This evening, I was speaking with an Orthodox Jewish pal outside the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue near 48th Street when my friend suddenly halted his conversation.
"Excuse me, I need to say a bracha," he said. "There's a man approaching who is an unusual shape —"
His eyes flashed toward my right and I looked to see the shortest grown man I've ever seen, a fellow in his 20s or 30s who was about three feet tall.
"— and there's a prayer that one says to thank God for creating a variety of things."
He proceeded to say softly, "Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech Haolam, m'shaneh hab'riyos." I believe it means, "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who makes the creatures different."
It was a lovely moment and it made me think of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty":
Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dím; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Amanda Marcotte wrote yesterday on Pandagon.net of what she called the "illusionary" world of Brill Building-era pop music (that of the early to mid-1960s), which she claims masked rampant homosexuality. In general, she writes, sexual expression at that time was more worldly than one might imagine from listening to the era's hits: "I suppose a very literal reading of this music might lead one to conclude that things were better in a more 'innocent' time ... The thing is, the world’s never been 'innocent'. What’s changed isn’t so much how people are but how honest society is about it."
Miss Marcotte is too young to remember the era of which she writes, as am I. If you are old enough to recall how people conducted themselves sexually before the advent of psychedelic drugs, "Hair," and Woodstock, I would be interested in your opinion on her assumptions. (For context, you may wish to read Ms. Marcotte's full post, which includes her standard four-letter words and ad hominems against me.) For the sake of authenticity, please comment under your real name. First name only or initials are OK, and you may leave the e-mail and Web site boxes blank if you wish. Thank you.
Twice since I entered the Church on Easter Vigil, I have experienced something in the confessional that reminds me of why I love the Communion of Saints — even when it drives me a bit crazy.
It happened each time with a different priest; both were in their 70s. The most recent time was yesterday afternoon. I was getting around to the sin of pride, and I mentioned, "and I wrote a book, which is about to come out ..."
The priest's eyes got wide.
"Really?" he said. "I wrote a book ..."
He proceeded to tell me a little about it, noting helpfully that it was available on eBay.
I'm laughing just thinking about it. I wish I could capture his tone; as with the other priest who volunteered that he'd written a book, he wasn't being braggadocious. It was actually kind of sweet.
"I cannot look into the future, as I said before, and say, This is going to happen to me and I'm so scared. I can't wake up every morning and say, Oh, my gosh, I'm going to die. You know, I wake up every morning and I say, I'm going to live, and I strive to meet that goal.
"So there's that possibility that somewhere along this line we made a wrong decision. But you know what? If I die, I'll die happy, and I will die healthy, and I will die in my home with my family, not in a hospital bed, bedridden and sick."
Note: Cherrix is not depriving himself of the necessities for life; he is attempting an alternative therapy for survival, one which a judge, ruling on behalf of the state, opposes. He had tried chemotherapy and, he and his parents say, it nearly killed him.]
To be fair, authorities in Hialeah don’t know how the infant found in the Hialeah clinic died, yet, and an autopsy is being performed. It is not clear if charges will even be filed.
Yet we may have a woman [who was president of the Hialeah clinic] on probation for assaulting a pregnant woman ... and a clinic that may have lost its license for having incompetents doing medical procedures.
And the Hialeah clinic was not investigated?
I don’t care what side of the abortion issue you are on: something is very wrong here.
Inspired by a post in For God, for Country, and for Yale on searching YouTube for Catholic videos, I found these two clips of a Greek Catholic Mass in a Ukrainian Village. Make sure you turn down the volume before playing these, as the chanting is loud. This first one is, I think, interesting to non-Ukrainian speakers only for the first few minutes or so, though the camera pans around the church towards the end. No reggae "Alleluia" for this church, that's for sure.
This second video gives an altarside view of the Holy Communion service — until just under four minutes in, when the priest waves the cameraman away. The priest then addresses the congregation in Ukrainian until 6 minutes 46 seconds in, when he suddenly switches to English — presumably for the benefit of the folks on YouTube. What he has to say about faith in the Ukraine is worth hearing.
I'm stunned by the beauty of the old church, and also impressed at the congregants' devotion. The service itself also seems majestic and deep — it makes me want to attend a service of that rite. I have attended a Russian Catholic Mass and an Antiochan Orthodox service and appreciated their traditions and faith, but I'm struck by the richness and intensity of this Mass.
Another thing that strikes me is the intimacy of the church's layout, and especially the altar, which seems to me to be strongly reminiscent of the ancient Temple's Holy of Holies.
12:44 AM |
Friday, July 28, 2006
Suozzi Defunds Abstinence-Ed Program — for Telling the Truth about Planned Parenthood's Promotion of Bestiality
Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi, currently struggling to win the Democratic nomination for New York's governorship, yesterday rescinded a $90,000 grant he had promised to an abstinence-education program — after the head of the program, which also runs pregnancy resource centers, complained publicly about Planned Parenthood's promotion of bestiality.
Lorraine Gariboldi, executive director of the Life Center of Long Island in Massapequa, made the comments about Planned Parenthood to Newsday at the county offices in Garden City in February, immediately following a news conference where Suozzi announced grants for eight groups in an effort to cut down on abortions.
Gariboldi's organization, which won a $90,000 grant for abstinence-based education, also runs "crisis pregnancy" centers where women are counseled against abortions. Planned Parenthood of Nassau County, which won $95,000 for sex education, counsels women on abortions and performs them.
"Working with Planned Parenthood did not change my opinion of the work that I do," Gariboldi said on Feb. 7. "Meeting their peer educators and hearing what they had to say confirmed to me that I'm in the right business."
"They're teaching young people to teach other young people how to be sexually active using deviant methods, in my opinion, of sexual behavior to avoid pregnancy," Gariboldi continued. "You can call it outercourse instead of intercourse, and bestiality in some cases, masturbation -- those kinds of behaviors they're promoting as good and healthy."...
After her remarks were printed in part on July 17, the steering committee for Suozzi's program, which he calls "Common Sense for the Common Good," advised withdrawing the Life Center's contract from the county legislature, where the initiative is stalled. Arda Nazerian, a Suozzi aide, said the group broke a compact to respect others' views. ...
Sister Mairead Barrett, a nun on Suozzi's steering committee, said she was in working groups with Gariboldi and heard no discussion of deviance.
"I was quite surprised actually to hear what this woman said and to read it because we were all in the room together," she said. "To me it shows a lack of openness and lack of insight."
Suozzi said his coalition included "people from all ends of the spectrum who are goodhearted people." He added, "These comments are just irresponsible." Full story]
The evidence for Planned Parenthood's promotion of bestiality is not as substantial as it is for Gariboldi's other accusations. But it is there, and any association with bestiality should disqualify Planned Parenthood from teaching children about sex.
In "Jim Dandy," a cartoon space alien explains human sexuality. "Being gay is a little like being left-handed," he says. "It's not something that you choose—it's simply the way you are. And the way you are is perfectly fine, no matter which hand you write with, no matter who you're attracted to."
Not being sure of your sexuality is called "questioning," the alien intones. He then narrates a visual demonstration:
"Humans may be attracted to their own gender..."
Notice how that's the first option Teenwire offers—homosexuality as default.
The alien contines: "...or the opposite gender..."
"...or they may be attracted to both genders..."
"...or they may not be sure which gender they're attracted to. It's normal to be questioning..."
Dearest Pet won notoriety after noted infanticide advocate and animal-rights activist Peter Singer reviewed it in the online erotica magazine Nerve. In another online article, this one on an animal-rights site, Karen Davis, describes the book:
Dearest Pet takes us on a journey of human sexual interest in and use of nonhuman animals as documented in art, literature, court records, personal confessions, veterinary files, and popular culture through history up to the present. Dekkers forces us to look at some old things in a new way. He says, for instance, that since the God of the Christians, like Zeus of the Olympians, once descended in the form of a bird to know a woman-the story of Leda and the Swan and the story of the Virgin Mary being visited by the Holy Spirit in the form of a Dove--Christianity "is founded on bestiality" (9). Of the perennial sexual abuse of farmed animals, Dekkers says that girls "have less opportunity than boys, if only because almost all animals are of their own sex: cows, ewes, sows, chickens, nanny-goats" (137), and that "Since animal abuse has been institutionalized in our society in the food industry, it cannot be difficult for sadism to find satisfaction" (147). Dekkers does not argue that human imposed sex with farmed animals per se is sadism; however, any sex with small animals such as chickens and rabbits, he says, "automatically involves sadism" (146). ...
Even while noting that the sex life of domestic animals is "completely organized by human beings" (178), raising the question of whether the consent of a domestic animal is ever possible under any circumstances, desire notwithstanding, Dekkers says that "as long as none of those involved suffers pain, no form of sex should be seen as pathological, bad or mad" (148).
I cannot think of any legitimate reason why Planned Parenthood, which received well over a quarter-billion dollars in taxpayer funding last year alone, should be recommending such a disgusting and blasphemous book "for informational purposes" or for any purposes.
Lorraine Gariboldi told the truth. Tom Suozzi is suppressing it — and hurting Long Island kids.
Also, contact Sister Mairead Barrett's order and educate the sisters about what Planned Parenthood really promotes: Ursuline Provincialate, Sister Catherine Talia, O.S.U., 81-15 Utopia Pkwy. Jamaica, NY 11432. E-mail: taliaosu@juno.com. Phone: (718) 591-0681. It may also be useful to express concerns to the bishop's office in the Diocese of Rockville Center, bishopsoffice@drvc.org.
UPDATE: The Raving Atheist's hypothesis has already earned him the ire of Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte, who — with the help of some four-letter words — manages to make two baseless ad hominems in a single post: first, asserting that RA's merely "casting around for a way to define an individual human being with rights after being scolded that, biologically speaking, a zygote is no different than any other batch of cells," and second, asserting that he is motivated by a desire to "wear down the resistance of an avowed celibate," meaning me.
With regard to Amanda's second point, because I am trying to follow the Raving Atheist's own self-imposed rule to avoid meanness, I can't respond to Amanda in kind. All I can say is, (1) I am convinced that she is completely wrong with regard to RA's motivation, and (2) the fact that she would stoop to make such an ad hominem attack shows that she is incapable of providing a sound, rational response to his philosophizing.
I will not assume malice on Amanda's part because I do not know her or anyone else's heart. At any rate, people do not need to have malice in order to make an ad hominem attack. They only need desperation.
I wasn't quite sure why this bus-shelter sign in Chelsea (advertising a New Age speaker) bewitched, bothered, and bewildered me so much when I spotted it while walking up Seventh Avenue with my friend Chris on Tuesday afternoon. The first thing that came to mind was, "If the Beatles or Leapy Lee returned today ..." Then I got home and discovered that G.K.C. had already voiced my opinions much better than I could, with up-to-the-minute comments published nearly a century ago:
"Students of popular science ... are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism. This is generally believed, and I believed it myself until I read a book giving the reasons for it. The reasons were of two kinds: resemblances that meant nothing because they were common to all humanity, and resemblances which were not resemblances at all. The author solemnly explained that the two creeds were alike in things in which all creeds are alike, or else he described them as alike in some point in which they are quite obviously different. Thus, as a case of the first class, he said that both Christ and Buddha were called by the divine voice coming out of the sky, as if you would expect the divine voice to come out of the coal-cellar."
