"Women Rivet Heaters and Passers on"
By an unknown photographer, Puget Sound Navy Yard, Washington, May 29, 1919



Okay so maybe it's a minority view amongst us these days, but I love this friggin' country. if you want to love this god fer sakin' country too, take a look at this awesome site (again from the national archives) called picturing the century: .
it's got all kinds of pictures of immigrants, teenage soldiers, suffragettes, and civil rights marchers. oh, plus a too funny picuture of the six living first ladies. aw shit, here it is too:

"First Ladies Nancy Reagan, Ladybird Johnson, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Rosalyn Carter, Betty Ford, and Barbara Bush sit together at the National Garden Gala, 'A Tribute to America's First Ladies.'"
By Barbara Kinney, Washington, DC, May 11, 1994



doesn't it look like hillary clinton is making a pass at ladybird!?

so, with evil biddies like these and their patriotic patriarchs running the country, how, you may ask, can i still love it?

because the "rivet heaters and passers on" are my first ladies! look at how tough these broads are! could you be that tough?

yeah the rich and powerful have always tried to steal our freedom and our money from us and work us to death, but they don't know how strong we are. this nation is run by the wealthy, but its built by the poor; the ambitious immigrants, rebellious slaves, hungry share croppers, striking factory workers and yeah, even the teenage soldiers who don't know any better but weep when their buddies get killed. the hidden history of these people, who are really, to use a historian's $10 word, indomitable, is what makes me "proud to be an american". they seemed to understand that freedom must be fought for. even if the myth of liberty is a farce, people make it true by believing it and living it. just ask your grandparents...

(this post is really an addendum to "everything makes me cry". maybe it should be subtitled "my creeping conservatism"...)

here is the new painting I just finished this weekend. there are some funny spots from the digital camera and a level adjust, but it's still pretty much what it looks like.

this painting is like a dream for me. i can almost feel how cold the air would be on my skin as i look out over the tiny world with clouds in my hair. i think next i will paint myself as a planet floating in outerspace. i feel so little and insignificant in real life, so this painting is a way to "work it out" i guess. it's cool that you can make an image of something you can only see in your head. its way more exciting than trying to explain in words what a dream is like, how totally different we can imagine ourselves in the world.

oh, the teeny little brown splotch in the corral behind the barn is a horse the size of a flea. for scale. :)

well it's saint patricks day and we've been drunk since about 4 o'clock for me, maybe earlier for the others. but i love the new green green green colors of the site (and the awesome maps.) i mean we're all a little green on the inside aren't we?

the parade was pretty crazy. there were a gagillion people, including drunken high school kids. i wanna go downtown tomorrow and see the aftermath, broken glass and green glitter everywhere.

my new question i'm asking is why don't we bring out the pagan in the european myths, the hard core priestesses and shamans? "westerners" seem to have modeled themselves after roma and greece, instead of their own tribal pasts. in that honor, here is an image of celtic goddess of fertility shelia-na gig, she's way B.C.:

Some of you have already seen this but here is my first self-portrait done in oil paints. Don't sell your Rembrandts just yet! (That's the joke I keep making.) I realize I look really serious and even kinda depressed, but actually I was just concentrating so friggin hard because oil paint is so friggin hard. Sheesh! Anyways these weekend I plan to work on a larger painting of myself, nude of course, as is required for oil painting. Tonight I'm going to "Michael's" craft emporium with Matthew so that he can get paper for collages, and I think I will get some linseed oil, which Robin said makes it easier to spread the paint. Let's hope so, cause this is an expensive habit and I gotta make that $3 tube of cerulean blue last!

Everything makes me cry these days, but not in a bad way, and not in a way that is me feeling sorry for myself, like I used to when I was young. My personal angst bores me so much now it never really gets a rise out of me. No, now I cry because, well, the Universe and everything in it.

1) Pai makes me cry, from Whale Rider. This is honestly one of the saddest, truest, films I've ever seen. It's too real for me to even understand, since I know nothing of the "real" Maori except what I can read, and now see. But it is real on a human level. And what it says about the past and the future coming into conflict in the present breaks my heart, although I'm just a privileged Euro freed from the burden of "history", especially ethnic history, which for me is as blank as my white white skin. But this movie also told me something that I've felt and haven't been able to express. That the reign of men is ending, or should be. The traditional male has no place in society anymore, the righteous warriors are dead, and in so many ways, good riddance, but still for them its tragic, and I feel that. But what is left? Bitter old men bent on revenging their irrelevance, or worse, ignorant boys, permanent children, concerned only with their own self-indulgent needs. And still they lead our societies. By now, as far as I can tell, no one knows how to be a real man anymore, unless she is a woman.

