=gino1 AN INNOCENT ABROAD IN PAGAN LANDS -- PART III -- GINO* CAVEAT TABBYCAT: The Caveat Tabbycat Rating applies to Sex, PeePee/PooPoo, and a Dash of Old Fashioned Heresy. My best Collected Heresies may be found in the =pur*.* Series This is merely sex. ----------------------------------------------------------------- I go to Bellinzona and buy a new shirt. It is softer and lighter than a little boy's pyjamas, and warmer than wool. There is an endangered species of llama or yak or talkative llama in the Himalayas that has such fleece for as long as it can, but this ain't that. It's one of those new synethetics that they maybe scraped off the inside of a space shuttle. Teflon, I guess, the stuff they cover Republican Presidents with. Or maybe radioactive dandelion fluff, imported from Chernobyl. It's like those new sweeteners they put in snackfoods nowadays, that make sugar seem unsatisfying -- I don't want to wear wool now that I have this. Once I started smoking a pipe almost habitually. One morning I wanted to smoke. I asked myself, will you enjoy it if you do. And I answered myself, No, but I want to. So then, with the help of heaven, I stopped. Once, back in college in Berkeley, I had some Scotch and started drinking it. I was not eating that much. One afternoon I had a choice between a glass of milk, or a drink of Scotch, and I wanted the Scotch. ---------------------------------------- I win a Rivella raffle, because I told a friend, if I don't win this time I will never enter another Rivella contest again. So the Rivella gods, who live in caves in the upper mountains, heard and rigged the draw a bit. The prize is a genuine Swiss Olympic athletic set. It is bright red and white, so I could not offer it to anyone not aesthetically colour-blind. Fortunately it was in my size, not hers. I thought I could use the pants for longjohns, but they forgot to put in a fly. So they were left with 7500 sets to give away sight unseen in a raffle. Maybe I can use the pack to shlep snowhoes up the ploughed road to the unploughed road, Cowup Weg. It seems to me that the snowshoe bindings were designed by someone who never walked on anything but a groomed trail. I mean, in a real situation, if your boot comes loose from the binding, you have a major problem. Especially if the binding fastener is so small you can't reclip it without taking off your gloves. ------------------ George Bush has been named Man of the Year (nowadays it's 'Person of the Year') in a Time Puff-piece. They should really have two, or rather three, categories: Man of the Year, Woman of the Year, and devils'_little_helper_of_the_year. ----------------------------- Ok, cut and post; things to do today. What follows is earlier notes that I'll avoid re-reading, and advise you to do similarly. ---------------------------------------------------------------- sa, Campra, 23 Dec '04 -- 11 Tevet ------------------------------------------------------------------ The Restorante is open under New Management. They seem to be willing to do anything to make money, except work. (And I once said, and the JP printed it: The Palestinians will do anything for a state of their own, except build and run it. ) There is one Plat de Jour, which is usually continued for about 3 days. If I don't like it, there's another restaurante 2 hours and 500 meters down the trail. Even if I push out the borders of Jewish dietary law with both hands and foot, I can't accommodate it. First it was horse, then it was pig, now it's back to horse again. Don't know why they can't buy a freezer and put a few chickens and a roast beef in it. I pick up a copy of the Christmas Issue of Playboy at the Co'op Superarket in Adramatt, walking carefully on the icy snow of mid- November, on the shady streets of a narrow valley, hoping to cnsole mzyself with a reminder that somewhere in the world it is warm enough for people to layabout practically naked, and with lots of bright lights and colours. At New Buffalo I bought copper for Blonde Larry to make a hood for the circle, but it sooted up with just about the first fires. Because we burned pinon, a softwood, not cedar, a hardwood, which is a beautiful reddish wood, and harder to get, and we used only for the cookstove and I think some of the ceremonial tipi fires. So I put it in my pack, and walk back to my hotel, where the owner/manager, who works in the kitchen, is an Israeli married to a Swiss woman -- this is the Stern Hotel, nice enough, considered moderately priced at SF 75 a night. It's an old wood building, or looks it. Andramatt, at the base of the mountains, looks like a USA western mining town of the past century -- the 