Hi. Are you with somebody?

So, it looks as if Larry Craig is going to resign, and hey, that's fine with me. I'm all for culling the right-wingers by any means necessary. Still, it's a shame that in our happiness at seeing him go, we're kinda missing the point that the law that exposed his hypocrisy shouldn't even be on the books. I mean, there's no reason why adult men shouldn't meet new friends in an airport toilet, is there? Seriously, why should propositioning someone over eighteen, assuming there's no threat or harrassment involved, be a crime?

In fact, it isn't a crime unless it happens between two men. Men hit on women all the time in public places, and nobody, including me, thinks it's a reason to call the police. I've received plenty of offers of intimate friendship from strangers--on the street, the subway, a city bus, in a library and a mall parking lot. There's hardly a woman alive who doesn't have a similar list. Who cares?

And when was the last time you heard about a police stakeout in the ladies lounge at Saks? I know if I wanted to pick up a nice woman that's where I'd go, but the cops don't seem concerned about this potential threat to public decency.

As for the argument that the problem is not the invitation but the act, all I can say is that if you think het and lesbian couples don't have sex in public, you have not been paying attention. I have never heard of anyone other than gay men being arrested for it.

The whole business is just absurd. It would be a better use of tax dollars to pay the cops to hand out condoms.

Was some milk*

Via Wikimedia Commons

For several years I've been buying meat and milk from a couple who run a farm east of Nashville. (The POL contingent has already heard me blather a lot about this. For the rest of you, here's an article I wrote about the farm, and you can see their website here.) The wife, Jenny Drake, has become a friend, and I've spent some time helping out at the farm--or trying to, anyway. Jenny was Nio's original rescuer, so we'll always be grateful to her for his sake.

I like having this little bit of my consumer life that happens off the grid. One of the things that is especially good about it is that it helps wean me away from the habit of instant gratification. The Drake farm operates according to the seasons and the life cycle of the animals. There aren't any eggs in winter, because in the real world chickens don't lay eggs in winter. The lambs are born in the spring and go to slaughter when they reach the right weight. I don't bother hoping for lamb the rest of the year, because there isn't going to be any. Once a month I pick up roughly 20 pounds of whatever's available--plus milk in the summer--and I enjoy what I get. It's a just a nice baby step away from the manufactured, shrink-wrapped world of modern shopping.

But I'm not yet weaned altogether, as I discovered when I learned this week that the Drakes are getting out of the dairy business once this season is over. They've been selling raw cow and goat milk for years on the "gray market"--it's illegal to sell raw milk for human consumption in almost every state. The law is skirted by marketing the stuff as pet food; hence my refrigerator often contains a gallon jug of milk labeled unfit for human consumption. For some reason, that delights me.

Anyway, I've gotten really attached to my summer supply of goat milk. Now that it's about to disappear for good, I find I am extremely disappointed and annoyed. Not at the Drakes. They've got a lot of good reasons for getting out of the milk business, not the least of which is a nationwide crackdown by state ag agencies on small farmers who bend idiotic laws. The regulators operate in the interests of giant agribusiness, which has such a tight grip on our food chain that it's almost impossible for small producers to survive by just selling natural food in its unprocessed state. It's going to be tough for me to find another reliable supplier.

I'm angry about that, but the truth is my inner spoiled consumer is the one who's really fit to be tied. It seems unjust that I should be unable to get this simple thing if I have the money to pay for it. I could, of course, get my own damn goats (I have room for them), but that would involve, you know, work. And I think you all know how I feel about that.

*A friend from my Chicago days liked to tell a story about asking her young son, age 4 or 5, to tell her the earliest thing he could remember. The title of this post was his answer: "Was some milk." I know how he felt.

Husband Dave's dream house

Dave informs me that he wants to live out his days in something like this little Hobbit house. (Yes, it's a real house in Wales, and you can read all about it here.) In theory, I am completely in favor of the idea. The big challenge will be convincing Nio it's not one big urinal.

Some bit of Dave's DNA is always jonesing for the joys of cave dwelling. When we first moved back to Tennessee from Chicago, I was the designated house hunter, and I looked pretty seriously at an earth berm house similar to this one. I never let Dave see it, because I knew he would fall madly in love with the place, even though it was so far out in the sticks we'd be lucky to get our mail delivered once a week. It would have driven us both crazy in the long run. Still, I felt a real pang a few months later when I drove by it and saw the new owners working on it. It could have been our little hole in the ground.

My own goofy dream home is an old church--not some fancy brick thing with stained glass windows, but a simple clapboard church like the one I went to as a kid. I'd leave it all open and plain as possible, just one big, austere room with lots of books. I suppose I'd have to give up wearing a pentacle around my neck, since people might get the wrong idea. But it would be worth it.

Do you have a dream house?

Core programming

Via Project Gutenberg

I was reading this article the other day by David Pratt (who wrote the book on the Intifada I blogged about a while ago), and it got me thinking about how the same themes keep echoing in our lives in spite of our efforts to escape them. Pratt talks about the books and action comics that shaped his fantasies, giving him an image of himself that eventually led him to wandering around real-life war zones. Thinking back, I certainly had books that I was passionate about, and that helped form my ideas of who I ought to be.

