hitting deer

Every year, the weekend before Thanksgiving, our neighbors go hunting and kill a deer. They hang the deer with a noose in a tree in the yard. For the several days until Thanksgiving, the deer dangles there, dripping blood.

In early years I talked with our neighbor about the killing and the obscene display, thinking it might change their custom. It did not. Some years I obsessed—staring at the corpse, taking pictures of it. Others I hung sheets over all the windows of the house.

This holiday season my girlfriend and I killed a deer. It was what the insurance company called "an act of god." It was a car accident on an eight lane highway during heavy traffic. The deer leapt over the car to our right, landing right in front of us. The impact was impossible to avoid.

I've worried about hitting animals for as long as I've been driving. In Arizona it was rabbits, sidewinders, roadrunners. In the northeast it's been possum, skunks, and mostly deer. On the Taconic Parkway especially, I drive so slowly that drivers of other cars cuss me out.

But after decades of worrying, we've hit a deer. She didn't die right away so I was glad when other cars hit her, putting her out of her agony. The next thirty minutes were spent waiting for the police, cringing in the smashed car expecting to be hit by one of the cars swerving to avoid her body, and watching her body be torn apart by those that didn't swerve enough.

I know there was nothing that could have been done to avoid hitting her, and nothing we could have done to save her. Still, I felt awful.

Both the sheriff and the insurance adjustor said accidents involving deer were up dramatically due to hunting season. It felt better to blame hunters.

DIY Funeral

I'm into the home funeral, and now, apparently, so is the NYTimes. I love the idea of the coffin acting as bookshelf until needed!

teardrops, raindrops, drops dropping

It has rained every day for a month, and with all that's going on in Iran, I'm feeling a bit down or drowned or something underwater and suffocating. Thank goodness for last night's dance party to all the Michael Jackson music played on the radio commemorating the death of the King of Pop. Dancing to "Ain't No Sunshine." Maybe someday the sun will come back. But then again, rain = the new normal for the northeast under global warming. And things on the news aren't getting better.






Images lovingly borrowed from all over the web: heartfish, Miss Natalie, Newburgh's Door Sixteen, Dropp by Elisabeth Dunker, bookhou, One fine day, and creepy silicone breast implant people.

terror

We've long known that the term "terrorist" is used by the powerful to label those they feel threatened by.

White phosphorus bombs showering from planes vs. pipe bombs, or sometimes rocks and shoes: the pipe bombs are terrorism, the destruction of an entire people is "security."

And, of course, the U.S. military bombing Iraqi civilians is not terrorism, but an Iraqi civilian bombing the U.S. military is.

With abortion doctors getting murdered, guys in Newburgh going to prison for terrorist plots dreamt up by FBI agents, and my "domestic terrorist" apron causing a hubub in the commercial kitchen where I work, I knew I had to turn to Green is the New Red (and this image from christianshirts.net) to break it all down for me.

teen spirit

I saw a sweet scene in Cold Spring Friday night: Students from the Poughkeepsie Day School held a vigil and concert for Lawrence King, and all queer teens who suffer harassment. Down by the waterfront, this groups of kids sang and gave speeches and hooted in support of one another. Lawrence King was murdered when he asked his best friend to be his valentine. These kids were handing out the love freely.

gentle men: how the alphabet is used

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood! Yes, I'm singing that old Mr. Rogers tune today, because the temperature is delicious, spring flowers and leaves and buds are appearing an an amazing pace, the sun is bright, and Beacon's little community food project is finding its feet.

I'm singing loudly, and then find myself thinking about people like Fred Rogers. Obsessed with community, how things are made and by whom, make-believe, swimming laps, and vegetarianism—like me! Fred was probably a lot more gentle to my aggro, but he was a big deal to me (kill your television and all). I was profoundly sad when he died, even though there's that weirdness over feeling you've lost someone who was actually unknown to you.

I had that same feeling of loss when River Phoenix died. To me, he was such a lesbian, a lesbian icon, even. Everything about him, aside from the silly fact that he was a straight man, was as dyke culture as can be. (Is it Kaia or River, River or Kaia?) It was the same year that Kurt Cobain died, the year I lived in the Pacific Northwest. Cobain's death was one I was on the outside of, looking in and seeing what looked like absurd public grief. He wanted to die. I thought people should be happy the poor man finally had some relief. But then, there was how I felt about River and Fred, so I get it, I guess.

