Pottage: A Message to Publicists About Me and Pot

Public library, Los Angeles

Every day I get multiple emails from various publicists offering me books to review and talk about here on the old a moon, worn as if it had been a shell or even reality shows that I might be interested in sharing with my readers. The books can be about everything from baby pacifiers to parenting techniques, and my favorite pitched reality show was for a couple having sexual problems. You might wonder how and why these publicists get my name, and I just have no idea other than that they're using some kind of search engine that pulls up my name and affiliation with perverse activities because -- you know -- I'm all about that.

A few months ago, I was asked by some publicist to get a free copy and review a book by former drug czar and family values man/blowhard Bill Bennett. The name of the book, which is now published, is Going to Pot:Why the Rush to Legalize Marijuana is Harming America. That I happen to have met and actually argued with the man himself because of his personal affiliation with someone I know quite intimately (but not perversely), and not only found him as insufferable in real life as he is on television, made the pitch all the more ironic. Dear Suzie, I replied, Clearly, you've been reading my blog and know that this is a perfect match for me and will truly appeal to my readers. Please send me the free copy of the book, and I'll take a look and let you know what I think. The book came a few days later, and it took me all of twenty minutes to skim through the chapters, lingering over the brief few lines about dubious medical claims and then to toss it in the trash. Just the other day, while winnowing through my hundreds of books, I came upon a signed copy of one of his American hero books, and I threw that one, too, into the box headed for the library. May some wealthy white woman doing volunteer work at the library stumble upon it and bring it home to her privileged children smoking pot in their bedrooms and be edified. What I should have done is what a friend suggested: shred em, roll em and smoke em.

Anyhoo.

This morning, I got another appeal from a publicist asking me to review a book called Marijuana Debunked, that purportedly uses scientific research to argue a case against the legalization of marijuana. To be fair, the gist of the book appears to be that use of marijuana in the teenage years is detrimental to brain development, and we do know this to be so, but the author apparently projects the dire consequences of marijuana use into adulthood and how it takes a toll on people's relationships, finances, careers and personal lives. There's also a section about the deception of medical marijuana laws and how they encourage teenage use. I had read enough when I saw the tired gateway drug bullshit. The name of this book is Marijuana Debunked, and the email enlarges the title and makes the word Marijuana large and green for emphasis. As my friend said, with whom I shared this ridiculous email, What a crock of shit book. You could use that as a review.

I know that I'm a tad biased, but if you're a publicist and reading this blog post (and I seriously doubt you've ever read any of my blog), you need to do your research because I'm not your gal. My daughter's brain and life were ruined by seizures and legal pharmaceutical drugs, yet saved by medical marijuana. I'm perfectly aware that my sons' brains are at the peak of their development, that they should not interfere with that development by smoking marijuana, just as they shouldn't smoke cigarettes, drink beer, have unprotected sex or drag race on Ventura Boulevard. You also need to tell your writers that they should do some research as well. Take a look at the article in a recent New Yorker about the tunnels built from Mexico to the United States, used until quite recently as marijuana laws have eased (and thus removed the profit), to smuggle gargantuan amounts of marijuana into this country (now it's cocaine) to feed the insatiable desire of Americans. Read about what is, essentially, conscripted or even slave labor to build these tunnels and how workers are duped into the work and then killed when it's done. That article is not only well-written but edifying in a way that underscores just how absurd the continued drug war, particularly against marijuana, really is.

You're wasting your money on me, frankly, and filling my inbox up with garbage.





There's an informative pdf file, published by The International Center for Science in Drug Policy, called Using Evidence to Talk about Cannabis that everyone should read and use when people put up these specious arguments. The link to the PDF (that I can't figure how to load) is also in a recent Huffington Post article here..

Beach Glory

It was, indeed, another day in Paradise. Henry had a four-hour lacrosse camp, so Oliver, his friend Mac, Sophie and I packed up my sexy Mazda (not the red one below that I covet) and headed to the beach, just down the road from the high school where the lacrosse camp was held.

