Braz-Valentine's Open Letter is really a poem!
She responded to an email I sent her with the text of the actual poem, so you can go to Blog Sisters and read the correct version. I don't think it's recorded correctly anywhere else on the net, at least not that I could find. Ah. Another "first" for Blog Sisters.

The Boob in the Hall of Justice
Thanks to Esta, who posted info about this on BlogSisters.

Remember the drape that Ashcroft had put over the naked breasts of Justice? Read here an absolutely perfect open letter to Ashcroft by an amazing crone -- poet, playwright, and journalist Claire Braz-Valentine -- that she presented at this year's In Celebration of the Muse, Cabrillo College. You also can see her and hear her read it.

As I post this, in the background on my television, Ground Zero, the Last Day plays out with sad ceremony. It sit here feeling the incredible schizoid nature of this country. We are a people of great heart and open soul. And yet so many of our leaders are such boobs.

Getting to Forgiveness
It’s not that I’m obsessed with AKMA, but he never fails to blog good stuff, and other articulate bloggers invariably pick up and run with his themes way before they start to gel in my own head. But I catch up, eventually.

“Forgiveness” is the current theme du jour.

Now, I don’t take issue with any of the thoughtful thoughts on this issue presented, for example, by David Weinberger or Halley Suitt or Marek.

But they all left out one step on the road that I need to take to get to Forgiveness so that I don’t simply suppress or repress my hurt and anger and then unwittingly find myself at the mercy of what happens when those feelings erupt and displace at some time in my (and probably some other innocent person's) future. I need catharsis. I need to purge the bad feelings. I need to vent. Let me give you an example. And this is the goddesses'-honest truth:

Several years ago, as I was ending a relationship with a man I had been living with for only a year, I realized that he had already begun seeing (and probably sleeping with) another woman before I even moved out. He didn’t even wait until, as they say, “the body was cold.” Even though I knew it was over between us, I was still devastated. Hell, I was mad. Furious. I mean, how would you feel?

But I knew that I needed to move on, forgive, put it all behind me – not repress it or harbor seething rage. I had put an awful lot of myself into trying to make the relationship work; I even spent a great deal of my own creative energies editing and re-writing the first mystery novel that he had ever tried to write. His total disregard of my feelings after all of that truly hit a nerve. I was hurt. I was mad. I felt betrayed. How was I going to get to Forgiveness? Hee hee, as the Crone says.

This is what I did after I moved out: I made a clay figure that looked pretty much like him. (This stuff called Fimo is great for this purpose because you use your toaster oven to harden it.) I took a tin box and decorated it so that it looked like a miniature sarcophagus and painted it with female power symbols. I invited my women friends over on the night of a full moon (they were used to my doing weird stuff like this, so they came) and had them help me tear up various photos of us, cards, notes he had written me etc. and put them in the box, along with the figure. I wrote a chant, which basically said that I take back all that I had given him, all the creative energies I brought into his life, and I leave him as he was before I met him – non-existent in my awareness. We lit some candles, burned some incense, I did my chant and then I put the piece of paper with the chant on it into the box and sealed it up. And then we all sat down and had some decaf coffee and tea and Pepperidge Farm cookies and spent some time venting a whole lot of other stuff that bothered us.

After they left, at midnight I drove over to his house and left the box on his porch. Yes, I could have gotten arrested for trespassing, I suppose. But I didn’t.

With the delivery of that box, not only was my anger gone, but I no longer felt victimized, and that alone was worth the risk of getting caught trespassing. After that, it was easy to forget and forgive.

Maybe that’s not the accepted way to find Forgiveness as far as traditional religions and spiritualities are concerned, but boy, did it feel good. And the strange thing is, he called me some time after, and we talked about the incident and the experience. He knew he did something wrong, and my little ritual somehow expunged his guilt as well as my anger. And now, when we run into each other, there’s no anger, no guilt, a little nostalgia, a few laughs, and all in a zone of comfort that we never would have had without the shared catharsis.

So, for me, Forgiveness is not a place I can get to from here without taking a little detour. Does the end justify the means? Works for me.

