Friday, July 14, 2006

Blue Men, And Other Thoughts

Last week I was going to go to the health food store, but then didn't make it. Outside the store, at the time I was planning to go, a man was reported painting the inside and outside of his car blue -- along with himself. Blue. I've been thinking of it all week long. What does it symbolize? What kind of performance art could it have been? What would I have done, had it been me in audience instead of the woman who called the police out of concern -- concern for the man painting himself blue, his car, his own baked horizon line?

Last week I was in the local store and a young couple was talking. I just caught what he had to say: "She doesn't deserve to have kids, she's too stupid to live." It rings blue notes into the smashed horizon, the pale jade of jazz ringing the homophones off the meat hooks of civilization on a song by Euthanasia. Why is this slaughter so subdued? It permeates the hemispheres from Columbine to Palestine, from the Perla de las islas, Cuba to the new deserts of Iraq. This is what bothers me about the post-avants: too often one joins to be smarter than thou. How much like the humanities; how different?

Some don't have to bother with difference that comes with a twisted fist.

Two young men, high on acid, brandish golf clubs on the Boulder Creek Path, playing troll and aiming for bikers. Another day I didn't go out biking with my son.

There's a scene in the beginning of the first video I posted on the recent police brutality against pro-immigrant observers where the officer comes upon a peaceful couple who are walking, not loitering, and rams his bicycle into them full force. It causes me shivers. The same thing once happened to me while "on the line" -- out of over a thousand people, almost all of them white and of varying ages, this guy picked me to ram his bike, full-force, into -- and right between the legs. What did that symbolize? What sort of communication was taking place at that moment?

It's incredibly hot here today. The desert has come visiting.

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I've been away from blogging this week. Crunching under paper, documenting my Brownie points for a post-tenure review. I go to the store wearing my housekeeper's face. I inhabit another body, another being, when I am out of the file.

2 Comments:

Blogger Suzanne said...

Thanks for this, Lorna.

15/7/06 05:27  
Blogger sam of the ten thousand things said...

This makes me wonder-- not where the hate and fear originates -- but where they go when they leave. Disturbing.

Thanks for the post.

15/7/06 07:44  

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