Smokey Mountain Breakdown

I'm tired. I have that punchy feeling where you can feel your blood vibrating in your veins.

I hate that.

I was just falling asleep this morning as the dawn charged over the horizon. I'm not sure why I stayed up all night, but I just did. So when the phone rang at eleven, I wasn't really half awake. But six hours is better than nothing.

So...I got nothin' for you today. I'm really really happy with Little Men. That's the sort of work I do when I'm well rested.

This morning was warmish in a weird way and the clouds came closing in on the blue sky. By afternoon it began. Great white globby snow flakes. I so love the first snow. I had to run to the store and stood out in it for a moment. In a moment of madness, I lifted my head to the sky and stuck out my tongue, letting those icy clumps fall and melt. They felt like little fairy needles.

Perhaps it was the exhaustion. I experienced a rare moment of Zen seeing on my way home. I stopped the jeep by the "Rope Hole", a local swimming hole with a rope swing. I saw the snowflakes falling on the rushing mountain water in a moment of crystal clarity. I zoomed in with my entire being to the moment before the snowflakes hit the water. I think they seemed to pause for a moment, as though knowing death was near.

I have no words to describe how unspeakably beautiful this was. It was a visual haiku.

But I have no words for you now. I'd just drown you in adjectives.

They started showing up when I hit my thirties. They may have been there before and I just failed to notice them. Suddenly, they would be there. Creeping up on dirty, bare feet; cutting glances in my direction; shy, they were, like small, feral creatures in the snow.

"What'cha doin'?"

Sometimes they brought gifts. Bull frog tadpoles in jars, deer skulls or other assorted bones, fresh trout just caught, ducks just shot or rabbits and animal skins. I have graciously accepted these offerings and let them watch as I placed the tadpoles in small porch aquariums to mature, proudly displayed the bones, cleaned the fish and dressed the game and birds. The latter would sometimes include an anatomy lesson.

"See that? You don't want to cut that...it's a bile duct and it's connected to the liver. You have one inside you too!"

They would come by bike, by foot and once in a while on horseback. Sometimes they timed their entrance to the start of the barbecue grill. Sometimes they came with questions, sometime tears and sometimes to rescue me.

I've always called them my army of little boys. Puck's friends. My little men.

I don't know why they came. I have no idea what it is about me that draws 9 to 13 year old boys to my doorstep. There was one girl once. She was a corn-rowed tomboy with sickle cell. She would arrive on her bike with the rest of the gang wearing a backwards baseball cap and a snaggle-tooth grin. Some days she wasn't there. She was in the hospital.

When I lived in Columbia, I was in graduate school. My hours were irregular and involved long nights at the theatre. So I would be home during the day when the latch-key gangs of the Olympia neighborhood were running wild in the streets. Before long, every one's Mom had my phone number so they could call their wayward offspring home.

"Is he over there bothering you again?"

"No...it's okay. He's just cleaning out the tadpole nursery. Do you need me to send him home?"

"His dinner's ready."

"No problem...I'll see that he heads out right away."

Olympia was a really cool neighborhood. It was an old textile mill village with wonderful old homes dating back to the turn of the century. Most of the original people who settled there were from the Appalachians. You can find these mill villages all over the eastern seaboard. Folk from the mountains would leave in droves to work in the textile mills. Most would work through the cold winter and return home to "make a garden" in the spring. This is a fairly common story heard here. Sometimes entire families would go. Children as young as five were put to work in the mills doing dangerous things that only quick small fingers could do.

Sometimes they lost those fingers.

Most of the families here in Grassy Fork have some sort of mill heritage. Some stayed behind and settled permanently in the mill villages. These people were called "lint heads". The term started as a pejorative but now, it has been reclaimed. It's rarely used in a negative sense anymore. The interesting thing is that no matter how many generations removed from the mountains, the people who stayed seemed to hang on for dear life to their Appalachian heritage. These villages for a while, before gentrification, were little oasis' of mountain culture plopped down in the middle of major cities.

If what happened to me in Olympia had not happened, I would have gladly stayed there.

I really loved it there; my mill house looking out over the abandoned mill, my lint head neighbors, Granny Wilson with her purple hair and feral chihuahuas and my army of little boys.

Two of them, brothers, were frequent visitors. Ryan and Jeremy. Ryan was of the age where he would excitedly relate stories that I'm sure, his mother would rather not have spread around.

"Miss Rosanne! Guess what WE did! Momma an' me...we went over to her ol' boyfriend's house...you know...the really mean one? We slashed his water bed and water...well...it like went ever'where!"

The mill house they lived in was catty-corner to mine. The yard decorations were simply wonderful. For a while, a toilet graced the front yard with one of those little fishing boy statuaries seated on top of the tank and fishing into the bowl of the toilet. I thought it inspired. They hung sheets in the trees for Halloween and you never knew what was going to show up there at Christmas.

One day, as Jeremy was walking with me and my dogs, he got a quizzical look on his face.

"My Momma, she says you're a 'dite'."

I cut my eyes at him. I could tell he was confused.

"So Jeremy. Do you know what a 'dite' is?" I asked, repeating the mispronunciation.

"Well, sure!" he replied with a bit of false bravado. "I've got lots of friends at school who are boys and there's nothin' wrong with that."

"Indeed."

I really loved my life there. I loved those people.

When I moved here, a new crop started coming up to visit. They would show up with pellet guns and bare feet. It always amazes me how the mountain children can run and scamper over the sharp rocks. I forbade them to come on the property without shoes. It took a few times to get them to obey. I still have projects that little boys like to help with. Building a rabbit trap just like the one my grandfather built for me. Holding lengths of wood steady while my circular saw rips the wood. Tending to newly hatched chicks or bottle-feeding baby goats. Gigging frogs in the pond.

It's an army of one right now. Only one left...my amazing helper, Adam. Adam at 11 can start any two cycle engine capable of starting. He has climbed down the cliff to retrieve dogs and goats. He's helped me run fences. He's a great kid. It seems sometimes that he's carrying around a very old soul.

As I said, I have no idea what draws them to me. Perhaps it is because my own interests, my simple pleasures, have remained fairly juvenile. I enjoy gigging for frogs. I like building rabbit traps and the breathless anticipation each day as you check them. I love a walk in the woods with my .22 hunting squirrels with my dogs or fishing in the creek. I like to go down to the creek on the hottest day of the year and swim in the ice cold water. Finger painting is fun and ever so sensual (remember the squishy feel of the tempera and that amazing smell?). These things still hold great pleasure to me. I still like doing the things I liked doing when I was 10. Except eating paste. I gave that up.

Just as mysteriously, they vanish. Like the litter of possums I hand raised, they disappear into the woods of young adulthood, clambering over the fallen leaves of their experiences. Sometimes, as with Ryan and Jeremy, I never hear from them again. I can only hope that some gift from me goes forth with them. I sometimes wonder where they are. If they are on some lonely desert fighting for their lives. If they have enough to eat. How many times has their heart been broken.

I'll never know. It is my way to walk softly in this world.

But sometimes...sometimes...I hope rather desperately that they still like to watch tadpoles grow into frogs.

I wake up this morning to a crisply, cold mountain morning. The quality of the light is just a wee bit hazy, but the sky is that amazing robin's egg blue that offsets the starkness of the winter landscape here.

I wonder if there is any snow up on Snowbird? Usually, when the temps drop this dramatically at my elevation, the high reaches are all craggy and snowy. The winds sweep down from Le Conte and Snowbird to chill us. If I'm this cold on my aerie, I know it must be really cold down in the holler.

