the Freakbox: comix, art, transgenderism, & silent revolt

Ye Daily Scowl

2012-02-16T09:51:00.002-05:00

=orchid gristle 112=

2012-02-15T11:33:00.002-05:00

Ye Daily Scowl

2012-02-14T22:17:00.003-05:00

Ye Daily Scowl

2012-02-13T22:59:00.002-05:00

Ye Daily Scowl

2012-02-12T15:52:00.001-05:00

Ye Daily Scowl

2012-02-12T11:52:00.002-05:00

Ye Daily Scowl

2012-02-11T13:03:00.002-05:00

JONATHAN FRANZEN, from THE CORRECTIONS:

2012-02-10T19:47:00.003-05:00

"When the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight--isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this."

+random picture of the day+

2012-02-10T15:58:00.002-05:00

Ye Daily Scowl

2012-02-09T16:55:00.002-05:00

Ye Daily Scowl

2012-02-08T20:29:00.004-05:00

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2012-02-08T16:18:00.002-05:00

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2012-02-08T15:44:00.002-05:00

+random picture of the day+

2012-02-08T15:01:00.002-05:00

GROWIN' BOOBIES!

2012-02-04T11:13:00.005-05:00

I’m not ready to apply for that job at Hooter’s just yet, but I’ve got them—tits…or, perhaps more accurately, titties. Going on a year after starting hormone therapy, I’ve at last got something substantial to fill my bra cups, something to jiggle when I dance, something to bounce when I get bounced on my boyfriend’s lap, something to fill his hand and squeeeeeze.

I’m taking Enjuvia. I’m taking Medroxypr. I should know what cocktail of hormones is inside the syringe that the doctor injects into my arm every other week, but I don’t. Maybe I’ll ask him next week. Whatever it is that he’s injecting into me seems less important than what it does: and what it’s been doing is sending me through the transgender equivalent of female puberty.

The most outward and obvious sign of this passage has been breast growth. It started relatively quickly, too. At first, I thought I must be only imagining the soreness in my nipples. Wishful thinking, I thought. You can’t grow breasts that fast, can you? This may be a fairytale, of sorts, but we’re not talking Jack and the Beanstalk here, are we?

Still, inside of two weeks, there was a decided puffiness to go with the soreness in the vicinity of my nipples and both the soreness and the puffiness only grew more pronounced in the weeks to come.

One evening I took off my bra and noticed that the cups had left an indentation that delineated my breasts as clearly as a tan line. I leaned forward, looking in the mirror at how “my breasts” hung down. It was almost too good, too magical, to be true. I didn’t want to keep looking for fear that what seemed by all modest and reasonable estimation to be breasts would reveal itself to be just a play of the light and my overactive imagination. I put my nightie on and vowed not to look again, unless by accident, at least for another week or so.

My nipples continued to be sore to the touch, at times almost unbearably so. I saw my breasts “by accident” a few more times. The aureoles were clearly growing larger, more diffuse. The puffiness had become firmer; tissue was gathering around and underneath my overly sensitive nipples.

In the shower, I’d reach across my body to soap myself and something would be in the way. Every time this happened, even if it happened two or three times during a single shower, it took me by surprise. It momentarily confused me; it even alarmed me. Even when I realized what the obstruction was—my breast!—it didn’t make the sensation any less startling. If anything, there was something alien about this extra mound of firm, smooth, white flesh.

These weren’t merely “man-boobs.” For one thing, I’m too underweight for man-boobs. For another, there was a firmness to the tissue that was gathering on my chest that was unmistakable. It wasn’t just excess fat, some byproduct of age and overeating; what was collecting on my chest was an integral part of the new me.

It was my body, my very flesh, acknowledging at long last, what my mind had always known. This, I came to understand, was the source of the “shock” of finding my breasts where they were always meant to be. That my stubborn mulish mistaken body had finally admitted its error. It was ready to acknowledge that it had lost the argument.

My body was and is changing; as much as it had been my decision and my desire to begin taking hormones, I am decidedly no longer in control. It’s like giving up the steering wheel of your car to a relative stranger, someone you think you know, but, in reality, don’t. Not entirely.

The hormones are now driving my body. I have a map of where we’re going, but the hormones don’t always follow it exactly. In the end, I’m just along for the ride. I took a similar ride before as a teenager. We all have. Except, for me, it was a different set of hormones behind the wheel that time and even before we arrived at our destination I could tell I didn’t like where we were going.

