior in enemy territory.
Courteous as a guest.
Fluid as melting ice.
Shapeable as a block of wood.
Receptive as a valley.
Clear as a glass of water.
Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
The Master doesn't seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
she is present, and can welcome all things.
|
August 3rd, 2008
08:11 am
This is what happens when you don't get to hand-pick your audience by vetting their names and addresses against party affiliation rosters and such:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-knYMTK4AEk
|
07:17 am
Impeachable offenses, according to Alexander Hamilton in the March 7, 1788 Federalist Papers are
"... those offences which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself."
Setting up an intelligence office in the executive to feed "unfiltered and unbiased intelligence" to the White House -- hold up: isn't that the CIAs job? No, wait: the CIA and NSA are there to check the intelligence for reliability so we don't end up taking an erroneous action that could be lethal to a disastrous degree. HINT.
That office headed up by Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the same man convicted for obstructing justice in the investigation of the outing a CIA operative -- a crime akin to treason -- and whose sentence was commuted by Bush. (Wait for the pardon...)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2qD8pYPATs
Why? Because Valerie Plame's husband Joe Wilson was sent to Niger to confirm that Hussein was attempting to procure yellow-cake uranium for the Bomb,
and he didn't come back with a 'yes,'
and Bush told the nation that Hussein was trying to get uranium as fact (State of The Union speech, 2003),
so Wilson told the Washington Post,
so someone in the White House outed Plame to Libby, who told the press, then started the "I don't recall" game.
Palettes of tax dollars -- literally -- unaccounted for in Iraq.
The piss-poor treatment of the troops.
My list isn't particularly exhaustive in the ways of
abuse or violation of public trust, or
injuries done immediately to society.
Are any of you against the impeachment of Bush?
|
August 2nd, 2008
03:58 pm
Windtalkers.
Initial reactions:
how many Japanese can be killed in the course of two hours?
or
John Woo must really hate the Japanese,
or
Isn't Japan empty by now?
I was getting to the point that, based on the facial expressions of the American soldier while shooting, I'd be able to predict how many Japanese would fall. Nicolas Cage waves a .45 Thompson from the hip, three or four Japanese fall at various degrees of a slope. Nevermind the up-and-right tendency of the weapon.
The redneck throws out the redkin stereotypes, the redskin saves the redneck's life, the redneck's eyes are opened. Nice. I suppose I needed to see that at a younger age, and I understand there's always a younger generation to see it.
At least they let the Navajo speak in their language, and showed a smattering of the culture.
And natives played natives!
And there was no Dances With Wolves patronizing.
That's huge.
The depiction of the Hellcat air support was excellent; I have to assume that some of it was CG -- the strafing of Japanese trenches -- but it was clean, and managed to capture the prop-engine-and-wings ferocity of that aircraft.
But I'll go back to Bill's post by David Drake:
"But, I sort of wish that more of the people who talk so blithely about 'conflict' [or perhaps depict it in film -KA] had had a chance to watch a kid or two bleed out on a stretcher.
A lot of fictional violence has been cleaned up. When I was a kid, I watched Davy Crockett shoot an Indian into a neat, bloodless swan dive from a tree branch. Nowadays, you can see a lot of the equivalent thing on TV- folks using fully-automatic weapons which do less obvious injury than Davy's flintlock had. In prose, the normal technique is for the victim to fall over, out of the storyline, and permit the author to get on to matters of greater interest.
And that's fine, no problem, we all do what we do. But, for my part, I don't want kids joining the Marines- or politicians voting to deploy those Marines- because at the back of their minds they have the notion that real violence is clean and cute."
A spinning bullet tears up flesh.
No one gets shot in the face, say, the jaw blown off the body.
And no, a SFX depiction of this would not make the film better. All war films did for me as a younger man was to give me the notion that I'd make a good killer.
And the Tough-Guy-With-The-Heart-Of-Gold phenomenon:
let's get one thing straight, folks:
there are strong men out there who understand the nature of conflict, what they might be called upon to do, and come time, they'll do it -- the consideration has been done beforehand: "Think slowly, act quickly."
You can call me a curmudgeon if you like, but very little is new in films nowadays, it seems, and are we as a public at large as ignorant as filmmakers seem to think we are?
ABOUT THAT:
If you like Nick Cage, don't watch Ghostrider unless you have friends over who really get into a sort of Mystery Science Theater takedown of a film.
|
08:36 am - Curmudgeon with cudgel
This is how it goes, sometimes, when a new batch of alumns get my IM address:
Alum: Hey
Andersen: Good morning.
