HOTELS

The Hotel du Lac is not like Hotel du Nord, but both are films. 

from IMDB (1938) "A young couple, Renee and Pierre, take one night a room at the Hotel du Nord, in Paris, near the canal Saint-Martin. They want to die together, but after having shot at Renee, Pierre lacks of courage and ran away. Another customer, Monsieur Edmond, a procurer, rescues her. When Renee goes out of the hospital, she is hired as a waitress at the hotel. Monsieur Edmond falls in love with her, but Renee is still thinking of Pierre ..."

Here's IMDV (1968) on Hotel du Lac.  "An authoress, whose career is more successful than her private life, arrives at a Swiss hotel and finds her life changing in unexpected ways."  It's an Anita Brooker novel of 184 pages.  Though labeled a lightweight novel, it won the Booker prize.  Specifically, the heroine runs away from one marriage, nearly accepts a new but loveless one, and returns to the old lover.  Maybe the deal is accepting reality, though the hotel is a fabulous castle-like edifice overlooking a lake in Switzerland and the storyline is much less likely than the "Nord" version.

The YouTube categorizer announced about the latter "Recommended for you."  I presume because I'm female, single and a writer.  But they never got around to dealing with how one writes a romance novel.  That person lives an hour's drive north of me and specializes in rodeo/ranch romances.  She also writes a  very funny but rueful humour column about struggling along with weather, animals and budgets.  There's no hotel up that way and when they're in town for a rodeo, their horse trailer has a compartment where they can stay.  I think.  Karilynndell.com  I taught school with her dad in Browning in the Sixties, so you see I AM old.

In "Hotel Du Lac" featured Anna Massey of the pointed chin and enormous eyes and Denholm Elliott, elegant as ever but rather malicious and tricky.  The heroine writes a lot of letters but never any novels.

I suppose the idea is to layer the lives of disappointed women -- sterile, silly, deaf, parasitical.  But I don't know how the heroine is supposed to be different.  She does invest very strongly in an idea that I use: that of the onlooker who watches and transmutes, except that I mostly just watch.  The Cat's Position, I call it. You know how cats are always around and tactfully looking away or keeping their eyes closed.

The idea of the hotel is a promising one.  I had a friend in Seattle who was combining a hotel with the I Ching, each room being one of the short bits of gnomic vignette.

So far mostly I've been doing short bits of memoir.  The hotels in my memories, since they were almost all in the small town West, are almost all shabby old affairs, originally meant to accommodate "drummers" (salesmen) who had territories where they sold their wares.  The aged salesmen sat in the lobby pretending to read newspapers.

There was a bus in those days which was lucky since I didn't have a car nor did I know how to drive.  But I was on a runaway, a great tragic weeping escape from a situation I didn't know how to manage.  It didn't help that I had no idea what I wanted to manage anyway.  I came to all this later than usual and with more exalted goals for my life.  I leaned my head on the cold window and leaked tears while everyone pretended not to notice.

I left the bus in some small town and took my single suitcase to the only hotel.  The broad splintery front porch, empty in the dark, and a brighter lobby where I went to the front desk.  The old men, deep in their overstuffed chairs, stirred, looking forward to something happening.  The desk clerk was entirely tactful and gave me my key gracefully, neither pressing it into my hand nor dangling it.  I think the rent was something like five dollars or less.  There was no bell boy.

The old men's faces followed me like an array of pale moons, not like footlights though it was a overdramatic moment that would have profited from them.

In the room -- sagging bed, faded rug, ratty curtains and rusty sink -- I got into bed like a conscientious child but there were no more tears.  Pulling the sheet up to my chin, I wondered what I was doing.  I'll figure it out in the morning, I thought.  But I didn't.

I just went back to Browning and that's really all there was to it, but it was both a demonstration that I COULD do such a thing and that there was not much use to it.  No one anywhere along the way offered to take me over and make me safe.  Like Hotel du Lac nor Hotel du Nord.

I WAS YOUNG AND THEY WERE VERY OLD

I am aware that posting this will make some people very angry and that some of them might even try to take revenge.  Very few of them, if any, will be as old as I am (79).  This relates to Khassoggi because it is in terms of writing.  But also it's about the young mostly female defenders of their identity.

