Abation, LOL!!!

The New York Times recently reported that IM chat slang is creeping into school reports, driving teachers crazy. It also seems to be making its way just as inappropriately into pregnancy scare letters. Look at this gem that E found in a newly returned book, a note in which some young lady contemplates the future direction of her relationship after a potential pregnancy crisis.

dear Simon,

Since our scare, ive been thinking. We are seriously not ready for stuff like this. We too young and financially, emotionally not ready. I mean what if I was, what then? You get? I don’t know. Would you want me to have had the abation? This scare has really got me thinking about the Future. Just makes me really think. I just feel scared and insecure about the future.

I just don’t know. The last scare really really scared me. I’m still really really scared. I was actually really considering it, thinking about it. What if I was. idk. I feel kinda confused. So sorry. I think I confused you too. Boo! THE END I think! LOL!!!!

Simon's 'boo' is kissing cousins to Amber Richardson, my favorite Onion columnist.

Crocuta crocuta

I have a soft spot for the misunderstood creatures of the world, the spotted hyena in particular.

They are an evolutionary oddity, a chimera, with snaky long necks and strangely shortened rear legs that give them their comical, awkward gait. Although they resemble a bear/dog/lion mixture, their closest relative, and not a close one, is the mongoose.

But here’s where spotted hyenas get really weird – the males and females are nearly impossible to tell apart, so much so that it widely believed until not that long ago that spotted hyenas were hermaphrodites. Females are awash in androgen and have scrotum like sacks and a pseudo-penis, just like what you hear happens to certain juiced up competitive female body builders. Actually, in the hyena’s case this pseudo penis (which they can make erect at will) is a fusion of the clitoris, labia of the vagina. Hyenas give birth through this narrow tunnel, which makes childbirth a risky proposition and frequently results in the death of the first time mother or the first cub, who will suffocate before it can make its way out. The females are highly aggressive, and the dominant female will try to kill all other females in her litter, sometimes within seconds of birth.

They live in female dominated, matriarchal packs. Male relatives are usually driven off, presumably to prevent inbreeding. As one hyena researcher states, “Female dominance imposes unusual diffidence and patience on males. Their obvious fear of female aggression makes courtship an often amusing spectacle.

Although labeled as scavengers, hyenas are skilled hunters. A pack can reduce a cape buffalo down to its hooves in minutes. Actually, hyenas will eat the hooves (and horn, teeth and pelt), extract what calcium there is to be had and then regurgitate it like an owl pellet.

This is a picture of a friend of mine taken while he was in Ethiopia. Hyenas descend upon this one town at night, presumably because they’re fed as a tourist attraction. Looks like he can feel that hyenas hot breath on his face.

Kicking it at the BK Lounge

Last Sunday E was at the sketchiest Burger King in the city, which, naturally, is located right across the street from the library. A seedy looking man leaned in the door and called to his lady, who was standing next to the food pickup station, clutching a grimy receipt.

“Oh, honey,” he said in the stilted, carefully enunciated words of a bad liar, "We're going to be late for…church, so you better just get a refund for our meal. We cannot wait any longer.”

She shuffled over to the cash register and asked for a refund.

The manager gave her the once over. “Ma'am, this food was purchased for you two, not by you two. I will only give a cash refund to the person who bought the food for you.”

Obviously some misguided Samaritan had bought them a meal in lieu of a cash handout, which of course they had absolutely no interest in, since you can’t trade street drugs for a flame broiled Whopper. After a lot of righteous indignation, she gave up and skulked out. She and her life partner then walked off down the street, bickering, I'm sure, over which one had failed in his oer her part of their sad little grift. Sebastian and Michelle ride again!

This city spends a staggering 80K on services per homeless person. They are not going hungry, believe me, despite the gauntlet of increasingly aggressive cant one has to face coming to and fro the library. Sorry that I sound so jaded, but cash handouts do nothing but fuel addiction and support an underground economy of drugs that is ruinous to the quality of life for all involved. One of my fedup colleagues will scream at people, primarily tourists, that she sees handing out money to panhandlers around the library, “Enablers! Quit ruining my city!”

