I should be vacuuming, doing the dishes, changing the sheets, folding the laundry. Instead, this:
still life with lunch
I eat my baguette and brie
contemplating a miniature collection
of my life

Yesterday was the Vernal Equinox, but my women friends and I celebrated it today, with our usual pot-luck gathering. where we sit around and complain about the aches and pains that plague our bodies and the aches and pains of the plague that is our country’s leadership. And then we share in some sort of creative ritual or ceremony. Today, it was a variation on this.
Of course, I can’t pass up the opportunity to pass along some Equinox lore, which just shows how contemporary religious Spring rituals and stories harken back to other, much, much older ones.
In ancient Rome, the 10-day rite in honor of Attis, son of the great goddess Cybele, began on March 15th. A pine tree, which represented Attis, was chopped down, wrapped in a linen shroud, decorated with violets and placed in a sepulchre in the temple. On the Day of Blood or Black Friday, the priests of the cult gashed themselves with knives as they danced ecstatically, sympathizing with Cybele in her grief and helping to restore Attis to life. Two days later, a priest opened the sepulchre at dawn, revealing that it was empty and announcing that the god was saved. This day was known as Hilaria or the Day of Joy, a time of feasting and merriment.
Sound familiar? Easter is the Christian version of the same myth. Even the name Easter is stolen. It comes from the Saxon dawn-goddess Eostre, whose festival was celebrated on spring equinox. The date of Easter is still determined by the old moon cycle. It is always the first Sunday on or after the first full moon after the spring equinox.
One can only hope that there will be some kind of rebirth for this country after its looming demise at the hands of the Almighty Burning Bush (see previous post), who needs some major help finding his way out of his own Fog of War. He would do well to internalize the “Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.”
Like that’s ever going to happen. Unless course, god tells him to. Oh Yeah!

A report released on March 16 by the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, Special Investigations Unit is described as
…a comprehensive examination of the statements made by the five [Bush] Administration officials most responsible for providing public information and shaping public opinion on Iraq…. It finds that the five officals made misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq in 125 public appearances. The report and an accompanying database identify 237 specific misleading statements by the five officials.
Complete with charts, graphs, timelines, quotes, and categories of disinformation, the report, Iraq on the Record offers substantial proof of either the incompetence or the deviousness of our leadership. Or maybe both.
Meanwhile, In Cincinnati, Claire Mugavin wore a biohazard suit to a protest that drew several hundred people. She pretended to look for weapons of mass destruction beneath benches and garbage cans. “We figure they’re not in Iraq,” said the 24-year-old Cincinnati resident. “So we figured we’d come look for them in Fountain Square.”
I like nonblogger myrln’s response to that:
You gotta love it. What we need is a National Mockery Movement that daily mocks Dumbya and his gang…a relentless, ruthless campaign for the next 8 months. Make them into a national joke, and we’d get rid of them. Laughter may indeed be not only the best medicine but maybe the best weapon, too.
The Ben of Ben and Jerry’s is already full speed on that one. To keep up with the lies being shoveled at us about even more than Iraq, keep checking here.

At the heart of it all is the heart. Literally. If it’s not keeping up, we can’t. That’s what’s happening to my mom. Her heart is beating only about half as fast as it should. Well, what do you want; it’s 88 years old. It’s dealt with the tribulations of two odd-ball offspring, another two odd-ball grand-offspring, and now a great grand-offspring who keeps getting really bad ear infections. Between the two great World Wars, it found itself in Poland living a “dust-bowl of the 30s” kind of life. It outbeat its spouse’s heart and the hearts of all four of its siblings and most of its friends. This is a tired heart. A pacemaker would help it to keep up. But that’s not what she wants, and I understand that. She wants to rest, wants her heart to rest with all of those other hearts that have left her behind. And so, at the heart of the matter for those she’ll leave behind is to be OK with what she wants — to let her heart do what it will naturally do. Beat..beat..beat…….beat……..beat……..
beat…………..beat……………….beat……………….beat…
…………………………………..beat…………………………..
……………………………………

Hee hee.
My daughter emailed me that my 19 month old grandson just looked at Bush on TV and said “boob.” Another dissident is born!!!
Meanwhile, the boob “celebrates” the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq. Congratulations, Dumbya, on getting 571 Americans (and countless others) killed in pursuit of your Amerikan nightmare.
And then there’s all these other monumental things you’re doing for our country, as Molly Ivins so clearly explains at the beginning of her piece of “Red Alert at the White House.”:
How much fun can one administration have? More dead GIs. New record trade deficit. Stock market plunge. Defeated ally in Spain. New Spanish prime minister says the occupation in Iraq is a “continuing disaster” and he’s pulling his troops out. Still no jobs. And then they guy who was supposed to be the new jobs czar turns out to have laid off 75 of his own workers while building a $3 million factory in China to employ 165 Chinese people………

