Enough is enough...

...according to Emma's Revolution:

In honor of Spot, out in the unknown universe

Spot, about 2003, up on the fridge
in my 39th Street apartment

Way back in August of 1997, I was living in a little house in Eugene, Oregon with my old cat Pounce. My long term girlfriend had left me that May, but I was getting over it. I worked at my janitorial job at the Eugene Public Library. I wrote poems, tinkered with old computers, thought about making a Web page. Life was pretty good, actually.

Then, on or about August 3rd, I heard a meow out on my side porch. I thought the neighbor's kitten had gotten loose. When I opened the door, a beautiful little tortoiseshell calico ran inside the house. She was about a year old, so far as I could tell, and she was all fur and bones. She dashed over to Pounce's food dish and gulped down over the food before I could throw her out.

I thought I didn't need another cat. I called the new arrival "Spot," as in "Out, damned Spot!" But it was too late. She had already won my heart.  Pounce tried to be patient, even when the kittens arrived. But that's another story.

Spot and I had almost 15 great years together. She died a month ago tomorrow.

Here's to you, Spotter Cat, to your intelligence, and your sly sense of humor, and your indomitable will. Here's to the way you would hide in the garden or under the house, and to the way you would yowl when I would pick you up and bring you in. And to the way you would come to investigate when I played the harmonica. I hope you are having fun out there in the unknown universe, wherever you are, and that you never have to go inside any more.

Summer begins and the struggle continues

As Starhawk reminds us, today--and tonight--marks the Solstice. For all of its great and sometimes excessive heat, summer is a time of great joy for me. On this Solstice, I like to think of things that help me feel connected to the Earth, other women, the community, and the ongoing struggle to set the world right.

Here are two random things that give me hope:

First, thanks to Spinifex for sharing this radio interview with renowned Indian eco-feminist Vandana Shiva.  Shiva describes not only the peril we face, but the great and growing strength of the movement to undo that peril.

Second, thanks to Tamlyn for sharing this video made by Oklahoma labor activists. The times we live in are both scary and exciting, and seeing that activists here are working to raise the voice of ordinary working people gives me hope.

At the risk of sounding like a pagan, I would like to say that the Earth and her seasons are sacred. Actually, I guess I am a pagan of sorts, an agnostic pagan. So finally, thanks to Beacon Press for sharing this video of poet Mary Oliver reading her poem "The Summer Day."

Hurricane Irene

I'd rather be suffering through record heat in Oklahoma than going through Hurricane Irene back home in Philadelphia, thank you very much. According to the New York Times, the storm made landfall in North Carolina about 7:30 Saturday morning, and continued to move slowly northward along the Atlantic Seaboard as of a little after midnight Sunday morning. New York City shut down in anticipation of the the storm's arrival, including the city's subway system.

A variety of online written and live video sources reported that there were some deaths. The highest number I heard so far was nine. This seems like a remarkably low number given that the hurricane is affecting the nation's most heavily populated area. The relatively weak but massive hurricane seems to be causing widespread flooding and power outages.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a time-lapse video of the storm as it made its way from Puerto Rico and the Bahamas to the East Coast of the United States, and a graphic that will let you track the storm.

Given that it is seriously past my bedtime, I am reminded of  this old folk song.

Last week...

...was not a quiet week in Oklahoma City.

First, populist candidate Ed Shadid defeated bank officer Charlie Swinton in the runoff election for the Ward 2 City Council seat.Doug Dawgz Blog has the complete story.

Then there were the fires out by Spencer. Sadly, several peoples lost homes due to these blazes. Happily, no one got hurt seriously. I have some good friends who live out there who came through okay with their house and outbuildings intact. But it was a stressful and exhausting few days for them.

