10 Posts tagged “memories” - GinBaby

Today I started unpacking some of the boxes we had relegated to the basement, mostly my books and random collections of things I couldn t part with. It s all very strange. These things have all been packed at least since I went to Japan which was in December 2001.

Some of them have been packed away even longer. That s 5 full years of not having seen them at all. And now here they are.

My past has come back with a vengeance.
I have moved a lot, and several of these moves have been dramatic, crossing oceans and continents. In those moves, I have shed many belongings.

Most of it I have not missed.
Inevitably, though, what has been saved has been the things that could not be replaced. Out-of-print or hard-to-find books or books that I have some memory associated with (like my old copy of The Language Instinct, thoroughly annotated in derisive tones).

Photo albums and a box full of negatives (yeah, I m going to love sorting through that shit). Old letters. My old journals.

The soccer ball on which Akifumi declared he loved me.
Some of these things I had completely forgotten I owned, or, at least, I had forgotten I still had them. I have somehow miraculously managed, for example, to save a handpainted box given to me as a birthday gift by my best friend in.

..first grade?

I think it was first grade. It s very pretty. Her mother painted it.

It was in the same box with my dad s old silver beer stein and the flag from his funeral (he was an ex-Marine).
I have never saved, in any of these moves, the practical things, and so we find ourselves in a house with no furniture (except in my son s room) and a bare minimum of practical items, like dishes, but with an overflow of notebooks (most of them very cute and from Japan) filled to the brim with my past and 1000 books for which we have no bookshelves.
It s very overwhelming, this.

I left all my past behind, in boxes in a storage shed, and now here it all is, laid out before me, all at once.
Here is my wedding dress, from my first wedding. It s very beautiful.

My mother made it. It does not have a full train or veil or anything like that, so she tells me I could wear it again. As if we ever go anywhere requiring fancy dress, let alone a wedding dress.

My husband always wears Carhartt s, anyway, which I hardly think would go.
Here is the little cross-stitch sign saying [my name] s Room with a rainbow, made for me by my best friend in third grade, the glorious Susan Stevens.
Here is the journal I got in Japan made of paper made from elephant dung.

That is too cool for school, as they say.
Here are my photos from my trip around the country with a Ford Festiva, a cat, and a Japanese guy who listened to far too much Billy Joel.
Here is the newspaper story about the car accident that killed my friend and intermittent lover, Ryusuke.

Here are my diplomas, with my high honors noted. How terribly handy.
Oh, God.

My journal from when I climbed Mt. Fuji. I stopped at every station to write about it.

Wow.
Ah, finally, my copy of Fisher s Hornpipe surfaces. It s like I can breathe again now.

Here is my first sleeping bag, made for me by my Grams.
No--no, it can t be. Good Lord.

Baudrillard s Le systeme des objets. French philosophy..

.in French. Did I seriously once read French well enough that I could have read that?

I guess I did, because I did (because, Dr. Michel Valentin, you are insane). No sane person reads Lacan--did you seriously make us read motherfucking Jacques Le Con in French in a 300-level class?

???

??--in any language.

You did. You did make us read that, and the Baudrillard, and Foucault as well. All those poor kids who were just in there looking to get some pansyass French minor to polish up the resume, and you not only made them read Lacan, you made us once construct a Mobius strip that represented Lacan s idea of the relationship between language and consciousness.

You cannot possibly be a real person, and yet here is evidence of you.
Oh, look! My poster from Juarez announcing the upcoming bullfight.

I was afraid I would get arrested for ripping the poster off the wall, but Yoshi protected me with his new Eric Estrada hairdo.
If you were St. Peter, and you wanted to judge my life, all the relevant facts are right here, in these boxes.

An entire history of who I ve loved and how I ve lived, although you might have to do some reading between the lines and at least one soccer ball.
None of the poems are here, though, I guess, which is good, because St. Peter would never let me in if he knew I used to write horrid poetry.

I m pretty sure that is the one sin he cannot forgive.
Now, back to the boxes.
This is not a tale about Japanese (are they Japanese?

