DWARVES IN MY MILK

An Open Letter to Kate Winslet and Kelly MacDonald

Kate and Kelly:

My sympathies and encouragement to you.   I am writing that in this time of tragedy and need, I am there for you, Kate Winslet, star of Titanic, and you, Kelly MacDonald, star of Trainspotting.

I am there for you.   

Oh, I doubt you actually need my assistance in the courageous and heroic things you must be doing in defense of Britain right now.  I suspect that even as I write, you must be bustling about in Churchillian fashion, doing everything you can to shore up the defenses against further tube bombings and V-2 Rocket attacks. 

I can imagine that you are helping others to haul heavy sacks of sand and stone as barricades against the threatening hordes, sweat glistening on your brows, and the napes of your necks, and the supple, alabaster plains beneath your clavicles.  Or perhaps standing guard for Civil Air Defense, wearing your Doughboy helmets and loose-fitting, white tank tops, damp from perspiration and pressed against your heaving breasts, whistles at the ready.  You serve your countries well.

No, I cannot assist you in the active defense of your nations, but perhaps there is something else I can do.  In these trying times, we Americans long to help.  Indeed, I yearn to ease your burden, if ever so slightly. 

Therefore, Kate, ethereal star of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Kelly, wee star of The Girl in the Cafe, I offer you my services in the coming weeks and months and years.  I will do what I must, he sighs, to help you through this trying period.  I feel there is much I can offer.

Dearest Kate, surely your feet tire from standing guard in defense of England. Here, let me lovingly massage them with my hands, kneading the flesh with my strong but nimble fingers.  What's that, you say?  Shall I suck this toe?  Why, but of course.  For I am only too happy.

Darling Kelly, surely your toiling in the rescue efforts in the Underground have left you exhausted and dirty.  Shall I draw a bath for you?  And help you to wash away the hot tears of anger at the outrage of such attacks?  Perhaps your hot tears rolled carelessly to the small of your back.  Here, let me sponge them for you, dousing them with milky bath water and later drying them--and the rest of your tired body--with a soft towel and, in those hard to reach places, my exploring, eager tongue.

Yes, it is a time for sacrifice, and I would give myself willingly in these or other similar chores, if they would only ease your tension, and assist Britain.  And while such selfless giving may exhaust me, I feel it is my duty to shoulder my share of the burden. 

Really, it's the least I can do.

Say the word, Kate, star of Heavenly Creatures, and Kelly, star of Finding Neverland, and I am on the next flight to Heathrow, ready to throw myself into the effort.

God save you, and God save the Queen.

Your Most Obedient Servant

Dead Bodies I Have Known

When I woke up this morning and dragged myself, hungover, out of my bed, I stood and stretched and walked to the sink to begin the day-long process of peeling layer after layer of caked-on mouth-plaster through the palliative application of smoothing water and sandpapery Pringles.  And I stopped, staring at the floor, because there was a dead body in my bathroom. 

Well, okay, not really.  But for the wholly disoriented thirty seconds I stood there in my boxers and t-shirt, head pounding in dehydrated pain, I was mostly convinced that I was boggling at a dead person.  And, frankly, nothing helps to sharpen and focus the mind in the morning like seeing a dead body in your bathroom.  You stand perfectly still, hands splayed, mouth slightly ajar, and you instantly reduce thirty-five years of your life into the single, repeated phrase what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck?!  But then the body groans and moves a little, and your heart begins to pump again, and your life slowly returns.

My friend, Tom and I had been drinking the night before, celebrating nothing in particular with a coterie of like-minded friends.  I am a reasonable drinker, for the most part, and can usually recognize my limitations.  My limitation stared me in the face seconds after I downed a shot that contained mostly vodka and some citrus flavoring and saw the face of God.  It was 11:45.  I called it a night and walked the two blocks to my house.

Apparently my friend Tom crossed the line between moderation and excess, boldly crossed the line, bought a house across the line, and in the process lost his keys.  Having no key hidden under the mat, no neighbor to call on, no bed to call his own, he did the sensible thing and took the key under my mat, entered my house, and crawled to the floor of my master bathroom to pass out, making sure he was near a toilet.  He was wearing a softball jersey and his pants were unbuttoned.  He was embracing my bath mat.

This is not the first time this has happened to me, finding a body in my house.

Seven years ago, I was living alone in a one-bedroom apartment in a high-rise apartment complex just outside of D.C.  It was a simple place, a bedroom, a bathroom, a living room and a small kitchen.  It cost me more in rent than my mortgage for my two bedroom house in Baltimore does now.  Such is the D.C. market.

