Titus Andronicus, Old People, etc.

Last night I went with some friends to see the Shakespeare play Titus Andronicus. Once a long time ago someone told me that their Classics prof bitched someone out in class for saying "An-DRO-ni-cus", like everyone does in English, and was like, "Please, 'An-dro-NIGH-cus'!" I think the thing that gets me about Classics people is not that they're irrelevant, since most of the stuff being studied in the Humanities is -- a fact which I not only have nothing against, but I think is stupendous!; it's cool people read Renaissance lit and other stuff like that all day that no one gives a fuck about -- but rather that the Classics stuff has the *pretense* of being relevant, since Western civilization has a bad hangover from Homer and Cicero and Livy being used in the educational system all the years. Really, please, go fuck yourself, especially since "An-dro-NIGH-cus" is the Anglicized pronunciation of what should be something like "An-dro-NEE-cus".

Anyhow, during the play, I really had to go take a piss, and after when I went to the urinals, like three old men had gotten there first, and since all of them had kidney problems or prostate problems or urinary tract problems or whatever the fuck old guys have, they each took like six or seven minutes to use the urinals, and me and the other normal people in the bathroom had were just standing around waiting for them to give up and clear out. Honestly, nothing can piss me off like an old person who can't get a move on. The other day I was walking home and like about four old couples had come out of a restuarant en masse and were blocking up the entire sidewalk since they were standing there and talking obliviously and waiting for a car or two to come pick them up while pedestrians on both sides were waiting for them to clear out, and honestly, they were just pissing me off. The same goes for the old people who are usually ahead of me in grocery lines, who take five minutes to get their wallet out of their purse or back pocket to pay for the two pounds of food they're buying for the week -- if they had an ounce of consideration in them, they would have kind of gotten that shit ready ahead of time.

One of the things I've always liked about my mom is that she comes out and says that some of the most obliviously selfish people she knows are old ones, and the worst part is that they demand your respect. "Why should I respect them just because they're old?", my mom is always like, "They can go screw themselves, they should behave like other people and earn my respect," though, unlike with me, she usually gets set off by the fat women in Amigos who are aggressive drivers in the narrow Wal*Mart aisles and, unlike me, she retaliates by pretending not to notice and not moving unless they're like "Excuse me," at which point she coldly says "Oh!", as if only then noticing, and politely steps aside so they can pass. Sometimes later when she's ranting she says as a variation, too, "They can get off their fat ass and go screw themselves," which is a nice twist on her theme when she's particularly ticked.

Anti-cult story: A Yalie.

From Ted Patrick and Tom Dulack's 1976 book Let Our Children Go! pp. 98-105, which is about Ted Patrick, a 5'8", early 40s black guy with a speech impediment who was a former boxer and a fundamentalist Christian and started the field of cult deprogramming in the early 70s after encountering the Children of God as San Diego community affairs liaison for then-governor Ronald Reagan, at which time he earned the name "Black Lightning" for his finesse in pulling off flawless kidnappings of upper-middle class kids who got tangled up in cults --

The back story is that in the early 70s the son of a Los Angeles lawyer ("Wes Lockwood") went to Yale and immediately became involved in Hannah Lowe's New Testament Missionary Fellowship, since every student in the freshman class got a slick-looking brochure mailed to their home describing the religious heritage of Yale College and suggesting they attend a (seemingly university-affiliated) Bible study group for fellowship if they were interested. After doing this, the kid got into fringe Pentecostalism, started speaking in tongues and doing ecstatic dancing, began to think Hannah Lowe was a prophetess, started giving her all his money and got a part-time job washing dishes at the Yale Faculty Club to support her, and then renounced his parents as instruments of demonic powers...

As the story begins, "Black Lightning" and Wes's father and uncle just kidnapped Wes from off of the street in front of the Yale Faculty Club in broad daylight, and were driving him to a motel in western Pennsylvania to deprogram him when a ruckus happened at the turnpike offramp --

I thought [Wes] was asleep as we approached the eastern end of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and I pulled up to the gate to get the ticket. There was a black man on the gate, and when we stopped, and I rolled down the window, Wes erupted. "Call the police. Please. Call the police," he screamed. "They're kidnapping me!"

I snatched the ticket from the man's fingers and got out of there fast. I told Wes, "Look, Wes -- that was a brother on the gate. I'm the only black man in the car. You think he's going to call the police on a brother?"