Filipino?) snacks. No.

This is about a different Yan-Yan altogether, so if you re looking for the poor man s Pocky, go elsewhere.
No. This is about a boy.

A boy I used to call Yan-Yan. His real name was Christian, and he was Filipino, and I guess (he said) his grandma or someone used to call him Yan-Yan, a reduplication of the last syllable of his given name. I thought it very cute and quickly adopted it.

Why? Because I was head over fucking heels in love with the man, that s why.
He had a similarly cloying nickname for me, too.

But I m not telling.
Anyway, Yan-Yan made me a bunch of CDs--wait, is burned the correct term?--and I unearthed them today, and I listened to one, the one that was my favorite, the one titled Heideggerian Deluxe: Artsy, Faggy British Fish Chips.

It s an unnecessarily long title, I agree. It is filled with songs from Travis and Portishead and Supergrass and Coldplay and some other deep-yet-uplifting artists. It s actually a great CD, and I say that despite the fact that I would probably not buy a CD by any of these artists individually.

Oh, wait, no I do have the Supergrass CD. And I might buy Portishead. Oh, right, and there is an Ian Brown song on there, too, the effin brilliant Dolphins Were Monkeys.

Good stuff, that. But Travis and Coldplay? Not really my thing.

I hadn t thought a lot about Yan-Yan in quite some time, but listening to the CD opened a floodgate of lost love. The feelings were real and prickly and a bit achy in awkward places.
So, what s so very noteworthy about that?

Listening to the CD burned especially for you by an ex-boyfriend does that. Certainly. But, see, I never met Yan-Yan, like, in real life.

I met Yan-Yan in a goddamned Internet chat room, I believe it was an MSN chatroom for Asian-Americans. I m not at all Asian (my slogan was white like rice! ), although I am American.

I was just trolling for Asian guys, particularly Japanese guys. Let s not get into my thing for Asian, and especially Japanese men, right now. Let s focus on Yan-Yan.

Anyway, I used to spend time chatting in there and became a regular. It got to the point where we had a little gang going; most of the others in it were Filipino-American. It was fun chatting, and I never took it seriously as real friendships, although I did occasionally talk on the phone with a couple of them and--egads!

--met a couple of the guys in real life. Hah.
Never met Yan-Yan, though, and it took a long time for us to fall in love.

As he said, he had walls. I didn t, but I also wasn t looking for love, just cheap thrills in the form of rapidfire dialogue and flirting. Yan-Yan hardly ever carried on private chats; he always just stuck to the main room.

Except one day he started a private chat with me. And things got out of hand.
It s not what you re thinking.

We started talking about music. He was impressed with my taste and knowledge. He was impressed with my wit.

He was impressed that I was not trying to get his phone number or promising him eternal love. Like I said, things just got totally out of hand. I fell in love with him.

It was so stupid.
This went on for a while, and at some point we started making plans to meet. We also started talking on the phone.

In the heat of a moment (probably talking about The Pixies, but you never know) we told each other the dreaded, I love you. I meant it, and I believe he did, too, at the time. I did not mean that I wanted to marry him or even necessarily sleep with him; you can t know that over the Internet or phone--at least I can t.

I don t know exactly what I meant, I guess, but I do know I really felt what I said. I know it now, several years later, because of the very real emotions fucking Coldplay evoked in me today.
Huh, well, I ll be a dolphin.

I just tried to find his web page, and it doesn t appear to still be there. Dang. I thought I might take a wee peek, but, no, denied.

Should I be walking the beach? Then I d be holding his hand.
Anyway, approximately one day after telling me he loved me, he got really scared and backed out.

He told me in chat and in email. I kept thinking that if I could just convince him that we could slow it down--way, way down--he wouldn t end it altogether, and some day we could still meet and see how it went. But he was already gone, really.

At the L word, the walls went up, very much up, and there was no more access. I sobbed. I called him when I knew he wouldn t answer his phone, just to hear his voice on voicemail.

