Eye

I can be anyone.

That’s right: I can be anyone at all. I can be a stranger. What’s stopping me? Why am I still being me?

Blog Seeds

I jot down ideas on little scraps of paper. On envelopes. Sales receipts. Business cards. The backs of checkbooks and in an endless trail of notebooks. Folders and coupons and wine bottle labels, covered! I fill flash drives and I email myself. Leave voicemails I never listen to.

The blog ideas pile up and up.

Out at Dana’s storage space, cleaning out my stuff, I see that most of what I own is my idea pads. There are stories and there are quotes and there are opening lines for things I never got around to writing.

Until now, I mean. Until this week. This is the week I’m finally going to get around to writing them.

It will go like this: For the next month, everything I post here will come from a single sheet of paper I covered in ideas back seven years ago.

I’ve got them all typed out below and I’ll change them into red after I use them. See?

I Believe in Everything; Nothing is Sacred

Strangers send me messages. It happens all the time.

Every morning, I wake. I stretch. Then I just lie there in the dark to see how long I can lie there. In the dark. Lie there NOT checking my messages.

It’s all about discipline.

Sometimes I go a whole minute. Sometimes two. I hold out for as long as I can and when I finally give in, there they are. Sometime in the night, strangers have sent me messages. Again.

The people I know hardly ever bother with me, but these strangers? They really seem to care.

Some are sending me grammar corrections for the blog. Some just want to share the music they’re listening to. Recipes. Rumors. Photographs to turn me straight. I get damned to hell at least one time every week.

There’s an Elvis impersonator in Ohio who links me to clips of all his shows and a girl in Tallahassee needs help coming out to her mom. This one guy sends me pages and pages of angry emails. Every day. Without fail. He calls me a slut and tells me I am going to pay for what I’ve done.

Keep in mind these are strangers. 

Corpses in the Cargo

They’re coming! They are nearly here! 

If I Told You the Truth, You Wouldn't Believe Me Anyway

I feel safe in here.

Things rush by, outside my windows – most of them just shapes, blurs, really – and some of them seem more threatening than others seem, but I feel safe in here.

Mostly.

While I am in here, I find things to do to occupy my time. We all have to be doing something, after all, wherever we end up, and mostly, I blog.

I have been blogging like this for years. By now, it might even have been decades. I do not know. There is no way to know for certain.

A Hint of Areola

Three and a quarter years.

I have been writing this blog for three and a quarter years now.

Do you have any idea how long that is? Can you even begin to wrap your tiny brain around just how old that makes  “Lesbians in My Soup!”?

Three and a quarter years is longer than Jesus Christ’s ministry (and he never posted a single word!). It is longer than Kurt Cobain was famous. Three and a quarter years is longer than the lifespan of the American newt, and it is even longer than it took the ship to sink in that Titanic  movie back in the Nineties (and I feature 100% less Celine Dion).

Why, this blog is 62 years old in blog years!

No Soup for You

“So don’t cry for me , ‘cos I’m going away / But I’ll be back some lucky day.”  – Tom Waits, 1993

“It’s no big deal, it’s just… We have to go away and ... and dream it all up again.”  – Bono, 1989

--------------------------------------

This blog isn’t dead. It’s just sleeping.

This is an official notice. Effective immediately, I am taking some time off from writing “Lesbians in My Soup.”

I do not know how long, exactly. I’m taking as long as it takes.

Way, way back, back in August of 2011, I set a goal for this blog and the goal was this: I was going to post at least four original pieces every month for a year.

And I did! I did that and then some.

That was nineteen months ago, and I’ve posted some amazing and fun blogs since then. I’ve blogged about Dana’s religious conversion and I’ve blogged our break-up. I’ve written about meeting a redneck God and I have written about the right way to kill baby seals. I’ve even written some stuff that did not make very much sense at all.

Now I need a break.

I’ll still be around: I’m on Twitter and I have a Tumblr and do Google+.  You should connect with me there and/or chat with me and/or partake in whatever interaction is appropriate in that particular forum.

I hope to see you soon!

The Universal Brotherhood of the Experts on Everything

They say a lot of things, and one of the things they say is that there exists a species of hominid known as The Expert. Maybe it’s more of a tribe, really. An eternal secret society.

