My Culturally Rooted Tangent

I sang at choir in the church basement tonight. Please, laugh away.

Yes, I'm a good Irish Catholic lady who practiced with fellow choir members for two and a half hours -- less a twenty minute break in which we drank wine or beer and ate hors d'ourves. (You can refill your glass at the end of break so you have sustenance for the second half of practice!)

Since I am grooving on my catholicism tonight, I shall make confession. I love singing! It's challenging fighting all of the complications of harmony (so appropros on so many levels), it is so challenging fighting all of the bullshit of organized religion -- but somehow set it to music and I feel it. So many conflicts, but goddammit -- I'm still a fucking catholic!

Excuse me, Irish Catholic.

See, that differential is significant. I don't buy into that political pope crap. I also grew up with several guys who killed themselves because they were destroyed by the tragedy of being raped by priests. I imagine one of them as a significant image in the Jungian Archetypical Heaven now. He was golden and beautiful and Michelangelo would have painted him as the Archangel Michael. And I was taught to practice catholicism by 13 years of catholic school and my Irish catholic grandma and Jesuits and a book of the saints. So really and obviously, I'm an overanalyzing, superstitious woman. But aren't those the qualities that keep religion solid, stable and historical?

The point I was trying to make a minute ago is I don't pray to Jesus or God. I think pure, unsinful beings are unapproachable (and a load of misogynistic, hallucinogenic bullshit). I am the product of faith passed on from the oppressed -- pray to your mother and your friends and family, the Blessed Mother and the saints.

And the name is also significant. I was not taught to pray to the Virgin Mary; I was taught to pray to the Blessed Mother. Recite both of those names to yourself and see who you want to call on to assist you in your petitions. Tonight I stood on a bridge that rocked over the Chicago River while singing "Gentle Woman" to a a gift of urban nature which always blesses me. Blessed Mother, thank you for your children.

And tonight I also sang with the church choir -- even "Danny Boy" (yuck) which according to the music notes was published in "Londonderry" rather than Derry. I hate "Danny Boy". Over-played and praising saccharine martyrdom to The Man.

We should sing "The Wind That Shakes the Barley". It's a more valuable theme and it relates better to the times.

"Twas hard the woeful words to frame

To break the ties that bound us.

But harder still to bare the shame

Of foreign chains around us."

Today, the foreign chains are made of different steels. In this millennium, foreign does not refer to other nations and cultures, but rather, multinational corporate persecutors. We are cuffed by different oppressors but we are all still trapped.

And now to quote a catholic from a different culture: "Better to die on your feet than live on your knees."

So let us pray.

Wave-particle Duality

The landlord painted the backyard sewer cap and all of the stray cats are rolling on the fresh white coat and getting high. I'm trying to get the drunky ladies out for end-of-the-work-week Friday cocktails and they sound like the temperance league. My nephew is fevered, my dad is tubed and my son is steadfastly working his way into the 1%. I'm getting unspecific orders via text, PJ Harvey is coming through me and I'm skimming the quantum theory of mechanics on the internet for shiggles.

Seasonal shifts bring out the strange.

Photo by Ted Nelson

Witching Hour

I am not a nice girl. I am not a sweet woman. The clock just struck truth and madness. I started this mermaid symbology to tap into my inner beauty but my inner beauty is dark and strange. On Saturday I was toted in a bicycle chariot up California Avenue by a potion brewing warrior. We kissed in the shadows and now I finally release my inner mother nature. This year, boys and girls, mother nature is tsunamis and tornados. She is moonstruck coyotes clamoring at the cataclysm. She laps up chaos and laughs at your dismantled structures. This siren sings sailors from their personal bondage and throws mona lisa smirks from her island.

Swim, bitches, swim.

(Credits to Dean and Diamanda Galas for inspiring this train of madness. Also to Tray Mead for the image.)

