Did you think I’d died? Did you think I’d been kidnapped by the Obama campaign and forced to swear fealty to the god-king?
Actually I’ve just had an insanely busy and complicated week. I’m still busy, as a matter of fact. But I’m here and alive — well, no, actually I’m not alive. Extant is perhaps a better word. I’m still a ghost in the Smoking Lounge with my peeps Raoul, Alex the Grey Parrot, Nietzsche, and God. But I’ve been so fried these past few days that I didn’t even have time for the Friday night throwdown with Nerf ball and tequila shots, which is usually the highlight of my week. (By the way, God always wins at Nerf ball. Always. Her aim is incredible.)
But I have a treat for you: a trailer for the documentary in the works that will “tell the WHOLE story of what happened to the Democratic Party this year.” Man, this movie is going to be good. Watch:
The fundraiser was a success! Thanks to all of you who donated and helped — loyal readers, anonymous donors, fellow bloggers — I was able to raise enough money to replace my dead satellite rig and get a whole new setup! WHEEE!!! I’m back online and thrilled to pieces. I love you all and am incredibly grateful for the support. It means so much to me. Being broke is embarrassing and painful, but discovering that you have the friendship and support of a lot of people is one hell of a silver lining. I love you all.
I want to especially thank the people who donated anonymously through Amazon, since there’s no other way for me to contact them. Thank you, dear generous souls. I respect your privacy (I’m a noted recluse myself), but I wish I knew who you were so I could thank you personally. Bless your hearts.
And to all of you whom I was able to contact individually, let me just say again how deeply grateful I am. I actually blubbed a few times this past week when people’s notes and donations came in. You are all so wonderful.
And to my fellow bloggers who helped spread the word: thank you so much. You helped send friends my way, and for that you have my undying gratitude.
Now that I’m re-connected and over that initial hump, I’ll probably set up a little subscription option on the sidebar for anybody who wants to chip in regularly (maybe $5 a month?) to cover the ongoing server costs. I’ll also look into some other things I might do to “monetize the blog,” as they say. And hey, I think it’s time for a WordPress upgrade and a fresh theme — haven’t touched it in two years. Everything’s gonna be new!
Thank you, everyone, for keeping this crazy gig going. I feel inspired again.
Posted by Violet under Reclusive Leftist on June 6, 2008, 8:30 pm EST
The worst has happened. The satellite dish is dead, gone, finished. It is an ex-satellite dish. I know I said before I was secretly hoping for that to happen so I could have the cathartic joy of blasting the thing to pieces with a shotgun, but there’s a problem. The problem is that I need a new rig to replace the old rig, and that stuff ain’t cheap.
On top of that, I’ve reached the point where I need to upgrade my hosting package to handle all the visitors to the blog. If you stopped by earlier this week you probably saw the tasteful “BANDWIDTH EXCEEDED” sign provided by my hosting service. The blog has grown immensely since I started it two years ago, and needing to buy more bandwidth is usually a very nice problem to have. Until it gets to the point where you can’t afford it.
It’s always feast or famine in the life of a writer, and this is definitely a famine year for me. I hate having to ask for money, but at this point my options are pretty limited. A few months ago I had the brilliant idea of saving money on my health insurance by cutting back drastically on the coverage and raising the deductible to some unspeakable level. Naturally enough, almost as soon as the new policy went into effect, I got sick. I’m too reclusive to feel comfortable discussing my medical situation, but suffice it to say that most of my pennies are going to pay for doctor visits and lab tests and maybe a bit of surgery — all the stuff that is no longer covered by my health insurance. (But boy, I sure am saving money on those premiums!)
And so, if you can find it in your hearts and wallets to help keep this show going, I will be forever grateful. A few bucks from a few faithful readers, and I’ll be able to re-dedicate myself to the noble task of blowing smoke up your ass and mine!
I set up two thingamajigs, so you can donate by PayPal or using the Amazon Honor System. Every little bit helps, so anything you can do is wonderful (even a dollar).