Happy Easter

We're going to have our own Easter egg hunt in the stacks of the the library today and by "Easter eggs" I mean human feces.

David Sedaris did a hilarious segment on This American Life about this phenomenon, although he focuses mostly on the goings on at large retail chains. His theory is that it is an acting out, a fecal uprising, against faceles corporatation, like throwing a rock through a Starbucks window at a G-8 demonstration. He became intrigued after his boyfriend mentioned offhandedly one day that when he worked at The Gap customers would often use the dressing rooms as bathrooms, even though there were bathrooms located conveniently throughout the mall where this Gap was. Sedaris, furious that Hugh withheld such fascinating material from him, embarks on his own informal research project about these incidences by polling everyone he meets who worked at a store if this had ever happened. My favorite reponse was from an elderly woman he just met who had worked at Target. She grasped his hands and gave him a deep, haunted look.

"Why, however did you know?"

She reported employees would find poo all over Target, but the most popular place was in the interior of the circular clothing racks. I suppose humans are no better than caged monkeys, flinging our poo as an act of defiance and rage. As thoroughly revolting as that is, I was relieved to know that the public library is not an isolated target of this sort of bio-vandalism.

Billy hatches on egg

Or puts the unborn in its place. Although this cannot be comfortable for Billy, and it certainly is not for me, my ever expanding abdomen has become his new favorite perch. I suspect he senses that there's a rival in there who must be told his place in the pack. Or perhaps he is trying to help me incubate it in his own special way.

According to the Dog Wheeesperer, some of the ways dogs exert dominance are to sit upon, lean against or place a body part upon whomever/whatever they're trying dominate. Because Billy is the most nervous and insecure alpha ever, he cannot be direct about it and has to stealth dominate. Whenever we have guests over Billy will sidle up next to the "intruder," curl up, feign sleep, stretch and then subtly but deliberately place a paw on them. In his little dog mind, hiearchy has been established. and he is now the boss of them.

This does not bode well.

Beautiful

During my last hour on the desk some workmen were jackhammering stonework that had become a tripping hazard not 20 feet away. The noise was deafening and made meaningful reference work or even conversation impossible. As frustrating and nerve rattling as the conditions were, I was reminded of my all time favorite Snopes entry.

Fun fact: More than a quarter of pregnant West Virginians smoke! You stay classy, West Virginia.

Supposedly babies in utero will begin to squirm and kick when mothers even THINK about lighting up.

A word from Spoon

I am completely disgusted. Your pregnancy is ridiculously long and the results unimpressively small. I myself gestated a brood of six puppies in just 63 days. By the time you reached your fourth month I had my puppies whelped, weaned and sold off to good homes for a tidy profit. I also had my figure back.

This fills me with dread

Here is a photograph that really showcases the infamous Key head. Doesn't it make you wince? I imagine my poor, dear great-grandmother is gazing down upon her baby (either my grandmother or great-aunt) in disbelief that she survived childbirth. Such an immense, disproportionate head doesn’t even seem evolutionarily possible.

Has it really been over a month since I posted last? This pregnancy has made me completely good for nothing. At least the constant, gnawing queasiness has ceased. It's hard to believe that not too long ago a woman's entire adult life was a continuous cycle of birthing, nursing and child rearing. You see how many might find death a welcome relief.

Hell Labs: Ironic Punishments Division

I do apologize for dropping off the face of the earth, but I've just feeling too sick to write. For the past few months I have been whipsawing between nausea and voracity. The cruelest part of the whole situation is that it's like being carsick, in that reading makes it so much worse, which is a special kind of hell for a librarian. This stage should have ended weeks ago, and I do feel a slight lifting.

