"No one will ever love you honestly,
No one will ever love you for your honesty."

The only two things I'm good at are my complete loyalty, and telling it like it is (unless I think someone is sensitive.)
So if that's true, I'm fucked. And I'm smiling because it's kind of funny. I hate to sound sentimental, but I think if anyone was going to love me for being just as fucking wicked crazy as I am, it will be Scott. We grew up together, so I don't think he could suddenly start disliking the things I do, and he never complains. He even thought it was funny when I was so furiously angry with him that I threw all his clothes out of the closet and snatched them out of his hands when he tried to put them back on hangers. I'm pretty set.

Honesty

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He got a tattoo finally, he tells me.  I already know, but I wanna see.  With a grin, he lift his t-shirt up over his bare chest.

And there it is: Los Angeles, written in ghetto-script over his heart.  Very East L.A.  Very Cali-style tattoo.  Unexpected, but not shocking just the same.

It's so Jon.  He laughs at my response, and lowers his shirt to reach for his rum and Coke.  That's Jon, alright.  A California purist; L.A. loyalist.  A Hollywood influenced, beach bumming, cigarette-sucking, high-rollin', Burbank movie-star partier intellectual who's up to no good but too smart to get in trouble.

It's a Friday night, and we're hanging out around the pool, drinking and smoking and eating frozen pizza.  Someone has a hooka, and it smells like bananas.  Jon's chest is raw and bright red.  Every night is a party at this house, and I wonder how Chris gets anything done living with him.  I wonder how Jon stands Fresno.  In the years I've known him, I've lost count of the weekend calls he's made to friends to relay about the party he was at, or how broke he is now, or how many Hollywood high-ups his dad had over for champagne and fillet mignon.  Fresno offers him nothing but dirt, and he itches to graduate and get the hell out.  I've watched him walk out the door at 2AM to drive home so that he could go surfing back in L.A.  Even today, he is back in Hollywood, working as an editor.

Jon belongs in L.A.  He wears his loyalty over his heart, etched onto his soul.  I find myself envying him and his tattoo as I sip my rum and dangle my feet in the luke-warm pool.  Tonight is a night for loyalty, it seems; Thomas is there, and Jon's bro, and all the boys.  I know that I'll have to stay the night, and we'll probably go out for hangover breakfast in the morning.  Good times.

I love Fresno, or the idea of Fresno.  I value my ties to it.  I will never be able to clear the dirt from my lungs.  We are simpatico, me and the burdens of the Central Valley.  She is my heritage, having raised me up with brown hands of peach fuzz and sweat.

I would never get Fresno tattooed over my heart.  Fresnans never leave, but don't stay out of loyalty.  They are taught to believe that there are no options.  The only thing that brings me back is family and habit, and the longing for tree-fresh fruit.  I believe there is a better place for me to flourish artistically, (though I've given L.A. a shot, and it certainly didn't make the cut.) 

I may not be as hardcore as a Los Angeleno, but there is something there that creeps up to resemble fondness.  I consider my loyalties, and I suppose that Fresno will always be home base.  She's the home of my family, my first love, hard times, and high times.  When I leave I miss her, and when I return, she makes me sigh.  While Jon lives in The City of Angels, I live in the ash tree.   I may fly from her dusty nest, but she is mi madre.  I don't blame Jon for  paying everlasting homage to his city.

Perhaps one day I will have a branch of peach blossoms reaching up my side, caught in a prefect state of coming to fruition.

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Why are you loyal to certain brands/stores? What keeps you coming back?
Sponsored by Microsoft Small Business.

Sometimes loyalty has nothing to do with repeat business.  Sometimes one company simply has a monopoly and if legitimate competition existed, then people would not keep going back.

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Hachiko Waits

Leslea Newman

One of my favorite wastes of time, Mental_Floss has a feature today on 6 Utterly Loyal Dogs.  Number one on the list is Hachiko.  I was pretty sure I'd already posted about my love for his story before.  Either I imagined that or I just tag so poorly that I cannot find it.

These are two juvenile books that I recommend.  Hachiko waited at the Shibuya station every day for his master-- even after he had long-since died.  fIt's a sad & beautiful story of loyalty (loyalty which some of you cat-persons out there consider to be a character flaw in dogs.  I beg to disagree.)  I wish I could have met Hachiko.  I would have given him a hotdog.  The sad thing about it is that after he died the vet said that it was probably the wooden skewers in the meat that passersby fed him that precipitated his death.

