Happy Mother’s Day to YOU! Really! (A story in captions)

The cartoon that prompted the whole shebang (I’m looking at YOU, Cthulu Hand Luke! Oh, I know you think you’re safe over on your Facebook page, far from mine, but you’re not safe as you think. I Know People. And They Know People. And some of the People They Know apparently Know People You Know, because this lovely little effort showed up on my Facebook page a mere two days before Mother’s Day. I ask you: Is that fair? Is that right? Is that wise? Probably not. Almost certainly not. Definitely not. Your image prompted Research. And just look at this mess! What would your mother think? She’s probably calling mine right now to suggest family counseling…this isn’t about you, Mom. This is about me, and about a whole bunch of really funny pictures. At least I think they’re funny. But maybe not…Hey! I got you a present! And food! I have food to give you brunch! Forget the nasty blog. Forget Cthulu Hand Luke’s Mom. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Really.

Well. That got out of hand. Still, though, credit where credit is due. That picture is definitely what prompted a short conversation.

>>> The EVIDENCE<<<
(and !, too! Also!)

So there it is, in what looks like a tint of, Um… PMS 645ish, a much lighter tint of PMS 645ish, and PMS Cool Gray…about..8? 9? That’s close (and yes they really ARE called “PMS Colors.” Stop snickering. I can’t help it. It’s just the way is.)

So there I am, left alone on Facebook because if Aaron has any sense, and I know he does, he’s sure as heck not sitting at his computer mulling over what Grendel might do for his Mom on Sunday.

But I have to. It’s my job. Or at least it’s how my brain works. So now I have to Google Grendel and his mom and see what’s up with them. It isn’t pretty.

So there’s Grendel, down at the Hallmark, looking for just the right card. He finally decides to make one and just when he’s finishing it who should show up but Beowulf, who should either be looking for his pants or a card for his own mom, but he’s left it to the last minute, as usual, and now he’s even missed Fedex, so he figures what the hell, I’ll tell Mom the ship must have gone down when I see her. And then he sees Grendel, and he’s all up in his face, like “What’re YOU doing here? Your Mom can’t even read,” and Grendel’s all “My mom can so read!” And Beowulf’s all, “Not this card she can’t . What’d you do, rip off a grocery bag and write it yourself?” And Grendel’s all, “So what if I did?” And Beowulf’s all, “Geez I don’t believe you. Gimme that!” And he grabs for it, but Grendel won’t let go, so Beowulf grabs his arm and tries to get the card THAT way, and then the manager shows up and says, “You boys forget something this morning?” And Grendel goes, “Huh? And Beowulf says, “Dude you got man-boobs–and you forgot your pants.” And Grendel says, “Did not. You stole THEM, too!” And Beowulf says, “I ain’t stole nothin’.” And the manager says, “Security? Security? We’ve got a situation on the card aisle.” And Beowulf yanks super hard on Grendel’s arm, and grabs the card off his claw, and beats feet for the exit. Grendel does, too, but the security guy follows the trail of blood right to Grendel’s mom’s house, which is where he’s going, just as fast as his feet will carry him.

Well. That was a little more than I bargained for. The full Monty on both Beowulf and Grendel. I wonder where that Hallmark store is…No! Stop! Don’t be shallow! Beowulf might have it goin’ on in the naked superhero department, but he’s sure not going to be winning any “Mr. Personality” prizes any time soon. I mean, he even steals poor Grendel’s pathetic homemade grocery bag card! Enough! Let’s forget Beowulf and see what’s happening at Grendel’s Mom’s house.

Oh, look–there’s Grendel now! And what’s that he’s got? A skull? For his mom? For Mother’s Day? We all knew he wasn’t exactly known as the brains of the bog, but still…a skull? Really? Still no pants, but then, again, it’s obvious he’s trying to evade the clutches of either Beowulf or the Hallmark security guy, though why the Hallmark guy might still be on his trail is anybody’s guess, unless he stole that skull from the remaindered Halloween decorations bin.

