Taking A Blog Break

Freddie apologizes profusely for her blog break. She has a monkey wrenching project in the works that needs her full attention. Look for her after the winter solstice 2008!

¡Lo Hicemos! A Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, six beautiful princesses ruled a magical kingdom. They were some real tyrant-ass bitches. Vain about their looks, and paranoid about their power. Their names were Snow White, Jasmine, Cinderella, Belle, Aurora, and Ariel.

They used to rule separate kingdoms but one day got the idea of consolidating their power into one continuum, known as Princess, in order to rule the world. Merging their identities into one was not really a problem since they did not have fully articulated selves to begin with. To paraphrase Courtney Love, whom the Princess Continuum has classified among the Axis of Evil: they look the same, they act the same, they even fuck the same.

To wit: all Princesses have the same basic fairy tale story. Once upon a time, a beautiful girl was beset in some form or another (household drudgery, poison apple, various and sundry spells) by ugliness personified – often in the form of an older woman (stepmother, stepsister, witch, etc.) – who prevented her in some way from hooking up with the man of her dreams. Eventually, however, the girl’s beauty triumphed. She and the man were said to have lived happily ever after in hetero-normative pair-bonded bliss. The moral of the story, girls: don’t be smart, be pretty, and you too can catch a prince.

And yet: these men have not been heard from again since the formation of the Princess Continuum. But that does not mean the Magic Kingdom under Princess domination is some kind of feminist utopia. The Princess has instituted groupthink, groupspeak, and groupdress for girls. Mandatory pinks and purples, big hair and pastel eye shadow, sparkly shoes and tiaras, love of cupcakes and fear of dirt. All girls between the ages of four and six must go to Princess school, learn Princess history, play Princess games, sing Princess songs with an optional My Pretty Pony repertoire. At the Continuum’s formation, the Princess decided that in the Magic Kingdom, girls will rule and boys, well, they just drool. (Until they are called upon to be Princes and engage in the happily ever after rituals.) The problem is that the Princess allows only one definition of girl, and that definition is Princess.

Back to the issue of paranoia and the Axis of Evil thing. The Princess would not have to institute rules if it did not fear rule breakers. Way out on the Magic Kingdom’s margins lived a trio of girls who decided not to join the Princess Continuum. Tough, smart, dark-skinned girls who lived off their wits and thought there might be more to life than hooking up with some guy. Their names were Mulan, Pocahantas, and Dora.

It was Mulan who had the idea first, for she was a Warrior at heart. Pocahantas was happy just hanging out in the Everglades with the Seminoles. She knew the Princess would never go that far south – it was full of alligators, panthers, and snakes. Oh my!

“Pocahantas! Get off your ass and stop singing that damn song about painting with the colors of the wind!” Mulan yelled, banging on the side of her friend’s chickee one day. “It sounds like the Princess has gotten to you already.”

Pocahantas agreed that the Princess Continuum had grabbed too many girls and eaten up too much land. And why was no one asking questions about water in the Magic Kingdom? Its many lakes were dyed in Easter Egg blues.

“You’re absolutely right, Mulan. Those are not the colors of the wind! We must fight! We have to call Dora!” The two marched forth to their friend’s home.

“Wake up Shawtie!” Mulan and Pocahantas cried when they reached their friend’s hacienda. “We need the backpack!”

Dora agreed that the Princess Continuum had grabbed too many girls and eaten up too much land. And why was no one asking questions about the lack of real animals in the Magic Kingdom? There was only a scary presence of people in animal suits.

“You’re absolutely right, Mulan and Pocahantas. We must figure out how to get there and bring down the Princess Continuum. Let’s see what’s in the backpack! Look! A GPS and some weapons of mass destruction!”

So the three tough, smart, dark-skinned girls who lived off their wits and thought there might be more to life than hooking up with some guy divided up the weapons of mass destruction equally among themselves because they believed in the value of sharing. Then they turned over the GPS duties to Dora because she was the one with the best Explorer skills, and they set off for the Magic Kingdom.

The non-abridged version of this fairy tale details their brave exploits. Suffice to say, they made it to the Magic Kingdom safe and sound only to find that they did not have the ticket price to get in. They were momentarily flummoxed until Dora had an idea.

“Let’s look in the backpack!” she said. And sure enough, she found inside the $150 plus tax that they needed for entry.