DUBLIN, Ireland - Irish archaeologists Tuesday heralded the discovery of an ancient book of psalms by a construction worker who spotted something while driving the shovel of his backhoe into a bog. The approximately 20-page book has been dated to the years 800-1000. Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries.
"This is really a miracle find," said Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland, which has the book stored in refrigeration and facing years of painstaking analysis before being put on public display.
"There's two sets of odds that make this discovery really way out. First of all, it's unlikely that something this fragile could survive buried in a bog at all, and then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing."
He said an engineer was digging up bogland last week to create commercial potting soil somewhere in Ireland's midlands when, "just beyond the bucket of his bulldozer, he spotted something." Wallace would not specify where the book was found because a team of archaeologists is still exploring the site.
"The owner of the bog has had dealings with us in past and is very much in favor of archaeological discovery and reporting it," Wallace said.
Crucially, he said, the bog owner covered up the book with damp soil. Had it been left exposed overnight, he said, "it could have dried out and just vanished, blown away."
The book was found open to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations' attempts to wipe out the name of Israel. [Full story]
Here is the full text of Psalm 83:
Keep not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God.
For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult: and they that hate thee have lifted up the head.
They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones.
They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.
For they have consulted together with one consent: they are confederate against thee:
The tabernacles of Edom, and the Ishmaelites; of Moab, and the Hagarenes;
Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek; the Philistines with the inhabitants of Tyre;
Assur also is joined with them: they have holpen the children of Lot. Selah.
Do unto them as unto the Midianites; as to Sisera, as to Jabin, at the brook of Kison:
Which perished at Endor: they became as dung for the earth.
Make their nobles like Oreb, and like Zeeb: yea, all their princes as Zebah, and as Zalmunna:
Who said, Let us take to ourselves the houses of God in possession.
O my God, make them like a wheel; as the stubble before the wind.
As the fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the mountains on fire;
So persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraid with thy storm.
Fill their faces with shame; that they may seek thy name, O LORD.
Let them be confounded and troubled for ever; yea, let them be put to shame, and perish:
That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art the most high over all the earth.
As Tom notes in his e-mail, "Coincidence? Perhaps. Pretty big one though …"
The obituary mentions Michael's book Sellers on Sellers. I haven't read that, but I did read his P.S. I Love You, which I recommend.
Fathers, read this story and tell your kids again that you love them. (My own dad is exempt, as he told me a few days ago — though I never tire of hearing it.)
[Continued from Part 24. To read previous installments, use the drop-down menu at left.]
One morning in early October 1999, not many days after my lunch with Mike McPadden, I arrived at the kimsvideo.com headquarters only to be stopped by an ashen-faced D.D. before I could get down the hall to my office. Sticking his head out of his little utility closet-turned-workspace, he asked me to come in along with two of my co-workers.
The co-workers and I stood in the hallway — because there was no room to sit in the closet.
D.D. took a breath. His expression was grave.
"I'm very sorry to tell you this, but I have bad news ..."
Mr. Kim was downsizing the Web site, D.D. said. He would have to lay us off.
I felt a cheer welling up in my bosom. My eyes got wide with what would have been a burst of joy — but then I remembered myself and let my face fall. D.D. looked so sad. I had to let him have his moment.
My boss's sorrow may sound strange given that his favorite expression — other than, "Your people are killing Palestinian children" — was, "I could fire you for that." However, part of D.D.'s charm was his utter conviction that he stood for the working people — even though he constantly abused them. He could fire someone capriciously and not think twice about it. But being forced to lower the axe on innocent workers because of the selfish capitalist whims of a petty oligarch was more than he could handle.
D.D. said he hoped he could hire us back when the site started to make money. I nodded with the best fake sincerity that I could muster, thanked him, and walked down the hall to my office, where I waited as D.D. arranged for me to collect my last "paycheck" — as usual, an envelope of cash.
A short while later, D.D. showed up at my doorway, where he gave me my pay envelope and I in turn handed him my elevator key. Thanking him, I headed for the elevator bank (the key wasn't necessary for the return trip), rode down to the main floor, and strode out — past the imported Sonic Youth vinyl records and the T-shirts depicting Brian Jones in SS regalia, and the "Faces of Death" videos — into the bright East Village afternoon. My prayers had been answered. I wasn't fired — something that would have made it more difficult for me to get another job. I was laid off. I was free.
A little Hollies to start your day. Can anyone tell me where they are? I'm thinking Manchester Square — the cameraman's back would be facing the EMI headquarters.
Toronto Planned Parenthood Likes Its Teens 'Horny and Ready to Ride'
Planned Parenthood of Canada — now known as the less historically freighted Canadian Federation for Sexual Health — has long pushed the envelope farther than its American counterpart. So, it's no surprise that its Toronto chapter's teen sex-ed site, Spiderbytes, is more openly pedophiliac than Planned Parenthood Federation of America's Teenwire (which I detailed in the Touchstone article "The Young and the Hot-Wired").
For anyone wishing to prove that Planned Parenthood's true agenda is to sexualize children, Spiderbytes is a goldmine. There's simply too much for me to describe on my own, and works fail me when it comes to features like the Risk Rater.
I took Spiderbytes' "sexual readiness" quiz: "What to Do and When?". To see what would be the site's advice to those teens who need the most guidance in controlling their behavior, I checked off the most sex-obsessed answers to multiple-choice questions like this one:
You are surfing the net and accidentally come across a porn site. You… a. bookmark it with the rest b. change sites immediately c. look if you're curious d. call friends to joke about it
Your hormones are raging and in your mind, life should be one big orgasm. So if your body is saying 'bring it on', the next step is to make sure your brain is on board. Hormones were never meant to make decisions for you, especially when the decisions could lead to an unplanned pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. If you know all the info about sexual health and sexual rights, then go ahead and have fun. If you're still learning about that stuff, try to hold back once in a while and give your brain a chance to assess the situation. Being horny with some common sense can be a lot of fun. So just let your 'sexy side' meet your 'smart side' and you'll be off for a good time.
Ah, yes, that's what Margaret Sanger's disciples tell a 13-year-old to do if he or she's obsessed with having sex: "go ahead and have fun." Unless "you're still learning about that stuff" like "sexual health" and "sexual rights." And did they mention that "being horny with some common sense can be a lot of fun"?
Once there was a thing called childhood. It involved being protected by adults from being sexually used or abused, including protection from being placed in sexual situations that a child is unable to handle. It was a time when adults observed boundaries around children — boundaries that were almost universally considered essential for the children's healthy emotional and physical development.
Please let me know if you see my then-platinum blonde head on "Tabloid Wars," premiering on Bravo at 9 p.m. tonight. I won't be seeing it right away, as I don't have a TV.
UPDATE: I hear my smile flashed across viewers' screens. The next new episode will be Monday at 9 p.m.
Sister Mary Karen of the Sisters of Life gave me some advice worth sharing.
She said that, since the devil can't read your mind, if you're feeling yourself under spiritual attack — sad or anxious — you should smile. The reason for this is that once you smile, the devil will think that you are receiving grace from your suffering — and that will make him flee, because that's the last thing he wants.
"In the future, God will bring the Evil Inclination and slaughter him in the presence of the righteous and the wicked. To the righteous, he will appear as a tall mountain and to the wicked he will appear as a strand of hair. Both the righteous and the wicked will weep. The righteous will cry, saying: How were we able to overcome a mountain as high as this? The wicked will cry, saying: How were we not able to overcome this strand of hair?"
This afternoon, at the Sisters of Life's Upper East Side convent, fellow volunteer Bob and I were trying to figure out how to get a 12,000 BTU air conditioner up two flights of stairs to the chapel while Sister Mary Karen looked on (and would have helped had we let her). Meanwhile, Sister Mary Loretta insisted she would find us a "St. Joseph" out on East 66th Street. This seemed unlikely, as the men who passed by were either walking dogs, or with dates, or just the brand of Upper East Sider who couldn't be bothered to lift anything heavier than a Starbucks venti skim mochaccino.
We had hauled the giant box to the first landing when Sister Loretta returned with a gray-haired, athletic-looking gentleman. He jumped right into the task and in practically no time the air conditioner box was through the chapel door.
As Bob proceeded to open the box, Sisters Mary Karen, John Joseph (named for the order's founder), Mary Loretta, and I thanked the kind stranger. Sister Mary Loretta asked him a question about himself — I forget what it was, but he responded that his name was Michael Valenti and he played the piano. The sister asked a follow-up, and the man answered that he had composed the processional played by the Philharmonic when Pope John Paul II entered Central Park to celebrate Mass there in 1995.
As it happened, the nuns had a piano in the next room. Graciously, Valenti obliged their request to play his "Processional for a Pontiff."
It was truly majestic and beautiful. We all clapped loudly and cheered at the end. Valenti gave his phone number to one of the sisters so they could call him another time they needed help.
Moments of grace like that could be called coincidences — but they're uncannily frequent when one spends any time around such faith-filled people as the Sisters of Life. They are doing such very important work that I think the Almighty can't help but dish out unexpected treats to them now and again. I'm thankful I was there to witness that one.
Oh, I forgot: About Sister Mary Loretta's insistence that she would find a St. Joseph — Valenti went to a school called St. Joseph's, and his middle name is, sure enough, Joseph.
Israeli blogger Yoni Tidl writes of the Pope's call for peace in the Mideast:
I know I may upset some people by what I am going to write. But it seems the history of Popes to call for prayers for peace is only when Israel strikes back. Where were the calls for peace and pressure on the Palestinians for the last 11 months as they fired rockets out of Gaza.
I first pray for justice, then safety for the Jews of Israel. I then pray for peace.
While I'm thankful that the Holy Father has called for peace prayers, I think Yoni's observation is a perfectly reasonable one.
He also writes:
I watched Israeli soldiers getting ready to enter Lebanon this erav [vigil] of Shabbat.
What were they doing, playing bacgammon, smoking, joking like soldiers do when they have some down time.
No, they were saying Kiddush. May G-D* protect them and bless their work.
Kiddush is the Shabbat prayer over wine. Here is an English translation of the full version, said by Orthdox Jews (other branches use a shorter version):
[And it was evening and it was morning], the sixth day. And the heavens and the earth and all their hosts were completed. And God finished by the seventh day His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, for on it He rested from all His work which God created to function.
Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, Who creates the fruit of the vine. (Amen)
Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, has desired us, and has given us, in love and good will, His holy Shabbat as a heritage, in remembrance of the work of Creation; the first of the holy festivals, commemorating the Exodus from Egypt. For You have chosen us and sanctified us from among all the nations, and with love and good will given us Your holy Shabbat as a heritage. Blessed are You Lord, who sanctifies the Shabbat. (Amen)
*Orthodox Jews believe that writing the Lord's name risks taking it in vain.