Monday Night Purgatory

I wanted to go to Weeds tonight for the open mike poetry because it was the annual Erotica Valentine's reading but I'm feeling decidely UN-erotic. I've never been very good at writing erotica, either. My work goes quickly pornographic and it doesn't take long to turn completely hardcore. Then Gregorio sent out a message that there would be filming and we should dress up and then possibly fall in love with someone. The pressure was mounting. Then I got my period (see what I mean about the suddenly hardcore) and had to drive to the far south side to visit someone in the hospital. Also, whenever I go to Weeds I end up drinking a bunch of tequilas and the next thing I know it's 4:30 a.m. and I'm getting thrown out of the Old Town Ale House. I wouldn't feel right tomorrow morning asking the patients how much they've been drinking while tequila and lime seep out of my pores and the seven dwarves sing "heigh ho" in my skull while driving sledgehammers against my temples.

I hate working in the mornings. It is decidedly not erotic.

Fashionably Late

I went with my friend to her big work shindig last night. I didn't get the memo about the dress code. Most of the women were wearing little black dresses with tights and shoes very much like the one pictured here. (Call me old-fashioned but I'm pretty sure you aren't supposed to wear hose with open-toed shoes.) I wore jeans and my peely red leather boots. Sometimes I feel like Clint Eastwood. That's probably why everyone was casually feeling out the true nature of the relationship between my friend and me. She and I are friends, not "girlfriends" but still, I refused to debunk that myth. That would be very un-cowboy of me.

In keeping with the flavor of the evening, we slipped away before the dancing and went to the secret bar. There was a cowboy band playing complete with a violinist and a lead guitarist with a 1950s era Fender in virginal white which contrasted nicely with his black pearl snap western shirt. The band was good. The lead singer was Australian but everybody knows Australians make the best rednecks because they're from the Deep South.

I can't remember the name of the band but my friend had to pass the tip jar because she's outgoing, trustworthy and was wearing a nice femme outfit. I guess that makes me the butch -- well, that and my Clint Eastwood glare.

Last night I dreamt I walked into a storefront and ordered some sushi from the beautiful darkhaired woman behind the glass counter.

While she was fixing my meal, she nodded to the purple fliers on the countertop. They were advertising a special political fundraiser -- a chocolate making, bake sale, love fest being thrown by all of the witches in Chicago. She said we were going to infiltrate the party with decadent deliciousness. She asked me if I could make frosting from scratch. I told her I could; my grandma taught me.

Naiad

Today is a breathtaking gift of Nature all rolling green with her azure cap and puffy cumulus feathers. Wandering away from my house, I encounter brick-painted, huddling homes from two centuries ago built by immigrant Irish who saved a few pennies and built a new community in a triangle a couple miles removed from the death-stench stockyards of their employment. Today there still exists a few Irish and Poles but now it is mostly comprised of upwardly-moblie Mexican nationals who have yard sales on Saturdays and fiestas on Sundays.

The triangle is bordered by Archer Avenue (formerly the Road to Widow Brown's) which reaches out from Chinatown into the wandering desires of Resurrection Mary. This is the southern border of Mount Pleasant, which settles along the river. The Chicago River is now the home of haunted steel mills and scarred ports. Most of it is vacant although the passing trains graon on their tracks day and night like a grandfather on the porch warning against the transcience of our values.

Here, the river itself is spanned by several suspension bridges still studied today by rapt mechanical engineers. The river, far below me, appears in the sunlight as a chunk of amber hiding in its depths some winged prehistoric creature. With its ornaments of railroad ties and ordered train cars and abandoned factories and graffittied granaries it stands in stark contrast to the lake it flows from -- divorced from natural union by dynamite. Once I visited her here among the broken factories and prarie flowers and I came back with a baby. Once I led a parade to meet her at her contrived lake source and dyed her the color of envy.

I am never far from her for long.

Life Imitates Art

Once upon a time, I met a man at Scenes. Scenes was a coffee house/ dramatist bookshop/ zine headquarters on Clark Street where you could smoke, drink a bottomless cup of strong brew all day for about $1.35 and tip and talk to strangers about interesting things. Their zine was called Strong Coffee. My friend Sergio had a regular editorial which seemed to focus on wandering around the city in altered states of mind. There was a naughty horoscope column called Madame Zosostris' Wicked Pack of Cards. Once, they were slapped with a cease-and-desist order for their parody of the glurgey comic Love Is... Once I met a guy who had spent a year in Germany and helped tear the Berlin Wall down. He coached me on Bertoldt Brecht which I believe led to me getting cast in Three Penny Opera. He was also a good kisser. But he isn't the man from the first part of this paragraph.

