I woke up this morning and got hit in the face with grief. I think I’d been dreaming about him. I feel the need to share, which is odd. Despite my tendency for brutal honesty here, I don’t ever like to let on that I’m hurt or upset in the meat world, even when I have perfectly good reasons for being both. Not too long ago there was a string of deaths, 6 people, and I couldn’t go to the funeral of any of them. The Kid says I need to go to Chas’ service, or he’ll haunt me and I’ll never deal with it (Kid is a smart one, I tell ya).

But since I know me, and I know that I am likely to clam up at the memorial service and start to feel all anxiety attack agoraphobic, and that in my head I will be feeling guilty for feeling sad when obviously there are people there (his wife and kids) who have more right to feel sad (I know- it’s stupid- I’m not going to be able to break a lifetime of being told my feeling aren’t important enough right now), here’s what I want to say.

1. Chas is the reason the Kid had a Christmas this year. I spent Christmas week helping him get his house together (and keeping him from having psychotic breaks) and he made sure that the Kid had something to open, an mp3 player that hasn’t left the Kid’s ears for months.

2. Chas is the first person to ever pay for my writing. Granted- he had me write coffee porn (or coffee erotica) but it was a paying gig.

3. Chas and his darling wife Carolina nursed me through the worst break up in history with the worst boyfriend ever. Chas offered to perform numerous illegal acts of revenge for me, but I declined. Thing is- Chas would TOTALLY have done it if I asked. How many people do you know who are willing to commit illegal acts to make you feel better.

4. Chas hid his good chef’s knives from his family, but he would pull them out and show them to me. They were glorious, and he was a hell of a cook.

5. Chas saved my broke ass on more than one occasion by offering me little jobs, hemming curtains or cleaning or writing. He bought my awesome digi cam off me a few years ago, and then gave it back to me at Christmas.

6. Chas once had me smuggle a lamb burger on an airplane for him.

7. Chas was my go to guy for “boyspeak to English” translations.

8. Chas was a bigger pack rat than anyone I have ever met. He makes my family look tidy. I helped him organize his basement and was under strict orders not to toss anything, including old zip ties and random candy wrappers.

9. No one on the planet can wear funky hats as well as Chas. No one. He wore a Captain’s hat and navy blue blazer to one of my birthday parties and he was the bomb.

10. He was a much better friend to me than I have been to him. And I really wish I could make that up to him. I had a project that I wanted to do with him, that he would have loved and would have distracted him for a little bit. I meant to call him about it last week. But I put it off. I’m sorry Chas.

My phone rang today. I thought it was my dear friend, and answered with my usual greeting for him “What up G-Money!”.

It wasn’t him on the phone though. It was his wife, who sounded weary and sad. Before she said it, I knew that had killed himself.

Chas was a bright and shiny ball of energy when he was happy. But PTSD and other, never fully diagnosed, mental illness had crippled him for the last year or so. Last time I saw him he had elaborate plans for escaping the country. He was in so much pain that every thought was a torment. He loved his kids and his wife, and worried what his illness was doing to them.

Chas is the reason I started blogging a million years ago. He’s responsible for this pile of digital words. We wanted to seceded from the Bushwhacked country. He was protective, like a big brother, when he was healthy. He had these little idiosyncratic insecurities that made him adorable, like a teddy bear that is missing its button eye (though the missing part was lower, and I’ve been told that since he kept it in a jar after surgery, it will be cremated with him).

Chas tried to get help through the system. The VA failed him. The only thing that calmed the constant anxiety was smoking pot, so the VA labeled him a drug addict. He was intensely pissed off that trying to make himself feel normal made him a criminal. Other drugs failed. Lithium failed. Multiple cocktails of pharmaceuticals just made him groggy and tired and sad. Therapists failed him. I failed him. I should have called. But I’ve been wrapped in my own cocoon of worry and fear.

I will miss you terribly Chasito. And so will everyone who ever met you and your gargantuan spirit.

To Burqa or not to burqa is the wrong question, and outlawing one style of dress is oppressive, whether that style of dress is a mini skirt or a burqa.

If women were really equal everywhere, including France and the U.S., then there would be no push to outlaw a style of dress that many women CHOOSE to wear. By banning a style of clothing, you perpetuate the idea that women cannot decide for themselves even the most basic of things, like what to wear. It is just as bad to ban a burqa as it is to force women to wear one.

Women are not children who need protection from the big bad world. We are adult human beings who need to be treated as such and allowed to decide on the details of our own lives.

I am trying to figure out your hideous online application process, and I gotta tell you I am stumped.

Now I am not a

A poster sized print of this is my wedding prezzie for Ruth & Bernard.

What is this? you are probably asking yourself.

It turns out that we live in at the nexus of yuppy hell, where seemingly unimportant things inspire both ire and gross revenge plans from neighbors.

That blue bag is a bag of dog shit hung on the car because it was parked slightly over the sidewalk (in our own driveway).

Peeps- I am used to the ghetto. I know what things will and won’t get you hurt in an environment of the urban poor. Calling someone’s mom a dirty name will get you hurt, parking badly will be ignored. These things make sense to me. I am having a very difficult time figuring out why someone would be soooooo pissed about having to take a half step to the side that they would need to leave animal excrement on the offending vehicle.

This post popped up in my reader from Feminist Philosophers about borderline personality disorder. At the very end of the post, the author mentions a book , Janet Wirth-Cauchon’s Women and Borderline Personality Disorder, and how Wirth-Cauchon thinks borderline personality disorder is the “new female malady”.

