Woman Goes Blind to Save Daughters' Eyesight

A mother suffering from a genetic disorder that is destroying her eyesight has chosen to forego treatment in order to reserve insurance funds for her daughters, who also suffer from the condition.



I'm pretty sure this is all her fault. After all... if she has a genetic condition that causes blindness, should she have even had children? I mean, seriously... wasn't that kind of financially irresponsible of her? I think Rahm Emanuel is right... let's wait on the public option until some kind of serious crisis in the current state of healthcare occurs to "trigger" a public option. Something life-altering... I don't know... like... maybe... SOMEONE GOING BLIND!!!!!

Someday, Rahm Emanuel is going to have a nice, cozy little seat in Hell, right beside Eric Cantor.  Gee, I hope they get along.

~C~

Roman Polanski Might Have to Actually Face The Music

The "music" in this case, of course, being the parade that Hollywood will throw him when he gets back. Because in Hollywood, drugging and having anal sex with 13-year-olds is actually a prestige-builder.  I'm beginning to wonder if the arrest wasn't a staged thing -- an opportunity to get Polanski back in the US, so whatever deal has been worked out in secret (and, yes, they've been trying to work one out for a couple of years now) can be put into play.

This is why I left The Business.  It was things like this -- a million little soul-killers that eat away at a human heart -- that made me realize that when you lie down with dogs, you absolutely get up with fleas.

That's an insulting metaphor, I realize.  I'll apologize personally to the dogs -- and the fleas -- later.

~C~

Welcome to Dystopia

There's an episode of The Twilight Zone where a young, beautiful painter, played by Lois Nettleton in her prime (if Lois actually had a prime, but for the purposes of this post, we'll say she did) and her apartment building neighbors are trapped in a kind of literal hell, as some cosmologic calamity propels the Earth closer and closer to the Sun. Progressively, the temperatures rise, Lois becomes all sweaty and shiny, then sheds her clothing (down to her silky full dress slip, bra and girdle -- what were women thinking?), while food and drink become scarce, and the streets of New York become a (no pun intended) "hot-bed" of savagery and primal desperation.

That's happening here in LA. Okay, presumably not the "Earth closer to the Sun" thing -- although that's not too difficult to believe, given the Gobi-like temperatures we've been experiencing. It's been well over 100 degrees every day for the past week. But it isn't just the heat. There is something unhealthy about this heat. The air smells vaguely of animal feces and rotting meat. Did I say, "vaguely"? I lied. Nothing vague about it at all. I walk out my door and I'm hit with the overpowering smell of disintegrating cat and raccoon feces, left by the army of rogue and feral critters that inhabit the vacant lot behind our house.

But it isn't just my front walk. The whole city is smelling like something crawled underneath it and died. I'm not sure if it’s the watering ban, or the fact that it is so hot no one is cleaning out their street gutters, but LA is turning into 1884 Paris, with the open sewer system and the constant, unabated flow of waste and decay. I don't feel like working. I don't feel like working out. I just feel like staying home in the air-conditioning and laying about. But today I had to run two errands. One was a trip to the library at CSUN, and the other was a trip to my mailbox to pick up my book delivery.

CSUN was practically deserted, though there were two parking enforcement cops on duty. When I asked one of them where I was allowed to park on a Saturday, his response came in a blathering, incoherent jibberjabber that didn't match up at all with the question I asked him. I'm going to chalk that up to the heat, but I have a feeling that's just how he talks on any given day. I went to return my books that were due today, and renew one of them. I was supposed to check two more out, but I left the print-outs of the catalog registry on the car seat next to me, and was not going to go back to retrieve them. Screw it. I'll buy the books if I have to. (And I do, because they're for school.)

At the UPS Store, I collected my mail and package, and stopped into the sushi restaurant in the shopping center there (sorry, Jim -- I ate sushi again without you). On the way to the shopping center, I was nearly side-swiped once and T-boned once by two drivers talking on cell phones while driving (you guys DO know that's illegal now, right?), and nearly hit head-on by a soccer mom in her brand-new, no-plates-yet Range Rover, as she hightailed it into the El Pollo Loco drive-thru.

By the time I got home, I honestly felt like stripping down to my full dress slip, bra and girdle.