My Aunt Sarah, an Orthodox Jew living in Jerusalem, writes eloquently in an e-mail about a side of the Mideast crisis that few commentators outside the Holy Land seem to understand:
I have been "disproportionately" disturbed by charge after charge from the "third-world" nations and certain European, East-European, and South-American nations, that Israel's actions in Lebanon are "disproportionate" to their provocation. Here they are attacking all Lebanon when it's only Hizbullah that attacked Israel, and they, the latter, only killed a few soldiers and kidnapped a few, and they only send an occasional rocket over the border. And here is red-eyed, red-necked, "insane" Israel over-reacting by hurting the Lebanese people and striking at their infrastructure.
What infuriates me is that Lebanon is seen as an innocent bystander in this conflict. Israel is only entitled to take Hezbollah to task, and any damage that poor Lebanon has to suffer is due to Israel's lack of restraint. It is reacting "disproportionately" to a limited provocation by an irresponsible group of fanatics. I have actually seen the comment that 2 kidnapped soldiers are not worth all the death and destruction that poor innocent Lebanon has been forced to bear.
Moreover, even our supporters are putting the blame on Syria and Iran, and reserving all their sympathy and concern for the Lebanese government. Yet Lebanon is entirely responsible for the whole thing. It is so obvious that I don't understand why it should be politically incorrect to say so. If you have seen the missiles that Hezbollah is expending wholesale upon Israel, missiles that they have obtained in the high thousands, and which by the way are stationed all over Lebanon, you will have noticed immediately that they are enormous (besides being very many). In some cases they can only be transported by flatbed truck, one or two at a time. They are entirely obvious. How can they be bussed along Lebanon's roads without the Lebanese government's sufferance? And without the people's knowledge? And both the government and the people knowing all along exactly what they were intended for, to attack a neighbor who is not their enemy, with whom they are not in a belligerent state. Moreover, the missiles were driven over the border from Syria and also were flown in through the Beirut airport. Obviously the border and customs authorities actively collaborated in supplying the Hezbollah with an awesome and exotic arsenal.
Yes, poor Lebanon explains that it can't control Hezbollah's militia in the South. But it is the government's function to control its imports and its commercial traffic, especially elsewhere in the country. And obviously they do. Except that they closed their eyes or blinked at the steady traffic in enormous and exotic high-tech war materiel heading toward the wholesale slaughter of the Jews. And the world did, too.
Yes, poor Lebanon is afraid of a civil war. Yes, poor Lebanon explains that the Hezbollah is a "state within a state". Yes, the Moslems are in the majority, and yes, the Shi'ites are the majority of those, and yes, they hold government positions and yes, they have a coercive power which the so-called Lebanese government won't stand up to. And so what it amounts to is that Lebanon, like Vichy France, is a willing and co-operative prop for fanatical, murderous, genocide-bent enemies and haters of the Jews. Is there any American who does not retch at the vile performance of the French (Vichy or not) in the Nazi era? Would anyone in the whole world, repelled or not, claim that the Vichy government did not represent nor reflect the French population which it governed? Why is Lebanon seen as an innocent bystander when it has been an indispensable accessory to Hezbollah's hate-crimes all these years? How come everyone is feeling sorry for them and no-one realizes that none of this could have happened without their cooperation?
Yesterday at 6:45 p.m., I was standing in a taxi line outside Grand Central Terminal, late for an event, when I saw a pedicab roll up — one of those small-but-indomitable bicycle taxis.
I had some extra cash on me, so I called out to the driver. He stopped and I hopped right in. It wouldn't be a terribly long ride — I was only going to 55th Street and 8th Avenue — and considering the length of the taxi line, there was every chance I'd be there soonest on the pedicab driver's leg power.
The ride was scary and great fun, especially when we wove back and forth through traffic. It was the first time I'd had such a novel transportation experience since my maiden carriage ride a year and a half ago.
One tip if you're a woman planning to ride in one of those things: Apply your lipstick before the ride, not during.
The driver told me he was originally from Turkey. He said he'd held his job for a year and a half, and was quitting soon, as he was finishing up his master's degree in financial engineering from Stevens University in Hoboken, N.J.
In answer to a question of mine, he told me that yes, thanks to his job, he could eat anything he wanted, even before bedtime, and not gain weight.
I asked him if he was concerned about the danger of getting hit. He assured me that he was much safer in that regard than his passengers.
I think he is used to being asked to pose for a photo.
Oh, yes — the ride from Grand Central took about 18 minutes, I think. Not bad for rush hour — and we passed pretty much every yellow cab we saw.
Safety Counts is a new program at Planned Parenthood aimed at helping injecting drug users who might not be ready to quit, but would like to practice safer drug use and make changes to their habits. Participants can be active drug users. Every participant is using or has used heroine and/or crack cocaine.
Bleach kits with sterile water and cotton pellets to clean off syringes, and mouth pieces for pipes are offered free-of-charge.
"What we're trying to do is teach them the stages of change, and how to make changes in their lives. We teach them how to stay clean. How to not contract or transmit HIV and Hepatitis C," said Mary Atilano the program coordinator. ...
... "Let's be realistic if you don't want to stop, if you can't stop what's the best thing? Prevention. Being safe," said Atilano. ...
... "A change means step by step, baby steps. I'm not talking about making a change from using everyday then all of a sudden not using," said Atilano
The group focuses on setting goals. It can include cutting down on drug use, or using new syringes.
Safety Counts meets every Tuesday and Thursday at noon. The program is free and that includes lunch.
Planned Parenthood has implemented "Safety Counts" nationally, often receiving state grants for the program (in addition to its federal funding, $272 million in 2005). Last year, The Brooklyn Rail Web site reported on Planned Parenthood of New York City's "Safety Counts" program, part of the organization's $2 million "Project Street Beat" (read the entire article for full context):
Eric Thornhill, a Preventive Case Manager, works in several low-income Brooklyn neighborhoods and runs Safety Counts, a seven-session group, out of Street Beat’s Bed-Stuy office. “We get people together to identify risky behaviors, whether it is IV drug use or not using condoms,” he says.
He rattles off a list of stages his clients go through. “There is pre-contemplation: we find a person who has been out in the streets as a commercial sex worker and does not use condoms. It may be in the back of her mind, ‘I need to use condoms,’ but it is a thought, not an action.”
In the group, Thornhill works to change this. “We hope to get her to practice safe sex on a consistent basis, moving her from contemplation—having the need to use condoms in her mind—to walking with them in her pocket and always using them,” he says.
He teaches group members to protect themselves, demonstrating how to use prophylactics and showing them how quickly an adept practitioner can do this. “We hope this moves her to the ‘action stage,’ where out of five guys she’s with, she uses condoms with two.”
A similar trajectory plays out regarding shared needles. “A person may shoot up six times a day,” says Peterkin. “We try to get them from needles to sniffing. If they sniff twice a day, we try to get them down to once. We give people incentives, grocery vouchers, movie tickets, snacks and metro cards. They see that we are taking care of them and are encouraged.” ...
... “Self esteem and partner communication are stressed,” adds Natasha Abney, another Street Beat advocate. “We do activities. How long does it take to put on a condom? Seconds—even when it pops and they have to start over. We do an exercise where we have a bag filled with panties and each girl picks one. We teach them that the satin ones may cause infection because they do not let the vulva breathe. We encourage communication between the woman and her partners and with her parents. We talk about condom negotiation, how to be assertive. Most of the girls say they’ve had Sex Ed in school, but they’re only told ‘Don’t have sex,’ and ‘Don’t get pregnant.’ We do much more than that.” ...
... The mix of judgment-free programs—street work, counseling, educating teens—keeps Street Beat staff more than busy. Yet despite this monumental task, they remain upbeat, taking pleasure in small victories. “I love the job,” says a smiling Peterkin. “It’s great to touch people in a positive way.”
Seriously, thanks very much to the National Catholic Register and writer Tim Drake for a wonderful cover story. (You can't see the cover on the Register's Web page, but trust me, that glamour shot gets around.)
I still can't get over that my book is getting so much wonderful publicity four months before it even comes out. As Shannon Donahoo wrote today, "Not having sex is front-page news."
(If the link to the Register article doesn't work, search the Register's Web site for "Dawn Eden" and it'll turn up.)
The story begins by describing Weezer singer Rivers Cuomo's well-publicized years of abstinence from sex, and the page with the story features a large photo of Cuomo alongside a small one of me (left), so I am completely surprised — just blown away — by the editors' decision to put me on the front page.
Many thanks to O'Regan for taking chaste singles seriously — she found ones who were dynamic and deep — and writing the best piece I've seen yet on the countercultural aspect of chastity.
"The whole panoply of nutty things liberals believe flows from their belief that man is just another animal. ... Only their core rejection of God can explain the bewildering array of liberal positions: We must save Tookie Williams, while slaughtering the unborn. We must eat natural foods, but the right to acquire disease in casual hookups is a holy ritual." — Ann Coulter, Godless
"[The newly approved contraceptive's] availability will be a benefit to women who want a method of birth control that doesn't require a daily, weekly or monthly 'ritual,' said Dr. Vanessa Cullins, vice president for medical affairs at Planned Parenthood Federation of America." — Associated Press, "FDA Approves Implantable Contraceptive"
"When we thought about the future of abortion, we knew it had to include many different perspectives and experiences. We also knew that the interesting questions were not about legal rights or access, but about the quality of the abortion experience. We realized that the question about abortion for the 21st century had to be: “How do you want your abortion?”
That's Margaret R. Johnson, writing in 2002 as president of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, and Claire Keyes, executive director of Pittsburgh abortion clinic Allegheny Reproductive Health Center, writing in their essay "How Do You Want Your Abortion, and, in their words, "imagining a utopian world where each of us constructs how we would like abortion—indeed, all pregnancy experiences—to be." The essay is on the abortion-advocating Abortion Conversation Project site, as well as the Allegheny center's site (where its URL calls it "fantasy.html").
Following are excerpts from Johnson's and Keyes' hopeful vision, sent to me by Alicia of Fructus Ventris. Your comments are most welcome.
The authors begin with a series of imaginary "packages," which they present as futuristic ideals (but don't take my word for it; read them in context):
3. The Family Package-- This is an important decision in your life and of course you want your loved ones around you!! You can be accompanied through every phase of this process by the person you choose. Counseling is available for all family members and includes training and suggestions for them to participate in your care. Flowers, breakfast in bed, baby-sitting, just tell us what you want and we'll pass it along. We stress support and coping skills before, during, and after your abortion. Choice of abortion pill (additional $100) or surgical abortion. $650.
4. DIY (Do-It-Yourself)-- Are you the kind of person who does a lot of research? Someone who is knows what you want? Do you want to avoid the hustle bustle--and waiting time-- of a busy clinic? Would you like your abortion in the comfort of your own home? Take a pill today and choose when you bleed anytime in the next three days, safely, completely, in your own home. Full instructions and educational video included and our 24 hour advice line is open to you. Available only in early pregnancy. Some restrictions apply. Like everything else you do, have this experience on your own terms! $550.