PayPal thingy:
Amazon Honor System thingy:
Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Posted by Violet under Reclusive Leftist on May 30, 2008, 9:01 pm EST
With apologies to Edward Albee. No, actually I’m not going to do that today, but someday — yes, someday I’ll write a post based on The Zoo Story — have you ever seen The Zoo Story? Wonderful play — and the monologue in the middle is like 20 pages long and it’s called “The Story of Jerry and the Dog.”
But never mind, I’m not doing that today.
Okay, so! You know my satellite? The one I hate? The one I lie awake at night plotting to destroy with a 400-gauge shotgun? I think it’s dead. Or the modem is dead. Or the cable between the satellite and the modem is dead. Whatever it is, it’s dead.
According to the Technical Support Specialist in India who helped me this morning (and I swear to God, one of these days I’m going to say to one of those people, “you know, the retroflex thing that you do there with the consonants, are you aware that you’re doing that?”), anyway, according to her, the Evil Satellite Empire no longer services my modem. My modem, it seems, is ancient history. It’s Sumerian. It’s a Baghdad Battery. Maybe if I filled it with lemon juice I could get enough voltage to electroplate a teaspoon; other than that, the thing’s useless.
No, I haven’t started drinking yet today. Why do you ask? I’m sitting in my father’s study using his computer. So of course I’m not drinking. How could I be drinking?
Long story short, I’m getting a new modem! Shipped to me from Maryland by Federal Express, and at no cost to me! Because I’m such a wonderful customer! And when it arrives — then, then we shall see. Whether the problem was with the Sumerian modem or the cable or — be still my beating heart — the satellite dish itself. Because if it’s the latter — you know what I’m thinking. Me, a shotgun, and that goddamn dish fragmenting into a thousand sparkly white pieces as I blow it to kingdom come.
Posted by Violet under Reclusive Leftist on May 20, 2008, 10:54 am EST
It has come to my attention that certain individuals are questioning my vacation schedule. In the words of commenter Aunti Disestablishmentarian, “Between your Red hot Chili Pepper and that Raul Feller, you sure do take alot of vacations! You’d give the Preznit a run for his money in terms of ‘most days off.’”
Christ on a club cracker with alfalfa sprouts, people, can you blame me? First of all, the Chili Peppers rule. They just do, sorry, end of story. Secondly, Anthony Kiedis is really, really good in bed. I mean think about it: if you had Anthony Kiedis in one hand and a large supply of some seriously fine mind-altering substances in the other, what would you do? Hang around here and write blog posts?
It’s not like I’m missing some big fucking Happy Dance back here in the real world. The past couple of weeks have been so goddamn depressing I don’t know why there hasn’t been a spate of mass suicides across the land. The media’s hate-on of Hillary continues unabated; I swear to god, I think those guys’ dicks must be hard all the time. It’s a fucking paroxysm, an orgy, a crack high of misogyny. And Obama is a fucking asshole who’s increasingly looking to me like an amoral creep. Yes, I will vote for him if he’s the nominee, no question, even work to support his campaign, blah blah blah, but I say it here: I do not like thee, Dr. Fell. I do not like thee one fucking little bit. Trash Hillary, trash the Clinton presidency, have your wife say she probably wouldn’t even help Hillary get elected (remember Bill saying that if Obama was the nominee he’d do everything in his power to help him win?), indulge in coded or not-so-coded misogyny, feed bullshit smears to the press, anything. Hope and change my ass. This guy is the new Reagan. Remember Reagan? An empty suit whose entire political life was based on giving speeches that people liked. I was appalled at the stupidity of the American public when they 1) elected Reagan and then 2) re-elected the son of a bitch, and during a recession at that, ’cause it was “Morning in America,” see? Yes, the American people in all their wisdom actually voted for a goddamn cereal commercial.
