Punkin!

We carved punkins at the Chart Room last night. It was far more fun than I had suspected it would be. I nursed a Neptune-sized snifter of Grand Marnier throughout the evening, accompanied by a squash-crazed Otter and an unnaturally calm Rubber Pig, who mostly stood watch over my drink.

This is the punkin Otter and I carved together. It totally shoulda won. Instead, the Dia-de-los-Muertos-lookin' one that I did placed third, and that's it. Otter's super-awesome punkin-with-folial-acne didn't get anything, and it was the most original one I'd seen.

So, if we're using a rubber chicken and gut-thick fake blood and squinty eyeballs in our punkin carving?

How could that not place first?

Seriously.

That's my punkin on the top, far right there. I loves me some teeth.

I always forget, though, what a pain in the ass it is to do all of those without destroying the face of the punkin.

...But goddamn, that is one happy cucurbit.

Otter.

His punkin.

Its follicular foliage.

I didn't get a single photo of this one that didn't cut off some part of its leaves or flowers.

It was really, really dim in there.

And I was really very drunk.

Too inebriated to be handling giant knives and antique icepicks, I'm sure, despite the exponentially raised Fun Level brought on by excessive inebriants combined with dangerous tools.

In retrospect, I'm surprised any of the photos turned out at all.

Painted Tits & White Guys with Cameras

For all the breasts that UStian males are exposed to, from every marketing firm on the planet, you'd think they'd know how to behave themselves when confronted with a pair of tits encased in an airbrushed "costume" and not much else.

Well, if you would think that, you would be dead fuckin wrong.

Key West is at the end of its much-touted Fantasy Fest, a celebration wrapped around the island's motto of "One Human Family," a festival intended to allow people to be/act as they really are, without fear of prejudicial treatment or arrest. It's like a mini-Mardi Gras without the historical backbone to hold it up and lend it credence. I mean it's a nice party and everything, but...

Seriously, dude, what's with the obsession with women's tits?

Please don't misunderstand; I love breasts as much and as contradictorily as most UStians, having been tutored, from the day I was born a girl, both in breasts' amazing qualities of form and function and in their absolute profanity, according to the also-obsessed Holier Than Thou churchmen, politicians, and etc.

Tits aren't the issue.

The Issue, the thing that completely and totally creeps me the fuck out, is the way the vast majority of UStian males behave when confronted with boobies made of real, live flesh and blood.
You wanna talk about watching a rapist-mob mentality, barely held in check by some dim, far-off awareness of the realities of jail?
You wanna talk rabid voyeurs with a sense of entitlement?
Watch a buncha drunk, white, US-born-'n'-bred dudes with their shiny digital cameras, turned loose in a festival that is one of the only places in this sanctimonious, self-righteous country where a woman can go out of doors, as topless as a man, without legal recrimination.
This week, anyway.

Okay, look,

1) Why the fuck am I, a woman, not allowed to walk outside without covering my tits?
Seriously. What the hell is so goddamned profane about my lovely, freckly breasts, especially when opposed to Shirtless Businessmen on Holiday, those bloated and pasty examples of UStian excess? I'll tell you what's profane about my tits: not a goddamned thing. It's the guys' preternatural fetishism that's profane. I have to cover up my sweet-creamy boobies only because the Boys are afraid they won't be able to control their dicks. And you can get, like, jail time for that.
Sometimes.

It's the same old argument:
"I wouldn't have raped her if she hadn't been wearing that hot little dress.
"I wouldn't have been spying if she hadn't forgotten to close the blinds.
"I wouldn't have followed her down the street taking photographs of her if she hadn't been outside without a shirt on."

Which, of course, brings me to the second query:

2) Why the fuck are you guys following these women down the street taking photos?
No, really.
What the fucking Fuck?
Don't you see how parasitically predatory that shit is? What the hell makes it okay, in your puerile excuse for logic, to grab a woman, a near or total stranger, and whip her around to face you so you can film her tits undulating? Who the hell are you? How disrespectful, how unforgiveable would that be if someone did that to your mom? Your sister? Your wife, girlfriend, grandmother, daughter?

