Shudder When You Penetrate Me

(I'll lock this short story like the thinly frayed broken wire basket that holds my heart, for friends only, so that strangers and other present and haunting undesirables can't read this erosion.)

Jumping from one hurt to another situation which inevitably in its sliver hurts -- whether I caused the wound or just stood beneath the shower of a pain that wouldn't turn off -- and in the end it all turns into the same deepening well, or a tree where you take a knife and carve in every scratch and scuff and scab until you whittle yourself into some new shape or sculpture. Maybe that shape becomes beautiful in its newly formed design, or maybe it becomes too irregular and gaping, like a signature that doesn't stop yelping at the end of a lost love letter. I am a shape continuously whittled away. Always seeking balance, I am pleasure and light, but also pain and an inflection of abandonments. I run into both, like a tunnel that promises some type of etched ride, whose walls throb and pulse and spin like something grabbed in the jaw of a pitbull. I'll take your ride, baby, its smoother than the one I promise. Mine feels warm like cotton candy laying in the sunlight, but first you have to bite through the glass. Maybe you should be a magician or a snake with an endless supply of extra skins. Which am I? The oversensitive child in the bathroom crying, crying every day in the bathroom stalls, grows into an adult who now must resist the temptation a stranger holds to hold her into his space the space she longs to grow into isn't his, not this stranger, but she'll imprint on him and place the beginning of her head into that spot it fits beneath his chin, and she'll whisper something from a story she heard only once that he will be unable to hear, but he will find desire in the sound and breath of her voice against him. The stranger, he'll put her in the shower next to him, without a sound, without words, in the dark, without sex, just a shower against a stranger, knowing she was made for someone else. Afterwards, he'll wrap her in an oversized towel and lay her out on the bed like mismatched shells. her hair spread out against the pillows, and he will kiss the wet strands. She won't look at him, even in the dark, won't look at the face above hers, although it is a beautiful face.

She has always only been able to resolve conflicts with lovers by meeting up with them in nearly pitch black spaces. Beforehand a letter stating there are to be no words. There is nothing to talk through at this point, just a long durable string of hurt to unravel. Once a lover insisted he needed to explain himself, so she told him he could communicate in little yellow sticky notes, which he left pressed all over the walls of her bedroom. They flew down, all those little broken yellow paper wings, to hide beneath her bed. What they said was unimportant after what had happened. After hours of fighting with a lover, she said she would meet him in his bed. Leave the door unlocked and the lights off. Don't say a thing. I will slip my dress above my head in the dark like that and slide into the bed with my arms around you. This new language of breath and heat where pain can't penetrate or where pain escapes like a snake through a broken shutter.

Shudder when you penetrate me.

I would have held you tighter into my body if I would have known you would go.

My Technicolor Paul

Paul Angelini

1977 - 2007

Paul Angelini encompassed and contained my entire childhood. Almost every wonderful memory I have from the years 4-16 have to do with Paul. He passed away unexpectedly last Friday, at the young age of 30 years old, and I am still a bit in shock. When he left the earth, he broke a piece of my heart and took it with him. He was just born when I was four years old, the year I met him, and Carolyn, my best friend since the moment she moved to Randolph, New Jersey when she was also four years old. My sense of humor is an echo given to me from Carolyn and Paul. I spent endless nights and over 30 years worth of Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with Paul and Carolyn's family. I am so deeply sad that he is really gone. I think I keep believing he is still far away in Germany, where he has been for the past four years, and that he will come back, even though I know he won't. We had so many really amazing technicolor times together. Paul taught me to live every moment to the fullest and to live as vibrantly as possible. I will deeply miss those big bear hugs he would give where he just full captured you in his arms and gave you everything he was and everything he had. I love you, Paul, and will forever miss you. Thank you for all the laughs. I cannot imagine my childhood without you. I do not think I would be the funny, warm person I was if it weren't for you being in my life. Your leaving us really, really hurts. I am really worried about your mother and sister, but I am going to try and be there for them in whatever capacity I can be. You were taken away from the world way too soon, but you lived every day so fully. Brian said it best in his speech when he quoted Abraham Lincoln: "It's not the days in your life but the life in your days. And if those words are true, than Paul has outlived us all." I will never ever forget you, Baby Paul.