I just read Catherine Marshall's Christy. I'd been putting off reading it since I knew that I was going to be writing about this place and it already had one well-known work written about it. Of course, I'm writing first hand and almost a hundred years later than Marshall. I'm also not fictionalizing. I think what struck me the most was how little the physical environs of the place had changed in a hundred years. There are definitely improvements...the typhoid and other serious illnesses aren't a problem thanks to modern well digging. I've walked back to the old springs that used to supply water here. They are pretty scary. Few are still being used. There is still the off person who has no indoor plumbing or running water. One of my close neighbors is one of them. After reading about the connection to typhoid and the springs, I now worry about Hammer. He's been digging a spring out near his house so he does not have to drive down the road to the artesian spring at the little church on Hall's Top to get water.

The Big Mud Hole was finally paved over last year when they started black topping The Old 15th. When I first moved here a few years ago...that wet spring was still causing problems. I've been up to the site of the Christy mission. I'm always a bit surprised by how small the footprints of the old structures are. So many people living in such small places. Easier to heat.

One thing that struck me about the book was that Marshall didn't shy away from the negative aspects of the people here. I realized that I've been doing that. I suppose I'm just so madly in love with the mountains and the mountain people that it's easier for me to turn a blind eye to that which is less beautiful than I'd like it to be. In a way, my first hand experience here keeps me from looking too closely and that is something I need to work on.

The terrible diseases here have been replaced, unfortunately. The three main scourges here are clinical depression, prescription drug addiction with methamphetamine addiction running a close third. My feeling is that the latter two are efforts to self-medicate the first. I have no science to back this up, but my feeling is that depression is something that is "bred in the bone" to these folk. A modern day Dr. MacNeill would no doubt be researching genetic markers for depression in the people up here.

They have a truly profound fascination with death and dying. The passages in Christy where Fairlight Spencer is watching the shadows overtake the mountain ranges, I see as being a metaphor for this obsession. I know exactly what that looks like. It's really very beautiful as seen from my high perch. The shadow is like a great hand reaching out to snuff out the twilighted candles of the mountains. It really is a perfect metaphor for the approach of death.

The local churches seem to feed this fascination. The stress is upon the afterlife rather than Christ-like behavior. Their beliefs are both narrowly defined and unambitious. One's entrance to paradise is guaranteed by mere belief. I feel strongly that one's actions, deportment and honor toward others (and Christ is as good an example to follow as any but the concept exists in all world religions) is key in being spiritually healthy. After all, if there is no one, or no reason for one to keep living...why bother? We need to be needed.

I talked with a friend about this concept. She smiled and said, "My husband liked to say that 'your faith should have legs'." Exactly. That's exactly what I mean. But, being the dunderhead that I am, I couldn't say it in five simple words.

People like to think the worst of people here. I'm not sure exactly how to describe it but it's almost titillating. There is a sort of gleeful glint in their eye when gossiping about someone who has committed a mortal sin in their eyes.

"Bless their heart. They are going to burn in hell."

As I mentioned in my "Picking out my Handbasket" post...this doesn't mean that they won't be your good friend, even if you are, after all, going to be doomed to hellfire.

Unfortunately, because of the prescription painkiller problem up here, many pain patients go without much needed pain meds. We have a cancer patient or two blow their brains out or commit suicide by some other means each year. Suicide seems to be a generally well accepted method of pain management here...but...

"Bless their heart. They are going to burn in hell."

I have a buddy who is facing an identity crisis right now. He was raised elsewhere but shares the same genes as the rest of the folk here. He's got a double shot of the depression gene and I honestly can't think of a worse place to try to discover one's identity than Grassy Fork. It's a great place to come to if you already have a firm grasp on who and what you are. I dealt with these issues 15 years ago and the pain of doing so is still quite vivid in my memory. His faith is quite strong and is of the ilk of these mountains. I think he is half worried about the burning in hell thing. I suggested he go to MCC or some other more tolerant faith...at least for the time being. But he enjoys the fire and brimstone.

I vividly remember Old Red down at the dump asking me if I thought "boys or girls were 'purtier' ". His sly mountain way of questioning my sexual preference when I first moved here. I honestly wasn't expecting that degree of frank inquiry. My coming here by myself was very suspect to the mountain folk. My easy reply was, "Well, Red. I think all of God's creatures are 'purty" in their own special way." And I do believe that. And with me...purty has nothing at all to do with it. Purty is as purty does, I always say.

Bless my heart. I'm going to burn in hell.

This is place to retreat from the world...not to find your place in it. The world here is nothing like the world out there. This place is very Brigadoonish in that respect. I was ready to leave the world when I came here, and this makes my isolation not merely bearable, but welcome. Many come here to seek peace and I think you have to have that within yourself to truly be happy here.

Of course I would love to have someone to share this with. That's possibly my one regret in this life...my seeming inability for form a life bond outside of friendship with another person. I console myself by knowing that platonic bonds are classically considered the highest form of love. And I consider romantic love to be a form of mental illness anyway. Still.

But I'm at peace that evidently, that isn't what the Big Picture has in mind for me.

And at 45, I've completely squandered whatever "Purty" I may have had at one time.

I think it was Terry Pratchett who said, "There is a reason why religions start in deserts or in high places. The stars are so close at night and make you feel so insignificant that you just have to put something in the way."

Come here and drink the night sky...or stay and go mad from the sheer weight of it.

Well. It's been almost a year since I posted. I'm a slacker. I've been neglecting Buzznet and Flikr so it's not just the blog.

You know, I'm still pissed off about Katrina.

But I'm much more at ease now that the balance of power has been restored in Washington. I stayed up all night waiting for the mid-term election results to come in. Woo-Boy-Howdy...I was doing the happy hillbilly dance of joy!

I feel much safer now. So, I can start writing again. Hopefully more about this strange place I live which just seems to never get boring.

I've been paring down on the livestock. I just have one chicken left. He is named "Mr. Chicken". I only have three geese left. Some of them flew off the 300 foot cliff just outside my back door and landed in the cow pasture. They are still down there but have now become community geese. I wish the three I have left would join them. It's damn near impossible to navigate the yard without landing in goose poop. I've decided to focus on the goats and the dogs.

I have two gorgeous new Nubian bucks. The herd is up to 10 head now and my new boys have bred all the does. I'm expecting kids in January. Not the greatest time for babies since it is pretty chilly here in late January and early February. I'm probably going to have to pull the doe kids and bring them in the house to bottle raise. So I'll have babies running about in diydies and onesies. I was planning to put Lucky in the freezer, but I just haven't been able to bring myself to do the deed. My freezer is also completely full of veggies from this past summer's garden so there is no room for cabritto. The garden was almost too successful and I was really busy with it all summer. My brandywine tomatoes did especially well and I put up about two dozen quarts of marinara sauce. I've got my eye on some unusual French winter squash for next year. I always bite off more than I can chew with that damn garden. It's a gang of work for one person weeding and tending a quarter acre plot. My watermelons were amazing this year! And the pumpkins were great too! I made some outstanding pies with the pumpkins. They were heirloom stock from a local garden. I got some amazing sunflowers and got some really good photos of bees on them. I think they are up on both Flikr and Buzznet.

When things are so beautiful...you just want to stay alive and enjoy it all.

The start of bear season kicked off. Big Creek Market and Deli has a hand-written sign on the front door proclaiming that they will be open at 5 a.m. for bear hunters. Heard a guy from Knoxville got a really big one on the first day out. I have my request in to a bear hunter to get me a big tub of bear fat. I'm going to render it down and make some soap with it. That's the other thing I've gotten really caught up in over the past year. Making soap. I sell it on my petfinder site to support the cocker spaniel rescue. One of my more successful batches involved getting local raw honey and wax from the beekeeper down the road.