Reader, can you imagine growing up here? Sometimes I just can't believe that my children can say that they have, that they're actually from this beautiful place.

Sophie was in fine form all day, quite different from how she's been over the last couple of months. We were able to get a higher ratio Charlotte's Web, and while I don't want to jinx it, I think it's doing the trick. She did break out into raucous laughter a few times today which I suspect were a type seizure called gelastic, but she seemed very present, and her face didn't have that rictus grin of the gelastic seizure, so perhaps she actually found something very funny.

Who the heck knows?

Looking north toward Malibu:

The waves were easily six feet tall at points, and the riptides were evidently dangerous as those dreamy
red-shorted southern California beach guards were on alert the whole time. Oliver and Mac literally played for hours in the water while Sophie and I wandered up and down at the edge.

I hope your weekend was as glorious as mine. School will be in full swing starting tomorrow, and I have lots of work to do -- both paid and the usual hausfrau stuff. I want to finish the Anthony Doerr novel that I've been reading and finish up listening to the Elizabeth Gilbert one. I've also got several New Yorkers to catch up on and a host of blogs. All of it makes me happy.

A good friend sent me the following link about trolls and angry internet comments. I found it perfectly relevant to the kerfuffle here at a moon, worn as if it had been a shell. It's an interesting discussion about how communication is evolving with technology and is worthy of even more discussion.

Furious trolls are everywhere -- Even Internet Moms are angry and they hate you

How to Maintain Your Non-Sports Identity at a Lacrosse Tournament:Day 2

Pull your old green hat low over your green sunglasses. Ignore the lady in the magenta track suit screaming, "Pick up the goddamn ball!" Glance fondly into your tote bag at the copies of The New Yorker you've brought along and pray you won't look pretentious reading them. Smile at your beautiful son who is playing his heart out.

It's time for Cinema Abbey

Pittule Day

photo by Jennifer Werndorf (one of my best friends)

I was supposed to be landing at Newark airport tonight, be on my way to my cousin's house to spend the night. In the morning we were headed up to Rockland County in New York, just over the Hudson from the city, where all my Italian relatives were meeting for the annual Pittule Day. I haven't been in fifteen years, since I moved to Los Angeles in 1997, and I was so looking forward to seeing aunts and uncles and cousins and cousins' children and even cousins' children's children. My parents will be there and so will my two sisters. Pittule Day is an Aquino family tradition where the elder women make enormous bowls of a yeast dough that rises and rises until it's almost tipping out of the container. Then pieces of the dough are grabbed and shaped into small balls and dropped into hot oil. They float there, frying, while the women and more enlightened men prod them in their oil bath until they turn a golden brown and are removed and placed on paper towels and are then topped with powdered sugar. Hundreds of these little delicacies are fried and eaten about as fast as they come out of the pot, until someone declares that it's time for the savory ones. The same-sized pieces of dough are pinched off, and a small chunk of anchovy is pushed into the center before they're dropped into the oil and cooked until golden brown as well. There are about sixty people at the gathering and food, probably, for six hundred. Trays of melanzane, homemade soppressata, cheeses, breads, pasta and meats, figs and peppers, oranges and whole walnuts, ready to be cracked.

Anywho.

I bought a ticket about a month ago for a very cheap price and was going for two nights, a quick trip with a stack of New Yorkers, my ducks at home in a row, and an ugly, old L.L. Bean coat pulled out of the back of the closet (I don't own a coat!) . I even wore socks! About a half hour after I arrived at the airport, when I was just opening my first New Yorker and eating my first Twizzler, I learned that our flight was delayed due to weather on the east coast, and because I was already arriving very late and the rumor was worse storms beginning Sunday, when I absolutely needed to make a flight home to Los Angeles, I decided to cancel my flight. Snow, sleet, ice and rain kept me away.