5. Deluxe Spa Treatment-- Get the luxury and personal attention you deserve!! Check into our special suite at the Jetson Hotel where you will meet with our experienced guide, who will be available to you for your abortion experience. After extensive orientation for you and your partner or family, enjoy a relaxing massage and jacuzzi. Full emotional support is available to you and those close to you, tailored to your needs. A full range of sedatives and pain relievers to choose from make for a pain free procedure by our experienced and friendly physician. Recover back in your suite and choose from 3 relaxing options--a foot massage, a mud pack facial, or a rebalancing of your shakras by our expert Reiki master. Then, enjoy room service from a 4 star restaurant. Our guide will be available to you to review aftercare and discuss any emotional issues. Full cable and choice of video entertainment available, and enjoy our feather pillow beds for a good night's sleep. $3000
6. Spiritual Journey-- Ending a pregnancy is not just a physical act but also a spiritual process. Meet with our spirit healer and guide a week in advance to plan the ritual journey that will meet your spiritual needs. Native American (Taino clan tradition), Eastern philosophy, nature-inspired (pagan), or custom designed ceremonies are available to you and to the support people who will accompany you on your spirit quest. Or, design your own rituals with the help of our experienced guides. Check in to our mountain retreat Friday night for a ritual cleansing and spiritual preparation. Have the surgical procedure when you are ready for a separation of paths with the spirit child within you. Miscarriage with medicines and herbs is also available early in pregnancy. A follow-up ritual a year and a day later is included in this package. $5000
7. Full Emotional Support-- Deciding to end a pregnancy may well be the most difficult emotional crisis a woman or couple may face. Our experienced counselor will spend 2 hours with you and support person of your choice, and your appointment will be scheduled 2-7 days after that. The counselor will explore relationship and identity issues, personal goals, religious and spiritual concerns and offer interactive skill building to you and your significant other. A choice of 3 self help books are included with additional suggestions for grief work and emotional aftercare. The procedure will be performed by an experienced and kind physician in privacy with your choice of pain relievers and sedatives. Or, choose to miscarry with medicine taken at home. ($100 extra.) Two follow up visits with our licensed and experienced counselors are available one week and one month after the procedure. Consultation by phone with the clergy or spiritual leader from your belief system included, if desired. $1000.
8. Discount Package-- A basic "no frills" package is available for those women who don't need ambiance or additional support. No additional sedation is available without additional cost. Licensed physicians perform the safe surgery in less than 5 minutes. Expect delays and waiting time. No support people allowed in counseling or medical areas. If you want to spend the money on something else, this package may work for you, but we encourage you to consult our website for a complete overview of the abortion experience. $250, cash only. 9. Abortions Anonymous-- For the woman who wants to tell no one, keep it secret, and have no record of having been there, we offer an anonymous service with private hours. Counseling offered to explore any feelings and potential emotional side effects. No names taken. $950, cash only.
After listing the full range of imagined options, the authors write:
In most utopian scenarios, price tags are not offered because we assume money will be replaced by a better system of valuation. We have included these imaginary prices, in 2002 dollars, as a way to think about what an experience is worth to us. It may seem strange to think about market forces at work in abortion services but, actually, the stigma long associated with abortion has kept the principles of market economics from working for the consumer of abortion care. Abortion fees have been historically low in relation to medical inflation, and consumers have few choices. Abortion services, by and large, have not changed much in the last 30 years. If people were given real choices of how they wanted their abortion experience to be, the market would reflect a range of price tags as well as desires. When the stigma of abortion dissipates, women will actually have more choices and more recognition of the range of feelings, circumstances and their needs in facing an unintended pregnancy.
[Continued from Part 23. Previous installments may be found by entering "wuz" into the search box at left.]
Mike was already at the restaurant when I arrived. He was neatly dressed in a plain button-down shirt and slacks. I could see that he'd put on a lot of weight since I'd last seen him about four years before, in mid-'95 or so. But he still had the same short, thick, dark brown hair, the same prominent brow, the same pot of flowers ... huh?
As he got up from his table to greet me, I couldn't help noticing a large, pink-foil-covered pot brimming with orange mums. He pushed it toward me as I sat down.
"These are for you," he said sheepishly — still with the same sandblasted James Cagney voice — indicating that the blooms were a sort of peace offering.
"Uh ... thanks!" I said, rather taken aback. I'd received unexpected flowers before, but never a big, heavy pot of them. It reminded me of the time, more than 18 years earlier, when the mean boys in my bar/bat mitzvah prep class decided to give me a "Chanukah bush" — so they pulled up a big shrub from the temple grounds, put some Christmas ornaments on it, and dumped it on my desk. (I guess one could say they were a bit prescient in their feeling that I would appreciate something Christmassy.)
This time, it was clear right away that the gift wasn't a joke. Mike started talking about his journey; he had given up not only alcohol and drugs, but also his work in the pornography industry. Currently, he was applying his journalistic skills at Chemical Market Reporter.
With all the fervor of a new convert, he told me about how he came to see that his old life was destroying him physically and emotionally. He had made the decision to get clean, separating himself from harmful acquaintances as well as harmful substances. It was a struggle, but he was determined not to return to his addictions.*
Needless to say, while he was telling me about these things — and also apologizing for the way he'd treated me in the past — I started to find Mike attractive. I had never felt terribly drawn to him physically; it was his wit and intellect that had first attracted me — well, that and his edgy Voice personal. Now, to see that same wit and intellect matched to a changed lifestyle, a renewed spirit, and a new, penitent heart — it was jarring, mysterious, and enticing. Plus, of course, there was that clunky pot of flowers, endearing and awkward-looking in their way ... like Mike.
The fact that I didn't come on to Mike (other than the adoring look in my eyes that I always have when I like someone) is, in retrospect, a sign of God's grace. I remember that I reined myself in by reminding myself that (a) Mike and I still had a lot of water under the bridge from his Selwyn Harris days, and (b) being in the midst of his recovery program, he was going through some serious emotional stuff. Despite the sort of benign hedonism that marked my relationships at the time, I somehow realized that it would be wrong to push myself on someone who was trying to get himself together.
While I didn't know much about 12-step programs, I knew the steps included faith in a higher power. From our first date, I remembered Mike had told me he was Catholic; he had attended a school run by Jesuits. I asked him if faith was part of his recovery.
His answer, as best I can remember, was yes — and no.
He did have some faith, he said, but his beliefs were syncretic. I think they involved two disparate schools of theology — Buddhism with a hint of Christian Science, or something like that.
My inherent dislike of New Age-style mix-and-match spirituality made me feel a little sorry for Mike — no, scratch that; I was annoyed, though I didn't show it. I thought, here's this guy who's had a dramatic reversal in his life, where he's finally free from some of the demons that had damaged his mind and body, and made him miserable — and he can't see that there's a point to it all? He has to make up a religion of his own from conflicting schools of belief?
If one doesn't have solid faith, I thought, it's better to admit — like me — that one does not believe, and yet appreciate the beauty of a coherent, God-centered theology, than to claim a mushy sort of faith that hinges on transparently man-made claims.
Looking back, it's hard for me to believe that I was riled about Mike's religious beliefs at a time when I lacked faith of my own. I would almost think that our lunch occurred after I became a believer, were it not that I have a clear memory of bringing the big pot of orange mums back to my desk at kimsvideo.com. I know I was not a believer while I worked at that place — however much I wanted to be one. __________________________ *According to the last information I have on him, an undated online interview with porn-industry gossip Luke Ford, Mike says that he is still free from alcohol and drugs — but he's back in the pornography business full force as a writer and Web entrepreneur. His hiatus from that world was brief.
ADDENDUM: A few hours after the above post appeared, Mike McPadden responded in an e-mail with some corrections — which I've made — as well as some general clarifications and thoughts, which he has permitted me to publish. He writes:
My respite from the porn industry endured from 1997 when Genesis magazine (which I was editing) was sold and relocated, to 2002, when I took a job at Celebrity Skin. During that five-year interval I worked for the homeless charity Ready, Willing and Able; the theatrical trade paper Show Business Weekly; Brooklyn College; Organic.com (one of the most spectacular tech-stock Hindenburgs); and The Chemical Market Reporter. I also put in eight weeks at the "art and fashion quarterly," Black Book, the only job of which I have been ashamed. Along the way I freelanced for numerous online businesses that have since vaporized, as well as The New York Press and Hustler.
The series of lay-offs that followed the dot-com crash exhausted me, and I longed to return to the world of nudity and crude jokes with which I am so comfortable. Hence, the move to Celebirty Skin and, since 2003, MrSkin.
My confidence in my own sobriety also figured into this decision. For a long time, as I was adjusting to living both without mind-altering substances and attempting to find a spiritual path, I felt guilt and shame about my own interests, desires and ideas as to what's amusing in this world. My favorite line in all of AA literature is this: "We are not saints."
God doesn't hate my predilection for eyeballing nudies, I concluded, nor anybody else's.
At least that's my take on it now, and it has been for some time. It can change. It probably will change. All I do is try to not resist the flow.
One essential reason, I believe, that the 12-step program has proven effective, not just to me, but to millions, is that it allows members to utilize "God as we understand him." AA initially grew out of the specifcally Christian-oriented Oxford Group. Long-term sobriety eluded many of its members due to the religious orthodoxy.
By opening the door to spirituality just a crack, the alcoholic -- who is, point blank, insane -- can work through his resentments, fears, misgivings, doubts, prejudices and other obstacles to enligtenment. By his own nature, the alcoholic is contrarian and contemptuous of authority. Many are also enfuriated at God and the hand that "He" has dealt them when they arrive at AA. So by simply planting the seed, the spiritual life can grow in its own time or, if you will, God's time.
AA, in fact, explicitly encourages members to "see where religious people are right" and to explore the faith of their upbringing. I've done both and concluded ... well, I'm no longer a practicing Catholic, nor do I feel the connection, even culturally, that I long did to the Church of Rome.
But that, too, can change. And, in fact, it probably will.
A quick round-up of my road to sobriety: I made a first attempt in late 1993, after moving to Los Angeles. It lasted about a year. I moved back to New York in December 1995 specifically to drink full-time. I came back to AA in Fall 1996. From there, I bumped along, putting together various clean times and then falling off the wagon for a night or two. By September 1999, I hadn't had a drink in over two years. Then I had a bunch one Saturday. And then the next Saturday. Since then, I've worked the program diligently and maintained a sober existence. God willing (indeed) on September 25th, I will celebrate seven years since my last consumption of alcohol and drugs.
In light of all this, there is another AA phrase that tickles me It describes members on the journey thusly: "We trudge the happy road of destiny."
The choice of the word "trudge" is genius; in fact, I dare say, it may well be divinely inspired.
[Continued from Part 22. To read previous entries, type "Wuz" into the search box at left.]
One day during that summer of 1999, I returned home to my Hoboken, N.J., apartment after a day of work to find an odd message from a man from my past. It went something like this, in a voice that sounded like James Cagney after gargling with gravel:
"Hello, Dawn, this is Mike McPadden ..." He sighed. "...Selwyn Harris."
I knew the name all right. A blast from the past. I even knew how he'd gotten the moniker; he'd named himself after the last two old-fashioned seedy movie houses left in Times Square back in the early Nineties, when he started his sex-industry fanzine. The publication was named Happy Land, in a sick reference to the 1990 fire at an illegal Bronx social club.