Once I met a man at Scenes. He and I were both in the midst of bad break-ups, as well as aspiring playwrites. We decided to co-author a piece illustrating the arc of the relationship. (This idea was every bit as bad as it sounds.) So when we wrote the meet & courtship scenes he invited me over for dinner. We had a lovely fortnight stand while we tried to outline the plot and when it came time to write the scenes for the break up we had a giant, public fight and didn't talk for a year and so we never finished the play.

I re-read it several months later. It really, really sucked so I tossed it in the recycling bin.

Stuff & Nonsense

I haven't posted in a very long time but I'm feeling sort of creative in an enthusiastically disinterested kind of way -- so here is some stuff and nonsense...

Yesterday, I stopped by the bodega to buy some smokes and there was a large, thuggish and quite stunningly attractive man buying lottery tickets, but he wasn't buying them the usual way. Instead of handing over a pre-filled card or rattling off numbers scrawled on a scrap of paper, this guy bought seven lottery tickets like so:

Next, the fives and eights -- five, eight, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-five, twenty-eight. Now the twos and sevens -- two, seven, twenty-two, twenty-seven, thirty-two, thirty-seven...

Seriously, this went on for about ten minutes and it was hot as hell in that store. Then as I was walking out, the same guy re-enters (nearly running me over) and seven guys walk in behind him as if by choreography(from the left, from the right, from the left, and so on. I finally had to elbow my way out of the doorway). As, I walked to my car I saw them come out of the store and walk down the street in formation. I started to wonder if the lottery tickets were actually an elaborately coded communication system among extremely organized street crews. Who knows? Maybe I'm just imposing patterns on everything.

Also, three of my girlfriends are moving out of town: Denver, Austin and Amsterdam, respectively. I'm itching to move but the kid's got one more year of school and I promised myself I would make strides toward stability. But there's a joyful surrender in a big move that I really miss. Moving can be seductive.

I read a book by a very wealthy capitalist and I learned some things, like it's nice to have tits and assets and it's really good to earn more than you spend. It was actually quite refreshing to read a book by someone who undestands that an economic system is supposed to be about economics -- not an ethos. Once you accept a given economic -ism as your personal savior, you are morally bankrupt and totally fucked.

Not that I'm judgemental or anything.

p.s. I borrowed that picture from somebody's photobucket account

Sirena's Sense of Snow

It sucks!


This is what every corner of the city used to look like. Only now the mushy slush has set, frozen, been packed by weeks of wind and sub-zero temps and is doing it's best impression of paleolithic-era stones.

It is January and this is how January is .... but I am so over January right now.

It's cold, depressing and the winter seems endless and insurmountable. I know that spring will come again -- but at the moment I don't actually believe it.

************

I've pulled Isa out of the velevet rune bag and Isa is my present. It's hard to see beyond the ice.

brrrrrrr!!!!!

It is sooooooo cold out today... My little weather pixie says it's 7, but I think it was below zero this morning. It took about 10 minutes for me and the kid to chip all of the ice off the windshield and I thought the wind was going to whisk me up Western Avenue to the land of winter, never to see my family again.

Seriously, I'm STILL not warm.

Not!

Evidently, selling a Senate seat is not considered a crime in the Blagojevich household.
(If this were the plot of a movie, I would call it ridiculous. Is being Governor of Illinois a prerequisite for attending the Federal Penitentiary? Jeez, Louise!)

Oh, and this was the frontpage of the Chicago Sun Times on July 17, 2008. You can see how popular Blago has been around here -- even the press was making fun of him for "getting tough on crime". And the Daley machine just loves to be called out in public. Ask Blago's father-in-law, Alderman Dick Mell, who gave testimony to Fitzgerald after Blago outed a dirty landfill contract Mell was "consulting" on -- with his nephew. Oh, and Patrick Fitzgerald is a piece of work to. He was nominated to his position as Federal Prosecutor of Northern IL by former Senator from IL, Peter Fitzgerald (no relation) at the request of "Hot" Karl Rove and has been slinging crap at practically every elected official ever since. See what I mean? If you made this a movie, you'd earn 2 well-deserved thumbs down for the story's utter impossibility.