“Ma? Ma? Happy mother’s day,” says Grendel. “I brung ya somethin.’ Here.” And he hands over the skull, which now is shiny and slimy and pretty rank from making the trip tucked into Grendel’s armpit.
“What the hell is that?” growls Grendel’s Mom. “A skull? Ya brung me a skull? When you know I already got a whole closet full a the damn things? For this ya pull me away from “Wheel of Fortune?” Sheesh! Get a clue!”
“Oh! I forgot…I brung ya this, too!” says Grendel.

“Now you’re talkin’!” shouts Grendel’s mom. She is out of her recliner like a shot, and her hands are wrapped around the beautiful, jewel-studded heart-shaped box of chocolates which, we suddenly understand are the reason the Hallmark security guy has persevered in his quest. Grendel collapses into his mom’s recliner and thumbs the remote. A beautiful blonde girl in a red bathing suit runs toward him out of the sea. She shakes back her mane of wet blonde locks. The shakes translate themselves in an interesting fashion throughout her body. All that shaking is probably why Grendel misses the battle royal happening at the door, where his mom is defending her home, her chocolates, and incidentally her son from the savage attack being waged by the security guy.
And then Grendel’s mom lets out a terrible scream.
The girl on the TV stops shaking.
“Hey!” says Grendel. He looks toward the commotion. “Hey!” he says again, when he realizes at the security guard who has just buried his sword into the back of MaGrendel’s neck bears more than a passing resemblance to Beowulf.
And suddenly Grendel Sees All. He understands that this has all been a Cunning Plan devised by the Beastly Beowulf Boys, a plan that would allow them to give their mom a nice card, a box of chocolates, and, as a sort of side treat, various fragments of dismembered monsters. For a moment he wonders if MaBeowulf is building her own monster from a kit, and lost a couple pieces or something.
But then MaGrendel screams again as the sword pierces the back of her neck, and collapses to the floor. The security guard loses his grip on sword and neck, but on the chocolates, and flies across the room. His head meets the wall with a wet, squishy thud. The box of chocolates at last flies free and smashes to the floor beside the recliner. Chocolates glistening with cherry liqueur roll everywhere. Grendel’s mouth waters. Then he sinks back and sighs. The box is right beside the recliner, well within reach. But it’s on the side where his arm is missing.

So there it is–what Grendel did for Mother’s Day. You do something nice for your mom. No skulls. Chocolates are good, as long as she’s not diabetic. Happy Mother’s Day. And HMD to you, too, Cthulu Hand Luke.

Sleep Apnea: The Inside Out, Right Upside Downside

Went to the doctor a couple days ago for persistant swelling in my legs, arms, neck–just about everywhere, really–as well as pain in moving and weight gain that just didn’t seem to tally with my food intake. She listened to me, asked a couple questions: “Have you been waking up a lot at night?” “Are you sleepy during the day?” “Do you snore?”…

And then said, “There’s little question in my mind that you have sleep apnea, that it’s advanced, and that if you don’t do something about it now your son will wake to find you struggling for breath some morning, or worse.”

And they wonder why I don’t like going to doctors.

All jesting aside, hearing that was terrifying. “Doing something about it” looks like it’s going to involve turning myself into Cyborg Woman every night and sleeping attached to a machine, as well as surgery. And I am in the process of (once again) trying to obtain health insurance. While the new laws that were supposed to be designed for people like me mean that insurance companies can’t outright deny me coverage, they apparently don’t mean that said companies can’t price my coverage prohibitively high. In essence, I am about where I was before the Affordable Health Care act passed–trying to apply for health insurance in a world where the people offering it do not want me to have it–and where they can price me right out of the market.

But my doctor’s preliminary diagnosis (I had a blood gas test yesterday, and I’m scheduled for a sleep apnea test study consult this coming week) has simplified things enormously. I no longer can afford to dither around. While I will continue to try to get onto the Oregon Health Plan, I’ve accepted that if I want to see my son graduate from high school, see my grandchildren, grow old, I can no longer afford to wait around for the insurance companies to dream up yet more innovative ways of making sure that I understand that they really, really don’t want me hanging around, and that if Big Brother (as they like to refer to the forces in government maintaining that they should Do The Right Thing and actually provide the health insurance for which they are paid billions) is going to insist I get to hang out with them, by all Gods they’re going to be sure it’s worth their while.

