Bathsheba Monk's Blog, page 3

Thoughts on the Plague

     1. The trials of homeless billionaires Meghan and Harry and Archibald are as uninteresting as the silly hats they wore to dole out largesse at some function. Please stop sending me news alerts.
2.       On the other hand, homeless POOR people are f*ked. Hungry? Out in the street? We’ll feed you our thoughts and prayers, babe.
3.       After years of unrequited love, BREAD—enemy of slim jeans and single digit sizes—all on its own and without warning, is now as boring as celery.
4.       The secret banality of novels about life In Brooklyn and the quest for the ultimate balsamic vinaigrette has been cracked wide open.
5.       I now feel nostalgic for novels about life in Brooklyn.
6.       Irony.
7.       Young brazen bullies, kicking boomer sandcastles, are partying on the beach while boomer lungs crash and burn.
8.       Our officially sanctioned culture—music, art, literature—has been revealed to be a money-making scheme.
9.       I got a survey yesterday from some arts organization in my town asking how the lock-down is affecting me.  Seriously? Are you going to give me money? Why do I feel I’m getting set up to be rejected? 
10.   Our government has been revealed to be what it has always been: a giant piggy bank for the party in power. Actually, both parties. Question of degree, not kind.
11.   A scene from The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind loops in my brain: where all memory of the boyfriend is surgically or chemically removed. Can’t we do that with the entire 45 administration, Republican Party and—so sorry—the Democratic National Committee as well? You people exhaust me.
12.   Isn’t insider trading a crime anymore?
13.   After shopping for groceries this morning, I can say with confidence that Germ Theory is no longer being taught in public schools.
14.   I knew the stock market was rigged when I read The Art of the Deal back when. Trump bragged that he dumped his shares in Tropicana a day before he declared bankruptcy for that eponymous casino.
15.   Also, stock market: it’s impossible for a private citizen with no connections to participate in an IPO. Fun fact.
16.   I spoke with a friend last night who is convinced he had COVID-19 this winter, but had no health insurance, so he scrounged leftover antibiotics from friends. Then he took a job in a high exposure place for the health insurance.
17.   Irony.
18.   I wonder if the panic that is invoked by the sight of a NY or NJ license plate (here in PA) will be encoded in our DNA much like our fear of rats because of the bubonic plague.
19.   I would gladly give up strawberries in January, if we could all manage to go local. Do we really need our garlic peeled in Hong Kong prisons? Our chickens processed in China?
20.   When my parents were considering moving into assisted living, one of the things we learned is that people need six personal connections a day. You don’t have to be best friends, but you need six people to look you in the eye and say “g’day, mate.” 
21.   Mental health professionals are going to have a field day when/if this is over.
22.   The friends I talk to on the phone all hope that this is a pivotal moment, that people will realize they can’t wear more than one dress at a time, you don’t need strawberries in January, that we don’t have to be connected by the global highway to embrace the golden chains that bind us to the hills and the wildlife, and even each other. You just have to open your eyes.
23.   Irony.
24.   It’s a great time to be a writer.

