THE OUTSIDER

grace hartigan

It has been a daily blessing since I clicked the power button *off* to my mental interest in following political nonsense. Simultaneous with turning off that interest came the facebook group, The Daily Creative Practice, brief conversations by way of comment boxes and photographs of varieties of works of art shared, the ones that want to, showing something new. It has brought me new friends, people I'm happy to know and communicate with almost daily. We tap into each other's aesthetic. One, Lee, I feel like we've known each other in lifetimes past. I appreciate about the group that nobody is promoting a given point of view. No games. I was gaping out the window a moment ago at a dove pecking around among last year's pine needle's on the ground, fixed momentarily on the subtle haze of pink on their gray-brown donkey color I can't find a name for. A red squirrel charged in from the right, straight to the dove from behind. The dove fluttered and twittered into space, the squirrel ran to the tree in front of the window, ran around the trunk, then out of sight. Now it is back at the place where it chased off the dove. The squirrel had been seed-hunting there before. A small black and white woodpecker is going over the bark of the white pine out another window. There came a day that I realized how truly ignorant our politicians are. They don't even try to cover up anymore. It's straight up they're in it for the money, they lick the hands that feed them. I asked myself why I was paying so much attention to ignorant people. A waste of my own mental time and space.

 

grace hartigan

 

The Daily Creative Practice has taken the space left over by the sudden vacancy of  my dim-witted drift through the mind-space of below average people. Pay more attention to the books I want to read, the art I want to make, the people I want to interact with. Pull back from media-fed mind to the world of people I live among, the people I care about who care about me. Eliminate the static of media nonsense from my own interior motion picture collage of mind. I want less of that belief system, less of that tone of voice in my head, less of that mind. It's been well over a month since I've paid attention to the vanity of self-centered men on the take. I see a picture of weeping Boner and it makes me laugh like seeing a cartoon, a 2D caricature of complicity with corporate greed. I used to react with a feeling of GAK in my belly. I don't value somebody of that mind, so why pay attention to him even to be disgusted by his Xtreme shamelessness? Why even laugh at cartoons about him? Our political system has become something I cannot support with my attention. I'm considering not participating in the vote later this year as a way of unplugging myself from the corporate media belief system that money is the only purpose. Much as I'd like to feel support for Obama because the racists hate him so much, I can't help but see him a corporate plant. I don't mean a rubber tree. The black people caught on early that he was not with them. He talks to them the way white men talk to them; you needta, you oughta, you better, you should. His white supporters are catching on gradually he's not there for them either.

grace hartigan

My new friends at DCP are a million times more interesting than Machinegun Barbie. At DCP, we have Paleontologist Barbie. I have also learned not to comment on memes I get from places I'd clicked Like on in the past. I got into a brief exchange with a guy involved with Occupy, and he was one hard core activist, the kind that ends up in a deep dark dungeon a political prisoner. Just his attitude made me shudder. It was a friendly exchange. I didn't know what to say. I seem far left in relation to the republican party, but when I have a glimpse of somebody far left, it throws me way back to center. In the face of the two extremes, I'm neither one. I could call myself of the right because I believe the people making ridiculous noise about guns have a right. I don't have a gun, don't want one. Somebody from the apparent "left" gave me all kinds of hell for using the "cruel word," redneck, "you know better," dotted with yellow smiley faces. It threw my mind to kindergarten and refrigerator magnets. I want nothing more to do with the left. I wrote back, "I AM a redneck and proud of it." Unliked the place. Lord have mercy, now I can't even say redneck. Two days ago I saw a thing saying it's not all right for white people to use the enword. I wrote back, "Can I say white emeffer?" I've become a little bit confrontational with those people. I've found some who promote tolerance are as judgmental and intolerant as the most adamantine baptist preacher. The very most intolerant person I know had a sticker on the back window of his car that said Tolerance, and called himself a Buddhist. I figured the sticker on his back window was there to remind himself--albeit in reverse, thinking he's telling everybody else. I seldom let any of them get away with their judgmental statements about the South.