I finished the Angel Dogs Calendar and it's up on Cafe Press. I'm sort of embarrassed by the Angel Dogs thing. I mean, I spend boucoup de years getting my MFA and all those years as a wigmaster for film and television, costume designer...blah, blah, blah... and I actually do know what good art looks like. I'm actually capable of doing good art. And I end up sticking wings on dogs in heaven. An artist friend described them as being frighteningly rococco. And it's true. They are. But people really like them and pay me money to do them. And I don't have to mess up the studio getting my watercolors and prismacolors out. I do have some standards. I draw the line at "sofa-sized" paintings.

Though I do feel I need a break from photoshop and illustrator. I wish there was a life studies class closer than Asheville. I really need a tune-up on my human figure work. It's just not the same working from books and photos. Even the losest, sketchiest life drawings look better than working from photos. I had one that I did during the class at Rythymfest one year that I really loved. Which is unusual for me since I don't usually get attached to my studies. I liked that one though.

Anyway...that's what's been going on...at least part of it for me. I'm going to start working more on the stories.

So...my apologies to all of you who have written saying you've read the stories over and over and want more. I'm going to start afresh tomorrow. I think it may be an introspective piece. Who I am, where I am, and how that's workin' out for me.

'Cause apparently I'm going to Hell in one.

I was informed at great length yesterday that I was doomed to hellfire. Not in a bad way or an angry way, but by a friend who was quite definite in expounding upon her religious beliefs which were quite clear that I would be swimming in the lake of fire. She didn't seem to think this was rude at all. She likes me, but I didn't really get the sort of sense that she was terribly upset about me doing the backstoke in a pool of lava.

This seems weird to me. If I really really believed someone I cared about was going to face such a horrible end, I'd be less concerned about talking about my own epiphany and more concerned about bringing about theirs.

I learned from my friend that I, in spite of being baptised in the Episcopal Church and educated in a Catholic convent with more religious training than is really healthy for a person, am not a Christian. Evidently, because I'm not a Baptist, I'm not a Christian. This came as a big surprise to me. Also, because I haven't been "saved", I'm going to hell.

Being "saved" or "born again" has always struck me as being a redundancy. I mean, how hard to you have to believe in something to make it part of your belief structure? You believe it or you don't. Unless you've been raised by wolves, it's likely that you have a passing acquaintance with the world's major belief structures. The whole "saved" thing strikes me as being oh-so-second century. Can't we move beyond that now? Like, it's 2000 years later. Can we please move onto something else past simple belief? How about "good works", "tolerance", or "kindness"?

Most people I know who have become "saved" or "born again" did so while whipped into a religious fervor surrounded by a church full of people and music. Their epiphany was spurred on and cemented in a mob full of people. It's easy to believe something when peer pressure surrounds you and echoes back your beliefs into your own ears. My experience with zealots of all stamps leads me to conclude that zealotry cannot exist in a vacuum.

My epiphany was in solitude. The only sound being the ka-chunk, ka-chunk-hiss of the ventilator that filled my lungs with air, keeping me alive. Somewhere, in that haze, I was aware of another entity with me. Someone who took the worst of my pain upon themselves.

My feelings were not of gratitude, fear or worship. I knew I was in the presence of the Divine. But all I could feel was concern. I was worried for God.

It's the same feeling I always get when confronted with anyone or thing who is hurt, depressed, lonely or grieving. It leads me to action rather than prayer. Not that prayer is a bad thing, but it's important to act if action is possible.

But since I'm most certainly hell-bound, I'm picking out my handbasket. I'm planning to avoid white since I really don't know if I'll be arriving there before or after Labor Day.

My life is in one of its insanely busy times. If you told me I was going to be this crazed when I quit working, I just wouldn't have believed it. But you sort of fill that 9 to 5 void with other important things.

I launched my eight month long Angel Dogs Calendar fundraiser for my dog rescue on the 1st. Basically, I'm raffling off portraits for a 2007 Angel Dogs calendar for the next eight months. Each portrait is themed for each month. So I had to create a web page with my meager web design skills for it. It's here.

Then PetFinder gave me a new url and hosting for a new improved PetFinder site for Rosie's Cocker Rescue Referral. I'm designing it now and hope to have it live in a few weeks. I'll have more room for the educational stuff that my rescue is really about and a page for the Farm and Jammery and other cool stuff.

Then...wonders of wonders, Bart got himself an approved forever home. Yay! I'm really happy for Ba-Ba, but very sad for myself. He's been with me for two years. If things don't work out, he'll always have a place here, but this looks like an ideal placement for him. He's been my buddy and ever-present shadow as I've fixed fences and puttered in the garden for the past two years. But he won't have to share me with five other dogs where he's going and he'll have a nice lady librarian who will love him just as madly as I have loved him. It's been an honor and a privilege to have him here. He'll be sorely missed by us all.

But there is lots of work to be done in getting him to Maryland. I have to get the transport arranged and his health certs in order and get him gussied up for the trip.

I'm also planning a revamp of the Angel-Dogs site and will get to work on that as soon as the Petfinder site is up.

I don't have many pictures to post right now. It's actually sort of gloomy here in Appalachia during the winter. I love it but it's not for everyone. Charles Keralt did this classic documentary that really shocked the nation called "Christmas in Appalachia" that painted the area with the grim strokes of poverty of the region. In a way it wasn't really fair. If he had done "Springtime in Appalachia" it would have been a completely different doc. The starkness of winter here lays bare the bones of the mountains. It lays bare the bones of the people, too.

So, that's my life right now. Chop wood. Carry water.

I have a confession to make.

I voted for Nixon. Yes, it's true. In 1968 Mrs. Nivers' first grade class participated in a mock election and I voted Republican. While it was true that I was concerned about exactly where I was going to hide my big brother from the draft in my small bedroom, it was not Nixon's fiery statement about the issues of the nation that won my approval.

"When the strongest nation in the world can be tied down for four years in a war in Vietnam with no end in sight, when the richest nation in the world cannot manage its economy, when the nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is plagued by unprecedented racial violence, when the President of the United States cannot travel abroad, or to any major city at home, then it is time for new leadership for the United States."

This makes total sense to me now. I'm sure he even pronounced all the words correctly. But that wasn't it. It was his hair. You see, male pattern baldness runs nowhere in my genetic line. At age seven, baldness and receding hairlines were just freakish to me. When I looked at the pictures on my little first grade ballot, Humphrey was definitely the more hair challenged. I knew I could trust all of my big-haired male relatives so Nixon it was. By 72, I was much more politically savvy and went with McGovern.

And two years later, Nixon came tumbling down in the Watergate scandal.

One Republican argument justifying Bush's NSA classified domestic surveillance program involves rolling back the state of executive privilege back to the pre-Watergate years. We essentially have a situation today where the president is advocating a modern day Huston plan, one of Nixon's Articles of Impeachment. The Huston plan advocated the systematic use of various illegal acts and infiltration of anti-war groups and others. In Nixon's words from his 1977 interview with David Frost, "Well, when the president does that it isn't illegal."

Are we okay with this? I don't recall being asked if I was okay with this. To me, Watergate restored some much needed checks and balances in the Executive branch of government. It made the statement that the president is accountable, not only at election time but the entire time he's in office. So watch your p's and q's buddy boy.

We live in a much different time now. Just visiting the NSA site will give you a cookie to track your movements on the Internet. We have very little privacy as it is, every purchase is tracked, private companies keep scores of our credit ratings, and the most intimate details of our life are available for a price. I'm old enough to remember joking around about our FBI files. Given that our lives are so accessible, I don't think it's too much to ask that government agencies wishing to violate mine or others constitutional rights take the extra few minutes to get a warrant to tap a phone.

It's not that I'm concerned about my own phone being tapped. This would result in long hours of dial-up screeching since I only keep one phone and am on the computer fairly often. But violating someone's rights should never be easy. It should never happen just because the president says it's okay. Unlike George Bush, the constitution is more to me that "just a %#$@#* piece of paper."