On Thursday night I took off my eyeglasses, picked up a shovel and a bucket, and did my best to help out by mopping up some hot spots. (I can sort of see without glasses, and fine ash can destroy a pair of plastic lenses very fast.) The shovel did a pretty good job, but I kept wishing for something to cut branches out of my way and something to break apart burning logs. In other words, I kept wishing I had a pulaski. When I described this to my friends afterward, they were baffled. You might have thought I was asking for a mythical contraption like a left-handed smoke shifter. But no, it's a wildland firefighting tool invented by the renowned fire boss Ed Pulaski, whose experiences in the great 1910 fire also brought about worker's compensation insurance. The firefighting tool he invented combines an axe with a grubbing hoe. You can see a picture here.

Being not only a former wildland firefighter, but also a former Girl Scout, I decided I wanted to be prepared for future occasions. After much searching, I was able to find what I needed at a chain home improvement store. They called it a "landscape axe." I would like to hope that this purchase would work to prevent my needing to use this tool in the future--a form of magic sort of like rolling down the car windows to bring on a rain storm. But I'm not optimistic. Maybe one dry spring doesn't prove anything, but I'm thinking this climate change thing is for real.

Below is a photo from back in the day. That's me on the right:

Is this typical springtime in Oklahoma?

It seems a bit extreme to me. Wildfire Forces Evacuation Order In Spencer - News9.com

Fire and Rain

In the morning, I wake up in my little house and switch on the radio, and then I usually fall back to sleep for a while. I hear little bits of things and remember them. Lately, I have been hearing about floods in Pakistan and wildfires in Russia, and I've started thinking the obvious question--are these things related to climate change?

CommonDreams.org has picked up a post from Reuters that tries to answer that question. According to this article, you can't really take any individual weather-related catastrophe and blame it on climate change. But the general increase in weather-related disasters probably is a result.

Reinsurer Munich Re said a natural catastrophe database it runs "shows that the number of extreme weather events like windstorm and floods has tripled since 1980, and the trend is expected to persist."

The worst floods in Pakistan in 80 years have killed more than 1,600 people and left 2 million homeless.

"Global warming is one reason" for the rare spate of recent weather extremes, said Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengarbe, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

He pointed to the heat wave and related forest fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, rains in China and downpours in countries including Germany and Poland. "We have four such extremes in the last few weeks. This is very seldom," he said.

According to JOTMAN, the Russian wildfires are doing more than spreading deadly levels of carbon monoxide:

As if things in Russia were not looking sufficiently apocalyptic already, with 100-degree temperatures and noxious fumes rolling in from burning peat bogs and forests, there is growing alarm here that fires in regions coated with fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 24 years ago could now be emitting plumes of radioactive smoke.

The Russian situation is serious enough, according to the New York Times, that it might force the Russian government to develop more aggressive policies to moderate climate change.

Recent comments made by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev link climate change and the wildfires, stoking speculation about what Russia may bring to the table in the next round of international climate talks. But once the wildfires' smoke clears, they may not amount to much, according to Alexey Kokorin, the Moscow-based climate negotiator for the World Wildlife Fund.

Medvedev said in a public speech last week, "Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions," according to a published transcript of the speech. "This means that we need to change the way we work, and change the methods that we used in the past," he said.

In another speech, Medvedev said these events must act as a "wake-up call" for heads of state and social organizations, "in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate," as reported by TIME.

"These are not brave statements for European leaders or Obama, but for a Russian president, it's a new statement," said WWF's Kokorin. Even last year, Medvedev's speeches on climate change were more about helping other continents like Europe and Asia without really focusing on the negative and severe impacts for Russia itself, he said.

Meanwhile, environmental writer Bill McKibben discusses the need for a strong grassroots movement to force the US government to take responsible action:

Those demonstrations were just a start (one we should have made long ago). We're following up in October -- on 10-10-10 -- with a Global Work Party. All around the country and the world people will be putting up solar panels and digging community gardens and laying out bike paths. Not because we can stop climate change one bike path at a time, but because we need to make a sharp political point to our leaders: we're getting to work, what about you?