I'm not sure what's happening to my hometown. I was born here, raised here. To people who move here, it's a city full of iconic landmarks they grew up watching on television. Grauman's Chinese, the Hollywood Bowl, the Watts Towers, Venice Beach.... None of that means anything to me. To me, I turn a corner and... this is where my best friend in fifth grade, Tracey Taylor, used to live. Over there is where I learned how to ride a bike without training wheels. That shopping center used to have an ice rink where I learned how to skate, and then, years later, my daughter learned how to skate (and once skated her way into Tai Babylonia's heart, as a matter of fact).

Now, it's a gigantic, festering, decaying garbage heap/cat litter box. People don't curb their pets, lawns are dead, arsonists are burning the hillsides, people are colliding with you head-on, just to beat you to the tastiest morsel of lime-marinated, grilled chicken breast.


And it's hot.

No... Wait... I take that back... Let me rephrase that. It's FUCKING hot!!! It's so fucking hot, I want to sit down and just cry and cry and cry. I want to cry like Lois Nettleton cried, in her white, silky slip. But no one would be able to tell if we were crying, Lois and I, because we'd be all sweaty (but in a sexy, Hollywood kinda way), and they'd all be left to wonder.

I always imagined I'd live my whole life in this town and never question it. Now, I question it. I go to school in a place with a marine climate, where the weather sits between 65 and 85 degrees -- rarely hotter or colder. I have friends who live even further north, in Santa Barbara, who rarely turn on their air-conditioner, and that's mostly to control humidity.

Sadly, I think my city is dying. The part of the city that doesn't live like a parasitic sucker-fish of the back of the show business shark is dying. Industries are leaving. Unemployment is high. People who emigrated here are moving back to their home states, or to other states that offer more promise, without the arm-and-leg cost of living. It's one thing to watch a city slowly languishing when you've come here, hoping to make your dreams come true. But to watch a city die, when that city is the only town in your dreams when you dream -- not because of the celebs or the famous eateries or Melrose Avenue -- but because it is the only one you've ever known intimately -- that's pretty disheartening. You want to give your child and any children she has down the road the kind of magical, temperate, genial childhood that you knew. And you realize now that that hometown -- the one you grew up in, that the émigrés treat like a doormat place to wipe they dirty, excrement crusted shoes before they roll up to Montana, to similarly pollute that state -- that hometown you knew is gone. Maybe it died in the '92 riots. Maybe it only developed a bad cough then, and then rolled over and began the stove-pipe breathing when the state elected (twice, mind you) a bodybuilder to the governorship.

I'm not really sure, and I'm too busy sweating and lighting incense to keep out the stench from the sidewalk below. I am left here to plot my exit strategy. To where, I'm not sure. Neither do I know how or when. Only that someday in the foreseeable future, I will take my leave of here, say good-bye to my childhood memories and the places of my heart, and find another town to call home.

Preferably one that doesn't smell like cat poop.

~C~

Poor Pitiful Little Comma C.

How sad your little life must be if you are still proofreading my posts from over a month ago for missing/extra commas and typos! And all the while, totally missing the point. But then, if I were left to wallow in the middle-class mediocrity of suburban Detroit, as you are, I might look for any distraction I could, just to survive the day.

Then again, maybe you didn't miss the point of the original blog post. Maybe you've gotten the point all too clearly. Perhaps that's why you're so bitter and petty. Maybe no institute of higher learning will have you. Unless, of course, they have an M.A. in Proofreading. They probably do somewhere. You should hit the search engines. I'd start with the University of Phoenix. That sounds just about right for you.

"Dearie...."

~C~

P.S. As long as you're too chicken-shit to post with a real e-mail or URL, you're never getting a comment posted on my blog. Did I remember all the commas in that post, sweetie? Huh, honey-pie? Did I, darling? Here, let me run spell check again, sugar, just to make sure I haven't misspelled anything, you craven, simpering little coward. Wait, I can't recall. Is there supposed to be a comma between "craven" and "simpering"? Oh, golly, punkin, it's all so confusing to me. Even with my MFA.