I have precious little privacy as it is. Despite my remote location and seclusion, nothing goes on here on the mountain that everyone doesn't know about. It's done the old-fashioned way, by observing and reporting to the rumor mill. I'm fairly sure that, at this instance, a community of 500 all share in the knowledge that I'm fighting a nasty chest cold and have plenty of cough syrup. They know this because I went to pick up some stuff at Mrs. Busbee's and declined her offer of cough syrup. If you want to tell your side of the story just go down to the dump and tell the dump crew your latest troubles, "leaking" the pertinent bit of information you want getting out.

This works just dandy for Grassy Fork. But I hold the federal government to a higher standard.

I spent most of yesterday worming and vaccinating the goats. I'd go down to the paddock with a bucket of grain and bring them up singly to the house to give shots and feed pelletized wormer to them. Nod was the toughest to catch. She's always been a bad girl but I absolutely had to get ahold of her this time. She'd grown out of her collar and it was way too tight. I have a festive purple one just for her.

Nod is one of my original three goats. She was just a wee doeling when she came here with Winkin' and her mother, Blinkin', and she's never calmed down. This time, I decided to keep her up here at the house for a few weeks to see if I could tame her down. I don't want her fighting me when I help her deliver her kids this spring.

I honestly think Nod will be happier for being gentled. She's not like the other goats. She's actually pretty mean to them. She's always the ringleader when the other goats decide to play "Throw Lucky against the Electric Fence." She bites the other goats and pulls their ears and tails. I've been remiss in not doing this before. Most herd keepers would just sell Nod for meat rather than fool with her, but I'm sort of fond of her ornery self.

When I was a child, my favorite Christmas myth was "The Night the Animals Talk". Supposedly, on Christmas Eve, for a time...the animals can speak. I'm not sure if they are supposed to speak English or not. I always just assumed that I would be able to understand them in the way I understand people.

My parents foiled numerous attempts on my part as a child to confirm this. My plan was to sneak out to the stable and finally hear my horse, Sonny, tell me that he loved me every bit as much as I adored him. I'm not sure what other sorts of horsely wisdom he might have had to tell me.

We once had a Siamese cat named Itty-Bitty who was taken from her mother too soon. She had that typically odd sounding cat cry that Siamese cats have. My root woman nanny was terrified of this cat. She swore the cat was saying, "Maaa-maaaa, maaaaa-maaaa".

It's not that I haven't always known exactly what my animals were saying. I just thought it would be neat to actually hear what their voices sounded like.

This midnight as the clock heralded in the wee hours of Christmas Day, I went out onto the porch to check on Nod. I think the part of me who was still eight years old was half-hoping to hear her say something.

"Blah. Blah-blah." She said, looking up at me with her topaz colored goat eyes and snorting.

I understood perfectly.

"Screw you! Give me some damn corn, you bitch!"

I scratched her under her chin and told her she was a good girl. Because it's important to tell homely creatures they are beautiful, and naughty creatures that they are good.

Tis the season of small sacrifices.

I recently harvested this bouquet of roosters to put in my freezer. They are such lovely things that I hate to put an end to what has been, up to this point, a very happy chicken life. But too many roosters in the coop makes for very unhappy and unproductive hens. So...sadly, it was time to say goodbye to these lovely gentlemen.

Left are ten hens and the most splendid of the roos, Splash III. I will get my incubator going some 21 days before Easter to welcome the new crop of chicks from these remaining chickens.

I'm thinking about giving up on the poultry all together. I love them dearly, but have no business with my SLE and funky immune system keeping birds should the dreaded bird flu reach here. I'll certainly miss all the fresh eggs and lovely fresh poultry. But for now, I'll keep on keeping my flock along with my small herd of goats. Honestly, the war with the foxes has beaten me down. It's just so heartbreaking to lose birds to the wildlife. I hate that my geese must stay impounded for their own safety. I miss having them underfoot in the yard, fussing at me and begging in their loud honks for treats.

I was glad to see a bit of sun coming in my window this morning. The incessant drizzle and grayness of this time of year tends to make me a bit cranky since I can't get out and do as much as I'd like to. The wind blows over the mountain like some howling beast, knocking down everything in its path. The porch rockers are on their backs and will stay that way until spring. The woodstove is going a mile a minute, consuming wood at a frenetic pace in hopes of conserving some precious propane.

Real coq-au-vin for supper tonight. If you've never had it made with the real thing...a rooster...well, you are missing out!

I've been following the idiocy of the recent outrage over the White House cards and tree with my usual slack-jawed dumbfoundedness. Christian conservatives just seem to have too much time on their hands and I'm shocked at the dearth of goodwill. Petty, selfish meanness seems to be their only common language.

The so-called "War on Christmas" is just another bamboozle being lead by the same group of extremists who are fighting gay marriage. It's the politics of exclusion. They must have all had hand painted signs up on their tree houses as kids saying "NO (fill in the blank with your most hated gender/race/sexual orientation/creed) ALLOWED".

So they are boycotting stores offering "Seasons Greetings" and "Happy Holidays", expressing outrage over the inclusive White House holiday card, and have bullied the White House into changing the name of the Holiday tree back to the Christmas tree.

We all know the prominent role the Christmas tree has in the Bible. I love the part where Jesus plugs in the Nazareth Mall's stately douglas fir tree then goes on to kick some serious Samaritan ass.

This recent nit-picking battle of the Culture Wars just seems to illustrate, once again, how completely irrelevant Christ-like behavior is to the religious right. Let's remember that there didn't seem to be a marginalized group in his neighborhood that Christ didn't include and befriend. Samaritans, lepers, whores, tax collectors...he spoke up for all these people. I can't believe that he would look on favorably upon the direction the church he founded has taken.

Christianity's success is based on inclusion. One of the earliest debates of the church revolved around whether to allow gentiles, i.e. non-Jews, to participate as Christians. The early church decided to allow the gentiles in without them first becoming Jews. I'd hazard a guess that if the debate had gone the other way and adult circumcision was a prerequisite to becoming a Christian that Christianity would now be small paragraph in the history books. So, in a way, the big selling point early on was "no weinie whacking".

There is no denying that Christmas has been a huge success as a holiday. It's success is largely due to the secular elements, the lights, the presents, the tree, the songs, Santa. The "spirit" of Christmas is one of giving, sharing, enjoying family and friends. These are things that people of all faiths enjoy. I see nothing bad in opening the big mid-winter festival to all. It's not just about Christ. It's about "Peace and Goodwill towards ALL."

So Happy Holidays, Season Greetings, a joyous Christmahanukwanzakah to everyone. Don't let those Grinches, the Christian right, spoil the holidays with their exclusive boy's club.

Everyone has a place at this table.

Skillet Cookies

My family's traditional Christmas cookie.

1 stick butter
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 package chopped dates
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 box Rice Crispy cereal
1 cup chopped pecans

Melt butter in a large iron skillet over medium heat. Cream eggs and sugar together. Pour into skillet with chopped dates. Stir constantly until caramelized mixture is a dark brown. Add vanilla. Remove from heat and whip by hand until cooler (5 minutes). Add rice crispies and nuts to mixture then form small balls and roll in powdered sugar or coconut.

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I have been making these cookies for as long as I have memories. In my mind's eye, I can see my chubby little four-year old hands in front of me, covered in stickiness and powdered sugar. I can feel the heat of the mixture of crisped rice, nuts and caramelized dates and creamed sugar.

I hear my mother's voice. "Be careful...it's still hot!" or "You're rolling them too big!"

I liked to roll them big. That was because later, after they were chilled, I would slyly select the largest ones when they were offered. Munching into that cold sweet crispiness and getting powdered sugar all over my shirt. My face. I loved it when my mother would look exasperated and dust me off with her hand.

"I swear!....," she would say.