“Yay!” all the brave girls cried, but soon their happiness dissolved into tears, for they saw that Dora’s backpack would be searched. The Princess Continuum’s security would find their weapons of mass destruction! What to do?

They were momentarily flummoxed until Mulan and Pocahantas simultaneously had an idea. They were older than Dora and knew about tampons.

“We shall hide them in our orifices!” they whispered, and indeed they did, backpack included. The girls walked in with their motives, and their weapons, undetected.

“Yay!” the brave girls cried, dancing about and squealing in high-pitched voices in order to look like all the girls who visit the Magic Kingdom. Now it was time to steal upon the castle.

The non-abridged version of this fairy tale details their brave exploits. Suffice to say, they made it to the castle safely, spirited over the moat with a rope-bridge from Dora’s backpack (removed carefully and sanitarily from Mulan’s orifices), and dynamited open the door (with ordnance removed carefully and sanitarily from the orifice of Pocahantas).

“Ka-Pow!” went the dynamite. When all was said and done, the two girl teams confronted each other, with the Princess Continuum headed up by Jasmine.

“What the fuck?” said Jasmine. The Princess Continuum stood behind her, either smiling or baring their teeth – with Princesses, especially the blonde ones, it’s sometimes hard to tell.

“What the fuck?” said Mulan and Pocahantas. Dora was too young to say “fuck,” so she hung back.

“How’d a dark-skinned girl get to be a Princess?” Mulan asked.

“They let in a Muslim too?” Pocahantas wanted to know.

“Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.” Jasmine said in a robot-like voice.

Dora sensed the presence of real evil. Not the devil kind of evil, but the banal kind the Hannah Arendt described. She held her backpack close and tiptoed behind the ruins of the castle door. She did not see everything that went on, but she heard the scuffling, biting, scratching, hair-pulling, and meowing. Her brave warrior friends Mulan and Pocahantas were losing the battle!

Dora opened her backpack. All the weapons of mass destruction were inside! What to do? She could blow up the Magic Kingdom, but everyone would die. Even her friends! Even Dora herself!

But wait? What was that? Dora heard a small voice, coming from a spider web by what was left of the door. “Help me!” it cried. It had wings and a human head. Was it a fly? A person? No! It was a fairy! Tinkerbell! Dora lifted her tiny new friend from the wreckage.

“I thought you were one of them,” she asked.

“No,” Tinkerbell said. “I wasn’t good enough for their Princess mythology, descending from both fairy and commoner lineage. You can look up my history on Wikipedia. Let’s bring ‘em down!”

Dora looked over to where the battle continued. Her brave warrior friends lay at the bottom of a Princess pile, being slowly transmogrified into plastic. There was no choice. She left her backpack with its weapons of mass destruction in the corner, and Tinkerbell lifted her up into the air. After they rose above the castle, the fairy sprinkled her pixie dust onto the backpack, making it explode into the biggest fireworks display that the Magic Kingdom’s visitors had ever seen. All of Florida’s I-4 corridor cheered, not realizing what was going on.

And yet: the Princess Continuum was not destroyed, for it was indeed made of ultra-durable plastic that endures both in reality and in the hearts and minds of girls everywhere. Any girl between the age of four and six is liable to fall victim to its groupthink, groupspeak, and groupdress. What Jasmine said to Mulan and Pocahantas is partially true. Resistance is somewhat futile, and you may indeed be assimilated. Poor Mulan and Pocahantas – once brave warriors – are now Princesses. And a new black girl, Tiana, is slated for assimilation in 2009. You can look all this up on Wikipedia.

The non-abridged version of this fairy tale could continue. Suffice to say, there is still hope in the form of Dora and even little Tinkerbell. The smart girls and the ones who’ll never quite fit the mold. The ones who always seem, paraphrasing Audre Lorde – another member of the Princess’s Axis of Evil – to have the right tool in their backpack for bringing down the master’s house. And the ones who wind up working within the system to subvert it in a different way, with a bit of poison pixie dust perhaps.

Parents, teach your children. Girls, keep your backpacks ready. Boys, stop drooling so much.

The Devil Went Down to Georgia

Fredonia Woolf went on the rare road trip this past weekend. I try not to leave the swamp, much less the state, but my friend The Women’s Studies Professor did something too painfully strange to be believed, so I tagged along. Each year since 2006, the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials (GABEO for short) has hosted a reenactment of the 1946 lynchings at Moore’s Ford Bridge, near Monroe, a small town in between Atlanta and Athens.

