Thoughts on a Train

She looks like every other ex-hippie-wannabe come suburban housewife and doting mother dressed in multiple shades of earth tone green, a pair of fairie wings slung casually across her shoulder and a small ball of energy attached to her hand, dressed tooth to toe in pink, purple, and princess with stringy brown hair matted to her head, a long, loud tongue wagging screeches too high for me to process at such an early hour.

Resembling something like an Ancient Greek Archaeology professor at a local university, he waddles around the train station in his unpressed slate grey slacks, brown rubber soled shoes, red patterened bow tie and dark suede panama hat. He's carrying two overstuffed bags, one a briefcase with manilla file folders protruding and bent, the black leather looking older and more worn than Joan River's skin, the other a forest green traveling bag with distinguished leather accents and handles. His grey hair pokes out from under his hat and out from his ears, and his wire framed glasses sit on the end of his nose as he peers over them to read the board announcing the train arrivals. He's late, or so he thinks he is for his 12:25 Amtrak to DC. Bustling past me to the ticket window I can see the liver spots on his face and his cheeks folded down over his jowles, and his busted capillaries on the end of his nose creating an omnipresent pink glow from a few too many sips from his brandy snifter. Plenty of time to catch that train, Doc. I imagine he has a palatial lisp or some other speech impediment that keeps anyone from taking him too seriously except for himself. There is no band around his left finger, just the imprint of where it used to be, where it sat for so many years before his wife passed away or up and left him because she was sick of being less important to him than the unearthed sarcophogus featuring Mycean fertility goddesses.

Overtired and addle brained, I sit on the edge of something great or a vast nothingness wondering whether I should shut my eyes and let myself tumble into the abyss or hold out for the attitude, aptitude, or eptitude of forward motion. My heart is cold, glacial almost for lack of love, loss of love, lick it and your tongue will stick, love. The train horn tears through me ripping my body in half at least, leaving me in blood soaked fleshy bits all over where I once sat.

At 12:26 the Acela barrels past my Providence local train, hopefully everyone is on board.

Who the Hell is St. Valentine anyway?

Due to my background in classic history, as well as my distaste for most things of Christian influence, paired with my general pessimism, I'm here to write just one of the many available, annually produced, anti-Valentine's Day scriptures. Like most "religious" holiday's celebrated in Western culture, Valentine's day has become a sales holiday to get chocolates and flowers into consumers hands; to fill up restaurants to sell their overly priced prix-fixe menues; to use the extra red construction paper, or candles, or cake decorations, or table clothes one more time before next Christmas; and to make sure every second grader get's their fair share of Necco Valentine's Day Candy Conversation Hearts and "choo-choo choose me" cards promoting romantic love and physical relationships far before puberty but if you look back into the history of the holiday or who exactly St. Valentine was, there are far less Whitman's chocolate heart samplers and personalized talking plush teddy bears than one may imagine.

The Catholic church can't even agree on precisely who St. Valentine was, as there were numerous Valentine's, or as the name implies, people worthy to be attributed to the feast of February 14th. He could have been a priest in Rome, a Bishop in a small town north of Rome, a martyr in some Roman province in Africa, or if you ask me, nobody imparticular. My personal feeling on the subject, is the same as my feeling on most Christian holidays in that it was created for the sole reason of superceding a Roman Pagan holiday. In this case Lupercalia, and in all honesty, I'd much rather celebrate "the Lycaean god, whom the Greeks call Pan and the Romans Lupercus" than a fictitious amalgimation of Christian "saints" who, I'm sure I don't need to remind you, were quite capable of purchasing their sainthood.

The obscurity of St. Valentine's identity implies that much like Christmas and it's Roman Pagan reciprocal Saturnalia, Valentine's Day was most likely a replacement holiday for Lupercalia, a pastoral pagan holiday celebrated between February 13th and February 15th which, as Plutarch notes, "...was anciently celebrated by shepherds, and has also some connection with the Arcadian Lycaea. At this time many of the noble youths and of the magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs. And many women of rank also purposely get in their way, and like children at school present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy." If you ask me, that sounds like a lot more fun than celebrating someone who may or may not have been martyrd for marrying Christian couples during the time of their greatest persecution with Edible Arrangements or overly priced rose bouquets.