When I came to Browning in 1961 to teach high school English, everyone (with a few exceptions) who had a business or profession was white though it was a rez. I became attached to a white man who was born there in 1914.  His father came there in 1903 and established the Browning Mercantile, which was the store most likely to be patronized by tribesmen.  The "Indians" of the town were divided between Blackfeet and Cree (and a few other tribes plus one or two black people).  Cree, which included Metis, occupied a social place halfway between white and "Indian".  A black person was treated as an anomaly and like most anomalies was either disliked and feared, or amusing and friends.  Some of my students became white replacers as the whites left, and some of them became "medicine men" to use movie parlance.

Bob Scriver's career began as a portrayer of frontiersmen and cowboys.  When the oil boom hit and the council was suddenly rich, Iliff McKay and Blackie Wetzel conferred with Scriver about a series of monument-sized depictions of Blackfeet.  The result was "Transition," "No More Buffalo," and "Return of the Blackfeet Raiders."  Bronze monuments of Indians had been one of the forces driving the assumed natural nobility of "red" people because they were presented as representing the original Americans, therefore symbolic.

Probably the last of these monuments was Fraser's "End of the Trail" at the Pacific Coast, which was acquired in plaster by the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City where it signified the end of the Old West.  Maybe by now it's about the end of the democracy of the United States.  By this time Scriver was making figures of "Indians" that were not portraits of individuals.  They were historical and responded to the stereotypical white man's ideas about history, which by this time many Indians shared.  They were now the administrators and small business owners.

But there was one last blooming of 1960 reality.  I always thought it had something to do with Bob being thrown out of the Masonic Lodge because of his sexual behavior: multiple marriages and romances.  He began to focus on traditional "Bundle-opening" ceremonials and beliefs as an access to honour and spirituality.  The result was portrayal of the actual people.  (George and Molly Kicking Woman were the youngest except for me -- George had been a classmate of Scriver.)  Sculptures were his "second life" of not-quite-secret doin's and beliefs.  

White people did not know these ceremonies existed, except for John Hellson, who had married a Blackfeet woman in Canada and knew a lot of behind-the-curtain things.  About that same time Adolf Hungry-Wolf was the same.  The most political tribal people objected -- but none of the old people we knew and no whites listened.  Bob -- and therefore myself as his appendage -- participated in the doin's as sincerely as we could on their terms.  We were accepted, partly because Bob put in a lot of money and partly because he genuinely had the dreams.

An influential third-circle of entrepreneurs and publishers had grown up around the "idea" of cowboys and Indians, which was partly about WWII, a way of dealing with trauma and a return to peace which gradually became more violent storywise.  Charlie Russell, James Willard Schultz, Walter McClintock and many others were part of this and it more and more took on the characteristics of an "Orientalism," as Edward Said's theories suggest.  That is, more and more it was about an IDEA derived from the reality and edited to flatter the white consumers who considered themselves the ones who really "knew."  There's still a lot of that around, but in the Sixties there were enough believers to support the genre.  Bob divorced me, at my request, in 1970 and I stayed around until the fourth wife moved her clothes into the bedroom.  Then I stopped being an appendage.

When I came back to Valier in 1999. I had the idea that I would write about all this.  The result was "Bronze Inside and Out."  I also had the idea that I would fit into the Montana writers group: AB Guthrie, Jr. and Norman Maclean, Ivan Doig and Jim Welch (both my age).  I would be the "other" "Writing Mary" besides Mary Clearman Blue.  And so on.  I soon found out -- mostly by attending the Montana Festival of the Book -- that writing can be a middle-class, self-congratulatory, white, prosperity-based form of mercantilism, just like Western art.  I didn't want to be like that.  Half one's time was given to promotion and negotiating contracts.  Writing had to sell.

I couldn't do that anyway.  The gamble was buying a house and hoping I would find a way to eat until I hit Social Security in a few years.  Along came the Internet.  And all the writers there were practically children who lived in a different world.  I wrote a few "Western" short stories, a bit of autobiography, and began a long association with a group of boys creating an online episodic cross between a bildungsroman (coming of age) and whatever Don Quixote is (Quest? Satire? Picaresque?), including images and videos mixed with print and presented as a journal or diary of their lives plus a strong unconventional moral dimension.  Of course, this was derived from doing sexwork for survival but moving towards art.  

No group of writers with this style has formed that I know of, though there are many transgressive writers.  It is multi-lingual, international, future-oriented, reform-demanding.  I've never met any of these people.  If I use the name of their instigator, it will only increase criticism and rejection of both me and him but form me I don't care.  Valier is what Browning used to be: so far out of the mainstream that no one comes here.  Maybe briefly in good weather.