But lo and fucking behold, nobody seems to get that Obama is the same can of soup. His speeches are written by a speechwriter, you fucking twits. Deliberately crafted to sound as much like MLK and JFK as possible. Do you not get that? Ignore the speeches and look at the man. Look at how he can’t hold his own in a debate. Look at his record. Look at the content. Look at the mudslinging his campaign engages in. God almighty, Americans are morons.
And the Brits are no fucking better, Mr.-Archbishop-Eyebrows-who-can-wipe-my-ass. Hey, why not sharia law in Britain? Oh, but only for family matters, says Eyebrow Man, by which he means the entire spectrum of codified patriarchal abuse that governs women’s personal lives: divorce, marriage, custody, marital rape, marital beatings, financial support, “honor,” etc. Clearly His Very Reverend Eyebrows think it’s just peachy keen for women to be second-class citizens because after all, they’re not really human, are they? They’re just women. Eight hundred years of English jurisprudence and a modern European concept of civil rights are fine and dandy, but they do only apply to human beings. Which lets women right out.
The only good thing that happened in the past two weeks was Robin Morgan’s kick-ass piece about the sexism dogging Hillary’s candidacy (go read it, it’s fucking great), but goddamn if a couple of third-wave feminists didn’t ruin the moment by wilfully misinterpreting the essay as a personal attack on them. Why? Who the fuck knows. I guess they saw the words “young” and “women” next to each other and the voices in their heads told them it was a coded message from Morgan to them personally. Shit, they must have even better substances than I do.
Sorry. These things happen. I’ve been AWOL on a sex vacation with Anthony Kiedis. I’d planned to be back a few days ago but then John Frusciante begged me to leave Anthony for him and so it was a real situation.
I gotta check my email and stuff.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Reclusive Leftist on February 7, 2008, 3:02 pm EST
My family is trying to talk me into coming back to life. They liked having me alive — I guess it’s some kind of love thing — and with the holidays approaching they’ve been pressuring me pretty heavily to climb back into the ol’ meat suit. My mother keeps calling me up in the Smoking Lounge, talking about Thanksgiving dinner and Molly and Christmas trees and the various advantages to being alive as opposed to dead in a tent with an ex-parrot who has a pumpkin for a head.
Last night I got online again and cruised around the blogulofeminewsosphere, trying to reacquaint myself with the world. Having spent the past several weeks in a kind of self-induced psychotic break, it was a bit of a shock to be plunged back into the harsh glare:
A gang-rape victim in Saudi Arabia is sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail because she was out without a male guardian. Her husband protests the ruling yet still claims that Saudi society — in which women have virtually no legal rights and are the wards and chattel of their male relatives — is “very respectful of women.”
Christian fundamentalists in the U.S., no doubt jealous of the Saudi success story, are brainwashing their daughters from birth to think of themselves as the property of their fathers.
An 11-year-old gang-rape victim in Georgia (U.S.) is accused of being a lying slut.
Rape victims in Hungary are denied justice by courts and police who maintain that women who are raped are really just prostitutes or (you guessed it) lying sluts.
Western expatriate sexist creeps in Moscow are thrilled to discover that “women’s lib never happened here.” Indeed: violence against women in Russia is so pervasive that 70% of married women are abused by their husbands. Political will and funding to deal with the problem are virtually non-existent. Moscow, a city of 10 million, does not have a single shelter for battered women.
At Jets games in New York male fans form gauntlets and demand that any passing woman expose her breasts; the women are spat on and pelted with beer bottles for refusing. (One woman who cooperated was subsequently threatened with arrest for indecent behavior — yes, she was reprimanded, not the hundreds of men surrounding her.)
A feminist activist in Iran is sentenced to be whipped and imprisoned as punishment for advocating women’s rights.
Less than 60% of Americans believe unequivocally that women should play an equal role with men in public life.
Maureen Dowd refers to Hillary Clinton as a dominatrix, Chris Matthews calls her a she-devil, and a McCain barnacle calls her a bitch. (I believe “lying slut” is reserved for rape victims.)