I'm sad to have missed the weekend and seeing people whom I haven't seen in years. I was also looking forward to all that reading on the plane, to ripping off the address labels of my New Yorkers as I finished them and tucking them into the pouch on the back of the seat in front of me.

Anywho.

I'm here in Los Angeles where it's gloriously beautiful and very cold for us. It's going down to the high thirties tonight, but the air is crystal clear, the clouds fluffy, the moon a perfect crescent. We won't get snow or ice or sleet, and that's just fine. I'll be picking out a Christmas tree tomorrow when my dear relatives are picking dough balls out of hot oil and licking their sugary fingers. I'll miss them.

A deeper and more vibrant blue

Despite an evening spent enthralled, listening to the Bosnian-American writer Aleksander Hemon read from his new book, Book of My Lives, and from his essay The Aquarium, and then listening to his careful, accented voice spin stories of the harrowing war in Yugoslavia, and then eating taramasalata and warm pita bread and drinking a glass of wine with a good friend, despite all of this, I woke up this morning, the second day in a row, singing Lola Lo Lo Lo Lo Lola, the latest download that Oliver made on his iPod several days ago. Have you ever heard this song, Mom? he asked, and when I refrained from rolling my eyes and answered in the affirmative, we sang along, off and on throughout the day. I'm not sure why Ray Davies has taken up residence in my brain but the hallway is even bluer, a deeper blue and when I raise my voice, Looooooola, it echoes and disappears right there to the left, a kink that I like to imagine reaches my son as he walks the streets of New York with his father and brother.

Sunday reading

Odilon Redon, The Birth of Venus, 1912

It's a gray morning in Los Angeles, and I'm lying in bed, nursing a cold and reading. Sophie is in her bedroom, humming and messing around with her things, the boys are out with The Husband getting haircuts and breakfast -- please, take them out! I pleaded earlier, before you go to work or they'll drive me crazy! If it weren't for the nagging guilt I perpetually feel to do something with Sophie, I'd feel perfect. The issue of The New Yorker that I'm reading is the kind that you can literally read from cover to cover without skimming the boring things. I enjoyed Adam Gopnik's comments about the Petraeus scandal, admittedly because they confirm my own iconoclastic feelings (who gives a damn about who is sleeping with whom, even if they are spies?) and I loved the short article about actor Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad and now Argo fame. Some of you might remember my obsession with the first four seasons of Breaking Bad, which I watched in bed, alone with my Kindle Fire, while my husband's business detonated, leaking into our personal life. I got it -- the breaking bad part -- and am thankful that watching the show was a substitute for any over-the-top actions on my part. I read a horrifying article about a Korean American woman who allegedly damaged a baby in her care and was sent to prison. The article was written by her grown son, and I don't know if it was well written or just seductively ambiguous. That article was followed by a very long one about The Grateful Dead, and while I did skim part of it, I was plunged in memory to my college days when I hung out with a group of boys attached to my boyfriend who carted around suitcases full of bootleg Dead tapes, tapes that they'd listen to while smoking pot out of bongs while watching Tar Heel basketball with the sound off. I didn't smoke much pot and really only enjoyed the more commercial Dead songs -- Ripple, Brown-Eyed Women, Scarlet Begonias, Box of Rain, etc., but I did enjoy those boys and their shenanigans. Those memories segued into the ones of my evangelical friends in college, a group of girls who went to Bible studies and had personal relationships with Jesus, even praying to him for good grades on history exams or resolutions to relationship problems with boys. I loved these girls, most are still my friends, thirty years later, and I gamely went to a few of their meetings. I even went to hear the Reverend Billy Graham speak in a stadium and was a tiny bit caught up in the fervor of giving one's life to Christ, but in the end, love and lust won out and I always felt like an outsider with very inchoate beliefs. The article about the controversial evangelist Rob Bell who preaches in a church with ten thousand worshipers was well-written but left me shaking my head, again, at human intention and need. People whose beliefs are that strong and unwavering about anything make me feel intensely lonely. I'm moving on to the fiction, movie and book review that are next. I hope ya'll are having a good end of Thanksgiving week day.