I picture them now – The Experts, I mean – standing around somewhere, experting. They’re wearing woolen hoods. Dark, woolen robes. The robes are tied at the waist with long golden ropes. You can’t see their faces, and if you did see their faces, you’d probably turn to stone for all the wisdom coming at you. And the eyes, the eyes sparkle with the knowledge that is full to bursting in the space behind them.

There might be nimbuses involved.  

These Experts, we don’t ever really see them, of course. You don’t and I don’t, that is. It’s probably because we don’t hang out in the right places – we don’t hang out in ivory towers, on mountain tops, or wherever it is The Expertsin those aforementioned long, dark woolen robes, with their hidden eyes, wherever it is they all hang out.

Would you… could you… ever deign to join their ranks?

Moondance Pie

Alright. C’mon. Let’s get started, shall we?

Take your seats, please. We are trying something new tonight. It is a first tonight for “Lesbians in My Soup.”

We’re experimenting with heterosexual men tonight. Specifically, with a fellow who goes by the name of Mooner Johnson. He is our GUEST. We are honored to have him!

Please give him your undivided attention. There will be a quiz at the end of the blog, and counselors will be available if you should feel you need to talk to one.

So with that, I give you our Guest Blogger, Mooner Johnson…

___________________________________________

So.  Whenever I pay a visit to a buddy blogger's place of business, like what I'm doing here, I don't ever know how to start things off.  You guys don't know me, I don't know you, so I have no credibility whatsoever.  Not that knowing me would grant credibilities, but as a full disclosure kind of guy I want you to always have everything you need to judge the truths and accuracies contained in my words.  I owe it to Katy to not fuck things up too badly. 

It's like with my good buddy BJ, who loaned his chain saw to a neighbor for a few hours' use.  Being a thoughtful and appreciative sort, the neighbor decided to perform some routine maintenance on BJ's chainsaw before returning the saw as a gift for its use.  He got on the INTERNET and found a volume of maintenance instructions posted by the saw's manufacturer with pictures and graphs, and even some videos for instruction.  Long story short, the nice neighbor totally fucked the chainsaw all the way up. 

Like BJ's neighbor, my native habit is to use my good intentions as tools of destruction.  I wrote some stories for this one buddy when he went to vacation last year, and The US Department of Defense shut his site down.  It wasn't my fault, mind you, but it was my doings.  So, your having a frame of reference through which to process what follows is vital.

Having said all of that, my name is Butcher Einstein “Mooner” Johnson, I'm an environmentalist who leans quite far to the left, I think Texas Governor Rick “The Pompadoured Prick” Perry is an asshole, and I am returning a favor to my beloved Katy wherein I will provide her with content for her website.  Katy's said favor was to produce a Public Service Announcement that she made for me when evil right-wing Christian conservative religious fuckballs spread rumors that I was having a big “open bar” party out to my place, and everyone was invited.

Everyone on the entire worldwide web.

Not that I don't like parties, it's just that I like to limit the percentages of evil right-wing Christian conservative religious fuckballs allowed entry out to my ranch.  I find that it takes but a small number of those assholes to reach critical mass and create circumstances under which I end up in jail.  Not that I mind jail all that much, but if I get jailed one more time before Halloween, my psycho therapist has promised to lock me up over to the Loony Bin and forget me.

I hate that fucking Loony Bin.

Every party I throw begins its guest list with at least one evil right-wing Christian conservative fuckball attending on a pre-confirmed RSVP.  That reservation would be made in the name of Mother Johnson, my mother, and mother likewise to my lesbian sister, Sister.  Which brings up a point.  Mother is my mother, Sister my sister, my grandmother is Gram, my father was Daddy and his father was Granddad.

Whythefuck am I Mooner?  I mean other than the fact that I'll drop my pants to my ankles and show you my ass for no apparent reason.  Then again, Brother would be a name that I wouldn't like and Sonny simply doesn't fit.  I'm many things, but I'm not your fucking Sonny.

Did I tell you I have a serious case of the dreaded ADHD and that fuck is my favorite word?  That little fact is likely the second thing I should have told you up there when I started.  I should have said, “My name is Mooner Johnson and I have the ADHD and blah, blah, and blah.” 

