Rebecca Arthur’s Blog

Well, after I got dressed this morning I realized I had snakes on my feet. Creepy, huh? Indeed…creepy…creepy shoes that are made of fake snake skin, so I feel like I’m walking around with my feet buried in a couple of boa constrictors…and you know, as I wrote that last sentence, the creepiness increased exponentially…like Indiana Jones, “I hate snakes!”…and no, there really isn’t any other comparison between Indie and myself, apart from the fact that he quests after ancient relics and I, in fact, am myself, an ancient…well, never mind…but I digress…so how did I find myself adorned with the faux flesh of a slithering reptile? It all gets back to my giant stature…i.e. tall…and not as in my place in history, although several of the voices in my head are attempting to argue the point, even as I speak…er…write…no, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere in this blog, my physical height reaches biblical proportions…out distanced only by my grandiosity…and my feet, of course, go along with the total package…similar in the way you can’t hold up a 20 foot Christmas tree by nailing one foot boards to the bottom…no, you’ve got to put some BIG suckers…hence, my feet…and now that I think about it, nailing the base to a tree makes me think of shoeing a horse…which is probably a somewhat fair analogy itself…a big a$$ horse…so when it comes to finding shoes I cannot afford to be too picky…and when I do find shoes that fit…and are 50% off…I get them…even if there’s a good reason why they’re 50% off…because they’ve got a ton of them…because most people don’t want to walk around looking like they have snakes on their feet…especially in tall grass…look out! a rattler!!! Shoot it!!!…which makes me wonder why anyone would go to the trouble to take leather, and make it look like snake skin for shoes…taking the flesh of a fairly innocuous animal and making it look like a really creepy one…do they realize that some women will be stuck having to buy whatever shoes fit…cause “if the shoe fits…”…and they just want to screw with us…and not in the good way…few people want that…they can’t be sure we’ll let go until we’re finished… but just mess with our heads…but I realize that there are people of all kinds in this world…people that wear striped shirts with plaid pants…people that eat fried pork rinds…people that vote Republican…so I’m sure there are many people that think having snakes on their feet is cool…I, on the other hand, just try not to look down too often…hey, if I get the shoes wet will they be “water moccasins?”

I’ve been wrestling, of late, to find a way to blog about the Gulf Oil spill…“wrestling” is an interesting image isn’t it?…makes it sound like I’m all rough and tumble and sweaty over an issue, although this whole drilling disaster does make me want to “go rouge” and use a steel chair, or some other foreign object…wait, isn’t BP a foreign object?…and I’ve decided that it would be very appropriate to compare this entire debacle to the sinking of the Titanic…and not just because I’m a Titanic historical buff…so fixated with the story, I think, because it’s an accident the magnitude of which even I can only aspire…and certainly not as a comparison to the amount of human lives lost…although there has to be some consideration to the loss of the lives of birds, fish, dolphins, jellyfish…well, maybe not jellyfish…jellyfish piss me off…but because in both instances we have death by complacency…the Titanic tragedy could easily have been prevented, but the people in charge didn’t pay attention…didn’t think such a disaster was possible…made short-cuts in production, like not sealing the watertight compartments so that water couldn’t spill over and continue the flooding…not extending the double hull on the bottom up the sides of the ship…not utilizing the special davits that could carry enough lifeboats for everyone on board…as a cost saving measure…well, they did all that was “required”…sound familiar?…barreling full steam through the night in an area where icebergs had been spotted…a ship managed by a captain who, in his words, “”…cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder… cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel…” A captain who knew icebergs were a danger, even steering a more southerly course in an attempt to avoid them…but still, would not take the simple, prudent step of reducing the ship’s speed…in summary, a disaster brought on by sacrificing safety for profit…taking unnecessary risks; the result of naive thinking that the worst could not happen…so we’ve seen the consequences of environmentally running with scissors…because that’s what’s happened…Mom told us what could happen, but we did it anyway, “You could put an eye out!!” and now LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE…and we’re getting our proverbial noses shoved in it…but will we learn? I think not…1912 was too long ago…each generation seems to have to learn its own lesson…did Vietnam keep us out of Iraq?…the last comparison I would make is between Bruce Ismay and BP CEO Tony Hayward…they both got to return to Britain…one because he took a lifeboat and left so many passengers to their fate…the other because…well…he’s a fool…at least Captain Smith went down with the ship…I rather wish I could draw a comparison there…

