4/4/14, Day 13, 849: Kendre’s Bar
This day is so named for the latest scene from Word(s), where Marina goes to patch things up (or does she?) with Kendre after their last battle. She meets him at one of his favorite bars, a place she has never been before, and he says this…
KENDRE
Ah, but this is no gay bar, my dear one,
This is a salon for the melancholy homosexual
You will know this by the sad jazz played by the frumpled professor at the old piano, just enough out of tune to make you suspect
That you’re all under water
That the great ship, the S.S. Sodomite, has sunk,
And we’re all so many leagues under the sea
That desire is unfathomable.
Look, there is the fading opium trader,
Too aristocratic for the drugs of the streets
His eyes are polished sea glass and his tongue
Lolls in and out like the plume of a rare sea-flower;
Look, there the dread Captain Black Bear,
Many a bottom has he made walk his plank before
Sending them to a deeper down, but now,
This sunk pirate’s peg has rotted to nautical flotsam,
And he rehearses his past over Long Island Ice Teas.
Look, the aging drag queen, fabulous jelly-fish,
Portuguese-woman-of war, bloated, painted an inch thick,
Drifting though cold tides, trembling for hot touch.
Make sure you choose the right door when using the bathroom, dear,
For I’m sure one of them leads straight to purgatory
And locks behind you.
Yup, I’m having fun with characters who can do things like this. My only fear is that I am coming to love them too much to hurt them the way the play may demand…
Technique never stands still: it only advances or retreats…
Writing: 81 out of 95 days (Word(s))
Spanish: 79 out of 95 days
What small things did I do yesterday to help build the Honeycomb?
(And what does it mean to “Help build the honeycomb?”)
- Signed Senator Gillibrand’s petition to lower the interest rate on federal-held student loans;
- Ate all vegetarian meals (mostly organic, some local) and added no direct food waste (plastics bags, plastic water bottles, etc.),
- Signed a petition to McDonalds to end wage theft;
- Asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore Idaho wolves to ESA protections;
- Signed a petition against the Ryan budget;
- Wrote a letter to the editor of a local paper to respond to the Fifth Assessment Report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change–see below for the text:
If we’re being honest with ourselves, the tipping point should have tumbled a long time ago. The so-called climate change debate should have shifted towards long-term planning for deep, structural changes in our unsustainable energy policies. Yet on Monday of last week, the president of the Koch-funded Heartland Institute published an op-ed in Forbes arguing that climate change would have “net benefits,” the latest in a long line of anti-science propaganda to support the status quo.
It is time to forcefully state that climate change is a moral issue, and along with income inequality, and racial and gender inequities, perhaps the great moral issue for our country at this time. The Fifth Assessment Report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states clearly that “climate-change impacts are expected to exacerbate poverty in most developing countries,” and that it has already “negatively affected wheat and maze yields” and increased “risks from extreme events, such as heat waves, extreme precipitation, and coastal flooding.”
When human rights violations occur on the timetables of the human lifespan, we react immediately, viscerally and with great moral clarity. When the great human rights violation of climate exploitation unfold over the longer timetable of generations, we allow ourselves to grow passive, and to let the propaganda of the climate exploiters dull our moral purpose. And so we must summon the spirit of the great civil rights movements of the past, and advocate for the fierce moral urgency of the long now of climate justice.
Corinna Schulenburg 