You could buy my silly fucking book, Full Rising Mooner, to get a full low-down on my world, or you could go over to my bloggie site and get confused for free.  The linkster stuff for the book is on the Bloggie Roller dealie.  I don't really give a shit either way because this isn't about me.  This is about social justice. 

Or is it about social injustice?  See what I mean about perspectives?

Probably not Mooner's house.
But how Katy pictures Mooner's house.

Since I've already introduced you to Mother and Sister, I'll use those two of the many strong women in my family to demonstrate my points.  When my sister exited my mother's womb, she came out feet first and shopping for Birkenstocks.  Sister was born lesbian and never had a closet to shed.  She was accepted as such by our entire family, including Mother, and she grew into a highly productive adult—even a model citizen.

Me, while I was always ready to defend her against any attackers, it was usually Sister who came to my defense.  Now, Sister is married to my third ex-wife, Anna the Amazon.  At six foot one, Anna is but three inches my junior and I'm stopping myself from telling you all sorts of stuff that you don't need to hear about my brief marriage to the blond goddess.  Let me summarize for you by saying that my sister is a typical American woman in every way except that her chosen life mate is another, mostly typical, woman.  I love them both and admire them as well.

My mother is likewise a typical American woman in every way, just so long as you like your typicals to be prejudiced, bigoted, and filled with the dogmatic religious idiocy of the Southern Baptist Convention.  I'm certain that my mother loves both my sister and me, but I'm just as certain that she doesn't like or approve of us. 

The certainty of her love is assumed.  Knowing that she dislikes and disapproves of us is rock-solid first-hand knowledge.

“I don't know what I have done to deserve having such an ungrateful heathen for a son and a homo-sex-u-al for a daughter.  God must think I've the shoulders of Atlas,” was Mother's martyred lament at breakfast a couple hours ago.  She always says the word homosexual like that, as if she's saying the word around a mouthful of dog shit.

Sister and Anna were out to the ranch this morning because today is “Pig Day” in my kitchen.  Every meal will feature fresh pork products carved from the carcass of a hog named Sweet Willie who was raised on a neighbor's farm.  As I am a terrific cooker of all things pork, Pig Day draws a crowd.  If I was to actually have a party this weekend, I would serve pig meat.

“What you have done to deserve us, dear Mother, is you've grown to become a bigoted, close-minded asshole who has forgotten how to think for herself,” I answered.  “You've gone from being a loving, gracious woman and turned into something unpleasant.  You and your Tea Bagger buddies have steeped your brew too long.  You're a bitter old bag with no love in your heart, and I think a major disappointment to Jesus.  You want some more bacon?  Smoked pig face?”

Smoked pig face is my favorite part of freshly cooked fresh hog.  I love the crunchy skin and ears and snout.  Most people turn all squeamish and shit just hearing about it.  And before you start on me about disrespecting my mother, stop.  Our current relationship is the result of decades of me bashing my head on the good son wall.  My mother is mean and vindictive and self centered.  And she lives in my home and eats my food, and she shits all over me and the people/things I love.  It has been only in the last month that I have allowed abrasiveness to enter my side of our relationship.  And I must tell you that it feels really fucking good!

OK, wait.  Maybe it feels really fucking well.  Hell, it feels good and well too.

“Answer me this, dear Mother, if you will.  If you Tea Baggers are all about small government and staying out of peoples' lives, why do you keep attacking homosexual people on every front?”

A germane question in these prickly times for American politics if I do say so myself.

“What part of 'God hates homosexuals' is so very difficult for you to understand, Mooner?  Are you so heretical a heathen that you deny God's word?”  Mother asked.

Now here my mother had set a trap for me and stepped into it her very ownself.  God has been making routine visits to see me and to tell me shit. “Well, Mommy Dearest, God came to visit me out to the dock just a few days ago and the Big Guy/Girl/Thing told me that you are full of shit.  His precise words were, 'Those silly assholes are full of shit.  Some of the best among you are homosexual.'  Then God and I discussed some of those gay people, like Lloyd and Katy and John Travolta.”

And don't you Katy readers even start on me about Johnny T.  That dog's done shed its hair.

“John Travolta is not a homo-sex-u-al, dummy, he's married and has a pilot's license and all of those big jet airplanes.”  My mother has interesting logic—the same logic used in many cases by right-wing bigots nationwide.

