PANSIES AND SLAM BOOKS

It’s the kind of day most of the country had in April -- on the cold side, rainy as in pouring hard for a few minutes -- then slacking off, gray sky. A good day for naps, even more so since last night was what they call “the planting moon,” meaning the full moon more or less close to when a person ought to plant. But not here. The date of our last frost is not due for another week or so and you couldn’t really count on it even then.

Someone gave Pansy two flats of, well, pansies yesterday and she passed some of them on to me. I risked leaving them out on the front stoop on top of the pots I’ll eventually put them in. Their sweet little turned-up kitten faces are getting well-watered, I think. In the house I’m pondering the wisdom of turning up the floor furnace. Maybe after I take a bit of a nap.

Last night was clear and bright, so the cats were out on the prowl until after midnight, then came to slip under the covers because their feet were cold -- yow! When we had all drifted off to sleep nicely, there was some kind of giveaway odor or sound from the kitchen and the bed exploded. CATS ON ATTACK! It was that black cat who slips around here sometimes and occasionally seizes the chance to get at the cat food dishes. Maybe it was left behind when the old man on the back of the block went into a nursing home. No one lives there anymore and you couldn’t really say it was “his” cat anyway. It’s just one of the creatures that takes refuge under that old deserted trailer.

The Squib wouldn’t come back to bed. I left the garage light on, which proved an effective deterrent to black cats, but now the neighbors will be asking for days why my garage light was on. It’s a quiet life here, but observant.

I’ve been reluctant to sign up for all the “friend” list websites. You know, where you designate people to be your friends and then they put you on THEIR list and somewhere there is an aggregator web crawler that is accumulating all the info, so that somewhere there is a marketer or a bureaucrat saying, “Hmmmmm.” Yesterday it was a woman who had taught with me during my brief adventure with the Cut Bank Schools, proposing that we be friends on a book list site. I declined. The less I have to do with Cut Bank the better it suits me. I’ll shop at their Albertson’s and that’s about the extent of it. It’s a small, corrupt, obsessed, never-gonna-be town that sucks blood off the reservation. Think I’m too harsh? I’m being kind.

Anyway, a marketer would have a tough time getting any sense out of my “friend list” if I made them a list of my real friends. They have nothing in common with each other except maybe me. Since I signed up to “monetize” my blog, I’ve been learning more about how others see me. One man wanted to exchange lists -- he runs a dog kennel. I’ve already forgotten what the woman yesterday wanted to exchange about. Some refuse to tell. I wondered what ads the pop-up computer would assign me, which is part of the reason I signed up. For me, curiosity is a far greater motivator than greed.

Most people are the opposite, I think. They aren’t very curious about anything except whether their neighbors are somehow getting richer than they are and how. The Chamber of Commerce might approve of that, but to me it all smacks of those junior high school slam books. Remember those? A notebook has numbered pages and in the back there’s a numbered list of the other kids, usually girls. Each page is entitled something like: “Worst hair in the class,” “Most offensive bad breath,” or “Who should force their parents to get them braces for their teeth.” All the stuff junior high girls think is important. Then there are the numbers of the coded kids who are being judged. It’s supposed to be anonymous and therefore a safe way to attack and gossip. Like blogs.

Sometimes pomo criticism and all the post-whatever politically incorrect stuff seem pretty similar. Instead of becoming a means of consciousness-raising and a thought puzzle about strategies for moving on beyond stereotypes and old grievances, it just turns into a kind of slam book. This is out, this is in. It must come from not being able to move beyond high school education’s categories and lists to principles and patterns. I think this is why Obama is invisible to so many people.

People who can’t be figured out, who are using information and ideas one doesn’t suspect exist, will always threaten the people whose world consists of one location, one kind of people -- mostly the kind on television, who are puppets, robots, controlled by marketers. Soap bubbles. If you haven’t survived them popping once already, it’s a lot harder when the world takes a major shift -- as most people will agree it just has.

I had warning. All my life I’d believed in some secret way that I would write a great book, funny and wise, that would redeem my blunders and make everyone love me the way they did when I was, three or four. I did not expect the publishing world to just disappear. In some ways it was far more disconcerting than finding out I just wasn’t that red-hot a writer anyway and whether or not people loved me, it would NOT be the way they did when I was a pre-schooler and it would NOT have anything to do with a book I wrote. It was plate-tectonics, continental drift, global warming, and the collapse of the world’s economy.

So I have a little sympathy for the people of the dominant culture around here who had really believed that George Bush was a nice guy, therefore a good president, and doing all the right things. I’d say the reaction to being in May, past the first hundred days of Obama, was still shock. But anger -- maybe even rage -- is beginning to thaw it. A little scary.

I do not want a friends list. I do not want an enemies list. I’m going to take naps and plant pansies. Maybe I’ll go out in the garage and burn some sticks.