Unfortunately, we were going too fast and I couldn’t get out of the car.

This time around I do like the looks of where we’re going. I like the scenery and I’m looking forward to the destination. I’ve seen the brochures!

And, more importantly, when I catch sight of myself in the side-view mirror as I look at the long road behind me, the long way I’ve come to be where I am, going where I am today, I like the looks of who I see looking back at me.

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2012-02-01T15:22:00.001-05:00

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2012-01-28T21:32:00.002-05:00

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2012-01-26T22:56:00.002-05:00

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2012-01-25T18:13:00.000-05:00

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2012-01-25T17:59:00.003-05:00

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2012-01-19T10:04:00.002-05:00

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2012-01-18T17:17:00.001-05:00

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2012-01-12T21:14:00.002-05:00

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2012-01-11T17:35:00.002-05:00

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2012-01-11T17:27:00.002-05:00

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2012-01-11T17:19:00.000-05:00

King Smut, or Porn in the Land of the Pyramids

2012-01-06T19:19:00.008-05:00

You’ve got to look closely to believe your eyes, but, yes, you gradually come to realize that you are really seeing what you’re think you’re seeing. And to think you might have walked by it without a second glance, figuring "yeah-yeah it's just another broken shard of something or other."

But smack dab in the middle of the venerable collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts at the Brooklyn Museum is a pornographic statuette depicting a splay-legged figure enjoying an anal joyride atop several monstrously endowed priapic figures. The ancient Egyptian equivalent to Hustler Magazine is one way to look at it. You don’t need a museum curator to tell you how they must have looked at it.

You can experience all the hand-carved sarcophagi, hieroglyphic dense papyri, tarnished jewelry, stained mummy wrappings, and noble-looking statue heads with smashed noses you like, but for my money, nothing humanizes these long vanished people than this obscene little vignette in stone. They may be dry as the dust of the Sahara now—they may be the dust of the Sahara now—but these were once a people who had some juice in them.

Of course, we know they had sex. We can imagine that they must have enjoyed their hanky-panky like every other people before and since. But to see physical evidence of it in a piece of pornographic sculpture is a confirmation of the theoretical obvious that in it’s undeniable specificity borders on revelation. Because this is not erotic art. This piece is not “tastefully done.” Nor does it point to any loftier spiritual aspiration; this is not about love, human or divine. This is pure raunch, plain and simple, down and dirty. This is bathroom-wall sort of stuff; the only thing that elevates its comic exaggeration is that it doesn’t actually appear on a bathroom wall. The over-the-top sexuality depicted here has it’s parallel in our contemporary porn theater, where all the guys are hung like mastadons and the women have hooters the size of beach balls.

As a pornographer myself, I’m heartened to see that the work of another smut purveyor, either by accident or design, has been preserved across the millennia and found a place of honor here in one of the world’s more widely-respected collections of Egyptian culture. It’s not just that anything put on a plinth is art. Pornography is culture no less relevant and indicative of a people than it’s phallic monuments. I’d even venture to say that it is more relevant and indicative of a people than their broken bits of crockery, their accountants’ lists of grain supplies, their grotty old sandals. It’s a record of the inescapable, flesh-and-blood humanity of a people behind the closed doors of their pyramids and sarcophagi. In its pornography is the beating heart of a culture…and it's beating-off hand.

It’s touching to see what turned people on five or six thousand years ago. What got them hard, what got them off, what led them to the climax of the most exquisitely pleasurable experience we can have in this body/mind incarnation. For all it’s awesomeness, it is likely no one, not even the pharaoh who built it, got sexually turned on to the point of orgasm by the sight of a pyramid. Which is why I quite seriously place, on a scale of relative values, a piece of orgasm-inducing pornography at equal value to any work by any literary Nobel-prize winner you’d care to name.

I can recall a half-dozen awkwardly-written internet porn stories that sent me to toe-curling ecstasy again and again but not one Camus novel that came close.

I’ll bet you can, too.

=orchid gristle 98=

2012-01-04T21:36:00.002-05:00

Old Acquaintances That Should Be Forgot

2012-01-02T20:01:00.005-05:00

Like a capacity to endure the cold or the programming on the O! network, each of us have a different constitutional tolerance for heartbreak. Like other forms of torture, you hold out as best you can, but in the end everyone cracks. What’s essential is that you know that moment before it arrives and shatters you forever.