"I'm in [a 12-step program] right now," Mike continued, "and I have to call people I've hurt and ask for forgiveness.* You're one of the main people. Please call me ..."
A wave of excitement rushed through me, followed immediately by fear that Mike was pranking me. Nobody who had wronged me had ever asked me for forgiveness years after the damage was done. The idea that Mike, of all people, would do so was unbelievable. The last messages I'd received from him, four years earlier, were sound bites of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in their personae as the ultra-scatological duo Derek and Clive, saying to one another in their thick Dagenham accents, "You [vulgar word for female anatomy]. You f---ing [ditto]."
Despite my skepticism, I knew that if there was the slightest chance that Mike was serious, I had to let him apologize to me in whatever way the 12-step folks wanted him to do so.
When I phoned him back, Mike sounded just as sincere as he had on my answering machine — wanting to meet me in person so he could apologize properly.
Thinking back to the actions for which he wanted forgiveness, I knew that although Mike did treat me badly, I was no saint to him. Yes, he wrote some poison-pen items about me in Happy Land (along the lines of Henry II's lament, "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"), causing me to fear that an unhinged reader might try to harm me. But that was only after I caused his girlfriend to dump him.
I really did it. Here's how it happened, in 150 words or less: I hadn't heard from Mike — then calling himself Selwyn — after having a few seemingly promising dates. A mutual acquaintance informed me that there was a simple reason for the silence: The man I'd considered a potential beau had neglected to tell me that he had a girlfriend all along. I then went to an East Village bar called Downtown Beirut where I'd heard Mike and his girlfriend hung out. Sure enough, they were there. I greeted Mike warmly; he swiveled right off his barstool and into the men's room. His girlfriend (beautiful, blonde, very young) swiveled around to me. "So, how do you know Selwyn?" she asked cheerily. I replied with equal lightness that I had answered his Village Voice personal ad seeking a "gutter goddess."
But by the time Mike got back in touch with me, all that — including the Derek and Clive phone messages — was several years' past. I hadn't thought about Mike in quite a while. So, I didn't know quite what to expect when I headed out of the kimsvideo.com headquarters one afternoon to meet him for lunch. Part of me still feared it was some kind of setup, in which case I would be defenseless.
To be continued ... ________________________________________ *Mike has already spoken in a published interview about being in a 12-step program. In the interview, he said that, as part of the program, he had asked forgiveness from those he had wronged.
Welcome, Readers of Gawker, Young Manhattanite ... and the National Catholic Register
I scored some sort of trifecta yesterday, with my name and grinning mug in Gawker (profanity alert), Young Manhattanite (ditto), and — in an interview about my conversion — the National Catholic Register (not currently on the newspaper's Web site).
The photos on Young Manhattanite, referenced on Gawker, were from a book party that Young Manhattanite blogger Andrew Krucoff held for Mr. T Experience frontman Frank Portman and his young-adult novel King Dork. (In one of the pics, Frank's holding a just-arrived galley of my book, which comes out in early December.)
I tried to impress Frank by mentioning some articles and liner notes I'd written about pop music, but when he learned my name, he recognized it because, as he noted, I have "a Catholic blog" — and he's a Catholic blogger too. Gotta love that Communion of Saints! As if that weren't coincidence enough, delving into his engaging novel on the train today, I was stunned to find a reference to the Flowerpot Men — a band originally formed by John Carter, whom I recently mentioned in "How I Became the Catholic I Wuz."
Blogger Pete of March Together for Life recently slammed an article purportedly written by abortion advocate — unaware that the piece was actually an Onion satire. He was rewarded with waves of ridicule and even outright harassment by ideological opponents. Now, John Sexton of Verum Serum looks at the Onion piece and finds it's not so fictional after all.
(Details at Verum Serum, above — and be aware that Pete's original blog post, linked at Verum Serum, now has an abortion photo. Comment at Verum Serum.)
"So the UN and the EU believe the Israeli response to the Palestinian[s] and Lebanese is ‘disproportionate’?
"To that, we say poppycock!!
"Where are the rules for a ‘appropriate’ response written? What exactly is the appropriate response to regimes that pose an existential threat to a free society?
"How dare the Europeans, after the Holocaust, deny Jews the right defend themselves with all the might they can muster? How dare the French, with the history of the collaborator Vichy Government, tell the Israelis what is and isn’t appropriate when it comes to their well being? How dare they lecture Israel!"
[Continued from Part 21. To read previous installments, type "wuz" into the search box at left.]
My right forearm was vibrating from the impact of the file cabinet and it was stinging at the point where it had hit the sharp edge of the cabinet's side. Cradling it against my chest, I staggered out Rob's office and across the hall to my desk.
I sat down and used my left hand to check my e-mail. After a few minutes, Rob walked in. He told me that he could have insisted I be fired, but he wasn't going to do so. I forget what his reason was, but I think it boiled down to his being a nice guy.
His words struck me as condescending, but I was coming down from the intensity of our confrontation, and I wanted to keep my job, so I thanked him.
Rob then stepped outside to buy some ice for my arm — a genuinely kind gesture that impressed me.
At the end of the day, Rob asked how was my arm. He was convinced that I must have fractured the bone.
I lifted my arm off the ice pack and tried it out. It actually felt fine.
Going home that night, waking up the next morning, I kept waiting for the bruising to start, the bone to get sore, or the muscle to reveal a tear. Nothing. There wasn't a single sign that anything had happened, other than a faint scratch where I'd hit the edge of the cabinet.
The lack of injury struck me as miraculous. There seemed to be no other explanation for it.
At night, I kept up my prayers — praying to be laid off from my job. D.D.'s abuse remained unbearable, and I couldn't take the thought of marketing the videos Rob wanted to sell. But I didn't want to quit, because — with little full-time job experience — I didn't want to have to tell a potential employer that I quit my last position.
My emotions were wedged between pained memory and a kind of hopeless hope. Every time I crossed Third Avenue to St. Mark's Place on my way to work, I would remember how that street had represented my youthful rebellion against societal mores — a rebellion that had never brought me deep or lasting happiness. Now, I was beginning to rebel against the rebellion — but I still found myself walking the same street, past the same stores and many of the same characters. If I couldn't find joy within bohemia, neither could I imagine finding joy — let alone an exciting job or even an interesting conversation partner — outside of it.
[Continued from Part 20. To read previous installments, type "wuz" into the search box at left.]
I stepped out the doorway and across the hall, where Rob was finishing up a phone call in his office — the one D.D. had vacated. Rob had put a few promotional posters for trashy flicks on the way, but other than that, the office looked the same — right down to the giant gray-brown metal file cabinet that looked older than the video store itself.
I waited a moment while he hung up the phone, and then took a breath. "Rob ..." I hesitated. "What's this I hear about some weird videos you want to sell on the site? Like a video about people getting holes in their skull?"
"It's a documentary that appeared on the Learning Channel last year about trepanation. There's a whole history behind it."
"Oh." A legitimate documentary about a historical practice. I couldn't argue with that.
"And people drinking their own urine?" I asked.
"Same thing," he said. "It's a documentary about people who do that for health reasons. They say it boosts their immunity."
"Oh." I thought about that for a moment.
"Also," I said, "what's this about videos of women throwing up?"
Rob chuckled. "I got this insane catalogue."
He reached to the corner of his desk, picked up a color pamphlet, and handed it to me.
"It's got all this wild stuff," he said. "We're going to promote some of these videos on the front page of the site, to draw attention to our online shopping."
D.D. appeared in the doorway and I could see he wanted Rob's attention.
I turned to Rob. "Can I look at this?"
"Sure," he said. I wriggled past D.D. and back across the hall to my and Dave's office.
The catalogue was beyond anything I had ever seen or heard about before. It was for a company that distributed videos for all manner of fetishes. Its featured fetish — the one for which the company apparently ruled the market — was of surgically enhanced women in string bikinis and spike heels who were vomiting, or pretending to vomit.
On the cover was one such model, a tall, white woman with a stringy mane of shopping-mall hair in a bright green string bikini and open-toed gold stilettos. She stood pigeon-toed, facing the camera, her hands cupped over her silicone breasts, her eyes crossed in Ben Turpin fashion. Her cheeks were stuffed with something and appeared to be as round as her breasts. Beneath the photo was a smaller one, a sort of "after" photo, showing her with gunk spewing out of her mouth.
I marched back into Rob's office. D.D. was gone. I dropped the catalogue back onto the desk.
"You're not really going to put this on the front page, are you?" I asked.
"Mr. Kim and D.D. love it," Rob said. "It's part of the marketing plan."
"But ..." I sputtered. "Why do we need to market this? It's demeaning towards women."
"Oh, come on," Rob laughed. "This isn't demeaning towards women." He reached for the catalogue. "This is demeaning to human beings.
"Look at it!" he added. "It's stoopid. And it's funny." His gaze went from the catalogue to me. "You can't take it so seriously."
My heart began to race. I stared at Rob. "It's funny?" My voice escalated louder and higher, into a sort of tortured whine. "You think that women getting sick is funny? You think it's funny when women are in pain?"
He grinned nervously. "Come on, Dawn ..."
But I was in The Zone. "You want to make money from women in pain ... because you think it's funny?"
He was still grinning like he was trying to humor me, no doubt hoping that I would toss him a curse word and get out of his office. "Why does it matter?" he asked. "None of this matters."
My eyes bulged. "It matters because they're human beings!" I yelled. "It matters because ... it matters if anyone, anywhere hurts."
I was really losing it. "You don't care, do you? You don't care if women are hurt so you can sell your stupid videos."
"Yeah," he said, getting tired of the game. "Yeah, that's right, I don't care."
"All right," I gasped, feeling short of breath. "All right. You don't think it matters if someone gets hurt. Well, I'm going to prove it to you that it does matter — even if I have to hurt myself —"
Rob gasped.
"Bam! Bam! Bam! on the metal file cabinet!" I screamed — punctuating each "bam" with the sound of my right forearm hitting the side of the file cabinet, full force, reverberating in a loud metallic crash.
All Rob's irony departed him. "Please, stop," he said. "Please, stop."
"...bam ..." I panted, "... bam ... wow, that hurt ..."
I was looking at my forearm, trying to see if the skin was broken, when D.D. stormed in. Apparently, he'd heard me back there in his little broom closet.
"What are you doing?" he shouted. "Do you know that I could hear you all the way down the hall? I could have you fired."
That was one of D.D.'s favorite lines. He was always threatening to have me fired for insignificant things like looking at online job ads while I was working.
"I'm sorry ..." I muttered, staring at my throbbing forearm and flexing the fingers of that hand — my writing hand — to make sure they still all worked.
The moon last night was a stunning orange. I thought it was due to New York City pollution (because of course it couldn't be due to bucolic New Jersey's atmosphere), but my dad says there was an orange moon farther down the East Coast as well.
[Continued from Part 19. To read previous installments, type "wuz" into the search box at left.]
I quickly took to Rob. For one thing, I was due for a workplace crush, having worn out my welcome with Paul, a writer who smoked like a chimney — so much so that his voice reminded me of Paul Lynde — and had a girlfriend. (Like me, Paul had an interesting religious background; he told me his father was one of the architects of something I'd never heard of: "liberation theology.")
