What Easter means to me ……….
Posted By Annette on April 10, 2009
Why the Internet was invented …….
Posted By Annette on April 7, 2009
My friend, who loves this photo, contends that it was the reason for the Internet(s) tubes coming into being.
My friend is a very funny guy ………….
Things have changed ………..
Posted By Annette on April 7, 2009
And they have changed for the better.
Remember when Chimpy Fucknuts met the Queen of England?
The Queen was overheard, as the photo below was taken, saying to Chimpy, “Let’s get this straight - you’re never coming back here, right?”
And now we are represented all over the world by these beautiful people………….
Today ………………
Posted By Annette on April 7, 2009
I had the distinct and memorable pleasure of telling my friend Tony that the Vermont legislature had overridden the governor’s veto of the gay marriage bill, and that wonderful New England state had become the fourth state in the country to legalize marriage for everyone.
He made a grand sound, one that I’ll never forget. He and Eric have been together for seven years, and don’t - right now - feel the need to “make it legal,” but every step forward is a victory, and not a small one.
What a week it’s been.
What a nice time it is to be alive, to watch as things turn around and good people rise up and do the right thing and the naysayers and losers and mean-spirited ones writhe and blather and spew, getting nowhere - in fact, falling back further and further. I wonder if they’ll ever catch on, or will they just continue, uneducable, intolerant, without substance, without hope, without any redeeming value, social or otherwise.
They’re bad winners, incapable and incompetence, but they’re also bad losers. I wish they’d find something they’re good at.
Self-mutilation, maybe?
An American icon ………….
Posted By Annette on April 7, 2009
A picture of Helen Thomas at an awards ceremony in Washington State last week.
She is wonderful. I love this photograph.
You know what?
Posted By Annette on April 4, 2009
…………………………………. You taste funny ……………………………
It’s so nice ……………….
Posted By Annette on April 1, 2009
not to be embarrassed or ashamed when our President goes abroad. Watching the reception the Obamas are getting in London, I am cheered - even though Gil is there, battling his way through the G20 demonstrations, I fear - by the way they are being embraced.
I am so proud of them.
And, back at home, we have the GOPigs who are incapable of doing or saying anything constructive or - this is a stretch, I know - intelligent.
Oliphant nailed it the other day:
An illustration of the stupidity of the GOPigs:
Posted By Annette on March 23, 2009
I am thankful that there are insane shepherds out there ………..
Posted By Annette on March 20, 2009
and, I don’t mind saying, I believe I’m a bit in love with these wonderfully goofy guys (and their superlative border collies):
There is an ocean out there, I can see it from here ………
Posted By Annette on March 15, 2009
For a structure that was demolished as the sixties became the seventies, it sure does show up regularly in odd places. I don’t remember where I found this image, but it’s not one that was in my great postal collection - the one I sent with Larry to distribute to any Atlantians who might have shown up.
He did just that, and then he reported back that Martha had asked for another, which, of course, he gave her. I love that she wanted two. I love that he gave her two.
It will always be my most magical place, and all these years have proven to me that that will never change. It is still the only place that I yearn to return to. It is the only place to which I can never return.
So, I find a picture, an old picture - they’re all old pictures - and I look again at the window that belonged to my room, right in front, on the second floor, right in the middle, just below that small balcony. It looked out onto the beach, the surf, the sunrise.
Sometimes I feel like I have always stayed there, standing at that window, the sash thrown open, the cool salt breeze embracing me, the smell of the ocean and the sand and the shells, seaweed, denizens all around my head, and all I can see out there is the sun on the water, sparkling and calling to me, telling me that the world will soon carry me away to my life, but something vital will remain, will always belong to the Atlantis, to the Atlantic, to the sunlight, to that day when something happened, something changed, something remained, and even though I turned away and men brought the building down, I am still standing there, looking out at the light on the water, and there is no time, yesterdays were never to be, tomorrow never came, a little boy is tugging at my leg, people behind me are laughing and calling to me, and I am standing there, at the open window, looking at the sun on the water.
Then I turn away and pick up the little boy and carry him away from the window, never knowing that he will find another window in a place far away, and then I will remember standing at the Atlantis window, wide open, taking in the breath of life, watching the light dance on the roiling seas, and I know how that water moves, for I have moved like that in my life, but I was even more beautiful than the ocean, and we are still sparkling, still rolling in and rolling out, still loving our light on the water, as that beautiful old building looks out onto my life to come.
I am weak, I am so weak ……….
Posted By Annette on March 15, 2009
Some things are irresistible……..
Posted By Annette on March 13, 2009
You can screw in public in Milton, FL…..
