Caye Caulker, Belize

In a motorboat skimming across Caribbean

Blue, the shirtless Islander pilots like a pirate.

One-hand on the wheel, he tells today's tourists

Stories of his Great Barrier Reef Boyhood.

Listening with lust, novice young snorkelers

Adjust their unfamiliar equipment, and awkwardly

Await their turn in the turquoise below.

A ceiling fan revolves, whirs, hums, delivers

Tiny breezes across naked bodies, sprawled

Like already forgotten suburbs. From the wall, a lazy

Lizard watches the only movement in the room–

A single thumb stroking a satisfied cheek. Outside,

The regularly-scheduled afternoon thunderstorm

Tells the stirring lovers in Neverland: Go back to sleep.

Escaping through make-believe walls, the sound

Of reggae rhythms, melodies.  At sunset, lured
By unbroken beats, sandaled feet wander from boats
And beds toward the bar. Reefer floats on the sea air.

Barefoot and nearly bare-bodied, American girls sway

With Rasta boys on floors of sand. Sometimes,
They stay, and raise beautiful blue-in-the-moonlight babies.

But most times, they manage to barely not miss the boat,

the bus, the plane, and end up in a gray airport, inadequately
dressed, asleep on a cold seat, waiting for a ride home.

192 hours later......

after Samhain, that is.

I've been thinking about posting Halloween pics for a week, because it was probably the best ever, but the election kind of took over for awhile. Thank god we only do that once every four years! I'm thinking six would be even better. Maybe we should change the constitution to let whoever's in there just stay put for half a dozen trips around the sun. But I digress......

Kristen, who cut and colored my lovely sky-blue locks, gave me a card that read, "If I could, I'd find you a fairy godmother with a magic wand and combat boots, so that she could make all your dreams come true and kick the crap out of anything that got in the way of your happiness."

That's it! I had already bought a fairy costume, but wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with it. Kristen had given me my answer.

And then my hair started to fall out, just in time to shave it into a mohawk! I've wanted one since I was 14, but my mother wouldn't let me do it then. Now I'm 41 (reversed numbers, interesting.....thanks Lynn), and my mother is dead. Being a cancer and chemotherapy survivor herself, I KNOW she would approve heartily!

Halloween afternoon, I was just coming out of my "chemo coma", the friendly term I've given to the three days of hell endured once every two weeks. It's like the first trimester of pregnancy, with the flu and a hangover thrown in for good measure. It sucks. Totally fucking sucks. But I digress...again.

Halloween afternoon was lovely, and the evening promised to be as well, for the first time I can ever remember since I moved to Colorado 13 years ago. I placed a chair out on the sunny porch, found an extension cord, and plugged in the razor. John made himself a margarita. He took great pride in getting the part just right.


I remained incredibly calm, considering that my husband had an electric razor on my scalp and my children had knives in their hands!


A few accessories and a whole lotta hair gel later, I AM your punk rock fairy godmother in combat boots! Let me know if anything's making you unhappy, k?

I cut out the words from the card and taped it on in between my wings. Can you see it?

Me-n-John:


Me-n-Jen:


I know holidays are for kids, but this one was so much fun for the grownups, for some reason.

feelin' bluevy

These first two weeks of October have passed by in economic crisis and bullshit politics. But they have also passed by in perfection. The Aspens and Cottonwoods have turned yellow and pink. My friends just got married in a uniquely symbolic ceremony at Mt. Princeton Hot Springs. The weather is such that you get to put on funky tights in the morning, then take them off and put on a tank top at noon. I chanted in a giant human yogic spiral and made a rock spiral sculpture with the Spiral Scouts. Halloween costumes are in the planning! We have all settled into our school routines. I have been volunteering in the boys' classrooms once a week, and am remembering what I loved so much about teaching children.

For the past few weeks, I have been living in a blissful denial. A sort of post-surgical-pre-chemical limbo. Now, on Columbus Day, I am about to set out and explore a new world.

In about an hour, I will have a needle placed into the port on my left side, and Adriamycin and Cytoxan will begin dripping into my body. Healing poisons. In about three days, I may (or may not) feel like shit. In about seven days (because of risk of infection), I will not be able to go contradancing (see next post below!) In about three weeks (just in time for Halloween!) I will lose my hair.

It is both a terrifying and a liberating feeling, this idea of losing one's hair. Here's how I chose to deal with it.