For another thing, Rob and I were both nerdy children of New Jersey suburbia and shared an appreciation of trash culture — though he was into it far more deeply than I, as witnessed by his fanzine Vex. He gave me a copy of issue No. 3, which featured an encyclopedic article on the history of movies featuring men in gorilla suits — delightfully titled "The Apes of Wrath." (It also had an article on bestiality in film, but I was willing to overlook that, as I was willing to overlook many of the odd interests of the writers and musicians in my circle.)
For his part, Rob may have felt he needed an ally in the decidedly bizarre kimsvideo.com workplace. D.D. — who every day seemed more and more like Noam Chomsky in a bra — had made a great show of evicting himself from his own office (the largest one on the floor save for owner Mr. Kim's) and giving it to Rob, moving himself to a storage closet down the hall. The apparent reason for his munificence was that D.D.'s office was right next to Mr. Kim's — and he wanted to go as far away from his boss as possible. So he hauled his computer — which he never seemed to use, save to look at the splayed-out nudie on its desktop — into the dark storage room and hooked up a crane lamp. The rest of us were all a little creeped out.
Soon, Rob and I were going to lunch together — where I told him the inside scoop about Kim's, and he told me his dream of writing the definitive guide to ABC's "After School Special" series. Once, he gave me a ride home to Hoboken. His camaraderie, and the relief I was gaining through reading Psalm 27, helped make up for D.D.'s vicious abuse.
One day, only a couple of weeks or so after Rob started on the job, I came to work late and found my officemate Dave, the middle-aged Englishman, looking at some notes he'd made on a legal pad.
"We had a meeting today — me, C.C., and Rob — and Rob had all these ideas about videos he wants to sell on the Web site," he said. He looked as if something had disturbed him. "It's strange stuff."
"Like what?" I asked.
"People having holes drilled into their head —" He looked at his notes. "Trepanation, I think he said ..."
"What?"
"People drinking their own urine ..."
"He must have been joking," I said, a look of concern on my face.
Dave looked at his notes again. "He wants to sell videos of women throwing up."
My eyes bugged out. "No," I said. "No way."
"That's what they want to do with the site," Dave said, with a hint of resignation. "You can ask Rob."
"I will!" I exclaimed, and marched into Rob's — formerly D.D.'s — office.
[Continued from Part 18. To read previous installments, type "Wuz" into the search box at left.]
In addition to D.D.'s virulent anti-Semitism, I faced other stresses at my kimsvideo.com job.There was D.D.'s frequent sexual harassment.
Although he claimed to be homosexual, D.D. was something other than that. No, not bisexual, exactly. He was omnisexual — probably the only true omnisexual I've ever met. One had the impression that if he could, he would simply devour men and women, without giving them anything in return — like a Tweedledee-shaped Pac-Man.
When he was angry, which was often, D.D. would blurt out pornographic language, more vulgar than what I imagine the proverbial sailors use, and worse because it was calculated to offend. And if I wanted to discuss something with him in his office, I had to face his computer desktop, which was adorned with a photo of a spread-eagled naked woman.
D.D.'s desktop image was acceptable at Kim's Video because the store, like many of its St. Mark's Place neighbors, sold a good deal of pornographic merchandise — not just videos, but also T-shirts bearing naked images and cuss words.
I was a bit torn about being involved with such an operation. Although I didn't think it was right to put pornography in an unwilling viewer's face, I believed in my little feminist heart that pornography was acceptable if the women posing for it and the women viewing it did so willingly. I also liked dressing up in some of the "Barbarella"-style black patent-vinyl clothes that I bought at the St. Mark's boutiques and seeing the effect my get-ups had on men. So I felt I wasn't really one to speak against pornographic imagery — but having it foisted upon me disturbed me just the same.
Although my relativism with regard to sexual imagery prevented me from believing that my porn-laden work environment was spiritually bad, I sensed evil in D.D.'s hatred of Jews. But I felt trapped, because my kimsvideo.com position was my first permanent full-time job in years, and I desperately needed to get more nonfreelance experience on my résumé. As the summer of 1999 wore on, the stress was so strong that I feared spiraling downward into another depression — one that I might not endure, considering I was still recovering from the suicidal breakdown I'd had in the spring.
The fact that D.D. hated my Judaism when I wasn't even practicing that religion — or any — struck me as particularly ironic. I developed the strong feeling that if D.D. so despised Judaism, then there must be something deeply important about the faith.
Since I had always liked the New Testament — thinking that if there were a Messiah, he might well be Jesus — and since I had seen how much Christian faith had done for my mother, my thoughts turned to Christianity as well. At home in my Hoboken, N.J., apartment, I found myself paging through a Gideons pocket New Testament/Psalms/Proverbs that a volunteer had handed me on a street by New York University over ten years earlier — it had long sat on my shelf untouched.
I asked my mother if there were some Bible verse I could read that would help me deal with persecution. She recommended I arm myself by reading Psalm 27, which begins:
The LORD is my light and my salvation; Whom shall I fear? The LORD is the strength of my life; Of whom shall I be afraid? When the wicked came against me To eat up my flesh, My enemies and foes, They stumbled and fell. Though an army may encamp against me, My heart shall not fear; Though war may rise against me, In this I will be confident.
I took my little Gideons Bible to work with me and would pray the psalm while D.D. wasn't looking. I'd also pray it before I went to bed at night, and in the morning if I had time before work. It really did make me feel better — but I didn't really have faith. What I had — and I was aware of this at the time — was a strong desire to believe, and this made me more hopeful than I was before. However, I retained the fear that at any time the rug might be pulled out from under me; I might fall back into depression and lose hope.
Shortly after I began praying the psalm, I arrived at work one day to find that D.D. had hired a new staff member to handle online sales. He was in his 20s, pale and thin, with brown hair and glasses, and I instantly thought he was cute despite my dislike of beards. His name was Rob Hauschild, and he edited Vex — a fanzine with the slogan "Movies Hate You."
[Continued from Part 17. To read previous entries, type "Wuz" into the search box at left.]
Once I began my job in June 1999 as a Web editor/writer for the Kim's Video site, I found out why my boss, D.D. , — the five-foot-six 220-pound bleached-blond French-educated Palestinian communist anarchist transvestite homosexual divorced custodial father of two young boys — said he would have no problem with my being Jewish.
It wasn't a problem for him. In fact, it was a boon. He now had a captive audience upon whom he could take out his anger at Israel — on a daily basis.
I've blocked out most of D.D.'s outbursts. Pretty much all I can remember is that they were frequent and filled with profanity, as though he were holding me personally responsible for all of what he believed were Israel's crimes against Palestinian. I do recall his saying to me one day, "Your people are killing hundreds of Palestinian children." Apparently he was under the impression that Israel was orchestrating some sort of genocidal slaughter.
I wasn't the only target of D.D.'s anti-Semitic wrath. He was a man with a mission. He used to tell me his travails at the hand of the New York City public school system, which was determined to teach his first-grader son about the Holocaust — via a course lasting six whole weeks, he said. (I was skeptical, but its being New York City, anything was possible, I suppose.)
D.D. met with officials of the school and P.T.A., arguing that if his son's class had to be taught about the Holocaust, they should at least be taught about what he called Israel's atrocities against Palestinians as well. But his fight was futile — and his remaining frustration found its target in me.
I wish I could aptly convey what a character D.D. was. I've never known anyone else who made such an effort to be freakish and repulsive, and yet possessed such a quirky wit and even — in a Bizarro World sort of way — charm. The closest comparison I can think of would be the John Waters star Divine, except that D.D. didn't make nearly as strong an effort to look pretty.
There was the time when I showed up at work and found myself getting mysterious funny looks from my co-workers. It didn't make sense, as I was wearing one of my tamer outfits: leopard-print leggings and a white cotton shirt.
Finally, my fellow editor and officemate, a kindly middle-aged Englishman named Dave Davies (no relation to the Kinks guitarist), explained why the odd reaction. My co-workers were wondering if I'd planned my outfit with D.D. — who was wearing a near-identical ensemble, complete with lightly padded bra.
Some friends whose music I've followed for a while have new releases. I admit I'm totally biased, but these albums have nonetheless given me hours of pleasure:
Alan Merrill (with me at right) previously appeared in The Dawn Patrol as "our fave rave shang-a-lang Scheherazade" with his first-person stories of his audition for the Left Banke and his writing "I Love Rock N Roll [second entry down on that page]. The son of singer Helen Merrill and jazzman Aaron Sachs (a Benny Goodman protégé), he has an illustrious history as a pure popmeister.
Alan's latest release is a reissue of his 1971 solo album Merrill 1, made while his star was ascending in the land of the rising sun. (Yes, as the saying goes, he really is big in Japan.) For years, he's been telling me about this, his "Emitt Rhodes" album — a self-penned, McCartneyesque work on which he plays all the guitars and bass (along with some other instruments) and sings all the vocals.
The Rhodes influence is indeed evident on Merrill 1, especially in the blissfully innocent, unaffected vocals and the charmingly miniaturist feel of its catchy three-minute tunes. But Alan's better at harmonizing with himself than Rhodes ever was — at certain points, his vocal blend has a depth that compares favorably with the Hollies. And while some of the album's songs lack Rhodes' astoundingly perfect, near-baroque construction, Alan shows a wider range of influences — particularly Todd Rundgren's most pristine piano-fueled melancholia (think "Baby Let's Swing"), the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (his "Crazy Lady" recalls their "Caroline No"), and early Nilsson (including a brief, blatant homage to "Good Old Desk").
Give a listen to one of Merrill 1's standout tracks, "Everyday All Night Stand," at the CD Baby store. The tune's plugged into that perfect early-Seventies power-pop zeitgeist, with the same kind of gorgeous guitars — run through a Hammond organ's Leslie speaker — that Canadian superstar Pagliaro was doing at the same time (here's one of Pag's best). Not everything on Merril 1 is that strong — at the tender age of 19, Alan had yet to mature as a songwriter — but it's eminently listenable and filled with ear candy.
The Anderson Council's long-awaited second album, The Fall Parade is finally out, and unlike their debut, Coloursound (which featured me on its front cover), it sounds like an album — not just a collection of songs. Gone are the Mod affectations — save for the occasional "And Your Bird Can Sing" riff and singer Peter Horvath's unsinkable British accent. (Admittedly, Peter — at left with me in 2003 — hails from a formerly British territory: New Jersey.) Instead, the Council's moved a few decades into the future, taking production and songwriting cues from their near neighbors the Smithereens, with hints of other Eighties and Nineties acts like Matthew Sweet, XTC, and classic Elvis Costello.
Thankfully, the Council's more recent influences retain a melodic sensibility and jangly guitar sound that's easy on the ears of Sixties pop fans like myself, so The Fall Parade should still appeal to those who dug the revivalist sound of the group's debut. The songs also include a couple of the group's early compositions that didn't make it onto Coloursound, most notably the whimsical "Pinkerton's Assorted Colours," which sounds for all the world like an outtake from The Who Sell Out.