La Rouge et La Blonde
No, this is not a mis-remembering the titleof Stendhal’s classic.

Unlike AKMA*, who watched Moulin Rouge because others in his family wanted to and then didn’t like it although they did, I loved it. And so did my kids. Of course, we also loved Buffy: The Musical. Probably for the same reasons. It has something to do with moving beyond the accepted and expected, playing with anachronisms and somehow making them “play.” It has something to do with shuffling together assumedly dissimilar approaches to performance and coming up with a new genre. Moulin Rouge is also gaudy and baudy. I guess that’s another reason why I like it.

Legally Blonde is another movie I just rented and liked a lot – and not because I’ve opted for blondeness. Our society has a tendency to force women into narrow categories: beautiful and dumb or smart and plain, mother or mistress, good girl or slut, attractive woman or old lady. Any female can be any or all of these things at various times. It’s good to be reminded that sometimes she can be beautiful, smart, sexy, ethical, moral, assertive, free-spirited – in the parlance of the ‘40s and '50s movies (as Tom Shurgart reminds me), a real “stand-up broad.” And that’s a fine and fabulous thing to be as far as I’m concerned.

*I couldn't find the exact citation for AKMA' blog about Moulin Rouge, so if anyone knows what it is, would you please leave it in the Comments? Thanks.

So, Am I Brave or Just Plain Stupid?
I had such fun answering Frank Paynter's interview questions about how I got be be "Resident Crone of Blogdom" that I just kept on e-mailing him the stories of my life, including things some of my closest friends don't know. Well, now they know. Now everyone knows.

I am totally "Older Than Dirt."
Older Than Dirt Quiz: Count all the ones that you remember -- not the ones you were told about! Ratings at the bottom.
1. Blackjack chewing gum
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed bottle
5. Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes
6. Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. P. F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (Olive - 6933)
12. Peashooters
13. Howdy Doody
14. 45 RPM records
15. S&H Green Stamps
16. Hi-fi's.
17. Metal ice trays with lever
18. Mimeograph paper
19. Blue flashbulb
20. Packard's
21. Roller skate keys
22. Cork popguns
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered
0- 05 = You're still young
6-10 = You are getting older
11-15 = Don't tell your age,
16-25 = You're older than dirt!

Heh. I even have the distinction of having been on one of the earliest Howdy Doody shows as one of the kids in the Peanut Gallery. I remember being absolutely disillusioned by the fact that Clarabelle's breath smelled like whiskey and he was mean to us. Yes, I learned early the difference between fantasy and reality.

Damn YACCS
OK, so Ev went to another version of ProBlogger and it messed up my YACCS comments. So much for improvements. Now remember, I don't know how to do codes so I don't know how to fix mine. Can someone just give me the whole YACCS code that I now should put in to replace what I have now so that my comments will work in the new ProBlogger version? Dammit.

P.S., Addendum, Whatever
It pays to cultivate smart and helpful friends!! Thanks to Gary Turner, who told me what to do, my Comments are back. And my deepest apologies for thinking that Sean Connery was Welsh (where the hell did I get that?). He's Scottish. Of course, No wonder! Thanks, Gary.

Hands Across the Ocean...
---or rather voices across the ocean. Gary Turner in the UK is making a hobby of collecting the voices of bloggers leaving actual voice messages on his voice mail. So, not wanting to be left behind, I added my message to his collection, which you can hear, in all my allergic nasality, by linking from his blog. (I don't think I sound as dorky as I thought I would sound -- *sigh of relief*.) You can hear Jeneane, Sharon, Shelley and Marek if you go here. See if you don't just love Gary's Scottish brogue -- sounds a little like Sean Connery, who's Welsh, I know, but still....it's the same rolling rrrrs, resonant tone. mmmm.

And for my next trick…..
So, now that the RageBoy ritual seems to have accomplished what it was intended to, my celebrity status is catching on. (No, that’s not what was intended.) Andrea is asking for my help winning the Mojo Jojo electric guitar so that she can achieve her rock star status dream.

