Due to an unfortunate unpleasantness, this journal is now mostly Friends Only.
Comment for correspondence.

I posted this on FB but not everybody there is here, and it was just too funny.

My son brought in the detergent from the grocery trip last week.
He announced: "I am the Moon, I bring in the Tide."

Occasionally we give the cats a treat of people food. They especially love chicken, which is the best of all the birds.

Hub noticed that they only eat cooked food - that on the occasion he has offered them a nibble of raw hamburger meat or a sliver of raw chicken, they are totally uninterested.

Which led him to the conclusion that when Cookie (the only outdoor cat) brings home a bird or a mouse or a squirrel and leaves it on the back porch, what he's really saying is "Throw this lil fella on the grill for me, whydon'tcha?"

I know this is body snark and policing, but I can't help it.

There's a notice that the powers that be are auctioning off lunch with Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer as a charity benefit.

Nice and all, but my first thought - "They eat?!"

My friend posted this on Facebook:
"If the US Government was a family, they would be making $58,000 a year, they spend $75,000 a year, & are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing BIG spending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget & debt, reduced to a level that we can understand."

My rejoinder:
You forgot the part where the daddy makes $500,000 per year but spends all but $25,000 on his outside mistress, and cries when asked to pony up for the household expenses.

Originally posted by deathpixie at Signal Boost: Return of the DDoS

My brother broke a tooth yesterday.

It apparently was painful.

In an effort to relieve the pain, he pulled the remainder of the tooth out with his leatherman tool.


Because, you know, the fact that he hasn't got the money to see a dentist, even on an emergency basis, and there are no provisions for people like him to get emergency dental care without cash in hand - that doesn't mean we don't have the BEST HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.

Because, you know, pulling your own tooth with pliers is totes what self respecting, capitalism loving Americans should do.

This is about show-Felton and show-Hotshot, not the one in the books. In my opinion, they are discrete entities.

Sure, Felton was violent, a v-addict, and shot his own daddy in cold blood. Sure, he clocked Jason upside the head and tied him up to be gang raped by all the women in the clan.

But in the few words we see him say to Becky on the morning (?) after her supposed encounter with Jason, we get a deeper glimpse into his character than meets the eye.

"Sex is gross and all, but it feels kinda good, don't it?"

Poignant. I think he was trying to comfort her.

"Sex is gross and all," he says. Likely his first sexual encounter was similar to Jason's experience, except he was actually related to the woman. Maybe it was his mother.
Incest is a powerful taboo in our culture, and even though the folks in Hotshot are somewhat isolated, they do interact with the wider community on some level. They have cars, they have electricity, they buy groceries, they make and sell meth. I'm sure they are all well aware of the general public's opinion of incest. They are certainly aware of how the wider community views them. Inbred hillbilly freak show, etc. So it's a fair bet that even though intrafamily and intergenerational sexual activity is a norm in Hotshot, younger Felton knew that this was not the case for the wider world. He probably felt like he was being bred like livestock, that he lost power over his own body, and it was in a way that was taboo and shameful in the wider culture.
"Sex is gross and all."

Addiction is common among people who have experienced trauma, and Felton is surely an addict. V gives the user super strength, endurance, and health (at least in the short run), and makes sex a deeper connection, too. Considering that they deal meth in Hotshot, Felton had probably used meth at some point in his life, and these are similar to the perceived effects of meth. At any rate, these effects would be very attractive to someone who feels powerless and weak, who has been forced into sex so much that "sex is gross."

He shot his daddy, who was apparently the headman in his community. Ostensibly it was to keep him away from the V, but there was probably an element of revenge in it as well.

Jason killed Felton in a kill or be killed situation. Felton was ultimately too damaged and violent to live. He completely lost whatever moral center he may have had.

But he was surely victimized by his culture, just as much as Crystal is. The victim becomes the perpetrator and the cycle continues.

When I think about Memorial Day, I think about Mr. and Mrs. Rainey. They were an elderly couple who went to my church when I was a kid. They were the last remaining charter members of the church which had been founded in 1920 or so.
They were always sweet and kind to me. He was a deacon, she was very involved with WMU. I never knew they'd had any children until I was a teenager.

My dad told me that they'd had one son. He died in Vietnam when he was in his early 20s. I don't know his name or any other details of his service.


My dad, who was never one to mince words about politics, said that LBJ had stolen their son from them.

I don't know what the Raineys' politics were. Because they were faithful members of a conservative Baptist church, they were probably true believers who thought Vietnam was justified in the fight against global godless Communist aggression. (As opposed to the point of view that the VietCong were nationalists fighting against French colonialism who approached the US after WWII to ask for help in their liberation, and we told them no, so they took help from Communist China instead.)

But even if that was what they believed, I can't imagine how painful it must have been to lose their only child to war.
How bitter it must have been for the Raineys to attend that church, which was always a youth oriented church with dozens of teenagers and young adults, especially in the early 70s, shortly after their son died.

They are dead now, and have been dead for more than a decade in the sweet reunion of the hereafter.

But on Memorial Day, those are the ones I remember- the people who are left.

So a girl that goes to school with my son was raped at school one day last week. My son knows her.I asked him if he'd heard about the incident, and he said "Yeah, that's (X)." He didn't know the boys involved, but had heard that they were some of the boys who had failed 7th and 8th grade repeatedly and so were 14 or 15 years old.

He told me that the other kids were having the usual reaction when someone reports a rape around here, generally parroting what their parents say - "She wasn't really raped, she was fooling around with the boys and didn't want to get caught, if she was really raped, why didn't she scream," etc. I asked my son what he thought, and he said he didn't know. I asked him how he would feel if someone had attacked him and he told people, and their reaction was that it wasn't true or that he'd brought it on himself, and he was outraged. I told him that this girl was going to need friends and I expected him to treat her kindly and be a friend to her.

The girl was not at school this week until Thursday, so all the speculation was going on outside of her presence, according to my son. Yesterday when he came home, he reported that she'd come back to school and "Nobody said anything bad to her because she was all beat up." She had a black eye, apparently, and this was good enough to make at least some of the detractors concede that she might have been attacked.

I have no idea what the teachers have been saying about the incident, if anything. It may be that the administration/school board has instructed them not to talk about it for fear of law suit fodder, since it's likely that this could result in an enormous law suit.

It shakes me up a bit. It makes me worry a lot. My kid stays after school for clubs and things, and he has been a frequent bully target, so of course I worry for his safety as well.

In better news, he reported that the heirloom tomatoes that he helped to plant in the Eco Club garden are growing well. He has been staying after school 1-2 days a week to work in the garden, and loves it. This makes me happy. I personally do not enjoy gardening at all, but I am glad that he does.