The American Dream is no longer a savage journey, but just an old discotech

There's no passion in our generation. We've accepted a life of passivity. Of 'credit cards and parents that love us'. There is no need to stress or to strain or to work hard. The ideal of the American Dream died long before Hunter Thompson went in search of it's end and now everyone just expects the dream to be handed to them in a highball glass, or in a Louis Vuitton bag or in an overly vocordered hit single. We haven't had to suffer for anything. We haven't had to fight for anything we thought was right or moral or inspirational. Our "culture" has become so patheticly cookie cutter and suburban white middle class that it is difficult if not impossible to have faith or hope for our artistic future, despite the reintroduction of the words to our vocabulary by the new president and messiah. I find myself in constant pursuit of the mania of the counterculture of the late sixties and seventies because people were so mad and as we all know, "the only people for me are the mad ones." Maybe I just need more ibogaine or psylicyben in my life because I'm mostly unimpressed with myself and my inability to access that elusive raciness, the mania, the madness.

Ward! Beaver! Dinner's ready. We're having roast beef.

White Women are Fragile Flowers

I'd like to thank Beyonce, or perhaps more appropriately her parents Matthew and Tina, for creating a beautiful woman, with curves and all, talented enough to fight the general portrayal of women in mainstream media as waifish toothpicks, flaunting all that is unfeminine and encouraging women and girls of all ages to fight their natural body growth in unhealthy ways thus keeping their body as childlike as possible. In doing some research on this particular post, as the video posted above (or the actual music video -which I couldn't embed) is what encouraged me to write this appreciative note regarding the ability to accept my own curves a bit more, lead me down a more racially diverse road than I expected to head. Initially, I thought simply that a woman with curves is a rarity in pop culture and I should interject my "thank you" when I feel so inclined, and while Beyonce is a beautiful woman, with hips and natural breasts, a small waist and gorgeous legs, she is also a woman of color and while that doesn't matter in the way I appreciate her beauty, it does exemplify the dichotemy of what is considered beautiful for white women and what is considered beautiful for women of color.

The passive, aggreable, and unthreatening version of a wilted flower portrayed by white women for so many years in Hollywood is what we can thank for the rise in the need of sizes like double zero, websites promoting anorexia, and "Best and Worst Beach Body" specials running year round reminding us that cellulite is not acceptable no matter who you are and is a far cry from the appreciation of a curvy body depicted in paintings of the Renaissance or Baroque eras. Tyra Banks, Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez, and Salma Hayek are all women with both breasts and hips who are considered beautiful by the mainstream but if you take a look at the white women considered beautiful, they're either Pamela Anderson-esque caractures of what women should be and plastic surgeon created cartoons, or they're like Angelina Jolie (who in my personal opinion was more attractive before she lost tons of weight), Rachel McAdams, Keira Knightly, Nicole Kidman or Jessica Alba, all of whom are certainly beautiful and I would give my right leg (but it'd probably take both legs for me to weigh enough to match any of their scales) to look like them, but none of them are women, even if I stopped eating for the next 4 months, I could ever be as small as. That's because I am a woman with breasts. I am a woman with hips. Granted, I could stand to lose some weight, but even at my most healthy, I'll never be a size zero. I'm simply not built that way.

There is hope, however, for white women in media to be portrayed as something other than a wilting, curveless, child-like nubiles or an overweight, sexless, unattractive secondary character. People like Christina Hendricks, of Mad Men, show that even white women can have curves, have breasts and hips and thighs and be considered attractive and not overweight.

Perhaps my post here is rambling and doesn't come to a concise point, but it's something I felt the need to touch on. My initial idea was to praise Beyonce for her fantastic body, her talent, her video etc, but had to acknowledge, as a white woman, that I should be able to be proud of the shape of my body as well, despite the fact that it is less accepted by mainstream media as typically beautiful.