There are certain relationships that are simply hopeless despite your best efforts. In worst case scenarios, they are hopeless because of your best efforts. Jung, usually so dependable, can be positively fatal here when he says, “When you’ve tried everything, the only thing that remains is what you could still do if only you knew it.” In certain situations, with certain people, this sort of thinking can have you trapped in misery for a lifetime.

We don’t often acknowledge it, but there are relationships that are meant not to work. Or, put differently, they work because they serve the dysfunction of one or both parties. Talking it over doesn’t help. No matter how hard you try misunderstanding persists. You're baffled. If you’re lucky, it dawns on you at last. The other party isn’t interested in hearing your explanations. They don’t want to understand. The whole point of the relationship as far they are concerned is that it doesn’t work. That’s the only reason for it to exist at all.

Victims are everywhere. And they often attract those more than happy to abuse them. But there are also victims in search of a victimizer and in the absence of a genuine bad guy they can be all-too-resourceful in making do with whoever’s at hand; unfortunately, the best candidate at hand may be you!

Every life, like every story, needs a villain. Everyone needs someone or something to overcome and the more unaware and self-dramatizing one is the more the tendency prevails to look outside oneself for this villain, to blame someone else for your own unhappiness.

I remember a couple who once lived downstairs from me. The woman would regularly and mercilessly badger her boyfriend. However the argument began, she would invariably end up haranguing him about how worthless he was, tearing him down in every conceivable way until he was literally pleading for her to stop. When she wouldn’t stop, he’d try to leave, but she wouldn’t let him do that either. He’d beg her to no avail to step away from the door. He’d retreat to another room; she’d follow, continuing her litany of his worthlessness. Any moment I was expecting to hear it: the crash, the gunshot, the smack across the face. It never came, but if it did, and if the police had questioned me, I’d have to say that she was asking for it.

It’s not politically correct to say such a thing, but there are people who truly want to be mistreated. It’s part of their identity, their myth of self. “I am the one who is always abused by others.”

I’m sure that the long history of my previously horrible relationships indicates that I, too, once sought out precisely the sorts of partners to play the abuser in my own self-pitying drama.

I recognize the tendency.

Now, I no longer look for an abuser. But I also refuse to play the villain in anyone else’s drama. It’s an unsatisfying role. And when I see that I’m being enlisted to play it, typecast against my actual type, I’ve learned that after an honest and exhaustive effort to make myself understood the only constructive act left me is to walk off the set.

It’s a painful thing to have to do, but less painful than remaining and absorbing the low blows to body and heart. Sure enough, they’ll blame you for abandoning them even if they drove you away. You have to resign yourself to the fact that whether you stay or whether you go, you’ll end up being the bad-guy anyway. It’s better, less painful, anyway, to fill that role in abstentia. At the very least you aren’t actively participating in continuing a dysfunctional relationship. You have to comfort yourself with the realization that it wasn't ever really about you anyway.

What you come to understand is that for some people victimization is a self-fulfilling prophecy; it’ll come true whether you’re there or not.

You can’t save everyone. Two people drowning are not better than one. If someone is hell-bent on going under the dark waves of self-pity and anger, resentment and revenge sometimes the best thing you can do is let them go and save yourself. Watching you swim away may be just the example they need to grow up and save themselves--the last good way left to show them you love them.

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2012-01-01T21:45:00.002-05:00

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2011-12-31T22:14:00.000-05:00

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2011-12-30T22:52:00.002-05:00

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2011-12-30T22:34:00.000-05:00

William Gass: Still Alive!

2011-12-30T21:44:00.004-05:00

Well, as of today, he is, anyway. And I check every day, not just to see if one of America’s greatest living authors, now age 87, is still on the pencil-wielding side of the sod, but to make sure no other cultural luminaries have blinked out unnoticed in the night. Because one thing is certain, you won’t hear about the death of a William Gass or a Don Delillo in the pages of USA Today or see it among the headlines on AOL.

If Lindsey Lohan burps in public anywhere in the world, or Jennifer Aniston lets a rumor (false, of course) purposely leak that someone has proposed to her just so she can stay relevant, I’ll know about it. I can’t avoid it. But when an important American abstract expressionist painter like Helen Frankenthaler dies, as she did on December 27^th, at the age of 83, you won’t hear a peep about it on the CBS nightly news.