Alum: What's going on?
[pause, as I recount the last spin o' the globe.]
Andersen: Same thing as yesterday.
So in the terminator-cam, the list of possible responses:
No news is good news.
Same shit, different shirt.
Looking at porn. Duh.
I'm sitting here with my coffee, doing my writing exercise.
I'm a creature of habit.
I avoid "excitement," and I like it that way; if excitement wants you, it'll come calling.
And you might well wish it hadn't.
A couple of mornings ago, there were some fools talking loudly in the street at 5:44 in the morning, ranging half the block.
I look out the window, and it looked to me that they were kicking somebody a la Reginald Denny in the LA riots. The view of what they were joyously kicking was obscured by parked cars.
Bearing in mind the Mullah Nasruddin story of the two drunks arguing,
bearing in mind the time it takes cops to get here,
bearing in mind that minutes may be crucial to staving off or intervening in blunt-force trauma,
bearing in mind I have to come out a door and reveal my home position to possible vengeful transients who could possibly return with impunity,
bearing in mind if I were to get hurt, there are at least three people who would be anguished to the point of their own physical detriment (the rest of you would hear weeks or months after a funeral),
bearing in mind the question: arm or unarm (the verb...me) --
bokken, katana, scramasax, dowel suited for escrima/kali? --
out the door I go.
The whoevers had returned to their car at the corner, and the street was empty. My mistake; they were just doing some fool dance in the street in the morning.
I could go to the car, knock on the window, and say, "Pardon me, but people are trying to sleep in the neighborhood..."
What do you think the reaction would be?
Do you think they give a shit about anyone but themselves?
Do you think I want to become entangled in that?
Do you think I want the excitement of "heroically saving a life"?
Nonevent.
Thank God.
Had it been an event, "We don't rise to expectations, we sink to our lowest level of training."
And, at 45, "the older I get, the better I was" though cynical, is a factor.
If it's worthy of saying, I'll post it.
Was that anecdote worthy of posting?
A nonevent. Its only significance is to point out the validity of "The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday."
Or 5:44 a.m.
But not today.
The only thing I find more inane than conversational small talk is IM small talk.
|
08:14 am
No, no!
The conclusion to the last post was a sort of a capitulation to hopelessness, a final admission that the academic point was inane and the distractors win out.
Some cynics would call it mere sarcasm.
I have nospace.
I loaned my facebook to a friend and she never gave it back: I think she sold it to a used bookstore.
I prefer a block of text; photos are easy, and shift the medium, the message.
(That's not to knock the occasional scrapbooks you lot nail up. I'd prefer photoessays; the proverbial thousand words should be yours: Why did you put the image up? Is there a story behind the taking of the photo?)
My only internet presence is Billy's Studio video of Andersen's old-school antics.
I like it quiet.
|
August 1st, 2008
06:16 am
0621 hrs.
Shit, shower, shave. (The nice thing about a full set is the shave part is optional, sometimes weekly.)
Grind some whole-bean French roast from Peet's. (It's fresh if the beans still look as if they've been drenched in oil...)
Out of filters, so I jury-rig a #2 from a paper towel. (I'm told the Marines say "Semper fi and improvise.")
Then I sit at the screen, say a grace in the form of sensually embracing the coffee (my nose is a bit stuffed, because I can't smell it very well...), and then get to writing.
Some journal teachers suggest timed writing, e.g., write nonstop for ten minutes. In process writing, the first draft should be the idea, as fresh and hot as the idea emerges; don't stop to look up a spelling, or stop to worry that you'll look a fool to misspell, to wish your spelling was better.
Get the idea. Get the ideas that arise as you write. Capture the deeper idea, the embellishment that occurs as you write. Don't edit: that comes later in the process; now it will only slow you down, dam up your flow.
If you'll note, I had no "purpose" to writing this morning, but have arrived at this because I was talking with a friend about journaling (blogging) styles. (My approach is not novel: Natalie Goldberg nails it in the fast read that is Writing Down the Bones. If you want the academic theories that support the value of journaling, you ask and I'll point.) It was percolating for a bit, and blam! out it pops this morning like your toasted bagel. Maybe even with a hole in the middle.
You sit later, reread your first draft, and begin to revise and correct. That's "second draft."
You take it to a peer, and ask for a reading. She suggests changes, points out ambiguities and confusions, perhaps finds a punctuation error you've missed. That's "third draft."