When I was 10 or 11, my favorite books were Jane Eyre, Black Beauty, The Once and Future King, and Rouse's Gods, Heroes and Men of Ancient Greece--all of them, in different ways, books of moral philosophy. Arguably, I guess, most children's books are concerned with moral philosphy, since we always think children are especially in need of ethical instruction--a theory not really supported by the evidence, but one to which we seem irrevocably attached. But books come at the teaching task from different directions, and I think my list of middle school faves all share a particular tendency of encouraging a child to look past the surface of things. The first two are all about finding a truer morality than the one presented by society. They're subversive in favoring empathy over authority.

The White book and the Greek myths, of course, are all about moral dilemmas, but they're also concerned with the unseen and unknowable forces that shape our lives, and how those must be taken into account. They're about mystery, in other words. They're filled with the clash of good and evil, but every hero has a weakness, every villain has a wound. Nothing is simple.

Looking past what's right in front of me, refusing to believe anything is simple, always questioning the ethics of a situation--those are probably my most marked habits of mind. Sometimes that's good. It means I don't run roughshod over people very often. Often, though, it's just pointless, and exasperating to everyone around me. Look how annoyed some of you got at my moral anxiety over rescuing stray dogs. But even when I know I'm being tedious, I can't seem to stop myself. It's a core bit of programming, my prime directive. No matter how many times I've tried to throw off that tendency to overthink things, it always overwhelms me.

So did those books make me this way? I don't know. They certainly had an influence, but I'm more inclined to think I latched onto those books because I already was a little moralist. I know I always had that sense of things being more complicated than they seemed, and if I could somehow get hold of the secret under the surface, it would guide me someplace good and right. My very first memory is of climbing out of my crib early in the morning--I was very small--and wandering around the house marvelling at the sunlight streaming through the windows. We lived in the country and didn't lock our doors, so I eventually found my way outside, where my horrified mother found me. (I think she started latching the door after that.)

I was so tiny, and my memory is dreamlike, but I know I had the sense of looking for something out there in the trees and the sunshine. It's exactly the same feeling I have now when I go tromping in the woods. I have a sense there's some vast goodness and wisdom out there, and I might get a glimpse of it in the course of fighting off the gnats and avoiding the poison ivy. I also get that feeling when I start drilling down into mundane life, looking for more complexity, for what's hidden. It's like a job I feel compelled to do--a cushy, but not terribly useful job. I can't decide if it's troubling or comforting to think I didn't choose it. But then, I'm not one for being decisive, am I?

Ah, the '80s

This was my theme song the year I finished college. (Yeah, that's right, I am that old.) The first line is especially descriptive of my life at the time. I should be embarrassed to admit that this tune still moves me, but I'm not. And I love the freakin' accordion.

Eve's Diary

Have you ever read Eve's Diary by Mark Twain? For some reason it popped into my head today--another one of those "stuck in the mental drain" moments--and I went digging through the random piles of books here looking for it. No luck, but thanks to Project Gutenberg, I found this nice illustrated edition online.

It's not really Twain at his best--it's soft-headed, and just hopelessly precious at times, especially in the beginning. Fortunately, the strained wit slowly gives way to a sweet tenderness that I find irresistible. I always have a little catch in my throat at the end. If you can't bear the romance, you can read it as an interesting expression of what passed for progressive ideas about gender in Twain's day. But I bet it gets to you.

If I ask myself why I love him, I find I do not know, and do not really much care to know; so I suppose that this kind of love is not a product of reasoning and statistics, like one's love for other reptiles and animals. I think that this must be so. I love certain birds because of their song; but I do not love Adam on account of his singing—no, it is not that; the more he sings the more I do not get reconciled to it. Yet I ask him to sing, because I wish to learn to like everything he is interested in. I am sure I can learn, because at first I could not stand it, but now I can. It sours the milk, but it doesn't matter; I can get used to that kind of milk.

From Eve's Diary by Mark Twain, Harper & Brothers, 1906. Illustrated by Lester Ralph.

Don't say this blog isn't educational

Euphronios, c. 520-510 B.C.E.

"The Greeks obviously attached great importance to attainable ideals of physical beauty. Expressions of physical pride stand as one of the hallmarks of their literature and art. Judging by the way they depicted themselves in their figurative art, and taking into account the general use of the kynodesme and its accompanying ethos that exalted the well-proportioned, sleek, tapered, protective, beautifying, and propriety-preserving akroposthion, one may surmise that they would have agreed with a recent commentator in the British Journal of Urology who wrote: "One can never be too rich or too thin or have too much foreskin."

From "The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome" by Frederick M. Hodges, The Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Volume 75, pp. 375-405, Fall 2001. You can read the entire article by clicking over to The Circumcision Reference Library. Seriously, go look. It's very edifying. You'll at least learn what kynodesme and akroposthion mean.

Let's have a '70s moment, shall we?

Some friends from New Orleans are in town this weekend, so in their honor here's Dr. John in serious gris gris mode. Stay to the end for the full flashback.

So, what are we doing?

Phydeaux, my favorite Tar Heel blogger, has a fine post today about the strange passivity that afflicts us. Click here to read the bearded one.

Local sex

The paper I write for, the Nashville Scene, has a funny/raunchy cover story this week about the city's odd laws governing the sex trade. Click over to the website to check it out. Somehow I suspect you will find it more amusing if you know that the reporter, P.J. Tobia, is young and male. (BTW, I had absolutely nothing to do with this story. My only contribution to the paper this week is a sober review of an earnest book about free speech in the workplace.)