grace hartigan

The liberals who want me tolerant of everything and everybody are severely intolerant of the South. They give more evidence that people outside the South have no idea about the South. I remind them the slavery they're pointing the finger at the South over has been gone over a century and a half, while in American coastal cities is more slavery going on than there ever was in the South. Only difference, the slavery now is Asian, and Asian's aren't cool to wax self-righteous over this year. It's still ok to say the A-word. And the Asian mob, the noise-makers intuit not to provoke that beast. Benign Southern people living in poverty in a trailer by the side of the road, a confederate flag in the bedroom window, did not have slaves, do not have slaves and never seen no damn slave in their life. The only thing the flag means is they drink beer, love the South, and just to be spiteful embrace everything Yankees judge wrong with the South. The South they love is the Lynard Skynard and Allman Brothers South. Southern rock! Hail Yeah! That's something else outsiders don't know about Southern rednecks; they embrace everything Yankees say is wrong with them, because Yankees don't like it. It's comedy. It's I-am-I humor. When I wrote back to the person on facebook saying I am a redneck, it was in place of saying, "Y'all sure are a judgmental bunch." I reminded myself of a saying learned from an aunt, Don't start it if you don't want it started. It's time to pull my mind out of that kind of thinking too. I'll be Unliking some more of them. I will kick into gear an attitude that I like people outside the South looking down on us--it keeps them away. I tell myself, don't educate them, let them believe the highway patrol south of the Mason-Dixon line pulls over every car they see with a Yankee tag. I must let go of my own intolerance of intolerance of intolerance.

grace hartigan herself

 

 

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A WORLD OF VARIETY

For a couple weeks I've paid next to no attention to the news. The most interesting media broadcast came to me by way of BBC radio. In Mogadishu, Somalia, teachers are having a problem enforcing no cell phones in class. That struck me as news worth hearing. We only know of Mogadishu from Black Hawk Down, a fairly good military action movie. Somalia we know of for pirates abducting oil tankers for ransom, a country of extreme poverty without government, the place we'd like the Teabaggers to go where they can live without government and have all the guns and ammo they want. But, as they say, "That's not what we mean." I see Sarah Palin's face and Ted Cruz's face every time I got to facebook. Finally, today I made comment to the source of a Ted Cruz article about what a bozo he is: His game is name recognition and you're helping him out. Fact is, I'm helping them out here using their names while dismissing them. Their advisors have taught them name recognition is all that is important. It doesn't matter that Sarah Palin said Jesus celebrated Easter. A year from now, nobody will remember. Ten years from now, everyone will remember the name Sarah Palin. The real horror story is that she is so popular. Faux tv can't keep her off the air by viewer demands. We who like to think ourselves somewhat rational see Ted Cruz a blithering buffoon. Yet he is wildly popular. Because he's a moron. That's where I scratch my head. I already know anti-intellectualism in America has degenerated to anti-paying attention. And here it is, popular ignorance, the legacy of the Reagan Revolution.

 

 

 

I've become shy of calling my mother. Her new husband is a Faux tv enthusiast. They live in separate apartments in an assisted living facility, but they watch tv together in the evening. Last time we talked, she said, "Obama is ruining our country." It took me back to age 16 when I was listening to Little Richard and she said, "The niggers are taking over." Then, as now, I could only think: What? The woman who has parroted preachers all her adult life is now parroting Faux tv. I wanted to say, Please stop watching that ignorance. But her fundamentalist religion has a tv news channel now. Her new political awareness via indoctrination tv is the political equivalent of her religion. It took me fifteen years to shake off the belief system she enforced. I had to throw out the baby with the bathwater, as they say. I turned my back to all of it by way of education. I went to college to flush the ignorance out of my system. One of the first things I learned studying 20th Century American poetry, dogmatism is not where it's at. Turns out I'd thought it was. It was a shock. One of my initial attractions to Bob Dylan was his dogmatism, which caused me eventually to say good-bye to him. Then his last five albums happened and each one pulled me back  Sitting in front of a preacher several times a week through the entirety of childhood was crazy-making. I'm reminded of a brother and sister I know whose dad made them sit and listen to Rush Limbaugh before they went to school every morning. Daddy was a preacher man. Eventually, I came to see preachers as culture cops. They enforce culture. If they paid any attention to "Jesus' word," they'd be promoting loving one another instead of guilt.  