The U.N. reports that most of the 800 million illiterate adults in the world are women; most of the 100 million children not in school are girls. Women earn three-quarters of what men do and their unpaid labor would, if calculated, equal trillions of dollars. Women hold only 17% of the parliamentary seats in the world, but they constitute 70% of the people living in poverty.
Yep, the world is still a shit pie for women. And that’s by no means a systematic survey; it’s just what caught my eye in the hour or two I spent getting caught up around the tubes. My reaction is twofold:
I want to go back into the tent with Raoul.
We need more feminism in the world. A lot more.
On the first point I need not elaborate; long-time readers will have observed that I have a tendency to disappear (into a tent, the Smoking Lounge, France, what have you) when The Horror Of It All starts to be too much.
I don’t need to belabor the second point either, but I do have something to add. Look again at that list of news items. That’s why I have no tolerance for anti-feminists. None. Zero. Feminism is the belief that women are human; it is the movement to secure their full human rights. It’s about stopping the rapes and the lashings and the mutilations and the oppression and the abuse. If you think that the best way for you to spend your time in this world is by working against feminism, then I’ve got no time for you.
And that goes for all anti-feminists, whatever the variety. MRAs with miniature dicks? Check. Christian fundamentalists who think Saudi Arabia sounds like Big Rock Candy Mountain? Check. So-called liberal dudes who become annoyed every time they’re asked to consider women’s rights? Check.
And the women, too, alas — though I don’t mean those true believers who have been Stockholmed into accepting their own God-ordained inferiority. No, I mean the women who cynically capitalize on the popularity of anti-feminism for the sake of their own self-aggrandizement. (You know the shtick — from Ann Coulter to Wendy McElroy to Toni Bentley to the trolls who haunt the blogosphere posing as “feminist critics.”) Since they are also women under patriarchy I usually hold my fire, but do I have time for them? That would be no, Bob.
So the next time some anti-feminist goblin shows up here and I promptly zap its tiny ass into a smoldering cinder, you’ll know why. I got no time for those people.
Raoul sporting his new head. Thanks for the suggestion, Sis!
Raoul and I are back from the Himalayas. Got a bunch of stuff to catch up on, and I owe you guys an anthropology post, eh? Eh. (Vocal mannerism courtesy of two weeks in a tent with Raoul. When he was a parrot he lived with a family in Montreal.)
It’s time to come clean with the reason I’m still hanging around here in the Spirit Smoking Lounge instead of resuming my corporeal form among the living. We’re now at Death+39 days, and I’m not sure how much longer the old meat sack will stay fresh on the heart-lung machine I’ve got hooked up in the garage. I occasionally pop back in to take the neurons on a spin around the block, make sure all the synapses are firing, that sort of thing, but I’m postponing the inevitable re-corporealization as long as possible.
The reason? Well, there’s the smoking, of course, and the tequila shots with no hangover, and the Nerf ball games with Nietzsche (who has really, really lightened up since he died), and the infinite knowledge and wisdom thing — all that’s great. But what’s really keeping me here is Raoul. Raoul, my Spirit boyfriend.
I lurve me some Raoul.
One of the most gratifying aspects of Spirit sex is that you can take on any form you want. Yesterday, for example, after spending a rather embarrassingly humongous amount of time staring at the sexy man picture, with my Spirit tongue hanging out and everything, it occurred to me to ask Raoul to make himself look like that. And he did! The lack of a head is weird, though, so we’re shopping around for something suitable.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Reclusive Leftist, Raoul on October 2, 2007, 4:42 pm EST
Hence religion, literature, art, science, technology, military action, trade and economic marketplaces, political organization, medicine — these all mainly emerged from the men’s sphere. The women’s sphere did not produce such things, though it did other valuable things, like take care of the next generation so the species would continue to exist.
