bgfay: Negotiating Peace

I asked the cat how she slept so well. This was yesterday morning, about four-fifteen. We were sitting on the couch watching an ad for Girls Gone Wild.

“It’s a matter of finding the right spot—here on the couch next to the pillows is good—and then being at peace with the world,” she told me.

“That second part,” I said, “is where I’m having some trouble.”

“I’ve noticed.”

A girl on the screen pulled up her shirt and screamed with her eyes closed. Another did it and another, then two girls kissed while falling down, and another girl got spanked. I wondered how all these girls slept and realized that I was supposed to be thinking of something else. Another girl screamed while pulling her shirt up. She kept her eyes open.

“It’s not on the television,” the cat said.

A girl in the commercial said, “peace isn’t in human nature.” She was drunk and had just spanked herself while licking her lips and the tip of her index finger.

“I think she’s right,” I said, looking at the cat and pointing my thumb at the television.

“She’s not,” said the cat.

“I should take your word over hers?” I asked.

Again I pointed at the television but now two guys were arguing over how best to make a video of the hottest girls ever. The cat looked at me. She yawned. The television warned me that some of what I was about to see for the fourth time was not suitable for someone or other.

“Keep watching,” the cat told me. “I’m sure you’ll find all the answers.”

“Sarcasm?” I asked. “Is that peaceful?”

She shushed me and closed her eyes.

“You’re keeping me awake,” she said.

The girls started screaming, whooping, and pulling up their shirts to show blurred breast-like shapes. The cat rolled onto her back and put her paws up as if in surrender. The girls on the screen kept moving.

I looked out the window behind me. Tremendously large flakes of snow drifted side to side as they fell the way sheets of paper fell from the towers when they came down. I switched off the television and lie down next to the cat. I watched the snow and told myself that it was just snow, just snow, just snow and that I would find peace, that it was waiting for me to fall into it. I told myself these things while beside me the cat slept deep and long and no one screamed.

[ fiction by bgfay, september 1, 2005 ]

POLITICS: You, sir, are no FDR

Slate is running a good piece about Bush’s comparison of himself to FDR and of the current “war” on terror to World War II.

This goes to the notion that I keep asking those who say they support the troops: In what way are you supporting them? I keep waiting for one concrete example that goes beyond prayer or the application of a bumper sticker yellow ribbon. My brother started me on this and I have to finally agree with him in part: I do not support our troops. It’s not that I am in any way angry with them, or that I would not attend a parade for their return (though I really hate parades). It means that I don’t do anything to support them and I admit that.

Well, there is one way in which I actively support them. I am writing these words and trying to convince as many people as I can that they should come home, that the Bush administration should publicly apologize to them and to us for their lies, and that we should begin to work for peace. I support that. I support the hell out of it.

SCHOOL: I’m ready to teach Intelligent Design

The New York Times has an article today about the true nature of how the world was created. It is must-read stuff for all true believers. Go now, read, bow down, and then write to every public official you can think of to get this into the schools. The Flying Spaghetti Monster commands it.