As it turned out, the brother did exactly that...

After "Black Lightning" gets things sorted out -- the police let him go after they found out he was doing deprogramming -- he pulls into the one-horse Pennsylvania town where he's supposed to call his friend who he had deprogrammed and had found the safe hotel for this deprogramming, only it's a redneck steel town and "Black Lightning" has to go into a bar to use the phone...

[After making the call] I returned to the bar and decided, hostility or no hostility, lynch mentality or no lynch mentality, I needed a drink after this long and difficult day and I was going to have one.

I sat down at the bar and, in as friendly a voice as I could manage, asked the bartender if he had any Cutty Sark. He said he did.

"Give me a double," I said. "On the rocks."

Pouring the drink, he set the glass down in front of me.

"How much?" I asked.

"A dollar-twenty," he said.

"Then that's two-forty for the double?"

"No. Sixty cents a shot."

"Sixty cents a shot! Hell, I've paid two-forty for a single where I come from. At prices like that, buy everybody a drink. Let's liven up the place."

Right after this, "Black Lightning" finds out the bartender is the uncle of the deprogrammed guy who was arranging a hotel room for the current deprogramming, and so the bartender gives "Black Lightning" the whiskey, tells him that his money is no good in this town, and lets him use the vacant apartment above the bar for the deprogramming, which goes smoothly until the second night...

That night [Wes] and his father got into a violent fight. Wes had been screaming that his mother was evil, was of Satan, all sorts of filthy and outrageous things, and the father lost his patience finally and smacked him. At that Wes leaped on his father and the two were at each other's throats -- I mean they were trying to strangle each other. They were overturning furniture and lamps were crashing to the floor. I jumped between them and pried them apart, and dragged Wes into the bedroom. My own patience was a little thin about then, and I threw him down onto the bed and said, "Now you sit there, sit your ass down, and if you so much as move a muscle again I'm going to knock the shit out of you. You understand?"

Fortunately, Wes calmed down, and on the third night he broke down and hugged his father, and turned his rage against cult-leader Hannah Lowe.

Look how conservation-minded am I...

Since my apartment is cold and the air is dry, I plug up the bathtub drain when I take a shower, and then let the water sit overnight so the heat and the humidity enter the apartment air. I read once long ago in a book that people should do this, and now I am.

Shoes / Lesbian-run Feminist Bookstore.

Today since the snow melted overnight and it's not that mucky, I put on my tennis shoes for the first time in weeks, rather than my boots. They felt very light, since I've been so used to wearing my boots, which are heavy.

Yesterday I went to a free lunch sponsored by the Gender Studies department where the two lesbians who head up the city's most prominent feminist bookstore came in to informally talk about their business. About fourteen people showed up, most of them lesbians. The owners were really sweet and went around the circle and had everyone say their name so it was more like a conversation then a lecture, but I found it disconcerting since the owners seemed to have forgotten everyone's name but mine, since one of them called me by name both times I asked a question, which was rather disconcerting... I got the vibe from her that she felt motherly towards me, which I guess is a good thing, though. Next time I stop through the store, I'm definitely going to say hi to them if they're in working.

Anyhow, my one question was if they had a religion/spirituality section and if so what they stocked and how has it changed over the years (I've been to the bookstore once or twice before but I hadn't spent much time poking around there). The owner, who smiled and was like, "Good question, [my name]" -- the same thing she said to my other question, how the bookstore has adjusted to the changes in interests and changes in generations that the shift from Second to Third Wave feminisim has witnessed! -- said that they have a 'Spirituality' section, not a 'Religion' one, and that they don't stock primary religious texts like the Bible or Koran, but rather a miscellany of stuff, though a lot less goddess-focused books than they used to back in the late 70s.

At another point, they said that they've always been surprised how few straight women buy sex-advice books, compared to other groups (lesbians, gays, straight men). Then one owner said, though, that she was glad since they get teenage girls that come in sometimes after school and browse the sex books, and that makes her glad that the girls have access to positive information about sex and their bodies, since who knows what they're getting at school.

She also said that they keep the sex books a discreet distance away from the children's books, and to their knowledge no pre-pubescent kids have ever just happened into them, which is good too.