Actually, taking care of the next generation seems to be the only “valuable thing” Baumeister thinks women have done, and they’ve barely managed that:
Giving birth is a revealing example. What could be more feminine than giving birth? Throughout most of history and prehistory, giving birth was at the center of the women’s sphere, and men were totally excluded. Men were rarely or never present at childbirth, nor was the knowledge about birthing even shared with them. But not very long ago, men were finally allowed to get involved, and the men were able to figure out ways to make childbirth safer for both mother and baby. Think of it: the most quintessentially female activity, and yet the men were able to improve on it in ways the women had not discovered for thousands and thousands of years.
It is astounding that in the year 2007, hate speech like this should be delivered in the context of an invited address at a prestigious medical/scientific conference. I went to the conference page of the APA to see if they’d issued some kind of apology for this thing, but no. They actually refer to it as “a provocative look at the motivational differences between men and women.”
How did this happen? How is it possible?
I’ll tell you how: Ev-psych. Baumeister, whose Ph.D. is in Social Psychology, is allowed to extrude this crud in public because he wraps his misogyny in the pseudo-scientific cloak of EP. His one precious factoid is the same one all the other ev-psych sexists cling to: that some cognitive test results show a wider distribution of scores among men than among women, with males occupying the extremes at both ends. (To an ev-psycho, of course, the statistical distribution of these particular results is a perfect mirror of innate human capacity. There is no possibility of test bias or performance differences based on gendered expectations or socialization or anything else, nor any question about just what external reality the test might be testing. It’s a funny thing, but evolutionary psychologists don’t actually seem to know much about psychology.)
But Baumeister’s statistics will only take him so far, because there’s the pesky fact that overall women’s scores are pretty much the same as men’s. So he adds his own fantastically cockamamie twist: that women are inherently “unmotivated” to use their brains. True, they do have the grey matter, and if someone plops a woman down in an office (invented by a man, of course) she’ll fire up the neurons and eventually figure out what to do, but otherwise females are content to function at about the level of lizards sunning themselves on a rock. Then Baumeister straps on his seven-league boots and leaps over a couple of mountains of logical absurdity to reach his promised land: men naturally rule the world because a) the smartest people in the world are always men, and b) women are lizards. And not only that, but (hang on if you’re an anthropologist because you’re about to vomit) men created all human culture.
Missing from this thesis is any knowledge of history, culture, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, genetics, biology, human origins, or pretty much anything else that you would think might come in handy in terms of understanding the history of our species, much less a social structure like patriarchy.
Oh, but wait — “patriarchy,” according to this thesis, doesn’t exist. The very notion that women have ever been systematically oppressed is a feminist conspiracy theory. According to Baumeister, women have never been discriminated against or oppressed or excluded from anything. They’re just naturally at the bottom of the social order because they’re so fucking dumb unmotivated. At one point in the speech he actually wonders aloud why women didn’t become composers in the 19th century, even though they had pianos at home and plenty of time to practice, and argues that the fact that they didn’t is clear evidence of women’s innate lack of creativity. That’s the level we’re dealing with here, folks.
Yet the faddish popularity of ev-psych makes it possible for this ignorant misogynist to expel his toe-curling fumes in public — at the goddamn APA convention! — without being shouted off the stage by an outraged audience.
You know, just the other night I was re-reading the excellent chapter on human origins research in Sarah Milledge Nelson’s Gender in Archaeology. I was chuckling along with Nelson at the ludicrousness of the field in the 60s and early 70s, the era of “Man the Hunter,” when male anthropologists argued that men had driven all of human evolution, that humanity itself was defined by the exclusively (so they thought) male occupations of hunting and flint knapping, and that all women did was sit around in the caves waiting for their pelvises to evolve so they could give birth to big-brained sons who would bring them meat.
Thirty-five years of feminist anthropology has beaten that shit to shreds*, but now ev-psych has come along to replace it. And that’s really all ev-psych is: another patriarchal just-so story explaining why modern male dominance is universal and natural and inevitable. Patriarchy always tells these stories. They’re justification myths — like the Greek legend about how the women of Athens lost power as a sop to Poseidon, or the Bible story that has women eternally paying for the apple thing. The modern version just talks about genes instead of gods and “gender motivational patterns” instead of apples. Same shit, different century.