This is what I read at his funeral mass:

My Technicolor Paul

All of the vivid, warm, wonderful memories of my childhood are wrapped up in Paul. What other five year old knows the word "shrapnel"? (When he was five, the Angelinis had some sort of clothing line outside in the backyard, which I do not think was ever used for clothing. I am unsure about what it was out there for, but Paul used it to launch his homemade explosives. I remember after one such "demonstration", he turned to me and said: Want to see where pieces of shrapnel are buried in my skin?

He always caught us off guard, always in the middle of some action in mid-occurrence, half the time creating the action, too in love with the possibilities of life. He loved things vibrantly and intensely, was full of a wonder which never left him, even when he grew out of being a child. He gave the strongest bear hugs in the world and you felt completely wrapped up in his warmth when he placed his two arms around you. He gave amazing back massages with the same strong hands Mr. A had, and when he held onto you, you were fully inside his embrace the way he was fully inside of life. Paul did nothing small because he knew life was not small.

Paul was so funny. I remember being asked to leave so many times as a child at the Angelinis dinner table by Mr. A because Paul would look over at me and make trouble, just because he knew it would make another laugh uncontrollably. I came back again and again for more dinners; for more laughter. Paul understood the power of humor from a very young age. Besides Carolyn, no one else has ever made me laugh so hard, so often. And what a beautiful, wonderful thing it is to laugh! And to be able to make others full of joy and laughter! How rare and special. I could probably spend hours (Carolyn could tell you!) delving out so many funny memories where Paul brought light and joy and humor into my life on a daily basis. Even though I was older, and Carolyn was my best friend, I hung around Paul as a child so much because his curiosity and humor made my life more energized, more vibrating and more alive. And on an even simpler, but equally as important level, it just felt good. It always felt good to be around Paul.

I think Paul truly did celebrate life in every way possible. His curiosity took him to new places mentally and physically, and his charm and humor made him popular with all types of people, from military types to artsy girl types to people to whom English was not their first language – everyone felt embraced by his warmth and humor and kind nature.

I will forever be grateful for all the moments of joy he gave to me. For all the laughs that spilled forth, for all the love and huge hugs and for his equally huge smile which filled up any space he was in. I can truly say that my childhood would not have the happy memories it does if it weren't for Paul and his curious antics while he was searching always for ways to figure out life and how it works. There were many times in my childhood, more often than not, where I felt very different and alone in regards to my peers, an outsider, perhaps even a reject. But when I came over and Paul was around, I felt light and free, caught up in his Technicolor world and journeys, where I never knew what might happen next, and so I always stuck around (sometimes for days on end –without even a change of clothing, even though I lived just up the block, literally footsteps away) to become part of his spontaneous world. The truth is: I didn't want to leave those moments where Paul made things happen, whether it was deconstructing a record player or calculator, making something explode (where else would I get to see THAT?), or just doing something that I could never have fathomed occurring just a moment before he made it unfold before us. His curiosity and spontaneity, by proxy, made ME curious and spontaneous. And in that way, I, too, had an unending interest in life.

What a beautiful, special, precious life. I feel so blessed to have been a planet orbiting his brightest sun. What warm rays of light he filled us with, making us feel whole in his presence.
I love and miss him. I will take from him the lesson of celebrating all that is life, every moment, every ounce; remaining forever curious through all the days.

September 12, 2007

Jumbo Romance - From The Guardian Unlimited

Jumbo Romance

Staff and agencies Thursday August 30, 2007

Guardian Unlimited

It's a very traditional love story - just on a bigger scale than usual.

A tame female elephant has fled an Indian circus after eloping with a wild bull elephant that broke open a gate and led her off into the jungle, her distraught handler said today.

"I brought up Savitri since she joined the circus two decades ago," Kalimudddin Sheikh, who unsuccessfully tried to lure his charge away from her new beau, added.

The wild male, who wildlife officials believe was probably in musth - the periodic condition in which bull elephants seek to mate - turned up at the travelling circus when it stopped in the village of Kumar Bazar, in West Bengal state, yesterday.