Lastly, one or another of the owners said that Barnes & Noble and Borders decimated small feminist presses. Since it's the practice of those businesses to have it built into contracts that they can send back unsold stock, when they were new on the scene, they would order one or two copies of a book from a press for each of their stores, which would amount to over a thousand books, then since no sales clerks would sell them, after a year they'd send the books back, and it would be a major finanical blow to the presses, many of which never recovered before they caught on to how they'd be affected by that contractual requirement, since they were used to selling to stores that actively sold their books to their customers. The one owner said that feminist presses and feminist bookstores are part of a delicate ecosystem that has been endangered for a while.

My morning.

I have a slight cold again. I used my neti pot and blew a bunch of yellow down the drain -- the biggest clump just slid down the sink and into the drain under its own weight on the residual water left in the basin -- and then I looked up into the mirror, and the slip of paper I had tucked in the corner of it caught my eye, "Perfect health is my natural state of being." I found it comforting, and it made me wonder if seeing that every morning is the reason my cold now isn't as bad as the other colds I've had this year.

At breakfast, I thought again of how I ate my persimmon last night. It was finally ripe, and tasty. I might buy one again.

More memories of Manilow: Entering the arena.

Before the concert, me and my friends went to this local new sportsbar that's getting written up in all the papers to get a sandwich and a beer, but the place was packed because of the Packers game, so we decamped to an Italian trattoria next door for a meal there before the Barry concert. The woman at the door, this hippie-ish late 20-something with braided hair and a swirly ceramic bead around her neck, asked if we were going to the concert (it affects service, I guess), and when we said yes, and I added that I couldn't wait for Manilow, she was like, "Oh, I love that Pina Colada song!", and I was like, "Actually, that's not Barry," and a friend of mine chipped in, "Yeah, it's Jimmy Buffett," and then I, being the bitch again, was like, "Maybe he covered it, but not originally," though when they asked who did it originally I couldn't remember, and so felt like a total asshole. Later in the evening "Rupert Holmes" came to me, and I told my friends -- they didn't know who he was -- and when I got the coats from the hippie door person, she was like, "You know, I was so messed up, I was like, thinking of that Copacabana song!", and I told her that that makes sense since the words are the same length and stress pattern and kind of sound alike -- "CO - pa - ca - BA -na" and "PI - na - co - LA - da", I said -- and then I added that Rupert Holmes did the Pina Colada song. "Who's that?", she was like.

Going across the street to the arena, there was this black woman in a bright orange directing-traffic suit directing traffic, and as we crossed the road in the crowd she waved us across with her lighted rod that like people use on airline runways and was like, "Enjoy the concert, everybody," and so I turned to her as I passed by her and was like, "Definitely!, how can we not?!?!?", and she just laughed at my enthusiasm.

At the entrance to the arena, my one friend pulled out of her purse the tickets (she had bought them for everyone online), and handed them to our other friend and me. "Gracias, senorita," I was like, and then this chunky women with big black hair and a sheepskin coat and nylons who was in line right ahead of us turned around with a big smile and was like, "That's so great you're speaking Spanish!", and when we all looked a little puzzled, she added, "I'm a middle school Spanish teacher, and I love to hear people speaking Spanish."

After that, we roamed through the building to find the escalators to go up a few tiers and find our seats. The lines for the women's restrooms were the longest I've ever seen, and everywhere you looked there were slightly-chunky suburban women wearing black, and here and there an even chunkier older woman with shorter coiffed hair in a puffy winter-themed yarn sweater with snowflakes on it, and fat bulging out from where the waist of her jeans dug into her stomach. And, everywhere you looked, people had glowsticks, and were just waiting.

GOP candidates on Biblical Literalism.

A couple weeks ago my one prof played in class a clip from the GOP YouTube debate where someone asked the candidates if they believe that the Bible is literally true. She's been interested in how people nowadays use the words "literal" and "allegorical" to describe interpretation -- her contention is that "literal" is always good, and operates in conversation as something like "fidelity to the Bible" -- but in this debate, she was particularly interested in how Mike Huckabee was like, "The Bible has some messages that nobody really can confuse, and really are not left up to interpretation," and then give "Love your neighbor as yourself" as an example.

"Read a few verses down!", she was like, "What does it say?: 'Who is my neighbor,' and Jesus replies with the parable of the Good Samaritan. What do you mean it doesn't need intepretation?"

She also thought Giuliani royally fucked up by saying Jonah should be interpreted allegorically, since for so many traditions it's important he's in the belly of the fish for three days and then be spit up, since that's a prefiguration of Christ's resurrection.