Recently, I’ve been taking steps to enhance my spiritual growth…as though that were possible…wasn’t that an amazing comment?…sounding all mature and such and then dashing the image with a self effacing comment geared to further my image as a self-serving egotist…I stand in awe of my sickness…but I digress…anyway, I’ve begun seriously practicing meditation, as though there was a frivolous way to practice meditation…of course, if there were, I would have tried it…and being new to all this, I attended Thursday’s lesson on Loving Kindness Meditation at the local Insight Mediitation Center…which frankly is a little like Charles Manson taking a course on sociology…or Jeffrey Dahmer attending Culinary Arts 101…as you may have noticed, I am prone to make rather grandiose comparisons of myself with images that stretch my personal flaws all out of shape, so just be aware…Actually, I should probably back up a bit…I’ve been dutifully meditating for several months now…dare I say religiously…20 minutes a day, twice a day…and I decided it would be interesting to attend the Insight Meditation Center, because…you know…those people might need my help…since I’ve obviously reached Nirvana with my 40 minute daily meditation practice…NOT!!!…So I attended my first “sitting” last Sunday, and as is my practice, I did not pay attention to the schedule shown on the web site…because “fore warned is fore…whatever”…so I didn’t know that the “sitting”…I put that in quotes because I think that’s a weird word to use, even though it is obviously very descriptive of what we are doing…sitting…but it seems like it would be better called “mediation”…that way we would be describing what we’re doing with our heads…rather than what we’re doing with our butts…but I digress…again…so I got to the Center a little before 8:30 am, blissfully…how appropriate is that?…unaware that the lesson would not start until 10:00…I did a TON of “sitting”…I was SO F’ING PRESENT!!!…actually, I liked it a great deal…especially all the silence…coming to a religious service…if it could be called that…and not having to introduce myself to anyone…or have to wear a badge that says, “Hi, I’m new…my name is Rebecca…please hassle me”…priceless…so now we’re back to the Loving Kindness Meditation session…did I mention Manson and Dahmer?…yes?…okay…I am very aware that my heart needs to be more open…much like a dank, dusty closet filled with used sweat socks needs to be aired out…so I think this practice is very good for me…and actually, I have very little trouble wishing happiness, safety, health, and ease for people I deemed to have wronged me…which includes a generous portion of the world population…my ego is so big that I think even people who don’t know me, by that very fact have, indeed, wronged me…because everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, should know ME!!!…and no, not in the biblical sense…I’m not THAT cruel…but I know that if someone is truly happy, safe, healthy, and at ease…they’ll leave me the f’ alone…so once again, my benevolent thoughts towards others becomes self-serving…Rebecca! Your ego is AWESOME!!!

Having recently spewed my thoughts about relationships, based on a complete lack of knowledge, it seems appropriate to turn my attention to “Love,” a subject that equally confounds me…Of course, that doesn’t stop me from feeling it, even if I don’t know what it is…I guess “I know it when I see it,” a phrase, interestingly enough, used by the Supreme Court in its attempt to define pornography…which means, of course, that Justice Potter Stewart, who included the phrase in his opinion, had some experience in “seeing” pornography…guess he had something in common with the current Justice Clarence “Long Dong Silver” Thomas…but I digress…anyway, I have experienced feelings of late which could be described as “love”…rather intense feelings, actually…which sucks…because I don’t really know what to do with feelings like “Love”…Hate?…Anger?…those I can deal with…I have tools…I can remove, for example, my anger with Rush Limbaugh, by praying for him to have what I would want for myself…like bigger breasts…but “Love?”…how do I get rid of that?…do I really want to?…I guess it helps in that the object of my attention is completely unavailable…and yes, it occurred to me that this may be one of the motivators of the attraction…you can’t be rejected by someone who was never there…but when I think about Love, I’m left with a conundrum…if you really LOVE someone, you want what’s best for them…and I can’t imagine that a relationship with me would be best for anyone…or anything for that matter…I don’t even think my relationship with myself is best for me…frankly, I wish I could break up with myself…I mean I’ve tried…I’ve dropped hints…like the time a threw all my clothes out the front door…did I get the message?…no…I just went out and gathered them all up…’course, I didn’t talk to myself for a week…which in retrospect is probably the most sane behavior I’ve exhibited for some time…fortunately, there hasn’t been any violence…god forbid I should have to call the police on myself…although that would make for a great “Cops” episode…the police would sound like an older sibling saying, “Stop hitting yourself!”…Well, I don’t think there’s any conclusion that can be drawn from this blog entry…the only saving factor is that once again…I have succeeded in focusing completely on myself…but in my life, what else is there?