It broke into an enclosure and led Savitri into the jungle, with the pair being followed by three other female elephants in the same pen. Their trumpeting alerted circus workers, who led them back.

Savitri's mind, however, seemed made up. According to one forestry official, she was last seen bathing with the bull in a jungle pond.

When handlers called for Savitri to come to them, she looped her trunk around the bull's leg and "he protectively shielded her like in a Bollywood blockbuster," the official said.
The forestry department said it would continue to monitor the pair to ensure they did not cause any damage.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

With Uninhibited Fingers for the Unfathomable

"With uninhibited fingers for the unfathomable"

"Why couldn't the world that concerns us -- be a fiction? And if somebody asked, "but to be a fiction there surely belongs an author?" -- couldn't one answer simply: Why? Doesn't this "belongs" perhaps belong to the fiction, too?"

-Nietzsche


The process of transition from one world to another could be one of simultaneous creation and destruction. "The opening of a world" might be an exquisitely timed process, like the stages of fetal development, but taking place within the psyche. It might even be necessary that this process remain shrouded in mystery until its final stage. As Heidegger also wrote: "All coming to presence...keeps itself concealed to the last."


-From 2012 - The Return of Quetzalcoatl - Daniel Pinchbeck

Report from Iraq

"And we were approaching this one house," he said. "In this farming area, they're, like, built up into little courtyards. So they have, like, the main house, common area. They have, like, a kitchen and then they have a storage shed-type deal. And we're approaching, and they had a family dog. And it was barking ferociously, 'cause it's doing its job. And my squad leader, just out of nowhere, just shoots it. And he didn't--mother­fucker--he shot it and it went in the jaw and exited out. So I see this dog--I'm a huge animal lover; I love animals--and this dog has, like, these eyes on it and he's running around spraying blood all over the place. And like, you know, What the hell is going on? The family is sitting right there, with three little children and a mom and a dad, horrified. And I'm at a loss for words. And so, I yell at him. I'm, like, What the fuck are you doing? And so the dog's yelping. It's crying out without a jaw. And I'm looking at the family, and they're just, you know, dead scared. And so I told them, I was like, Fucking shoot it, you know? At least kill it, because that can't be fixed....

And--I actually get tears from just saying this right now, but--and I had tears then, too--and I'm looking at the kids and they are so scared. So I got the interpreter over with me and, you know, I get my wallet out and I gave them twenty bucks, because that's what I had. And, you know, I had him give it to them and told them that I'm so sorry that asshole did that."

-From The Guardian Unlimited, "The Carnage, The Blown-Up Bodies I saw...Why? What was this for?

They Are Other Nations

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."


-Henry Beston, The Outermost House

Void of Ourselves

So. I guess I have been a bit hypersensitive lately. Or maybe it is just the way people have phrased things around me. Or maybe it is that both environmental destruction and animal rights have been weighing heavy on my mind.

Yesterday I wrote a message to a close friend's best friend saying "Red Heads are my weakness". She wrote back: "Don't you know there are no bones in ice cream." Even though we hadn't discussed my veganism, nor had I ever brought it up to her, I figured she had seen that some of the friends on my myspace have animal rights or vegan affiliations. It was 5pm on a Friday and I instantly became hostile, thinking that her comment is something I could expect from someone about ten years ago, but thought now most people know that the milk they drink isn't coming from Old McDonald's Farm. On top of that, I do what *I* feel is right for myself. I hadn't discussed this or lectured her on this, so I was taken aback that a stranger felt the need to go there with me. I wasn't in the mood, so I copied some dairy information (that I also posted on my myspace blog) and educated her, since I took her comment to mean "Why aren't you eating dairy? It isn't an animal." Well, I spoke to my close friend who is her best friend this morning and said I was a bit pissed off. She told me that her friend said she didn't even know I was vegan and said it was something cute that she wrote on everyone's myspace. I kept saying I don't get it. Then she said it was from an old Southern song, and proceeded to sing it to my friend. So it turned out it in fact did not have anything to do with my beliefs, and wasn't meant to provoke me.