 

 

 

 

The culture of my developing years was Kansas creationist, before Creationism, fundamentalist. Of course I believed it. But something is amiss when what it did to a kid of a questioning mind was pack him so full of sewage that he had to open the release valve and get rid of it all. That is the process that took fifteen years. Westboro Baptist church that's frequently in the news is Kansas fundamentalism. It looks odd from the outside, but on the inside, that mind is a dynamic force. That the likes of the Koch Bros are from Wichita surprises me not. All my life I have questioned myself and God about why I was destined to grow up in Kansas this time. Could I have read The Wizard of Oz in my former lifetime? Could the horrors of the previous lifetime, Europe subdued by Nazis, have made me long in my heart for the "free world," for Kansas, "there's no place like home." To quote Lou Reed from one of his songs, "Just goes to show how wrong you can be." When I question how I came about my parents by way of karma, then I wonder how they came about me? If I was the torment to them that they were to me, I know they were glad to see me go. Mother lives in a state of denial and I can't get a straight answer from her about anything. Denial is what it takes to keep her equilibrium. I was taught denial in depth, and never to talk about anything that might run a ripple across her smooth lake of denial. Next, I find myself drawn to people of these characteristics. First thing I did was marry daddy. Then came the day I said this will not be the nature of my life. I will not live with him in a woman's body all the way along. I've already done my time with him. I felt like a kid born in prison. I was not going to drag that ball and chain through the rest of my life.

 

 

 

At age 23, as far away from Wichita as land allows without the extreme of Alaska, the checklist of obligations to rule by others, parents, school, church, marriage and military, was done. The marriage was divorced after two years when I realized I was living with daddy and liked it less every day. I turned my back to all of it. Release from the navy, then release from marriage, I started at the College of Charleston because my X had told me I would not be accepted there. Challenge a Taurus. I started the first day of my life that would be my own at the College of Charleston. The entire student body would not fill an auditorium classroom at a state university. It was not a high-powered school. It was still an Old South college. I loved that about it most of all. I had longed throughout childhood to feel the soul of the South. Most of my friends in the South have been non-racist people of several races. The great southern writers are not racist. I know there is a great deal of fervent racism in the South, but I don't care. It's everywhere. It's worse in New York City. In the South I learned not to let other people's belief systems be a problem for me. They allow me mine, I allow them theirs. I've found it to be a Southern code wherever I am in the South. I don't mean to apologize for barbeque culture or any of the parts of Southern culture I don't participate in, only that in the South we allow each other to be who we are. So you think different from somebody. So what else is new? I've found the Southern people best known individually.

 

 

 

From the outside the southern people are judged collectively by abstractions without meaning. People outside the South think they know all about the South. I'm here to tell you, nobody outside the South knows anything about the South. The South can only be known from the inside. Southern people don't care that Yankees think they're ignernt racists. It keeps them away. It's a good thing. When I found out about a Yankee I know who told a sheriff deputy living a couple doors down the street in town to keep his dog at home--it's shitting in his yard, I said, What! Man! This is the South! We don't do that shit! I don't mean the South is Ozzie & Harriet forever. I mean there is a bond between somebody from North Carolina and somebody from Alabama when they meet at a convention in New York. I saw recently in the news that a couple in Johnson City, Tennessee, were renting out their teenage girls to make porn films, getting paid pretty well, subsistence. They started when the girls were 9. Shit happens in the South same as shit happens in the North. We're all a world of people, all of us endowed with human nature, whatever our culture. I love about the South that it continues to be a culture even after all these years of television. I don't like to leave the South anymore. After the second half of my life in the mountains, I don't like to leave the mountains for more than a very short time. I don't like to leave my county anymore. The people of Alleghany County allow me to live among them and many of them have a place in my heart. I've walked my own walk, talked my own talk; I love living among the Southern people and am grateful to them for allowing me to live happily among them.

 

 

 

 I really don't care if somebody is racist or not, whether somebody is republican or not. I've known enough people of other races to see they're racist too. In the South, you take it for granted everybody is republican and leave it be at that. I don't care how they vote. People I like are people I like. I don't want all liberals around me. I don't want everybody around me agreeing with me. I want different kinds of people in my life. Somebody's racism is their own business. Somebody's politics is their own business. Same with religion. In the world of people I know that I live among, it is a wide variety. I like that every person I know is unique among all the others. Last week I saw a friend who is 81, bluegrass bass player, good a man as you'll find on earth, haughtily rejected for his PC insensitive language. He was hurt by it, didn't understand it. I was perplexed. I stood there and watched my friend be rejected by intolerance for his unconscious clichés of intolerance. I had to remind myself this world is not necessarily rational. That I have reminded myself so many times explains why it shocked me to hear Joe in the coffee shop say that something to do with somebody's behavior was not logical. That rang every bell I had. I didn't know that Joe took the logical for the norm. And I'm not sure he really does. It's a conjecture from one word. All I mean to say is it shocked me to hear it, no matter who said it.   