The “every other Tuesday night” poet’s group I’m in is usually mostly made up of of guys — which actually works for me because, in my confined life these days, I don’t get to interact much with guys. Granted, as fine poets, these are not your stereotypical guys; they are used to digging below the surface of things and they are unusually perceptive. They’re also funny.
But that’s not what this post is about. This is about one of them sending an email around listing “37 cool things about being a man.” (This might have been one of those viral emails that somehow missed me.) And then another of the guys created “37 not so cool things about being a man,” which makes me enjoy having been born a girl (but not for these reasons.)
For all my beleaguered male friends everywhere, I share:
37 not so cool things about being a man.
1. I never get a job interview anymore.
2. MY orgasms don’t matter.
3. My last name appears on too many checks I didn’t write.
4. The garage is where I sleep after I’ve shared my feelings.
5. I wind up paying for the wedding the rest of my life.
6. I never stop feeling compelled to get laid.
7. Car mechanics are always engaging me in conversations.
8. I look really dumb when I shave my pubic hair.
9. I can get 30 years for helping a child who has fallen off a bike.
10. All work…more gray.
11. Wrinkles mean I’m old and dirty.
12. Nobody ever tells me about my zipper.
13. Pregnancy 9 months; deadbeat dad forever.
14. Somebody’s always pissing in my canteen.
15. No one ever stuffs dollar bills into my underwear.
16. I haven’t been able to afford shoes since the wedding day.
17. I have a tumor the size of all the emotions I’ve never expressed.
18. Phone conversations are the only sex I ever have.
19. I consider 5 days under the rubble of a collapsed building a vacation.
20. I am often praised for my ability to open a jar.
21. All my thoughtful acts have to be connected to credit card usage.
22. My underwear has stains old enough to vote.
23. & Now that I’m 54 and married, nobody notices.
24. I drive a truck and expect to be able to pick up something with it.
25. “Shoos” are what are hurled at me in the kitchen.
26. I have to watch football every Sunday instead of jerking off.
27. I have my memories – at least until I turn 50.
28. I can’t act worth a damn – it takes years of imagining the death of Ron Jeremy for me to cry a single tear.
29. There is more variety in the colors of my bowel movements than in the colors of my wardrobe.
30. I can’t bolt from a nut without being called a coward.
31. I am perfectly capable of tinkling on my pants.
32. The same hairstyle is persisting for decades, even as the follicles disappear.
33. My belly hides my erection.
34. One empty wallet, and one pair of ratty shoes.
35. I have to claw my way to the top without any fingernails.
36. I even have to be sloppy about my suicide.
37. The world is a stopped-up toilet.

Shelley Powers (aka Burningbird) took and posted this photo.
If you read this weblog, you know why I’m posting the photo. If you read Shelley’s weblog, you know that this is not representative of her exquisite talent for capturing remarkable images.
And we all know, in this age of Bushite media manipulation, image is everything.

From todays New York Post: Go and read the whole article, which begins:
A delusional man who apparently believed he was Jesus Christ built a wooden cross and tried to nail his hands to it in a horrific bid to re-create the crucifixion, police say.
But after hammering a spike through one palm, the man realized there was no way to hammer his other hand to the cross – so he dragged himself to the phone to dial 911 with his free hand.
Asked if he’d recently seen “The Passion of the Christ,” the 23-year-old man, from Hartland, Maine, answered no, but said he had been “seeing pictures of God on the computer.”
What a world! What a world!

While others are celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, I’m celebrating Bring Back the Snakes Day (preferably, green ones).
It’s not easy being green.
Or a snake.

Some disempowering of an American Bushite missionary at MoveOn.org:
A year ago today, the Bush Administration was making its final push toward war in Iraq. We know now that much of what we were told about the threat that Iraq posed was untrue. And rather than own up to their distortion of the facts, Bush administration officials are denying they ever said such things.
But this Sunday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got caught blatantly contradicting his past statements, and we have the video clip. You can check it out at:
http://www.moveon.org/censure/caughtonvideo/
I’m repeating here my suggestion to give the Bush boys a SimAmerika game to play, plug ’em in, and let ’em go at it and let the rest of us get on with saving what’s left of this country.