Voter Fraud Watch Redux

Remember November 2000? In Florida, where W's brother just happened to be governor, all of those ballots marked Gore had to be thrown out and in violation of the US Constitution, the Supreme Court dubbed W. "the Decider".

What about 2004? When the Department of Justice engaged in vote caging, and used dubious tactics to bar deployed military personnel and minorities and lower income people from voting. That, coupled with the votes lost due to "technical problems" in Ohio, points to yet another presidential election stolen by BushCo.

Now it's 2008 and BushCo's fat cat friends don't want to give up their lucrative, thieving ways -- and dammit, McCain is old and it is his turn to be President. So in Michigan, the Republicans are once again attempting to use vote caging -- by using foreclosure lists to prevent hard hit Michigan citizens from voting.

Can you imagine the scene at the polls???

Hard-Working, Laid-Off, Tax-Paying Citizen Ruined By BushCo ("Citizen"): I'm John Q. Public. May I please have my ballot?

Heartless, Greedy, Unpatriotic Asshole GOP Election Judge ("Unpatriotic GOP Asshole"): Let me see... hmmmm.... I'm very sorry, Mr. Public. You won't be voting today.

Citizen: What do you mean? I've been coming to this polling place for 20 years!

Unpatriotic GOP Asshole: Yes. But you are no longer a homeowner in this area. You lost your home. You can't pay your bills. You don't get to vote.

Citizen: I lost my home because the factory where I've been working for the last 25 years moved to China. My heating bill tripled and my daughter developed leukemia from drinking polluted water. Now we rent an apartment in this precinct with another family. It's crowded, but at least our kids didn't have to change schools. Now, please hand me my ballot. Besides, property ownership is not a voting requirement. Does the GOP even know how to spell constitution anymore? (authors note: please see Constitutional Amendments 14, 15, 19, 24 and 26.)

Unpatriotic GOP Asshole: I am so sorry you've had such a hard time, but that hard time is precisely why you CAN'T vote. We simply don't trust that you will continue to be a loyal Republican and if we think you won't vote for McCain, you lose your right to vote.

And the Democrats, in a surprising and long overdue display of chutzpah, ARE ACTUALLY CHALLENGING THIS BEFORE THEY LOSE ANOTHER ELECTION. The Democratic National Committee is taking the GOP to court in Michigan and in Ohio, their Secretary of State has stricken the dubious vote caging policies put in place before the election in 2004 by her Republican predecessor.

Ohio Republicans are crying foul -- because today's Republican policy makers see a level playing field as a threat to their continued looting and tyranny. It is the only thing they see clearly these days. However, 2 Ohio "voters" are now suing Ohio for not weighting their votes more heavily, by throwing out the votes of others. Ohio Republicans are also attempting to challenge voters via foreclosure listings. Boy, those Republicans really put country first! Not! Actually, Republicans are trying to prevent homeless citizens (whose numbers have greatly increased during BushCo's tenure) from voting at all anywhere in the country. Now THAT'S compassionate conservatism and good, old fashioned patriotism. Sure, sure, sure!!!

Go, Obama, go! We're from Chicago and you can't trick us, you GOPpy, crappy, pansy, crybaby neocons. We INVENTED voter fraud back when your great-granddaddies were still getting pantsed at Andover and we reformed ourselves long before John McCain took bribes from Charles Keating during the Savings and Loan Scandal.

We are on to you crooks and you aren't getting away with it this time.

The Planet Is Fine

I love those random conversations with strangers in which you feel tightly, yet temporarily connected to this other person somehow. Or, barring the sensation of a personal connection, I love having a random conversation with a stranger in which it seems that one or the other of you (or both) is passing on some kind of clue.

And as I get older, I find myself having random clue-like conversations with strangers in which our bizarre exchange indicates to me that this very intimate spiritual and philosophical spiral path I've been traveling IS relevant and meaningful, at least for me and the occasional random stranger.