Dulce et Decorum est

Civil War family via Dream Dogs Art

I never have much to say on these holidays that memorialize soldiers and war and killing and dying. I shirk from expressions like freedom isn't free. I feel a roiling conflict when asked to honor the soldier and not the war and risk the censure of those who take to these easily. I might even envy them. I don't begin to understand the life of a Marine, the dedication, the camaraderie, the duty. I saw the movie Lincoln this weekend and was struck, again, by the simpler brutality of the Civil War when men fought against men, most of the time, in hand to hand combat. It is at once heroic to watch and absurd. I also happened to read an article in the New Yorker magazine called Atonement about a very young Iraqi veteran tortured by a debacle in 2009 when his unit in Iraq opened fire in a street battle and brutally murdered members of a family, including a baby. He eventually tracks down the remaining members of the family and asks for forgiveness, which they give to him, but the cost of this atonement took my breath away. Over 4,000 American soldiers died in Iraq and over 150,000 Iraqis died. This morning, the Los Angeles Times newspaper includes an article titled 2 Wars, 11 Years, 725 fallen Californians. The article states that 41% of these soldiers who died were not yet 22 years old. Sixty-three of them were still teenagers. Those numbers don't make me feel proud; they make me feel ashamed. No, freedom isn't free, but sending boys away to fight and kill never works, has never worked and will never work. On Veterans' Day, I will honor those who have fallen and those who have had to kill others in the name of freedom or liberty or God, but I feel sad for just about everyone.



Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

David Sedaris made my stomach hurt last night.

This is the book Sedaris recommended this year -- a tradition  on his tour

Yes. I laughed so hard that not only my stomach ached, but my face muscles did, too. In fact, for a second I thought that I'd dislocated my jaw. He read a few new essays, the recent dentist/medical system/socialism essay from The New Yorker, told very dirty jokes, read from his diary and otherwise charmed the audience of thousands at UCLA last night. He dissed animals, particularly dogs (you would have howled, Ms. Moon), and spoke a lot about taxidermy and owls. He is just about the weirdest, sweetest humorist in the world, I think, and I love him. He's definitely the only person who can tell the foulest of jokes and get me to laugh so hard I spit saliva. I've seen him now at least six  times, and each time I'm convinced that if he only knew I was out there in the audience, he'd be one of my best friends.

Here's an excerpt from the recent essay in The New Yorker, titled Dentists Without Borders:

One thing that puzzled me during the American health-care debate was all the talk about socialized medicine and how ineffective it’s supposed to be. The Canadian plan was likened to genocide, but even worse were the ones in Europe, where patients languished on filthy cots, waiting for aspirin to be invented. I don’t know where these people get their ideas, but my experiences in France, where I’ve lived off and on for the past thirteen years, have all been good. A house call in Paris will run you around fifty dollars. I was tempted to arrange one the last time I had a kidney stone, but waiting even ten minutes seemed out of the question, so instead I took the subway to the nearest hospital. In the center of town, where we’re lucky enough to have an apartment, most of my needs are within arm’s reach. There’s a pharmacy right around the corner, and two blocks further is the office of my physician, Dr. Médioni. Twice I’ve called on a Saturday morning, and, after answering the phone himself, he has told me to come on over. These visits, too, cost around fifty dollars. The last time I went, I had a red thunderbolt bisecting my left eyeball.
The doctor looked at it for a moment, and then took a seat behind his desk. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you,” he said. “A thing like that, it should be gone in a day or two.”
“Well, where did it come from?” I asked. “How did I get it?”
“How do we get most things?” he answered.
“We buy them?”
The time before that, I was lying in bed and found a lump on my right side, just below my rib cage. It was like a devilled egg tucked beneath my skin. Cancer, I thought. A phone call and twenty minutes later, I was stretched out on the examining table with my shirt raised.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” the doctor said. “A little fatty tumor. Dogs get them all the time.”
I thought of other things dogs have that I don’t want: Dewclaws, for example. Hookworms. “Can I have it removed?”
“I guess you could, but why would you want to?”
He made me feel vain and frivolous for even thinking about it. “You’re right,” I told him. “I’ll just pull my bathing suit up a little higher.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/02/120402fa_fact_sedaris#ixzz1tpKc9cAi

