all soul's day

I knew without planning it that the account was going to be finished on this day. That's not just serendipity, it's the architecture of fate. Rather than the dead burying the dead--part of why we have historical amnesia in this country--I, the living, am burying my part of Jeane. Why she picked me to assist her I believe is complicated. For one, I know she didn't want me pissing in the tent and preferred me pissing outwards. You could say she wanted to keep me on ice during the proceedings, most certainly a good possibility there. That means I was definitely onto something, maybe many fundamental somethings about her case. The problem was, not a lot of that was exculpatory. Such is life. Her suffering is over, ours continues until we meet our own endings, like a story. Anything ending tends to choke the best of us up, it's got a sadness to it that's part of the human condition. And so it goes. I'll probably even lay out a meal for her, and all of the people who I and my family have lost--who everyone has lost, because that's what All Soul's Day is about, remembering, honoring, and continuing on.

Postscript 11.03.12--And so it did, so mote it be, the circle is completed.

On blowing your own balls off to spite your heart...

This has been irking me for a very long time: felons, in most states in America, don't ever get to vote again, YET we're constantly electing them into public office. Not only is it wrong to keep people who have paid their debt to society from ever voting again--especially considering that having been incarcerated, they've seen the real face of this nation--it's also anti-democratic and unjust. It doesn't fix anything.

I have a theory, and I'm not alone: for the most part, we're still living in Massachusetts Bay colony. We're still an almost hopelessly puritanical nation and culture, and that means there can never be enough punishment. Even with wave-after-wave of immigration, and we're talking in the tens-of-millions of people of just about every culture, it persists. How is that? Why is that?

I think there's a simple and complicated explanation. While Americans like to think that there's always going to be another "new wave" of wealth in this nation, I think old money and (most importantly) aristocratic privilege still rules this country and will for the foreseeable future. The image of the noose-wielding puritan patriarch haunts the social landscape of America where Old Testament punishment rejects even the New Testament message of forgiveness. Forget about the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, that blew past a lot of people in this country, and especially the quasi-aristocratic wackos who rule over us. The fact is, they hate the everyman and woman and want to make the rest of us suffer, mostly for their own sins.

I don't claim to know what the solution to this is except to never stop fighting it in every way humanly possible. We should insist on everyone having the right to vote, frankly, and even for at least those who have served their sentences in the inhuman dungeons of America where even privatized slavery is making its return with the ever-encroaching war on drugs. The laws regarding prostitution made the outlines of this puritanical hypocrisy patently clear to me in the DC Madam case with a two women dead, and the men, the "Johns" (especially the rich ones), merely walking away from it, and without a scratch. My dislike for these rich men will be with me for the rest of our respective lives. Never mind the "average Joe" ones, they didn't really deserve the attention some of them got.

It's the self-appointed patriarchs that I will always take issue with...

From the Blough family vaults: A dirty postcard to a mistress

Kansas, 1907--It seems my great-great grandfather liked to screw-around on his wife. This is close to 101-years-ago, when the dead are scarcely a memory any longer. If you want an idea of how much you're going to be remembered--if at all--this is a good lesson.

But be wise, dear friend, and be sure to destroy all of the physical evidence that might fall into the wrong hands of, say...a historian. Then, they, your descendants and others in the future, could accidentally discover what a fool, a coward, and a scoundrel you were. One ancestor forgot to burn a pile of his post card collection, the majority-of-which were written to his mistress. Oh, it was a very different America, and yet the it's still the same. There was Populism them with all its own internal-contradictions just as there is today. Some of my ancestors were prairie Populists.

As far as I can tell from the accounts, my great-great grandfather was a very wrong-headed small businessman who owned a hotel for a time. It burned-down around the time of this card. A petty bourgeois, some of the worst among us, and I believe his own father was a barber and leather-worker in the Old West. Since the Revolutionary War, some of the Bloughs have worked closely with horses, and we're a vast surname. I have my great-great-great grandfather's Old West Bible. You have to wonder whose hair he cut during his time living in 19th century Kansas. He died in the 1890s of poor health, possibly tuberculosis or pneumonia.

On December 25th, 1907, his mistress felt it important to mail him saying that her ride on the railways had gone well. Wonderful, at least they were satisfied, though I doubt Mrs. Blough was. If you think everything nowadays is new, unique, and that you're the first person to have sex...you must be under the age of 30. That's right kids, you're not the first people to discover illicit-fucking, I hate breaking it to you. Most of you are as boring as you suspect, so try to work on that one. Your parents are full-of-shit too, so why imitate them so much?

My point is, I reject a lot of things in my family history. Many people do, or like to think that they do. I'm not mistaken in my assertions, but all Americans of every color harbor bigotry and racist conditioning, it's inherent to our culture.

While these lily-white slobs were playing house, thousands of Native Americans were being herded into the reservations, thousands were being forcibly-sterilized for being "different" or troubled, millions of workers were being exploited and flogged like slaves, while blacks were being lynched from the highest-trees and still worked as slaves when they weren't being hounded under vagrancy laws; and while our military was slaughtering untold thousands of Filipinos, these ancestors--not the mistress--of mine were screwing in their ignorance. Such are the lives of the middle class.

It's a funny little card from an unfunny little era, not so different from our own. It was yesterday, and I reject the racism and the hypocrisies of that time and this era. Why is reincarnation necessary at all?

Postscript, 09.18.2008: There are what appear to be remnants of writing along the left-margin of the postcard. Yes, some of them are stains from deterioration, very perceptive. I'm guessing it's a reference to the spurned- wife.