When I was divorced ($1200 alimony which was three months salary in 1970), and after my sojourn with animal control in Portland, I went to the University of Chicago Divinity School which is my Yale Law School.  That is, I use it as a shield and a sword the way Kavanaugh did.  I was there to try to understand Blackfeet culture and ceremonies as one with the sensory life of them within me.  The Div School was not able to do that, but what I needed was somehow alive in the thought stream of the community (Eliade, Lakoff) enough of a handhold.

The irony is that I can't write about it without a storm coming down on my head.  The glory of it is that I don't care.  It's worth everything.  I have left the narrow, the prescribed, the well-rehearsed middle-class story that has escaped suburbia like kudzu covering reality.  I have joined the "deep," the "long," the people's and all life's history and all that preceded it in the cosmos and is still transcribed in our very planetary stones if we only learn to read the evidence with our elegant new ideas.  They include "Indians," whether or not they left molecular traces in Warren's cells, whether or not it's a useful identity.

I defend the right of an academic or politician or artist to leverage genome, cultural heritage, life experience, location, practices, language, aspirations or whatever else.  I want to get out of their way.  But I also want to tell them about Mary Ground, Alonzo Skunkcap, Chewing Black Bone, Young Jim Whitecalf and so on.  I knew them when they were very old and I was very young.

THE BONE SAW MURDER

I'm changing my daily schedule.  In the past I've written in the morning and done household things afternoon and evening.  Now I'm going to reverse that because the sun is actually SHINING the way it's supposed to be this time of year.  We've had two snow storms and the outside is still wet mostly, but the snow has melted down here and even the mountains are not so white. I do not want to sit at a keyboard all morning.

The main kink in this plan is my eyes which are in trouble.  I'll see someone next week, but every legitimate opthalmologist I've had over the years has moved out the clinic I attended.  I'll go to an optometrist who pays close attention and is concentrating on doing a good job of sorting the real problem instead of selling $300 glasses.  Good thinking on his part since I can buy Zenni glasses from China for maybe $25.  The business must shift.  Besides, he speaks of honor and the respect he has for the previous owner of this business.  

But it is very clear that when I made the original decision to come to Valier until death us do part, I hadn't thought about vision problems.  it's not really about vision but rather about not being able to drive.  Valier has only one small grocery store and it is dependent on a multi-tasking woman who is also the mayor of Conrad.  She and her crew are doing an excellent job, but a grocery store is a hustle to keep up with.  Can it last?

In spite of all this, all I can think of for the past few days is Khashoggi.  I hardly knew who he was until he was gone.  I looked on YouTube for vid of him speaking, but the site was crammed with opinions and imagined descriptions

The details are gruesome -- so much so that the guy with the bone saw, a professional autopsy expert, wore earphones with music and advised the other 14 thugs to do the same.  All that screaming, you know  The parting-out of any mammal involves a lot of fluid, and in today's high tech world a drop or two is enough to discover intricate proofs of identity.  This was a conventional office rather than an abbatoir.  No drains or tubs.

People are wondering why it has been so easy to get the tape of the event and to discover the identities and flight plans of the death team.  We have a vid of Khashoggi himself confidently striding into the embassy.  Much as I like the idea of his Apple watch sending the sound to his fiancé holding his smart phone, relaying to the Cloud, it's probably true that the embassy was bugged.  Everything is recorded, everything is bugged, everything is planned and protected by interests of various sorts.

The Crown Prince, every casting director's dream of a smug, malevolent, handsome sheik, expresses surprise that anyone cared about some scribbler who, as Trump says, wasn't even an American.  Both of these power-mongers are living in tunnel vision as deep and dark as mole holes.  They are preventing themselves from understanding their enemies because they can't think like them.  There are factors they simply can't get their heads around.  

For instance, perhaps it doesn't get through to them that love was the lure that brought a wary man to the embassy, a man suspicious enough to leave his soon-to-be bride outside but linked to him via electronics  This melding of love and protectiveness goes deep in the ethics of ordinary Americans, but maybe not in Saudi Princes or lying billionaire American politicians like Jared Kushner.  We still love weddings and give them special importance.  No harems get respect -- just jokes.

Maybe the Saudis depended on the grisly parting-out as being too horrible for soft self-protective Americans.  It would be fast (7 minutes), without any possibility of a poison not being fatal enough, and it would be undetectable -- they thought.  If it were a TV series, Khassoggi would have had an implant of some kind that set off an alarm.  Americans see that sort of thing on TV every night.  Chainsaw murders, not so different.  