I mean, Mister Old White Dude? If you get a girl to both expose and let you photograph her beautiful ta-tas, and you know you're gonna be jacking off to those same photos later? Muthafucka, you owe that girl some cash.

I am not fuckin lyin, either.

See, without that monetary exchange, your behavior is something I call Stealing.
That's what I call Taking Advantage.

Regardless how much your ridiculous indoctrination has eroded women's sense of self-worth,

Regardless how willing we are to allow you, a total stranger, to photograph parts of our bodies, knowing full goddamned well what you will eventually do with those photos, because we have come to see our bodies as being worth so fuckin little,

Regardless how innocent you have led yourself to believe you are in this ancient power dynamic,
You're still taking something from someone and giving not-a-goddamned-thing in return.

Steeeealiiing.
Cheating.
Lying from your eyeballs down.

...But, whatever, you're like, just another white guy, right?
That's just the kinda stuff you ignorantly priveleged white guys do.

...Man, what the Fuck is Wrong with you people?

Fantasy Fest Bar Notes ...or... Our Fest-Obsession and Puritanism Are Obliterating Small Town USA

At the Parrot.
Saturday night of Fantasy Fest week.

Brought food (delicata squash stuffed with andouille spicy rice, topped with a little bruschetta, toasty pecans, and parmesan; sweet pickled beets and peppercorns on the side) to a beautiful friend who's working a double, right in the thick of the crowds and parade.
Sat here at the back bar with the same friend and watched parts of the bodyart contest, which basically consisted of a buncha old white dudes taking photos of women's tits.

My beautiful friend told me how she has watched Fantasy Fest evolve, over the past 8 years or so, from an artsy, costume-float-frivolity-focused occasion into an event populated by middle-aged swingers lookin to see some tits and maybe, maybe get lucky with someone besides their own wives. While empathizing about the pathetic debauchery that is rapidly coming to signify the Key West Experience, it occurred to me that this same progression seems to happen to every place or event that is able to bill itself as some sort of bastion of freedom. ...Freedom, I say. Not that All-American crap that tries to fit in Freedom's underpants.

Maybe too many people found out about Fantasy Fest.

Too many people whose lives are otherwise totally constrictive.

Too many people craving an anonymous outlet for their Not So Deviant deviant behavior.

Too many people desperate to shake loose the Manacles of Propriety that they themselves helped fashion.

...................

It's pretty disheartening and more than a little disturbing.
...Y'know, the more I think about it.

....................

So, which is the next poor town or festival to fall prey to Ustians' flight from their own Puritanism? How will these (Our) towns and festivals pay for the privelege of being centers of openmindedness?
Will we pay with legal sanctions on/against our festivities?
Will we pay with our vibrant, living communities' eventual conformity to our country's mediocre standards?
Will we trade our neighborhoods and small businesses for the Big Box's cunning conveniences and contaminated comforts?
Will we pay, in effect, with the same qualities that made our towns and celebrations such wonderful destinations in the first place?

Birfday Barfday

Today is my super-awesome brother's 31st birthday. I will get to see him in a very little less than two months, when I'll squeeze him 'til stuff comes out.

Happy Birfday, Shane! You'll always be taller and more amazing than I, but I'll always be able to feed you well and knock you on the floor laughing.

I fuckin miss you, dork.

...and, y'know...I totally love you and stuff, too.

Big Ol' Cycle

man, this death stuff is heavy this week; the moon's getting darker.
this is part of a letter to my brother, d~, dated 24 august 2006. i'd forgotten it had been over a year. how did i forget?...
...feel all weird posting this, self-indulgent as all hell, but...sometimes that ain't so bad. -rd