Cheers to two gentle men in my life who were never actually in my life. And to those people who actually are my neighbors. It was a stunning sunrise, and it is a beautiful day.

good friday

My grandma died almost 20 years ago. They say things happen in threes, and that particular three was that my friend Darrin died, Operation Desert Shield began in earnest and my Grandma died.

Darrin was cremated, and because of that, I don't think I ever accepted that he'd died. Where the hell was the body? Why was nobody singing Ave Maria? He died on Christmas, someone performed an opera he'd written at the funeral, nobody mentioned him being queer, and then the war really picked up, with people leaving my classes to go fight. I went to some protests and borrowed a five inch black and white tv so I could watch the footage of bombs dropping at nighttime. I continued working the late shift at Yogurt N More, without Darrin.I took my bevy of foster kittens to visit Grandma in the nursing home, and got freaked by all the people who were so desperate to get out, and would grab my hands when I tried to leave. She couldn't swallow, and the staff could never quite remember to sit her up before feeding her. I don't remember when her birthday was, not even what season, but I do remember that she was buried on Good Friday. In my head I've made Good Friday her day.

Gram would be 110 years old this year. The exact same age as my house.It seemed significant in some way that she was buried on Good Friday, a holy day that I'd tried to respect in all the right ways, but with my usual failure at praying. I did all the stations of the cross and inhaled incense until I was dizzy, and spent what felt like forever in perfect silence. That year, we flew to North Dakota with the box of her ashes, and buried it in the grave of the husband she hadn't seemed too close to, and that I'd never met. It was a military graveyard, the ground was freezing my feet through my shoes, and there were deer there on the next hill. I remember reading Susan Faludi's Backlash in the back seat of the car, and feeling very adult and very kid at the same time. I didn't have any money or nice clothes, so my mom had had to buy me a dress.The dramas of Holy Week and the dramas of Passover blend in my head, even though I know they're not the same. The image from Passover that sticks is the blood of the lamb over the doorway in order that your house is passed by the angel of death. I'm more an amulet person, I suppose, than a blood sacrifice person, and my version of this is blueing. I could swear I knew that people in Morocco put laundry blueing on their door lintels as protection. I'm convinced I've seen pictures where it's rained, and the blueing has left stains running down the doorjambs and the door itself. I was sure that people painting their doors and even courtyards blue came from the tradition of safety through blueing. According to the internet, I might have made it up.I used to hang those little blueing tablets tied in cheesecloth bags in my own doorways. Bundles of Ocotillo branches above the door, blueing hanging into the passageway. I had to protect myself.
Maybe by talking about smearing the blood and hanging the blue to avoid death, I'm blending them with Ash Wednesday, too. It's weird, you have to admit, seeing people walking around with an acknowledgment of their mortality on their face all day. I'll be safe over here, behind my amulet.

rat island

I call my cats rats or dogs, rarely cats. But I guess I name them names of other animals, too: Donkey, Marmot, Sasquatch. And multiple of my children remind me of rabbits. One, a small domestic rabbit with spots, and the other a crazy alien desert jackrabbit with enormous ears. My friend's cat just died, the one that she was closest to, the one she feels like she can't live without. I know what that's like. My favorite cat was a roach, with a low, fast scuttle. And you'd think that would be bad, but it wasn't; it was delicious and perfect. She was perfect.

There's an island near City Island in the Bronx that's for sale. It's a little slip of land called "Rat Island." I want to take my noses and my ears there and be insulated from the world where animals suffer far far worse than dying housecats. It must have been named for us.

the real cost of prisons

It's fascinating watching the Rockefeller Drug Laws be knocked back a bunch of steps. Drug arrests and arrests of vendors or homeless people in public space are so much of what the NYPD is about. The entire Hudson Valley is covered in prisons, many of which are filled with people being held for absurdly long sentences on drug charges. The bulk of the arrests were made just for possession. Of course those people should be freed.

It has an interesting edge, though, because for the first time in decades, prison populations may shrink, and some prisons may close. Of the three prisons near my home, at least one is filled primarily with drug offenders. Maybe two. (Different people give different reports, and prison websites are useless.) One expert on Democracy Now said whole upstate towns would be closing down when their prison closed. It feels really strange to live in a town that may see collapse because its evil main industry is being challenged.

Reading an entirely different article about Queens County Farm Museum (agriculture in the city, we like that), they make reference to sending animals to slaughter at a slaughterhouse on Long Island that uses prisoners as workers for "job training." More like training your free workers, a.k.a. slaves, to be killers. Crazy!