I listened to a lot of British Fish Chips. Oh, pathetic, right? I had a heartbreak from some guy I never even met, a face and a font in the ether.

I did meet a couple of the other guys--oh, 3, actually--from the chat room in real life. I wasn t in love with them, though they were interesting and fun guys (and at least one of them was dead hawwwttt), and I dated one of them for a few months (yes, in person). When those ended, as they inevitably did, I was barely even fazed.

But, Yan-Yan just hangs there like a ghost sometimes. I have wondered if I would have gotten over him, too, like SNAP!, had I actually met him.

Probably. Or I would have married him. You know--one of the two.

Apropos of , I want to say a couple of things about singlehood. I have talked at length about how happily married I am but not how happily single I was. I would still be happily single--indeed, I was sure after my divorce that I would always be single--had not this man who does not speak my language, who buys me no gifts, who does not tell me that he loves me, who cares not at all for what colors I paint the house as long as I leave his garage alone, come along and stolen my heart, yes, like a bad outlaw.

I don t miss being single, but I never missed being married either. Both have good parts and bad. Overall, if you get a good marriage, the good parts of it will far outweigh the good parts of being single; if you get a bad marriage, you will hate it every waking second and long to be single again, even if it means months without sex.

I got married for the first time when quite young; I was only 20, and he was, too. That was a mistake. I think you need more time alone between the time you leave your parents house and the time when you are again living with someone who will hold so much sway over your future.

You need time to find yourself and gain the self-confidence and self-knowledge that will allow you to never be completely whipped. You should always know that, even if you choose marriage at some point, you could have been happy alone. You should have dreams that are only yours, some of which you should have fulfilled before getting married.

I had a lot of self-confidence and self-knowledge for a 19 year old, but I had not yet fulfilled any of my dreams. My husband lacked the self-confidence and self-knowledge and also the fulfillment of his dreams, and so he was utterly dependent on me in crucial, emotional ways. If we re being honest here, I grew to hate him for that.

I hadn t wanted a child or a pet. I wanted a full partner in the game of life.
When I left him, I was in grad school.

One of my friends, who called upon returning from his summer vacation and finding out we had split up, said, You sound...

you sound really happy. And I was. I was very sad by having broken my promise of forever to him, and I wish him only well.

I was also, though, happier and freer than I had been in a long time. Suddenly the whole world was open again, and I rushed at it. I went a bit, erm, Samantha Jones for a while and loved it.

I started making plans to go live overseas. I learned to cook Vietnamese food. I did go live overseas with just a smile and a phrasebook and spent an entire year being so giddy I could have peed my pants--a whole year, people.

But, you know. Things happen. I had to come down from the high sometime, and when I did come down, I found this Japanese guy still hanging around, still loving me even when I was down.

I found us growing into something more substantial than anything I had ever experienced. I felt our hearts gradually intertwining until I couldn t find my way out. So we married, had a kid, etc.

You know. The usual.
I went from Samantha Jones to Charlotte, just like that.

The single times, though, were vital to getting to know myself and what I m capable of as a person and as a woman. I couldn t be as good a spouse now if I didn t have them because my husband, like me in my first marriage, wouldn t want a child or a pet. He wants a full, thinking person, a partner.

Besides, you can t really love a person until you know love, and you can t know love until you love yourself. I wouldn t voluntarily go back to being single now, but I wouldn t have married, either, had I not just found this particular guy.
So, girls and boys, if you find yourselves alone on VD, use it to celebrate your life.

Don t envy the people getting bouquets, because many of them are trapped in relationships that are not good. You, on the other hand, can gloriously embrace a good relationship: that with yourself.
My husband and I recently had a two-year wedding anniversary.

And we completely forgot about it. In our defense, there was a lot going on--we had just moved to Idaho, the kid wasn t sleeping much, we were worried about buying a house and jobs and all that. So we spaced it.

But I thought today I might make up for that a little by writing about him.
We have been married for two years, but in April we will celebrate the fifth anniversary of our first date. We have lived together since October 2003.