Then this morning, I met my best friend, her husband, our mutual friends and my sister for brunch at Relish. At the end of the meal, I was opening my bag to take out my money and my sister goes: "Is that a plastic bag in there?" in a tone that sounded condenscending. So I jumped all over her, going: THE REASON I HAVE THE PLASTIC BAG IN THERE IS BECAUSE I DON'T ORDER COFFEE IN PAPER OR PLASTIC CUPS AND DON'T WANT THE COFFEE TO DRIP ALL OVER MY BAG!

My sister was taken aback. She said: I meant I needed a plastic bag to put the cards I made for Rachel in. Carolyn looked at me and took what my sister said to mean the same thing I thought, but our other friend said right before that my sister had said to them that she felt bad giving them all those cards without anything to put them in.

So yes. I have been very sensitive -- maybe oversensitive -- to environmental and animal rights related issues lately, and innocent comments I guess take on different meaning in the midst of what has been consuming my mind. I feel deeply sad and disturbed by all that is going on in the world. I am continuously amazed at how far we have gotten from having any reverence for life, in shutting ourselves off to understanding consciousness (I do not believe we are here on the earth just to die. And if not for consciousness and its expansion, what else is there?) ; I believe we are doing this through object worship; through materialism, destruction of nature, greed, selfishness, narcissism, lack of community, and even technological advances that continue to disconnect us from each other.

Last night I talked to one of my best friends, Sean, for hours on the phone while he was driving from Maryland to New York. He said that he didn't think he wanted to date someone who wasn't vegan again. I told him while I didn't want to limit myself from the possibility of someone who might be someone I could fall in love with, at the same time, the very things that attract me most to someone is their compassionate, sensitivity and progressiveness of thought. The idea of caring for someone who would scorn or criticize what I deeply believe in to my very core would hurt me more than anything.

Last night I was sitting in the Cake Shop reading when a beautiful boy and girl walked in, both with accents that I thought were Norwegian. It turns out they had lived all over the world and were students of mysticism. We talked about Daniel Pinchbeck and 2012, the year of the Mayan calender. I told them about the time I my ex-boyfriend, the son of a scientist who doesn't believe anything unless it can be proved, saw a light with no shadow, and nothing producing the light, run into my chest, which while I never saw, I felt as a pain of such strength that I doubled over and screamed. I also told them about the time I was home from college for Christmas vacation and I felt an excruciating pain in my head where I blacked out suddenly after screaming for my father to call an ambulance, thinking I was having a brain aneurysm , and when I regained my sight after the pain went away looked up and saw my father standing in the doorway to my bedroom with his mouth wide open and his jaw dropped. He said he had seen one of the dolls from my childhood collection flapping its arms rapidly back and forth and then went speechless again. He told me "not to bring my friends back with me again". The girl told me I had a clairvoyant ability to channel the energy of the dead. She kept saying it to me over and over. While I am not sure what I feel about that, and while if I did have such an ability, I know I have closed it off -- or not been aware or open to it for years now, encumbered with my career, my social life and explorations -- there was something about our interaction that made me buzz. There was a luminosity that exploded from within them and I felt as if I had known them my entire life. We sat talking for over an hour and I felt internally fed by the time they left. While I have doubts and am skeptical about some of the things we discussed, I am also open to those very things, and the experience of them, and believe strongly in the harboring of consciousnesses in ways most of us have not even begun to understand or explore. I do not believe we are here only to die. And without consciousness, what other purpose does life serve? I believe we are all part of one consciousness, but we are very disconnected from it due to false and shallow properties we fill and surround ourselves with. And through denial of nature and losing respect and reverence for other lives, we become consciousnessly deficient. Void of ourselves.

It is a personal goal of mine to focus on educating myself further in regards to environmental advocacy and to be as consistent as I can be in trying to tread as lightly as I can on the earth and towards the reverence and sanctity it -- as well as the beings it inhabits -- so deeply deserves.

The Principles of the Equal Consideration of Interests of All Sentient Creatures

"Reason is neither the being of the universe nor the being of God...Reason is the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking."

Therefore, as the crime committed by the Nazis consisted of their lack of compassion with their victims, it is other spectrums, such as sympathy and compassion, which need to be prioritized in consideration of animal rights. Because "there are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination."

"Poetry itself is the record of an engagement."