And all this to save my life with two comparatively simple procedures, procedures which my doctor says should effect a total cure or at least a significant reduction in symptoms. We’re not talking a few more good years here–we’re talking the prospect of a long and healthy life.  That’s worth fighting for. And in my case, since I really don’t have a viable choice, it’s worth going into debt for. Is it worth it to me to incur the huge bills I know will be my lot if I proceed with treatment as an uninsured person? Is it worth it to me to watch my son grow up? Well, yes, it is. So I’m moving ahead. I haven’t forgotten you, health insurance people. You can expect to continue hearing from me for the foreseeable future. But I’m not waiting for you to make what we both should know is a good investment in my continued productive, tax-paying, hard-working, good-momming, writing, designing, future. I’m going to do what I need to do, and then I’m going to deal with the consequences.

But all that’s the downside. The upside is that I’ve rediscovered fun. Not intellectual, comedy. Not deep, deep joy–I’ve never really lost that–but the value of sheer, goofy, creative fun. This diagnosis has reminded me that I’m not immortal. At some point my son will be left with nothing but memories of me.

And what will he remember?

I think back over the few years, and I know that what he’ll remember is a mom who “did her best,” but who was weighed down by a lot of things over which she had no control, a woman who gradually became more and more embroiled in the struggle of keeping everything together, and who, to a great degree, had forgotten why.

This diagnosis has reminded me. Furthermore, since one of the things that happens when it gets as advanced as mine apparently is, is that one operates in a constant state of oxygen deprivation. This is not good, don’t get me wrong. I’m making every effort to get my oxygen back. But in the meantime one of the side effects is that it makes it a little easier to let go of some of the big scary stuff and just sit and listen to YouTube with my kid, or look at a strip of those inflated plastic tubes that one sometimes finds in boxes and see not recyclable trash, but something that, combined with a fat black sharpie marker, a hair clip that has been lurking in the bottom drawer in the bathroom, and a little scotch tape can become a really remarkable modern interpretation of a Native American war bonnet–one which stays securely on the head, and which can be produced without harming a single eagle. One which I might point out I am wearing as I type this very post.

I have work to do. I’ll get to it. But for right now, thanks to a really scary diagnosis and the lovely, slightly floaty state in which I seem to be living right now, blogging in a home made war bonnet, with my son sitting at the table exploring the wonders of Music and Kindle Fire and smiling at me occasionally, is enough. It’s more than enough. It’s a memory worth making. And what’s more, this morning has provided me with a wonderful bit of headgear perfectly suited to phone duels with the soulless, godless hacks who keep losing my insurance applications, forcing me to recalculate up-to-the-minute taxes, then re-apply, and then “go to the end of the waiting list,” since the process has taken too long. When I start making those calls, filling out those forms for the bazillionth time, I will do it wearing my my plastic-tube-sharpie-and-alligator-clip war bonnet. So they just better watch out, is all I have to say. And when I succeed in actually getting insurance, I will take that damned card, make a xerox, and staple it to the end of my war bonnet–another feather in my cap.

Flying Words

When I was a little girl, my dad used to talk about a poem he loved. It was called “The First Settler’s Story,” and it was written by Will Carleton, an American poet who often took the plight of the disadvantaged as his subjects. Much of his poetry was time-specific–his poem “Over the Hill to the Poorhouse,” for example, has largely faded from public knowledge. Likewise his poem about divorce, “Betsy and I Are Out.” Even “The First Settler’s Story,” has largely become a casualty of changing times, values, and worlds.

Will Carleton wasn’t one of our finer poets, but he did manage to produce four lines of text that have been quoted over and over–even if few remember where they came from. Here are the lines:

Boys flying kites haul in their white-winged birds.
You can’t do that when you’re flying words.
Once spoken, though you wish them left unsaid,
God Himself can’t kill them, make them dead.