We have been through a lot, as most couples worth their salt have. We had a long-distance relationship for the whole first year, and even after that, he was frequently gone for weeks at a time on some kind of mysterious training junkets (he was in the Japanese Self-Defense Force, something like our National Guard--except that it is the only military Japan has, which makes it more like our army..

.except that the Japanese ones can t actually carry bullets and are completely unprepared for any kind of actual self-defense, despite the fact that many of them practice judo and karate [one time I asked my husband what they would do, without bullets, if North Korea did invade, and he said, Call the police. ]).

We nearly broke up a few times--I mean very nearly. At the beginning, we couldn t communicate because we had no language in common until I got my ass in gear and learned Japanese. We had an accidental pregnancy and then a horrible miscarriage.

We got pregnant again. We moved to the USA and got a fucking Green Card. We had a kid.

We moved to Alaska, back to New Mexico, and now to Idaho. It s really been a lot.
Through this all, what amazes me most about our relationship--and I think this is probably the hallmark of a good marriage as opposed to a bad one like my first one--is that we periodically fall completely and madly in love with each other all over again, like we had just met and were in the first breathless grips of romance, except that our kid is there singing the goddamned WonderPets!

songs which kind of dampens the lovefest. We obviously go through periods where we are more like companions or friends who live with each other and, occasionally as time permits, have sex. Then some mystical waxing of the moon happens, and we are both just smitten again.

We re in one of those times right now. I feel like a schoolgirl.
When I first met him, he didn t have any hobbies or free-time pursuits other than walking around and watching a little telly.

Seriously. He had no interests. I didn t know what to make of this at the time, but I have since realized that it was only true in the context of Japan.

The truth was and is that he had no interests in anything to do with Japan (except Japanese TV and comedy). His interests now are in hunting, fishing, and cutting wood for our wood-burning stove. Very manly.

Those things just weren t possible in Japan. Obviously there is fishing and fishermen, but fishing as a hobby is absurdly difficult in most of the country due to poor habitat (concrete riverbeds and coastlines), pollution, inaccessibility, etc. He is blossoming here in the Rocky Mountain West, finding exactly the person he always wanted to be and the culture that will allow it.

That is surely part of our renaissance of love; we re both just really happy.
I was first attracted to him, beyond physically, by his obvious honesty and calm demeanor. On our first meeting and first few dates, he was patently not trying to impress me; he said a lot of the wrong things.

I thought, though, that when men say the right things on first dates, they re usually just trying to get in your pants. Here was a guy who, although clearly attracted to me, was less worried about getting into my pants than just being honest. Awesome.

He was also then, and continues to be, totally unflappable. I have seen him angry so far twice in our five years. The first time was when some yakuza were trying to extort money from him; the second was when I had said some things that were truly out of line, and I was being a bitch, and he got a little tweaked.

Both times he continued to be polite to a fault--he s always polite.
He is really my opposite in a lot of ways. He barely skated through high school (and the worst high school around at that).

He doesn t care for talking and would go days without talking if I let him. He is always calm and polite and very disciplined; he never loses his temper. He hates socializing.

He genuinely does not care about much--he has no real friends and does not want them; he does not care how dinner tasted so long as he is full; he is very easily contented. I know he never wanted to be married until he met me, but I would have thought he would have gone for someone less temperamental, extroverted, and bookish. But he says that I make his life more exciting than it would otherwise be.

Without me his life would be predictable, but he never knows what sort of thing I m going to do or say next. He says he loves this element of surprise and loves the way I think. I love him because he gives me some balance; I am more calm and unflappable now than I was before and more easily contented.

I don t really think he s made me more polite, although he did make me see the reasons to be superficially polite in Japan.
He s also really the reason I keep this blog. He doesn t want to talk about this stuff with me because he gives less than a fig about politics, and his total response to my anger at blaming the patriarchy was, Mm along with a nonverbal but clearly expressed in that inscrutable Japanese way rebuke along the lines of: You already know that nothing you say will change the mind of people like that, no matter how well-worded or well-thought your reply.

