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August 31, 2008Love is lovelier…Sex is sexier…THE BEST SECOND FIRST DATE I’VE EVER HADOut with one era, in with another. Ever reconnect with an oldie-but-goodie? Long have I needed a man in my life. Long have I needed his brains and brawn around the house. I needed a man, mojambo, not José Schmosé from Yahoo Personals, to eat alive like red ants on Charlton Heston. Anyway, long story short, the Silver Fox, aka “Mark Marsh,” is back on the scene, after a ten-year hiatus, and foxier than ever. There’s a lot to be said for the comfort and familiarity of an arm draped across a thigh in the dark recesses of Date Night at the movies. Everything old is new again. According to Wikipedia,”[t]he fur of a silver fox was once considered by the natives of New England to be worth over 40 beaver skins. A chieftain accepting a gift of silver fox fur was seen as an act of reconciliation.” The fox and I did have a falling out last year in the decade-long course of our friendship, but now that we’re trading beaver skins for silver fox fur we’ll be just fine. HURRAY FOR HIYAO MIYAZAKI,Japanese director and animator who sticks to the good old pencil to draw his animations. “I think animation is something that needs the pencil, needs man’s drawing hand, and that is why I decided to do this work in this way. Currently computer graphics are of course used a great deal and, as I’ve said before, this use can at times be excessive. I will continue to use my pencil as long as I can.” Right on! ”ON BEHALF OF PRESIDENT BUSH,thank you for your correspondence. “We appreciate hearing your views and welcome your suggestions. “Due to the large volume of e-mail received, the White House cannot respond to every message. “Thank you again for taking the time to write.” SUCKA!!! “THANK YOU FOR E-MAILING VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY.Your comments, suggestions and concerns are important to him. Unfortunately, because of the large volume of e-mail received, the Vice President cannot personally respond to each message. However, members of the Vice President’s staff consider and report citizen ideas and concerns. Please visit the White House web site for the most up-to-date information on Presidential initiatives, current events, and topics of interest to you. “Thank you again for taking the time to write.” SUCKA!!! IS THERE ANY POINTin emailing the White House? At least Cheney’s robo-response gives the impression you have an ice cube’s chance in hell of your message being reviewed by someone—if only for laughs—whereas Bush’s doesn’t bother to offer that condescending lie. Bully for him, the fuckin’ lyin’ bully. DOJ CHECKS INHere’s one from the Department of Justice: “Thank you for contacting the Department of Justice. This is an automatic acknowledgement that your e-mail was received. It will be reviewed in the order it was received.” “Reviewed” = code word for “deleted.” And one more: “Thank you for contacting the Republican National Committee. We certainly appreciated your email, and will include your thoughts in our report to the Chairman. Please do not hesitate to contact us in the future with any of your thoughts, opinions or observations.” “Report to the Chairman” = issued on toilet paper and committed to the “flush” file. I do like the “certainly” touch, though, an amusing if meaningless counterbalance to the extent to which they don’t give a shit. Well flush this, RNC! “WE CANNOT AFFORD TO SCREW UP AGAIN,”warned New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin about Hurricane Gustav. On more than one front. Most-uttered slogan at the DNC: “We cannot afford another eight years of the status quo,” and variants thereof. God speed we succeed on both fronts, the new threat to the Gulf Coast, and the 2008 elections. Both are potential disasters it could take years more to recover from. Let us hope we have all learned from past errors and omissions and handle both like a nation that knows what it’s doing. I BE BONA FIDENow, I have never required confirmation from the outside world on my status as a writer. I have long been one, despite spending the majority of my youth working full-time and having nervous breakdowns. Now that drugs have cleared my mind and jobs have been left behind, I have for the first time been able to devote myself to The Word. All the same, it has been immensely gratifying for me to receive your email testimonials and responses to this column (keep ‘em coming, can’t get enough) and last year I won an Honorable Mention for my poem “The Picture,” published on www.beatmuseum.org. But this weekend I received in the mail the first checks ever presented to me for anything I wrote, a couple of pieces in the newly-launched Arts & Living California, a regional magazine “for the thinking person with a curious mindset.” You can check them out on www.artsandlivingmag.com. The pieces are excerpts from my column, which I email to the editor, Leslie Dunn, the result of responding to a Craig’s List ad for writers. Bravo, Leslie! It is an attractive publication, lively, smart, fresh and young-at-heart. I am pleased to have been included in the debut Fall 2008 issue—and will also be featured in the December issue. She managed to whittle me down from my usual verbose self to a sidebar on the delight of pencils from my column “I Wasn’t Looking for Love,” but what a joy to see myself enshrined on slick paper. It is quite different from any other experience of my own writing. And so now I suppose I can call myself a bona fide “free-lance writer.” It’s progress—because if I don’t make a living as a writer, I will essentially be living on and depleting what ought to be my retirement fund (if I valued safety above sanity) from the proceeds on the sale of my flat. AS I PREPAREto leave for a sad family reunion in Philadelphia, God speed, one and all, in these scary, turbulent times.
Because it’s beautiful. ------------------------------------------------------------ Now drugs have cleared my mind
S.O.S. America: Save our souls. copyright Alexandra Jones 2008 |
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