Have you ever seen an original manuscript? (manu 'hand' + script 'writing,' before it goes to be typeset. Back in the day. Today, you tap the keyboard, press 'Post it to the world,' and it's up for anyone who can hyperlink.) Strikethroughs, rewrites, marginalia, coffee stains. Hemingway's ninety-nine rewrites of one paragraph. Whitman's constant re-editions of Leaves of Grass. "Writing is the art of the second thought."
Last comes the "publication draft." This is your idea, correctly presented in terms of the conventions of English. Usually, this is mediated by professional editors.
There are writers, and there are editors.
Why?
Well, roughly speaking, "Four eyes are better than two," but an editor is a strict grammarian, has a sharp eye for what works given the rhetorical situation of audience, purpose, style. Has an idea of how many words fit in a book. ("You've given us 200, 000 words: please bring it down to 100,000"...)
Yes, editors can be accused of being gatekeepers who are capable of stifling thought. ("There's freedom of the press -- if you own a press.")
But I'm veering off course.
You see, the two problems with Whole Language:
1. The notion that you'll pick up good grammar through exposure to it works if you're exposed to it, i.e., you read a wide variety of styles and media, avidly, often. That your parents model reading, read to you.
Nah, fuck that: what's on Fox? Mmmmmm Alisyn Camerota -- hotness!
2. That you'll get wild in the first draft, but not take it through draft five, six, seven to get it to perfection. Too laborious! Who has time? I'm so done with that.
Anyway.
So this is what a first draft might look like if you hit on an idea and it flows.
Admittedly, I cheat: I backspace and fix typing errors because my three-finger method is whacky, so I suppose it's technically 1.5 draft.
If you look at my grammar, you'll find mistakes. ("Good God, he's an English teacher, and yet his writing is terrible; look, an error in tense!" Scandalous.)
Are you still reading?
Get a life, loser!
What's your myspace so I can just type in BFF at three a.m.
|
July 31st, 2008
07:40 pm - Best Devil
OK, it's time for the Best Portrayal of The Devil competition.
What do you consider the best envisioning of Lucifer? Film or fiction of any flavor.
My vote:
in the 1987 film Angel Heart, in which Mickey Rourke's Harry Angel says to Robert De Niro's character:
"Louis Cyphre...even your name is a dime-store joke," and De Niro just rolls his eyes, smiling.
De Niro as Old Nick: you say "Of course."
IF YOU DON'T PLAY YOU'RE OFF MY LIST, DEADWEIGHT!
ADDENDUM:
Well I'll be dipped:
pf's suggesting I watch Windtalkers -- so I bail from Ghostrider -- and Billy's putting up Peter Stormare as the best devil, and here he is playing a sergeant.
That's some spooky shit right there.
|
12:48 pm
So I pick up Ghost Rider for $3.95 from Rasputins bargain bin. (Cheaper than that: Windtalkers and Tears of the Sun evened out the three for ten-buck deal.)
So, Johnny Blaze jumps some large number of truck cabs by motorcycle for the stereotypical Monster-Truck crowd of demin-vested bubbas and off-duty Hooter's waitresses. He come in at the edge of the ramp, goes over the handlebars, the front wheel impacts his helmet, breaking the glass. He slides to a sitting position, back against the fence. Cut to his crew and medics running to where he's totally supine with head about a foot from fence. Continuity error?
The crewmembers -- medics now strangely absent -- pull off his helmet even though he's unconscious, and attempt to slap him awake.
Uhhhhh...
...C-spine precautions?
An extremity assessment?
Backboard and transport and let x-ray decide?
I'm sorry, but films today cater to a very low-level of credulity that's a big turnoff.
Yes, yes, I hear you when you say it's escapism, but there has to be a consideration of suspension of disbelief.
I got robbed again.
ADDENDUM:
I haven't finished it: I'm about to go for attempt #3.
Johnny Blaze is now trying to engage the same C-spine-inept roadie in a religious-cum-philosophical discussion about Redemption: "Do you think that when somebody does something really stupid he should have to pay for it everyday?"
This is the point where a body should crash through the roof, they look up in shock, and there's Bruce Willis' John McClane, barefoot and with an MP5, yelling, "Welcome to the party, pal!"
|
July 30th, 2008
12:24 pm
But here was a rare opportunity for stupidity even more flagrant and glorious.