The truly absurd thing is that if James Patterson kicks the bucket or even John Grisham, two scribblers of mindless entertainment who no serious writer or honest editor would ever confuse for practitioners of the literary arts were to kick off, you’d surely be informed. But William Gass, winner of three National Book Circle Critics Awards, a Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, and an American Book Award, author of such notable novels as “Omensetter’s Luck” and “The Tunnel,” both widely regarded among the best fiction written by an American author in the late 20^th century—forget it. You’d be lucky to find one out of fifty average Americans who even knew the guy was ever alive.

This is the problem with American “culture.” Not that there isn’t any, but that no one knows about it. Sure, it might be argued that the average American doesn’t give a damn about William Gass, but I wonder. Do they really care about Lady Gaga or Pippa Middleton or Kardashian (take your pick) or is that all that is offered up to them by the media to care about? Do they really want a steady diet of People Magazine and Danielle Steele or is it that there is nothing else for them to read.

Does mass media reflect the appetite of the masses or force-feed them the cheapest possible fare? Would people enjoy good stuff, even if it were stuff they had to develop a taste for, if they were at least exposed to it? Is this really a nation that reaches for its collective Browning when it hears the word “culture”? A line, by the way, often mistakenly attributed to the Nazi Herman Goring, but actually composed by the playwright Hanns Johst for one of the characters in his play “Schlageter.”

I used to think that the mass of Americans were really pretty stupid and deserved the cultural equivalent of junk food that was poured into the sugar bowl of their craniums every day, but I’m no longer as sure of that as I used to be. Theoretically, at least, people in this country can’t be any more stupid than they are in France, for instance, where they actually have intellectual “superstars,” and a popular culture that actually cares about, or, at worst, is passing aware of “Culture.”

In any event, William Gass, as of today, is still alive and we’re all the better off for it, whether you know it or not. For when the rest of us are dead, buried, and fertilizer, Gass’s work will be considered by future generations to be one of the flowers of the times we’re living in. Making it that much sadder that so relatively few alive in his lifetime have appreciated his books.

Airport Insecurity: A Survivor's Guide, or How to Please a TSA Agent Every Time

2011-12-29T20:48:00.007-05:00

Although it’s the bane of many travelers at U.S. airports nowadays, I never have any trouble dealing with the invasive and humiliating fascistic procedures of today’s airport security. My secret? I simply apply the lessons that I learned in order to survive the darkest of my most harrowing formative years. The skill-set one acquires as the survivor of an abusive childhood uniquely prepares one to breezily navigate many of the trickiest situations that so many folks find particularly troublesome in today’s world.

For those who grew up without the privilege of such an education let me elucidate a few key principles that should see you through your next encounter with airport security, no matter how egregious, without losing your cool and being led away in handcuffs to Guantanamo Bay.

Stop Taking Your Person So Personally! Put out of your mind the silly unsubstantiated notion that you have any claim of ownership to your body. People in positions of authority have the authority to touch you anywhere at anytime without your permission or consent. What gave you the idea that an orifice is your private property, anyway, even if it is located on your body? Your body? Says who? Do you have a deed to it? A bill of sale?Produce it, please. Was it a gift, then? Who gave it to you? Your parents? Imagine that man touching you down there is daddy. He brought you into this world, didn’t he? He can bloody well touch you where he pleases. Case closed! Go limp. Vacate your body. You don’t want to be here when this happens anyhow. You can’t be hurt or humiliated if you’re not even here, can you? You can always come back when it’s all over.

Don’t Be Negative. Erase, at least for the time being, the word “no” from your vocabulary. It won’t mean anything to anyone in charge anyway, so there’s no use making such a small troublesome noise. It will only cause offense; it will only attract unwanted attention to yourself; it will only get you a smack in the mouth; after all, that’s all it ever got you in the past, isn’t it? Show me your license, your photo ID, your ticket, your passport, your right to exist. Stand here, stand there. Spread your legs, hold out your arms, open your bag, pull down your zipper. Lift your blouse. Drop your panties. These are not yes and no questions. These aren’t questions at all. No one’s expecting an answer. No need to even say "yes"; it implies a "no." Just do as your told. A TSA agent doesn’t want to hear your objection any more than Dad did and he or she won’t take to it any more kindly or philosophically. No? Don’t even silently scream the word in your mind. He’ll see the defiance in your eyes. Better to be safe than sorry. And if you’re not safe, you’ll be sorry.