Seriously. Black people pretend to be the four victims: Roger and Dorothy Malcolm, and George and Mae Murray Dorsey. White people pretend to be the mob members. Spectators gather at the bridge to watch the Malcolms and Dorseys get pulled from a car, dragged to the riverside, shot multiple times, and then worse: a mob member cuts open Dorothy Malcolm’s pregnant belly and pulls out her seven month fetus (in this case, a black baby doll).

The point is to mourn communally and to call for justice. No one was ever prosecuted, despite an FBI investigation. A $35,000 reward remains active for information that will lead to arrest and conviction of the killers. The reenactment is filmed and posted on YouTube (search for “Massacre at Moore’s Ford”) to assist in the effort.

The reenactment, the only one of its kind in the country, is controversial. The Moore’s Ford Memorial Committee, an interracial group that was instrumental in starting the dialogue about the case, plays no official role even though some of its members take part individually. Other members find the reenactment distasteful. Many local whites wonder why anyone wants to bring up a history that they think is better off buried in the first place. Laura Wexler’s book about the lynchings, Fire in a Canebreak, says the part about Dorothy Malcolm being pregnant is not true. The Professor thinks that the memory of what happened at Moore’s Ford might have gotten folded into the memory of another terrible story, the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner, who was eight months pregnant when she was killed near Valdosta.

The people in South Georgia still don’t talk about what happened in 1918. Most of them probably don’t even know, even though somewhere between eleven and eighteen African Americans died including Mary Turner. The Professor says that the incident shows up in all kinds of art and literature, and even folks in Brooks and Lowndes remember it in weird ways. A few years back, some boys painted a bunch of Barbie dolls back and hung them from nooses in the trees at a local high school. And almost stranger than that, as The Professor and I drove up I-75, she pointed out to me a billboard at the very spot where Mary Turner was lynched and her fetus was ripped out. It was one of those right-to-life affairs picturing a giant baby in the womb. “Heartbeat Begins at 18 Days,” it said. Kind of made we want to get up there with a can of spray paint and add, “And Ends at 8 Months.”

The people in North Georgia had the decency to put up a historical marker. Even if some people don’t agree with the reenactment, it beats the ways that memories eek their way out circuitously the way they do in South Georgia. Juvenile delinquents lynching Barbie! What will they think of next! Memory always finds a way out, especially bad memory, so my vote goes with the folks who find a way to acknowledge it.

It’s like evil spirits. You can pretend they don’t exist until one gets into your house. But by then you’re cooked. The furniture’s all tumbled up, drawers pulled out of chests, plates broken, flour and corn meal strewn all over the kitchen, pets cowering out back with their tails between their hind legs. Better off to just go ahead and put up some bottle trees by your doors to catch the spirits before they get in. That bottle tree says, “Hello, Evil Spirit, I know you exist, but this is as far as you can go. You have to stay in this blue bottle here and not go into my house.” And that is actually a good thing, because evil spirits prefer blue bottles to your house. That’s why they mess up your house when they get inside – it’s not a blue bottle.

All this talk of blue brings me back to Blue Spring. My weird rash still has not completely healed. Some wounds, I think, never do. But I’m getting away from my point – or am I? Georgia has certainly not cornered the market on stories of racial violence. And in Florida’s book of myths where certain names do not appear, what evil spirits are not getting acknowledged? The Professor tells me that only Rosewood has an organized group devoted to remembering lynching in Florida, even though the state ranked seventh in the nation in total numbers.

We can choose to be like the folks in North Georgia, or we can choose to be like the folks in South Georgia. The question is, do we want to acknowledge the devil’s presence up front or just wait for him to catch us unaware? As for me, I’m making some bottle trees.

White-Haired Man Speak With Forked Tongue

Florida’s governor, Charlie Christ, is a good environmentalist. He cares about manatees, and he has recently helped broker a deal to sell U.S. Sugar’s lands south of Lake Okeechobee to the state. This major accomplishment will not exactly restore the Everglades to their former capabilities, but it will go a long way.