The best of The Fall Parade's newer compositions, like "Strawberry Smell" (with its great cycle of fifths and "Looking at Louth," reflect Peter's ear for inventive chord changes and playfully enigmatic lyrics. The latter's a bit of a problem for me; I always liked Rod Argent better than Ray Davies and Paul McCartney better than Pete Townshend, so lyrics that contain irony, vague symbolism, or similar forms of detachment leave me cold. The words to the tunes on Coloursound, like "Mind Meld Mud" and "Feet of the Guru," were largely nonsense, but they let the listener in on the joke — like Edward Lear for the Cuban-heel set. I've listened to The Fall Parade 20 times and I adore the sound of it, but I have only the faintest idea of what its songs are about. I can only close my eyes and think of England.
Back in 2001, Peter Horvath very kindly recorded a fab demo of a song I wrote: "Girl on the Northern Line." Enjoy!
[Continued from Part 16. To read previous installments, type "Wuz" into the search box at left.]
At the time that I started my job at the Kim's Video Web site in June 1999, something had recently happened that made me more open to faith than I had been in some time.
It had started, as so many things did back then, with a musical obsession. (I was so prone to obsessions that my friend Alan Abramowitz, producer of the Manhattan Cable TV show "Videowave," named my commentary segments "Obsessing With Dawn Eden.") Since my college years in the late 1980s, I had been a great fan of British songwriter John Carter. A founding member of the Ivy League and First Class (co-writing "Beach Baby"), Carter commands a cult following among fans of pure pop for obscure classics like "My World Fell Down" (a minor hit for the U.S. psych-pop act Sagittarius) as well as million-sellers like Herman's Hermits' "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat" and the Music Explosion's "Little Bit of Soul."
The Ivy League, 1965: John Carter (standing), Ken Lewis (left), and Perry Ford
In November 1997, during a trip to London, I was introduced to Carter by rock historian Kingsley Abbott. It was a thrill to meet him after having collected his records for 10 years, and the songwriter did not disappoint. Unlike many of the hitmakers I'd met over the years, he had weathered the Sixties extremely well, retaining a sharp memory and a cheerful spirit — not to mention the same spouse he'd wed back in the day ("Beach Baby" co-writer Gill Shakespeare). (For the record, despite my sycophantic fandom and my penchant for honey-voiced British songsters, my friendship with Carter was purely platonic.)
I asked Carter about his former co-writer Ken Lewis — who, along with Carter, sang background on numerous British Invasion hits — and learned that Lewis was a Christian. In fact, Carter said, "Little Bit of Soul" was Lewis's experiment to see if a song with Christian lyrics could become a pop hit:
Now when you're feelin' low and the fish won't bite You need a little bit o' soul to put you right You gotta make like you wanna kneel and pray And then a little bit of soul will come your way
A salty rock-and-roll Christian! Perhaps G.K. Chesterton — whose books I sought during my U.K. trip and whenever I was in a used bookstore — was right after all; perhaps it was indeed possible for a rebellious spirit to find a home in Christianity.
So what had become of this evangelist to the Carnaby Street set? Bad news. Carter told me that he'd had a falling out with Lewis. The former collaborators knew where to find each other, but hadn't spoken in some time.
Was there a chance of reconciliation, I asked? "No," Carter said firmly.
Having met him, I was inclined to think that Carter must have good reason for not communicating with Lewis, but the idea of there being a rift between the former songwriting partners weighed on me. I was like the kid wanting her parents to get along. For two boyhood friends whose music had brought pleasure — still brought it — to millions of people around the world ... life was too short for them to harbor any kind of misunderstanding.
A few weeks later, I was in a dive bar on Irving Place with a married couple I knew from the music scene, telling them about my U.K. trip. (I feel bad that I can't remember their names; it was my only time seeing them outside a rock club. They were fellow Sixties pop fans who put out a fanzine of Mod-era music and pop culture.) I related what Carter had said about his fallout with Lewis, and for some reason it made me feel very emotional.
I put down my Diet Coke-with-Rose's-lime-juice (I'm not much of a drinker — and alcohol clashed with my antidepressants) to go to the ladies' room. It was one of those typical downtown peeling-paint johns, the walls lined with fading pictures of pulp paperback covers. The Carter/Lewis fallout was still on my mind. As I sat, literally on the toilet, I had the strange urge to pray.
Even back then, it seemed somehow disrespectful to God to pray on the toilet, but I didn't feel like waiting another five seconds. I thought about how my stepfather and other Christian evangelists had sometimes tried to lure me into praying for something that seemed impossible, and promising God that I'd believe if He answered it. It's a time-honored ploy used to back atheists and agnostics into a corner — because such prayers are often answered.
"Dear God," I said, "please let there be a real, positive change in John Carter and Ken Lewis's friendship, so that they reconcile." (I was and am a wordy and inarticulate petititioner.)
"I will pray every day that You do this," I continued, "until You do. And if you do, then I'll believe in You."
I got up — finally — and tears welled in my eyes. I was convinced that my prayer would be answered. I felt it.
And so it went. I prayed every day, day in and day out, for Carter and Lewis to reconcile. I prayed for other things too, like healing from my depression. Sometimes those prayers seemed to be answered, and sometimes they weren't. In any case, I didn't feel that there was any real connection between my prayers and whatever happened in my life. Certainly, my depression didn't get any better; in fact, it got worse. In March 1999, I suffered a nervous breakdown, falling into one of the blackest holes ever, and starving myself down to a record low of 112 pounds. (That's an acceptable weight for one who's 5-foot-2, but starving is not a good way to achieve it.)
Yet, throughout it all, I kept those prayers coming for those dudes who sang the glorious backup vocals on the Who's "I Can't Explain."
I talked to Carter several times during 1998, also visiting him and his wife during another trip to England, and would occasionally ask if he had reconciled with Lewis. The answer was always no.
In early 1999, Carter contacted me to let me know he was coming to New York City. I can't quite remember whose idea it was, but somehow I wound up promoting a live concert by him at the East Village's Sidewalk Cafe.
That I could promote such a concert — handling every aspect down to the guitar rental — at a time when I was fighting a terrible depression and struggling to find temp jobs is a mystery to me. The press release I wrote, filled with delicious Carter trivia, survives on an Internet message board:
... His co-writer on ["My World Fell Down"] was Geoff Stephens, who roped John into singing lead on a record he was making. The record, "Winchester Cathedral," released under the name of the New Vaudeville Band, became England's best-selling single of 1966. (Incidentally, there's no megaphone on that recording, just Carter singing through cupped hands.) ...
Me and John Carter at Sidewalk Cafe, May 8, 1999. Look in my eyes and you see a 30-year-old kid whose depression is taking a desperately needed two-hour holiday. Photo via umo.com.
The concert was a smashing success. All the tables at the club were filled, the money collected in the tip jar (actually the club's tip ukelele) covered the guitar rental, and the crowd cried out for more.
Before the concert, during dinner with him at the Sidewalk, I asked Carter if he'd reconciled with Lewis. Oh, yes, he had. They were friendly again.
My eyes got wide and my jaw dropped. "Wow!" I exclaimed. "That means I have to start believing in God!"
I tried to explain my reaction to Carter, but I'm afraid it just looked odd. Oh, well; being British, he was no doubt used to eccentrics.
From then on, something inside me told me that I would eventually believe. But, contrary to what I had hoped, I didn't get instant faith merely from having my seemingly impossible prayer answered.
For one thing, the prayer wasn't really impossible; as long as two people at odds with one another are alive, there's always the chance that they may reconcile.
For another — and this, I think, is the real problem with encouraging atheists or agnostics to promise faith in return for answered prayer — one answered prayer in a vacuum doesn't really tell you much about God.
If I accepted that God had answered my Carter/Lewis prayer — and it did seem that way — all it really told me was that God was essentially a man in the sky who could choose which prayers to grant and which ones to let slide. It didn't tell me that God was a person, a friend, someone I could talk to. And it didn't have any relevance, as far as I could tell, to the question that plagued me — the conundrum from Job, and the one that a Chesterton character expressed in what was even then one of my favorite books, The Man Who Was Thursday:
Congratulations to Kathy Shaidle, who is celebrating the sixth (!) anniversary of her blog Relapsed Catholic with links to her greatest hits — including a classic that I had missed: "Gidget Vs. Gonzo." Kathy contrasts the life of Hunter S. Thompson with that of Sandra Dee — who died the same day as the gonzo journalist — with Gidget coming out the winner.
"[Thompson] supposedly killed himself because ... he dreaded the indignities of growing old," Kathy writes. "He rode with the Hell's Angels but was scared of Depends?"
Turning in "early" this morning after attending a delightful Jinx Atheneum Society debate on the resolution: "Should Superheroes Have to Register with the Government?" I cast my vote at the end for Ken Silber's argument for the resolution, but Robert A. George's argument against it won over the audience; the vote was 18 to 6. More details to come from Matt Alderman on Shrine of the Holy Whapping.
The "Wuz" series continues late tonight. In the meantime, you are invited to use the comments section below to hold your own discussion of whether superheroes should register with the government.
First they came for The Hulk and I said nothing because I wasn't big, green and filled with anger management issues; then they came for the mutants and I said nothing because I wasn't a mutant; then they came for the superheroes and I said nothing because I wasn't a superhero; then they came for me ...
[Continued from Part 15. To read previous installments, type "Wuz" into the search box at left.]
Kim's Video sales clerks were among the snottiest underpaid retail workers in the city. They worked for less than what they were worth because they craved the employee discounts on indie-label CDs and especially videos of films that couldn't be found anywhere else. (Many of those films were bootlegged in a back-room counterfeit operation that went on day and night, though it took the feds years to find out.)
I was working upstairs, on the chain's fledgling Web site, but the cachet of working at Kim's — and especially on St. Mark's Place — went to my head quickly. After working temp jobs where I had to dress up in bland office wear, it was exciting to be in an anything-goes environment. Plus, I was still reveling in my depression-induced weight loss and wanted to wear all the clothes I'd dreamed of wearing back when I was a size 14. Take a pair of crocheted hose or black patent-vinyl stockings ("bed boots") bought at one of the St. Mark's fetish boutiques, add a spaghetti-string micro-mini nightgown or maybe a velvet minidress if I had a date, pile on some costume jewelry, and voila! Look at me, I'm a hip online pop-culture journalist!
Frugging at a live concert — probably Gary Lewis & The Playboys — at the World Trade Center, summer 1999. I believe I had just come from work at Kim's Video. The velvet minidress is slightly more modest than what I normally wore to work.
As much as I wanted to rule the East Village with my newly defined collarbone and my encyclopedic knowledge of Sixties pop music, I had the nagging feeling that there was something more to life. However, I didn't want to think about it too much, because looking within meant looking at the depression that was always fighting to reach the surface.
By then, my mother had long given up on Catholicism in favor of a variant of Protestantism known as Messianic Judaism — essentially evangelical Christianity with some Sh'ma's thrown in. She had won over my stepfather Ron to the faith, though he was not baptized. At Ron's behest, their marriage in 1998 took place in a Jewish ceremony at the local Conservative temple. They kept the rabbi in the dark about their Christian beliefs.