Now, Bob, who'd been observing Jack carefully for many years, had observed that when these moments arrived, Jack was almost invariably possessed by something that Bob had heard about in Church called the Imp of the Perverse. Bob was convinced that the Imp of the Perverse rode invisibly on Jack's shoulder whispering bad ideas into his ear, and that the only counterbalance was Bob himself, standing alongsides counseling good sense, prudence, caution, and other Puritan virtues.
But Bob was in England.
-- from Quicksilver
|
07:56 am
Nowadays, they sit around on the couch acting it out in Grand Theft Auto.
Goddamn pansies.
|
July 29th, 2008
11:59 am - Grenadoes
Yeah, grenades too.
I have a good visual memory; I can still see him “reconstituting” the practice dummy grenades you used to be able to buy for $4 at the Army/Navy store.
Well enough that I can do it in a pinch.
(The difference between 45 and 19 is that I have no inclination. And I’ve since been trained to cook up meaner IEDs by the government.)
And no; even though it would make for a good writing exercise, and a chronicle of his creativity, I’m not putting it up.
Some of you readers are still nineteen.
And the times have certainly changed: I don’t want my blog on the blotter.
We’d take these grenades, as well as firearms ranging from .22s to sawed-off 12 gauges, out to “The Pit.”
Right behind Mather AFB. A sort of shallow valley in the grasslands.
It was someone’s private property, but it was the known shooting gallery.
Do places like this still exist nowadays?
When my friends wonder how we survived our teens, they’re not far off the mark.
I was never shot at in the Army,* but I was shot-at out there.
By rank amateurs, much more dangerous than professionals.
The special ops guys would tell us that bullets coming close to you make a whizzing sound, and those that are inches from you crack.
So I’m sitting on a hill, cleaning my weapon, reloading; my friends are off somewhere.
Well they weren’t checking fire, because the rounds started whizzing by me.
What do I do?
I start looking over my shoulder to see where they were and yell “Idiots.”
Sitting there.
Still.
Might as well have taken out a jew's harp, start twanging "Turkey in the Straw," and saying to myself, "Well, dad-gummit: I do believe some a'bodies shootin' 'mah gen-ral d'rection."
(If it were today, it’d be flat down faster than you could snap fingers after the first zing: I'd be one with the silt.)
Hold up a second:
How could they not see me up on that hill?
Hmmmmmmmmmmm…
|
09:36 am
Now I know all of you have seen at least one of the original Fat Albert cartoons, complete with the Brer Bill Cosby spitting morals at the beginning, right?
(How the hell can I educate you when you don’t bring a base familiarity with the corpus of American classics? And no, I’m not talking the film remake.)
So this last year was a sort of Asian Fat Albert, except with Fat Jon. Fat Jon’s straight outta the Mekong, baby. Floated to America on a banana leaf.
Fat Jon sat next to Kyle, so they were like a sumo tag-team.
I’d say, “Did you guys watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Of course you did: what Asian hasn’t seen that? Anyway…
…the part where the Wu Tang Gang comes after Jiao Long in the restaurant, and these two heavy dudes, the Chinese Doublemint Twins, walk in with these huge iron maces?
That’s you two.”
They’d do this jackass laugh, and then try to mean mug.
Then they became the Garcia twins.
“You Garcia boys go pick some strawberries or some shit.”
“They’re Asians, Andersen.”
“Like hell: them boys are fresh over the border from L.A.”
Jackass laugh.
That’s because they know I was playing the Bigoted White Male. (Read: playing. Acting.) Those are alive and well in San Lo’: bitching about poor restaurant service because “you need to learn English before you come here.”
Now, speaking two languages is a sign of intelligence.
How many languages do you think the bigot speaks?
No! Not even one, because they can’t even speak English correctly.
Not too many stories about Jon, though, because he was one of the most courteous students – no, people – that I’ve ever met. He’d ask how things were going, he’d ask why things are going that way, and he’d understand it.
An easy sincerity.
A rare gift.
Not Fat Jon,
Gentleman Jon.
|
July 28th, 2008
07:19 pm
A friend of mine used to make pipe bombs.
This was back in the day, 1982 or so.
The spraypaint was unlocked on a shelf, for anyone to buy.
Beachballs had no warnings written on them.
It wasn’t called “yoga,” it was Twister.
And we weren’t called “Terrorists,” just mudlarks.
And black powder and waterproof cannon fuse were standard items at Big 5, and pipe fittings were seemingly made for the job of knocking together an explosive.
And there were Taco Charleys as well as Taco Bells.