MBS, the sly-eyed crown prince, is a cousin to Princess Diana's lover, the one who was not in the fatal Paris car crash but had just been with her.  9/11 was performed by a majority of Saudi suicide pilots, though the blame slid off to other countries.  Americans do so love these conspiracy stories and they master all the details.  But they're bad at which countries are out of favor.  Just follow the money and you'll catch on.

Journalists are killed and imprisoned everywhere, at least the kind that go out in mufti and risk bombs and bullets to bring back the news.  At the same time newspapers and even TV stations are controlled by the fads of the watchers who respond to advertising more than hardcore news.

I'lll think about it tomorrow while I clean the gutters.

CVS and AETNA WILL SEE YOU NOW

On the news I see this man who looks like a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman from the Fifties with his little mustache and not-quite-aligned teeth and my blood runs cold.  He is a man who wants to put us all in chemical bondage by combining CVS (he's the president) with Aetna insurance company.  It's wrong to mock his appearance, but that is one of his company's techniques as they try to enslave a country.  The merger of CVS and AETNA is approved.

The first step is to medicalize the normal deterioration of aging, the pursuit of beauty and appeal, and our constant struggle for status.  All small things we used to just accept.  Not everyone can be under thirty, blonde, athletic and smelling sweet.  This step is related to the deprofessionalization of doctors.  Once professionals, they are now just high-paid technicians.  Medicine at the people level is no longer a judgment from an experienced and erudite person, but rather a matter of "best practices" by insurance companies and practice managers looking to maximize profit and charging for cotton balls.

All they need docs for is a diagnosis and since that's dictated by the insurance code, it's a snap.  Most everyone has about the same stuff anyway -- high blood pressure, diabetes, lipids out of control, etc.  (No one asks why and they wouldn't ask these guys anyway.  It may be a problem with toxic food supply or air contamination, which are related to profit.)  The answer for all of it is pills, regular pills on a schedule, and if the patient gets worse, it's because they fail to stay on schedule and come in for their regular blood draws for titration and all that.  No need to bother doctors -- a physician's assistant can do it.  They are lower-pay women pleased to be so important.  

Document hell out of it.  Use the Latinate descriptors that describe a bodily malfunction.  The pharmacist is one of the keys.  Once he or she has the insurance code, he knows which pills to hand out.  He's in the back of his little niche -- his female clerk-assistant handles all the actual sales at the counter.

CVS got hold of my name and access once, and soon I felt nibbled to death by ducks -- a constant stream of phone calls, emails and letters all pushing something trivial that was supposed to prolong my life.  They didn't do heart surgery.  They didn't "do" all that stuff I get on my computer about my nonexistent penis. (I'm cisfemale.)  Rather it was small sales: ten cents off toothbrushes with a new alignment of bristles; maybe something to cure toenail fungus.  Just a few dollars each.  It adds up.

I had never bought anything more than dandruff shampoo from CVS.  They had to have been hacking databases or just buying customer lists, including those compiled by insurance providers like Aetna, though I have Medicare now.

That's advertising but there's something much scarier that has been practised and perfected for years.  In the Seventies, dealing with folks kinda on the edge, I ran into people who were on methadone programs.  Some were voluntarily using methadone to kick their habits.  Probably the majority were on the program because the court had ordered them to do so as a condition of avoiding jail.  The program meant that clients had to turn up at a certain time, take a urinalysis test, and then receive the methadone which might have had to be swallowed while someone watched.

There is a brave contingent of women (mostly) who pursue homeless street people daily -- which means tracking them down in strange places -- to make sure they take their tuberculosis meds, because the disease has learned to repel many drugs when they are erratically taken.  This government effort is not to help street people (though it does that) so much as to protect the rest of society from their contagion.  TB can be a terrible plague, as it was in the 19th century when it killed our best and brightest along with others.

The modern version of this is the HIV/AIDS clinic.  If those carrying the virus are diligent about taking the right drugs, they are not so likely to die themselves and will not spread the virus to others.  It would seem like a good thing except that "plus" people are so stigmatized that those who provide their pills also serve them contempt and poor service.  The pills might simply never have been shipped so as to be ready for clients.  Armed guards are there to suppress indignation.  What is meant to be protective becomes a street prison.

The new programs for meds for high blood pressure, high glucose, and lipid control etc. are described as "your choice."  That is, one of the issues is people who don't comply with the protocol, which is assumed to be deliberate.  That means taking your meds is "your responsibility" and that means "blame is on you."  If you don't take your meds on schedule, if you take the wrong ones, if you fail to take them at all, it's your fault.  So far this has been a moral issue, but it could be criminalized.  Probably not jail time, but a money penalty.  Or being excluded from a subsidy program.