A painful Saturday night, evangelicals and a funny poem

1. I reached deep into parenting patience last night and spent about one half of an hour looking at Oliver's Wacky Pack collection. I made comments, tittered over the gross ones and expressed interest in the sheer numbers that he had collected.
2. I watched Facing the Giants with the boys,  perhaps the lamest movie about high school football ever made. Weirdly, I hate football but am a complete sucker for a football movie (not to mention Friday Night Lights, one of the best tv series ever produced). That this pathetic excuse of a movie was also over-the-top evangelical Christian was salt in the open wound of football. Evidently, Christian filmmakers believe that God is on the side of the football team that prays the hardest and leads their entire sinner high school to revival, and they also write lines for the coach that include various Biblical phrases to pump the kids up (I apologize about the spoiler, but I'm assuming that no one here will waste their time on such pablum unless you want to be a martyr). I amused myself by noting how the opposing team (at the Georgia State championship) was made up of animal-like mostly African Americans dressed all in black while "our" team was entirely white, a veritable army of future Ricks (Santorums and Perrys). The only salvation was that even Oliver at some point looked at me and rolled his eyes. I know I probably sighed a lot and prompted the derision, and lest you think me entirely heretical, I did assure both boys that yes, I thought the movie was really nice, but the acting was terrible. I also threw in the fact that I believed in God but I didn't believe he cared one whit about football. Oh, and the other salvation was that we ate a lot of Girl Scout cookies.

How did you spend your Saturday night?

15 minutes go by....I am reading in bed...and now I've turned the computer back on and am finishing this post.

I opened up my New Yorker to this poem, which demonstrates, if not an act of God, a perfect synchronicity:

Testimony


The Lord woke me in the middle of the night
and there stood Jesus with a huge tray,
and the tray was heaped with cookies,
and He said, Stephen, have a cookie,


and that's when I knew for sure the Lord 
is the real deal, the Man of all men,
because at that very moment
I was thinking of cookies, Vanilla Wafers


to be exact, and there were two
Vanilla Wafers in among the chocolate
chips and the lemon ices, and one
had a big S on it, and I knew it was for me,


and Jesus took it off the tray and put it
in my mouth, as if He were giving me
communication, or whatever they call it.
Then He said, Have another,


and I tell you I thought a long time before I
refused, because I knew it was a test
to see if I was a Christian, which
means a man like Christ, not a big old hog.


--Stephen Dunn

Let me refer you to

via  Moon to Moon

• a wild, cosmic photo posted every day by NASA:

• something to eat while you're watching Season 2 of Downton Abbey

• something that might make you throw up a little but perhaps also be re-activated to do something

• something to make you feel better:

• the two back to back articles in the January 2nd New Yorker (disregard the hideous cartoon of Newt on the front in diapers or even rip the cover off) titled The Jersey Game by Ben McGrath and No Remorse by Rachel Aviv. The first is about a high school football team in New Jersey, and while I despise football, I couldn't put this down. The second is a powerful article about a young teenager who shot his grandfather, was tried as an adult and given life in prison.

• the fourth season of Breaking Bad, which I caved and bought the other day for $20.00 because I couldn't wait for it to be free on Netflix. I stayed up until 2:45 am watching it, and I have ONE MORE EPISODE TO GO.