2) William Sloane Coffin. Freedom-bus rider, anti-war protester, progressive Christian. Maybe this is the man we're missing, but he's dying. What a heart, what a mind, even after a stroke. Everything he says is measured by compassion and consideration. You can read the interview I saw with him on Now . Here are a few gems though (and by gems I mean jewels, like the teachings of the Buddha):

"MOYERS: I once heard you speak in which you said, "We must always press the socialist questions. But be careful and dubious about the socialist answers."

COFFIN: Well, the socialist questions are questions about justice. And it's, you can say, with prophet Amos, let justice roll down like mighty waters, but figuring out the irrigation system is complicated. So that justice issue at the heart of socialism. But what's the best irrigation system..."

And this, much truer than I could ever say it: "And my understanding of Christianity is that it underlies all progressive moves to implement more justice. Get higher degree of peace in the world, you know? And although people don't see it, that's what I mean by politically-committed spirituality.

You know, the impulse to love God and neighbor, that impulse is at the heart of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. No question about it. We have much more in common than we have in conflict."

3) Spaulding Gray's body washed ashore. Some say he jumped off the Staten Island ferry. There's poetry in that. This one goes out to all my neurotic, self-involved, self-destructive, dead-pan delivery, dead homies.

4) The Universe. What you're really seeing here is time, remember, the moment when the universe was only 440 million years old. It's there right now just as we are here, but relative to it we don't exist yet. Every higher human endeavour asks the same question in one way or another, and no one can answer it: if the Universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? Is there a set of all things and if so how could it contain itself? If God is everything then what contains God? What is really "outside" the limits if everything is included?

Another gem from the National Archive:
by Weimer Pursell, 1943
Printed by the Government Printing Office for the Office of Price Administration

Oh, and I've figured out a new plan, I'm moving to Turkey to teach English! That's "out", right?

Oh! Apostrophes!
What would I have without you!
Nothing could be Holly's
if not for your well placed possession.

And what about contractions!
Imagine the space I could not use
if you did not chose
to bring us close where other punctuation
can't

But Apostrophe!
Still you hide from me
the mystery of the ages,
it's not to say its rule is hard
to follow but
its is

here's some humor to lessens anyone's nervousness. today i woke up thinking okay so now we have a candidate, but guess who has $180 million for the fight?

but, i fear no chimp. for more tension releasing funniness, you must check out bushorchimp:

also, for further relief, watch bush's new ads, which he plans to unveil tomorrow: . they are soooo bland, but i guess he only plans to convince those who are already convinced, you know, that other half of the country...

eeeek! how am i gonna make it to november without having a heartattack or a hernia or a hemorrhage or something horrible!

So this morning I got negged at the polling both because if you change your party affiliation, it doesn't go into effect until after the next general election. Apparently this is designed to prevent people from doing exactly what I tried to do, which is changing parties just so you could vote in a primary.

The funniest part was of course the white haired ladies in charge at the polling center. Clearly old ladies are at the helm of the civil infrastructure of American voting. Sometimes, based on who gets into office, I think they may be the only people in the country who vote!

But they kept calling me dear and were flustered by the confusion I caused when I wasn't in their books. One lady asked me if I was sure I wasn't a Republican! I just looked at her with my eyebrow raised like "whadoo you think?" But then another lady explained why it was I wasn't eligible to vote in the primary. She actually said it was a "slap on the wrist" for changing my party affiliation. Ah, the American electoral system. Nothing like freedom of choice, eh folks?

Well it is over two months late but today I will finish my Moby Dick paper. That friggin whale just keeps slipping away. Here is some mad Ahab for y'all:

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?"

Good question.

In other news, yesterday I tried oil painting for the first time in years, and it was just as frustrating as I remember it being. After three hours all I had was a blue grey blob. Most of what I have painted in the past has been water color, and oil painting mixes with that experience about as well as, well, oil and water. But I'm not really that frustrated. I was thinking "well, like all great human endevours which amaze us when done well, oil painting is really hard." That makes sense to me. As I'm getting older I'm less and less surprised when difficult things are difficult, and that difficulty frustrated me less because of it.

What else... went to the pink in search of art instruction, but my teacher wasn't there. where is he? he must be somewhere. "I miss you"... Moriah and I had an awesome time as usual, and we ran into Rachel so it was a regular group thing. The company of fine ladies kinda makes up for my lack of man flesh. But not totally. Nothing personal ladies, that's just my biology.

I think I may drive to Ellicott Creek Park now before the sun goes down. Funny how the car substitutes more and more for actual body movement.

Then tonight, more painting, the concluding paragraph of My Moby Dick Opus, and of course the oscars. Viggo will have to stand in for an actual human once again...