For those who don’t know how the ‘Glades work, pull out a map of Florida and look for the huge blue bowl in the state’s southern third. That’s Lake Okeechobee. A low lip on the lake’s bottom end used to spill out into what guardian angel Marjory Stoneman Douglas called “the river of grass.” Not exactly a river, the nearly coast-to-coast flush once made Florida Bay one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. Let’s just say that a lot still flushes from the Everglades, and that the past century’s mega-development, corporate farming, and attempts to re-engineer the area have done some serious, almost irreversible damage. A rhetorical question: how healthy would you be if Florida’s washouts were spiffed up by transfusions through your life-blood?

With U.S. Sugar, a major polluter, soon to be out of the picture, I imagine that Saint Marjory is doing a spiral dance of joy to all the goddesses from her grave.

Meanwhile, a few doors down those gold-paved streets in Heaven, another Marjorie (Carr) is freaking out, having tuned in to MSNBC.

“Archie, Archie, wake up!” She runs over to her husband, a famous environmentalist himself, who is dozing in the hammock dreaming about the mysteries of Kemp’s Ridley Turtle and sloths in the trees of Nicaraguan parks.

“The sea turtles are in danger off Florida’s west coast,” Marjorie cries, dumping Archie out of his hammock. “Charlie Crist has reversed his position on offshore drilling! We have to get busy”!

“Jeezus H. Christ!” the notoriously potty-mouthed Archie yells. “Oh, shit, not you, Lord. That was just an apostrophe. Marjory S.D. Quit your dancing. These ghosts have some haunting to do!”

And so a holy trinity of Florida environmentalists gets busy doing what they do best. The trouble is, they can do only so much from behind the Pearly Gated Community, which keeps folks in as often as it keeps them out. As usual, however, they know before everyone else the wages of environmental sin.

Are we going to do what we did before, and ignore them as strange voices crying in the wilderness until we realize that we’ve gone way past FUBAR?

Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, is a good environmentalist, who loves manatees and brokered a deal to sell U.S. Sugar lands to the state. What’s that? A small voice in my head – where could that be coming from? – tells me that U.S. Sugar was in a pinch because Earth Justice held South Florida’s Water Management District’s feet to the fire, resulting in a successful lawsuit that was about to send the polluter to the poorhouse. What’s that? The voice tells me that they had to unload that property or else they’d be in a real fix. So Governor Crist really did something that was good for business, and the environment was just sauce on the gravy.

Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, is a good environmentalist, who loves manatees and brokered a deal to sell U.S. Sugar lands to the state. He would not steer us wrong on this offshore drilling thing. Our nation is in an oil crisis. Our boys and girls are dying in Iraq. No more blood for oil. What’s that? A small voice in my head – where could that be coming from? (o.k., maybe that one is “welling up” from deep inside me) – tells me that our boys and girls should not be fighting a bogus oil war in Iraq to begin with. And Americans should stop driving those gas sucking pigs of vehicles. And wasting energy in hundreds of ways big and small. No more blood for oil is absolutely right, just not in the way that most people mean it. Have you ever seen what offshore drilling looks like, the voice in my head continues. It is ugly business that will destroy some of the last vestiges of beauty that Florida has. It is one thing to take Florida’s washouts through your lifeblood, but damned if I want to take oil washups on my coasts.

But Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, is a good environmentalist, who loves manatees and brokered a deal to sell U.S. Sugar lands to the state. He would not steer us wrong. And don’t forget, the voice nudges in again, he’s completely and utterly heterosexual. He recently became engaged to the lovely Carole Rome. And certainly, the voice gets in one last dig, no self-respecting queer would purchase his beloved’s ring at strip mall (Eegad, does that not defy everything we have learned from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”? Where is Carson when we need him?).

The ghosts will continue to keep watch over Forked Tongued Charlie from their live MSNBC feeds to Heaven.

Itty Bitty White Boy Dick

It’s that time of the year, my pretties. Summer: when tabloids take zoom photographs of starlets’ cellulite-lined thighs. “Guess Whose Ass This Is!” The Nationalist Speculum screams. All manner of butts line the cover. Fat butts, skinny butts, butts from girls on coke. Black butts, white butts, even butts from boys sometimes. But(t) you know it’s mostly us ladies who are the tail-end of this joke.

Why are people so fascinated with who has cellulite and who doesn’t, when cellulite is a naturally occurring phenomenon on all women’s bodies? All women, after a certain age, have cellulite unless a) they have it liposuctioned away or b) they are Olympic track runners, whose bodies are in temporarily unnatural states of being anyway – these women often don’t menstruate.

