Potential PoliSci paper?

dmfoley@gmail.com — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:53:21 GMT

Westward, Ho? The Causes and Effects of a Geographical Shift in the Politico-Demographic Center of the United States

House Majority Leader - Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco
Senate Majority Leader - Harry Reid, D-Nevada
President - Barack Obama, Hawai'i-by-way-of-Chicago

Hopefully more to come.

With apologies to PJO'R

dmfoley@gmail.com — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:11:07 GMT

My girlfriend, Juanita, and I lived in the carriage house for most of the winter. It was a handsome little brick building with a tile roof. Inside, there was one large room, with the supposedly haunted oil burner in a corner and wide-arched casement windows on either side. At the back was a small kitchen, with another arch of windows, that looked out on a field and the woods beyond. The bathroom was small and almost all shower, like the head on a sailboat. But the hot-water heater was much bigger than necessary, and we could stand in that shower for ninety minutes if we liked. In the living room there was a ladder that went up to a loft with a window in each gable. The place was clean and had been painted. We found a few pieces of used furniture for it -- a table, a couple of chairs, and a mattress.

Juanita quit school that fall and worked as a model for life-drawing classes, so we had a little money. She was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen -- small, tawny-skinned, with sleek dark hair and wide brown eyes. She had long legs and a very small waist that gave her hips, though slight, a perfect roundness. Her breasts were large, placed high on her chest, with hard dark nipples. She cooked and kept house and treated me better than anyone ever has. We slept in a hug, arms and legs tangled together. I've never been able to sleep that way with anyone else. It's claustrophobic now, or an arm goes to sleep. We made love two or three times a day. Part of that was youth. But part of it was an attraction that cannot be explained at any age. I wanted to touch every part of her with my fingers, my cock, and my tongue. She rubbed me thick with soap lather once so I could try to push myself up between her buttocks, not knowing how much the soap would sting. But she just laughed when it hurt her. We stayed in the shower as much as we could, and in the bed when we weren't in the shower, and half naked all the time, even outside in the field. It was a very mild winter, freakishly warm for weeks at a time. Most mornings, when I got up to go to classes, there was an odor of timothy and alfalfa decaying in the fields, where it had been mown too late and damp for baling. It's a rare odor in the East, where I live now, that smell of rotting hay, and I'm glad it is, because I cannot smell it without overwhelming nostalgia, without crying, years later.

The carriage house was a perfect home to Juanita and me. We talked about how it could be fixed up and told each other we never wanted to leave. That there was something spooky about the place only made it more intimate. And we heard no moans or chains or Gregorian chants. But after sundown it always did seem to be darker outside our door than anywhere nearby. And sometimes the rungs on the ladder to the loft would creak, one after another, as though something were going upstairs. And there was, on still nights, a persistent thumping at one corner of the roof, where there were no pipes or tree branches or even squirrels that I could discover. So maybe Ballow was right about the ghosts.

Unfortunately, Ballow was wrong about me. I was irresponsible. You fall in love with perhaps half a dozen people in your life, and a like number of people fall in love with you. But the affections are rarely mutual and almost never contemporary. It is the most irresponsible thing that can be done to let such a coincidence pass and not act upon it. Of course, I didn't know that. I thought that the world was infinitely supplied with romances and that I would be the willing recipient of each in its turn. I was very young. But ignorance of natural law is a weaker excuse even than ignorance of the criminal code.

I was in love with Juanita, but any man would have been. In fact, quite a few were. The remarkable thing was that she loved me. She asked me questions about myself (one sure way to tell). "Where were you on this day exactly ten years ago?" "What were you like when you were twelve?" She read my poetry. She even said she liked it. And she was the only person who has ever thought I was beautiful. I was sleeping one afternoon, naked on top of the bed, and woke to find her drawing me. On her sketch pad I was an Adonis, which I was not. She loved me. She wanted us to live together until we died. She wanted to have a baby. I gave her a puppy instead. She wanted to get married. But I was a poor kid and I could see the future. Me with a teacher's salary and her at home with the kids -- a sea of small debts, rented homes, and used cars stretched out before us, a life like my parents' or her. I'd get bald. She'd get fat. The kids would get in trouble. I was too cowardly to go through with it. And I was not yet nineteen. I'd never made love to anyone but Juanita. I wanted to fuck all the women in the world. So I did not do the decent thing and make her breasts and belly swell and buy a pair of matching goldlike rings. I didn't even treat her very well. I took her kindness for granted and yelled when there were no clean shirts. It's difficult to find someone who loves you, even more difficult not to abuse her for doing so.

So Juanita and I lived in the carriage house. And I was very happy, whether I knew it or not. The house creaked and pounded and made footfall noises, but the ghosts never harmed us, until March. We were asleep on our mattress in the loft when, about three in the morning, I awoke with a fit of coughing that turned into a retching gag. I got up from the bed and tripped over the unconscious puppy. The air in the room was thick and sickening with fumes from the oil burner. I shook the dog, but it wouldn't wake. Then I shook Juanita, but she was unconscious too. I got her under one arm and the puppy under the other and went down the ladder. I don't know how. I'm not a strong person, and Juanita, although small, certainly weighed a hundred pounds. With her in one hand and the dog in the other, that left no hand at all for the ladder rungs. But I did do it. Crying and choking, I got them out the door and slapped Juanita until she came to. We went naked through the streets to a friend's house. There were little blue crescents at the base of Juanita's nails. She was sick for several days, and the puppy nearly died. It was an unnerving experience. The more so since the oil burner hadn't been lit for three weeks.

I suppose we didn't entirely escape the curse. What happened between Juanita and me the next year was unpleasant, maybe tragic. Forrester didn't escape it either. He joined the military and was killed overseas. And Ballow's estimate of his own depravity was overblown, it seems, for he drank himself to death that summer.

Roommate conversation.

dmfoley@gmail.com — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 20:10:34 GMT

Since my first entry (and some of the backdated ones) have been a little long, I thought I'd even things out with a short interaction that just happened between me and one of my two flatmates.

Me: (Getting out of the shower and hearing the door shut) Abe, is that you?
Abe: Yeah.
Me: Hey, honey. ...Oh, nevermind -- we're not married.
Abe: Yet.
Me: Oh, hey, did you hear the news? Canada just legalized same-sex marriage.
Abe: Across the entire country?
Me: Yep.
Abe: Roadtrip.

-Love and Peace

chipsmunc

Potential PoliSci paper?

With apologies to PJO'R

Roommate conversation.