Goodbye to All That

     1. The trials of homeless billionaires Meghan and Harry and Archibald are as uninteresting as the silly hats they wore to dole out largesse at some function. Please stop sending me news alerts.
2.       On the other hand, homeless POOR people are f*ked. Hungry? Out in the street? We’ll feed you our thoughts and prayers, babe.
3.       After years of unrequited love, BREAD—enemy of slim jeans and single digit sizes—all on its own and without warning, is now as boring as celery.
4.       The secret banality of novels about life In Brooklyn and the quest for the ultimate balsamic vinaigrette has been cracked wide open.
5.       I now feel nostalgic for novels about life in Brooklyn.
6.       Irony.
7.       Young brazen bullies, kicking boomer sandcastles, are partying on the beach while boomer lungs crash and burn.
8.       Our officially sanctioned culture—music, art, literature—has been revealed to be a money-making scheme.
9.       I got a survey yesterday from some arts organization in my town asking how the lock-down is affecting me.  Seriously? Are you going to give me money? Why do I feel I’m getting set up to be rejected? And why is the guy who was fired as director of our local art museum for being a prick sending out the survey? I thought he was run out of town.
10.   Our government has been revealed to be what it has always been: a giant piggy bank for the party in power. Actually, both parties. Question of degree, not kind.
11.   A scene from The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind loops in my brain: where all memory of the boyfriend is surgically or chemically removed. Can’t we do that with the entire 45 administration, Republican Party and—so sorry—the Democratic National Committee as well? You people exhaust me.
12.   Isn’t insider trading a crime anymore?
13.   After shopping for groceries this morning, I can say with confidence that Germ Theory is no longer being taught in public schools.
14.   I knew the stock market was rigged when I read The Art of the Deal back when. Trump bragged that he dumped his shares in Tropicana a day before he declared bankruptcy for that eponymous casino.
15.   Also, stock market: it’s impossible for a private citizen with no connections to participate in an IPO. Fun fact.
16.   I spoke with a friend last night who is convinced he had COVID-19 this winter, but had no health insurance, so he scrounged leftover antibiotics from friends. Then he took a job in a high exposure place for the health insurance.
17.   Irony.
18.   I wonder if the panic that is invoked by the sight of a NY or NJ license plate will be encoded in our DNA much like our fear of rats because of the bubonic plague.
19.   I would gladly give up strawberries in January, if we could all manage to go local. Do we really need our garlic peeled in Hong Kong prisons? Our chickens processed in China?
20.   When my parents were considering moving into assisted living, one of the things we learned is that people need six personal connections a day. You don’t have to be best friends, but you need six people to look you in the eye and say “g’day, mate.” 
21.   Mental health professionals are going to have a field day when/if this is over.
22.   The friends I talk to on the phone all hope that this is a pivotal moment, that people will realize they can’t wear more than one dress at a time, you don’t need strawberries in January, that we don’t have to be connected by the global highway to embrace the golden chains that bind us to the hills and the wildlife, and even each other. You just have to open your eyes.
23.   Irony.
24.   It’s a great time to be a writer.

Shelter From the Cold

Icy complaints:
1      days are short,
2.       3 AM wake-up alert: I think we forgot to bring the garden hose in before the frost—but, hey, where is it, did somebody stealour garden hose?!
3.       and the cold gruel we eat for culture.

           We ventured to the movie theater on Christmas day just to get out of the house, but also because we heard that Adam Sandler did a fabulous acting job in Uncut Gems and from what I saw he did. But I only lasted 25 minutes in. Twenty-five minutes trying to find a place in my psyche where I wasn’t bombarded by unrelenting ugliness and human desperation with no hope of redemption.
I left Paul there, and while I was looking for a place to land in the theater lobby to wait out the movie, a green lit game room with digital bells and spinning lights, I stepped on a spit out piece of gum and while cursing that, felt the thrum of an incoming message. Paul: where are you? I’m coming out too. I read a piece in Salon the other day that claimed Hallmark movies are the kind of stuff they made in Nazi Germany—the fascism of white supremacy where the mating problems of a couple of privileged people magically do add up to a hill of beans. The only non-normative people of color in the story are on the sidelines cheering on the white folks who don’t have enough sense to get together.I’m not advocating for the unreality of Hallmark, but neither am I a big fan of having my face pushed into the abyss of despair. Neither of them offers truth or even ambiguity which is the point of art, isn’t it? I can’t find the humanity in a character whose biggest problem is getting back to her big city marketing job any more than I can find the humanity in a character who compulsively bets 40K he doesn’t have on a sporting event. Drop dead, both of you.I think that the proliferation of Marvel and franchise movies and stale shoot-em-up television shows has made us forget that stories, fiction, are the stuff of our lives. Yes, the stories must be entertaining, but recent entertainment is measured in vials of adrenalin or adherence to a dogma, either left or right. They don’t cater to our need to engage our morality, challenge our philosophies or empathize with the other.  Where else do you have a chance to do that except in fiction?A friend of mine, a successful men’s fashion writer, told me he reads fiction to learn how to live his life. It seems to me that’s what missing in our stories now: a blueprint for how to live our lives which stories have traditionally given the culture. When a famous soap opera (Days of Our Lives? I think) went off the air a few years ago, the critics bemoaned the fact that now people wouldn’t have uncomfortable life scenarios to measure their own lives against. People who in real life had strong negative opinions about a gay couple moving into the apartment upstairs, had to confront their now-conflicted feelings about seeing a gay couple they really loved in the soap opera moving into someone else’s upstairs and getting guff from the neighbors. That’s how progress is made. Imagination. Challenging assumptions. Stories are a safe place to try out complicated feelings and integrate new information into our worlds.Even now, when I think of where I get my opinions of right and wrong and human nature, the first evidence that presents itself is fiction: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Man Who Would be King, Genesis. It’s never a supreme court case or scientific studies which are just accumulations of data. It’s stories where we find our truth, where the data is formed into a meaningful tale that the soul can understand.I’m wishing us all stories that entertain and enlighten. Wish me well and have a great new year.-