I had a beach house with friends that summer, and spent most weekends at the shore, away from the congestion and the traffic, baking my pale flesh, drinking fruity drinks, forgetting my weekday lawyerly existence.  One Sunday night I returned home from the beach, dropped my bag in the small foyer, and collapsed on the couch.  I think I had watched two full episodes of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and was staring on my third when I got up to get a drink of water.  When I walked around the corner, I saw two legs clad in work boots and green pants sticking out of my kitchen.  Someone was laying on the floor of my kitchen and I could see his legs.

I froze.  I froze because I was unable to move, even though a panicked voice in my head was telling me, there's someone laying down in your kitchen, it's a body, it must be a dead body, it's a dead body in your kitchen and the person who killed him is still in here, hiding, run.  I couldn't run, I couldn't turn and go to the phone, I could do nothing.  I just stared at the legs and felt gripping paralyzing fear.

I must have stood that way for at least two minutes, because I could hear that Rob Petrie had successfully avoided the pesky ottoman and was now talking convivially with his co-writers Sally and Buddy about the hilarious shopping habits of Buddy's wife, Pickles.  The legs didn't move.  The fear and panic ebbed enough for me to move, and I walked so very cautiously toward the kitchen.  I grabbed a brass candleholder off a shelf for protection, and I turned the corner and looked in my kitchen.

It was a maintenance man.  Wearing a pair of green pants and a khaki shirt, a maintenance man was laying next to the louvered doors of the laundry closet.  His eyes were closed.  I didn't see blood.  I didn't know if he was dead.

I bent over, looking at him, and couldn't tell if he was breathing.  I checked his pulse on his neck with my middle finger.  He was alive.  I darted to the living room, picked up the phone and called 911.  I told the 911 operator that a maintenance man had collapsed in my kitchen, and I didn't know from what.  I gave them my address and the operator told me to sit tight and not move him.  I then called the front desk--the complex had a 24 hour concierge--and told them a maintenance man was unconscious in my apartment, and EMTs are on the way.

"That's gotta be Manny," the concierge said, and explained that they had been trying to call him on his radio all day.  I asked what he might have been doing in my apartment, and she told me that they were doing a routine changing of air conditioning filters and checking to make sure dryer vents were clear.  She had no idea why he might be unconscious, and then told me that she would call the manager and someone would come up to my apartment.

In 10 minutes, the EMTs arrived.  I stayed in my living room while the EMTs worked on him, talking with the apartment manager.  He awkwardly told me that several days before I moved in, a woman had killed herself in a different apartment in my building.  I'm not sure why that story was relevant, but it seemed to bring him a kind of well-what-can-you-do? comfort.  The EMTs took Manny, and I stayed up all night with my windows open, unable to sleep and afraid that a gas leak was what laid Manny low, and would get me, too. 

I later learned that Manny was diabetic, and had slipped into diabetic shock while checking my dryer vent.  He was kept in the hospital for a few days, and the next time I thought about him was when he and I shared an elevator together.  It was about a month after his collapse, and I recognized him when I stepped into the elevator.  Having never seen me, he didn't know me.  I asked how he was, and he said he was fine, thanks for asking.  I didn't tell him that it was my apartment he'd been found in.  I didn't see the point, and I didn't want any awkwardness.  No need to embarrass the guy.  So I told him I was glad he was feeling better, and he thanked me, and I went to my apartment and I never saw him again.

I didn't take nearly the same steps to avoid embarrassment on Tom's part.  Shortly before writing this entry, I e-mailed to several mutual friends photos of Tom laying on my bat room floor, clutching the bathroom mat.  I made sure I got several shots of his face.  They are valuable.

Chechnya: Oh, the Things You'll Learn!

I posted this in response to the following submitted request, raised shortly after the attack by Chechen rebels on a school: "In 30 words or less, explain the situation in Chechnya, preferably with poetry." 

***

Chechnya!
What's there to see?
Let's take a look at history!

First, Nicky I, he made a play
to make it his, one awful day.
With little weeble-wobbled men
he fought the brave caucasians.
Bap! they frought!
Bip! they froed!
And Nicky's men were made to goed!

Next Russians came (the olden ones)
With heavy coats and shiny guns.
They bonked Caucasians on the head
until the streets were filled with dead.
Bop! they hit,
and Bam! was heard.
And Chechnya was conquer-ered.

For fifty years they stayed that way,
'til Bolsheviks took stage to play.
(The Chechnyans were known back then
as scrappy little Dagestan.)

As Lenin read a book on Marx,
the Dagestans, they met in parks,
and darkened halls, and public squares,
and vowed to get right out of theres.

But Lenin smelled a dirty plot,
and all the traitor-ors were caught.
Zip! he ripped the land in two!
And Zap! he stuck them back with glue!
The Dagestans, they took their lick
and were made into a republic.