"Do you really believe, Mother, that poetry classes are going to close down the slaughterhouses?"

"No", she replies.

"Then why do it?"

Neither Elizabeth Costello nor Coetzee can offer a very good answer to that. Except that a moral person has the obligation to say something, no matter how little it matters.


- Reconstructed from a literary review from H-Net Reviews on J. M Coetzee's novel, Elizabeth Costello

Tortured Calif. Tortoise Returns Home

Associated Press

Sat Aug 18, 12:04 AM ET

A 42-pound pet tortoise that was slashed and mutilated after being stolen from a family's yard is home following more than a month in a rehabilitation center.

The tortoise, Bob, heartily ate a meal of hibiscus flowers and roses — its first since having a feeding tube pulled from its neck, owner Dorothy Sullivan said Friday.

"He's eating like a pig," she said. "He's doing great and we're pretty excited."

The 25-year-old African spurred tortoise was snatched from Sullivan's yard on July 7. Police, following an anonymous tip, found the injured animal behind an apartment complex several days later.

The tortoise's hind legs were badly cut, a toe was cut off, its neck was slashed and its shell was punctured with a sharp object. The attacker tried to cut the animal out of its shell and threw it against a wall, police said.

Jose "Tony" Mosqueda, 18, of Ventura, was arrested and charged with animal cruelty. He pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he faces up to three years in prison, prosecutors said.

Sullivan said Bob is a friend to her 6-year-old autistic son William, who rarely spoke to people but chattered to the animal. She said the boy was withdrawn during the tortoise's stay at Turtle Dreams, a Montecito rehab center, but has started talking again since Bob's return.

"It's made a good impact on our son. He's sleeping through the night and he's opening up," Sullivan said.

A benefit concert was planned for Sunday at a Ventura night club to raise money to help pay the animal's veterinary bills.

Arctic Sea Shrinks to an All-Time Low

Arctic Sea Shrinks to an All-Time Low

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer 21 minutes ago

There was less sea ice in the Arctic on Friday than ever before on record, and the melting is continuing, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported.

"Today is a historic day," said Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist at the center. "This is the least sea ice we've ever seen in the satellite record and we have another month left to go in the melt season this year."

Satellite measurements showed 2.02 million square miles of ice in the Arctic, falling below the Sept. 21, 2005, record minimum of 2.05 million square miles, the agency said.
Sea ice is particularly low in the East Siberian side of the Arctic and the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska, the center reported.

Ice in the Canadian Archipelago is also quite low. Along the Atlantic side of the Arctic Ocean, sea ice extent is not as unusually low, but there is still less than normal, according to the center located in Boulder, Colo.

The snow and ice center is part of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado. It receives support from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation.

Scientists began monitoring the extent of Arctic sea ice in the 1970s when satellite images became available.

The polar regions have long been of concern to climate specialists studying global warming because those regions are expected to feel the impact of climate change sooner and to a greater extent than other areas.

Sea ice in the Arctic helps keep those regions cool by reflecting sunlight that might be absorbed by darker land or ocean surfaces. Exposed to direct sun, for example, instead of reflecting 80 percent of the sunlight, the ocean absorbs 90 percent. That causes the ocean to heat up and raises Arctic temperatures.

Unusually clear sky conditions have prevailed in the Arctic in June and July, promoting more sunshine at the time when the sun is highest in the sky over the region.

The center said this led to an unusually high amount of solar energy being pumped onto the Arctic ice surface, accelerating the melting process. Fairly strong winds also brought in some warm air from the south.

But, Serreze said in a telephone interview, while some natural variability is involved in the melting "we simply can't explain everything through natural processes."
"It is very strong evidence that we are starting to see an effect of greenhouse warming," he said.
The puzzling thing, he said, is that the melting is actually occurring faster than computer climate models have predicted.

Several years ago he would have predicted a complete melt of Arctic sea ice in summer would occur by the year 2070 to 2100, Serreze said. But at the rates now occurring, a complete melt could happen by 2030, he said Friday.

There will still be ice in winter, he said, but it could be gone in summer.
___
On the Net:
National Snow and Ice Data Center: http://www.nsidc.org