We need to shame them, starting now. And we need everyone working together. This movement is starting to emerge on many fronts. In September, for instance, opponents of mountaintop removal are converging on DC to demand an end to the coal trade. That same month, Tim DeChristopher goes on trial in Salt Lake City for monkey-wrenching oil and gas auctions by submitting phony bids.  (Naomi Klein and Terry Tempest Williams have called for folks to gather at the courthouse.)

Reason, intuition, emotion, and two of my favorite philosophers

I've been talking with friends about the relationship between (among?) reason, intuition, and emotion. Some friends seem to think that reason should be used to guide and restrain the unruly impulses of emotion, which can otherwise get is into such big trouble. Other friends argue that clear intuition, properly understood, is the best guide to action. I think it all goes together, reason, emotion, and intuition, and they all affect and correct each other. My friends are tolerant and open-minded people, but they seem to think that this is a rather unusual idea. As much as I would like to believe that I am the creative genius that has discovered this innovative way of looking at the world, it just ain't so. It is something that many radical feminists and lesbian feminists have been saying for years. This discussion inspired me to look up what two of my favorite philosophers have to say about the subject.

First, here is a passage from Mary Daly's autobiography, Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage. Starting on page 74, she describes her struggle with the concepts of reason and intuition when writing her dissertation for her doctoral dissertation in philosophy:

The point is that although I cherished this intuition, and could see no use in philosophizing without it, perhaps even in living without it, I wanted a clear defense of intellectual rigor/vigor. This insistence on having it all--intuition and arduous reasoning that is rooted in intuition--was of deep importance to me. I loved both modes of knowing, which I recognized as essential to each other. Sickened by the downgrading and caricaturing of intuition and the relegation of this pathetically reduced "talent" to women--which of course also implied the safeguarding of "reason" as the prerogative of males--I was struggling to Name this game which had been played by academics for centuries. It was indeed one of the masters' major mind fucks of the millennia.

That is one of my favorite things about feminist thinking, this wild insistence on having it all, on not having ourselves cut up into little pieces that get labeled "masculine" or "feminine." Another example of this wild insistence comes from radical lesbian Sarah Hoagland, whose 1988 book Lesbian Ethics has been one of the major influences on my own thinking. Hoagland has a long and interesting chapter on "Integrating Reason and Emotions," which I haven't the time to re-read at the moment. I'll content myself with quoting most of her first paragraph, found on page 157:

I want to discuss the split between reasoning and emotions, and the subsequent belief that one must control the other, which informs traditional anglo-european philosophy from ancient greece to the present and which we as lesbians perpetuate in our interactions. I want to suggest that accepting the split keeps alive the idea of power as control and keeps our selves fragmented and isolated. My overall argument is that our moral agency is encouraged by integrating and so politicizing reasoning and emotions within the community, for this is how we get back in touch with the energy that moves us, energy which is deadened when we separate reasoning and emotions.

Here is to unfucking all of our our minds and putting our reason, emotion, and intuition back together.

Who was that masked animal?

I have always liked raccoons. I have fond memories of looking out of my bedroom window at my mother's house in Philadelphia on a cold winter night to find a raccoon snuggled up to the other side of the window, soaking up the heat. I also remember waking once in the middle of the night by the horrid noise of three raccoons fighting over some chicken bones out on the roof. My mother always put such things in a tightly sealed glass jar before she threw them away, but I suppose the neighbors weren't so careful.

Like many cute and appealing beings, raccoons are capable of causing great inconvenience to others. I've always known this. Besides raiding garbage cans, they are susceptible to a number of diseases -- although apparently, most of those diseases are rarely transmitted to humans. What I didn't know until just today -- when a friend was dealing with the aftermath of the situation -- is that raccoons are habitual attic invaders. According to www.raccoonatticguide.com:

THE MAJORITY OF THE TIME, A RACCOON IN AN ATTIC IS A FEMALE WITH YOUNG – Yes, the majority of the time, about 80% of cases of any raccoon in an attic, there’s a litter of 3-5 baby raccoon pups. The most common reason for a raccoon to enter an attic and choose to live there is the case of a female who needs a safe place to give birth and raise its babies. The mother raccoon usually gives birth shortly after moving into the attic, within 1-2 weeks, and then spends about 10 weeks nursing the baby raccoons. She is very active during this time, often leaving the attic during the daytime to gather additional food. Then at 10 weeks, she starts to take the young out at night to forage.