First, the cut:











Then the color:

















Finally:




My friend's daughter, aged 12, asked me yesterday, "So why did you dye your hair blue?"

"Well, I'm going to be losing it in a few weeks, so...."

(Interrupting) "You just figured what the heck right?!"

You got it, girl!

one more reason to vote democrat

...... as if we needed one

hi guys!

Every June (ok, so this is only the second one, but I'm feeling hopeful about the years to come), Newspeak! publishes their Sex Issue. I wrote a little feature for it. So for all of you who don't live 'round these parts and can't pick up the paper, here 'tis......








When I read the sex stories from last year’s Newspeak! June issue, I remember thinking to myself, “Yeah, yeah, all well and good and I remember some of those similarly insane moments from my life”, but none of them came close to revealing the beautiful complexity that is…… SEX AFTER MARRIAGE AND KIDS. So I figured I’d have to write it myself. I know for a fact there are other Newspeak! readers out there who are married/partnered, have kids, and have sex. This one’s for you.

It isn’t easy, that’s for sure. But it really isn’t that hard, either. It was harder when they were younger, and woke up three or four times in the middle of the night, and I was so tired from feeding, cleaning, changing diapers, and nursing (I won’t even go into the whole “these boobs are mine and the baby’s so don’t you even think about touching them right now” stage), that sex was absolutely the last thing on my mind when collapsing into bed at the end of the day. And then, if you choose to have your babies sleep in bed with you (known as “attachment parenting”), as we did, it becomes even a bit more complicated. I’m pretty sure, even though the memory from the infant/toddler years is rather hazy, that we didn’t have sex IN OUR OWN BED for about two years! There was the living room floor, the bedroom floor, the couch, the shower, the tent.

You know, it just seems to me that people who worry about a loss of sex life if they let their kids sleep in their bed with them simply lack imagination!

I can’t even begin to count the number of times we would just get started, and from the baby monitor would come the little cry of an infant waking up. Or a scared toddler who had just woken up from a nightmare screaming, “Mommmmmy!” Because, truly, once you have kids, the only time you can possibly have sex is when they’re asleep. That, or while they’re watching Saturday morning cartoons. You do all know why Saturday morning cartoons were invented, do you not!? And enforced nap times. Very important. I remember several Sunday afternoons of frantically trying to get the boys to nap at the same time because we wanted to have sex so desperately!

Now that they’re older (seven and nine), and sleep through the night in their own beds, the bedroom has become our own Chamber of Secrets once again. Until a few weeks ago, anyway……

My husband John and I have a master bedroom upstairs, for which there is no locking door. Hell, there’s not even a door, just an opening from the top of the stairs. This lack of a door has never been a problem for us until the other night, when a little visitor came to call.

It was during that post-orgasmic-still-connected-and-slightly-moaning stage, when from the foot of the bed, our 9-year-old son held up his right hand, waved, and said, “Hi guys!” Those were his only two words, but in his impish smile and tone of voice I heard this: “This is so cool-my mommy and daddy are mating just like the animals on all those nature shows I watch and this has got to be IT!”

It was the shock of hearing him before we saw him that made the moment so memorable. I still wonder to this day exactly how long he had been standing there before he uttered those words. Like he had been waiting until it was all over to declare his presence.

There was a brief moment of panic as we immediately tried to issue him downstairs, my husband looking over his shoulder and me trying to sit up, both of us frantically searching for the covers to hide our butt nakedness. Just then the sudden realization of the absurdness of it all sunk in, and the only thing left to do was laugh. Hysterically. John rolled off to my left, we pulled the duvet up over us, and invited our little visitor to come up onto the bed.

He lay down on my right, on top of the covers, and rested his head on my shoulder. I had my husband’s head on my left, my son’s on my right, my arms around both of them, all snuggled together in our King size bed, in which we had all slept together for so many, many years as the boys were growing up.

We lay like that for a few seconds, and then John spoke. “So, I guess you know now how your mommy and daddy made you, huh?” That smile again, so all-knowing and like some great secret had just been revealed. “Uh-huh”. We talked some more about sex, (he already knew the details, so it wasn’t anything new), laughed, snuggled, and then I finally walked him back downstairs to his room.

When I came back upstairs, John and I laughed and laughed and laughed some more before we finally fell asleep. I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, but I like to believe that by our actions, we gave our son a gift: a memory of the goodness, the naturalness, the laughingness of sex. Only time will tell.

oh brother.....