You miss, or the pills aren't at the pharmacy, or there was a three day holiday, or a blizzard meant the roads were impassible, or your car is unreliable and there's no public transportation.  The assumption is that you failed to plan ahead properly.  You also are told you shortened your life and you get the same kind of penalty you would if you did something bad or late at your bank.  Because at heart all of this is based on merchandizing.  Not just selling the meds, but also imposing the cost of the little cards that warn you and the bookkeeping that add up costs and whether you obeyed.

When I worked at a nearby medical center one year, I was briefly friendly with the woman in charge of medical coding.  She kept a lawyer on retainer because of the possibility of being sued over coding decisions -- maybe the patient was harmed by mistaken diagnosis or maybe the insurance company was suspecting double-coding (two codes for similar problems that should have been combined) or coding for a more expensive condition than another possibility.

Much of this can be traced to the invention of the computer which makes it possible to handle huge amounts of data and encourages the use of algorythms which can become inscrutable and out of control.  At the least you can be reduced to a number.  This time you will probably not be tattooed, but microchipping can't be far away.  Television plots include evidence of the microchip being cut out of one's flesh.  We still cherish our freedom from control. 

WHAT I CAN SEE WITH BAD EYES

My eyes are too bad to be posting because only non-use will let them heal, but I'll post this first since I've thought about it a lot.

1.  So far as I know I am not genetically indigenous but might have a bit of Metis on one side -- never admitted.  Certainly not enrolled. Closest I can come is my ex-husband had a daughter whose second husband was enrolled.

2.  It is impossible to determine "tribe" from the molecular genome that determines what proteins/consequences turn out to be the physical structure of any mammal. Tribes are created by culture and ecosystem, which develop AFTER the genomically dictated human bodies are formed.  Stories about early moving children from white/red or red/white end with the child becoming a member of the group that raised him. That's why we're stealing all those vigorous, genomically indigenous children and teaching them to be red-neck white.  

3.  Much of the reification of "blood origin" comes from the Eurasian continent where hegemony depends on descent -- i.e. the son becomes the king when the king dies.  "Indian" tribes tended to be meritocracies based on performance rather than inbred children of pre-existing royalty.

4.  Another distorting set of ideas are about raising livestock.  Careful breeding can create exemplary cows or race-horses.  But in the case of dog "breeds" inbreeding has created cripples and mini-monsters.

5.  Blackfeet are VERY careful about exogamy: marrying someone not related.  To the point of frustrating people who like their cousins very much.  (Many examples of outstanding Euros who married cousins: Churchill, Darwin, et al.)  For Blackfeet, a person who came along who was worthy and not related, got pulled into the clan as favorable.

6.  Rez education is double: partly old-time culture and partly state dictated curriculum.  Old-time culture is still valuable, still relevant, because it is based on the ecosystem of the rez.  Fish? Bison? Corn?  Eco means economic as much as species and aesthetics.  The recovery effort is worthy.  So can Warren make bannock on a stick over a campfire? Can she slice up a salmon for it to dry?  Can she cook with the "three sisters" of corn/squash/beans?  She doesn't get tasked with cutting up a buffalo unless her tribe did it.  (The Blackfeet who are relearning say it's harder than it looks.)

7.  Modern white culture -- and all others eligible to vote -- is about citizenship.  If you don't think about the nation's  well-being and use the machinery set up by our ancestors -- Euro but borrowing from the American tribes -- then you are not "white", but just undetermined.  Citizenship is not about pigment.  Nor pigs. 

8.  Getting elected is not about the genome (which is just a collection of molecules in a particular arrangement) or family heritage, though that kind of sentimentality is a story that appeals to some and turns others off.  Elections are about emotions.  Alas.

9.  The planet is telling us something.  Hurricanes have meaning.  The death of coral is our death.  The culture of the indigenous is aware and wants to respond, but mercantile culture interferes.

10.  Mafia is the ultimate mercantile culture.

THE NEXT DAY . . .

After days of storm and snow the morning opened up the sky and a week of good weather is forecast.  I would call it Indian Summer, but that's a hot button word.  Still, Native American Summer doesn't work.