Things like this shouldn't surprise me. After all, we live in a country where people couldn't figure out where Timothy McVeigh got his killer instinct. Duh, the military! There's nothing quite as brilliant as locking up innocent people and training them to be killers.

Image from the book The Real Cost of Prisons, from PM Press.

nesting

Speaking of plane crashes, after the whole Hudson River ordeal, I'm worried about the geese. Everybody blames the birds, as if the sky doesn't belong to them! I worry about mass killings of my sweet voiced flyover friends.

For the moment though, I'm focusing on the incredible architecture of bird nests, as photographed by Sharon Beals.

deer, dear

I've been lucky. In all my driving years I've never hit an animal. This may be due to the obsessively slow and white knuckled approach to the open road, or maybe the alert whistles hooked up to the battery. Today, my commuter train struck a deer on the way to work. The conductor obsessively announced the condition of each of the train's mechanical parts, but no report on the deer. May she have died quickly, without pain or fear.

leaving the body

As a kid, I was obsessed with Lois Duncan novels and the concept of astral projection—willing your spirit to travel free of your body. [There was the thrilling story about Navajo twins separated at birth, one good, one plotting vengeance for her unhappy life. When the lonely girl's body dies her baaad spirit shows up and takes residence in the body of the happy one while her spirit is out running around. What could be more exciting for a pre-teen?]

And, the unruly winter weather has me admiring snowshoes for runners that have springs in them, turning otherwise boring ground-bound humans into snow kangaroos.

But neither of these examples are the body leaving I refer to: Rather than worrying after my soul, I'm pondering where the old bod will go when I die. Cremation seems like a waste of resources. Burial is good, but chemicals and makeup and expensive coffins are yuck, and not what we ought to be planting in the earth. In other countries you can be same-day buried without all the chemical pollutant fuss, but in the U.S., that's still rare. There are new eco-cemeteries, but somehow I expect they find ways to charge you an arm and a leg. I'm into the idea of simple home burial. Plant me with my cats in the side yard.

This is the best thing I got out of Six Feet Under. [Some slack here, please: I was sick delirious dying, and the gfriend rented full seasons to distract from the agony.] Annoying funeral director Nate buries annoying vegan chef Lisa au naturale, no box, in the woods. No rows, no markers, no mowing or plastic flowers. The idea seemed so lovely, and so illegal.

Heard the rumor that Tennessee is the only state where you can bury your human loved-ones in your yard. Go to town with deceased cats, dogs, snakes, rats, rabbits, groundhogs, squirrels, deer, and birds, but it's gonna cost you to lose your humans.

I thought of leaving my body to the faeries at Short Mountain. They'd get some good compost, and would likely have a ritual involving drumming, which would make my hovering spirit happy. Mom fiddled with the fantasy by bringing up the difficulties of legally transporting a human body across state lines. I guess I'll have to get old on communal lesbian land in TN, and, if at all sick or feeble, will have to be restricted within state lines. (Turns out Ohio and Vermont will work, too.) Preferably, I will expel my last breath within dragging distance of a good-sized compost heap.

Or, the gov could chill and let us have our dead in every state.

Note to swimmers: Ocean dumping is legal!

The beautiful GONER tag is by Jonathan Berger, from his Founder, GONER, Seer series of shows in 2007.

sometimes living in the country punches you in the gut

The neighbors who knit me sweaters and invite me to their children's birthdays and make me vegan cinnamon rolls on christmas also kill a deer once a year, and hang it in a tree in their yard.

I watch them drag the body across the lawn, struggle to hang it, hose out the insides in the deep slice. I stare from every window in the house, trying not to look but unable to look away, checking every few minutes if it's still there for the entire three or four days it hangs there.

The first year I knocked on my neighbors' door and talked with them about it. That year, and most years, the deer has hung from the tree in a noose, and I talked with them not only about hunting, but about the trauma a body in a tree in a noose causes. They listened, and went on eviscerating the deer.

Now, powerless to stop it, I hang a "no hunting" sign on the house every year, cover the windows with sheets, but pull those sheets aside and stare, check, watch, make sure it's real. I see dead animals strapped to cars every year, and I get furious, terribly sad, I rant. I talk to myself about hunted animals having at least lived free (unlike the billions of animals in factory farms).

But the body hanging in the tree every year remains one of the hardest parts of having moved to the country.

drilling for gays

I went to one of the protests last week about the CA gay marriage ban. I wasn't happy there. Again and again I don't have all the words to explain why. I can bristle at the "God Loves Gay Marriage" banner, I can point out to everyone that 95% of attendees are white men, I can joke about how everyone there seems to be on their cell phone, and still I'm never eloquent about saying why the demo didn't work for me, why this will never be my issue.