Removing these animals can be difficult and complicated, even for a professional wildlife trapping specialist:

As stated, the vast majority of the time, the raccoon in the attic is a mother with babies. You don’t trap the mother and leave the babies up there to cry for two weeks, die, and cause a big odor. First, you go into the attic and find the babies! That’s right, you explore the whole attic and remove the young by hand. Be careful, there’s a protective and ferocious mother raccoon nearby! Actually, I’ve removed hundreds of raccoon litters in my lifetime, and I’ve never been attacked. But there have been some close calls, so do so at your own risk. It might be a good idea to wait until the mother isn’t nearby the litter before removing them. Of course, when in an attic, be mindful to walk only on the wooden beams, or you’ll fall through the ceiling. And be careful not to get insulation on your skin. I wear a HEPA filter mask to avoid breathing in airborne dust particles. And I wear thick gloves, particularly when handling wildlife, even baby raccoons, which are usually gentle, but can bite and claw. I put them in a pillowcase, and bring them out of the attic. They can often be very hard to find. The mother raccoon stashes them in a safe place, often down at the very tight edge of the attic, down in the soffit, or down a wall. I usually find myself climbing through very tight quarters to find the young. It can be hard to do, but a 75-year-old woman I know, a wildlife rehabber, has done it, so I guess it’s possible for anyone!

Interesting, isn't it, how this guy assumes that if a 75-year-old-woman can do it, anyone can do it. Other than that, he seems to know what he's talking about. (I'm assuming he's a guy, because his picture is on his home page, decked out in his respirator, with a big old raccoon in his grasp.) He notes, for instance that "Animals that live in houses also sometimes die in houses, and the odor of a dead raccoon is incredible." From my experience this afternoon, I can attest that he is absolutely right about that.

On the other hand, while human beings have great difficulty in keeping raccoons under control, there is at least one cat in the world who has no difficulty keeping the upper paw:

Federal district judge overturns gene patents

Usually the news I hear on the radio causes me to grumble and even to swear, but the other morning I heard a news item that caused me to cheer out loud and startle my cat.

On March 29, federal Judge Robert Sweet of the Southern District of New York invalidated a patent held by Myriad Genetics on two genes related to breast and ovarian cancer. If this ruling survives the inevitable court challenges, it could undermine the whole idea of patenting human genes. Incurable optimist that I am, I can even hope that it could undermine the patenting of living organisms as well.

Revolutionary crocuses

Alice Walker has her revolutionary petunias, but if I were a poet, I would write about crocuses. How they bloom where they're not planted. How it matters not how desolate the winter, how wracked with war or fraught with flood, here comes Candlemas and there are the crocuses, shoving up through the mud, pushing out through the snow. I half think they could crack concrete if they had a mind to. I saw one growing once where an old slab had been demolished after maybe 40 years.The flower is fragile. A hard rain will melt it in an instant. But the bulb beneath is tough, and next year she will pour forth her delicate color again.

You might imprison her in your garden, but once she's lost the blossom that you captured her for, she will grow her leaves green and fat for her own pleasure and nourishment. Starting alone, she multiplies and spreads far beyond your established borders. She knows when to hide, when to go underground, and when to rise up singing, by the dozen, by the thousand, for she is related to everything and understands all. She may be crushed by the heel of the mighty, but understand, the flame of a million blooming crocuses will transform the landscape forever.

A careful reader of this poem will notice that it refers to crocuses blooming at Candlemas, about a month earlier than they bloom in Oklahoma. That's because I wrote this poem years ago in Western Oregon.

Climate change and snowstorms

Climate-change deniers such as Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe have claimed that recent heavy snows on the East Coast disprove the theory that the earth is warming because of human activities. Inter Press Service has an interesting counterpoint:

If anything, though, the weather should help discredit climate change deniers, contend major climate scientists and activists.