The point was -- now that the roads were clear enough, QUITE clear, in fact -- I could catch the laundry up in Cut Bank.  The summer bedding has been in a heap in the middle of my front room for a week or more.  In fact, so much ordinary clothing had filled up the baskets that I really only did half the wash.  It took two of the double-machines and four singles.  A lady who arrived just as I loaded the machines protested, "You took the whole aisle!"  I didn't but the other machines on that aisle were out of order.  Even so, the 90-year-old proprietor who runs the desk had to call his wife in from the country to make two machines run properly and one never did the last spin, so the contents are out in the pickup waiting for morning when I'll put them on the line sopping wet and let them dry all day.

The owner, who was a military guard at Nuremberg. is a politics buff, so we always have a good time talking. I had a lot of science news to tell as well. Why the weather is so unexpected (the circumpolar air stream is breaking down and developing loops) and which one of the submerged lands I talked about in earlier posts was the fabled Atlantis. My friend always wants to feed me and offered cookies.  I finally accepted a graham cracker.

After the laundry I went to the grocery store, which has had a face lift that confuses me, and barely managed to resist buying a white paleonopolis (?) orchid for $25 because I always neglect things to death except geraniums and spider plants.  A bag of onions, a package of TP, 2 small pieces of meat, 4 cheap cans of soup, some buns, and a new cat toy cost over sixty dollars.  

The cat toy is a miniature hedgehog, very realistic and hairy.  They love it.  The Bug, their former toy, was getting pretty worn.  Sometimes it's a mouse or bird and ends up in the cat food dish and sometimes it's a little kitten and one of them takes it to bed.  There's a realistic flannel mouse who sometimes shows up.

Thread, sister of the ill-fated Thimble, who brought

the Bug with her for her nap.

The gray butt she's up against is her mother, Blue Bunny.

Blue Bunny is a kind of ice cream, but I don't eat that kind.

On the way back I parked at the overlook meant to indicate the camping spot where Lewis and three others camped overnight with a group of Blackfeet boys herding horses, woke in the morning to realize the boys were stealing their guns, and killed two of them.  We know the names and families of the victims.  Lewis put a medallion necklace on one dead person.  We don't know why.  I ate my lunch in the pickup there and pondered the event.  (I probably should not tell you lunch was a small container of coffee flavor Haagen-Daas ice cream.)

When I got home I took a nap with the cats and their new hedgehog.  There were no dreams.  At least I didn't have any.

The point is that the day after a soul-search that was fairly intense and that some people would resist as being past and best forgotten, can be recovered from with trivia.  The state of this house is disastrous, though I shouldn't use that word when there are real disasters still unassimilated.  But that's the way a writer rolls.

Note the little things, recognize the big things, let oneself slowly realize that a week of good weather is beginning, so I can clean the gutters before the next snow.  Unless I forget.

IT HAPPENED DECADES AGO

This morning I was a bit surprised when a YouTube of Sam Vaknin showed up in my Twitter feed.  It was this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3crqM3acY0w  

The subject is incest, which he discussed so rationally in his multi-syllabic accented way that the subject almost overcomes our emotional reaction, so intense and confusing that the topic never gets quite resolved.  A movie like "Souffle du Coeur" is an emotional and aesthetic answer at the opposite end of the pole from Vaknin's exploration, sitting as usual in his workroom with one camera.  I watch his vids on YouTube occasionally, but sitting there groggy, clutching my coffee, I wasn't so attentive as usual and asked myself other questions which I tried to answer as frankly as Vaknin but more personally.

Like whether I should be so open about my thoughts on #metoo.  I guess I should tell you a story, though it's not directly about me.  All parties involved are dead now except me and family members whom I will try to protect by omitting detail.

At the time I was an animal control officer, the first female in the state to have the job, considered a speciality deputy of the county sheriff with the same badge but merely silver instead of gold.  I took this seriously, even after I formed and occupied a new focus as education coordinator.  One day my beautiful young shirt-tail relative came to my office with a weedy pimply grinning boy to ask if I would help them get married.  She was pregnant by him.

It developed that he had achieved this impregnation by getting the girl drunk enough to pass out.  She was a high school alcoholic and he was a lawless satyr.  He bragged that he had fucked many girls this way, but this was the first one that proved his fertile potency by achieving a live insemination.  His mother thought it was cute.  There was no father.  Her son was "her little man."  He did have a penis.

I'd known this girl since she was a child, tried to help when her parents divorced, then married others, expanded the blended family (Catholic) to nine children plus the parents who met at AA but dropped out when they married.  I visited one evening and found all children in their respective bedrooms with their respective TV sets and the parents in front of their own TV where they sat on the sofa with tall alcoholic drinks.  All emotion was suppressed.  The children, adolescent, were not told I was there.  I had been divorced by my connection to this outfit and was ambivalent about continuing to know and care about them.