I saw M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening at the theater the other night. (Parenthetical snatch* -- I forget how much better movies are in the theater on the big screen. DVDs are convenient, cheap and fabulous for lazy entertainment and escapism, but you really end up missing something in the transition to the small screen.) Anyway, I recommend The Happening, but I'm not really going to tell you about it because you know how you just have to see his movies and let them unfold to really enjoy them. Also, the theater where I saw it was crowded and about one third of the audience seemed to really enjoy it and two-thirds were pissed, saying things like, remind me never to see another M. Night Shyamalan movie. In other words, he didn't necessarily tailor this to soothe the fears and meet the expectations of the status quo.

So when the movie ended, my friend and I did the post-movie meaningful look that says, Whoa, good, I think. Need a minute. And the lady in her early sixties with fabulous earrings and a very sharp gauze pantsuit (confession: sometimes I'm into certain kinds of clothes and accessories) on the other side of my friend also gets in the post-movie glance interchange with us. And she and I start chatting while waiting for the grumbling crowd to pass.

Random Stranger Lady (RSL): Well, I really enjoyed that!

La Sirena (LS) and Friend: Me, too! (he owes me a coke)

RSL: You know, lots of people have been saying things like that, that plants are interactive and you should talk to them, like... (lots of people are walking by and complaining here so I don't catch the first five names she rattles off)...and George Washington Carver. You know, and I think I would hate people if I were a plant. We deserve everything we get and then some!

LS: You know what George Carlin said about the earth, that she's just going to--

LS and RSL: (in perfectly metered unison)-- shake us off like a bunch of fleas!!! (The women laugh while the passing 20-something hipster doofi fire them looks of annoyed confusion.)

And so this is my roundabout way of saying goodbye to George Carlin and here is the full text of the Carlin bit from which the aforementioned quote came.

Goodbye, George -- or is it, really? Perhaps you've just attached yourself to another valence?

* Wouldn't "Parenthetical Snatch" be a great name for a band?

"Waiting For My Man"

In case you hadn't noticed yet, I have a very intense and admittedly bizarre crush on John Leguizamo. (He's sexy, smart, an author, a playwright and he chooses interesting roles -- for example he played Toulouse-Lautrec and an MD who snorted lines off his married mistress' ass on primetime network TV while brandishing a gun and admonishing his residents to stay abreast of the latest medical research. Also he was in a Romero zombie movie and I can really only love a man who knows what to do in case of zombie pandemic.)

Anyway... Leguizamo is in town -- actually, he and Freddy Rodriguez (another man with a zombie pandemic plan) are filming a movie in my neighborhood and like my neighborhood, it's called Humboldt Park. (I am not afraid to tell you where I live because you are way too much of a wimpy crybaby to come here and find me.)

I know he's married, but I figure since we'll be in the same neighborhood, I'll have him over for some barbeque and beer... that's all, because I'm actually a lady even if I am occasionally lascivious and often way too tough for you.

I know I haven't mentioned it in awhile, so in case you've forgotten (you wish!) George W. Bush is a bloodthirsty motherfucker and a baby-eating asshole.

He just pocket-vetoed (the chicken-shit, sneaky form of presidential veto) probably the only military expenditure he has ever refused. Congress and the Senate passed legislation that would increase the pay and benefits of Vets. Bush didn't think they really needed a raise or a dental plan, so he let the bill expire. (Greedy baby-eating, earth-raping, soulless antichrist!)

Way to support the troops there, W!!! When you look in the mirror, do you even see a reflection?

On a brighter note, Iowa had record turnouts for the presidential primary caucuses and our Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama won with a resonably significant lead.

~

Go, Obama, go!!!

~

It's hard to come to terms with the fact that I am not going to be supporting a woman, but frankly I'm pretty pissed off at Hillary's voting record regarding American military intervention and she didn't vote against the Patriot Act and -- let's be honest -- while a million brazilian times better than W, putting the Clinton's back in the White House would be just so much more business as usual.

I like Edwards, too, however I feel his message is very close to Obama's, but Edwards lacks Obama's charisma. Also, Obama is from Chicago -- it wouldn't hurt to have a local man running the show.

~

And finally, white men have been in charge for a couple of thousand years. I'm over it. Move along, please.