Words have consequences. Sometimes those consequences are  unintended. In  “The First Settler’s Story” the husband offers them to us as the lesson he learns in the wake of his wife’s tragic death–that his cruel, angry words to her drove her to dangerous behavior that ultimately cost her life.

Words matter. That’s why we have laws against verbal abuse. Here’s how Wikipedia describes it:

Verbal abuse includes the following: countering, withholding, discounting, verbal abuse disguised as a joke, blocking & diverting, accusing & blaming, judging & criticizing, trivializing, undermining, threatening, name calling, chronic forgetting, ordering, denial of anger or abuse, and abusive anger.”^[1]

What prompted all this? The onset of our political season. I watched a clip in which a woman at a GOP Town Hall meeting asserted that President Obama should be tried for treason. It doesn’t take a genius to track this back to the overheated rhetoric during the last political campaign, where various spokespeople asserted all sorts of untrue things–and, even when those things were proven false, continued to assert them.

A virtue was made of knowing nothing. Sophomoric behavior became what passed for public discourse. And, as verbal abuse does, the rhetoric and claims became more and more vile and less and less veiled as time when on.

And now we are starting all over again–but we’re starting at a point higher on the abuse curve than we did last time. We are starting with phrases like “Don’t retreat, reload” an established (and hotly defended, even in the wake of shootings that cost lives) part of our political lexicon. We are starting with GOP operatives considering allowing rally participants to attend political events–with loaded guns. We are starting with a mass of swirling falsehoods, all of which have been “flown” not inadvertently, but as part of a concerted plan to defeat a President who “is not like us” by destroying the nation and laying the blame at his feet.

That’s not to say that the Democratic Party has been blameless–there are falsehoods there, too. But a simple look at any of the reputable, non-partisan fact check sites (and I’m defining those as sites funded by non-partisan organizations and not affiliated with any candidate’s election or defeat)–heck, even a look at the email smears reported on Snopes.com–reveals that there is a serious credibility problem in the Republican party and its conservative base today. Count the smears. Do the math.

But it’s not just the number of smears in question–it’s the violent rhetoric at issue here. The right to keep and bear arms has been translated into the right to carry loaded guns into highly charged, heavily-frequented areas. The right to “political imagery” has been cited in defense of the crosshairs marketing congressional districts that are “targeted” for takedowns. Town halls as a means of conveying information have been compromised by concerted plans to shout down speakers–to prevent the exchange of information.

I teach writing. I’m a writer by trade. It breaks my heart to see words, a unique human invention that has allowed us to develop a sense of history, a concept of past and future, a body of literature unmatched in the animal kingdom, and  even a system of jurisprudence and ethics, misused to circumvent their intended purpose.

Words have become the weapons of those who take pride in their ignorance, who maintain that those who value studying the issues and weighing their merits are somehow the enemy. Words have become the servants of rage, the tools of racism, and the weapons of a group of businessmen who use them to turn the rage of the less successful against the very systems and ideas that might better their lot.

Words matter. The kites are flying again, and many of them are dark and drenched with blood. It is time that we took back our words, that we drew clear lines between spirited debate and verbal abuse, between legitimate discussion and incitements to riot, between the sorts of words that provoke us to think, and the sorts of words that can provoke some of us to pick up weapons and start shooting, or stabbing.

And so, to those most guilting (and we and you all know who they–and we–are) I would say, “We’re starting a new campaign. Let’s not make it an escalation of the last campaign. Let’s not turn what should be a uniquely American system of transferring power into a mockery of itself, and an excuse for encouraging the ugliest parts of our national heritage. Let’s not make this election be about how close we can come to actually advocating that someone kill the President.

Before we send up our kites, let’s think about who all is looking at them, and what they are seeing. Above all, let’s remember that while we might not bear physical responsibility for the actions that grow out of our words, we absolutely bear responsibility for the atmosphere our words help to create.