"Record snow is not in any way, shape, or form evidence against climate science and in fact it is largely consistent with it," Joseph Romm, a former Energy Department official in President Bill Clinton's administration and the editor of the Centre for American Progress's Climate Progress blog, said Thursday.

"I wouldn’t want to say global warming is the cause or the sole cause [of the snowstorms]…but we are in a warming trend," he said. "It is absurd when we are in an overall warming trend that a snowstorm is evidence of a cooling trend. But the anti-science side – the ideologues – have been trying to push the idea that we're in a cooling trend and that this is evidence of that."

In fact, increased snowfall is entirely in line with climate projections, said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist with WeatherUnderground.com.

While the current storms are likely due to "natural variability" – the "jet stream this year [happened to] set up in a path that includes these cities" on the eastern U.S. seaboard, he explained – they are nonetheless historically "extraordinary" and it is reasonable to expect global warming to bring more such storms in the future.

Romm agrees. "You heat up the planet and you put more moisture in the atmosphere, you get the more intense precipitation that has been observed globally and has been observed in the United States," he said.

A poem I wrote while I wasn't in church

Actually, I don't ever go to church, and I don't exactly believe in god, but here's a poem I wrote this morning:

Not Quite a Prayer

I talked with God this morning,
and I don't think I understood
a single word she said.
I wasn't even sure she was really there,
or if it was just me hoping
that there was someone listening.
I didn't understand what she was saying,
because I'm almost sure she said
she's not an unpleasant bossy man
with a long beard,
and she doesn't send people to roast slowly
over hellish fires once they're dead.
I was trying to talk to God
but I couldn't understand her because she
wasn't what I expected.
She said that when she writes,
she writes with music in the clouds,
she whispers in the roar of the waves,
and under extraordinary circumstances,
she might shout along with the thunderclap,
but she never writes anything in stone.
Stone is for pictures.
Stone is for vast sculptures carved slowly
over many, many centuries.
I talked with God the other day,
and I swear I didn't understand a word she said,
because she told me she doesn't have a plan
for my life,
that she won't save me in this life,
and won't condemn me in the next.
But if I lift my eyes to the hills,
I might see a diagram I could use,
and if I reach out my hands I might
find friends to help me.
If I reach out my hands I might grab
hold of friends that I could
help along their way.

Maybe a kiss is not just a kiss...

A big hat tip to my friend Pat R. for sending me this fascinating blog post on the power of lesbian kisses.

This bugs me

I think it's because the weather has been so hot. At night on the front porch I've been seeing a few cockroaches. I've been thinking about going out to the hardware store and finding some roach bait. The only problem is that I've checked out some archy and mehitabel books from the library, and now I feel bad about the idea of killing cockroaches.

But entomology is not my strong suit. The insects I've been seeing might be junebugs. The more I think about it, the more I think they must be junebugs, because they don't scurry away from light the way that cockroaches do. One of these things crawled into my well-lighted living room last night and provided a great deal of entertainment for Spot. I doubt the experience was entertaining for the insect involved, which did not survive the occasion. But Spot needed the exercise.

I am also tempted to be sentimental about ants, whose form of social organization could be described as socialist matriarchy. Unfortunately, my kitchen counter was invaded this morning by what looked like pavement ants, and I had to get out the Terro again.

Fireworks

I didn't go out to see any fireworks tonight (unless you count stepping out the door to take out the trash while people on my street are setting a few things off). But earlier there was a very dramatic thunderstorm. I was in the midst of printing out a manuscript that a friend had asked to see when after one big boom, all the power went out.

A couple of years ago during the big December ice storm that left me without power for eight days, I swore that I'd never complain about the Oklahoma summer again. Tonight I was reflecting that being without power during the Oklahoma summer could be a worse thing than going without it during an ice storm.

