#which the stork dumped on their porch

[aalt-ctrl-del]

since its Pride Month I have to make the obligatory point that I didn't see a 'homosexual' rainbow until I was in highschool.

and my lore is as follows - I was a fruity lil rebel from dawn till dusk. I didn't know about asexual or homos or any of the spectrum of the flags until my early 20s. I wasn't blessed by a drag queen with the powers of queer. I didn't have a traumatic experience with some lesbian. Freudian theory doesn't have my number and we don't have long conversation in the study about desire or childhood insecurities or longing.

I'm queer and the only people that have a problem with this are the ones that have to look my way but have a bundle of insecurities they can't address internally. They are also uptight about having conversations with their children because they didn't develop past high school emotional mentality.

I don't have a problem with straight couples hauling their crouch goblins around - everyone knows you probably banged to fill your clown van with your brood. So don't have an issue with a complicated gender of ambiguity buying eggs at the store - we are capable of coexisting. Its just pastels and primary colors in a sequence trigger some people, and if that's the case you should probably reevaluate your priorities.

Pride month exists because the people who existed to make it happen, have been beaten, scorned, restricted from jobs, and had otherwise difficult and dangerous lives to make it happen. When someone gets hella angry at a straight person for existing, it's usually a personal issue or conflict.

When a person wearing a rainbow is targeted for hate and assault, its typically a surface level resentment dealing with something so shallow as their existence. And hate for colors and pastels and primaries persists to this day, driven by nothing but discomfort and the myth that "rainbows will turn my precious chosen first born main character baby into a gay".

No karen. Your kids gonna be gay regardless if rainbows and love existed. You either cope and love your child, or you turn into a praying mantis and eat your offspring due to stress. Dont be a praying mantis, be a functional adult who is now a parent. Civilization will appreciate your love, support, and guiding your kids through the struggles they face because people are going to hate them. Hate shouldn't fester in their home life too.

[everydaybrautigan]

Revenge of the Lawn

My grandmother, in her own way, shines like a beacon down the stormy American past. She was a bootlegger in a little county up in the state of Washington. She was also a hand­some woman, close to six feet tall who carried 190 pounds in the grand operatic manner of the early 1900s. And her spe­cialty was bourbon, a little raw but a welcomed refreshment in those Volstead Act days.

She of course was no female Al Capone, but her bootleg­ging feats were the cornucopia of legend in her neck of the woods, as they say. She had the county in her pocket for years. The sheriff used to call her up every morning and give her the weather report and tell her how the chickens were laying.