But the girl I'm talking about had no doubt and ran away.  She settled with a classmate girlfriend and the parents were okay with that.  Until I got a phone call: the girl was seriously ill and the classmate's parents didn't want to pay the hospital bill.  She was not a genetic family member and therefore not insured.  Would I take her to the hospital?

I did that.  She was unconscious, recovering from surgery.  I stood by her bed to have a conversation with the doctor, a young man who did not speak plainly enough for me to read between the lines.  He, in his turn, could not figure out my relationship to his patient.  I suppose in the end the genetic father paid the bill for the tubal pregnancy.  Ligation was not discussed.

Everyone scolded her for not being on the pill.  She was convinced that the pill had caused her mother's cancer, so refused it, but she rejected penetration so long as she wasn't drunk to the point of unconsciousness.  I decided the best thing I could do was coach through classes until she graduated.  I had very little experience.  In my family education was the answer to everything.  The girl got her the diploma.  

A former teacher myself, I went to the school to get them to help.  The first time I went, it was after work and I was in my uniform.  They brushed me off.  The second time I wore my Sunday best --  complete with hat -- and they were respectful.  They made arrangements.

Again she was pregnant.  She wanted a D&C -- would I take her to the clinic?  I did.  She was still with the girl friend's family but they seemed not to be involved.  And once more she was pregnant and she said she felt like a murderer.  I agreed that it was killing. (My job included the deaths of unwanted animals.)  The alcoholism was also related to many car crashes in which sometimes people died. 

The fourth pregnancy was so advanced before she admitted it that the abortion was by saline injection which precipitates a birth.  There could be no fantasies about it being anything else.  This was the pregnancy that the delinquent of a boy claimed, boasting.  This time I asked to be excused from further relationship and the genetic father took over.  It was making me crazy, but also making claims on me that I could not fulfill.

I had decided to go to seminary and made plans for it.  Vaguely I realized that she wanted me to mother her and her baby, but I have never wanted babies.  I don't have the temperament.  I realize that this is against social pressure.  It was dealing with this girl's mother's bereft children that overloaded marriage and emotions.  I made the narcissistic choice of me over her.  Sorry, Sam.

While I was in seminary, when Mt. St. Helens blew up, she was killed in a car crash.  Her death seemed connected.  My narcissism seemed connected.  The emotions remain unsettled, like the mountain.  Watching Dr. Ford talk about being jumped at a drinking party gave them new energy.  Kavanaugh's manner reminded me very much of the boy who raped unconscious girls.

In my desk I kept surgical scissors for various reasons having to do with our animal population.  The couple sat next to my desk.  I took out the scissors and snicked them flashing at the boy.  "I should castrate you here and now for the good of society," I said.  He seemed to believe me.  There was more and the staff that could overhear was frozen, listening.  Then the couple left.  It took a while to calm down.

But I didn't call the cops.  What this boy had done was a felony rape.  No adult connected to the situation called the cops.  I have no idea what happened to this miserable progenitor and I don't care -- maybe that's the key.  He didn't even understand that he was guilty of anything.  I had read the law carefully about many subjects, even helped write a new animal ordinance.  I knew a lot about cruelty, about violence or chain of custody and various levels of proof.  Why did I see this only as moral, psychological, monetary, secret?

Okay, why didn't Dr. Ford and hosts of others NOT go to the police?  Why does the subject of violent rape dominate crime shows while the main characters happily hop into bed?  Is it the pill issue?  Or is it just plain confusion, both personal and societal?  Sam Vaknin explains to some degree.  But he doesn't tell people what to do nor is he a cop.

HYDRAULICS OF THE PEOPLE

My practice of focusing on two romanticized and "Orientalized" (the strategy of making exotic and projecting from presumed superiority) is a discipline of compare and contrast.  That is, Blackfeet and Cinematheque/Smash Street both are defined and motivated by where they are, which pushes them in ways below their consciousness.  Darrell Kipp, a Blackfeet thinker, used to talk about the "hydraulics of the prairie" meaning the reconfiguring of tribes among each other, depending as much on economic forces (like weather and ecology) as war, which wasn't like the Euro version of war anyway.

Recently this has surfaced in a podcast called "Tides of History" which asserts "Everywhere around us are echoes of the past. Those echoes define the boundaries of states and countries, how we pray and how we fight."

https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/

Jeff Lavezzo twitters: "As an American listening to @Patrick_Wyman's Tides of History I get a sense of how short a time European borders stay in place.  Makes sense that identity can shift again, especially an identity shift from the narrow to the more universal."