So under Soviets they'd fallen,
but then along came Mr. Stalin!
Old Uncle Joe! Boy, what a man!
He took the Chechens by the hand!
And beat them hard, in ways so many,
they looked for help from German-any.

Help us! they cried!
Save us! they pled!
For many had been rendered dead.
And Uncle Joe, he saw what's doing,
he smelled the independence brewing.

So in this mass his-teria,
he sent them to Siberia.
And Kazhakstan.
And to the grave.
Their freedom lost, which they did crave.
So in this state of prison-ation
languished weak, this one proud nation.

Their spirits broke, the fate of whims,
and soon along came Musl-ims.
From whence they came? We do not know!
They'd been shipped there
by Uncle Joe.

Now skip ahead, dear boids and girlds,
through coldish wars fought between worlds.
There came a time,
it came to be,
that Chechnya was finally free.

How's that?! you ask.
How come?! you beg.
I do not like green hams and egg!

What happened was (it's plain to see!):
The Soviets, they ceased to be.

Free! they were singin'!
At last! they were gushin'
But wait a sec--here come the Russians.

And so, again, their hope to be
allowed to run to, fro, and free
was gently pushed under the mat
by Bo Yeltsin,
the drunkocrat.

Boris tried to hold together
the states that were once of a feather.
But though he sat
and thinked,
and thunk,
Boris was a little drunk.

And he declared, one fateful day,
"I'll just make bad Chechnya stay!"
5,000 Russians (in '94)
came and knocked upon the door.

Be off! Chechens shouted!
Go 'way! Chechens blared!
But in a war they were ensnared.

Now here it gets a little sticky,
confusing
and a little tricky.

Remember the old musl-ims?
Who said their prayers and sang their hymms?
In Chechnya they were still there,
madly pulling at their hair.
"We've got a deal, we think it's handsome..."
And soon Russkies were taken ransom.
The war it waged, both day and night,
and radicals fought back with fright.

Boom! went the theater!
Bang! went the raid!
A tug of war...
For a decade.

And in the hazy, hanging smoke,
your wizened beard you sit and stroke.
Pondering aloud, "What has it brought
but hate
and death
and fear
and fraught?"

"Who will lose?" you wonder.
You ask, "Who will win?"
But ask any old Chechny-an....

He'll tell you, sadly,
thinking back,
to Nick and Joe,
and that whole pack:

"It doesn't matter, in the end,
who sits inside the Krem-a-lin.
Whether Lenin...
or Gorby...
or Boris..
or Putin...

Expect the same sometime again."

The Story So Far, or Sorry I Skipped The Sixties, Hippies

A re-print of a response to a thread on Fark.com that inquired, "What's the long story on why Fark does not accept links from Ananova (an internet-based news site)?"  I gave the questioner what he wanted.

***

First, before all, there was the Big Bang.  Stars formed thereafter, and then, planetary systems.  One such planet, out of eleventy billion billion was a small, insignificant planet that would, billions of years later, be called Earth.

The Earth cooled.  Molten masses cooled to form land masses, and soon, gases formed by the cooling molten masses formed base elements such as oxygen and hydrogen.  Water followed.

In time the Earth, lifeless, formed oceans that rose over the cooled masses. Billions of years later, these would form continents.  But for now they were, it is believed, a single land mass.

Through a complex interconnectedness of chemistry and physics, molecules formed.  Thereafter came amino acids.

In time, when the planet had cooled sufficiently, amino acids began merging to form the building blocks of that which we call life.

Single celled creatures arose. In eleventy million years they formed multi-celled organisms.  An abundance of life, mostly plant in nature, began spreading across the planet.  Soon, evolutionary forces created animal life.

Simple animals at first.  Little worms and plankton and such and such. Then came fish and other aquatic creatures.  In time, an unheralded creature whose unknown name will never be known, crawled from the water and settled in  muck. Over time, similar creatures evolved. Soon--over millions of years--other creatures dotted the landscape.  Dogs and pigs and such and such.  Over there, in the fields, some dinosaurs were gallivanting around.  Then a Big Rock came and killed all of them.  Back to square three.

Then, life evolved again, and smaller creatures that had survived the desolation brought by the Big Rock changed and grew.  Then came more dogs and pigs and such and such.

Then came the monkeys.  Soon, monkeys evolved into larger creatures that walked erect.  Their brain capacity grew.  In time, and with help from the Monolith, they learned to fashion bones into tools.  This still occurs in parts of Alabama.

Monkeys evolved into men, and men--who were largely nomadic in nature--began to gather together.  In time, an unheralded monkey-man, whose unknown name is lost to the sands of time, learned to generate fire from the rubbing of sticks.

Monkey-man became the species of man.  Men formed communities, gathering for hunt and shelter.  Over tens of thousands of years they formed societies, complete with unwritten rules derived by genetic necessity.