A certain amount of lower-body fat, as I understand it, is necessary for a human being to sustain other human life forms inside it, which most women – if they choose, and if there are no medical problems preventing them from doing so – can do. A brief tangent. This leads me to another annoying Nationalist Speculum headline: “Starlet Du Jour Drops 35 Pounds! Her Secret for Losing Pregnancy Weight.” Um, wouldn’t that “secret” be “having a baby”?

To sum up: cellulite’s presence can be an indicator that one is, in fact, a woman and not a) a plastic Barbie, or b) a South Beach drag queen. An aside: while I do think there is indeed something wrong with being a plastic Barbie, I do not think there is anything at all wrong with being a South Beach drag queen. We need much more of that kind of gender bending in the world. I’m not sure who said this, but I read it somewhere (if anyone knows, please help me out!): If you want to eradicate the category of gender, multiply it exponentially. Sounds like Foucault. At any rate, that’s what drag queens do, and that’s why I like them. Even ones that look like plastic Barbies. What I’m saying is that you can usually tell girl butts from boy butts by the cellulite, if you’re trying not to be surprised by whom you’ve picked up on the beach in Miami. Then again, maybe some surprises are not too unwelcome. Remember that Kinks song, “Lola”?

Back to the point. I wasted a lot of time as a young woman worrying about my ass wrinkles when I could have been plotting the revolution. Leg lifts, Nautilus equipment, brisk walking, thigh creams, you name it. Why didn’t someone tell me back then, as I am telling you now, that harping on cellulite is a patriarchal plot against women? It seems obvious to me that The Nationalist Speculum’s editorial staff is dominated by straight men heavily invested in women’s oppression or else they would devote equal front-page space to critiquing men’s packages.

Oh my pretties, can’t you just see the captions? “Who brought that kielbasa to the picnic?” “Looks like we’ve got some shrinkage here!” Who’s the white guy with the Big Bamboo?” Or, worse, “Who’s the gangsta with the itty bitty white boy dick?” No wonder he’s so “hung” up on hos and bitches. Maybe his fear of inadequacy prompts him to put women down. Maybe no one ever shared that line with him about it not being the size of the boat but the motion of the ocean. Welcome to Jamaica, Mon, Have a Nice Day, my ass.

Which brings us around, of course, to a comparison between the ocean and my ass. Quit staring at my butt’s ripples and waves as if they were anything less natural than those on the water and the sand that everyone is there to enjoy. Thank you, and Have a Nice Day, Mon.

Beware! Beware! The Flashing Eyes! The Floating Hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

"Kubla Khan: Or, A Vision in a Dream," Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.

“Diving into the Wreck,” Adrienne Rich

Not too long ago, I visited a favorite watering hole – Blue Spring State Park in Orange City, north of Orlando. The place gets mobbed in the summer, but it has historical resonance, and like all Florida springs the water, bubbling up from the aquifer, stays constant at 72 degrees. When July's heat and humidity seem to hover in the low 90s day and night, the number 72 resounds like a magic spell in my mind.

I took Elvis, the young Dominican-born man who works for my cousin Buddy and sometimes for me, and Elvis's new lady friend. I have taken it upon myself to see to Elvis's moral and cultural education. (I do not mean that in an anti-Dominican way. His upbringing was just fine. I mean that the moral and cultural education he has received since coming to the U.S. needs serious help.) Buddy is a bad influence. I want Elvis to graduate from college without a) getting arrested, b) becoming a redneck like my cousin, or c) getting Disneyfied. While in reality, I should fear letter "a" the most, I have never been a realist, so "c" is something I try to do something about. This remains an exercise in futility. Elvis's American Dream is to strike it rich through one of Buddy's alternative economic enterprises, cash out and enter some legitimate business, marry a smokin' hot huge breasted girl who made it through college with her virginity intact, take her on a Disney cruise, and buy a gargantuan house with multiple large screen televisions in a community not unlike Celebration. The dream involves endless nights of great sex, culminates in some tiny Elvises who also worship the Rat God, but after that it gets somewhat fuzzy.

Elvis's dream mystifies me as much as my obsession with steering him away from that dream. The kid also likes his literature classes, so maybe I see a glimmer of hope. Last term, he read Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," hence the road trip to Blue Spring.