Thanksgiving Sonnet

1.   I pitch gratitude into the waves, a life vest2.   Happy for this, thankful for that.3.     So, so lucky I am4.     Swimming one stroke ahead of the beast
5.       I read recently that our DNA remembers our grandmothers’ traumas6.     So, I have to carry their sorrow too?7.     Not thankful for that8.   Weighing me down
9.      I savor each salty moment now10.  Anticipating a time when luckier vignettes will keep me company11.  When the earth is on fire. Or drowned12.  Prey to other species hunting me down like the assassin I am
13. Thankful for interlude, thank you thank you thank you14.  Do you think they noticed me?

Idle Speculation

1. Why do John Bolton and Barr always touch their glasses like they're adjusting pince nez? It looks like they're receiving secret instructions from outer space.
2. Or foreign countries.
2. Nevertheless,  I don't trust people who never wear glasses.
3. It's like they never strained to see anything.
4. And we're living in dark times.
5. It's hard to make sense of things in the dark.
6. Not that I trust those two.
7. Oh, boy, I don't.
8. I read that Prince Charles doesn't buy new clothes, that he has his old suits mended.
9.  He makes do.
10. An old-fashioned phrase. Making do.
11. My friend Rose, who deals in vintage clothing, claims people throw away a hundred pounds of clothing a year.
12. They don't even tear them up for cleaning rags.
13. Sea-foam colored bridesmaid dresses and holey Calvin Kleins floating in barges off the coast of China.
14. With the rest of our junk.
15. Waiting for a place to debark.
16. To be buried in landfill.
17. Then rise from the dead in a couple millennia as fossil fuel.
18. How do you not let dark times define you?
19. I remember reading that the Vietnamese, back when we were killing them, would never throw anything away.
20. I saw pictures of entire houses they made out of Coca Cola bottle caps.
21. Making shelter out of packaging for a consumable product.
22. Talk about making do!
23. Like fish do now.
24. Knitting reefs out of beer carriers.
25. Hundreds of feet below.
26. In the dark.

Bad Hair Day

1.       Why doesn’t anyone talk about Trump’s charisma?2.       Just because charisma is in the plus column, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have it.3.       Hitler had charisma too.4.       Watch “Triumph of the Will” if you don’t believe me.5.       Crowds cheering an obviously insane person, like he’s making sense.6.       Admittedly, it’s easier to spot insanity when the person is speaking German.7.       I met a woman last night who had a myriad of health problems you wouldn’t believe. 8.       Husband too. 9.       Both in wheelchairs.10.   Their problems seemed somewhat avoidable.11.   Like being told the woman was allergic to penicillin then was given it anyway. 12.   Which threw the woman into full blown MS.13.   On so on. 14.   Capricious decisions by medical people over the years that basically ruined their lives.15.   The couple is African American.16.   Think that makes a difference?17.   I didn’t think it was possible to have charisma with weirdo hair.18.   Don’t they have women in their lives harping on their appearance?19.   Maybe bad hair is part of charisma.20.   So much of life is appearances, isn't it?

This is not a robot...er, okay.

This monstrosity was seen careening the aisles in the local Giant Supermarket here in A-town, PA.  Asked an employee what it was and they said it was device that scanned the rows looking for errant peanuts and grapes so people wouldn't slip on them. "Grape down on aisle 3!" it would supposedly announce to an employee who would come running with a broom to capture the runaway devil. Instead of having an actual human being, you know, scanning with a broom saving the middle device. When my companion suggested it might be checking up on THEM the employee, or gathering data from customers' cellphones (sorry to be paranoid, but we live in a weirdo 5G world where my telephone is an unrepentant eavesdropper) they were less cheerful about their cute new robot friend.  