Look Beyond the Gate. Just as I once looked beyond my miserable childhood to the fantasy of an adulthood where I would no longer be subjected to the terrors of my father’s capricious violence, his inexplicable obsessions, his irrational regulation, I look beyond the pat-down and the full-body x-ray scan to the goal: Florida, Seattle, Germany—it doesn’t matter—anywhere but here. Give this all-powerful person what they want and there’s a good chance that they’ll let you go. The key is to do nothing to arouse their unreasoning antipathy. Remember, ultimately, there is only thing you really want, only one thing is important: to get the hell away.

With these three simple principles in mind, you should be off the ground in no time. Have a great flight!

Four Days from Florida to Birmingham...

2011-12-29T07:24:00.003-05:00

Alabama at 75mph (the only way to see it!)

2011-12-28T17:32:00.008-05:00

For me, being in Alabama was a lot like standing in front of Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” and I don’t mean only the surreality of it. Alabama, like Dali’s painting, is something I’ve heard about, read about, seen in photographs so often that it exists in my head so exclusively that it seems unreal to see it anywhere else, such as outside my head.

If you haven’t been, let me save you the trouble of going there yourself with a quick review of what there is to see there.

Alabamians. Lots of them. So apparently this place is real for someone, a considerable number of someones and they find it just as real as I find New York or Connecticut. Unbelievable.

Strip malls—or, more accurately, what seems to be one enormous strip mall that girds the entire state like a fat, glittering anaconda of waffle houses, fried chicken emporiums, sporting goods stores, and chain retailers grimly determined to strangle every red cent out of the under-employed population.

Cities and towns with unlikely monikers like Tuscaloosa, Helena, Alabaster(!), Calera, Clanton, Montevalio, Jemison, Thornsby, Wetumpka, and Coosada.

Churches, lots of them. The Metropolitan Church of God, Church of the Rock, Church of Christ Caring for His Community, The Living Word Church, True Divine Baptist Church, Mount Zion Baptist Church, etc., etc., etc. These are a righteous people, meaning they are only one quick side-shuffle from being a dangerously self-righteous people.

Buffets: These folks like to eat out of stainless steel bins and they take it as religion that God helps those who help themselves. They expect to go back for seconds and thirds. They seem to judge a good meal by how high a pile they can make of it. They don’t mind their peach cobbler setting atop their pearled onions or their biscuit gravy inundating the whole mess. Miscegenation, when it comes to food, is no problem. It’s all going to the same place anyway: their bellies, ass, and thighs. God invented the bib overall, after all, for His Chosen People.

On the radio: College sports and fevered sales pitches for Jay-Zuss, who can do anything except, apparently, mint cash. He needs you for that.

On television: the same.

You hear: Sweet-sounding, soft-spoken drawls that almost invariably express the most startlingly intolerant conservative views.

You experience: Courtesy like you wouldn’t believe—and sho-nuf you don’t believe it, not for one cotton-pickin’ moment.

Signs announcing: George Wallace Parkway; Martin Luther King Expressway; Confederate Memorial Park; Go to Church—or the Devil Will Get You; Daily Bible Message Call: 299-(we were going too fast for me to see the rest).

Roadside attractions: Mack’s Nut Shop, Piggly-Wiggly (and their inevitable competition Hoggly-Woggly), TNT fireworks, The Gun Outpost, and any number of trailer parks and mobile homes that look like they must have been dropped out of the sky into the middle of the nowhere where they stand. Barely upright shacks just waiting for the right puff of wind to reduce them to matchsticks, where you wouldn’t be surprised to see Jed Clampett (pre-bubbling crude days) staggering out the front door with a bottle of shine under one arm, a rifle under the other, and a dazed glassy look in his eyes as he zips up his stained trousers—dilapidated shambles that would be condemned even for raccoon habitation in any U.S. state north of West Virginia.

Also: Majestic mansions on huge sprawling tracts of manicured horse pastures that recall to mind the good ole halcyon days of the plantation, the black mammy, the whipping post.

A water tower crowned with a representation of a giant peach; a cow made of hammered scrap metal (pictured above), a giant rooster made of old car parts, and other great works of art by anonymous hillbilly Michelangelos. (Actually, I really do adore this sort of stuff).