*From my own comment in the thread below: “And as for the creation of culture, the notion that this was somehow a male-only venture is unsupportable on any grounds. From our primate predecessors to Palelolithic tool makers to the Fiber Revolution to the invention of agriculture, all the evidence is that females have been as much culture-creators as males (if not more, actually, given the way research is going).”
I’m realizing that public perception is lagging a few decades behind the field, so I’m going to start posting on this work here and there to help get the word out.
As for the historical restrictions on women (such as, to take the example of “women composers,” the fact that until recently women were actually barred from higher education and musician unions and orchestras, and were ostracized and denied support and publication when they did compose), I feel sure my readers know all about that. Far better than this Baumeister clown.
Now here’s a coincidence. It so happens that I’ve been kicking around the idea of taking on advertising again to cover the site costs, and just this morning I was complaining to the other spirits here in the Smoking Lounge about the problems with Google Adsense.
Me: The problem with Adsense is that it goes off keywords Spirit of Adsense: High Paying Keywords. Get Millions of High Paying Adsense Keywords & Develop Adsense Pages. Me: but it doesn’t do any other screening Spirit of Adsense: Buy imported Oriental screens. Shoji Screens Starting at $69.00. Me: so if you have a feminist blog with the word “feminism” in your posts or on your header Spirit of Adsense: The Book Feminists Don’t Want You To Read. Women Who Make the World Worse, by Kate O’Beirne. Now at 34% off. $16.47 in hardcover. Me: you get ads for anti-feminist things. Spirit of Adsense: Discover the Truth about God’s Plan for Men and Women. Biblical Headship and Christian Submission. Me: For example, you could write a post about those fake Crisis Pregnancy Centers Spirit of Adsense: Pregnant? Scared? Alone? Me: and lo and behold if Adsense doesn’t serve up an ad from a goddamn Crisis Pregnancy Center right there in your fucking sidebar! Spirit of Adsense: Hot Sidebar Fucking Online. Watch Free XXX Videos.
It’s really annoying. This blog averages about 150,000 page views a month, a minuscule figure compared to a blog like Feministing, which I understand is actually visible from space. Still, it’s ten times the circulation of my local Auto Trader. I should at least be able to sell ad space for a 2000 TOYOTA CAMRY 4 Dr LE V6 Sedan, at, ac, pw, pdl, tilt, cc, CD, loaded, Exc Cond, MUST SEE.
But back to Victoria’s post. The porn-ad thing made her think of this guy, a conceptual artist who has created pollination porn for plants. Here’s the description from Reuters:
Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats… filmed a six-minute long video of plants getting pollinated, then edited his uncensored footage into a gritty black-and-white porn video. The result was what he claims to be the world’s first plant porn movie, “Cinema Botanica.”
“It is very boring but that is part of the essence of pornography, that it is very repetitive,” he said.
During September his film will be projected onto an audience of 60 house plants lined in rows at the 1078 Gallery, an alternative arts space in Chico, California - a venue Keats has dubbed “the world’s first porn theater for house plants.”
It’s a sublime demonstration, isn’t it? A row of house plants lined up in front of a screen where grainy pollination footage is being projected. When I read that I thought this Jonathon Keats person was a good guy, the kind of artist who is able to deconstruct our cultural narratives and expose the absurdities.* I thought he was a feminist.
I was wrong.