So, rather than let her drive you insane, just forget about it. Just simply decide to not think about it. Seriously, you need to stop thinking about it before you have a heart attack.

He only halfway gets that, to forget about it, I have to talk about it. I started this blog so that I could rant and rave and then, well, mostly just forget about it. It s given me great peace.

I should have done this years ago. Ah, well.
How about a toast, then?

To two years of marriage and being 100% in love with my husband and looking forward to a future in which he is someday a codgerly old man who putters about in the garage while I fuss over our grandkids and rant and rave about the state of our country and make jam and we still look at each other and see our whole lives there in each other s faces, to being more than the sum of our parts.
Have you ever met any celebrities? Any interesting stories?

Submitted by .

I don t know about celebrities, exactly, but I ve met a ton of entertainers, some famous and some only marginally so, because I used to work as a caterer at the university I went to.

That university got a lot of musical shows, possibly because it was a college town full of kids with crazy musical tastes and possibly because it was a convenient stop between, say, Minneapolis and Seattle. A few of the fonder memories:
Les Claypool played with a broken leg. George Clinton gave me a gallon of organic carrot juice, and he s really awe inspiring in person.

Sonic Youth wished the caterers to give advice on the procurement of, ah, special herbs, and they were also extremely cool and fun and awe inspiring. I completely worship Kim and Thurston. Hmm.

The Reverend Horton Heat and Jimbo were, I hate to admit it, kind of assholes; Jimbo did kind of hit on me, too--love their music still, though. REO Speedwagon were the fucking worst; they reminded me of Spinal Tap, only they weren t doing it to be funny. They didn t actually call the olives a complete disaster, but very nearly.

The Squirrel Nut Zippers were rockin cool people, very polite and fun to talk to, and we ended up bullshitting about the Athens, GA, scene and The Jody Grind and Kelly Hogan (I also totally worship Kelly Hogan--she s super neat), and they were surprised that I knew who they were, and then they went out and blew the house down with some swing. Andie MacDowell, I thought, was prettier in person than on TV, but she always seemed like she really didn t want to be there. Kenny G is a fucking midget and mighty full of himself, and it was funny to watch all the overdressed women, all towering over him of the godless sax, scurry about him.

Paul Anka is also very short but not so assholish. Bill Monroe is something of a dirty old man, god bless him. Oh, and the guys from Pearl Jam suck; I hate Jeff Ament.

Kurt Cobain was nice, though; he gave me some of his underwear and a little note that said, Hi, I m Kurt --actually he gave them to my then boyfriend to give to me...

whatever. My boyfriend at that time was friends with him. Bill Frisell, Wayne Horvitz, Timothy Young and the Very Special Forces, and Danny Barnes are all super, incredible, lovely people, too.

I love them all, but secretly I especially love Timothy Young who is not only nice and an unbelievable guitarist but also completely fucking unhinged. I sent him and the VSF some homemade orange marmalade once, and they were very appreciative.
Interesting stories?

Well, I did once see do the macarena while slightly tipsy. My great-grandmother had far more interesting celebrity stories than I do because she used to date guys like Errol Flynn (she turned down Clark Gable, she claims, due to his halitosis). She was in a few movies, and her cousin or something was .

I don t remember how we re related to him, but we do have that same Scott nose, so we must be. (I have my dad s nose, not the Scott nose.) Randolph Scott looks incredibly like my Uncle Bud s two sons, now that I look at him.

What s something that you re really proud of, which most people in your life don t know about?
Submitted by .

Well...

It was the morning after I had been released from jail. I had been in jail for a few days on a drug-related charge. I was 19.

It was the Texas Hill Country, late August. The drug-related charge came about because a friend of a friend asked me to drive to San Antonio and pick up some stuff for him and bring it back. I did.

His name was Sal, which should have been a dead giveaway, but none of our friends seemed to know that Sal had previously been arrested for his own drug-related charges and turned narc.
I ve always heard that some Catholics believe there is one sin for which you cannot repent, for which no forgiveness can be given, for which you may never be free from the eternal torments of Hell. I m pretty sure that sin is turning narc.