God, no doubt, made Alabama, but it must have been for one of those mysterious reasons only He can fathom, the way He's ultimately responsible for cancer and tornadoes and napalm, because I cant figure out why…unless it was to make people like me thankful that I live somewhere—anywhere-- else.

A Motorcycle is Not a Motorcycle is Not a Motorcycle

2011-12-27T19:54:00.006-05:00

That is one of the first thing that impresses itself upon you when you walk into the Barber Motorsports Museum in Birmingham, Alabama where you are overwhelmed by five floors of motorcycles in every flavor and color imaginable to man. There are some 600 motorbikes on display at any given time out of a collection of 1200, as well as a large number of vintage racing cars and other motor-related curiosities. They are parked everywhere you look on display platforms, shelved against the walls, hanging from the ceiling, even tiered on metal “trees” and no two are exactly alike.

What I know about motorcycles couldn’t fill a crankcase—even if a crankcase were the size of a thimble, provided a motorcycle even has a crankcase—but I think it is impossible to appreciate any kind of art and not appreciate the craftsmanship and aesthetics of this spectacular collection of machines. The profusion of colors, designs, and sheer ingenuity of concept and execution are clearly the stuff of art with a capital “A.”

Consider, for instance, how many statues of horses are recorded in art history. Or paintings of the Madonna and child. Even though the subject is the same, the treatment and interpretation is infinitely different from artist to artist and so it is with the motorcycles on display at the Barber. They are all variations on a single theme, but it is in those variations that each style of bike becomes a unique object of beauty.

We don’t often think of the functional as “Art” even though so much of what is displayed in any museum of ancient Egyptian or Chinese art had a practical function. Think of all those pot shards and sarcophagi, tapestries and water dippers mounted with such sanctity behind protective glass that we’ve come to revere. A carved chunk of some ancient Babylonian chariot is no more a piece of “Art” than a 1912 Indian Board or a 1952 Harley Davidson K Sport. Really, it’s not. Just give it time—maybe about two thousand years or so and see if I’m wrong.

Each motorcycle at the Barber has a history, continues a dialogue with the machines that came before it, and poses new questions and challenges that will be answered, provisionally, by the machines that come after it…just as the objects do of any other artistic discipline.

And just as any great art does, these motorcycles produce an awe and excitement proportionate to the level of knowledge one possesses about them. You can see it in the eyes, in the hushed tones, in the entire demeanor of the true cognescenti. I was fortunate enough to be touring the Barber with such connoisseur.

He was able to tell me what I was looking at and why I should appreciate it beyond the childlike sensual pleasure I gleaned from the razzle-dazzle of color and sparkling chrome. But, like an unschooled savage being led through the Louvre, most of what he said sailed clear over my head and I was left, perhaps in some ways even for the better, simply overwhelmed by the beauty of it all.

2011-12-25T00:22:00.001-05:00

2011-12-20T10:13:00.000-05:00

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2011-12-19T15:02:00.001-05:00

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2011-12-17T00:19:00.001-05:00

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2011-12-16T20:34:00.001-05:00

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2011-12-14T17:54:00.001-05:00

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2011-12-13T07:50:00.002-05:00

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2011-12-13T07:42:00.001-05:00

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2011-12-13T07:35:00.001-05:00

Pie!!!

2011-12-09T23:52:00.003-05:00

Here is the apple-blueberry pie i made tonite for dessert...well, it actually turned out to be an almost-midnite-snack by the time it was ready to eat. Its a variation of an Emeril recipe...daddy declared it extra-delicious as we each munched away on a big warm piece while watching TV. Are there better ways to tell your boyfriend "I'm just the perfect little feminized sissywife, daddy!" than baking a yummy pie from scratch? Sure. But not many!

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2011-12-08T23:43:00.000-05:00

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2011-12-07T23:59:00.002-05:00

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2011-12-06T23:17:00.002-05:00

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2011-12-06T12:55:00.001-05:00

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2011-12-05T17:28:00.002-05:00

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2011-12-02T23:41:00.002-05:00

=incidental comix 1=

2011-12-02T09:26:00.000-05:00

jot & tittle

2011-12-01T23:58:00.004-05:00

I found this one roughly sketched out on a piece of scrap paper being used as a bookmark in a copy of Pragmatism by Wm James that I'd been reading in what must have been some godforsaken period of my life. I have no memory of having drawn it and the very alienness of it to anything I can imagine having done or wanting to do made it seem worth re-drawing and preserving. What my point could have been in having concocted this thing, or what my state of mind was at the time is a mystery to me.