Like in other cities, NY had a huge crowd. I hadn't seen a crowd so big so white so male at a demonstration for ten years, since Matthew Shepard was murdered, to be exact. This was the first thing in ten years that made Chelsea come out to a demo.

Gay marriage has never been my thing. As Ms. Mel of readspeakresist says, "I feel like fighting for marriage is the gay equivalent of Drill Baby Drill. It's antiquated. It's a short-term solution and it's only useful to some of us." It causes other damage, that isn't spoken about. It's surface, no structural changes required, a continuation of the "we're just like you" charade. Like mattilda says "no on eight isn't really no on hate."

Two days after this massive demo, about which I'd received a zillion emails, Teish Cannon, a trans person of color, was murdered in Syracuse with barely a whisper. I found out about her murder tonight, and only by accident. No demonstration, no email campaign, no mention anywhere but the local paper.

Gay marriage wouldn't have helped a deviant queer like Teish Cannon. And I'd rather work for her.

all souls

Halloween, all saints, and all souls all make us have a look at death. All the grim reapers and skeletons running around, the gravestones my friend with cancer reported decorating the walls of her chemo lab, all the graveyard visitation and wishes for the souls of the dead. I've always been a Day of the Dead and sugar skull fan, and recently learned about the Yi Peng festival in Thailand, where some reports say those releasing the lanterns let their troubles float away, and others say they release the souls of their dead. I'd hoped to go to one of the city's largest graveyards today to have a sendoff for my own dead with the accompaniment of a Haitian band, but was too caught up cheering the tail end of the marathoners.

Whatever your celebration of the dead may entail, here's a nod to your deceased loved ones, as well as you and yours still living.

eat me?

You have to forgive my current obsession with food. As the cold sets in, I AM obsessed with cold and heat, the dwindling light, with packing away fresh foods, with how to close the hatches enough to get to the other side.

By my eyes have wandered, too. Around the corner from home there's an old maple with about 5 square feet of huge, beautiful mushrooms growing. I'm convinced they are oyster mushrooms, and they make me salivate.

I'm still relatively new to wild edibles, having bit of dandelion here, some purslane there, and gobs of berries in the summers. I'm well aware that mushrooms are a different beast, though, and that regardless of how many pictures I compare, I shouldn't dive in without some experienced advice. But sources say that there are no poisonous mushrooms that look like oysters....

I can hear them (and a recipe of Wildman Steve Brill's) calling my name.

remember

remember sakia gunn, originally uploaded by abovegroundpool.

See more from the murdered queers set at the aboveground pool activist archive.

fear and anger, anger and fear

Since when is anger a bad thing? It's a response all animals have to disturbing situations and it helps us, the same way that pain stops us from causing ourselves greater harm.

People who are afraid to face their discontents like to write off activists as not being in charge of their anger. Bush made reference to the "angry left" at the RNC this week (though of course calling centrist Obama "left" is laughable). What sane person wouldn't want to riot?

I think anger is an incredibly valuable response to all kinds of things, and it's one of the ways I know I'm alive, and conscious. I don't only feel anger: I (and all those other "angry activists") are driven by love and hunger and other passions.

I get weary of being asked why I insist on acknowledging my anger. Silence = Death may be an old school slogan, but Act Up knew what they were talking about. Silence and the lack of truth telling keep us in our place, keep us numb, keep us isolated and questioning our own sanity. Not speaking makes sexual abuse able to go on, allows all manner of violation to occur.

Speaking up and fighting for improvements is about being alive. I fear the outcome of numbness and complacency far more than I fear anger.

Without anger, I am as dead as one of Annette Messager's sparrows. The ritual of clothing and protecting them and treating them gently doesn't make them any less dead.

the end of the world as we know it?

Everytime it's 70 degrees in New York in January, I'm positive it's global warming. When I saw last month how thick the oceans and river are with jellyfish, I thought it just meant there were a lot of jellyfish this year, and ok, a little early. Alas, the NY Times reports that it means the death of the oceans. Behold the jellyfish, and be very scared.

tree city

My town has been awarded a "tree city" award by the Arbor Day Foundation a bunch of years in a row. This is funny (in a sick way) since there are constantly massive, old trees being cut, and rarely any being planted. In four days this week, eight 75+ year old trees were cut down in view of my house, by two different homeowners. Now you see them, now you don't. The thuds the trunks make when they hit the ground makes my heart hurt.