We pull up to the park on a steamy, blue-skied Sunday morning. The swathe of grass above the spring run is already so packed with bodies that we have trouble finding a spot to put down our lawn chairs. I scurry Elvis and his lady friend along the boardwalk to the spring head several yards away. Surrounding the water basin is a tangle of palmetto brush, water oak, and curling vine. The basin itself forms an aquamarine circle maybe fifty feet across, filled with bubbles from the water shooting up and kids in flippers and snorkel masks, trying their best to dive into the water's source and being spit back up again. The water is so clear that one can see all the way down to where the spring caves begin and the water gushes out. The rocks look like vaginal lips. The whole thing recalls a giant vagina for me, with those caves leading back to the essence of life itself: Florida's aquifer, the source of our drinking water. Our great Floridian womb. Our mother. Our soul.

I begin to overexcite and gesticulate. "This is the Real Florida, Elvis. 45 minutes from Rat World, and you've got manatees, real animals, not consumer cartoon characters. And primeval forest, and gushing springs, and water so clear you can see into caves that go on forever. Behold! It's fucking Xanadu, right here before your very eyes!"

Coleridge is said to have based his description of Kubla Khan's Xanadu on William Bartram's description of Blue Spring. Alph, the sacred river, corresponds to the St. Johns that Blue Spring feeds into. The caverns, interconnected with the extensive aquifer system, are indeed "measureless to man." The spring itself discharges 104 million gallons of water daily – talk about your "ceaseless turmoil seething"! Bartram traveled through Florida in the mid 1770s on a natural history excursion – collecting plant specimens; drawing images; writing descriptions of the native flora, fauna, and folks; and along the way finding his soul. I can guarantee that you won't do that on a pilgrimage to the Rat God’s temple.

On an earlier Bartram trip, William's father John was less impressed with a nearby Florida spring. "Tastes like bilge-water," he observed. Elvis might as well have been John Bartram. "Where's the concession stand?" he asked, "I want a Coke."

This is point at which my story starts to go downhill fast. The point in which I have to ask myself not, "Why oh why didn't I take the blue pill," but "Why oh why didn't I stay away from all recreational drugs entirely"?

Elvis, the lady friend, and I stomped back down the boardwalk. Well, I stomped. We got the Cokes, sat in our lawn chairs, and Elvis pulled out brownies. I know better than to indulge in anything that comes from Cousin Buddy's kitchen: a) I learned that lesson when I was much younger, and b) the product is just a lot stronger these days. To reiterate: Buddy is a bad influence. But I was miffed at Elvis for thinking that the Real Florida would be better enjoyed under circumstances of Altered Reality. If I wouldn't take him to the Magic Kingdom, then by God, he would bring the Magic Kingdom to Blue Spring. While on one hand, my decision to eat the brownie makes no sense (why should I alter my reality too?). On the other hand it does. I was angry. The brownie had chocolate in it.

After a few minutes, or hours, or perhaps a week or two, I began to feel all Adrienne Rich inside. So much for Coleridge. I wanted to get some flippers and a mask, swim up the spring run, and dive into that cave. In Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving Into the Wreck,” she talks about getting back to the source, “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.” Sometimes, not just when I’ve been eating Buddy’s brownies, I get to thinking that through those caves, beyond that aquifer, lies the source of all mystery. It’s not just Xanadu down there, but the origin of all life and the culmination of all death. I didn’t just make up this idea from drugs. Some of Florida’s native inhabitants believed that springs were sacred portals to the underworld. The difference between them and me is that they did not cut a ridiculous figure in rented snorkel gear trying repeatedly to nose-dive a cave with a bunch of ten-year-olds.

Rich talks about “a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear.” I often think that living in Florida is like reading that book. Florida history as written is all Paradise, Sunshine, and the Florida Dream. And sometimes, not just when I’ve been eating Buddy’s brownies, I get to thinking that if one could dive into the spring and explore the caves far enough one could time-travel backward to learn the names and stories that got left out.

On this excursion, however, I learned a more frightening lesson. The short version is this: Florida’s springs are growing more and more polluted. Many swimmers are coming away from the most popular springs – Ichetucknee, Wakulla, Wekiwa, Rainbow, Fanning, DeLeon, and Blue – with mysterious rashes. State officials suspect, but have not yet confirmed, a blue-green algae called Lyngbya wollei, which has multiplied because of pollution-spurred algae blooms.