The recipe was lost for a time. My sister had gotten rid of the cookbook that the recipe was in. I was devastated when I realized this particular book was gone. I thought I was being fair by leaving the sugar-stained tattered book behind for her. She did not see the old book as the pearl of great price that I did. My brother and sister have often been bemused by the things I deem valuable, but I think they are coming around to my way of thinking. History is important. Even the history of one family is important.

I reconstructed the recipe from my memories. My dead mother whispering in my ear the entire time. She often whispers to me.

I make them alone now to send to my family and friends. It doesn't seem right somehow, they are the sort of treat that really needs tiny sticky hands to form the warm melange into the little sugar-covered balls. If you have such little fingers in your house, you may want to give these a try.

They are like some Dickensian nightmare that seems to crawl from under the modern Christmas Present’s robes during and after times of great tragedy. Actually they are always there. You see them rearing their petty noggins from time to time, but they like to snatch them back inside their shell once they realize how hideously ugly they are.

It would be so much easier if they were accompanied by clanking chains and the moans of the damned. I have a feeling that comes later for them.

I know we all are capable of being one of them. When I was in eighth grade, I remember the moment that made me their kin.

She was incredibly popular and pretty in a Mormon way. Big pretty teeth in a constant beauty pageant smile. She was just smart enough for people to like her but not freakishly smart. That was me. Freakishly smart and trying so hard to hide it.

I hated her. I think her name was Tammy. She grated on my nerves to the point that I could barely stand to be around her.

“Haaaa-ay!” She could turn ‘hey’ into two syllables. Chirpy, Chirpety, Chirp, Chirp.

My dislike for Tammy went beyond mere envy. It was a fury at the world that valued people like her and despised people like me. It was a rage at her on a cellular level, yet not at her, but at what she was. It was an archetypal racism. It’s the hate they talk about when they talk about “hate crimes”. It’s unspeakably ugly. Ugly as sin.

We were both attending a beach party on the Island. She came up to me with a sad look on her face and asked, “Why do you hate me so much?”

I was shocked because she noticed.

I broke down in tears and could not answer. My silence witnessed my epiphany. She walked away without realizing the change she had wrought in me by showing me my hatred.

I’ve come to understand that my epiphany hasn’t arrived for a fair portion of the population of earth. Most people are perfectly happy hating without rhyme or reason. Most people like to wallow in their hate and enjoy aiming it toward curious and inappropriate places.

I reserve my hatred for the government. They are largely deserving and I figure, they can take it. The pompous and hubris-ridden are fun to make fun of.

You’d think that philanthropic endeavors would be free of such vitriol. How can anyone hate you for feeding the hungry or clothing the naked or helping little puppy dogs? But not-for-profits seem to be almost as good a target for hate as pretty cheerleaders and stupid, evil political regimes.

Hurricane Katrina had barely cleared Mississippi before the rumblings began denigrating the Red Cross. The Internet is full of anti-Red Cross sentiment, some of it quite ugly. I heard a nasty Internet tirade the other day that went off on the Red Cross largely because the writer of this piece of idiocy thought the Red Cross charged WWII soldiers for cigarettes.

In humane circles, the big target is the HSUS. I can’t claim to agree with everything that comes out of there, but the sheer range of crazy opposition to the HSUS is pretty impressive. They have apparently pissed off everyone at some point or another. So you get cock fighters and puppy-millers screaming at them for being crazy animal rightists. Then you have all of the crazy animal rightists sneering at them for being toadies of the government. I am being stalked right now for including their url in a list of charities to consider for donations.

Even my little tiny corner of philanthropy is under attack. I honestly can’t find much these days to recommend about the rescue community, even in my little corner of fearless defenders of cocker spaniels. A rival group of cocker spaniel rescuers became insanely jealous of my little group’s fundraising success for Noah’s Wish and began pelting us with sour grapes. It’s actually fairly hilarious if it weren’t so vicious. I think I need to write a book about it.

Even when we were setting up the little fundraiser for Noah’s Wish, some slime mold came out of the woodwork and began defaming the founder of that organization. It very nearly pulled us off track. But it became obvious that this person was trying to appropriate our fundraiser for her own charity.

Part of the problem of moving the responsibility of news gathering to the Internet is that there are no ethics on the Internet. No control for slander or character defamation. And most of the people on the Internet really do believe everything they read there, particularly if it is nasty, gossipy or slanderous. It’s the price we pay for living in a “dumbed down” society.

But in the end, those telling the tales and badmouthing charities end up looking bad. You might as well beat yourself to death with an ugly stick. Picking on people who are just trying to alleviate a bad situation just makes you look petty. And sure, you will have people who will flock to you because of your ranting. They are more than likely to be people who feed off of pettiness.

Tammy, I imagine in my mind, lives in a perfectly ordered Junior League life as the successful wife of some lawyer or doctor. She has a perfect family with a gaggle of beautiful children with perfect teeth. I need to believe in her perfection. I need her to be that happy chirpy adult. I need her to be my reminder that just because there is an anti-me out there, that the world is big enough for both of us. I need to believe that her ability to marry well has served a purpose to the greater good. And I’m sure that it has.

We are a complex species. Each of us equally capable of both transcendental kindness and unspeakable depravity. Perhaps we do know better how charity dollars should be spent. Perhaps we would do a better job. If we honestly believe this, we should go out and use our powers for good. Not beat up on The United Way or The Red Cross or the HSUS.

Unless you are beating up on Reverend Benny Hinn. Now that guy is open season 24-7.

My talent for melding into cultures different from own has led me into some interesting situations. The axiom I try to follow is, "Keep your mouth shut and your ears open and you might just learn something. "

A year ago, I remember making the same monthly trip into the small feed and seed where I purchase my dog food that I make each month. I like this little feed store because it is full of local color and is run by South Carolinians. I hear stories here I don’t hear anywhere else.

As I enter the front door, I always stop and read the bulletin board. The usual fare includes ads for hay, both square and royal bales, horses, pit bull puppies, farriers, guineas and game chickens. Indeed, much of the store is dedicated to the last item. Cocke County is famous for its game chicken breeders and illegal chicken fights. You can find all sorts of stuff here; special feed mixtures, special gunpowder to feed your cocks, special medications, muffs and things I have no idea what they are used for.

The folks who run the store have always been great source of information for me concerning my chickens. My chickens are fat, placid standards. As far removed from the brilliantly colored game chickens as a draft horse is removed from a Mongolian Steppes pony. Still, they get the same ailments and suffer from the same chicken problems. And if there is anything moving through the area that will impact chickens…these people will know about it. They keep healthier and cleaner flocks than any of the commercial or hobby breeders.

Indeed, I quite admire the chicken people. I agree with them up to the point where they throw those gorgeous birds into the ring to fight one another. The chicken people seem to like me as well. We are united by our disdain for the animal rights movement. I think they are a bit misinformed about this. I don’t think they understand that I’m very involved with animal welfare and don’t see the HSUS as the “great Satan” that they do. My disdain for the animal rights people is much different from theirs. This is just one area that I would consider myself in a “strange bedfellow” situation.

A year ago, I waded through a handful of cherried-out pick-up trucks with “Blood and Feathers” mud flaps and Bush/Cheney bumper stickers to pick up my dog food. I would have loved to have a Kerry/Edwards sticker on my jeep. Hell, I would have loved to have Kerry/Edwards signs all over my property. But I was soundly warned not to do such a thing. I was told out right that my property would be vandalized if I showed support for my Democratic candidates. Driving around this oddly traditional Republican stronghold dating back to the Civil War, the only places you could see Kerry/Edwards signs were on vacant stretches of woodland. I didn’t see one sign in anyone’s yard. If you are pushing toward a single party system, fear seems to be the best motivator.