Hanging with Royalty

Vocabulary Lesson

I know, I know, language is a living thing. Can’t stop the beat. When I wasn’t looking, “good” became “bad,” everyone dropped the conditional tense, and we started putting only one space after periods. (I blame the nuns.) But even in our gas-lit world, it's alarming that a certain group (let’s call them Republicans) shroud their bad behavior and bad intentions in the catch-all “political differences,” like a cloak of invisibility.  
Calling the way we view our treatment of children running to us for safety a matter of political differences is a disingenuous use of the phrase. It implies there are several rational ways for civilized good people to treat children running to us for safety. There are not. People who believe that it is okay to cage children and make them drink from toilets are bad people. It’s not a political debate, it’s a moral failing—God have mercy on their shrunken evil souls—and they are moral dwarfs. Can we start calling them that? Moral dwarfs.
Taking away legitimate rights from other citizens (I’m talking LGBT, Black, Brown, WOMEN, Muslim, Jewish, disabled, POOR)…calling that a matter of political differences is a disingenuous use of the phrase. Withholding legal rights from citizens is a crime. Full stop. Breaking the law is not political, it’s criminal. People who break the law are criminals, ergo, people who withhold rights from legitimate citizens are criminals. Let’s start calling them that: Criminals.
Parceling out our national treasure so that only a tribe of oligarchic despots benefit…calling that a  matter of political difference is, you got it, a disingenuous use of the phrase. It’s not a difference in politics, it’s breaking one of the Ten Commandments that Republicans are so eager to post everywhere (because they obviously have no innate sense of right and wrong and need constant guidance), “Thou shalt not steal.” People who steal what belongs to us all and give it to their friends are thieves. Can we start calling them what they are? Thieves.
While we’re at it, can we talk about the word “Patriotism”? It’s the fourth of July and that word is getting taken out to dinner a lot. Being a Tom Brady fan doesn’t make me a patriot any more than covering my torso in stars and stripes tattoos does. For that matter, rooting for the US Women’s Soccer Team doesn’t make me a patriot either, no matter how much glee I get (a lot!) from them beating the English team. We’re a country which is an assembly of people with roots in different places, hopefully all marching towards the same goal: equal access to opportunity and equal access to justice under the law. Sports teams and flags have nothing to do with it, unless you think that winning athletes reflect our national spirit of skill, team work, and perseverance, and unless you think that the flag stands for something like equal access to opportunity and equal access to justice under the law.  And not some jingoistic bullshit like “love it or leave it” or “we’re number ONE!” Because….please. Are you in third grade? On July 4, 1976, an Irish Jesuit missionary giving the sermon at my church said, “Congratulations, Americans. You made it 200 years and you think you’re going to last forever. But you know what? You would be the first country in the history of the world that has.” It’s been a subtext of my life to prove him wrong. And having our democracy overrun by thieves, criminals, and moral dwarfs significantly reduces my chances.
Photo: www.violentlips.com

Things that are on my mind...

1.       I lost all my phone numbers when my phone crashed and burned: “It’s the software. All gone,” says boy (yes, boy, I think he was skipping middle school) at Verizon store. 2.       I email certain people in my family and tell them I don’t have their phone numbers anymore.3.       They say that’s a shame, but they don’t volunteer them to me.4.       I have come to realize that what I see in the mirror is what I really look like.5.       I’m considering hiring my own lighting professionals to follow me around. 6.       I am weary of celebrities and has-been FBI commissars and ex-prosecutors and gangs of ex-Generals, ex-politicians writing letters to the ether about how disgusted/alarmed they are with the current administration bringing our country down. 7.       I would like CURRENT politicians and Generals and prosecutors coming out with that information and those opinions.  8.       I think I drink too much. 9.       So, I stopped.10.   People kept saying, “Well, you’re not an alcoholic!”11.   Is that even a thing?12.   I wish I was good at math.13.   Or that I could understand what calculus is GOOD for. 14.   I think the human species consists mainly of brutes.15.   If you think humans are made in God’s image, I think you’re right.16.   But God isn’t who you think he is.17.   He rewards bad behavior.18.   Look around if you think otherwise. 19.   Why do some people get towers with their name in gold when a lot of the kids I teach are homeless?20.   They don’t even have sox in the winter.21.   Not that sox would fix everything.22.   I’m not even talking about the poor kids trying to get into America. 23.   Talk about being homeless!24.   Religion is the most reliable way for governments to keep people under control.25.   If you manage to combine the two, you just hit the fascism jackpot. 26.   I’m taking up knitting.27.   And sending little sox to the kids at the border.28. That's something I don't need special lighting for.