I try to eat my way out of nausea, and when I do it affords me a small window of relief before the queasiness settles back in. And when I eat it's not pretty, it's in a gulping, gasping, urgent manner that reminds me of the mess hall scene in Alien. John Hurt seemingly recovered, ravenous and strangely jovial for someone who had recently had a pulsing leathery horseshoe crab like alien affixed to his face, joins the crew for a meal in the mess hall. He repeatedly declares how hungry he is and attacks the food. Before he can greedily down more than a few bites, he begins to cough and convulse until the alien bursts from his chest in a spectacular plume of gore.

I read that the director, Ridley Scott, decided to do a little method experiment and not let the rest of the cast in on what was going to take place in the scene, so their ghastly reactions of shock and horror were completely genuine. Come to think of it, this whole scene is more of an apt metaphor for pregnancy than I would care to dwell on right now.

Back to hosting my own little adorable parasite...

The Daily Coyote

I so hope that this is not going to end in "The Yearling" style heartbreak, but I'm adoring the photos for now:

http://dailycoyote.blogspot.com/

A cousin was telling me how when he lived in Jackson Hole he saw a coyote slink up in broad daylight and snatch and carry off a 15 pound pug that had been sunning itself on his neighbor's porch. And not to be its bride, I'm afraid - no trace of the pug was every found. His neighbors had just moved from New York City and found out the hard way that a pug, defenseless in every way, is not the best choice of pet in Wyoming.

Pot, Kettle

Dateline: front of the library, 8:45 AM.
A seedy looking couple waiting for the doors to the library to open so they could begin their morning toilette bickered. The woman, clutching her breakfast Colt 45, began to upbraid her companion. She pointed her finger at him and declared, “You need to shape up and start getting your shit together!”

I believe those in the field of psychology would call this a classic case of projection.

Big News

I deeply apologize for falling off the face of the earth. I have been working on a creative project of a different sort lately and it has completely kicked my ass. If things go well, we'll be expecting the little pitter pat of feet in June. More details soon, I promise.

Earthquake Country

A colleague from San Jose sent us pictures of the mess the latest earthquake out there caused. Life in earthquake country... When I was in library school, I visited a friend in San Francisco for spring break. He was a first year medical student, and he gave me a tour of his classrooms and laboratory. There was one lab that had all of its shelves lined with glass jars of fetuses in all the stages of development, from their unrecognizably alien beginnings all the way to babies so far along they must have been full term stillborns.

The fetuses were perfectly preserved. They had an eerie air of peacefulness, and looked as if they were each floating silently in an artificial, transparent womb. I stared at them so long with such morbid yet clinical fascination that I had almost had to be dragged away. Years later my friend told me that these jars had not been secured properly, and during an earthquake they had all crashed to the floor, their contents exploding into a heaping stew of glass shards, fetuses and preservation liquid. Bad day for the custodial staff.

My friend also introduced me to his dissection cadaver, a woman who had died of systemic scleroderma, a horrific autoimmune disease that sounds like some sort of gypsy curse. Basically, your body’s production of collagen goes haywire, slowly petrifying your skin and your organs until you die from suffocation and organ failure. It is a prolonged, agonizing death, and it has been the stuff of my nightmares ever since.

From The Onion

In The Know: Is The Government Spying On Paranoid Schizophrenics Enough?

Panelists discuss ways to care for the nation's paranoid schizophrenics, such as hiding cameras in their homes or audio transmitters in their ears.

"We have to give them practical advice, too, like tell them which bus drivers hate them, which manholes are covering up underground government prisons, which statues don't love them anymore..."

All the Porn that's Fit to Print

Hello, I need a publisher’s contact information. For a magazine.

No problem. What is the name of the magazine?

It’s a…uh…an adult magazine. Is that O.K.?

“Go ahead,” I replied using the weary, flat affect of one who’s heard it all, a tone I’ve been really cultivating lately.

Mandate. One word, I think.

I turned to Ulrich’s, the venerable, authoritative reference source of bibliographic and publisher information for periodicals. I wasn’t sure if Ulrich’s indexed smut, but I was quite curious to find out, since I really wasn’t eager to see what a Google search would turn up.

“I found two, one published by the United Church of Canada and the other by Mandate Publications LTD. I have a hunch it’s the latter.”