Since I have absolutely zero knowledge about relationships…especially in the area of sex…I feel well qualified to discuss it…much in the same way Sarah Palin is well qualified to render her wisdom in matters of the environment…anyone heard her saying “Drill, baby, drill” recently?…or can she see the Gulf oil slick from her house…but I digress…so, someone asked me the other day if I was a lesbian…which is a step up for me…Usually, I am more likely to be asked if I’m a drag queen…because of my size, which has been known to prompt parents to take their small children off the street…and my voice, which to me sounds like I gargled Drano……actually, people don’t generally ask…most people don’t have the courage to pose a question like that, at least not to someone who looks like she could fold them up and fit them in her purse. The original question got me thinking, however…a dangerous endeavor that I try to avoid, rather skillfully, most of the time…see I have more in common with the Tea Party movement than you thought!…and I believe I’m more Bi-Sexual…but not “Bi” as in two…“Bye” as in “so long, sex life”…Frankly, I haven’t come across…heh, heh…she said “come”…I haven’t found many people who “want what I have,” unless I find a really good parking spot near the mall the weekend before Christmas…but that’s not a complaint, because frankly, with the emotional baggage I carry around, if someone WAS interested, I’d be like the proverbial dog that once catching a car doesn’t have a clue what to do with it…Still, it would be nice if someone was interested…you see, I don’t really think I want anyone…I just want them to want me…which is why the vast majority of my sex relations are selfish…well, they have to be…I’m usually the only one there…occasionally faking orgasm so I don’t disappoint myself…

Now that I’m…well…older, I’m starting to think that plastic surgery isn’t such a bad idea…although even the name make makes it seem scary…plastic…that’s what it usually winds up looking like…you look like your face got laminated…which gets really creepy when the rest of your body falls apart…like this woman I talked to once…just once…thankfully…and she had smooth skin on her face…a fixed joker smile…and hands that looked like they were covered in very cheap, very worn naugahyde,,,Now the smooth skin I guess they tighten…but what’s with the Botox…I hear it paralyzes muscles in the face and thereby…somehow…removes wrinkles…how does that work?…my muscles aren’t wrinkled…well, they’re practically non-existent to tell the truth…so how does paralyzing them smooth out the skin on top…actually, just getting the bill would probably paralyze me with fear…so would my whole body be smooth then?…somebody told me how much she paid for the treatments…I told her that if she’d just give me five dollars, I’d have snake bite her on the face…cut out the middle man…note I didn’t call her my friend…what really, really creeps me out are those lip implants…the ones that look like someone bent an inner tube in half and crammed it in their mouth…now that is SEXY…you don’t want to get near lips like those…lips like those latch on and don’t let go…it’d be like kissing a bathroom plunger…but all this finally gets to my Mr. Potato Head idea…for those of you too young to have experienced the magic of the Mr. Potato Head in days of old…when we used to huddle together in caves for protection…you used a real potato, and stuck various body parts…eyes, nose, ears, mouth, legs, etc…into the potato…and then you bake it…well, you’re not really supposed to bake it…that gets you grounded and seeing a psychiatrist before you’re 12…or so I am told…anyway, if I was God…besides the fact the fact that life as we know it would no longer exist…I’d make us all like Mr. Potato Heads…then we could exchange body parts…”Hey, I like your ears…wanna swap?”…”I think I’ll try the blue eyes today”…”I’ve got a date tonight…did I say I’d be a man or a woman”…’course it would make for some really interesting crimes…and the threat “I’ve got your nose!!!” would have to be taken much more seriously…did I start off by saying plastic surgery wasn’t such a bad idea?…