1800's, that is, I'm by no means resigned to the existence, or usurpation, of this one, starting as it has with the Bushie's, as reactionary if not neo-facist a movement as the USA has seen -- I mean, there was the McCarthy era, which left my family scarred, and before that the Red Scares of the Hoover era, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the No_Nothing's. So as soon as I put in in my pack I fall down about two Maquomot , from a tolerable spiritual level appropriate to the cold light on the mountains, so a sort of smarmy sense of shame. I walk down the street, gazing hopefully at the mountains, and trying to regain that higher state, or at least deal properly with my sense of guilt as a learning experience, but then I decide, this is too much like work, so I take a sip of shcnapps -- Cherry kirsch, if I recall -- and cruise along faking it on the strength of that glow, until my shame, as HIK says, gets tired of trying to prod me toward nobility, and runs off wherever wherever such prissy virtues go , and then I feel myself again. "He wrestled briefly with is conscience, and won." That's from one of the books I read on the beach on Rodos, by an English authoress. Someone left it there, probably because it only looked like trash lit. It wasn't 'Behind the Scence at the _____ ' -- my memory is off duty at the moment, it's so hard to get good help -- a book about one of those funny little towns in England, a former Roman stronghold, a very good book, and the author well-reognized now, that was her first hit. Well, nothing stimulates vluability like sitting down to write about something one would rather not write about. I may eventually get to the point of all this. Well, later I peruse Playboy, lying in bed, to my soul if not to other people, trying to aussage the long nights. One needs less sleep as one grows older. And Sinatra once said, I'm in favor of anything that helps you get through the night. Well, that was before laptops were invented, upon which to reminise, and then people starting writing autobiograhies and placing them in little caves in cyberspace for posterity or the cybermice. There's a genre of modern pseudo-art whose whole point, and almost its only point, is that it deteriorates into nothingness and dust. Making an affect out of inevitability. "Or something", as AG would say, or was wont to. People grow, without asking our permission. So anyhow -- "moving right along", as slowly as possible -- well, its the really back hours of the night now, about 4 hours before daybreak, the time of deep sleep, and it feels it -- what they used to call the "graveyard shift", when the haunts and spooks and whatenot would come out of the cemetaries -- it is the hardest of the three watches to keep. Playboy was always the most chaste and respectable of the T&A mags, even a role-model. It was quite a beacon of upward mobility in the late 50s and early 60s, before sexism was invented by feminists. I mean, the reactionaries do, as always, have a point, there is always something good left behind in the good old days -- eg, our youth -- . So in the good old days Playboy displayed only T's -- I mean, whatever it is, if we can't look at it, it becomes alluring -- on the religious Moshav in Israel, I find myself gazing with prurient interest when someone's wife opens the door and has neglected to tie her head-scarf. And I've been to many nude beaches, etc. etc. But of course there one soon takes it all for granted. And of course learns to leer discreetly. A woman once asked R. Zalman, at a Retreat he was leading, in a place with a swimming pool, 'Do you mind if I swim naked', and he replied, 'Not if you don't mind if I look.' So now Playboy is displaying nearly shaved pubi, exclusively female of course, with just a little line left, rather like a Mohawk haircut. And in some photos, the shape of the thing revealed. Well, "I have been a callow lad, and now I am an unwillng greybeard, but never have I seen -- " for all of the passing young ships in the nights -- I had almost thought a women's crotch to be as neat as that of a tree, with just a small entryway, which one had often to fumble to find -- Sad, I suppose -- Well, to finish up with the smuttalk, and go back to whateer they pay me for -- working for myself, or rather at my own behest, I slack off almost as much as when I played at being a wage-slave, cheating the boss as much as possible of course -- I mean, one must maintain one's self-respect -- So anyhow, I pick up an Italian adult comic book, to motivate myself to learn the language of course. It is wrapped in cellophane, of course, less to deflect smudgy fingerpints than to discourage