I wandered around my neighborhood trying to figure out how far the outage went. Just around the corner from my house, some nice young people sitting out on a porch offered to let me barbecue a marshmallow on their charcoal grill. So I did, since it had been ever so long since I'd had a toasted marshmallow. Then I proceded to survey the extent of the blackout. It seemed to extend from the north side of 31st to the south side of Hill, and from Western to at least as far as Walker.

When I passed the substation at 31st and Western, there was an OG&E truck parked out front. Just then, some very loud popping sounds emanated from some of the substation equipment, and large sparks jumped into the air. This was not encouraging, but a few minutes later when I passed my house again, I could see that the power had come back on.

Meanwhile, the nice young people on the porch had been joined by another friend, and they were all discussing whether a straight man might shave his testicles without any aspersions being cast on his masculinity. This question was actually posed to me. I gave the only answer possible, which was, "I'm an old-school lesbian feminist, how the hell should I know?" But I offered the opinion that everyone should shave whatever they wanted to shave, and leave alone whatever body hair they liked as it was.

Now there are loud popping sounds out on the street that seem to be caused by fireworks rather than by thunder, and my little cat is sitting under the bed. But she doesn't seem terribly distressed.  All in all, a fairly pleasant evening.

No hole in her head

Just found this YouTube clip of the incomparable Malvina Reynolds:

Of course, Malvina also has her own Wikipedia entry. Plus, her daughter Nancy Schimmel is writing a biography and blogging about the process. If you'd like to know more, or to find more music videos or tidbits of  information, you can do the Google search yourself.

Trying not to do anything rash

This afternoon, some friends came over to see my little house. One of these women told me she thought that the plant with shiny red leaves that has spread through so much of my back yard might be poison ivy. I'd had that same thought myself, but concluded it was something different. I've pulled lots of it out of my yard, and haven't had a reaction, so I'd thought I had nothing to worry about.

But, then again, back when I was a Girl Scout in Philadelphia, I used to get the worst cases of poison ivy. Once, I had a big red scar on my face and one eye was almost swollen shut. Another time, I managed to get a poison ivy rash in the dead of winter. Hearing my friend explain how much this thing looked like poison ivy, I could feel myself start to itch. If this stuff turned out to be my old nemesis, I was going to be in for some itchy times indeed.

What to do?

I did a web search on poison ivy pictures and found the Poison Ivy, Oak and Sumac Information Center. A quick search of their site turned up a photo of the thing growing in my back yard, which appears to be something called pepper vine. Comments on the site said that this plant can also cause a rash, but so far I haven't gotten one.

This must be my lucky week. I don't have poison ivy and the Terro got rid of the ants.

Antipathy and anticipation

For the past week or two, there have been a very few ants wandering aimlessly around my kitchen counter. I could trace them back to a line that was marching along my living room basement. My kitchen is mostly clean. It hasn't particularly gotten dirtier in the past couple of days. But for some reason, this morning, the right-hand countertop and the cabinet shelves above it were swarming with ants. A bit of investigation showed that they had found a little chocolate pastry from the supermarket that comes clad in only a cardboard package. Discarding the pastry, wiping up under the honey and jam, and murdering thousands of ants with my dishrag did little to discourage them. Convinced that a bounty of sugary stuff awaits them in my kitchen, they just keep coming.

It's time to get serious about ant eradication. I went out to Ace Hardware and got the Terro. Tonight when I get home I'll put it out. It's sugar syrup with boric acid in it, and I've had good luck with it in the past. You pour out a little bit of the stuff on a flat piece of cardboard or plastic and put it where the ants will find it. At first, you draw more ants than you can imagine. They all come out to get this wonderful treat and dutifully carry it back to their nest, where it kills them and their offspring. Ants are difficult not to admire for their hard work and team spirit. I kind of hate to do them in. But it's kinda gross when they climb all over everything. (By this afternoon they had even infested Spot's dish of cat food.) At least with the Terro, I figure they'll die happy.

Right here in Oklahoma City

There is this really cool blog: Peak Oil Hausfrau. Check it out.