Poem for Wednesday

Black Nikes
By Harryette Mullen

We need quarters like King Tut needed a boat. A slave could row him to heaven from his crypt in Egypt full of loot. We've lived quietly among the stars, knowing money isn't what matters. We only bring enough to tip the shuttle driver when we hitch a ride aboard a trailblazer of light. This comet could scour the planet. Make it sparkle like a fresh toilet swirling with blue. Or only come close enough to brush a few lost souls. Time is rotting as our bodies wait for now I lay me down to earth. Noiseless patient spiders paid with dirt when what we want is star dust. If nature abhors an expensive appliance, why does the planet suck ozone? This is a big ticket item, a thickety ride. Please page our home and visit our sigh on the wide world's ebb. Just point and cluck at our new persuasion shoes. We're opening the gate that opens our containers for recycling. Time to throw down and take off on our launch. This flight will nail our proof of pudding. The thrill of victory is, we're exiting earth. We're leaving all this dirt.

--------

This is the kind of day I had. There was company from cats aplenty, but I have a screaming headache from the paint and the time of month, and indigestion from the school fundraiser at California Tortilla for dinner, so rather than whining any more, I will let the photos do the talking:


This is what my living room looked like. And my dining room and kitchen and basement and upstairs hallway.


I spent as much of the day as humanly possible in my bedroom, but I had to share the bed with three perturbed kitties...


...and it was no escape from paint fumes because the staircase and hall were getting painted right outside the door.


The living room looked like this, pretty much.


See the lovely view of the dining room behind?


And the shelves still look mostly like this. Wednesday must put everything back on them.

Not even Boston Legal improved my mood...in fact it distinctly annoyed me, between Denny and the Fat Girl and Alan either being unable or refusing to distinguish between Torah and Israeli politics (if he were a politician rather than a fictional character, I'd be seething). I've figured out what I like about Carl, too; they're now writing him exactly the way they wrote Paul Lewiston except Carl is allowed to have sex with Shirley. Which kind of begs the question, why couldn't Paul have had sex with Shirley? Sigh.

The fat girl storyline I gather is supposed to be funny and supposed to make us feel sorry for Denny, but it's just nasty...three times the usual misogyny and no one really defending the woman lawyer for her skills as an attorney or litigator or researcher or anything the way people did with Jerry even when he had Shirley at knife point! And the Jerry story is even less likable, a woman who thinks she's in love with a utility box, played for laughs even while Katie is going on about how what people love about Crane, Poole and Schmidt is that it puts compassion over profit. More like ratings over profit.

So yeah, rooting wholeheartedly for Nancy Wilding who dared to make Denny feel his age because he couldn't even make it with a desperate fat girl, and I don't care what Alan argues this time. It's funny -- I related very much to Patrice Kelly and thought she was brilliant on the stand, but when Alan refused to allow the jury to consider manslaughter, I hoped that she would get convicted of murder. Alan's statistics about brain chemistry and revenge are a bit revolting -- so if a man felt really good and right and justified after raping a girl he thought he deserved, would that make rape okay, too?

I'm not at all clear why, if Patrice is supposed to have been temporarily insane when God talked to her, both the DA and the defense had clergy on the stand -- bringing in a Jewish scholar to interpret an eye for an eye is just ludicrous and leaping from a question about how literally Genesis is interpreted when it comes to revenge killings to Israeli border politics and Eichmann (and then giving the Jewish scholar stupid dialogue to make Alan sound smart) is repulsive. Originally I didn't like Patrice but was rooting for Alan on the case; in the end I sympathized with Patrice but her own lawyer's arguments were persuading me to find her guilty.

I didn't even have the heart to enjoy Denny and Alan's romance-fest on the balcony until the very end, when Alan made the obvious remarks about people being pro-death penalty and pro-life, and Denny blathered about not being over. I almost turned it off when Alan started in with statistics and studies again -- HE should date Jerry's girl, he's got as many defense mechanisms as someone in love with a box -- but then he implied that Denny only wanted a younger friend for the same reason men date young women, and Denny pointed out that Alan is no spring chicken and besides, and he didn't want to finish the sentence but Alan made him, "I love you. And it has nothing to do with your youth." Alan immediately asked for a sleepover and Denny insisted that that was why he didn't want to say it, and they argued into the credits, which was at least a nice mood-lifter to end the evening!