Romance Challenge 2008

A couple of weeks ago I told my friend Dennis I was tired of working in an office and I wanted to stay home and crank out several romance novels every year instead. I chose this particular genre because I find it formulaic, popular (read lucrative) and intellectually simple. I also imagined that by injecting the occasional period setting, I could happily spend hours and hours learning the details of certain historic and cultural eras.

Sometimes, I'm a snotty bitch.

Dennis is a good soul. He said I needed to set a deadline, show him my first five pages, and in the spirit of good sportspersonship he would play, too. And so was born Romance Challenge 2008. On Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at high noon we are meeting at Street Side in the back horseshoe booth with the first 5 pages of our original romance novels. The idea is catching on like wildfire among the drunky, boho neighborhoodies -- after all, we have to find something else to do with our hands and mouths now that we can no longer smoke anywhere -- and we're expecting a small crowd.

An unexpected treat is all of the fun we're having pointing out some of the flotsam and jetsam of random conversations that should be used as first lines or titles like, "Sweaty Breasts and Cigarettes" or "I felt like I was riding a very erotic horse" or "I realized she was probably a man, but we had a good time so I asked her out again." (By the way, those are all copyrighted snippets, so no plagery, please.)

But therein lies the crux of Romance Challenge 2008 for me. I want to write a pure, sweet -- hopefully highly readable and intellectually stimulating -- romance novel. I want to be pure to the genre. I realize I've spent this lifetime smothering nearly every romantic sentiment or impulse I've ever had and I think I would be cheating myself if I didn't give in to that strange, stereotypically soft and feminine and foreign mood, at least once. Even if I only do it on paper.

And it's difficult. Everything I've come up with so far smacks of cynical satire. But I will not give in to my monkey mind's desire to protect me from flowering into a silly, vulnerable fool. I will write a fucking love story even if it makes me weep.

Wanna play?

Purge - ery

Greetings, pumpkins! I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving -- even those of you who live in countries where you don't sacrifice turkeys to the Land Lord in his infinite wisdom for the real estate windfall created by decimation of the native population while drinking beer at noon and pointing larger, shinier pieces from the butcher block at first degree relatives because triptophen causes a feeling of distrust.

But I'm just cynical this year because I spent all of Wednesday and Thursday in the throes of a wicked stomach flu complete with repetitive projectile vomiting. I had a piece of dry toast and half a cup of peppermint tea around 6 pm for Thanksgiving dinner. Boo-hoo, poor me, etc., etc...

Anyway, I woke up Friday STARVING, so my friend Baldie took me out to brunch and then we bopped around -- stopping in a comic book store. While perusing the numerous fiddy cent bins, I discovered a comic called My Monkey's Name Is Jennifer by Ken Knudsten. Of course, I purchased the three random issues I found, because "It's a scientifically proven fact that everyone's favorite word is their own name."

That quote is from Lars and the Real Girl, which is the fan-freaking-tastic movie that Baldie and I went to see at the neighborhood theater. I give it five stars, several dozen outloud laughs and three hankies. It's the heartwarming story of a pathologically isolative nice guy named Lars, who buys a custom made sex doll on the internet, puts her in a wheelchair and introduces her around town as his girlfriend Bianca. It's kind of a post-modernist re-telling of The Velveteen Rabbit for adults. Go see it A.S.A.P.

Then Baldie and I went bar hopping, ending up with Pauly in Boystown where 2 wonderful things happened:

1. I got to watch a buff young man gyrate in velour hotpants which had a kind of penis bustier -- a cocktier? -- sewn in them.
2. I really, REALLY had to pee at one point, and the sexy and extremely sweet drag queen dancing with me in the hallway bathroom line danced me in ahead of her -- even though she was in front of me. (Maybe my moves betrayed my urgency?)

I'm thinking, however, that you're probably going to only ever be platonic friends with someone who says, "What a great day! I've had so much fun with you! Do you want to go to Boystown, now?" Even if he is straight, he probably doesn't like you in that way (Unless, he's kinky.)

Either way, I guess...