While I often visited Mom and Ron, who exuded evangelical fervor, Christianity struck me as little more than a means for some people to find contentment with the world. I had long given up on finding that contentment myself, through Christianity or any other means save for the short-term Band-Aids of sex and music, and the distant hope of true love.
During the few times that I had attended church services, I had tried to work myself up. At best, I'd get a warm, fuzzy feeling that would uplift me for a day or so until some disappointment knocked me back down again.
But there was one thing about Christianity that appealed to me even when I felt that faith was beyond my reach. It was the idea that Christianity could produce someone like G.K. Chesterton.
Back in December 1995, as I was doing a phone interview with Ben Eshbach, leader of the rock band Sugarplastic. I asked him what he was reading those days. His answer was Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday.
The name G.K. Chesterton meant nothing to me. I assumed he was an author of quaint comedic British novels, like P.G. Wodehouse.
I bought The Man Who Was Thursday out of curiosity and was fascinated. Being a fan of Lewis Carroll from childhood, I was instantly sucked in by Chesterton's surreal plot twists, especially with the playful ways he would switch around the heroes and villains.
Soon, I was picking up everything by Chesterton that I could get my hands on — Orthodoxy, Heretics, The Blatchford Controversies, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and The Ball and the Cross — as well as Maisie Ward's biography of him. I was also e-mailing questions to Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, via the organization's newly created Web site. I think my correspondence had to do with the mention in The Ball and the Cross of a nefarious "Dr. Hertz," which I suspected was a reference to my great-great-uncle, J.H. Hertz, Chief Rabbi of the British Empire during Chesterton's time. It disturbed me that an author whom I liked so much would take Hertz's name in vain. (Ahlquist didn't think Chesterton meant any slander on the rabbi.)
Reading Chesterton, it struck me for the first time that there was something exciting about Christianity. Up until then, I had been politically liberal and thought that Christians apart from my mom were a faceless mass of white-bread Moral Majority types who controlled the world. I wanted to be a rebel, and part of defining myself that was was to not be a Christian. Chesterton suggested to me that it was the other way around; Christians were the true rebels.
As I say, Chesterton suggested that to me, planting the idea in my head, but believing it was another matter. I didn't see any Christians when I walked down St. Mark's Place — and I certainly didn't notice any inside Kim's Video.
A kindly You Tube user has put up a clip of the late L.A. singer/songwriter Judee Sill on the BBC's "Old Grey Whistle Test" in 1973. She's performing her gorgeous song "The Kiss," from her Heart Food album:
Hard to believe there was a time when a songwriter and singer that gifted got national airtime (in England, anyway).
I loved Sill's first album from the get-go, but I bought Heart Food twice in the 1990s, only to give it away each time. I wanted very much to like it, but resented its Jesus-haunted lyrics. (Today, I own it on both vinyl and CD.)
Two hundred thirty years and counting. Some of my family celebrated our liberty at a Styx concert last night; my stepfather told me the band reminisced fondly about the Bicentennial — "back in 1975."
[Continued from Part 14. To read the whole series, enter "Wuz" into the search box at left.]
By the time I turned 30, in September 1998, it was clear that my freelance writing jobs — most of it then for Mojo and Salon — were not going to bring me up to a subsistence income anytime soon. But this time, when I asked my mother and stepfather for financial help, they said they'd be more inclined to cover my bills if I got a job — any job.
The idea of working "any" job scared me because I imagined if I gave up whatever tiny foothold I had in the music business, I would lose it forever. But I was more scared of having to move back home, so I began a succession of temporary and part-time jobs.
At that time, I was the thinnest I had ever been in my adult life. From a high of 172 in my college years, I had gone down to 117. The weight loss resulted partly from counting calories, partly from being on the antidepressant Wellbutrin, and partly just from being depressed. In the past, I had what was called an atypical depression, where I would react to the dips in my mood by eating more. This time, feeling like I could control neither my career's direction nor the direction of my love life, I went for the only thing I could control — my eating.
And so it was that, in February 1999, I used my weight to help me land a part-time job as a counselor at a branch of the Diet Center on Nassau St., a short walk from the World Trade Center PATH station. My job was to weigh clients, test their body-mass index, give them pep talks, and answer their questions in such a way that they would stick with the program. (In case you're wondering how much training such counselors get before they are left alone with clients, the answer is one week.)
I felt guilty advising Diet Center clients when my own weight loss had nothing to do with the program. Often, I would just tell them they looked great as they were and that they didn't need to lose weight.
A couple of months at the Diet Center was all I could take. I then got some temp jobs, had several crushes of varying levels of pain (I got crushes back then about as often as Seattle gets rain), went through a terrible suicidal patch, and dumped my prurient psychiatrist for a kind female social worker.
In May, I saw an ad in the Village Voice for a Web site editor/writer for the Manhattan chain Kim's Video, a music-and-movies operation that specialized in cult-classic films. It wasn't often that a full-time job writing about pop culture came up, so I applied and was called to meet with the Web site's manager, whom I'll call "D.D."
I met D.D. in his office on the third floor of Kim's flagship store on St. Mark's Place in the heart of the East Village — a neighborhood I'd adored since I was a teen. Standing about 5-foot-6, he weighed about 220 pounds and had some sort of mild chesty protrusions, His Mediterranean skin contrasted with his bleached hair, which stuck out in a stubby ponytail at an odd angle. Oh, yes, and he wore glasses.
He proceeded to do more talking than listening. Much more. He explained to me that he was a French-educated Palestinian communist atheist homosexual. On the glass of his hall window was pasted a snapshot of two boys, ages 6 and 1 — his sons, he explained. He won custody of them after being divorced from their mother, who was "crazy."
Finally, D.D. told me a little about the job and asked if I had any questions.
"Well, there is one thing ..." I ventured. "My résumé gives my name as Dawn Eden, which is my first and middle name, but my full name is Dawn Eden Goldstein. You mentioned that you're Palestinian. Would my being Jewish be a problem?"
If you haven't visited the Raving Atheist in a while, do stop by and see how he continues to anger and befuddle his longtime readers as he digs for gold. Please pray that he finds it, as with the treasure-seeker described in Matthew 13:44.
P.S. I just discovered that my patron saint Maximilian Kolbe must have been following the Raving Atheist from the beginning. Read the post on Kolbe that RA wrote one week after starting the site.
Continued from Part 13 (type "wuz" into search box at left to see all previous installments):
My career as a popular music historian peaked from 1992 through 1994, the only years after graduating college that I was really making enough money to freelance full-time. Most of my income during that period came from writing liner notes for CD reissues of 1960s pop, for which I would do a great deal of original research (which wasn't easy before the Internet was a resource) and interview the original artists and recording personnel. It was boom times for CD reissues, when vintage artists' music was coming out on CD for the first time; not like today, when the hit artists have all been re-re-repackaged.
During lean times, I got a lot of help from each of my parents. They weren't rich, but their concern over my depression, combined with their faith that I would eventually find my niche in the working world, made them want to do whatever they could to sustain me until I could get it together.
There were many times when it looked like I'd open a door that would lead to bigger things. I'd get a cover story in Billboard, or an assignment to write liner notes for a Connie Francis boxed set, and I'd tell my parents that I was certain more work would come out of it. But I didn't get a second assignment from Billboard, despite editor Timothy White's telling me he liked my story (he explained that he rarely used freelancers), and Bear Family Records head Richard Weize rejected my liner notes for the Connie Francis box because they were too lukewarm. (He was right; she was a very nice woman who gave me a great interview, but I couldn't muster much enthusiasm for her music.)
The liner-note work slowed abruptly in the mid-1990s as labels, having released reissues by their best-selling artists, scaled back their reissue programs. I managed to continue freelancing for publications such as the British music glossy Mojo, but somehow it took me literally years to realize that unless I had the discipline to write a book — which I did not have at that time — there was no way that I would again make a steady living as a rock historian. By that point, there were far more people who fancied themselves vintage-pop experts than there were when I began my research in the mid-Eighties and I couldn't hack the competition.
At the same time, my depression — a cyclical condition that alternated between normal phases and black holes, with no manic highs to break things up — continued to spiral downward. My psychiatrist would prescribe me lithium to take the edge off the lows. To stave off the black holes, he would prescribe a strong antidepressant.
The antidepressant did give me a lift, and they would make the normal part of my mood cycle last longer. But my mood would still eventually dip and I'd be suicidal again. It was as though some part of me was determined to feel bleak, even it meant battling the chemicals in my bloodstream. Any antidepressant that my psychiatrist would prescribe would work only for a couple of years, by which time my brain would rebel against it so strongly that I'd have to switch. I started on Prozac, then went to Wellbutrin, then Paxil.
My depression was aggravated by my loneliness. I resented the fact that I didn't have a boyfriend — or, at least, that I didn't have one who lived within 2,000 miles. (I had a number of long-distance ones, a fact which I chalked up to having bad luck meeting men who lived close by. It wasn't until later that I realized the distance suited me, as I was afraid of the intimacy — and the corresponding risk of rejection — that a close-distance relationship would entail.)
From mid-1991 onward, my parents had been paying for me to see an upper East Side psychiatrist, an Ivy Leaguer whose status as shrink-to-the-stars and Laurence Olivier-type patrician looks dazzled me. In fact, I'll call him Dr. Olivier. He was known for his psychopharmacological talents, so I could rely on him to boost my antidepressants if I was feeling down — which was, as I said, often. He was also super-encouraging, which I appreciated very much at the time. Actually, he was too encouraging.
Dr. Olivier liked it when I discussed my sexual exploits. I mean, really liked it. I never heard a word of caution from him. It didn't matter if I was having casual affairs. As long as I was having fun in the short term, the doctor was quite happy to hear that I was getting any.
I could ask Dr. Olivier anything about men's anatomy or sexual behavior and he would gladly enlighten me. He never made any advances on me, so I felt safe. In retrospect, however, it was probably not the healthiest psychiatrist-patient relationship.
His ears would perk up if I told him that I thought a romantic interest of mine was a bit too interested in men. It would make him talk about how the Greeks had an understanding of male bonding, and how you can see this healthy sexual tension today in locker rooms when men snap towels at one another's butts.
Often, Dr. Olivier would illustrate his explanations with scenes from movies, which didn't really have that much to do with what we were discussing. He'd rhapsodize about the scene in "A Room With a View" where Daniel Day-Lewis goes skinny-dipping, noting how the actor must have been very secure about his manhood to swim naked in a cold pond. Only he didn't use the word "manhood."
His favorite scenes were from David Bowie movies: "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" and especially "The Hunger." Many times, he would recount the tender scene between Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon — "Sapphic bonding," he called it. (At least, he said it was tender; I've never seen it myself.)
Actually, now it makes sense why he never made any advances.
Alan Merrill (with me at right) previously appeared in The Dawn Patrol as "our fave rave shang-a-lang Scheherazade" with his first-person stories of 
Turning in "early" this morning after attending a delightful Jinx Atheneum Society debate on the resolution: "Should Superheroes Have to Register with the Government?" I cast my vote at the end for 