On the Origin of My Last Freakin' Nerve

Oh, Kirk Cameron... how cute you were as America's favorite ne'er-do-well, Mike Seaver, in the sit-com, Growing Pains.  I liked Mike Seaver.  He was a smart, sassy, clever underachiever, who used all of his mental and psychological abilities to outwit his long-suffering parents and siblings.  He had cute 80s clothes, an adorable, mullety haircut and fabulous lines. Mike Seaver was destined to be a success in the world, because though his sister Carol's diligence and hard work paid off in school, in real life, it's generally charm and the ability to think fast on your feet that puts you in the winner's circle. Mike Seaver had those in spades.

Unfortunately, Kirk Cameron is not Mike Seaver.  Since GP closed up shop in 1992, Cameron has been kept busy being a Christian.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you.  Some of my best friends are Christian.  But the difference between my best friends' kind of Christianity, and Kirk's Christianity, is that my best friends are okay with me not being a Christian.  And you not being a Christian.  In fact, my friends -- all learned, well-read, educated people, many of whom are actually in or have graduated from seminaries -- get the fact that there are a whole lotta folks out there who aren't Christian and aren't hungering to be made Christian.  They get that some of us gave Christianity the old college try, and found it lacking, and they can live with that.  They love me -- and you, regardless of your belief system -- for who you are, not which deity you worship or don't worship, whichever the case may be.

Kirk, I'm afraid, isn't quite so tolerant.  Kirk believes in a Christian God.  But more to the point, Kirk believes that you should believe in a Christian God, too.  And that if you don't believe in a Christian God and don't force your children to believe in a Christian God, then the world is doomed.  It's not enough that he's slathered the airwaves and Blockbuster's shelves with his DVD adaptation of those whacked out crazy guys, Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind books.  Now, he wants to start messing with our books -- namely, On the Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin.  November marks the sesquicentennial for the publication of Darwin's original edition of the book, and Kirk and Christian minister Ray Comfort (he of the "banana as evidence of God" theory) are planning on distributing a "special edition" of OtOotS to the top fifty universities that Cameron and Comfort feel are hotbeds of atheistic reason and education.

What makes this edition special?  A fifty-page "special introduction" which attempts to paint Darwin as a racist woman-hating atheist with ties to Adolph Hitler.  I'm not kidding.  (Just in case you haven't looked lately, by the way, Darwin died in 1882, seven years before Hitler's birth).  Without even debating any of the specious allegations that Cameron and Comfort make in the new edition of the book (because why bother to debate one guy who is outright insane and the other who is one of the dimmest individuals that ever sashayed out of sit-com history), I think it's important that people challenge this "new edition" for the very fact of its "specialness."  I do think it's great that we live in a country where Comfort and Cameron have the freedom to express themselves.  I just wish they wouldn't lie so much while doing it.

One of the things I'm most fed up with about evangelicals is this constant drumbeat of how Christians in America are so downtrodden and stripped of their rights. Really? Seriously?  This kind of complaint only underlines the lack of education and the barely passing acquaintance that evangelicals have with non-Biblical texts, like history books and political science texts.  It's not enough that they keep themselves ignorant of science and biology, they have to stay stupid about all the other subjects now, too?

I don't know what to say, except a big, hearty hello and shout out to all atheists and agnostics everywhere (some of my other best friends are atheists and agnostics, by the way), and keep up the good work promoting logic and reason, rather than hoodoo and hooey.

For a slightly different take on this whole affair, Romanian vlogger ZOMGitsCriss has recorded her slant on the whole thing, complete with her utterly charming accent ("BOOL-sheet" is my new favorite word, I've decided) and her darkly Eastern European sarcasm. 



I'm all in favor of her idea that college students on those fifty campuses to take as many copies as they can get their hands on, rip out the fifty "special" pages, and pass the books on, so that as many people as possible can read what Darwin actually wrote, without being misled by the crazy evangelicals.

Criss also has a couple of good ideas for some "special editions" of the Bible, with an introduction that would connect Christianity and its evangelical followers to some of the most heinous and shameful moments in history, like the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch trials and -- ironically -- Adolph Hitler (who was raised a Catholic, by the way).  Criss is pretty sure the Kirk & Ray Show wouldn't be so thrilled with this, but I like the idea a lot.