 

 

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HATE IS A BAR OF SOAP

a r penck

Every day I see some in-yer-face current event that's heinous with text calling for change. Some want more police state, some want less. I laugh when it says to "tell" Boner, Cheney, other republicans, something or other that makes sense, something that reason applies to. Somebody like me doesn't tell a republican what to do. It's like speaking to a parrot, telling it what to do. The parrot bobs its head up and down. Get too close, it will bite. I remember what a gift it is when somebody who despises me stays away, won't go where I go, leaves when I turn up. I think, thank you, and smile big. I find it a truth that somebody I don't like for whatever is behind it, that person doesn't like me either. I've got to where I can just about tell what somebody is thinking about me by what I'm thinking about them. Dislike tends to be mutual, same as like. We're taught all through school it is necessary to be liked by everybody. No reason why, just necessary to be popular. I fell for that until it just fell away from me for being assessed not worthy of attention. Recently a friend was moaning because she'd found out someone we both knew did not like her. I said, Do you like him? Answer: no. There it is, I said, what does it matter if he likes you or not? Better that he doesn't like you so he'll stay away and you won't have to bother to stay away from him. I just heard myself say that, said it without forethought. It spoke itself. I heard it and made a mental notation for myself to pay attention. I added, you don't want everybody liking you.

a r penck

I found some good spiritual counsel about hating and being hated. That's some powerful energy to have coursing through your blood. Hate is close to love when it comes to power of the energy.  Somewhere, and I don't remember where, in reading Meher Baba's discourses and sayings, he said that the karmic danger in hating someone is that I pull to myself whatever it is I hate in the other. Hate is a bar of soap. When somebody hates me for something about my character that he or she doesn't like, the hate pulls the reprehensible characteristic that I may not like having myself, pulls it to the individual doing the hating, taking it off of me onto themselves. It taught me to keep an eye on my own active hating. As far as I know I have no hates. I know of some who hate me, and I'm ok with that. I think of them as my friends scrubbing me good with soap, taking my trash to themselves. I say thank you. This one character I cannot name, though the name is so common there must be multiple hundreds of thousands of them, hates me so bad that when I come into view he starts shaking and finds a way to exit himself immediately. It cracks me up. I always speak to him, Hey, how you doin? And I'm laughing inside. I don't even care why he hates me. I just thank him for taking whatever it is from me to himself. It makes me laugh. I'm grateful in a big way that he avoids me first. It's just easier that way.

a r penck

Since learning about hate as a bar of soap, I welcome it anymore, almost flippantly. I tell myself to watch that part. It's like curiosity about the other side, over yonder, glory land, makes me almost flippant with danger. Sometimes I have to keep myself reminded. Not that I have a suicide problem. It's more a relaxed attitude about dying that makes it something I'm not afraid of, but look forward to. It's relaxing into accidents that concerns me. Like letting something happen because I'm not afraid. I have to remind self that I'm in the body because I'm meant to be in the body, so don't be frivolous with it. Don't take it too seriously, but don't take it too lightly either. I think of it as a form of being responsible. An awful lot of hate is in the air in this time, but there has always been hate in the air. Hate in the air is where wars come form. I've seen in people new to the county, mostly republicans who moved to the mountains to get away from the N word in the cities, intolerant toward any political opinion other than their own. I can't say how pervasive this is. Going only by my limited experience. One old boy quit going to the coffee shop because not enough cement-heads went there. One day talking with a woman who was retired Army, brilliant woman I enjoyed talking with, there came a time I realized she would be intolerant of me if she knew she was not talking to another teabagger. So I dropped the bomb that I'm a liberal. She turned her back to me and had no more to do with me. I thought: thanks, and had to contain my inner laughter so it wouldn't show.