So Taco Charleys were equipped with trash can receptacles: imagine a steel drum slathered with gravel-encrusted concrete, topped with a two-and-a-half foot hemispherical lid of orange plastic, removable so the trash bag can be lifted out the top.
Solid affairs, these constructions; you’d not want to back into one with your car.
So, here we are late at night, at Taco Charley. (Back in the day, fast food restaurants close at eleven at night.)
Volvo.
Pipe bomb.
Bored teens, in the company of other bored teens, looking to each other to provide excitement.
So, I am handed the pipe bomb. My friend is driving the get-away Volvo, so I’m the demolition man.
Light fuse.
Push in spring-loaded flap on garbage can dome.
Drop bomb.
Run to car, jump in door, hit the accelerator.
I’m watching out the back window. Lighted parking lot. Garbage can receding. The only sound, the loud dice-rolling of the Volvo engine.
Five seconds can seem a long time, as one wonders whether it was a dud – which would pose a moral dilemma: I wouldn’t just walk away from unexploded ordinance: a prank could end up lethal if the device went off as someone was emptying or hauling trash.
Then it went off.
No sound that we could hear.
The masonry was entirely unmoved.
The dome, however, lifted, and from its rim emerged a gritty dark halo of pulverized refuse, as the dome lifted majestically, almost perfectly except for a slight wobble, straight up.
Almost slow motion.
One hundred feet, easily.
Have you ever seen footage of the old Apollo program’s lunar module taking off from the moon?
I hadn’t seen that spectacle since the seventies, and some decade later, that’s what came to mind:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIKRkvCKri8
(Watch it with the sound off; that'll recreate the ambiance.)
It was eerily silent, spectacular.
It hung for a second, then started its descent.
I think we heard the thunderclap crash of the landing, but memory fails, here.
He was a fireworks and rockets man back in the day: he just didn’t know it.
|
07:52 am - By the way,
Kyle's not the only hep cat I've known.
If you want a write-up, tell me and I'll paste you up for the world wide web to see.
I have quite a following in Lhasa, and my site meter registers hits from Camaguey, Rondonopolis, Toowoomba, Promise City, Sisimiut, N'gage, Hackensack, Beaverbank --
Doo' I'm hella up.
|
July 27th, 2008
09:25 am - Classroom snapshot
So I’ll tell you about Kyle McKenna.
Sounds like a good Scotsman, hey?
Except he’s half Japanese, and looks straight outta Honshu.
GATE – Gifted and Talented. (“This must be a hard question, because even the GATE Asians can’t get it…”)
Plays football.
Kid’s a f---ing tree stump.
(At Shaolin they harden the body by smashing it against trees. Running into Kyle is gung-fu training.)
So anyway, Kyle is good fodder, because he keeps popping up as a target.
In the classroom I have an old set of bogu – kendo armor – and there’s some kanji written on it.
Kyle: Hey man, what does that say?
Andersen: Damn, you’re Japanese; you tell me.
Kyle: It says, “I’m gay”?
Andersen: You’re gay? Well, what a bold step to come out to all your classmates; hey everyone, Kyle’s gay!
Things get a li’l slow, I look over at Kyle and sing “God-damn you half Japanese boys, you doooo it to me ev-rrry time.”
(It’s a play on a Weezer song, "El Scorcho."
See, and here’s the thing: most of y’all don’t know the song and didn’t get the joke.
And most of the students, who should get the joke, don’t have good-enough memories to recognize the lyrics.
Kyle got it, though.)
All these gay references:
So I’m as bad as Savage, hey?
Except for the fact that after the humor – or the attempt at it, so noted – I talk about the fact that “gay” is equated with “effete,” and how prejudiced that is.
I judge individuals on a set of criteria, and their sexuality isn’t a factor.
Largely, I judge a man on his citizenship:
Does he share the road?
Doe he keep his hands to himself?
Is he intelligent enough to consider well before voting?
Is he strong enough to take care of himself?
Is he able to lend a hand to his neighbors should they need?
His sexual preference is waaaaaaaay low on the list:
That’s his business – unless it involves harm to others.
(If you recall, getting the laugh first can be sort of gate-opening.)
Kyle’s not gay.
But if he was, that wouldn’t make a wit of difference to me:
He’s good folk.
If there was ever a disaster at that school, I’d want him on my team.
It’s sort of like some punishment from Greek mythology:
I get to know some really fine people, but I only get to know them for 180 days.
|
|
|