on another note of longing, my amazing, ornery, foul-mouthed, big hearted, "darlin-i'll-always-keep-a-cowgirl-hat-for-you" texas grandad just died monday; his funeral's today. i am so fucking heartsore i can hardly breathe these mornings, too fed up with death and dying and suffering and missed opportunities and untold stories and lost links to other perspectives that i deeply treasure. i'm fuckin heavy with love that has lost three outlets this year, and with grandad it lost one of its main arteries. oh, d~... if ever there were a year to learn how to mourn and how to survive.... goddamn it. it's been 5 years since i've seen grandad. five motherfuckin years. i never wrote, never called. couldn't bear to hear his robust voice made small and flat by telephone lines. couldn't bear to try and write all the stuff i only know how to say with my eyes, to try and waste all my splendid vocabulary on a man who had no time for such things, who only had time for gut feelings that are too big for words. he was the first grown-up man i ever loved. ever. he was the first one to ever tell me i could do anything boys could do, that i'm just as smart (if not moreso) than boys and not to let anyone ever tell me different; he was the first one to lay out so many truisms in such plain language, language no one else i've known has been able to match: "just cause a boy's got a pecker don't mean he can tell it from his brain." he stood up for me to my dad. he wrote to me every year on my birthday, these past few always asking me to come and see them when i got the chance. ...fuck! fuck, Fuck, FUCK! and today they're putting him in the ground. today, six feet of earth step up to close the bridge that death first set afire. oh, d~, my heart wails a ululation as deep and slow as the very earth's rumblings today; i cannot separate this sorrow from the immense, unstoppable river of all humanity's woe. jeremy and jason's deaths were large rooms in my house burning down; grandad's exit is fully a third of my foundation rattled loose and crumbled beneath me. i don't know where to stand. i haven't been able to tell anyone about this, outside my housemates i mean, who were there when i found out. it's like i don't know how to say it. i don't know how to say "my grandad's dead" without it sounding small and insignificant, without belittling the enormity of its impact on me, without making it sound like just another body has passed from the earth instead of one of its titans. grief is a growling like no other hunger. i feel like a goddamned seive, full of holes, my love and perpectives and reasons for actively living, draining and changing, eroding down to nothing so that i might have room to rebuild them. ...at least, that's how i'm dealing this year. today, though...

today my bones cry.

Death? This is Doxy...

Every now and again, I am drawn along a necrophilic path of curiosity that never fails to uncover the most amazing observations of humans' relationships with Death. The woman to the left is from the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, Italy. I have as yet been unsuccessful in gathering any other information about her. The Capuchin tombs are listed, along with the Sedlec Ossuary in Czechoslovakia, the necropolis of North Ossetia, and the burial sites of the Tana Toraja in Sulawesi, in a little article on humankind's most impressive extant tombs.

Further down this morning's path of beautifully confrontational mortality, please behold Kittiwat Unarrom, an artist who absolutely caramelizes my little bread baker's heart. In his shop in Ratchamburi, Thailand, he fashions the most heart-stoppingly realistic representations of (bits of) human bodies...out of bread. I read a blurb about him in Juxtapoz several years ago and only yesterday found this little video of the gentleman working in his shop. It's fuckin awesome.

Uhmmm, lessee...more dead stuff...

Yes, of course! The inimitable Sarina Brewer of Custom Creature Taxidermy has stitched together the most enchanting little capricorn in the whole wide world (and it's even blue!). Ms. Brewer's a naturalist with what appears to be a deep reverance for life, beginning to end. She deals with death by honoring the already-dead (roadkill, etc.) with beauty and immortality. I totally have a crush on this woman for both her aesthetics and her pragmatism; would that more people could see like she sees.

Another amazing artist in the necrophilic realm (and another girl, oh my palpitating heart!) is the taxidermist of A Case of Curiosities. She's done some chimerical physical illustrations of 18th and 19th century Russian, French, and German fairy tales. ...I'm talking real kittens in princess dresses here. Secondly, she's got a really lovely piece on exhibiting human corpses (mummified or taxidermied) and its longlived status as social taboo.

Yeah...,

Yeah, Death has been on my mind again, as she is during life-changing and -challenging spaces. I'm getting married, and so it is perfectly natural that my preternatural obsession with our inevitable quietus should resurface now, now, now.