Now, Andrea, the way Crone magic works is that we have to ask for what is “best” for you. I know that you promised that, if you get it, you
won't participate in or be the origin of any drug-ridden orgies that destroy hotel rooms. I will also give money to charity and be kind to small children. And I will go to church twice on Sunday and not swear when drivers cut me off on the freeway.

Well, we all know where good intentions lead.

However, since you write such great poetry and are such a model Geek Icon as well as a member of GEEK Force, and since you’re a BlogSister who actually posts on that weblog and also leaves nice Comments on mine, I will give it my best shot. Now, you gave me a very tight time frame – May 31. No time to find magical feathers and string beads and dig through my assorted paraphernalia for the other doodads that one needs in such situations. And not even a full moon to count on! This is going to be a tough one, so don’t get your hopes up too high. And, in the meanwhile, you’d better line up as many e-mail addresses as you can and make sure you play WinBall every day from each address. (Hey, I practice very practical magic.) And, while you're at it, make sure that you have your fave Sheryl Crowe (or other female guitar player of your choice) playing loud enough to disturb your neighbors. Oh, and buy a new guitar pick, drill a hole in it, and wear it around your neck for the rest of the week. Even better if you buy two and make them into earrings.

If you win it, of course, that was my doing. If you don’t, then I guess you just didn’t play enough WinBall. :-)

The Elixir of Life
According to the BBC News, NASA has confirmed early Odyssey data about water-ice on Mars. Water is essential for life, so the discovery enhances the belief that Mars could have had life in the past and perhaps in the present as well.

It's so good to hear your voice.
One would tend to think that, since it's so easy to communicate online these days, we wouldn't bother using a telephone to talk with other bloggers. But that's not so. Maybe we just get to the point where we want to match a voice to the "voice." Whatever it is, there have been a lot of phone calls going on lately. I even wound up leaving Gary Turner a voice mail message on his work phone. (Well, he DID invite us to do so on his weblog.) And, after all, Jeneane and Sharon and Shelley already got to Gary's voice mail before me, and I can't stand being left behind. Of course, I forgot that Gary makes our voice messages available to the world at large, and I'm sure that I sounded like a real dork. I knew that I should have written out what I wanted to say first!!

I also called Jeneane today because she's even got a worse sinus problem that I have right now (although I'm going to need surgery, so maybe mine really is worse; but she certainly sounds and feels worse). I guess our intra-national ritual took its toll on the poor thing. Not so with RageBoy, who sounded rather chipper on the telephone. (hee hee cackle cackle says the Crone). And then Marek J called me the other day, and we had just the kind of energizing conversation that one might expect to have with Marek.

The next step has to be some sort of face to face. Too bad we can't videoconference. Nah. We need to figure out how to all get together for a real messy group hug. :-)

Let’s hear it for the grrrls.
Jeneane, Halley, and me stirring it up on the East Coast; Denise reflecting it back on the West Coast; RB center stage absorbing it all and finding himself buying a copy of Eve Ensler. Now try to tell me something hasn’t begun shifting in the universe!

The moon hid from my view last night, but she couldn’t hide her secrets. Denise saw a ring-‘round-the-moon. A portent if ever there was one. Jeneane and RB, ever in sync, paused to share the lucid moonlight.

This morning at about 8 a.m., which is when the moon was said to be most full-faced out this way, a brief, thunderous, and lightening-lit rainstorm. A little cosmic applause for the grrrls, Blogaria’s revisionist ladies of the nethernight.

Our part is over. But the rest isn’t.

If you believe in faeries, clap your hands.

It has begun.
It didn't rain, but the wind blew fiercely, except when I needed it not to. Alice Hoffman's kind of magic. The in-between time has begun. Watch. Wait. Witness.

Entredeux
Being between -- between two places, two worlds, two people, two states of consciousness, two hearts, two minds. Betweentwo. Betweentwo.

As Jeneane says Helene Cixous says:
Human beings are equipped for daily life, with its rites, with its closure, its commodities, its furniture. When an event arrives which evicts us from ourselves, we do not know how to 'live.' But we must. Thus, we are launched into a space-time whose coordinates are all different from those we have always been accustomed to.

Aha! Aha! Ahas happen because of entredeux journeys.