So I didn’t flaunt it. I’m a poor person and can’t afford to replace my vehicle or have my home rebuilt after arson. I felt a certain quiet hopefulness though. It hardly seemed possible that George Bush could get re-elected after his lying ways had been revealed. Because lying is a sin and surely his thickly born-again Christian base would realize that. Wouldn’t they? I felt hopeful because I knew that Dems were getting the vote out in record numbers. Even as I was passing through the phalanx of RNP supporters stationed solidly within 25 feet of my polling place, I felt hopeful. I even grinned and said to them, “No thanks, I’m a Yella Dawg!”

So, I was understandably dumbfounded when GWB won. Evidently so were a lot of people. There are still rumblings involving Diebold’s involvement. Most recently a whistleblower came forward to reveal a remote back door to the Diebold’s software. Jimmy Carter, who supervises elections in third world countries, cannot say that our elections are fair. In our heart of hearts…we know George is an imposter. We just don’t know what to do about it but wait.

So my recent dog food buying expedition ended up being much different. Prominently displayed on the back wall were T-shirts for sale that said, “I SURVIVED 6-11”. They refer to the June federal raid on a Del Rio cockfighting ring. The feds brought to bear their full resources, the Patriot Act and 400,000 taxpayer dollars to net 150 people on misdemeanor charges. They’ve spent the summer kicking in the doors of various small town sheriffs, Boss Hogs, deputies and other local officials. They’ve gone through courthouse records in great detail. The Feds are obviously looking for something. They don’t appear to have found it yet…whatever it is.

The chicken people have really taken all this very personally and are fighting it tooth and nail. They blame George W. Bush and the HSUS. I found myself in the singular position of hearing a well-phrased rant regarding the importance of separating leadership from personable foibles. They praised Bill Clinton to the heavens; because they knew Bill would have had more important things to do than harass a bunch of chicken people at taxpayer’s expense. They are very clear now that the drunk guy who’s the life of the pig pickin’ ain’t necessarily cut out to lead the free world.

Indeed, finally, after Hurricane Katrina, I seem to have strange bedfellows all about. They are like people waking up from a long, long sleep. I think the conversions have more to do with the Federal governments application of the Patriot act here in East Tennessee. It smacks of the old “revenuer” type of action that these people have such a long history with. Evidently, these types of actions are occurring all over the country in small rural communities and counties. I wish I knew why the Feds were cleaning house in these small rural enclaves known for cheap property taxes and slow economic growth. But people are finally experiencing what the loss of civil liberties means to them personally.

They still want “God” back in government, but they want George W. Bush out of there. I don’t know that they will become Democrats. I doubt they’ll ever be able to vote past their narrow self-interests and single-issue politics. They may continue to be easily swayed be slick ideologues with hot button talking points. But they are going to be looking more closely at what a candidate’s history is…and realize that “less government” pretty much means lots more government at the end of the day.

Tennessee is my second home, the home of my adulthood. I grew up, as did all of my family going back several generations, on the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands.



The 1893 Sea Islands Hurricane

As we witness the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina and watch, with horror and fascination as Hurricane Rita churns her monstrous way toward Texas, it is easy to think, "Surely we have not seen the like of these storms before."

I've been wanting to write about the Sea Islands Hurricane since Katrina struck. Partly because I was honored to hear a first hand account when I was a youngster from an ancient black man who was my nanny's father. Joe Kinlaw was 98 when I saw his milky cataract-veiled eyes well up with tears at the recollection. I sat on the old heart pine blanket chest in his two room block house and heard a tale of unbelievable destruction. Bodies buried in shallow graves, flood, disease and the unbelievable stench of rotting corpses of animals and people.

Joe didn't have an inch of dark black skin that wasn't creased from a lifetime of tilling his crops with his mule on his Buck Island farm. He was a slight man, bent from a lifetime of broken promises. But he was strangely happy given all he had seen in his life and had the funny chortling laugh that Katie had...the laugh I inherited from the black woman who raised me practically from birth.

The Sea Island Hurricane struck August 27th, 1893, bearing down upon Savannah, Georgia and affecting the entire stretch of coastline on either side. It is hard to guage how many actually died but it is placed between 1000 and 3000, mostly the poor black population. Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross who supervised the 10 month long relief effort, placed those numbers much higher. 30,000 were left homeless and starving, their crops ruined and the farm land salted by the storm surge.

The Sea Island Hurricane, like Katrina, chose its victims from the poor disenfranchised people of the coast. Like Katrina, accounts reflect that they had at least three days warning of the storm, but those who could not afford to flee inland were the ones who paid the ultimate price. Like Katrina, The Sea Island storm was followed by another terrible storm, The 1893 Charleston Hurricane. The US government did nothing to assist in the relief efforts in 1893. Over 100 years later, with all the benefits of our technology, we could not get our most vulnerable citizens out of the way of a killer storm. So much for "Lessons Learned". How many lessons do we need?

In 1894, Scribner's Magazine ran a long article about the storm and the relief effort. It tells the story much better than I could, but keep in mind the period when reading it. Attitudes toward blacks of the era are reflected in the writing.

Scribners Article

Here are some excerpts:

"Two thousand persons, the great majority of them Negroes, were drowned or killed on the night of the storm. The others died from exposure, from a lack of food, or from the malarial fever that was epidemic on the islands during the hot September days that succeeded the disturbance."

"One peculiarity of this storm was that the aged, the very young, and the infirm were all killed. The survivors were young men in the vigor of manhood. Very few were seriously wounded, and hundreds were found without a bruise on their bodies. They were killed by the sheer pressure and fury of the wind. In the settlements where the storm was worst, not a single child survived, and very few women."

"Fortunately for the survivors, they were in reach of immediate aid. They lived near New Orleans, one of the richest and most charitable communities in the country, a community in which the organization of benevolence has reached the highest point of efficiency. Relief was instantly forthcoming; there was not a moments delay."

"One moment she had five children clinging to her, in another moment there were only two. The angry winds and the hungry waters had torn them from her and swept them out of hearing before they could utter a cry. But what this wom an said did not run in the direction of grief. 'I glad to God I got two lil' one lef'.'"

"It is estimated - and the estimate is not in the nature of a rough guess - that two thousand five hundred lives were lost in the islands and on the adjacent coast. The truth would not be missed very far if the number were placed at three thousand. Not all of those were lost in the storm. Two thousand persons, the great majority of them Negroes, were drowned or killed on the night of the storm. The others died from exposure, from a lack of food, or from the malarial fever that was epidemic on the islands during the hot September days that succeeded the disturbance."

"As a matter of fact, the Red Cross Society as I saw it at Beaufort is something entirely different from any other relief organization that has come under my observation. Its strongest and most admirable feature is its extreme simplicity. The perfection of its machinery is shown by the apparent absence of all machinery. There are no exhibitions of self-importance. There is no display -no torturous cross-examination of applicants - no needless delay. And yet nothing is done blindly, or hastily, or indifferently."

Perhaps my knowlege of this 1893 storm colored my reactions to Katrina. Knowing that New Orleans came to the aid of my homeland so swiftly when we were decimated made me want to help even more keenly. Our memories are long here in the South. Our gratitude reaches across the centuries.

I know, as surely as I know anything, that happiness, music and humid summer breezes dancing in spanish moss will return to New Orleans...just as they returned to Beaufort and Savannah. And God Bless the Red Cross for being there then...and being there now.

Other Sea Island Hurricane and Red Cross Links:

American Red Cross Museum: African Americans in the American Red Cross

Her baby had died and she was glad.

