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How could I not love a writer who uses words like ’stentorian-assed’?

I’ve only just begun to read, but I know a serious feast when I find one. I’ve spent a lot of time recently thunking about how words shape people, for better or worse. Words are powerful things and when uttered over and over again by parents and caregivers and teachers and TV’s and magazines, they can gradually constrict, restrict, demean, disempower, sanitize, atrophy, shame and cripple.

Inga Muscio put it deftly into words for me:

‘Words outlive people, institutions, civilizations. Words spur images, associations, memories, inspirations and synapse pulsations. Words send off physical resonations of thought into the nethersphere. Words hurt, soothe, inspire, demean, demand, incite, pacify, teach, romance, pervert, unite, divide.
Words be powerful.
Grownups and children are not readily encouraged to unearth the power of words. Adults are repeatedly assured a picture is worth a thousand of them, while the playground response to almost any verbal taunt is “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”
I don’t beg, so much as command to differ.’

She commands our attention and…

She delivers cunt to us, liberated from the filthy ordure of centuries, like a miraculous gem.

Cunt, in her hands and by her lights, is a dangerous treasure, a beautiful word-a thunderstorm, a monster truck, a powerful force that all women hold between their soft thighs and in their wild hearts.

‘Since everybody already knows that the diabolization of “cunt” is an absolute reality of our language, nobody has to waste time and energy defending it’s honor.
A cunt by any other name is still a cunt.
“Cunt” is a highly satisfying word to utter on a regular basis.
Every girl and lady who is strong and fighting and powerful, who thrives in this world in a way that serves her, is a rockin’, cuntlovin’ babe doing her part to goad the post-patriarchal age into fruition.
“Cunt is the crusty, disgusting bottle in the city dump pile that is bejewelled underneath and has a beautiful genie inside.’

I certainly enjoyed walking into Third Place Books and asking the woman behind the counter for Cunt.

It’s a shockingly good word and an excellent book. Go buy it, read it, give it to everyone you know-spread it throughout this mad world like honey, like butter, like sanity.

I don’t know what it is that overwhelms me so about paperwork. Somehow it just drags and grates at me so much that I will find almost any (chat anyone?-tea, coffee, guinness… can I walk your dog, wash your car, clean your hearth?) reason to avoid having to hunker down and take it on. I detest it on the same level as going to the dentist, or being cold and wet(I’m downright feline there-brrrrgrrrrppphhtch!)

Eventually the piles are frightening, sifting down from the ominous stacks in my office, on my dresser, by the phone… And the bills, applications, forms are swiftly approaching their due dates. There’s no squirming out of it, no reprieve for the self-employed.

The time has come. By now it will take an entire afternoon to hash through the gargantuan towering mass.

Sigh.

That’s what I did today.

I finally found my continuing education certificates(all 62 hours worth), buried under the unfiled dregs-paid bills, bank statements, Sam’s dentistry records, accident reports, check stubs, artwork, business cards, etc, etc, etc.

My license come due on my birthday(March 7th) an the continuing ed. credits are due, so voila! Now it’s paid and mailed, along with my bills.

Phew.

Now I just have to do my taxes.

Yikes! Anyone know a good accountant who wants to trade for massage or art?

The American defense budget made simple-simply, absurdly, sweetly, insanely, utterly, indefensible, that is.

Fat cats play the game, alright.

My guardian wolf.

I sculpted this piece back in 2001, somewhat in reaction to the 9/11 debacle and somewhat as a cerebus against the turmoil of my own little life’s dramas. She’s protected my tender spirit through a lot since then.

Wolves have always entranced me. Wild, fierce, beautiful, savage, loyal beasts. I often imagined them roaming the forests I grew up in, though in all my fifteen years there, I only caught one breathtaking glimpse.

We were driving the endless stretches of Highway One, which seems to meander aimlessly all over Maine. It was one of those amazing, sunny, snowy ANW days where the drifts hurt you with their brilliant whiteness and the ice-coated trees bedazzle your eyes, every gnarled limb and leafless twig transformed into a shimmering fairyland fantasy of coruscating crystal.

The wolf stood at the mouth of a small woodland meadow, perhaps fifty feet away. It was over in an instant, though we craned our necks to see longer and begged the adults to stop the car. I don’t clearly remember what they said, probably that it was too icey, or the animal was gone and it was probably just a coyote anyway… But I’ll never forget the wolf.

My first ceramic sculpture ever, in high school, was a commemoration of that moment:

By massaging a police officer.