Here is how I found out: I dove and dove and dove until the point of exhaustion. I wound up passing out in my lawn chair, a collapsed manatee of a nearly middle aged woman. Elvis and his lady friend (whose name I have not used because I suspect that her utter embarrassment over the entire fiasco precludes her from being part of his continued American Dream) performed manatee rescue services, depositing me safely back to my swamp, for which Elvis now swears upon the Holy Bible that I promised him a trip to – of all places – ANIMAL KINGDOM!, the most infernal of regions. My attempt to find “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth,” this time, resulted in a three-day hangover and a series of oozing, red, egg-shaped welts across my back. Still, you have not heard the last from me on a) our polluted life-source, and b) Florida’s book of myths where certain names do not appear.

Nearly Naked Sushi Fu

I read in the St. Petersburg Times last week about a restaurant that just opened somewhere in Tampa Bay called Nearly Naked Sushi. As the name suggests, patrons select their sushi options from plates spread out upon bodies of prone g-string and pasty-clad ladies. An accompanying photograph showed the torso only of one such nubile nymph, with a plate of some seaweed-wrapped rice and fish dish perched upon her mons, with patrons standing in the background as if this were any normal cocktail party.

Gives new meaning to the phrase, "tastes like tuna." Or, as Toni Morrison has said more poetically, "smells like the ocean, tastes like the sea." (An aside: in an unexpected simile, one of my new favorite writers Junot Diaz says, "tastes like Heinecken." My friend Raymond and I get quite a kick out of it. This is how you know I am not a male basher. One of my very best friends is male. Raymond likes to ask me, "want to go out for some Heinecken tonight?")

Don't these people worry about getting pubes in their sushi? I have also wondered this about the men who frequent Café Risque on I-75 just south of Gainesville (Couples Welcome!). I went in once – don't ask why – and saw guys eating burgers and drinking beer right there where the bored/stoned out of their minds pole-dancers were gyrating and squatting. Of course, I also noticed, with both the pole-dancers and the Nearly Naked Sushi girls, that wearing the g-string entails shaving off one's pubes entirely or so closely that they might as well be gone.

Number One: without that protective coat of hair, I would soooo get a yeast infection – which results in something else one does not want to ingest with sushi or burgers. Number Two: without the hair, doesn't one's pussy look a bit prepubescent? (Um, that's why it's called pre-PUBE-scent, right?) With all the brouhaha about Amber Alerts and sexual predators around, why isn't anyone questioning grown men wanting grown women to look like twelve-year-olds "down there"?

Why, precisely, does our society ostracize child pornographers and make jokes about pussy tasting like tuna, then turn around and open up a restaurant where people eat raw tuna off a woman's shaved pubic area?

And Raymond tells me I'm crazy. "It's edgy," he says of Nearly Naked Sushi.

"Right," I say. "Edgy in that retro sort of way. Like the 1950s. Edgy like Playboy Bunnies. Edgy in the way women's bodies as objects of conspicuous consumption have always been edgy."

"If you want something really edgy," I tell Raymond, "Let's go in there with those biker dykes you know and see how people react."

"Are you kidding," Raymond laughs, "lesbians are totally hot."

"That's true only if they're young, breasty, and Scandinavian, or maybe that Afrolatinasian mix. I don't see Howard Sterne begging someone's Meemaw and Aunt Gladys to do a lesbian shower scene."

Raymond concedes the point. A rarity for him.

"In my fantasy," I tell him, "the Nearly Naked Sushi girl conceals a razor under her tongue that she flips out mid-sashimi. One by one, the poly-blend tropical shirts and gold-chained chests of the day traders and house flippers tumble. One by one, their plastic-boobed, strappy-sandaled pseudo-Barbies get upended. Headline reads: 'Tragedy Slashes Tampa Bay Eatery.'" My fantasy is all razor-toting, g-string fu, to use Joe Bob Briggs' term for B-movie violence.

Raymond tells me, "Your fantasy sounds a lot like Quentin Tarantino's. Talk about women's bodies as objects of conspicuous consumption. Nearly Naked Sushi girl as Uma Thurman."

I concede the point. A rarity for me.

Raymond has given me something to chew on. As free as I think myself, I remain a prisoner of the male gaze.