In the era of unrecorded history, man achieved miracles.  He invented oral traditions and from those oral traditions came lessons that became law.  Soon, man began writing down what he had learned, and history was born.

The earliest civilizations established the remarkable.  In the thick jungles of South America, natives built ziggurats and stone shelters.  They would later serve as the rebel base in "Star Wars."

In North Africa, a people known as Egyptians built mighty pyramids.  They were built by Jews, who served as slaves, and whose troubles were really only just beginning.

In greater Africa, tribes formed that would spend thousands of years battling over scarce resources.  Then they would battle the Belgians and the British and the French for their freedom.  When they got it, they would go right back to battling each other until they were largely laid low by a tiny virus.

In Asia, a mighty people would arise as great warriors and poets.  They eventually would make houses out of paper and offer three-item express carry-out for $4.95 (fried rice extra).

In Europe--where we shall dwell--a bland people arose.   Nomadic at first, they created villages and hamlets towns and then cities.   They brought great civilizations, and painful dancing moves.

First, there were the Greeks.  They invented a flawed concept, democracy, and a perfect one, butt sex.

Then there were the Gauls.  They invented and, over centuries, perfected, the art of surrender.  They consoled their losses in battle by grooming small, hated creatures called poodles.

Then there were the Romans.  They invented roads and aqueducts and arched constructs and a republican form of government and sanitation and atriums and perfected irrigation.  In time, their empire, savaged by invading hordes, would be reduced to inhabiting a land that looked like a boot.  After that, their achievements were reduced to one, Sophia Lauren.

Then there were the Celts.  They invented mead and, some historians claim, saved civilization through the preservation of history and the reproduction of scrolls and tablets into the form we now call a book.  They indeed saved civilization, but not for that reason.  They saved civilization because they invented mead.

Over time a great plague came, then a time of great darkness and desperation. Serf's up.  Then a renaissance, bringing velvet and oil-based art showing naked men and women and statues without arms but with perfectly crafted breasts and penises.  And life was good.

So good, in fact, that soon the Europeans wanted to see if there were breasts and penises in other lands.  They sent a man named Christopher Columbus to find India.  He went the wrong way and found North America.  The people who lived there were nevertheless called Indians  by the settlers, an early example of the magnanimity the people who would eventually settle there showed to different cultures.

After Columbus came the colonists.  The Spanish sent gold seekers, who would settle in South America and in greater Los Angeles.  The Gauls, having changed their name to the French under new management, settled in Canada to catch beaver and play on the ice.  The English got the rest.

The English colonists--on who we will dwell--formed "states" based on religious and political principles.  Georgia was founded as a Catholic state, but would later change its religion to NASCAR.  Massachusetts formed based on religious freedom and then, showing a level of rationality and practicality that would later hallmark the Big Dig, burned little girls as witches.  New York was founded as New Amsterdam, but then beat up Holland and called its mother names, and then became New York.

Over time these colonists became restless.  They didn't like being told what to do by a large, faceless foreign government, so they threw off the yoke of their oppression and fought two wars of independence, becoming the United States. Although it was the United States and only a part of the Americas, the citizens called themselves Americans, another example of the magnanimity the people there showed to different cultures.

Over one-hundred and fifty years later, the Americans became restless.  They didn't like being told what to do by a large, faceless domestic government.  But this time they invented television.

The invention of television spawned the invention of enormous machines called computers.  In time these were refined by a tribe called the Japanese, and then perfected by a tribe called Nerds.

These computers promised an age of advancement and enlightenment.  They promised answers to difficult scientific questions, and a revolutionary advancement in business.  They served as backdrop in a show called "Star Trek."

Soon a man named Al Gore was born, became an important governor of the people, and, bringing to bear all of his expertise as the son of a politician and a Tennessean, invented the internet.

The internet promised a greater age of information and a quantum leap forward in human knowledge.  What it delivered was a greater age of pornography and pop-up ads.

And then one glorious January morning a man named Drew Curtis--the equal of a Columbus, in many respects--used the internet to disseminate great knowledge to those throughout the land: he presented a large nut-sacked squirrel.  Like a golden calf, it drew others.  Soon, people from all over the land began submitting news items and funny stories.  Flame-wars ensued.  And sometimes, peace.  It was a site called Fark.

Many of the stories posted to Fark were soon misappropriated by a lesser news source called Ananova, which was created by fugitive Nazis and other ne'er-do-wells.  Drew Curtis inserted spikes and false stories into his site to detect misappropriation by Ananova.  And they were detected.  So Drew attempted satisfaction from the Ananova proprietors.  But none came.

Exercising sage wisdom and cold revenge, Drew cut Ananova off from Fark, and left it to wither and die in a sea of its own urine.

And that, my son, is the long story.