One thing I am grateful for is that Darwin's book -- his actual, original book -- which you can read online here, unencumbered by quasi-Christian drivel -- has been brought to the foreground again. It's a fascinating look at the launching of a theory that shot man into Twentieth Century science with a bullet. Darwin's theory was the ground spring from which all evolutionary and genetic sciences -- including the discovery of the human genome -- has come. I am certain that he never would have guessed how scientiests would extrapolate on his original theory of natural selection in order to branch off into completely diverse and almost unrelated areas of science. It wasn't his purpose.  His purpose was to tell the story of life -- of its brilliance, its resourcefulness and its unconquerable will to survive. His book -- a book that truly needs no introduction at all -- does just that.

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians.
Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

~Mohandas Ghandi~

~C~

(art credit: original photo in artwork by cazkhel on deviantART.  Altered in PSCS with Virtual Painter 5 filters)

A Week of Good-byes.

Patrick Swayze.

Henry Gibson.

Mary Travers.

One made me want to dance, one made me want to be funny, and one taught me how to sing harmony.

We said good-bye to all of them this week.  What a sad, melancholy week!  Someone told me today that, according the Tibetan Book of the Dead, they have 49 days to decide come back to another life here.  While I suppose I should be hoping they move on to the next plane or level, for purely selfish reasons, I'm hoping they all choose to come back here.

Peace and love, y'all.

~C~

Al Franken Explains It All For You

Senator Al Franken has an impromptu town hall meeting at the Minnesota State Fair, where he was accosted by tea party Republicans who had staked out his booth, demanding he vote their way on health care.   In moments, Franken used his likability and sensibility to calm the crowd and actually engage in a productive, sane, reasonable discussion about health care.  Even when the tea partyers wanted to make the problem about immigrants or an insufficient amount of doctors, Franken kept his cool, listened to their questions and explained his position and how he intends to vote.




THIS is a town hall meeting, people.  Nobody screaming, or biting, or shrieking or yelling racist invectives against the President, or blaming Mexicans for higher health care costs.

Thank God this man finally made it to the Senate.  May he stay a long, long time.  Long enough to fill the gap left by Ted Kennedy.

~C~

Dear Ms. Adkins:

Please try and understand. We simply must deny your request for compassionate release, although we realize you are suffering from a terminal illness.

You held Sharon Tate and her unborn child down and stabbed them both to death. You effectively made Sharon Tate terminally wounded. And you laughed about it. When you make someone else terminal, with no end-of-life care, other than stab wound after stab wound, when you stab her stomach where her unborn child is dying, when you drink her blood and wipe it on your face, as if you're a bullfighter whose made her first kill, then you must face the end of your life in an institution of our choosing. We are society, and we must protect ourselves, not only from you, but from anyone who watches you and thinks that their life mirrors yours. It was a long time ago, we realize. But Sharon Tate and her son remain dead today. Soon, you will know what that feels like, although I dare say, we will do everything in our power to make your death more peaceful and less painful.

We will see to it that you have round-the-clock medical care, hospice services, comfort care, including any pain medication you might need to see you through. Your care will be paid for by us, we will minister to your needs, tend to your requirements. We will see to it that no one stabs you, or drinks your blood. We will make sure that, if you plead for mercy, to be spared the agony of your wretched circumstance, that every consideration for your comfort and peaceful end will be met to the best of our abilities. When we, the People of the State of California, incarcerated you, that was our part of the deal.

But you may not leave. You may live until you are no longer living. But you simply may not leave. It is the one thing we cannot permit. Permanent, unrelenting, unabated imprisonment. This was your part of the deal, when you accepted the commutation of your sentence from death to life in prison. And you simply must fulfill it. The "life" part, I mean. Given the viciousness of the crimes you committed in your youth, "life" must mean "life," in your case and in the cases of your co-defendants.

I would hope that, all these years later, you would know why this is the case. But if you do not, I feel deeply sorry for you.

May your passing be as painless and peaceful as humanly possible, and that the end of this life be the passage to a better, more abundant and fruitful one to come. And may you learn between now and the time of your passing all of the lessons this life has left to teach you, so you do not have to continue them into the next. A fresh start. A new, enlightened beginning. This intention is the most precious gift I have to offer you.

Peace, Ms. Adkins.

~C~