Sidearms are so not good for the back… But she left a happier, relaxed cop.

PCC has betrayed me!

They’ve replaced my trusty, delicious, nutricious, and oh-so-handy braunschwiger with-YEARRRRRRRRGHHHH-Liverwurst!

My sadness is inconsolable.

the joy of the feminine has been denigrated as mere frivolity; her joyful lust demeaned as whorishness, or sentimentalized and maternalized; her vitality bound into duty and obedience. This devaluation produced ungrounded daughters of the patriarchy, their feminine strength and passion split off, their dreams and ideals in the unobtainable heavens, maintained grandly with a spirit false to the instinctual pattern symbolised by the queen of heaven and earth. It also produced frustrated furies.’

Sylvia B Perera, ‘Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women’

I had no idea I was risking my life every day, just by entering my bathroom! It’s amazing, the things we adults fail to notice, right under our very noses.

Sam just told me the reason he takes so long in the bathroom is because of all the distractions…

Such as the secret surveillance room under the house, accessed by pressing a spot in the pattern on the living room rug. Once in the room, you can see every room in the house on screens, via hidden surveillance cameras.

The ones in the bathroom are masquerading as specks of dirt on the floor(who knew!-I thought we were just poor housecleaners).

If the cameras detect bad guys, a little alarm goes off: “INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT!” and a little wall comes up around the house so nobody can get out of it.

Then, if you’re in the secret room, you can press a button and the tiles on the bathroom wall slide over to reveal secret panels, bristling with hidden guns, which mechanically protrude into the room and point unerringly at the unlucky intruder. A robotic voice says: “Hands up!“.

At that point, if the intruder is in the bathtub, the bottom opens up and dumps them through. If they are on the toilet, the toilet flushes, the pipes enlarging to accommodate the riffraff, and a robotic arm grabs them and stuffs them down into the bowl.

If we want to capture them, instead of getting rid of them with the murderous flushomatic, the sides of the bathtub automatically turn into rows of laser guns.

If the intruder merely steps into the room without using the tub or toilet, the floor tiles can also react to their steps and the observer in the secret room can activate the tiles to cause dilation and thus, plunge the unsuspecting intruder through the floor.

Holy guacamole, peeing will never be the same again!

Sam assures me this only happens if it’s definately a bad guy.

Phew.

Right out of the gorgeous, sunny, cold Washougal River.

It was a weekend of firsts. My first out of town commission, my first round painting, my first onsite job… It was supposed to be a mural, but Heather had already painted the green mountains and purple skies(I just added the snowcaps) and we decided stripping and sanding wasn’t going to fly, so happily, the idea of a circular canvas popped up.

Such a cool format! I love it, love it, love it! The perfect frame for a goddess. There will be many, many more now that I’ve jumped outside that little box-whassup with all the squares and rectangles anyway?

I wanted her to be doing something musical, since Heather is such an amazingly musical woman and she just happened to have the perfect instrument.

It’s a drone, a shruti box. Makes a lovely accompaniment to a song, or chanting, as I found the next morning when Heather urged me to try it(upon overhearing my green Tara mantras). So fun-I’ll have to get Sam one. He’d LOVE it!

Voila! The Shruti Goddess was born.

Thanks so very much, Heather and Dave, for the awesome hospitality of your welcoming, inspiring home, Heather, for birthing this whole wonderful creative endeavor, Josh fer the ride an’ the excellent roadtrip companionship, my rythm section…

…for the magnificient painting ambience and, my gratitude also to the sparkling river, the biting wind, the brilliant sun, the hot tea that sustained me, and the great horned owl who kept me company in Danni’s Princess bed by WHOOing all night long whilst I snuggled down under the plush, green, velvety covers.

I love my freaky friends!

Teenage boys on the bus:

Boy 1: “He keeps grabbing my chest in the hall and yelling ‘tittypudding, pudding titties!’”

Boy 2: “That could annoying after a while…”

Boy 3: “My mom’s annoying. She’s always embarrassing me in front of my friends.”

Boy 1: “My mom’s cool when we’re alone-she’s really funny, except when my friends are over, then she embarrasses me.”

Boy 2: “My mom yells at you, but she’s not mean, like it’s not mean yelling, it’s like ‘What the hell did you think?’ yelling and you can yell back if you need to.”

Boy 3, incredulous: “You can yell back?”

Boy 2, laughing: “Yeah, she’s cool that way.”