Will Carleton had it right. Words said cannot be unsaid, and like stones, they send out ripples. The time to recognize that–and to change the ripples we are creating–is now.

I’m not here…

Today starts the first day of my blog tour. This week, I’ll be visiting a few other blogs to talk about Benchmarks: A Single Mother’s Illustrated Journal, living in a small town, and making illustrations work for you. Here’s the list–please stop by and say hello!

Bodie P

Blog Tour Schedule:

Tuesday: Fatal Foodies
Wednesday: Marian Allen’s Writer’s Blog
Thursday:  Diana Orgain’s Spunky Blog
Friday: Magic Dog Press

Crazy Little Women

Yesterday was a hard day. By the time evening arrived I felt like I had been beaten up. All day. I found myself wanting the simple comfort of a friendly voice. And so I called my friend, Deanna.

When she came on the line she sounded blurry, like she often does when I call. But within a few sentences she was there, with me, also as often happens. But in spite of the fact that everything seemed to be going as usual, this conversation was different. Usually I call because I want to be a friend to Deanna. Last night I called because I needed her to be a friend to me.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“Oh, pretty well. Same as usual,” she said.

“Were you busy?”

“No, just … I can’t find the words…” she said after a bit.

“It’s okay, I just needed to hear a friendly voice,” I said.

She laughed, and I felt immediately better. Deanna has one of those laughs that can light up a room. “Well, I think I can do that,” she said.

And then we talked. We just talked. And when Deanna couldn’t capture the words she needed we just listened to each other breathe, and after a while we would find something else to talk about.

As many of our conversations do these days, our conversation last night meandered back and forth between worlds and realities. Sometimes we were in hers, and sometimes we were in mine. And it didn’t really matter where we were at any given time, under it all I felt the love that we have for each other, and I knew that, no matter how far Deanna travels, no matter how far her world’s orbit may swing from mine, that there will always be this tesseract of love, our wormhole in mental and emotional space, the conduit that keeps our crazy elliptical orbits from spinning completely away from each other.

Our conversation was different because last night it wasn’t Deanna needing me–it was me, needing Deanna. And it reminded me again how much she has taught me about the nature of friendship–and of reality–over the years.

In the beginning, right after Deanna was hospitalized, I found myself dividing what she said into two categories: “real” and “delusional.” I thought that “healing” would mean that the “real” stuff squeezed out the “delusional” stuff. I was wrong. As we have traversed the last few years together I have come to see her “delusions” as her way of reaching a deeper, more painful reality, one her conscious mind couldn’t bear. I have learned to listen not to her words, but to the fears and pain behind them–the fears and pain she could never acknowledge when she was “all right”–the fears and pain that, I think, played a huge part in breaking her.

I am not a mental health professional. I am only her friend. But, because I am her friend, I can see that many of her “delusions” are simply parables for the sometimes terrible realities of her life. When she speaks of the woman who raised her “not being her mother, but someone who took her mother’s place,” I can agree. Deanna was indeed raised by a woman who was not a “mother” to her in the best sense of the word. Deanna’s explanation, that another woman replaced her true mother, is her effort to make sense of one of the deepest, most painful truths of her life. When she speaks of family members stealing from her, lying about her, and trying to kill her I think of the pain of rejection she felt when she lost her job working for the church that was everything to her–and that, in fact, frequently referred to itself as her “church family.” Her “delusion” is allowing her to face that pain in symbolic terms, and over the years I have learned to respond to the pain and anguish behind her words, rather than the words themselves. Instead of trying to convince her that her relatives are not indeed framing her for murder I simply offer to be a character witness, and reassure her that when the judge comes to know her he will see that she is not capable of such things. And then we move on, and she is comforted.

Deanna is teaching me that we humans are more than just fleshy machines that move through a static world. We are not creatures who exist in a single, simple reality. We are creatures of air, of fire, of symbol, and of story. For the last few years, Deanna has moved beyond living her biography. These days, she is writing myth in the purest sense of the word–she is finding the deep truth that has lain below her waking world, and she is giving it voice.