My awe-inspiring brother D~ and I were recently discussing awareness as it applies to personal mortality. Knowing, or at least being pretty goddamned sure that we will eventually die, we agree that it behooves us to be as aware as mortally possible up through the very last moments of our lives, to be awake, in the most naturally esoteric sense, down to our very last inch. I have, of course, been reading about this awareness stuff through my whole life, through teachings of christ/buddha/mohammed, and etc. However, all my efforts at willful awareness, through meditation and the like, have proven pretty fruitless. The only times I have been really, truly in my skin, in my every breath, in whatever I have that feels like a living soul, are times when I have deliberately put myself in the way of Death:

Skydiving. Cliff-jumping. Formerly ingesting and insulflating massive quantities of potentially mortally harmful chemicals. It's like...

It's kinda like doing psychomimetic substances, specifically organic ones. Mushrooms, for example, always make me hyper-aware of beauty. When I'm up for a fungal, kaleidoscopic afternoon, colors seem brighter, more vivid, more like themselves. Ditto all organic shapes, smells, textures, tastes, and on and on. They help me remember how the world felt when I was a little, little girl. Y'know, back when I knew everything was made of magic way, way older than god.

Lovely as hallucinogens are...well, frankly, hallucinogens are tools, are means to an end. They are a cut-to-the-chase way to kick my brain out of its entanglement in the short-sighted day-to-day quagmire that we pass off as Reality with a capital 'R'. Visionary plants are not solely for recreation; they are not toys. They are keys to the doors in our own perceptions, our own realities. I take, have sporadically taken for years, mushrooms (and their organic cousins) to show my brain what it feels like to be open. 'Cause, y'know...sometimes I forget. The goal, though, the goal is to eventually be at a point where I can see Beauty for what it is all the time, without any additional help from the plant kingdom.

And it works.

Not quite like LSD does; I don't have uncontrollable flashbacks or disorientation. I don't suddenly see giant dahlias in my sautee pans or hear the cats talking to me (they do that all the time, anyway). It's way gentler than that.

I just perceive more. I actually notice season changes, even the super-subtle ones to be found here in the subtropics. I am much more prone to stop and smell the frangipani than I was before taking mushrooms. I observe and appreciate life. I know that the reward for occasionally sitting and watching the daily drama that takes place among the tiny anole lizards in my yard will far outweigh the "lost" time I could've spent doing something more industrially productive. I remember that this stuff, the unending performance of all living things, is actually important, each timeless moment of it, for reasons that are prohibitively difficult to articulate to the consumer-minded. And, difficult to explain or not, I am a hell of a lot wealthier for it.

So, back to the Death thing, I like to do stuff like skydive and cliff-jump and whatnot because these also function as tools to help my brain learn how it feels to be really, really present. While circling up and up and up in a little Cessna just built for jumping out of, Death is sitting, in all but physical form, right next to me, thigh to thigh. And lordy, is that girl grinnin! I've gotta be cool, gotta be calm so I don't do something stupid and panic-driven that might endanger myself or the pilot or the jumpmaster. Thus, it behooves me to look over at Death, acknowledge that she's got a job to do and know that I cannot stand in her way if it's my time, then just grin at her sweet and sideways, and give her a little flirtatious wink that says, "See ya at the bottom, baby; I'm goin for a ride!"

It seems to me that...well, that Death likes to give her blessing if you approach her humbly and mischeviously like that, y'know? And when I jump? Once I have come to that understanding with Death? I have absolutely nothing to worry about. Nothin. No future. No past. No grocery lists or social obligations. For all I know, I may be dead in a couple of minutes, and these sky-high, spellbound moments may be my last; I am sure as hell gonna live 'em. Peacefully. Thankfully. Joyously.

I will be Here.

Death is Birth is Death is Birth. Ain't nothin to be afraid of. In fact, I'm invitin 'em to my weddin. To all the events of my life, great and small.

All of the people I mentioned above?---the baker, the churchmen, the taxidermists and the preservationists?---all of them are working with their chosen charges in ways that pose a kind of anathema to our whitebread, plasticene, fear-based, UStian ideals concerning mortality and our relationships to Life and Death. In doing so, they absolutely honor us by gently, beautifully showing us what we fear to see: the immutable frailty of Life, and our heartbreaking, heartswelling connection to every single aspect of it.

How fuckin gracious and aware is that?