Here's a bit of film that more or less explains Hachiko's wait.

Hachiko: The True Story of a Loyal Dog (Bccb Blue Ribbon Picture Book Awards (Awards))

Pamela S. Turner

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Earth (A Deepa Mehta Film)

A few nights ago, I got to watch Deepa Mehta's film EARTH, the first in her EARTH, WATER, FIRE trilogy that provoked such a firestorm of protest in India. EARTH is about the unraveling of India upon the acquisition of Independence from the British in 1948. It looks at this period of great anguish and suffering through the eyes of one young girl (Lenny Baby) and a circle of her young adult caregivers. The film opens with Lenny Baby intentionally breaking a China dish, as though she senses the divisions to come and needs to symbolize them in some tangible way so that she can talk about her fears. Needless to say, no one really takes notice of the message she was trying to send, just as no one REALLY took time to think about the emotional and psychological stresses that a free India would bring to bear on its diverse populations.

India had always been a multi-cultural and multi-religious society. But it had always had some caste or some foreign power to regulate their co-existence. Political Independence demanded that whole new ways of thinking about one another be developed. Unfortunately, it led to the surfacing of deep and buried suspicians and animosities. Muslims, the minority, did not believe that they could trust a democratic and mostly Hindu India to protect its cultural distinctives. Sikhs and Parsees were forced to align themselves with one group or the other. It became too difficult to take the time needed to distinguish between one "sort" of Muslim or one "sort" of Hindu and another and individuals became identified as simply cells of the group, either enemy or friend.

 “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggression.” Sigmund Freud

And EARTH looks at this one group of comrades, some Sikh, some Hindu, some Muslim, some Parsee and it looks at how the forces of the wider community eventually split them apart and set them to warring against each other. In the midst of them, Lenny Baby, a nine or ten year old girl who loves them all is also split apart. In one of the most poignant scenes, She takes a doll and rips it apart, as she herself is being torn apart.  She is hopelessly doomed and in her childlike way, she knows it. She loves a Hindu. She loves a Muslim. She loves a Sikh. She speaks English. Her parents are Parsee. In a world where all these are killing each other in horrible ways she too will be forced to chose.

It raises important questions. Will we always resort in our loyalties to the communities were were born into? Can we create communities from the various "pre-loaded communities" and make them just as solid, just as enduring, just as formidable? And why can't we all see that really, we are most healthy when we feel free to belong to a number of communities that can overlap. Of course that makes life more complicated but, can we not manage it?

Have you ever done something symbolic, hoping that someone would see what you did and hear your cry for help in it?

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To Kill a King

“not what they want but what is good for them.”
Remark by Oliver Cromwell.

Tonight's movie was To Kill a King. It is the story of the Roundhead's victory over the armies of King Charles in one of England's more interesting revolutions. It's about an inspired movement to dethrone a tyrant without having a clear plan for what sort of regime will replace it. It is about how even leaders of revolutions come to find out that their brothers-in-arms have different visions. And it is about how easily wealth can purchase power out from under idealism as long as there is a table to make deals under. I found myself asking "Am I watching a movie about King Chalres, Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Fairfax, the Tower of London, and England? or am I watching a movie about Saddam Hussein, George Bush, Colin Powell, Guantanamo Bay, and Iraq?"

Soon after the Roundhead armies defeat the armies of the monarchists, King Charles goes about bribing parliament to vote to keep him in power. Oliver Cromwell wants to see him tried and beheaded. Lord Thomas Fairfax sees a more moderate approach to change in view, seeing only a need to get Charles to sign a new Constitution limiting his power. Unfortunately for him, he is caught in the middle. His family's privileges have their origins in the Monarchical system whereby families are rewarded with special treatment for serving and defending the crown. The inequalities that he enjoys are founded on a belief in the divine right of kings so ... how can he kill the king?

Eventually, he determines to kill his friend Cromwell instead. It is only King Charles who is not conflicted by second guesses in this portrayal of regime change and personal loyalty. Fairfax's loyalty to his wife, to his children, to his family, to tradition cannot take him on as long a leap as Oliver Cromwell takes. Cromwell seeks not a reformed old order but a completely reformatted new order.