Heard on the news that they did a survey of Tea Party members…the people in the party…not their members…and apparently, they differ from most Americans in that they are generally more affluent…got to have money for all that poster board, lynching ropes, and tickets to right-wing rallies…“Dude! I just scored Sarah Palin tickets! Awesome!!”…as he tokes on a fat cigar dusted with Rush Limbaugh’s oxycotton…Tea Partiers are also older…well, so much for the wisdom of the ancients…and better educated…really…how can this be?…’course we just experienced having a graduate of Harvard who was lucky if he could stick his tooth brush in the right hole…so we know it is possible to get an education and not get an education at the same time…which seems like a bit of an Alice in Wonderland conundrum. Maybe one explanation is that the Tea Party clan…yes, Klan…filled out the survey themselves, and figured they should count all the hours they spent in line at the grocery store, waiting to buy their grits and hog fat in 55 gallon drums, reading the Star or the National Enquirer, and “did you know that Tiger Woods gave birth to Michael Jackson’s love child while space aliens gave him an anal probe”…they might think that’s an education…at least as much of one as watching Glen Beck tell you how “Barrack Obama joined a cult that worships Yugoslavian socialist mountain goats and he’s going to be under your bed tonight…yes, tonight…so hide under those covers, and let me diagram it on the blackboard for you because even though everything I’m telling you is total BS, if I put it on the blackboard, all those years you spent in third grade will make you think it’s a fact because its on a blackboard, Damn It!”..The educational equivalent of Pavlov’s dog…No, I’m sorry…better educated? I think that says more about our education system than it does about any member of the Tea Party having an intellect even slightly higher that a tree sloth…But if we wanted to provide more quality education to our children that would mean more taxes…“And we don’t want more TAXES, by GUM!!!!”…very depressing…maybe they don’t want better educated folks…then they might get some real competition at the Bingo hall… “B??? Where’s the B…What’s a B…4???…that’s a number right?”…well, it would make for longer games, which might keep them off the street…you know they drive back from those rallies…anyone want to risk life and/or limb driving while all those old folks are making right turns from the left hand lane, with their turn signals running for hours…and hours…and hours…my head hurts…

So I’m jogging down the street just before dawn this morning…I don’t say running because frankly I’m so slow I’m lucky I don’t leave a trail…and one of the street lights turns on when I go past. Now maybe that’s a fluke…I mean I don’t think they’re on motion sensors…but part of me thinks maybe they are…and if so, they’re street lights…which means they’re probably set to be triggered by something large…like a car…but I set it off…and what does that say about me…now, I’m big…6’ 4”…really big for a woman…but my weight is in proportion to my height…which is like saying the Empire State Building’s weight is in proportion to its height…its still A LOT…and I’m a bit sensitive about it, not that I really notice it all the time…only when its in my face…like when I’m standing in line for the women’s restroom and feel like I’ve landed in Munchkin land…or when I notice how dirty the top of my refrigerator is…without a step stool…or when a ceiling fan makes me nervous…or when I think I’ve triggered the motion sensor on a street light because I have an axle rating of more than a ton…but what should probably be of deeper concern is how I managed to personalize the simple occurrence of street light turning on to the point that I managed to write an entire blog entry around it…really an exceptional display of self-centeredness, which is a flaw I would try to eliminate…if I wasn’t so proud of it. If you’re proud of your own egotism, is that like the proverbial snowball rolling down hill that just gets bigger and bigger…ugh! Back to big again.

Saw on the news that there is enough loose nuclear material to make 120,000 nuclear weapons…and I’m thinking…and one BIG one. If I were President, I too would work to secure all loose nuclear material…so I could build one big bomb…and blow up the moon…tides piss me off. I have this really sick attraction to the thought of nuclear war…I think its like people that were abused as children becoming serial killers later in life…it must have been all those bomb drills at school in the 60s, when the bell would ring and we’d line up against the wall in the hall, kneel down, and put our hands behind our necks…duck and cover…yeah, that would help…radiation can’t find you if you’re in the fetal position…it didn’t make me safer; just made me want to wet my pants every time I heard the word “Russia” in the news…so now I have dreams of nuclear war where I’m not afraid…just waiting and wondering if that millisecond it takes to evaporate will hurt…maybe its just because I don’t want to die alone…and the contents of this blog entry probably helps explain why that is a concern.

Okay…while I find it to be highly unlikely, it has been mentioned that my life could be…more…well…spiritual. Yes, I know…I don’t believe it either…as is obvious to anyone who reads the mindless prattle that has preceded this blog entry…I already have one foot in Nirvana. But Mistress T, my therapist…who is trying to turn me into a Buddhist…a wasted effort since to be Buddhist is to renounce excess, and I am a person with the motto, “Too much is not enough”…Mistress T wants me to be mindful…which I already am…well, my mind is certainly full…of what, you can guess…and she wants me to meditate. Well, that sounds cool. Sit down…do nothing…I do a lot of nothing. But eliminate unwanted thoughts…wow…

“Okay, I’m meditating…meditating…no thoughts…breathing…breathing in…breathing out…breathing deep…I’m a deep thinker…like a deep septic tank that holds a ton of $hit…whoops….meditating…no thoughts…Am I a pedophile if I have a constant urge to fondle my inner child?…whoops…meditating…breathe in…breathe out…If I stuck false teeth in my vagina, guys could screw me and imagine they’re getting oral sex at the same time…whoops…breathe out…in…out…in…out…would I get in trouble is I snuck into the Braille library and ironed the books?…stop that!…breathe in…out…in…out…

Maybe Nirvana will have to wait…