2012/04/27

Propelled By the Huge Wings on the Sides of Her Wimple

We did the what if Obama truly is an honorable Liberal schnauzer doing the honest best he can against forces he cannot control in a center-right country, not a Corporate pull-toy debate at Thursday Night Pints, which is worse? What's worse of course is both all agreed, and then we gossiped happily and cattily about stuff I'm not going to talk about here. The NFL draft was on TV over the bar. It caught our eye, the ritual, from the three minutes of hugging the family and agents by the player after his name was announced to the handing of the player's new team hat and jersey to the complex and choreographed slapping handshakes and culminating dramatic hug between the player and the commissioner as if this white millionaire Corporate lawyer and 22 year old football player have been blood friends for years. Fascinating, creepy, chockful of symbolism. Remember that paper you wrote for me, asked L, referring to a paper I wrote two decades ago about carnival via Bakhtin, Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses, and the NBA. Sure, I said, the punch line was, I said for the benefit of D and K, that in reality a person had a better chance of being a CEO of a Fortune 500 company than an NBA player (the math worked at the time; I have no idea how many more NBA teams there are now than twenty years ago) and that Corporate (although I wasn't calling it Corporate then) held out the promise of NBA jobs as both the release of state-sanctioned carnival release within reiterated markers of class matrixes and reaffirmed the holy American myth of equal economic opportunity to impoverished, primarily African-American men . We watched the next draftee hug his family, hug his agents, walk the ramp to the stage, be handed his new team's hat and jersey, already stenciled with his last name on the back, walk to the stage, high-five, low-five, hand-slap, fist-bump, and demonstratively hug the commissioner, then ESPN's clowns started screaming at each other over the pick.







THE THREAT

Denise Duhamel

my mother pushed my sister out of the apartment door with an empty
suitcase because she kept threatening to run away my sister was sick of me
getting the best of everything the bathrobe with the pink stripes instead of
the red the soft middle piece of bread while she got the crust I was sick with
asthma and she thought this made me a favorite

I wanted to be like the girl in the made-for-tv movie Maybe I'll Come Home
in the Spring which was supposed to make you not want to run away but it
looked pretty fun especially all of the agony it put your parents through and
the girl was in California or someplace warm with a boyfriend and they
always found good food in the dumpsters at least they could eat pizza and
candy and not meat loaf the runaway actress was Sally Field or at least
someone who looked like Sally Field as a teenager the Flying Nun propelled
by the huge wings on the sides of her wimple Arnold the Pig getting drafted
in Green Acres my understanding then of Vietnam I read Go Ask Alice and
The Peter Pan Bag books that were designed to keep a young girl home but
there were the sex scenes and if anything this made me want to cut my hair
with scissors in front of the mirror while I was high on marijuana but I
couldn't inhale because of my lungs my sister was the one to pass out
behind the church for both of us rum and angel dust

and that's how it was my sister standing at the top of all those stairs that
lead up to the apartment and she pushed down the empty suitcase that
banged the banister and wall as it tumbled and I was crying on the other side
of the door because I was sure it was my sister who fell all ketchup blood and
stuck out bones my mother wouldn't let me open the door to let my sister
back in I don't know if she knew it was just the suitcase or not she was cold
rubbing her sleeves a mug of coffee in her hand and I had to decide she said I
had to decide right then


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