“But he is a devil worshiper, so you might have a point,” Mother added.  “Anybody who believes that some guy from outer space is God is a coo-coo if you ask me.”

Exactly.

“Well, Mother, my God is better than your God.  My Big He/She/It is loving and inclusive and only wishes that we earthlings learn to appreciate and care about one and another.  Your God is, in all truth and actuality, a narrow minded, bigoted asshole.”

Have you ever been around a narrow minded and bigoted fine Christian lady when somebody calls their God a narrow minded, bigoted asshole?

Anyway, I had a point when I started this but I don't even know what it was.  That's one of the frustrating things about the ADHD, you know, getting off track and then tracking off into the wilderness.  Oh, did I tell you about the three-way sex dream I had with Hilary Clinton and the Governor of New Mexico?  I love sex dreams.  I've met some incredible women in my dreams.

OK, I just hit 1,750 words and I haven't said squat.  So let me give you something to think about.  Whenever God comes to see me, we drink a few icy-cold Carta Blanca beers and shoot the shit awhile.  He calls me “Dude” sometimes, and sometimes He lets me ask Him questions.  I asked God this one question on his last visit, but he would neither confirm nor deny the veracity of my hypothesis. 

Here's what I presented to God.  I think that the Pope is Queen Elizabeth's maternal twin and they were separated at birth.  What do you think? 

Manana, y'all.

__________________________________________

QUIZ:

1. If Mooner’s sister, Sister, were to have a daughter, what would that daughter’s name be?

2. What was the symbolic significance of John Travolta in this blog post?

3. How would you describe the level of vulgar language in this blog post?

            a. Too much

            b. Too little

            c. Just about right

            d. What was vulgar about it?

4. What effect has reading this blog had on your likeliness to buy Mooner’s book?

            a. More likely to buy

            b. Less likely to buy

            c. No difference

            d. Been hearing good things about Finnegans Wake

The 5 Stages of Writer’s Block

After five days without writing, everything starts to go a little hinky at the corners.

This always seems to happen when I’ve been on a real roll – the tail end of a few weeks where it’s felt as though I could do no wrong, write nothing bad, a time when even the flimsiest of ideas has blossomed at my fingertips into a row of fully-flowered crape myrtle trees, almost as though I’ve known what it was I’ve been doing all along. And so it is I’ll be feeling good, abuzz with that sort of contact high that happens when my every word connects with its intended audience, and then… NUTHIN’.

And this NUTHIN’ is the worst feeling in the world so I can’t think about it directly, but after five days without writing, the NUTHIN’ is hot on my trail and it’s closing in fast, and this is when the FIVE STAGES OF WRITER’S BLOCK kick in.

DENIAL.   During the first stage of writer’s block, it remains possible for me to pretend nothing is wrong. To go about my day on a normal schedule, to eat and to groom and to wash myself just like this gal here or like that guy over there, or even like you, over there in your corner with that dumb grin on your face. It remains possible for me to look the other way, but the truth is, I will already be exhibiting classic junkie behavior, with all the telltale signs of the gambler, the crackhead, and the sex addict.

They say that an addict who has gone without a fix looks at the world differently, looks at every single thing around him as a potential means for obtaining what it is he lacks. The gambler, if only he had that watch from around your wrist or that wedding band from around your finger, why, he could have him one more round at the craps table and this time, he could finally turn his luck around once and for all.

After five days without writing – right when the denial is kicking in hardcore – I’m the same way. Like maybe you’ll be telling me a mildly amusing tidbit about your family’s recent Passover observance and I’ll be sitting there, half-listening, figuring in my head how much mileage I might be able to get out of your tale if I were to turn it into a short story. I mean, I’m not above stealing, but could I convince readers that my family is Jewish? Can I melt it down for its parts and then Frankenstein it into something that is even remotely usable?

ANGER.   After seven days without writing, I no longer want to hear any of your cute Passover stories. After seven days without writing, I spend most of my time pacing back and forth in front of my bookshelves, snapping up a random novel here and there, reading its opening line and then plunging it right back onto the bookshelf where I found it.

I sweat a lot on days like this, and if you come into my room to, say, ask where I left the car keys or whether I need anything at the grocery store, chances are about dead even that I’ll snap at you, blaming your interruption for my failure to produce even a single word all day.