Anyway, so there I was: Honor student, Rotary Club president, future member of the new intelligentsia as one of my professors put it back then and gifted by most accounts -- and in the pokey because of an ounce of MJ. Convicted of trafficking, a felony.
This Sal fellow had called me up several times after the one marijuana delivery to ask me to go pick him up some acid and whatnot, but I never did.

So they busted me for just the one thing and sent my little life packing. Bye-bye Rotary Club. Bye-bye college.

Bye-bye Texas. Actually leaving Texas wasn t such a bad deal except that, at the time, it meant going back to Great Falls, Montana, a place I really don t like. Bye-bye apartment and job and truck.

I did get the truck back out of impound eventually, which was good because I had to live in it until I got up to Montana.
Yeah. So, the morning after I got out of jail, I was sitting in a park on a table wondering exactly what the fuck I was going to do now.

I noticed a fellow sitting and looking nervous in his car under the bridge nearby. I watched him a bit, slant-like so he wouldn t notice. Nervous guys don t like to be watched.

And then...

good Christ, is that Sal in the truck driving by? Yes. And he saw me, too.

Hmmm, he seems to be slowing down, checking out the nervous guy in the car. But not stopping. Sal pulled out of the park, and the nervous guy kept watching him.

So I went over to the nervous guy and asked him if he was waiting for that guy in the truck. He said no, but the answer was clearly yes. I just casually offered the information that the snake in the truck, Sal, was a narc.

He busted me, pal, and he ll bust your ass, too. The guy thanked me for the info just as casually then drove out of the park as quickly as his fidgeting fingers could put it in gear.
Maybe the guy in the car was a hardened drug addict who would have been out corrupting kids and shooting up the inner city.

I doubt it. I think probably he was a guy who had a steady job and a family and just smoked a little bowl occasionally. Maybe I m wrong, and maybe you feel like anyone who smokes a little peace pipe now and again is an immoral creep who deserves time in the big house.

Me, I was thinking about how much destruction had been caused by running a simple errand for a friend of a friend, far more destruction than my sporadic experimentation with drugs had caused. I was thinking about how hard it is to find a job once you re a convicted felon, very difficult indeed to find a job that would allow you to support kids. I was thinking about a justice system that supports lying and entrapment and scum like Sal who get a clean record for jacking all their friends.

I was thinking about how good it was to see the sunshine and not be locked up with 6 or 7 other people in a tiny, fluorescent cell with nothing but beans-and-weenies and COPS to get you through.
OK, OK, in the end, the time in jail and the felony conviction have not ruined my life. But that brief encounter with the long arm of the law derailed all of my plans, and 13 years later, it continues to have a quiet power over my life--there are some jobs I can never have, no matter what I ve done in the interim.

I can build Habitat for Humanity houses till my fucking hands fall off, and I m still a felon.
And yes I know that the member of the new intelligentsia bit is pretentious as hell. I know.

One of my professors actually did tell me that. It would have gagged me, but he was totally hot, and I had the major puppy love and thought he could do no wrong. Come to think of it, I think I still have a wee torch for him.

Oooh, hott.
You want a heavy moral to go with this story, a sure sign that there is, in fact, justice in this world? Here you go: Sal came to me while I was incarcerated and asked me to be a narc with him.

He offered me the whole package--no conviction, no record, summers in Rangoon. He said he was going to San Antonio to infiltrate the Crips. I turned him down on principle.

I heard a few months later that the Crips are perhaps not so easily infiltrated and had dealt with the problem. Usually I don t think choosing the moral high road has overt physical ramifications, but in this case slime took care of slime, and even the cops were happy.
Sigh.

So, it comes to .
I would not want to, and I am not going to, defend Republicans. I do think there are a few words to say in defense of the South, though.

To take a few of the points made by the anonymous ranter and give them brief responses: First and foremost, the South didn t go red until pretty recently. I can t find a date for exactly which election made the South red, but historically the South was Democrat--very strongly Democrat. Where do you think the term Southern Democrat comes from, ass-pie?