a r penck

I see in a lot of younger people (to me, everybody is younger) an intolerance unspoken, unacknowledged. It is a common belief that if you don't agree with somebody on whatever level, you can't know each other. I find it not all the time, but frequently among people under my age. It's a shock for me, because I've known so many mountain people older than me for so many years and adopted their culture as my own. It was never a consideration among mountain people to dislike somebody because he has a differing opinion. The mountain way is the same as the old American way, that a man's politics is his own and a man's religion is his own. Democrats and republicans could sit around a wood stove in a country store spitting "backer" into tin cans, somebody telling about finding a bee hive in a white pine, "aint never seen narry bee hive in no white pine." The old people knew who was a democrat and who was a republican, same as they knew what church everybody went to. It was ok for a Regular Baptist to know a Primitive Baptist or even a Methodist. In the present day, I don't mean the attitude is unanimous to stay away from people with a different checklist of likes and preferences. However, I see enough of it to catch my attention after years and years of living among people who accepted others for who they were, not according to a checklist of tastes.

a r penck

 

I'm in no place to make any assessments of generations younger than mine. Up front, I confess I do not understand younger generations. American pop culture changes so fast, there is indeed a culture gap between generations, has been since ww2. The general culture that is American culture has been very much the same since ww2. It's time for another big change, a change like from before ww1 to after ww1. The before and after of both great wars was drastic. Another big war is brooding in the air. By the time it is over, the world as we know it will be a very different place. Twitter will be so far in the past it will be ancient, like books now. USA will continue to decline under systematic republican treason and the 21st Century will belong to Asia. America had its moment of greatness at the end of ww2, then squandered it right away. 9/11 had the whole world sympathetic with the Paper Tiger, the Great Satan, and that was squandered immediately. Racism holds American social progress back like the dumbest kids in class hold the class back. Racism is tattooed onto the American consciousness. It will change. The racists are mostly above a certain age. Whey they are all dead in a few generations, racism will have died with them. Maybe. That's kind of simplistic for such a complex matter, to think an end of racism is in sight. A surprising number of adults in USA believe the earth is flat. Let's just learn to live with racism and keep it under control. There are so many other human impulses we control to live peaceably in a world of others, racism can be controlled too. Many control it in themselves. It's possible.

 

a r penck

 

 

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TOLERANCE INTOLERANCE

silent sign by tj worthington


Again, ongoing problems with website. I write a sentence and the computer locks. I wait and wait, it starts again, I write a sentence and computer freezes again. I've learned that when it happens to stop and not force myself against it, because it turns into a cussing frenzy and makes me crazy. The only reason I've got this far is that it has stopped. When it starts I click on "send feedback" and tell the anonymous entity that sees the feedback the "interface" is not working again. Anonymous Entity never responds to questions. Wait a few hours and it's ok. I get so tired of that I think of letting this project go. I see in a baby a year and a half old a humorous version of my own behavior. She cannot figure something out, like screwing a cap onto a bottle, she tries until she sees she can't do it, puts it down and the thing is no longer of interest to her. She goes off to something else. That's how I do. It takes all my self-will to continue. Attempted to start writing a few minutes ago. I decided to go take a nap. Attempted it again after just a few minutes and it worked this time. Whatever.

An hour or so ago I saw an interview somebody had put on facebook of Colin Powell with Bill O'Reilly. I couldn't watch it all. Again, Powell was the easy target setting himself up for republican refudiation of his credibility pointing at his negritude on the air. Powell called O'Reilly on calling him an African American all the time. It didn't faze O'Reilly. Fact is, Powell is Jamaican by birth. Maybe he's an African Jamaican, or a Jamaican American, or in Powell's way of seeing it, an American. That won't do, however. It's not divisive enough. It doesn't separate him from the white audience. Of course, O'Reilly is seeing a nigger and Powell is playing through it. Sometimes I go to these odd videos from Faux News for comedy, to hear yo-yos O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck, Coulter, Ingraham, and almost always turn it off before it's a third of the way into it. It is not easy for me to listen to that mind. It's not even glossed over. It's plain stupid. I wonder about what kind of morons they are. It doesn't seem rational to me that people would have a talking head job on tv and take such pride in ignorance and deception.I didn't realize such ignorant people could keep high-profile well-paying jobs. Sarah Palin, not the dumbest of them all, was put aside. This guy Paul Rand is showing himself to be a Sarah Palin wannabe. He's really bad off. It comes out his mouth every time he speaks. Like saying to Hilary Clinton at the "hearing," "if I were president, I'd fire you." I saw a clever meme on facebook that captioned Hilary saying, "I stopped listening when you said, if you were president."