So consider this geographical, geological, hydraulic shift and its effect on thought.  The maps following are of the change in land due to the change in sea level, which in turn is due to the change is the ice burden of the planet which is due to change in atmospheric temperature.  The first one is the idea of the Bering Strait, which has been seen imaginatively as a narrow bridge with people crossing it single-file as refugees or explorers, in similarity to the use of the Americas today. 

When England was a peninsula

When Indonesian islands were connected

When Beringia was a wide lowland

In the past Beringia was simply a lowland, like many countries today --let's say Bangladesh.  Beringia WAS a country for thousands of years with its own culture and occupation.  There was no file of people like the Rohinga searching for a place of safety until the sea began to rise, as it is doing today.  Siberia and Alaska pulled apart, their ecology sundered.  The genomic fundament with its subtly different hominin base (Denisovan?) also existed on both continents.

The chain of islands in SE Asia was created by the sea rising, drowning lowlands.  It happened slowly enough for the people and other lives to use the islands as refugia, continuing as they had, before they needed boats to move from place to place.

For Brits it might be startling to realize that their green island was once a peninsula so that a person could walk across the English channel.  Only now are the genomic scientists are working out what that meant in terms of the population.  "Ancient Britain was a peninsula until a tsunami flooded its land-links to Europe some 8,000 years ago. Did that wave help shape the national character? The coastline and landscape of what would become modern Britain began to emerge at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago."  This is when agriculture was just beginning to develop around the Mediterranean.

https://www.abroadintheyard.com/if-doggerland-had-not-drowned/

"By around 8,500 years ago most of Doggerland was submerged beneath the North Sea and Britain was cut off from the European mainland. Dogger Bank remained as an island before it too was flooded by a tsunami around 8,200 years ago, caused by a submarine landslide off the coast of Norway."

https://www.abroadintheyard.com/if-doggerland-had-not-drowned/

We are who we are because the earth shifts beneath our feet and the tide comes in, sometimes suddenly and sometimes gradually.  Florida and Manhattan are on the way to submerging.

To the Blackfeet there are two "places", one of them assigned by Euro governments and sundered by the straight border between them.  This place is registered on maps made by surveyors and marked numerically according to the Mercator system of dividing the planet like a segmented orange, vertically and horizontally.  The people are defined by descent from a list made by Euros, "provenance" as with objects whose value and nature are determined by their use or appearance.  Blood was not involved except as a result of violence or birth.  Self-identification, mixed with the opinion of outsiders looking at appearance, were the first records.  

There were problems.  Before the surveyors, the rivers were the boundaries and recorded legally.  But rivers are processes and they move all the time.  So are provenances, so these "objects" who were people kept going through their lives which changed as they adapted or aged.  And they gave birth. The boundary was thought by some to keep the people "in" and by others to keep the Euros "out."  The consequences show up in the contrast between the Canadian Blackfoot (where the idea was to preserve their unique culture by shielding them) and the American Blackfeet where by now they are not obviously different and half of them don't live on the rez.

The "at risk" youth of Cinematheque and Smash Street are meant to cluster those who are singularly and in loose definition stigmatized.  In the past they have cloaked in secrecy, been elusive and secretive, but one-by-one have inhabited all parts of the world, arising repeatedly, sometimes stigmatized and sometimes simply accepted or even honored.  That was before HIV/AIDS reinforced the stigma and medicalized the orientation of desire.  Because of this scattering, a developing male would unfold in rather different ways and not even realize his deep compass.

When gays became a defined group and burst all boundaries in order to force a new vocabulary and way of surviving, it was observed via media and impressed us deeply, sometimes with fear of difference.  When they then became the AIDS Zero in the minds of everyone, they were forced to accommodate grief, insanity, outrage, and compassion as they scattered to what seemed like remote safe places.  That is, it was a special place in the geography of the country that was sent in bits to other places.  

The boy groups, one in Paris and one in Appalachia, were quite different because each brought together boys from different cultures.  Paris had historically accommodated gays, sometimes as Poets Maudit, sometimes as philosophers of revolution, sometimes as transgressive users of filth and violence to acccuse the corruption of supposed respectability, and finally as existentialists stripped and burned by war.  

Appalachia was once a refuge that prospered from resource development for a while, but then economically became strip-mined by the times, leaving people to die from starvation and drugs.  Boys here were impelled by their biology, bodies growing as they sickened.  The test was whether technologies of image and transmission, Internet skills, could become a renewal.