• my The Marriage Plot audiobook giveaway, ending TODAY AT 6:00 Pacific Time

If there must be trouble, let it be in my day -- Thomas Paine

Yes, I've been reading, albeit cursorily, about the folks "occupying Wall Street," and I have a neighbor friend who's actually participated in some of the rallies here in Los Angeles. Everyone who reads this blog knows where my political persuasions lie, but lately I've kept my head in the sand, deeply depressed, to tell you the truth, more convinced than ever that we're living in a plutocracy, or perhaps an oligarchy but certainly NOT a democracy. My family is struggling mightily -- and I have to say that while the stress and grief and loss that accompany being the parents of a child with severe disabilities takes its toll, behind that stress and grief and loss is overwhelming love, love that makes it all bearable, all the time.

Behind financial and economic stress is literally nothing, a black hole, a gaping maw, a terrifying void.

I don't know why this is, but it is.

I'm moved by the photos of We Are the 99 Percent that you can see here.  There's this one:

and this one:

and I'm educated by Hendrik Hertzberg's article about the movement in The New Yorker.


Here's an excerpt:

The process, not the platform, is the point. Anyway, OWES is not the Brookings Institution. But its implicit grievances are plain enough: the mass pain of mass unemployment, underemployment, and economic insecurity; the corrupting, pervasive political influence of big money; the outrageous, rapidly growing inequality of wealth and income; the impunity of the financial-industry scammers whose greed and fraud precipitated the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; a broken political system hobbled by a Republican right willing and usually able to block any measures, however timid and partial, that might relieve the suffering. 




From the introduction to We are the 99 Percent:


They say it’s because you’re lazy. They say it’s because you make poor choices. They say it’s because you’re spoiled. If you’d only apply yourself a little more, worked a little harder, planned a little better, things would go well for you. Why do you need more help? Haven’t they helped you enough? They say you have no one to blame but yourself. They say it’s all your fault.


And here:

The American Dream is not to become rich. It is to see the fruit of your labors, whatever they may be. It is to EARN your rewards. But Corporate America has taken the rewards away. All that is left is work and desperation. (Or no work, and even more desperation) A home, health insurance, providing for your children, giving them a future…those things SHOULD be attainable.  But unions are gone or ineffective. Politicians are corrupt. The Supreme Court values the speech of corporations over those of the people.  Jobs are taken overseas. 

“These are the times that try men’s souls.” Thomas Paine said that.  He also said, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” 

And there's this astonishing article.

There's something very different going on here -- it's not scary to me as much as inevitable. Dare I say exciting? Hopeful? Possible?


What do you think?

Get me out of here

I am stuck in the Washington Dulles airport for four hours. The name of the above pictured store is AMERICA and is staffed by a polite, young Indian man. I think I'm going to have to assuage my anxiety with a Wetzel Pretzel dog. Then I'll finish the Michelle Bachmann article I'm reading in the New Yorker over drinks in the airport bar. Multiple ones.

Cakes and Kate

I made two cakes today, a lemon cake with lemon frosting and tiny little squares of candied lemon peel on top. Just before the customer came to pick it up, I opened the box to check on it and saw three splits on the top and even though I don't gasp, I exclaimed and lifted it carefully out of the box and proceeded to patch it, shaking my head, wondering what had happened because except for the time I forgot the sugar in a cake long ago and it came out like a pancake and the other time when I grabbed the box of baking soda instead of baking powder and tasted its tinny witness only hours later (blaming Trader Joe's and their packaging, making the soda look like powder in a round container instead of a square), I have made few mistakes in the cake itself. Patched, it looked fine and I sent it on its way. While the frosting for the second cake was whirring in the bowl -- ten minutes and sometimes twenty -- I opened The New Yorker and began to read Kate Walbert's (a writer whom I met in NYC several years ago when I had actual lunch with her and some friends at my dear friend Jane's house, and I was in awe of her presence as I always am, writers my heroes and especially this one) new short story M&M World, so good that I stood, reading it as if I were on a subway, the whirring in my ears, instead of a roar, I stopped the machine and dipped a finger in, licked the sweet to check and then turned a page.