what used to be called the One-Armed Browser. A notice on the cover says: "Tutti i dirtti sono riservati esclusavamente in tutto il mondo all (c) Squalo Comics S.r.l. Milano -- Italia" That is, in English: "All the dirty is reserved exclusived in all the world to SQUALO COMICS , Milano. "Squalo" -- a fine name that. Squalid and squallor and Squaw -- 'Squaw' being, we have lately learned, a rather basic and most ungracious American Indian term for a woman. Well, many of the scences in this comic are set in prison -- and for that matter the Christimas Playboy has available ladies pretending to be arresting officers, and jailers -- which leads one to suppose that these mags are sold largely to the ever- increasing population of prisoners, for obvious purposes, castration being as yet forbidden Heterosexual deprivation is, as Henry Miller noted in one of his books, one of the unacknowleged barbarities of western penology. Ah, Western Civilization, Great Books and all that. R. Shlomo notes that Jewish tradition does not countenance imprisonment. So anyhow, "I have been a youth" -- and there I was, or am, in Harvard Square, right across from Harvard yard, in this magazine shop that had everything -- I mean, Foreign Affairs, and Fantasy Affairs, and The New Republic -- I mean, how risque could you get -- this was at the start of the Beatnik coomet -- I think they even sold Evergreen Review there too -- the storefront was the finest art deco window that maybe ever was designed -- it was eventually recognized as such and preserved -- So there I was, about 12 years old, or maybe 11, glancing at what would now be deemed extraordinary chaste T&A Mags -- I mean, this was before the sensation or frisson of the topless bathing suit, and now that is usual on all European beaches, tho Greece does make a good living, contrary to Israel, in using that to attract European tourists -- So anyhow, a rather large man is standing beside me -- I mean, we were all rather lined up at the magazine rack, politely ignoring each other -- and says, in so deep a voice it is, as intended, almost inaudible -- "Come with me, I'll make it worth your while." I had no idea what that mean, and ignored him, but it does stick in my mind. Well, there should be no tolerance for anyone who would debauch an adolescent boy. It could rather rather spoil his soul or spirit or whatever. An innocent wholesome sexuality is something very valuable, to be safeguarded if possible. That is one of the strenghts of Israeli society, especially the so-called and self- defined 'religious' segment. I am speaking now of the more or less 'modern orthodox'. The ultra-orthodox even more so -- I walk along the streets of Mea Shearim, pasing schoolgirls, and am astounded that there is absolutely no sexual manetism, or tension, or whatever -- as there usually is when one passes women anywhere else -- Homos, per se -- by which I mean male homosexuals; I see no grounds except a formal analogy for conflating female homosexuality to male homosexuality. As I often say: *** Sleeping with women is normal, everone likes to do it, from little_bitty babies, to Old King David. But sleeping with men seems a bit queer, although some women seem to find if periodically bearable. *** Well, if I don't someday get that line in print, it won't have been lack of flogging it. "He that hath a wit tiny wit / with a heigh , ho, the wind and the rain / must needs get by as he find fit / though the rain it raineth every day" , as dirty Billy Shakespeare says, and then that ditty gets really dirty. So anyhow, and then I can take a coffee-break, or rather, tea with milk and honey -- such luxury -- So in this Comic Book I see that most of the depicted peni are circumcised. Which means that circumcision must now be the usual practice in most of Europe. Because this comic book is , excuse me, real lower-class. Not like Playboy, which is for would-be yuppies. Playboy you read only in your private Jacuzzi with the Home Entertainment Center turned on, and a slender full-figured young woman barely old enough to procreate by your side, and if you don't have at least 2 out of 3 of those, you had better forget Playboy and buy Penthouse. It's a point worth making, because nowadays, as was the case in the Roman-dominated Herodian times, there are some neurotic Jewish men who resent circumcission. I once mentioned that point with Ciel, when there was a glimmer that we might have made something substantive of our relationsip. I said I would have real reservations about circumcission. She said she would insist upon it, so their would be no risk of a boy transmitting a disease fostered by incomplete