There is no winning with me when I am in the midst of this stage of writer’s block. The best you can do is to stand clear and hope that maybe it will pass quickly into…

BARGAINING.  Heaven forbid it should so happen that I go nine days without writing!

I am unable to fathom what kind of twisted bastard of a Creator-God would set into motion a Universe in which such a thing as nine days without writing is even possible. But while the twisted bastardly nature of the Creator-God might be a fantastic topic for some future blog, the ugly reality is that nine days without writing is not unknown. Nine days happens. Nine days in which I watch my blog’s page views steadily dropping farther and farther and… This is about the time when the Bargaining comes.

After nine long days without writing, I will sit in front of my blank screen and I will think,  “Hey! Maybe I can just write something short. Something to get me back up on the horse.”

Or  “Maybe I can do a picture post with some jokes thrown in to break up the monotony.”

Or even,  “Oh, the hell with it. I’ll just make snide remarks about Rick Perry again for a page and a half!”

But no matter how simple the writing goal, no matter how far I drop my sights and my standards, the Bargaining will fail. This is writer’s block, after all, pure and simple, and there’s no way to cheat it.

DEPRESSION.   After eleven days without writing, I become convinced I will never write again, that writing was a phase I was lucky enough to pass through for a little while. Now, with my writing days behind me, I am left with a couple decent manuscripts and a whole boatload of blog posts to show for it. Someday, years from now, I will pull a few yellowed scraps of paper out of a foot locker in the attic so I can show my grandchildren how Gramma Katy spent her misspent youth.  

After eleven days without writing, I stay in my room a lot, with the covers pulled up over my head, taking shots of Ni-Quil. In my mind, I relive all of the good times I had writing, those magical days before my muse deserted me. I think of the people who told me that something I’d written changed the way they thought about a particular topic or who told me that my writing made them want to try writing, too.

I lie there, like some Robert Plant circa 1984 or a David Bowie circa 1984 or a Paul McCartney circa, well, 1984, and I wonder what I am going to do with the rest of my life, a life that could – who knows? – still have another seven or even eight years left in it.

ACCEPTANCE.  After fourteen days without writing, I get up from the bed. I take a tentative step towards the bathroom. I shower. Brush my teeth. I gather all of the empty Ni-Quil bottles from my bedroom and I throw them into a trash bag. After that, I roam through the rest of the house with the trash bag, and I clean the odd scraps of paper and trash from everyone else’s rooms, too.

I wash my clothes. I load up the dish washer. I go online and do a Google search to learn how to load a dish washer properly.

I think to myself,   “I’ll no doubt be doing a lot of dishes from here on out, now that I am not going to be spending my time writing.”

Then New Me – the Me who doesn’t write – alphabetizes my nonfiction books. She alphabetizes my fiction books. My religious texts and books of poetry. I sit down in front of the television, remote in hand, I take a deep breath and – only moments before diving (for the first time) into all that reality television I’ve been hearing so much about – I think,  “Hey, you know what? I could probably make a fairly decent blog post out of ‘The 5 Stages of Writer’s Block’! Hell it’s at least worth a try…”

Then I run upstairs to my computer, and the whole cycle begins again… and again… and again…

Shakespeare Can Haz Cheezburger?

I read a book by Nabokov recently and reading a book by Nabokov recently made me realize that I am not a writer. Or I am not a “real writer”, anyway.

Like a Refugee



I am a refugee from the political blogosphere. 

Here, take a whiff of my fingers. You can still smell it on me.

That’s how recent it’s been.

I find myself looking over my shoulder all of the time. In the grocery store. At the post office. Looking around to make sure they haven’t found me.

Refugees can get paranoid, you see.

With me, it’s all sort of touch and go. Even now. I take it day by day.

For five years, I was a ghost writer for several high-ish profile political blogger-commentators. If your daughter had a piano recital the same night you needed to write 100 column inches blaming George W. Bush for glitter glue, I was the one you called. If you were at a loss for how Obama’s stance on abortion could have caused that Icelandic volcano to erupt, then no worries, my friend: You just call Katy, wait a couple hours, and Whap! – a bitterly partisan blog you could slap your name on and hand over to any newspaper or web site in the world.

Guaranteed to turn readers’ faces red. To get blood pressure spiking. Tongues wagging. Et cetera, et cetera.