Being fairly familiar with BPD (Hi Mom- stop stalking me on the internet- it’s creepy and gross) and sadly familiar with domestic violence, I don’t think BDP is a particularly female problem. I think that men with BDP are seen as love sick, John Cusak with a boombox type romantics instead of potentially violent stalkers with a mental illness (an illness that is patriarchy approved, mind you). Now granted, I’m not a psychologist but I’ve spent enough time on a couch sorting through this shit to have a pretty good idea of what I’m talking about.

Life with my mom was excruciating. There was never enough I could do to prove that I loved her and was a good daughter. The more I sacrificed of myself, the more needy she became. And when my attention was focused elsewhere for even a minute, her rage was earthshaking. For people with BPD, you can never love them enough to make it ok. If they feel that you are “slipping away” then there are suicide threats, eating disorders, drug abuse, lies, manipulations, or some crisis is created where you have to come pay attention to them right now. Having friends or boyfriends or even other family members that love you is not ok. For my mom, there is only a limited amount of love in the world and any love that goes to someone else is love (re/ attention) that is not going to her. Loved ones of people with BDP can find themselves very isolated.

And this isn’t very different from domestic abuse patterns. If you listen to any DV victim, the same themes of needy partners and isolation come up. Unfounded jealousy, “crazy making” manipulations, violent episodes of rage for no rational reason are all pretty standard for both BDP and DV.

It makes sense to me, that after growing up in a house where love was this obsessive, needy, devouring beast that I ended up with the Kid’s dad when I did. It was familiar, unhealthy but familiar. At the end of my relationship with the Kid’s dad and at various points in my relationship with my mom I did what I could to become a blank slate around them. I tried to erase whatever it was about me that made them hurt. It was a futile exercise, because there wasn’t ever enough I could do to make it right and the more I tried to blank out the more I resented them, which made them more volatile, which made me more resentful, etc. But the thing that saved me from continuing both of those relationships was the same, the Kid. I could tolerate a whole lot of shit being thrown my way, but when that shit started heading towards the Kid the logical part of my brain, or perhaps what one shrink called my “survivor’s heart” kicked in and said enough.

Since the Kid’s dad, I have never been in another romantic relationship that was even slightly abusive. Sure, I’ve dated my fair share of jerks (and I’ve been a jerk a few times myself) but they weren’t abusive.

All of this is just a long way of saying that I don’t think BDP is a female malady. I think it may be a female manifestation of domestic abuse. But what does it say about female agency that men who act this way are criminals (as long as you have a police force, district attorney and judicial system with domestic violence training) while women who act this way are diseased? I think that is an interesting question, and one I don’t have a good answer for.

This post is just pissing me off. Actually, Andrew Leonard’s take on it is fine, but the whole basis of the idea that there are scads of people out there voting against their own best interest either by being poor and white and voting Republican or being rich and white and voting for higher taxes is a sham.

People DO vote in their own self interest. For the reasons Andrew stated

I personally would be inclined to argue that pro-fiscal stimulus rich liberals are following John Maynard Keynes when they willingly accept higher taxes to pay for government spending because they understand that this makes economic sense of the whole country. If all the workers are laid off, who is going to buy the products or services that allow rich people to get rich? Supporting an active government effort to shorten a recession seems like pure self interest to me, whether you are rich or poor.

I think that’s a pretty good take on why rich people in urban areas vote for higher taxes.

Why poor white men in rural areas vote Republican is pretty easy to explain too. The Democratic party doesn’t offer them anything. Sure it’s supposed to be the party of the liberal working class, yet the Dems have failed to offer anything to the working class, black or white. What they have done is put in place affirmative action (much needed, but not perfect) which puts more competitive stress on poor white men for jobs. The few qualities that have made their lives tolerable over the course of American history (being white and male) by giving them advantages over the non-white and non-male are being taken away, without any good solutions to replace them. In their eyes, at least the Republicans want to let them keep their unfair advantages, even if they don’t offer any eal kind of improvement either.

Until we on the left figure out that we have to make things better for everyone at the bottom (black, white, brown, male, female, etc) then there will be a large section of the population that resents any efforts we make to improve things for people on a group basis. We need more jobs for everyone, not JUST more access to jobs for some. We need better wages for everyone, not just more lenient immigration policies for people willing to work for a fraction of fair wages.

Those poor white men ain’t stupid, they are holding on to their only advantage. It is our failure as progressives that we haven’t come up with a plan that shows them a better way for everyone.

Or perhaps a better title is “what do we do about Iran?”

And the answer is pretty simple.

Nothing. We don’t interfere in their recount process. We don’t channel any kind of support (publicly or privately) to any of the candidates. We stay the fuck out of it. We don’t make any comments about what we will or won’t do regarding the nuclear situation depending on who ends up in charge. We don’t send weapons or money to the revolutionaries. We back off. Way off.

Except for the media. Don’t send soldiers or guns. Send cameras and laptops.

We (Americans) have a history of interfering in other people’s elections and/or revolutions. And we have a history of backing atrocious people (Trujillo in the DR, Pinochet in Chile, Saddam Hussein, and the Shaw of Iran whose ousting has led to Iran’s extended trip into theocracy, to name just a few). We are bad at trying to set up “democracy” in other countries. They always fail because democracy through tyranny is still tyranny.

I think it’s entirely plausible that the protests and riots are proof that the election was fixed. They are risking their lives in Iran to make their votes count. But change has to come from inside, and so does revolution. The minute we pick a candidate, that candidate looses all legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian people. They have to be willing to fight for it themselves, and as we’ve seen in Iraq, without that kind of public groundswell you end up with a violent quagmire.