Here's why:

Sexy - 6x
Breast - 3x
Death - 2x
Porn - 1x

It helps, I suppose, that "sexy" is one of my labels, not just a word used randomly in various posts. And then there's the fact that my mother died of breast cancer. Yes, Ron Jeremy did pass through Colorado Springs last year, but he was touring with a holy man (click on "porn" above for the details). It should be obvious to everyone that these things combined hardly warrant an NC-17 rating.

I'm also wondering why it picked up the word "breast", but not the word penis. And what about whore? Who created this rating program anyhow?

Anyway, I suppose my new rating (which I am rather proud of even if it is suspect) gives me license to recommend this movie. I watched it last night. As it ended, I had a silly happy grin on my face while the tears were gently falling. I was acutely aware that these were genuine emotions, not ones that had been manipulated in the usual Hollywood fashion. It's a beautiful film. And funny. Really. Just watch the trailer:



Or perhaps you would rather take a look at this website. Oh, wait, it's for teens. Damn! Stupid rating. (If you have teens, or if you will soon, please check out the link and watch at least one of the episodes. It's brilliant) I just think it strange how we condone and allow violence in absurd amounts - the average child has seen X* number of murders before he/she is 17, and yet the words breast, death, sexy, and porn are enough to send me into NC-17!? Why is crime and punishment more acceptable to us than sex and relationships? WTF is wrong with our society people!?

More sexy stories about death and breasts and porn to come! (I'll let you decide if that pun was intended or not)

*I'm too lazy to go looking for the stats right now, but I know they're out there.

a date with a train

And there will be nothing left
for them
to say except,
“We saw her last, tight-rope walking on the rail, balancing Sexus upon her head.”








And there will be nothing left
for them
to find, only
The contents of her purse scattered in the passenger seat:
One last cigarette
Some chewing gum
A banana peel
The keys
Lipstick

And on the floor
a collection of rusty ancient nails and unknowns

And Jimmy will swear he saw her
just moments before-
slip a hand up her billowing skirt, turn her smiling face up to the sky,
and lie down upon the track

And they will say (later-
when the story had turned to legend) that her cries
of pleasure
echoed through the abandoned warehouse
of runaway fantasies



And they will know,
Yes! They will surely know-
that when you have
a date with a train......

there is nothing left
to do
but to keep it


[April 2008]

empire lite?

Yesterday, a graphic representation of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States was published. It's called, simply, A People's History of American Empire. Real American history in comic book form! What more could we possibly ask for?!

Here is one of the most amazing 8 and a half minutes of succinct video I've ever seen. It's Howard Zinn's essay "Empire or Humanity? What The Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire", and contains images from the newly published book. Viggo Mortenson narrates. The video is worth watching, if not for the content, then for the sexy way in which the word "Louisiana" comes sensuously rolling out of Mr. Mortenson's mouth.



You can read the full text of the essay at TomDispatch.com.

sexus 123

I read about this meme awhile back at Maria's place - Just Eat Your Cupcake. The story of how her blog got its name is particularly hilarious and worth reading, especially for those of you with young children.

Here's the deal:
You are supposed to look up from your computer, look around the room where you are sitting, and pick up the closest book. Open the book, turn to page 123, count down to the 5th sentence on that page and then post the next three sentences. Easy enough.

Well, the book I have been reading for the past two weeks or so is Sexus by Henry Miller. I finally finished it while driving home from Utah, but it's still sitting here on the floor by my bed, waiting to be shelved on a bookshelf I'm afraid will topple over and kill me in the middle of the night, loaded down as it is. Here's what Mr. Miller has to say on p. 123. At the moment, he is driving out to Long Island with some interesting characters when he realizes that Walt Whitman was born somewhere nearby and mentions going to visit his birthplace.

"Do you know where?" shouted MacGregor.
"No, but we could ask someone."
"Oh, the hell with that!"

Sorry it wasn't one of the more sexy or philosophical bits! But in its own way, I think perhaps it is. Sometimes it is better to go somewhere, to just drive or travel, without directions......you never know where you will end up.......... or with whom. :-)

Consider yourself tagged. I look forward to reading about your page 123's..... or just put them in the comments if you'd rather.

P.S. I wish I would have read this book when I was 20.