I'll have to reconsider my position later. Right now, I have new fantasy film in mind. Pissed off razor-toting grannies take control of the country, starting with Florida. I'm calling it Meemaw-Fu.

The Monkey Takes Flight: A Declaration of Independence

July 4, 2008

When the course of current events compels a person to dissolve the political bands which have connected her, something the highly esteemed Founding Fathers declared unanimously that Nature and Nature's Deities entitle her to do, and form a nation unto herself, it seems reasonable and in keeping with historical, legal, philosophical, and literary precedent that she should outline the causes for her separation.

I agree with the basic tenets of the original Declaration (slightly revised and updated to include those people like me who did not fully count back in 1776): that all human beings are born into this world with equal opportunity to pursue Life, Liberty, and Happiness. In order to secure and defend these rights, individuals form governments that derive their powers from the consent of the governed. When governments fall short of their duties, individuals have the right to change, even abolish, those governments. Obviously, governments should not be overturned on whim, and, obviously, the original document was more of an ideal that the nation needed to continue striving toward than a fully constituted reality. However, as the decades and years wear on, and the nation moves so increasingly far from the goal that it mocks the very document itself, I cannot help but, in the words of one of the great political philosophers who started this whole trajectory into the abyss, "just say no."

I secede from the Madness of King George the Younger and Dumber.

I secede as well from Change We Can Believe In. Show me a Revolution We Can Believe In, and maybe we can talk.

I secede from an economy based upon worker exploitation, nationalist aggression, and environmental destruction.

I secede from hatred in all forms. But not anger.

I secede from violence against other people and animals. But not against property.

I secede from patriarchal oppression, and the economic, religious, educational, and social structures that support it.

I secede from cleaninglaundrycookingshopping, the mommy track, makeup, body enhancement surgery, little dresses, cute shoes, and pantyhose. I don't want a pedicure, but the whole world needs a Man-o-cure.

I secede from television.

I secede from Disney World. Especially those damn Princesses.

I secede from the Disneyfication of the world. I secede from McFoods and McMansions. I secede from the mind control that passes for public discourse in the media, from the control over information that passes for security, from the control over my body that passes for rights, and from the control over my food and water that passes for health.

Folks have been caterwauling for seven years (a magical number!) about terrorists hijacking planes to take down the big phalluses of globalization, but who has raised a peep about the terrorists who've hijacked language itself? Those who convince us that wrong is right, evil is them, injustice is constitutional, slave is free? Those who convince us that we need to live in fear every single day of our lives, lest the axis of evil get us, the sexual predators get us, the gangbangers get us, the e. coli get us, the Asian bird flu get us, the West Nile virus get us, the African killer bees get us, the hurricanes get us (they originate from the Dark Continent, too, you know). Maybe we should just stay inside our houses, where it's safe and climate-controlled, watching the shiny box with its smiling drones telling us what we can do to prepare. Can duct save us from the apocalyptic loss of freedom that we have suffered in this country? We did not lose it to Al-Qaeda. We surrendered our birthright willingly for a mess of cheap goods from Wal-Mart, cheap entertainment from Fox News, and cheap government from U.S.A., Inc.

Simply put: I quit. Like Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, I prefer not to.

I have retreated to the swamp to live off my wits and what I can beg, borrow, and steal. I would cast my lot with the Seminoles further south, but they won't have me. They know better than to trust white people. (And they're also too busy right now, taking back the land that was stolen from them, one blackjack game at a time.) The Miccosukees still haven't signed a treaty with the U.S. Like them, I am a nation unto myself. Where I am, you won't find me. Osceola led battles from the Second Seminole War from here. Before that, escaped slaves called Maroons lived hidden from prying eyes in this hammock. Before that, Timucuans led DeSoto's army on a fool's errand for fool's gold – in chain mail, in August (suckers!).

No, I don't have Internet access out here. I use the public library, although technically, I am no longer "public." (This is why my declaration, written on July 4, is posted on July 7 – had to wait for the library to be open.) I reach out through this blog because, like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, perhaps on the lower frequencies, I may speak to some of you. I cannot bring down a system by myself. I'm only one monkey flying under radar. But maybe a whole bunch of flying monkeys could wrench some real wizard ass.

Sometimes this blog will be serious. Sometimes stupid. I hope it always makes you think and frees your mind in some small way.

Come fly with me.