Secondly, what is this we Northeasterners founded this country shit? You Northeasterners didn t do jack-all. The Pilgrims may have landed there (umm.

..and in Virginia), but you northeasterners had nothing to do with it.

Oh, are you a direct descendant of the Mayflower crew? How nice. Granted, 10 of the 13 original states are in the North.

That is mainly due to the logistical fact that most of the South and West belonged at that time to Spain and France. Also, I don t think Southerners have a monopoly on people griping about taxes. Southerners might have to pay more taxes, and thus support their own stop-sign-buying, if they had something as basic as employment.

See, the income tax--it only applies to income. After the collapse of the agriculture-based economy, not a hell of a lot has moved into most of the South to make up for it. The official unemployment rates don t begin to tell the story of the South because unemployment there has become so chronic a lot of them aren t even getting counted anymore.

If you want to talk about self-reliance, when was the last time you grew your own food? Because you know what? My hillbilly fucking family in Arkansas doesn t give a rip who pays for their stop signs (they would just as soon not have stop signs--hell, one of my uncles has not been off his own property in over a year), but they damn sure grow the food they put in their mouths, unlike your sorry shrink-wrapped ass.

Oh, yes, and the divorce rates--if you check those statistics carefully, you ll see that Massachusetts has a low divorce rate because it has a comparatively low marriage rate. Can t very well get divorced if you re not married first, jack-boy. So take your high-horse morality and shove it up the Liberty Bell or some other, more convenient and less historic crack.

And the statistics on the murder rate? Yep, it s New Orleans. Louisiana has by far the highest murder rate.

New Orleans doesn t quite equal the South. Other Southern states have high murder rates, though most of them are not terribly higher than our national average, as noted in the very you provided to support your asinine ranting. I m not defending the murderers in the South, mind you, just pointing out that the South is by no means the ONLY place in the country with a murder problem.

Ever heard of Detroit? Oddly, and you wouldn t know it from the rant, but the South isn t even the only place with nutjob evangelical Bush supporters.
And in return, I ask you Mr.

Anonymous, what has the Northeast contributed to American culture since the Revolutionary War? Culture, here. Think about it.

Is there a definitively American cuisine, say, that originated in the Northeast? Nope, but there are two (Cajun and soul food) that started in the South. Is there a distinct, American style of music that originated in the Northeast?

Hmmm. OK, OK, I ll give hip-hop to NYC. Other than that?

Let s see...

jazz (and ragtime and Dixieland), country, bluegrass, rock-and-roll, blues? Huh. All from the South.

There is also R B; let s call that for Motown. [As an aside, I find it interesting that America has produced, in its short life span, such a number of distinct musical genres, genres that have really overtaken worldwide music. I find it especially interesting because a lot of those other countries who say we have no culture are aping our music.

]
Sadly, the South has of late been taken over by the twin dragons of fundamentalism and apathy. Both of these can be seen to arise from deep, unrelenting poverty. It s not the first time poverty, lack of education (and, since Massachusetts is apparently already doing such a great job of funding the South, why can t Massachusetts do something about the state of public schooling there?

), and hopelessness have joined together to foment the worst kind of backlash. A backlash against the backlash is not likely to be especially productive.
I do understand the urge, though.

I hate what has become of the South s politics (though I live in the non-coastal West which is more steadfastly Republican, I m afraid, although possibly less bombastic about it), but I love Southern culture. I love the food. I love the music.

I love the front-porch sittin . I love the dialect (my love of double modals has already been noted). I love the way history seems to still breathe there.

I love Faulkner. I love being called hon by the waitress and plied with quarts of sweet tea. I don t think I could or would ever live there again--because for all that, it has chiggers and poison ivy and heat/humidity that will oppress you--but it s not all as red-state-shitty as it seems from outside either.

by Garth Brooks. I didn t even have to think about that. I don t know if that counts as heartbreak song because it isn t clearly about a heartbreak, but it breaks my heart every time I hear it, so I am counting it.