Stop Yelling At Me

To the bleached-blonde kept woman driving the brand-spanking-new Lexus in her just-so pink sweats on the way home from her mani and pedi who is fond of catastrophising in that very special super-nasal, suburban C- average of the MRS major who has blessed the city with her presence and is running up the cost of living faster than her credit cards:

Stop yelling at me. I only let you go on that way because I was fantasizing about punching you repeatedly in any one of your surgically-enhanced body parts. That's wrong, so I didn't move a muscle, nor talk, nor breathe too much. Beware the silent flaring nostrils.

To the arrogant youth from a culture that doesn't necessarily appreciate brassy dames asserting anything, much less daring to remind men of the accepted standard of line-standing etiquette:

Stop yelling at me! Don't assume a wounded look or point your finger too close to my nose or call me a liar. The whole chicken-shit line backed me up and thanked me for stopping you from taking orders from every girl in your class who happened to walk past.

All ex-boyfriends and bossy types should also stop yelling at me. I'm feeling raw. I don't know how much longer I'm going to be able to keep my temper. I am a Taurus, I have been on simmer for days and days and I am deeply concerned for all of our well-being. Please, stop now.

Thank you.

I Have Bad Gas

OK, would someone please explain a couple of things to me???

1. Why is it that socialized medicine is reputed to be bad because it eliminates consumer choice and the free market laissez-faire economy will sort itself out, with the best competitors/ companies rising to the top like cream or whatever BUT private utility companies are given government subsidies and monopolies in different municipalities? In other words, the government closes the free market to favor for-profit natural gas companies such as People's Energy or oil companies such as Halliburton or mercenary companies like Blackwater-- but that's okay and not threatening to undermine all that capitalism purports to stand for? Why and how?


2. Why is it that now that our Democratic Republic has been converted to a Corporatocracy -- primary product oil -- half the people I know no longer can afford luxuries like natural gas for hot water and heat?


3. Is it true that People's Energy can now turn off your heat in the winter if you haven't paid you bill? If so, why should they get government subsidies within a non-competitive market?


4. Among other things, are our tax dollars now going to be used to:

• Steal oil from the Iraqis for American-owned private corporations?


• Fight wars for oil companies -- who have made record profits the last 3 years running.


• Give no-bid government contracts to oil companies, who make record profits, disappear billions of dollars and then move to Dubai?


• Build warming centers (read homeless shelters) for people who have homes, but who have had their heat shut off in the dead of winter because of the astronomical increases in the cost of energy and 6 years of economic depression?*** With all of this oil our government is killing for, we can't even get some heat?

If we're going to have a mixed economy -- and you have to if your nation can be found anywhere on a map of reality -- why can't we face the fact that social welfare will ALWAYS have to exist to prevent rioting and starvation and maintain social stability. (Oh, and it's also THE RIGHT THING TO DO, but I digress.) We justify and allow corporate welfare at a much greater cost. And with corporate welfare -- such as government grants and subsidies or when the feds let corporations off the hook for things like taxes or environmental, health and safety regulations -- the citizenry has to foot the bill at least twice.

• Once, to provide government contracts to large, for-profit companies. (example: Halliburton's multi-billion dollar contracts in Iraq)
• Twice, to clean up the fall out. (Another 150 billion dollars to prolong this endless quagmire -- a quagmire that was exacerbated by poor policy planning after the invasion in 2003, policy enacted by companies like Halliburton, for example.)
• If -- for example -- Halliburton makes record profits from this invasion which just keeps going, will Halliburton be footing the bill for the health care of the vets who come home with chronic and severe health problems while fighting this war for oil profits? Perhaps when hell freezes over?

I don't think that capitalism is the healthiest way to run and sustain a society as large and as heterogeneous as ours, however since that is the system we are using, shouldn't we stick to its basic principles -- like a free market, no corporate subsidies, tariffs on goods manufactured in other countries, etc., etc.? Or if we are going to support a system of corporate welfare, why can't we also support a system of civic welfare and institute socialized medicine, support for sustainable (and affordable) energy sources, childcare programs, etc., atc., etc.?

Am I missing something?

***(This is the City of Chicago's current solution to the disconnected heat situation -- send those without heat to warming centers. How about, cut off all contracts for People's Energy if they can't use their exclusive regional contract to help heat the community?)