I have a problem with calling people stupid and the frequency of its use in the time of online chat and name calling in comment boxes. In the first several times of my problems with the blogger website, I'd click on send feedback and wallow in the freedom to let whoever was reading feedback have it. Finally, I caught on that it was somebody at the other end doing the best that can be done attempting to take the kinks out of the program and make it a better experience instead of worse. I fell into that tendency with a computer to regard the anonymous person at the other end an asshole, moron, stupid, idiot, dork, words that are the most popular on the internet. I've stopped myself from using those words, except where there is no other word. I've come to see the use of these words an invalid attitude toward the unknown other. Of course, the reason the words are so abundant online is you don't know the person at the other end, both ways. Nobody is going to knock on your door and when you open it kick your ass. This is what we become when there are no repercussions to our actions. It's nothing to be proud of, but many are.

I've never heard conservatives define conservatism in a manner that satisfied me, nor have I heard any self-definition by liberals that satisfies what I see. I've finally found that both can be broken down to tolerance. The conservative agenda has to do with intolerance. The liberal agenda has to do with tolerance. Faux News is nothing but intolerance spewing round the clock. Intolerance is for all except ignorant white men. I suppose it is a good thing to have Faux News because it brings out the ignorance in the American white man belief system. White man has presented himself before as rational thinking and in charge. Since Limbaugh, you want to find out what white men are thinking, listen to him. He's paid $4,000,000 a year to be the voice of the white man. Before Limbaugh, these people did not have a voice. Now that they do have a voice, I'd like them to shut up. I'm glad I never fell for the comfort of ignorance among white men. This is only one of many reasons I embrace my self-created Outsider status.

I'm recalling someone I once knew who kept a sticker on his car's rear window that said TOLERANCE. I had to laugh every time I saw it. This is the most intolerant individual I have known. All I could figure was he put it there to remind himself of tolerance since he had so little. He was very tolerant where the latest cool thing to be tolerant about was somebody else's race or sexuality, indignantly tolerant. It's very close to indignant piety. The sticker's colors faded, it dried and curled up. Eventually it fell off after several years. Every time I saw it was a reminder of his intolerance. That he's tolerant of black people and gay people, doesn't mean he's tolerant of the people around him. They're just ideas. I've not found that he likes anyone in his world, that being the people of the county and the American people. He thinks of them like he thinks of me, too ignorant to bother with. After blowing his mind with LSD in the Sixties, he spends his life in superiority to everyone around him. He only looks down on others from way high up where you can see the curve of the earth. Not one is good enough to rate his attention. His wives have moved in, freaked out, and left, like frogs dropped into boiling water. After 30+ years of knowing him, I never saw his superiority bear out. It comes down to he is himself and everyone else is not. So he's got the goods on everybody.

Hearing him harangue on the ignorance of the people of this county left my mouth hanging open. He has lived here as long as I have. I don't see the mountain people like that at all. I've found the mountain people so incredibly intelligent they humble whatever intelligence I may have. The time he told me of his contempt for the mountain people, I wanted to say something to give him a new way to look at the people around him, but realized this was an expression of his attitude toward life, just like his absence of tolerance was his attitude toward life, as well. When I look at his intolerance of all but self, it bespeaks an ego so profound, evidently so overwhelming to him he worships it. He loves his ego. He's the only one that knows anything, wherever his, whoever he's among. He's always right and everybody else is always wrong. He told me he can only tolerate being among these ignorant mountain people nine months of the year, has to get away for three months to another part of the world where the people are not as ignorant as here. My tolerance of him dried up and fell away like the sticker on his car.

I've not seen him in over a year and don't want to see him or hear his voice again. I don't appreciate the people I know to be true human beings held for ignorant, incompetent and stupid. Those are words I'd use on him, but not any others I live among. I've tried for years to tolerate him, but a year ago something inside snapped. That day he was being especially contrarian at lunch and I called him on it. He got up and walked away and I thought: Wow! That was easy! I could have done that years ago! After a year of his absence from my life, it makes me joyous to think of the span of time getting longer every day. He'll never call me again and I'll never call him. In the past I had enjoyed his three month absences. It was never good to see him again. I've not seen his car in town so I'm guessing he's gone away to someplace in the rest of the world where he accords everybody there his intellectual equal. I've never let on, but I don't see his intellect anything to crow about, let alone be proud of. What he calls his intellect I call his ego. I don't even like to use his name anymore. I asked him once, just to be a bitch, if he put that sticker on his car window to remind himself of tolerance. No. He doesn't believe there is enough tolerance in the world. There's certainly none in his world.


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