I think the song itself is good. The lyrics are well written, and I think Garth does a good job singing it. It was on his first album, and he still managed to do understated back then.

But that song just brings back so much. So much. It was our prom theme song my junior year.

We debated for a long time about picking that song, because most of us thought a prom theme should be a happier song, but ultimately The Dance fit the mood of our high school at that time much better.
Three of our friends were dead for no real apparent reasons. They didn t all die at the same time.

Two of them were suicides. Garrick killed himself first with a gun to the head. He was found by his best friend.

They were a year ahead of me but we were in together, and Garrick had been my soil mentor (as in teaching me to judge soil for FFA). He killed himself on a school morning, apparently after a fight with his parents. There is some speculation that he was being abused, but I can t substantiate that.

For some grotesque reason, his parents had his funeral open casket, a bad choice with a gunshot wound to the head. In my opinion it s a bad choice anyway, but especially with head wounds. It was the first funeral for most of us.

A while later, our friend Jason was killed. Jason didn t go to our high school, but he was in FFA, and FFA is a small world. Jason was my boyfriend s best friend and my best friend s boyfriend.

See? Small world. He was killed in school, in a fight.

The other guy kicked Jason s throat and Jason asphyxiated. He was 14.
Then came Bear.

Bear was only 12 and was the little brother of a friend of mine. Bear was widely liked and often hung out with us even though we were older. Bear killed himself with a shotgun to the head.

I heard the call come over my mother s radio (she was an EMT at the time). I didn t believe it for a long time.
I don t know how to explain any of these deaths.

They were all just kids like the rest of us. They occurred within two years of each other, and I don t even know if heartbreak could describe it. But something broke.

Something most definitely broke. It s not that the rest of us became mopey. Life mostly went on as before, but with awkward gaps sometimes and uncomfortable silences and a pervasive feeling of just having been broken somehow.

When The Dance came out we all knew it was true. Looking back you can t change anything, no matter what the pain of the heartbreak to come. Looking back all you can do is remember the beauty of what was, the joys and satisfactions of the good times.

We could have missed the pain, but we would have had to miss the dance.
Now, I don t know. So many people I ve loved have died that whatever broke back then has never had proper time to heal.

It s permanently broken and sometimes The Dance is about the only thing that gets me through.
, but I guess not). Finally they get around to the meal, and Pandaman cooks something spicy, so Knoxville needs a drink.

The Pandaman brings a large glass of clear liquid that Knoxville, silly rabbit, assumes is water, and so he takes a huge drink. You guessed it. It s vodka.

Knoxville s face turns bright red, he begins shouting at Pandaman, and then he takes his sticky broom (like something you might use to pick up dog hair and lint off the upholstery--he brought it to check the cleanliness of Pandaman s digs) and begins using it to rip all the aluminum foil off the walls. On the bottom of the screen, a Japanese subtitle begins flashing that says (translated), Big Panic! Big Panic!

Sadly, Pandaman did not win. I m not sure they even compensated him for all the lost foil.
Anyway, so, Japanese TV.

And then I came back to America. And what the fucking fuck, huh, people? What is this crap you call television?

Why does every joke have to be a juvenile sex joke? Sex can certainly be funny. But most of the jokes I hear on TV these days are jokes I heard in junior high school.

Personally, I have moved on since then. Why does every drama have to take place either in a hospital or a police department/crime lab/law office? Is there nothing else of interest in life?

Seriously, that s the best you can do with all the richness and grandeur that is human life? SERIOUSLY? I m not antisex, but is what we as a nation have to say about sex reduced to the level of the spitball?

We ve managed to make television sex references both uncomfortable (in some trying so hard to titillate you in front of your mom way) and really boring, when sex is ideally neither. And the occurrence of heinous murders and rape-murders and serial murders and whatever new level of violence they can dream up is so common as to be, well, commonplace. Is this what we, as a nation, want?

Boring sex and routine kidnap-rape-gang-related-serial murders? Can we not do better than this?
The only thing I don t miss about Japanese TV is the music.

Oh, I hate J-Pop.