hygiene. Ok, coffee-break. Or more precisely, poopoo break, plus a cup of tea. They all write about sex, usually gratuitiously and in airbrushed pneumatic fantasies that add no realistic apercus to one's consciousness. But to write of relieving oneself remains rather taboo, though it is an even more essential component of life. Maybe I forgot to make two points I intended to -- I mean, I'm darned if I'll scroll up and reread this stuff, like I say, it was enough of a drag writing it -- So I want to say, homos have no rights -- that is, no writes per se, and that goes for this farce of 'gay marriage' -- and again, I am not speaking of women finding companionship with each other, that's something entirely different, and quite proper, if in some cases a bit sad. But then, holy deadlock can be much worse than sad. My mother once said, marriage is not ideal, it's just better than any of the alternatives. And more generally I want to say -- the reacactionaries do have a point, this rather foppish political correctness is becoming rather effete, like any of the upper-class monarchic courts, with all their ruffles and vices. If homos didn't have discretionary income, the Democrats too would ignore them. There is a world-wide reactionary movement, especially in all the few religions I know of; there are essential human values, and universal truths, in all intellectual and artistic fields as well as personal an interpersonal behavior. This is the cosmic truth, if you will, from which the reactionary movements draw their strength -- I mean, with the Bushie's, the USA's Christian yahoos luckily discovered the Islamic yahoos, and may , like that last scene in Dr. Strangelove whre Captain Buck or whatever his name rides his H-bomb down to Armageddon, ride this to the destruction of the nation of my people -- I mean, Bush will unflinchingly fight to the last Israeli, though peronally he'd most likely run pisspants from anything much larger than a cocker spaniel -- I mean, a complete phony -- Obviously, the Bushies are complet fakes and phonies, who have tapped into the subconscious American mythic underlay -- the true religion of America -- and, led by brilliantly perceptive Huckster Admen, have unconscionably exploited it. This may be as close as we come to subjugation by black magic. There are similarities with the Nazi movement, which explicitly created a shlock mythology around which to rally the always passive "silent majority", the sheep who keep any social order and its government going. I had hoped that a perception of reality would overcome bedazzlement by fanstasy in the USA, but that didn't quite happen. "Close, but no cigar." The day after the election, one of the Swiss tabloids ran a headline that read, if I understand, "Are 50 million Americans Mad?" Oh, as for the title of this doc, from =inno* to =fino* amd now =gino*. I strongly recommend Bombay Gin. An Egyptian, surely of an upper class, offered me a drink of it as I sat out in front of a hotel on Rodos, at a park bench. At times I imagined that hotel to be hosting an important meeting one or another of the spiritual groups with which I have been associated. At times I took it as the portal to a landscape which I can rather fully visualize -- there is a fountain in the center of the main cobblestone street, if I recall -- but which is a fantasy composite. One night, as I stood outside that hotel, trying to work up the willpower to go in and meet the friends I was sure had come to rescue me, I was, I think, shot at, I think I heard the bullet pass by. Just one shot, and I think it was aimed at someone else, a black girl who hid behind a car. So anyhow, this Egyptian offered me a choice of various things, each of which I took as symbolic of one of the possible paths opening before me. There was the Bombay Gin, representing urbanity, and a cigarette, tobacco being sacred in American Indian tradition, and some whole wheat crackers, bread being essential in Judaism, and a McDonald's Chicken McNugget sandwich, which is what I took, holding myself in conempt for my cowardness. Well, some have asked me, from time to time, what happened to me when I dropped out or fell out, for I took it as involuntary, for 4 years on R…odos, and I usually push such enqurieis aside, but acaknowlege a certain obligation, or obligations, to respond, and am doing so, but as obscurely as possible. Like placing little clues or bits and pieces under rocks here and there, and then walking away from it all. So ok, coffee break. =============================================================== (drafted ca. 1 Dec '04 ================================================================