Keats says he chose pornography because “it is so innately appealing.” What? Innate? And appealing to whom? He cheerfully cites early nickelodeons and refers to “humans,” as if pornography were as natural and innocuous as breathing, as if he hadn’t the faintest idea that pornography is a cultural artifact of our misogynistic society. Is it possible he’s deliberately playing the fool? That was my first guess, given his record as a performance artist.**
But it seems he really is a fool when it comes to everything connected to gender and sexuality. I dug around and discovered that not only is Keats a fool, he’s also an anti-feminist and a historical illiterate (a not unusual combination). In a book review at Salon — a serious book review, written apparently of his own free will and not under duress or in a state of extreme intoxication — he said, “What was once the argument of the gentleman misogynist is now the line taken by the academic feminist: The sexual body is a dangerous thing, best shrouded from sight.” He referred to “hetero-patriarchal dominance” as a self-evidently absurd phrase, and went on to claim that “the academic feminist orthodoxy [wants] to keep the feminine body hidden from view, and female sexuality under wraps.” And finally, “the corset has been an instrument of liberation.”
I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Performance art! Gotta be! Clearly he’s just committed to his form.” Because really, who could be that stupid? But there’s more where that came from, since Keats regularly stinks up various online venues with his puerile ruminations. In one column he argued breathlessly that American Psycho was a work of “genius.” His own first novel was so sexist that even the distinctly non-feminist Publisher’s Weekly felt compelled to comment.
It’s a shame, because if Keats weren’t a pornhound (which I’m betting five hundred gazillion dollars he is), he might be able to think about sexuality with the same transgressive humor he brings to religion. Instead he’s in thrall to the age, soaking in the effluvium of an obscene culture, unable to recognize that his frame of reference is, indeed, a frame and not Eternal Truth.
Of course it’s possible that everything he writes about sex and gender is a knowing joke; that his entire output, including his own novel, is intended as ironic commentary. But if so, his stance is so indistinguishable from the dominant cultural narrative that whatever irony he may have intended has vanished. With no space between subject and object, not even the tiniest crack, there is no commentary. The joke’s on him.
*Remember the Kilgore Trout story about the planet where pornography consists of movies of people eating?
**From the SF Weekly story about Keats’ research into the genetic taxonomy of God, which included an experiment to breed God in a petri dish:
Keats believes that much of the debate about his approach would be unnecessary if field scientists (other than Keats, who doesn’t “like to go camping”) were to collect additional field notes on God. “At least footprints, so to speak, or droppings, so to speak,” he says. “I mean, I don’t want to be vulgar, but the more we can get a concrete picture of God, the better this research will be.”
Loyal readers know that I was killed a few days ago in a freak accident involving President Bush, Martin Heidegger, and some smack. I spent the weekend goofing off in my new disembodied state — floating around the house, stealing socks out of the dryer, scooting Molly’s ball all around the floor like it’s alive (she loves that, just barks her little head off!) — but it’s time to buckle down and get serious. I have a Higher Calling.
As a Disembodied Being of Pure Spirit, I am now on another plane of existence, one where the mysteries that defy mortal souls are revealed, where the ultimate truths that underpin the universe are as clear as a drop of melted snow on the tip of a bodhisattva’s finger. And I owe it to you, my meaty friends, to share these spiritual riches.
Yes, friends, I’m here to answer all your questions: about God, the meaning of life, Alberto Gonzales, what have you.
Sometime during the late evening hours of August 10, 2007, I was assimilated by BlogWarBot, resulting in a new, horrifying entity: Dr. BlogWarBot Socks. This Borg-like creature maintained control of the blog for several days, until an emergency intervention by a crack team of lolkitteh avatars (see above) finally succeeded in removing the alien implants this morning.
When I first started blogging, I had no idea that blogs could be so vulnerable, much less those by fictional characters such as myself. Long-time readers may be reminded of the unpleasant incident last summer, when my physical host was possessed by The Virus for over week. And there was that day when the Ministry of Truth took over the blog, though of course I completely welcomed that and was deeply grateful to Minitrue for explaining things to my readers in such a clear and, well, truthful fashion!
At any rate, my message to other bloggers, particularly fictitious ones, is to be careful. You never know when another fictional character could take over your blog.
Posted by Violet under Reclusive Leftist on August 14, 2007, 1:02 pm EST