It’s not easy. There are good days and bad days. Neither of us knows if she’ll ever be well enough to move beyond her current sheltered world. But that’s okay. In these years that Deanna has been “confined,” her spirit has traveled vast distances. It is still traveling. She has been to places most of us will never go. She has been to places none of us will ever want to go. But in all that journeying, even on the very worst days, there are two central truths. She has always remembered me. And we are still good friends.

Observing the Dog Wars

Okay, I think that we’ve officially entered the Silly Season. First we have the sad story of Mitt Romney’s pooch, who was crated, strapped on top of the car, and taken on vacation. There are a lot of ways to spin this. the ASPCA roundly condemns the practice of strapping one’s dog–however crated–to the car roof and zooming off for a fun-filled vacation. Not surprisingly, many agree. Also not surprisingly, the Romneys are holding fast to their “he liked it, and it was better than a kennel” position. I am unconvinced that the car roof was the only alternative to a kennel for the vacationing Romneys–possibly Seamus could have stayed in one of their numerous homes–but to be perfectly honest, in the absence of a weigh-in by Seamus himself I am prepared to give the Romneys a pass on the whole dog on the car roof thing.

I’m willing to concede that Seamus may indeed have “loved it”–Irish Setters are famously beautiful but dumb. Maybe Seamus did love the prospect of an eighteen-wheeler roaring toward him. Maybe he did love the endless, incessant, inescapable buffeting of the wind driving him ever back, back, back against the back wall of the crate. Maybe he did love the way the crate rocked and shook as the car raced toward Ontario. Maybe he did love bugs in his teeth. Maybe the Romneys strapped the crate on sideways. Maybe it was indeed an ill-advised turkey, rather than terror, that caused Seamus’ sudden attack of diarrhea. Who knows? So–in the absence of any sort of word from Seamus, I’m willing to file this under “things that make me go ‘huh?’” and move on.

What is bothering me more these days is the GOP’s answer to the Seamus-on-the-roof story, and that’s their “revelation” from Dreams of My Father, President Obama’s memoir about, in part, his childhood in Indonesia, that in his childhood Barry Obama ate dog meat. The implication is that but for the eagle eye of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh the First Family would be barbecuing Bo in the Rose Garden. Apparently the plan is to use the story about child Obama eating dog meat in Indonesia as some kind of answer to Seamus-on-the-roof.

It would be funny, if it didn’t reveal how very insular, smug, and dim-witted the spinmeisters at the GOP believe us to be. In the first place, equating an action taken by a grown man, married, with children, and presumably in his right mind, with the action of a child, arguably still at the “eat-what’s-set-before-you” stage of life, is ridiculous. The two things simply aren’t equivalent. No matter what one thinks of Seamus’ car trip, there’s simply no way to equate the fact that the adult Mitt chose to strap his dog to the roof of the car with the fact that a young child ate a piece of meat he was given by a caretaker. None.

What’s more troubling, though, is what the “You ate dog” response says about the insularity and bigotry that we are being asked to embrace. Let me say right here that I do not eat dog. I have no plans to try. But I recognize that this is because of a powerful cultural bias, not because dog meat is inherently inedible. Biases are powerful things, and food biases are some of the most powerful of all.

Andrew Zimmern’s show, Bizarre Foods, regularly invites viewers to confront their biases by exploring how people around the world  meet the nutritional demands of their bodies. I watch. And sometimes I wince. But the show carries a profound message–one important enough that I used it as the basis for a writing class I teach. The message is this: Humans all have certain nutritional needs, and how we meet those needs is driven by where we live, what foods are available, and yes, our cultural and religious taboos. Understanding and respecting that fact is the first step toward understanding that humanity is truly all one family–we eat what is around us, and for millions in third-world countries–like Indonesia–that has prompted the acceptance of a much wider variety of protein sources than we, who live in a far wealthier world, are accustomed to. Like privileged children who turn up their noses at bread crusts, in the context of the world population we are picky eaters. We can afford to be. We’re rich.