I had to say that I like the authoritative quality of that title, and the humorous pun for which that genre of magazine is often known. I saw that Ulrich’s categorized Mandate under the subject heading “Men’s Interest.” I wondered what other publications had that subject heading. The journals ranged from fashion and lifestyle, like Vogue Homme and Cigar Aficiando, to erotica to the hardcore, to the deviant - some really sick shit. Oh, I had my fun browsing the list of titles the rest of the afternoon.

Skin Mag titles:

The Straightforward: Big Butt, Boobs, Mega Boobs, Big & Black

The colloquial: Juggs – I like how the double g’s give the visual of two pendulous knockers

Fetish: Dominantly Yours, Foot Worship, Women in Power

Decade specific: 40 and Over! Once you mature out of that, there’s 50 and Over!

Act specific: Pussy Grazer, which I think sounds lackadaisical, for the dilettante, not the true enthusiast. If I were the publisher I would definitely choose a title that conveyed something more forceful, like Carpet Ripper.

Illegal: Family Heat - just as the name implies - gross

Bizarre: Girls and Corpses – nymphos posed next to moldering corpses. Necrophilia with a sense of humor. Fangoria meets Oui. Marriage of Thanatos and Eros.
Disturbingly Self Explanatory: Zoo. The only other language edition that exists is in, of all things, Afrikaanse. What the hell goes on in the veldt?

Uncomfortable porn memory:

A former neighbor of mine was a strange loner who lived in a house with his shut in mother. He dressed just like his idol, latter day Elvis, complete with side burns, white jumpsuit, and large, gold metal sunglasses. One time we met on the sidewalk and I stopped to say hello. My dog Sid was a rambunctious puppy then and wrapped his leash around his ankles. It startled my neighbor and caused him to drop his grocery bag. Around 10 hardcore skin mags skidded out onto the sidewalk. We both looked down, our eyes locking with the dead eyed come hither stares of the cover girls. Boy, that was awkward. I apologized, extricated Sid and left.

The President of the Animal Kingdom

"I didn't RTFA, so I'm just guessing gangs of wild goats ate the homeless. Once goats get the taste for human flesh, they'll never go back to tin cans again. This is problematic."

Goats destroy homeless habitat. I hope these goats famously indiscriminate digestive systems can handle all of the hypodermic needles.


Billy, Spoon and I pass by an overgrown hillside on our morning walk each day. The other morning the hill was covered with goats. The dogs were dumbstruck and stood frozen, staring in disbelief. We stood and watched the goats for awhile as they placidly and efficiently denuded the hillside. It was mesmerizing. The goats finished up the hillside in a few days but now every time we walk past the hill they smell the air and look for them.

I adore goats. I worked at the stables at my beloved summer camp all through college and graduate school. Every summer horses would arrive from several different stables from around the state and it would be 3 days of hell while they sorted out their pecking order. Once the hierarchy was established, the situation in the paddock was much more tranquil, although there were always a few who bore such enmity and bad blood for each other that we had to keep separated from each other permanently. This was especially crucial on trail rides or in the riding ring, when the horses wouldn’t let the fact that there were campers riding on them stop them from settling scores. One time when I was a camper on a trail ride I got my foot viciously kicked by my horse’s bitter enemy while it was trying to aim at my horse’s flank. A horse’s naturally sharp hooves are reinforced by steel shoes and I had to hobble around on crutches for a week. To prevent this sort of camper collateral damage we respected the horse’s enmity and were very careful about how the horses lined up.

This summer we quickly tired of tending to all of the bite marks and kick wounds. We mentioned the problem to the man who delivered the feed and he recommended that we get a goat to pacify the horses. He claimed that there was something about the distraction of having a goat around that would really cut down on the quarrelling. I was dubious, but I thought it would be fun to have a goat around, so we obtained one from a neighboring farmer and released it into the paddock. Sure enough, the next morning I saw the horses all gathered around it in a circle, watching it like it was the big game on television. The fighting ceased.