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2011-12-01T12:51:00.000-05:00

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2011-11-29T17:42:00.000-05:00

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2011-11-23T10:34:00.002-05:00

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2011-11-21T10:21:00.003-05:00

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2011-11-20T09:39:00.002-05:00

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2011-11-19T18:28:00.004-05:00

2011-11-18T19:10:00.001-05:00

Hi...back to posting!

2011-11-18T18:53:00.002-05:00

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2011-11-18T10:17:00.002-05:00

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2011-11-18T09:53:00.002-05:00

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2011-11-18T09:50:00.002-05:00

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2011-11-18T09:43:00.001-05:00

=On location in Seattle!=

2011-10-22T10:52:00.002-04:00

--for the next month, until mid-November, i'll be in Seattle with my boyfriend, guzzling coffee & scouting out places for a possible future location of our persons. I wont have access to a scanner so i'll have to keep my newest *orchid gristle* comics to myself until our return...but in the meantime, i'll add what records of images & thoughts that i can.

for instance, this is one of the birds that they have flying around out here. we havent actually seen one yet, but you never know when one might come flying out of the bushes!

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2011-10-18T10:53:00.001-04:00

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2011-10-16T18:00:00.002-04:00

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2011-10-12T19:43:00.002-04:00

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2011-10-11T21:27:00.002-04:00

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2011-10-10T15:34:00.002-04:00

2011-10-08T20:18:00.001-04:00

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2011-10-08T20:17:00.002-04:00

=I'm Street Legal!!!=

2011-10-03T20:58:00.012-04:00

Its official! I went to Court today & had my name legally changed. The actual procedure took about ten minutes, if that. The judge asked me some questions, declared herself satisfied that I wasnt a fugitive from the law or trying to defraud anyone, and let me be, at long last, officially and legally, Meeah. A few minutes earlier she had asked me, through my attorney, if I wanted the court cleared before we began. Because my lawyer, as part of my petition, was going to have to state aloud for the record that I was requesting a name change as part of a gender reassignment and since I was now living full-time as a woman, she wanted to spare me any embarrassment and preserve my privacy.

"No, it's okay," I told my lawyer, "there's no need to clear the courtroom. I'm okay with it."

I was touched by the judge's consideration and appreciated her offer. But I felt no embarrassment, no need for any unusual measures; if anything, I felt a strange, unaccustomed pride. I had come so far to get here. The entire courtroom, in one voice, could have stood as one and howled their derision: it wouldn't have mattered. I was on a cloud so far above and beyond anyone's potential disapproval I felt as pure and untouchable as an angel. I was being born again and it felt magnificent!

Of course, as might have been predicted, there was no reaction in the courtroom; after all, everyone there had more important and pressing issues on their mind...namely, their own. In the end, if you can depend on nothing else to ensure your privacy and personal freedom, you can always depend on two things--bureaucratic incompetence and the general self-centeredness of strangers.

I turned and looked back at the only other person in the room that mattered: my amazing boyfriend, who's been with me every single baby-step along the path. I felt like applauding him. How in the world had I gotten so lucky to have found someone who had so much faith in me, so much love for me, who always saw me as Meeah even before I could fully be Meeah?

And now here I was becoming what I was always meant to be.

It was all over before I knew it. With stamped papers in hand, I headed to the DMV to have my license changed. In New Jersey, you only need to fill out a form stating your intention to live and present yourself as a different gender. This form then has to be signed by a certified counselor, psychiatrist, or physican. I had mine signed by the MD who administers my hormones.

Everyone at the DMV was astonishingly discrete, no matter what they might have privately thought. I was ushered to the final window with an efficiency one doesn't usually expect in a bureaucratic institution. In short order, I had a new picture taken, (see above), and was given a new license, complete with my "new" name, and the designation F.

I also came away with an unexpected compliment. The first time through the inputting the information the clerk, who was new, and only in her second day on the job, asked me to look over the mock-up of my new license. My eyes went first--and only-- to whether she had corrected the M to F. She hadn't. She apologized profusely and set about fixing her mistake, for which she needed the assistance of her more experienced co-worker. After explaining that she needed to fix the M to an F, her co-worker looked at me and asked, "Did you realize that it had been wrong on your old license all along?" It took me a moment to understand what he meant.