Rituals are meant to be catalysts for certain kinds of entredeux – to evict us, launch us – force us to alter our perceptions, perspectives, permissions. To force Ahas.

Soon, soon.

I am surprised that no one has emailed me and said, What are you weird? You don’t really believe that magic ritual stuff do you? Well, almost no one. Frank Paynter asked me. He asked me some other questions, too, and I wound up writing “The Story of My Life in 5 E-mails.” If he shares any of that on his blog, you will know if I believe in magic.

Meanwhile, I will share with you one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite magical novelists, Alice Hoffman. It’s from Turtle Moon.
Every May, when the sea turtles begin their migration across West Main Street, mistaking the glow of streetlights for the moon, people go a little bit crazy. At least one teenage boy comes close to slamming his car right into the gumbo-limbo tree that grows beside the Burger King. Girls run away from home, babies cry all night, ficus hedges explode into flame, and during one particularly awful May, half a dozen rattlesnakes set themselves up in the phone booth outside the 7-Eleven and refused to budge until June.

Magic is a way to view the world.

In another hour, I will leave and go outside, where three fir trees form a perfect triangle, where the roof of a strip of garages blocks the view of those trees from the windows of my elderly frightened neighbors, who, no doubt will call the cops if they see the flicker of candlelight, if they notice the subtle whirl of shadow and sage smoke.

The clouds obscure the gleam of the full moon, but I know where it is. The same moon that nestles above the cloud cover here in upstate NY is the same moon that watches over Boulder. The moon is entredeux.

It’s the thinking that counts
Periodically, over at AKMA and Himmer and Sanders, and often spilling over to other fiefdoms in Blogaria, are meandering meaningful conversations about religion, afterlife, and all of the associated dogmas, beliefs, wishes, and hopes.

Again, b!X inadvertently reassures me that, somewhere along the line, I miraculously managed not to damage his soul. In his “In Heaven, Everything is Fine” post, he speculates on what if there were a Heaven in which everyone gets to spend eternity. In this thought experiment, he says:

It presents us with a profound choice: To live our lives however selfishly or destructively as we desire, since there will be no repercussions. Or to derive from this complete separation of worlds a deep sense of our own individual and collective power.

We and we alone would be responsible for making the world. We and we alone get to decide just what sort of world we wish to have.

I do believe that if b!X and Marek J. got together to join politically active forces, the universe definitely would bend a little in the right direction.

Now, whether it bends tonight when I conduct my Ritual for RageBoy is yet to be seen.

The crows already gathered in force at exactly 3 p.m. to begin cawing down the moon. Their insistent chant filled the circle of trees at the far end of the new park behind my building. It has begun, I thought, as I sat beside my re-planted garden, worshiping the drifting sun, offering the threads of my mind to Apollo, begging the beneficence of Pan with the new proliferation of basil bowing to his wanton will.

I hope it doesn’t rain before midnight.

I am thinking that, perhaps, for the Summer Solstice, when I will be on the coast of Maine, I will create a ritual for b!X – another Scorpio struggling to find a loving place in this world. Sounds about right to me.

I’m not kidding, really.
I’m ready for the full moon – ritual objects representative of roots and wings: a feather that appeared before me on a path in the woods, to which I attached a tail made of fabric strips imprinted with RB’s words; a stick of wood inscribed with ancient symbols, wrapped in a double helix of golden glass, three rose quartz circles and various “milogras.” Abalone inserted into the tip. Don’t believe me? Here they are:

Selene, Diana, Hecate. Pan, Cernnunos.
Eagle, Bear, Raven, Buffalo.
Lilith, Lamia, Innana.
We are ready to rock and roll.

"Anthurian" is the word!
Actually, it's a new blog worth reading. He's a collegue of Jeneane's, and the way that they discovered that they each are bloggers is wonderful. Check out her story and his blog. And then send him an email and tell him the Crone sent ya'.

Countdown to the Full Moon
On Sunday, May 26 at about 8 a.m. on the East Coast, the moon will be at it’s fullest. This is the time of the Full Flower Moon, the Full Milk Moon. Somewhere between midnight and midnight, RageBoy will know.