The goat was friendly and delightful. She soon began to put on airs, though, and decided she was too good to associate with the horses. She moved herself on up from the paddock to the tack room, which had a big ceiling fan and was where the humans hung out in between classes. She preferred the choicest spot directly under the fan, and if any of us where occupying it she would lower her head and butt us away before comfortably settling down. She began to accompany us on trail rides, trotting next to the lead horse, her head held high haughtily high. She was quite a personality.

Brian Fellows and the devil goat.

Caturday

A woman called on Saturday and wanted to know if she could bring her cat to the library.

"Is this a" clearing my throat "service animal?"

"Nah. It's just that my cat gets lonely if I leave it at home for too long."

"I'm sorry, only service animals are permitted in the building."

Lolcats.

Daemon Dog

One of the most delightful and wondrous literary creations of late are the daemons in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. In the somewhat parallel world where the books take place, humans have a visible animal spirit called a daemon accompanying them at all times. The daemons speak and serve as both conscience and beloved companion. Children’s daemons shape shift until puberty, then their form becomes fixed, usually in some animal reflective of the person’s station and temperament. A typical daemon for a soldier would be a large guard dog, for example, and for a university don, an owl or a raven. If a person is separated from his or her daemon the resulting physical and mental agony is so great he or she usually dies.

The other day a tall man I recognized as a habitué of drag queen row came in to check out some books. Even though he was not in drag and was in complete nondescript civilian mode I see him all the time on my daily bike commute to the library preening on the streets like a peacock so I knew exactly who he was. As 6’5 African American man who dresses in clothes that would put the cast of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert to shame, he tends to stand out. I was sure it was him because he had his tiny pet Chihuahua in tow. The dog danced about and circled his owner’s feet the whole time, somehow anticipating all of his owner’s moves. It was miraculous the way it would avoiding getting crushed by the man’s swiftly moving feet. Philip Pullman couldn’t have imagined a more fitting daemon for the man.

Tranny Tuesday

A brood of drag queens dressed to the nines in marabous and high heels, chiffon negligees and diaphanous nightgowns spilling out of a bar to smoke on the sidewalk. The sidewalk glowed with them. They raised their champagne and martini glasses to me as a biked by. At 8:45 on a Tuesday morning, an unexpected benediction. It felt like grace.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Billy has been recuperating from kidney issues resulting from the heat prostration he suffered in Texas. To his embarrassment, sometimes he cannot make it through the entire night without a trip to the yard, and will apologetically scratch the door for me to take him out in the middle of the night. The other night I awoke to a thud as he jumped from the bed and ran to the door. I staggered out of bed to take him out. I was barefoot and in just a long t-shirt, commando, like Porky Pig, but with a little more modesty since the t-shirt stretched to just above my knees. It was 4:30 AM and the street was deserted. Still half asleep and shivering, I was enjoying the stillness when a rusted out beater came roaring up the street. The driver was driving in the reckless manner of someone with nothing to lose, like a complete psychopath or someone on a 3 day meth binge searching for some victim upon whom to inflict unspeakable mayhem and depravity.

I grabbed Billy and pressed myself against the side of the house. As if the driver had spied me, he pulled into a driveway up the street and whipped around. Although I was hidden in the shadows on the side of the long corridor that leads up to the house, it was like one of those helpless “you’re the quarry” dreams where your supernatural pursuer can see you through walls and find you no matter where you run or hide. He then skidded to a stop right in front of the house. I was in disbelief that this was happening, frozen by the horrible dreamlike quality of the situation, feeling all the more vulnerable because of my attire. A hulking man jumped out of the car and ran straight for me. I remained cowering in the shadows of the corridor, clutching Billy. He came right up to me, handed me the paper and ran back to his car. It was the newspaper delivery man, and he was completely unruffled, acting as if it was the most natural thing in the world to run into a half dressed customer pressed up against the side of the house in the dark and gripping a Jack Russell terrier at 4:30 in the morning.

A really scary dream sequence.

I almost always enjoy a good skull fuckin’ by Mulholland Drive, but I will never, ever forgive him for that scare.