Posted By Annette on March 7, 2009
but there’s a whole lot you’re not allowed to do in their little park.
A recent visitor had a comment for the good folks of Milton who decreed what isn’t permitted in their park.
He can dish it out, but he can’t take it
Posted By Annette on March 7, 2009
I found this video clip and just about died laughing. Then I read the article explaining the video. The salient events are:
In 1990, a year or two before he became super-famous, Rush Limbaugh guest-hosted Pat Sajak’s short-lived talk show. It didn’t go so well: The taping was disrupted by a group of angry activists who were seated throughout the audience. A visibly rattled Limbaugh was unable to regain control of the show.
“He came out full of bluster and left a very shaken man,” a CBS executive later said. “I had never seen a man sweat as much in my life.”
Eventually Limbaugh made it to the first commercial break, and then, barely, to the next one; when the show returned from the second break, the activists were gone, along with the rest of the audience.
A demoralized Limbaugh then delivered self-serving closing remarks to an empty studio.
Watch it all here, if your stomach is strong and you need a good laugh:
I dare you……….
Posted By Annette on March 1, 2009
…… to watch this video without ending up humming, with a big, goofy grin on your face:
This time I really mean it……..
Posted By Annette on February 28, 2009
Even though I swore that I’d published the last Chimpy Fucknuts post, this graphic was just too good to pass up.
We have a brilliant and courageous President in the White House now, but we must never forget the nightmare of the past eight years.
As if we ever could.
Nothing compares to free speech……..
Posted By Annette on February 28, 2009
…… except maybe free spelling lessons.
Looks like “No Child Left Behind” left someone behind:
He remembered ………..
Posted By Annette on February 28, 2009
I realized today that he knew he was dying, even before he started to die.
It just hit me as I moved a tiny ashtray out of the way, an ashtray from a Chinese restaurant in Kittery, Maine. The year was 1966, and I doubt the restaurant is still there.
Our first date. He was faculty, I was a student. A faculty member and his wife had set us up, and we didn’t object. He wore a sport jacket and tie. I was in a frock of some sort, something involving pantyhose.
Over dinner, I got a buzz. An MSG buzz. I felt lightheaded, dizzy, and it was hard to breathe.
He took me for a walk outside, which helped a lot. The restaurant was in an old house, with a wide porch that went around three sides. We walked slowly, his arm around my shoulders. It was early autumn, early enough that we didn’t need coats. It was the first time he’d touched me.
I liked having his arm around me.
After that, we were a couple, but we were, we thought, very discreet about it. It wasn’t all that liberal, the old private college that had established the experimental division where we had met. He had graduated from that private college, gone off to grad school, gotten his Master’s, and then come back to work at the new division. Director of Student Affairs. We found his title very, very funny.
It was a romance that never ended, really. When I went off to marry someone else, he didn’t sulk, but he wasn’t happy. Then, a few years later, he called to tell me he was getting married, too. Working on his doctorate, he had met The One. I was happy for him.
When my marriage broke up, and I called him to tell him I was leaving California, he was here to meet me when I returned. He wasn’t married any more, either. He never remarried, even though he had a long-time girlfriend who was crazy about him. Even when life got almost impossible for him, and she wanted to be with him all the time, he wouldn’t let her, and she stayed in her home, many states south.
Once, on my birthday, I got a crazed call from that girlfriend. Sue, her name was. He had told me about her. He loved her. She loved him so much that she went through his old phone bills to find my number – she knew that he and I talked very often – and called me because his father was dying, and he had gone home to be with his father, and she was so afraid for him – he was an only child, a surviving twin, his identical brother having died shortly after birth – that she called me to ask me to call him at his parents’ home.
“If he can talk to you,” she said in a strong voice, “he’ll feel better.”
I realized how much she loved him. She loved him enough to call me, the woman who always was The Woman In His Life, to help him. She really, really loved him.
I called him. When he heard my voice, he sounded like he would cry, but he didn’t. He sounded like he was in horrible physical pain, a leg caught in a bear trap, and he told me something that only I would understand.
“I cut my hair,” he said.
He had long, beautiful dark brown hair. He was part Indian, and he had a beaked nose that was just right with his pale blue eyes, his shimmering hair. It grew past his shoulders, and he cut it.
It had always annoyed his father, so he cut his hair. He cut his hair so his father wouldn’t die.
He died anyway.
Later, his mother began buying too much cinnamon and forgetting who he was when he called, and he left the small town in upstate New York where he’d made a life for himself, and went home to Maine to take care of his mother. She died, too, a few years later.