To build a political “smear” on a simple fact of life–Barry Obama was living in a part of the world where the consumption of dog meat was acceptable, and one of his caregivers gave him some–says more about those who have crafted the smear than it says about President Obama, who no longer lives in Indonesia, who can make his own protein choices now, and who, judging by Bo’s continued happy existence, does not appear to number dog meat among those choices. It says that the crafters of that particular bit of propaganda live smug, safe, sheltered lives, lives in which they can afford to pick and choose what they will eat, rather than eating what they must, the way that much of the world does. It says that they can see no difference between the biases that govern all of our food choices and morality–possibly even religion. It says that they are willing to convict someone for being different, for having a broader, more inclusive cultural experience. At worst, it says that they are willing to condemn those who live in other parts of the world, who use other proteins, fruits, vegetables, and starches to fill out their food pyramid to either ostracism or malnutrition. Mostly, it says that they simply have no concept of or respect for the exigencies under which most of the world lives. It makes me wonder how much they understand about how the less privileged in America live, and the dietary choices being made in smaller, humbler homes just down the street.

That smear reeks of snobbism, self-congratulation, narrow-mindedness, and insularity. It is beneath us. And if you doubt me, reflect for a moment on the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans partake of beef in myriad forms, while half a world away there is a nation that holds cattle sacred–and that is probably as appalled by our addiction to McDonald’s as we are by the idea of eating dog meat.

At its root, this smear comes back to the same tired meme that stained so much of the last election. It is an appeal to the lowest human instincts, to racism and xenophobia. The smear is designed to remind us all that President Obama is different, other, and quite possibly dangerous. It is a return to the canard that “he is not like us.”

So here’s the question: Who is “us?” If the measure of “us-ness” is buying into this bit of ugliness, I hope to all gods that he is not “like us.” And I hope I’m not like “us,” either.

Read Bodie Parkhurst Books for Free

For the next five days, Amazon is running a promotion on Bodie Parkhurst books–five titles can be downloaded and read for free. Free is good, but it’s not forever. Download your free copies today.

So here’s the deal, if you’ve been waiting to sample until the price was right, now’s the time. Here, for your information and delectation, is a list of the free titles, and what you can expect from them. For more information, visit the links at the top of the page, or check out Amazon’s “search inside” function.

Here’s the list:

Redeeming Stanley: A Savage Little Tale of True Love, Old Gods, Bitches, Bestiality, Burnout, and above all, Payback  The winner of AudioLark’s Best of the Best E-books contest in 2009, Redeeming Stanley is the cautionary and hilarious tale of Weldon Frame, his ex-girlfriend Annie, and what happens when they get all tangled up with the Old Gods, who have taken new jobs and are living just outside of Los Angeles. Check out the Amazon reviews for reader responses.

Benchmarks: A Single Mother’s Illustrated Journal  A memoir about mothering–and single mothering, specifically. It’s a warm, lovely book that challenges a lot of assumptions about what single parenting is, and is not.

And while you’re at it, check out the Benchmarks Baby line of mom and baby stuff at Magic Dog Press’ CafePress store.

Good on Paper  A book full of farmers, and staunch christians, and witches, and smart-mouthed women, and magic, and televangelists who sleep with the wrong women. Most of all, it’s a great story, narrated by four women, each of whom has a very different take on life. It’s terrifying, hilarious, magical, sarcastic, and poetic by turns. Set in a slice of America that’s fast disappearing, this is first and foremost a good story–a story in which to lose yourself–but it also raises questions worth asking about the links between abuse and fundamentalism, and about the nature and goal of healing from a painful past. So–a good story, with a sting in its tail.

Past Lives: A Journey  A small collection of short stories that grew out of a foray into past life exploration. While they don’t provide empirical evidence for or against the idea of past existences, they do make good reading–and they raise some interesting questions.

Force of Nature a sweet, sexy short story, just for mature readers, all about love, romance, magic, sex, and cows. And Russell. You don’t want to miss Russell.