Not that Margaret Workman didn't love her son. But his death in July meant that he wasn't with the family at Tybee Island a month later on Aug. 27, 1893

Reading of Maggie Workman's letter about the storm

An Interview with Clara Barton about the Sea Islands Hurricane

The box office of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kalita Humphries Theater in Dallas is shaped like a coffin. I was there working during Adrian Hall’s reign during the 80’s when it happened. It’s fair to say that Adrian didn’t care for me, often referring to me as “that woman”. So I spent my years of employment there doing the not so creative work of box office and house management. This was okay with me at the time. I had burned myself up like a white goat on the altar of Los Angeles and spilled all my creative blood so that I had nothing left to give. The Dallas Theater Center was a break I needed badly.

I consoled myself by remembering that the coffin shaped office was exactly where Preston Jones had penned A Texas Trilogy. If The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia had emerged from this hopeless place…perhaps I wasn’t completely washed up at 24. Maybe I could go on to do something wonderful like that.

And it was a good place for me then. A time and place of unbridled silliness where we giggled and “corpsed” each time Mrs. Polly Baumfalk came to exchange her tickets. (Could you spell that for me, please Ma’am?) I’d bleached my hair an absurd platinum color that, to my delight, seemed to absolve me of any expectations of intelligence.

In 1985 were doing a production of C. P. Taylor’s dark musical tragi-comedy Good. Good is set in 1930’s Germany and is the story of a basically decent “good” man, a professor, and how he ends up supervising the final solution at Auschwitz. It’s about how “good” people become encompassed and overtaken by evil. Slowly, seductively until in utter horror…it is too late to turn back. In 1985, the Holocaust was still a taboo topic. It was before the Shoah Project and Schindler’s List. It was like saying the word “cancer” in those days…also not a topic for polite conversation. People were still uncomfortable about what had happened to six million souls in Hitler’s death camps. We knew the play was going to be controversial. I just wasn’t prepared for the first and only complaint I handled.

She came in the big glass doors using a cane that seemed poorly suited to support the weight of an entire world. Her frailty seemed a symptom of more than her advanced age and when she spoke you heard the echoes of long dead happiness. She slowly advanced on the ticket window and pushed her season tickets through the window. Her hands were talons that grew sideways from crippling arthritis and were decorated with huge gold rings like jewels on bleached bones.

She grasped my hand when I reached for the tickets and asked, “Why?” Her rheumy eyes, filling with watery tears.

Stupidly I looked from her tickets to her face, not knowing what to say.

Frustrated, she released my hand and rolled her sleeve up. There, still visible, in the creases of her skin was a death camp tattoo.

“Why?” She asked again and grasped my hand, digging into my flesh.

I excused myself and joined her in the lobby. Still quiet, still searching for something I could say, and gently guided her to a seat and sat beside her.

I then said the only thing I could say.

“Because it is important that we, all of us, never forget this. It needs to be remembered.”

I knew when I said it that it was the right thing and the true thing, but I also knew that it was coming from a blonde bubble-headed gentile twenty-something and nothing that came out of my mouth was going to sound right. This grand old woman had more experience of cruelty and brutality and hatred than I would ever in my life imagine.

“Why?” She said again with a sob. “I can think of no good reason to remember such a thing. Such a ugly thing I’ve spent my life forgetting.”

I could not argue with her.

“You know, I there is nothing I can do to stop this play. What can I do for you?”

She seemed to tremble in her delicate, precarious unhappiness.

I called the general manager and we cut her comps for another show. I remember watching her leave the theater, still abjectly unhappy that this terrible thing was going to happen.

She was the first Holocaust survivor I ever met.

I hadn’t thought about my frail little Jewish lady in a long time. Lately, seeing the faces of these new survivors of an entirely different sort of cataclysm, she has haunted me. I doubt she lived long enough to see the efforts that have been made since to remember what happened to her and so many others. She was old beyond her many years even then.

I am tormented by my species’ inability to learn from past mistakes. We seem doomed to repeat history under different circumstances, never taking notice of the ominous similarities from situation to situation. We are like the friend who intentionally seeks out abusive relationships, one after another, each time thinking this time it will be different. All the while ignoring the fact that the new person is really the same person as before…just in a different skin.

I am a Cassandra. There are many of us and our numbers are growing.

Because it is important that we, all of us, never forget this. It needs to be remembered.

I was ten years old and putting my ballet slippers on in the cold, dank old jalopy of a building off Victory Drive in Savannah that served as a ballet school. I can still smell that mixture of kid leather, sweat, pine dust and nylon. Someone was boasting about their sister's recent debut.

"My sister's a movie star." I slyly said, looking up from my chubby legs stuffed uncomfortably into pink tights.

Another little girl, feeling left out from this preteen one-upsmanship blurted out, "Oh, yeah! Well MY sister is a majorette!"

I didn't know what to say. So I wisely said nothing. How do you compete with that?

I was recently looking for a bio of my sister. Not one of the awful B movie site ones, but one she'd written herself. I knew she had this excellent head shot out there for the real estate company she and her husband own and I thought there might be a bio as well. There wasn't. My sister remains adorably computer illiterate.

But I found this amazing little nugget on a blog called Velociworld. This guy, Kim Crawford, left this really wonderful blog entry about my sister and sideways, about my family.

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October 28, 2003

SIMONE GRIFFETH

I haven't blogged about Simone in a long, long time, mostly because it's too painful. She's the first girl I ever fell in love with, and to this day she has no idea who the fuck I am. Life's funny like that.

Simone was born in Savannah, too, 3 days shy of being two years older than me. When I was a kid my parents had a river cottage on the May River in Bluffton, South Carolina, and we'd spend the summers there. Simone's family lived just down the road, on Myrtle Island, on the same river, but in a great huge brick 1920's southern mansion, with enormous live oaks that blocked the sun, dripping Spanish moss and somnolent decorum. They had a long gravel driveway that circled around a fountain in front of the house, the Sure Sign of Old Money to me. This was obviously their primary residence.

I first heard of Simone the summer of '71, when our next door neighbor told us who she was and where she lived. Simone was enjoying great notoriety for a sixteen year old, because she'd just starred in a low-budget flick called Swamp Girl, about a girl raised in the Okeefenokee Swamp with no contact with the outside world.

They call it stalking now; I called it innocent curiosity, and spent the better part of that summer pedaling around her house and Myrtle Island, desperately trying to catch a glimpse of Simone, even as the hired help chased my pimply fourteen-year-old ass out of their driveway for attempting to cut doughnuts in the gravel with a Kolkhoff ten-speed. The fourteen-year-old boy's equivalent of scratching the grass with his hind legs.

I'd often see Simone as she water-ski'd by our dock, blond hair slicked back, bikini aquiver (you know what I mean). There were usually one or two GQ-looking boys in the boat with her, all studly and such, but at least she had the decency to wave back to the skinny geek with big ears and big wood in his banlon nut hugger bathing suit.

Unrequited love. Man. Actually, unrequited acknowledgement of existence. But we stalkers never recognize that fact until it's too late.

Simone did a lot of B movies and TV work after that, but I don't think she did anything after the mid-eighties.

You want to know when she broke my heart? In 1975, when I was in college, and I saw her do a nude scene in Death Race 2000 with David Carradine. Because I felt betrayed? Hell, no. Because she'd seduced Grasshopper. Some things a man just can't forgive.

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My mother would have slap eaten this up. Mom worked terribly hard to project the image of "Old Money"...though...honestly...we had nothing of the sort.

The house never had a fountain. You can check the images in my galleries on that one and deeming it a "mansion", well, it's very flattering but quite wrong. I do, totally, believe that Katie chased him out of our yard for doing donuts. That is just such a Katie sort of thing. I can hear her in my head yelling, "Whatcho doin'! Git!".

Thank you, Kim Crawford, for this lovely little memory of my family. In return, I'm trying to make my beautiful sister aware of your existence. We tried to figure it out last night, but you are right.

She doesn't have a clue who you are.