I smiled. "Yes," I said quietly, "I did realize they'd gotten it wrong."

A few moments later, they handed me my new license. Note the picture. It's pretty awful, as almost all driver's license photographs are supposed to be. But I'm grinning from ear to ear. I don't think I've ever smiled like that for any photograph. Ever. Why, in spite of everything, I look almost beautiful.

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2011-10-01T15:56:00.002-04:00

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2011-09-30T10:14:00.002-04:00

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2011-09-28T21:59:00.000-04:00

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2011-09-27T15:58:00.001-04:00

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2011-09-25T13:28:00.001-04:00

=Daddy's New Tattoo!=

2011-09-25T11:10:00.003-04:00

--here it is! My boyfriend had one of my cartoons inked into his living arm! To think that someone would choose to have my art permanently on his flesh...its a real honor...better than having something hanging in the Louvre!

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2011-09-24T15:39:00.000-04:00

2011-09-23T12:02:00.005-04:00

9 Cups….self-sufficient, having what I need safeguarded in a place where none can take it away, this is my security, the reason for my happiness and content regardless of circumstance.

The Queen of Pentacles is in the background, my connection with my body, my inner nature, the earth itself…I belong here; for the very first time in my life, I feel this.

My past apprenticeship has been long and arduous…did I get anything out of it? I labored for others and the approval of others (Three of Pentacles) according to the plans of others.

I am free now, impatient to begin, full of energy and spirit. (Knight of Wands).

I have the Strength necessary to confront my fears, the past, the obstacles that might still arise, no matter how formidable they might seem. This Strength is not a byproduct of anger or resentment, it has nothing to do with force, but with kindness and understanding, not only of others, but first and foremost, of my inner self. I have quelled my inner doubts, tamed my demons, overcome my ego…but it’s an ongoing process that requires continuous attention and concentration for the beast can still bite.

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2011-09-22T19:15:00.002-04:00

2011-09-21T19:35:00.000-04:00

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2011-09-21T19:34:00.000-04:00

2011-09-21T19:32:00.001-04:00

My boyfriend had me re-design a couple of panels from my Pig & Robot cartoon series (his favorite) for a new tattoo he's planning to get. Seeing my work on his skin...that'll be cool!

2011-09-18T08:37:00.004-04:00

I have the secret scroll, my orchid gristle, the hidden word, the abracadabra...self-possessed i have everything i need and will ever need. Over the last several years i have been following my star, my true course, at last, the path is clearly illuminated because it is the right path, the fated path.

Ahead of me is a crossroads, but there is no doubt about which direction i will go. i pause as it is natural to pause at a crossroads, if only to take stock, to reflect on what has happened in the past, to gaze down the wrong roads on which i traveled lost for so long. But the pause is momentary, at any moment, i'll spur my horse to go forward.

Behind me, i have a multitude of support: lucky coincidences, unexpected friends & guardians, resources that come to hand just when i need them...this, too, is what it means to be going in the right direction. The entire universe conspires to help you forward.

Enough waiting: Go! The Great Marriage awaits! The celebration, the goal, the reward for all my struggles, my true home...

2011-09-17T19:17:00.000-04:00

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2011-09-16T10:19:00.001-04:00

2011-09-16T10:17:00.000-04:00

the Freakbox: comix, art, transgenderism, & silent revolt

***Ye Daily Scowl***

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***Ye Daily Scowl***

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***Ye Daily Scowl***

JONATHAN FRANZEN, from THE CORRECTIONS:

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***Ye Daily Scowl***

***Ye Daily Scowl***

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+random picture of the day+

GROWIN' BOOBIES!

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King Smut, or Porn in the Land of the Pyramids

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Old Acquaintances That Should Be Forgot

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William Gass: Still Alive!

Airport Insecurity: A Survivor's Guide, or How to Please a TSA Agent Every Time

Four Days from Florida to Birmingham...

Alabama at 75mph (the only way to see it!)

A Motorcycle is Not a Motorcycle is Not a Motorcycle

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Pie!!!

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=incidental comix 1=

jot & tittle

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Hi...back to posting!

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=On location in Seattle!=

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=I'm Street Legal!!!=

Ye Daily Scowl

Ye Daily Scowl

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