... And yet, a few years into his new regime, Cromwell has to consider that the idea of a king might have its advantages. The following comes from an article by Patrick Little in History Today; Feb2007, Vol. 57 Issue 2, p24-31,

"If his highness can be moved to accept of it [the crown], the services he hath done the nations have abundantly deserved it; but if he who hath so much merited it do judge it fit to continue his refusal of it, the contempt of a crown -- which can not proceed but from an extraordinary virtue -- will render him, in the esteem of all whose opinion is to be valued, more honourable than any that wear it.

WHEN THE AMBASSADOR to France, Sir William Lockhart, wrote this in April 1657, it had been nearly two months since the first formal offer by Parliament to make Oliver Cromwell king, and in England people were waiting anxiously for the Lord Protector to make up his mind. Would he choose to become King Oliver or not?"

Ultimately, Cromwell went with his convictions and insisted that regardless of the pragmatics, it would be a sin to resurrect the idea of monarchy.

"Truly the providence of God has laid this title aside providentially … I would not seek to set up that that providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again."

His reference to rebuilding Jericho is from a passage in Joshua where God instructs that the city of Jericho, once razed, should never be rebuilt.

Again, the parallels to Iraq are interesting. Should Iraq have been completly deBaathified? should the Iraqi army have been dismissed entirely? How much change was possible in Iraq in such a short period of time?  Should America have ever started using "Cromwellian methods" to achieve what may have been idealistic objectives?

“No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.”
Cromwell on personal fortunes.

Question for Comment: How are you affected when you feel that a cause you have dedicated yourself to has been taken over by someone who is using it for their own purposes? 

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Happy fuckin' Friday 13th.

The whole day went alright, until about 10 PM last night. Andi, Jayne and I were driving to a show, when I swear to you a pothole about the size of a T-rex came out of nowhere and fucked my car's front end up. I was mentally head-desking, while Andi and Jayne were "oh shit"-ing as we pulled into a church parking lot (ha ha God, ha ha).

I get out, and yes, the tire was flat. Rim looked ok, but tire--flat. So what the hell. It's dark, there's like one streetlight, and I don't have my phone. Jayne doesn't have her phone. Andi, however, had her phone, so we called my sister.

My KIND AND LOVING SISTER, in no uncertain terms, basically to go fuck off because she was with her boobie-boo-boo kissy-wuvvy John. And did not have time to come FUCKING HELP ME. Us. And then she got all defensive when I grabbed the phone away from Andi and was PISSED AS FUCK?!!

Did I mention also that, at this point, I notice a little trail of fluid flowing away from my car? I get down on my knees (in my skirt and white shirt) and notice a little drip coming from where my radiator is (it's dark, I couldn't see the radiator itself, just drippies silhouetted against the orange glow of a seedy streetlamp).

So, Andi calls Cooter. Apparently he felt the need to bring Alyssa, Jennifer, and Other Random Girl along with him, so they just sat around talking in some weird language that started a lot with "skwiz". Cooter successfully puts the spare on, and comments that he can't find any damage on the tire, and that it might have just had the air knocked out of it. Please Goddess please. Cooter looks under the car, under the hood, he's not 100% sure about the radiator, but he said if I went straight home I would be fine.

Oh, and I neglected to mention how, once Cooter got the spare tire on, the cheap jack that comes with the car for such emergencies then tilted, and fucking BENT itself to an unusable state. Piece of shit.

Andi and Jayne gathered their stuffs, piled in with Cooter and left on their merry way. I limped my merry way back home and watched Metalocalypse, silently fuming at my sister. Dumb cunt. I'm so completely and utterly giving her the cold shoulder the whole weekend. I haven't spoken a word to her today, and the shitty part is I don't think she's noticed.

That's the shit that hurts the most, damn it. If her number had even popped up on my PHONE at ten o clock at night and I didn't know if she was somewhere safe, I would have saddled up right then and there for a fuckin' rescue.

Now my work schedule is all fucked up cuz I'm having to bum rides and shit. I rue the realization that up in Tennessee, Sonja and other awesome people are at Bonnaroo, drinking and dancing all night and all day and having fun.

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