I'm not sure if they've called Mike Brown back to DC to fire him orgive him a medal. Everyone else who has screwed up in this administration has gotten some sort of honor or promotion.

And of course... every one pads their resume. I'm sure he didn't expect this to happen. I mean....Who'd a thunk it? But, Brownie does appear to padded his resume in a way that sort of crosses the line. The line between bullshit and pathological lying.

And it all comes down to accountability and the lack thereof in theadministration. If GWB was a real leader, heads would roll. But he's too interested in people liking him. And not the people who count.

Here ya go, Brownie. Here's the nation's safety from natural disasters. You deserve it for kissing my ass so good. "You're doing a heck of a job here, Brownie!"

Gormless Git. Ain't no cold cokes in hell.

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How
Reliable is Mike Brown's Resume?

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Mike Brown's Resume
from Findlaw



They had to take the Arabian Horse thing off today. I think they
are trying to expunge that part of Brownie's life for some reason.

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Memorable Quotes from previous employers and people Brown claims to have worked for, et al...:



"I think I've told you that I'm into Arab horses. Well, for 3 years Michael Brown was hired and then fired by our IAHA, the International Arabian Horse Assoc. He was an unmitigated, total fucking disaster. I was shocked as hell when captain clueless put him in charge of FEMA a couple of years ago."



"He ruined IAHA financially so badly that we had to change the name and combine it with the Purebred registry.

I am telling you this after watching the fucking shipwreck in the Gulf. His incompetence is KILLING people."



"The assistant is more like an intern. Department heads did not report
to him."



"Yes. Mike Brown worked for me. He was my administrative assistant. He
was a student at Central State University. Mike used to handle a lot of
details. Every now and
again I'd ask him to write me a speech. He was very loyal. He was
always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt."
(anyone who's been trained to write coded negative letters of
recommendation will get a laugh out of the above.)



"He may have been an adjunct instructor, but that title is very
different from that of 'professor'."



As for the honor of "Outstanding Political Science Professor," Johnson
says, "I spoke with the department chair yesterday and he's not aware
of it."



"not a person that anyone here is familiar with."



"was never director here, was never on the board of directors, was
never executive director. He was never here in any capacity. I never
heard his name mentioned here."



"He did mainly transactional work, not litigation," says Jones. "There
was a feeling that he was not serious and somewhat shallow."

---

I keep finding more quotes about this idiot as I go.

We all know a Mike Brown. He's the guy at work who gets by kissing the bosses' ass while doing absolutely nothing. He's the idiot who keeps talking about "team work"when what he really means is "how can I get you to do my job for me?" He's the asshole that you've had to cover for for the past five years because no one can get rid of him because the boss thinks his crap doesn't stink. You know him!




The difference here is that even our most incompetant bosses usually know not to give this asshole any real or crucial responsibility. Mike can't help it that he's an idiot. The real responsibility and accountability lies with the numbnut who awarded him FEMA.




Guess the leadership at the Department of Complete Imbecility had already been farmed out.

In fairness to Marie Antoinette, she did not actually say, "Let them eat cake". It was Marie-Therese who said "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" some 100 years earlier. I'm sticking with the Marie Antoinette allusion since that is more commonly known. And brioche...while not cake...is still very yummy.


Perversely, people are defending this.  Just can't see this for the astoundingly insensitive and tasteless comment that it was.


This is the sort of thing that is out there. Name removed to protect the astoundingly insensitive.

---

"Do you honestly believe that any media person (other than a FOX employee) would give an accurate rendering of anything said by any member of the Bush family? Or any Republican, for that matter? PUHLEEZE!!!


I would bet what few $$ I have that Mrs. Bush's remarks were:

1.  Incorrectly quoted

2.  Taken completely out of context

3.  Deliberately reworded


I don't care what circumstance prompted this migration to other states -- it IS a hardship on the people who live in the communities where they go. It reduces housing availability and job availability. Many of those being transported were "homeless" before Katrina had her say. And now the government will "reward" them for being "victims".


Think about this a bit more dispassionately. And NEVER believe the liberal media when they "quote" the remarks of a Republican. Sound bites can be spliced. Audio can be edited. Spin is applied liberally (deliberate choice of words there). Don't sucker into it."

---

This is why I'm growing hateful towards Republicans. I'm fairly certain that these sentiments are nestling in all of their hearts like nasty little worms, whether they give voice to them or not. It's like racism. It's hideous when it's visible but you know even when it's not that it's still there.


I gave this person a link to the actual raw tape...that even FOX had to report on. I also gave her a piece of my fairly irate mind. She said I won the nasty contest by a country mile.


Guess I did.

Declaration of New Orleans
by Charles Montesquieu
Saturday, Sep. 03, 2005 at 3:24 AM
charliemontesquieu@yahoo.com

A Declaration of The People of the United States of America Concerning
the Present Crisis in the City of New Orleans.

In the name of the People of the United States of America, we declare:

That for the last four and a half years the President and his
administration have served the interests of a few wealthy citizens and
not the interests of the American People.

That he has acted with contempt for the People and for the Constitution
and the laws of the United States.

That an edict of the Supreme Court made him President in 2000 and fraud
made him President again in 2004.

That the President has pursued an unprecedented expansion of Executive
powers that are a grave threat to the rights and liberties of the
American People.

That he has made war on sovereign nations that are no threat to the
American People.

That his "War on Terror" has cost billions of dollars and thousands of
lives without bringing those responsible for the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001 to justice.

That the failure of his leadership in the present crisis in the City of
New Orleans has resulted in the deaths of thousands more.

That he is derelict in every duty of his office.

Therefore, we resolve:

That President George W. Bush and his administration are illegitimate.

That he should resign from office and new elections should be held
immediately.

That if he does not resign, the Congress of the United States should
act to remove him from office.

That if the Congress should fail to act, the People will exercise their
right to abolish this state and will establish a new government that
will better secure their rights and liberties.

COPY AND DISTRIBUTE


And by the way....

There ain't no cold cokes in hell.

The only person you have the ability to muzzle is yourself. Yes. I'm talking to you.

I will continue to be critical of George W. Bush who now surely has lost the largest number of civilian citizens to violent death under his rule as any president in our history. We don't need to have an inquiry...we need an indictment.

I will continue with my efforts to help my fellow Southerners, for whom I weep for daily. We have long, long memories down here, Mr. Bush. You will surely live forever in infamy. Not since Sherman have we seen the miserable likes of you.

You bastard. May you rot in hell.

If I hear him say the results are "not acceptable" while failing to step up and take responsibility for what is obviously his failing as a leader, I will surely spew chunks. George W. Bush is no more fit to lead a nation than my nanny goat is.

We have been so sorely injured as a nation by this man and his merry band of fascisti. Up to this point, I've merely had a shuddering horror and dislike of him, his administration and his policies. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I now realize that he is more than a dangerous, stupid madman. I no longer have to wonder what life must have been like for Romans under the rule of a Nero or a Caligula. I know. I watched this asshole fall apart while reading "My Pet Goat" to school children while the Twin Towers were hit. I've now observed him sit on his ass waiting for someone else to do something while hundreds perished and are still dying in New Orleans. The thought of this monster walking about stealing air while people are drowning like rats in their attics dismays me. It's just not right. He should be made to pay.

The fact that he fails to take responsibility for his gross incompetence yet again...well, I'm not surprised. I just wish there were some way we could get rid of him now and not have to risk another three years of his inept bumbling, global faux pas' and waste of life.

My apologies to any serious practitioners of Voudon...my reference to Samedi is because Bush now must be as well acquainted with the realm of death as the good Baron, having brought so very many over to that side. No offense was intended.

I find myself thinking that the poor, black population of New Orleans is the one disadvantaged population I would not like pissed off at me. I think we may see mass produced GWB voodoo dolls in the very near future. I'll take two!

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