I can imagine her talking to the sheriff: “Well, Sheriff, I hope your mother gets better soon. I had a cold and a bad sore throat last week myself. I’ve still got the sniffles. Tell her hello for me and to drop by the next time she’s down this way. And if you want that case, you can pick it up or I can have it sent over as soon as Jack gets back with the car. "No, I don’t know if I’m going to the firemen’s ball this year, but you know that my heart is with the firemen. If you don’t see me there tonight, you tell the boys that. No, I’ll try to get there, but I’m still not fully recovered from my cold. It kind of climbs on me in the evening.” My grandmother lived in a three-story house that was old even in those days. There was a pear tree in the front yard which was heavily eroded by rain from years of not having any lawn. The picket fence that once enclosed the lawn was gone, too, and people just drove their cars right up to the porch. In the winter the front yard was a mud hole and in the summer it was hard as a rock. Jack used to curse the front yard as if it were a living thing. He was the man who lived with my grandmother for thirty years. He was not my grandfather, but an Italian who came down the road one day selling lots in Florida. He was selling a vision of eternal oranges and sunshine door to door in a land where people ate apples and it rained a lot. Jack stopped at my grandmother’s house to sell her a lot just a stone’s throw from downtown Miami, and he was de­livering her whiskey a week later. He stayed for thirty years and Florida went on without him. Jack hated the front yard because he thought it was against him. There had been a beautiful lawn there when Jack came along, but he let it wander off into nothing. He refused to water it or take care of it in any way. Now the ground was so hard that it gave his car flat tires in the summer. The yard was always finding a nail to put in one of his tires or the car was always sinking out of sight in the winter when the rains came on. The lawn had belonged to my grandfather who lived out the end of his life in an insane asylum. It had been his pride and joy and was said to be the place where his powers came from. My grandfather was a minor Washington mystic who in 1911 prophesied the exact date when World War I would start: June 28, 1914, but it had been too much for him. He never got to enjoy the fruit of his labor because they had to put him away in 1913 and he spent seventeen years in the state insane asylum believing he was a child and it was actually May 3, 1872. He believed that he was six years old and it was a cloudy day about to rain and his mother was baking a chocolate cake. It stayed May 3, 1872 for my grandfather until he died in 1930. It took seventeen years for that chocolate cake to be baked. There was a photograph of my grandfather. I look a great deal like him. The only difference being that I am over six feet tall and he was not quite five feet tall. He had a dark idea that being so short, so close to the earth and his lawn would help to prophesy the exact date when World War I would start. It was a shame that the war started without him. If only he could have held back his childhood for another year, avoided that chocolate cake, all of his dreams would have come true. There were always two large dents in my grandmother’s house that had never been repaired and one of them came about this way: In the autumn the pears would get ripe on the tree in the front yard and the pears would fall on the ground and rot and bees would gather by the hundreds to swarm on them. The bees somewhere along the line had picked up the habit of stinging Jack two or three times a year. They would sting him in the most ingenious ways. Once a bee got in his wallet and he went down to the store to buy some food for dinner, not knowing the mischief that he carried in his pocket. He took out his wallet to pay for the food. “That will be 72 cents,” the grocer said. “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” Jack replied, looking down to see a bee busy stinging him on the little finger. The first large dent in the house was brought about by still another bee landing on Jack’s cigar as he was driving the car into the front yard that peary autumn the stock market crashed. The bee ran down the cigar, Jack could only stare at it cross-eyed in terror, and stung him on the upper lip. His reaction to this was to drive the car immediately into the house. That front yard had quite a history after Jack let the lawn go to hell. One day in 1932 Jack was off running an errand or delivering something for my grandmother. She wanted to dump the old mash and get a new batch going. Because Jack was gone, she decided to do it herself. Grandmother put on a pair of railroad overalls that she used for working around the still and filled a wheelbarrow with mash and dumped it out in the front yard. She had a flock of snow-white geese that roamed outside the house and nested in the garage that had not been used to park the car since the time Jack had come along selling futures in Florida. Jack had some kind of idea that it was all wrong for a car to have a house. I think it was something that he had learned in the Old Country. The answer was in Italian because that was the only language Jack used when he talked about the garage. For everything else he used English, but it was only Italian for the garage. After Grandmother had dumped the mash on the ground near the pear tree, she went back to the still down in the basement and the geese all gathered around the mash and started talking it over. I guess they came to a mutually agreeable decision because they all started eating the mash. As they ate the mash their eyes got brighter and brighter and their voices, in appreciation of the mash, got louder and louder. After a while one of the geese stuck his head in the mash and forgot to take it out. Another one of the geese cackled madly and tried to stand on one leg and give a W. C. Fields imitation of a stork. He maintained that position for about a minute before he fell on his tail feathers. My grandmother found them all lying around the mash in the positions that they had fallen. They looked as if they had been machine-gunned. From the height of her operatic splendor she thought they were all dead. She responded to this by plucking all their feathers and piling their bald bodies in the wheelbarrow and wheeling them down to the basement. She had to make five trips to accom­modate them. She stacked them like cordwood near the still and waited for Jack to return and dispose of them in a way that would provide a goose for dinner and a small profit by selling the rest of the flock in town. She went upstairs to take a nap after finishing with the still. It was about an hour later that the geese woke up. They had devastating hangovers. They had all kind of gathered themselves uselessly to their feet when suddenly one of the geese noticed that he did not have any feathers. He informed the other geese of their condition, too. They were all in despair. They paraded out of the basement in a forlorn and wobbly gang. They were all standing in a cluster near the pear tree when Jack drove into the front yard. The memory of the time he had been stung on the mouth by that bee must have come back to his mind when he saw the defeathered geese standing there, because suddenly like a madman he tore out the cigar he had stuck in his mouth and threw it away from him as hard as he could. This caused his hand to travel through the windshield. A feat that cost him thirty-two stitches. The geese stood by staring on like some helpless, primitive American advertisement for aspirin under the pear tree as Jack drove his car into the house for the second and last time in the Twentieth Century. The first time I remember anything in life occurred in my grandmother’s front yard. The year was either 1936 or 1937. I remember a man, probably Jack, cutting down the pear tree and soaking it with kerosene. It looked strange, even for a first memory of life, to watch a man pour gallons and gallons of kerosene all over a tree lying stretched out thirty feet or so on the ground, and then to set fire to it while the fruit was still green on the branches. -Richard Brautigan