He would call and tell him how she bought cinnamon every time he took her to the store. All that cinnamon, he said, sounding awed and saddened.
When she died, he inherited the house, and his health was fading by then, so he just stayed in the village where he’d been born, in the house where he grew up. It’s a beautiful place, and he took pictures of everything he could see from every room in the house, through all the seasons, and sent them to me. So that I could see what he saw, know what he knew.
The packages began to arrive one day, just little things. A pocket knife, a program from his junior high graduation. Pictures of his relatives. A denim vest. A stuffed lobster.
A wooden sign for a beachfront hotel in southern Maine, a place that is no longer there. There are signatures on the back of the sign, and a lot of those names aren’t here any more, either.
He sent me the ashtray, and I asked him what that was about.
“Don’t you remember?” he asked. “You got that Chinese food buzz, and we went outside, and . . . . . “
“And we walked around that porch until I felt better,” I remembered. He had taken an ashtray that night, a remembrance of our first date.
I never knew he’d done that. All those years, he’d kept it, and I never knew. Then he sent it to me.
Today I touched it, and then I picked it up and I kissed it. Wherever he is now, he felt someone kiss him.
When he died, I got the news from a wonderful old friend who acted heroically to make sure I didn’t hear about the horrible fire that claimed him. My old friend wanted to protect me, wanted me to hear the bad news so that I could cry with him. My old friend is a fine man, a really fine man.
I wrote to the Fire Chief in his town, to tell him about the man who’d died when his wooden house was consumed in flames that frigid February night. I wanted him to know that there were people out in the world, far from that Maine village, who loved the lost man, that he had left behind a sweet legacy, that he would be remembered.
So I kissed that ashtray and remembered, and I realized that he knew he wouldn’t last long when he began sending me his treasures. He wanted me to have the things that mattered to him.
And, after all those years, he finally gave me the ashtray he’d kept secret for so long. He knew I’d remember.
How could I ever forget?
Weekend……….
Posted By Annette on February 8, 2009
There is that old line that addresses the “Sunday morning fight about Saturday night,” but I don’t know that from my own life. Saturday nights have always been special and sweet, and the Sunday mornings have been blessedly quiet and sweet. No drama, nothing that would make the papers, just some routines that remained until they weren’t there any more.
I remember them all so fondly, yet they took place in different cities, different countries, with different people around, and sometimes there were none. I remember a phone call from a man who was dancing around the edges of my life while I waited for him to realize that he was welcome inside, and he asked me what I was doing at home on that Saturday night.
“Cleaning out files,” was the honest answer. “There’s too much paper in my life,” which was true. Then I told him I’d just thrown away my divorce file, and his response to that was the equivalent of him placing his hand on the doorknob, turning it, and opening the door to the rest of our lives.
“You’ll need that when you get married again,” he said, and I laughed.
“Do I sound crazy to you?” I asked him, and he said no, I didn’t sound at all crazy.
Then we were both silent, and he closed the door behind him. We both exhaled, and life went on, only it was all different.
Sunday mornings overlooking the Marina, the light from the Pacific bouncing off the glass walls of our home, the distant noise of the tourists and the busy locals barely skimming the surface of our Sunday morning, white terrycloth robes, bare feet touching on a long couch, newspapers everywhere, the occasional grunt when one of us read something interesting, and finally, as the light moved towards us, that moment of acknowledging the world out there.
“Brunch?” he would ask.
“Lunch?” I’d say, noting the height of the sun.
Smiles were a good enough answer to both questions. Sometimes we went out, sometimes we didn’t.
Sunday mornings, Saturday nights.
I smell my own scent, as he stands behind me. I reach to fasten the clasp on my pearls, and his hands take the ends from mine; he clasps them and I pat them and we both admire them. I see the reflection of my wedding ring in the mirror, how it glows; he is handsome in a dark suit; I am beautiful. His smooth face against my neck, just enough scent there to remind him of all the times we’ve done this, all the moments that brought us there, again, standing where we stood so many times before, and he kisses my neck while I smile at us in the big mirror.
Never did I want so much to be me. Never was I so glad to be me.
Coming home, away from all the people, laughing on the elevator where we are alone and he is frisky. Laughing and leaning on each other on way to the bedroom, clothes falling everywhere.
“Leave the pearls on,” he says, and of course the pearls stay.
On Sunday morning, the sunlight barely enters where we sleep and when I awaken, he is standing there, tall and handsome, holding a big glass of freshly-squeezed orange juice. “Good morning,” he says.
Yes. Yes, it is.
Yes. Yes, it was.