The words are ready. RageBoy gave us the words. The objects are almost ready. Feather, stick, beads, crystals, sacred images. We are waiting for the moon. Full, it magnifies any energies generated. A full moon on Sun-day. The yin with the yang. Opposites superimposed. The ultimate connectedness.

If you’re so inclined, when the moon hangs full in your night sky on Sunday, say the words, feel the universe bend just enough.

Truth Telling
I'm stealing this directly from Tom Tomorrow's site, This Modern World, which is quoting the following from from Media Whores Online (but Tom's link doesn't get you to the Whore's post). Thanks to b!X who pointed me to it in an email. (Why the hell isn't he posting this himself????)

"Don't miss this story in this morning's Times. I'm going to steal a summary from Media Whores Online, because they understand what the Times seems to be overlooking:

In a stunning revelation, the New York Times has reported that among the two FBI office counterterrorism chiefs who received the now famously neglected Phoenix memorandum last July was none other than John O'Neill -- then the top counterterrorist officer in the FBI's New York City's office, and the FBI's leading expert on Osama bin Laden.

O'Neill knew perfectly well what Al Qaeda was up to, and had been knocking on doors (and, at times, heads) for years to get his colleagues and superiors to understand what he did.

The last straw came in July 2001, when (as he told the French authors Guillaume Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard in an interview), O'Neill became fully aware that the Bush administration, anxious over negotiations for a Caspian Sea oil pipe line, had decided to back off of tracking bin Laden and opposing the Taliban, lest it risk alienating powerful Saudi families. Instead of going after the Taliban and bin Laden, the Bush Administration decided to negotiate and try to buy off the Taliban and bin Laden.

Unfortunately for the Administration, the pipe-line negotiations broke down in August.

And on September 11, bin Laden struck.

What no one has known until now is that at the very moment that O'Neill was finally giving up, in July, he was being apprised of the Phoenix memorandum -- a memo, it seems, that practically nobody inside the Bush Administration was willing to treat seriously other than himself.

At the end of August, in disgust, O'Neill left the FBI to take what he somewhat ruefully regarded as his "retirement" job --as head of security at the World Trade Center. There, on September 11, John O'Neill died at the hands of his arch-enemy bin Laden's fiendish followers.

Connect the dots? Well, duh! O'Neill got the Phoenix message. No one would listen. No one. The Bushies had backed off bin Laden. So O'Neill changed jobs -- and went on to die a martyr's death. While all the people who ignored him, on up the chain to the Oval Office, live on -- ghoulishly making political hay out of his sacrifice and their own incompetence -- and, in a sense, their own perfidy.

But here's the really amazing thing -- having unearthed this blockbuster, the New York Times reporters David Johnston and Don Van Natta, Jr., simply bury it in their story.

They report, incredibly, that O'Neill simply "retired" back in August -- ignoring the well-known background, leaving the dots unconnected!!

What did O'Neill know back in July? Whom did he try to warn? What happened when he did so? What did his "retirement" -- and its tragic consequences -- have to do with his frustrated efforts to get Bush's people to listen to him about the Phoenix memo, and/or about everything else he knew about Osama bin Laden's clear and present danger to American lives?

Here are some questions that the Bush people don't want asked, by the New York Times, by a National Board of Investigation, or by anyone else."

Frank Paynter resurrects my AHA!
Back in the early feminist seventies, we were all having AHAs! -- that was how one woman writer back then (who, of course, I can't remember where or when) described the moment when we realized what had been holding us back, what had been making us angry. In the course of his e-mail interviews with me, Frank Paynter unearths the Ms. Magazine article that changed my life. My AHA! Read it here.

I had a chance to actually meet Lilly Rivlin, who wrote the article, several years ago when some of us who had contributed to Which Lilith: Feminists Writers Re-Create the First Woman -- including the editors -- gathered in a theater in Kinderhook, NY to read our pieces. What a phenomenal woman! We hugged a lot, cried a little, she gave me her card and then we each went off in our own direction to follow our chosen paths. But I've never forgotten her or how her words changed my life.