Chapter Thirteen Finishing School for Fathers

Chapter Thirteen

 

Finishing School for Fathers

 

“The petty despot of the man – made home is hindered in his humanness by too much manness.”

--- Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Chapter Two, “The Man – Made Family,” of her 1911 work,

Our Androcentric Culture, or The Man – Made World

 

There was Mona at the first, of course, then Justine, Trevor’s mom and a local municipal judge’s wife able to work at mothering from her home 24 / 7 and very watchful of Trevor’s asthma which I, as his soccer coaching assistant, had to also be.  Justine was not overprotective.  I was actually surprised.  Jesse was a bit this way – asthmatic – but not too badly.  Exercise – induced and viral – induced, the pediatricians were terming it to me from time to time, especially two or three days into cold – and flu – like illnesses, but we had experienced nothing yet really serious with Jesse although with that kinda’ little cardiac thing of his, too, I always wondered about the potential of his pulmonary system to turn against him and worsen.  And although Justine had been elated to learn Dr. Edinsmaier would be coaching, she was equally reassured and satisfied with my skills as a veterinarian to be able to discern when enough was enough and easily allowed Trevor to participate.  The brisk, cold air coming on strong in November and early December could help relieve at the onset of an attack or it could bring it on in the first place; that was somewhat mysterious but just the way it was for him, and Trevor himself handled this with the polish of an emergency room nurse so we all managed.  Lastly, I met with the loftiest luck a lady could run into when I was introduced to Grace Portia, who in everyday parlance, certainly was the epitome of both her first and married, last names.  All soccer moms – so all of them with little boys in Mirzah’s Unit A, too.

 

Grace and Grace’s gentle – hearted and, thankfully, not too blue – blooded husband, Lionel, have remained my friends.  Simply there, and at any time, day or night.  If not this year, then when I needed ‘em the next year, they were.  One time recently when I hadn’t talked to Grace in months, Jesse asked, when her name must’ve come up or that of one of her kids, if I ever still saw her.

 

“Well, it’s been awhile, I guess.”

“Well, how long?”

“Uuhhh, I don’t know.  Maybe six months, maybe eight.  I don’t remember.”

“Then how can you say you’re still friends with her?”

 

O o o o o o!  Grace had that answer when next I did visit with her and told her of this exchange with so youthful a Jesse but who was now a legal adult.  “It could be years and then when one of us rang up the other, it’d be like we took up where we left off, ya’ know, … ‘last week’.  I mean it.  It could really be years.”

 

It isn’t as if Grace and Lionel hadn’t a thing else to do with their lives than attend to me either.  Lionel is    a microbiologist, even now working his entire microbiologist heart out on that marvelously elusive (for it, anyhow) Mycoplasma creature in all its variants.  Such a bugaboo this itty bitty bug is to swine, feline and, O, yeah, people – and all of their lungs and some of their joints!  I like a lot what Lionel is doing for a living, and he does it a lot.  His passion, Mycoplasma. 

 

I like a lot what Grace does, and not only does she do it a lot, too; but so do I, and have, for quite a few years now.  But before we both got into keeping secrets –  secretarying, that is – secretarying for a salary, we did a bunch of other stuff together first.  Grace is the mother of three kids, just as I am.  Boys they happen to be, too.  And, voila, they are all just within the same knockabout ages as mine, each just a year younger so both of her two younger sons, Nathan and Noel, were Mirzah’s teammates and became the fastest of friends with both my Mirzah and Jesse.  Zane, maybe because of his proximity to most of the Portia family by way of his own brothers, took an interest in Grace’s oldest, Neil, or the other way around, I don’t remember.  At any rate, all three of her and Lionel’s Boys and all three of mine, it really was incredible to watch.  And I loved it.

 

Grace had been an accountant with Willard’s Department Store chain for seven years before growing and bearing anybody.  Very gently married that entire length of time and on the road much of it, she, too, was able and very much wanted to stay at home like Justine and I were doing.  Mona, on the other hand, married but not so tenderly as Grace, took care of BJ and his older sister and traveled on treacherous wintry Iowa highways the nerve – wracking 35 racing interstate miles it is into the capitol city to work evening shifts as a pediatric intensive care nurse who had actually saved children discovered unconscious and way under the iciest of waters for long, long over life’s time limit.  This just frickin’ fascinated me as well as her stories of the little kids’ plastic surgeon there, Dr. Jude Carruthers, who made it the holiest of his missions in life to lower Iowa’s legal limit on blood alcohol to 0.04 striving, he was, to stop the butchery to those same little kids’ smiles – and the emotional carnage to the viscera of their mommies and daddies. 

 

*     *     *     *

 

One of those other jobs Grace still accomplishes superbly and did so extremely well for years before she as aptly assumed her duties as a merit – level university secretary is the evidently difficult work of listening.  With the exception of AmTaham, I know of no one who has mastered this job of developing empathy for nearly all other people through the work of listening as Grace has. 

 

She should open a private college of her own where the only major offered is Listening.  And, for tuition, charge the bloody beYesus out of the students who most need ... to be willing ... to learn to listen:  politicians, world leaders, judges, lawyers, corporate executives, some teachers –    the always – a – teacher ones, some college administrators, all the journalists and media and entertainment artists, film, television, music and otherwise, athletes, militarists and many, many doctors, in fact most of them actually.  Most definitely, every last one of those walking around the World who think in any way – most especially via their particular path to freedom and peace – that they are going to proclaim it their life’s purpose, much less, make it their life’s earnings to go around telling the rest of us others how we all should know a redeeming and delivering god and act like we do know one.  Ya’ know, ‘holy’ … men. 

 

Grace could start with the basics as in any undergraduate degree program.  Like with a course called “On One Simple Observation of the Earth.”  For the media students and entertainment industry folks, this would be a requisite, the nucleus course, I am thinking.  As it would be the same for the degree requirements of all the world leaders and politicians and certainly for the programs of all of them that are the generals and any other manner of military leaders.  I guess included in the militarists’ category are also all of the lawyers and the judges who, we so well remember, are still lawyers after they get elected or appointed to judgeships.

 

As well as, equivocally it may appear at the first, those peacenik catechists espousing from this nation’s Washington Mall pulpits, sermonizing love and brotherhood and commitment all over its vast gymnasia and sports areas and any other of the Entire Globe’s rooftops, basilica balconies, bloodied mosques, enshrined embankments, big – sky blocs, disheveled levees, simple taluses, tabernacle bunkers, Baptist alters.  And master bedrooms.

 

Course content would center, then, around just what its title states, one simple observation the World over.

The fact that there are children across six continents isn’t the observation either.  But nearly.

 

Connectedly enmeshed to this fact that there are these said children – and that are not our children everywhere really the ‘it’ that anyone working toward being able to call herself or himself by the title        of Ancestor does anything for every single day during her or his own entire lifetime – is the Truth that:   this fact is fuckingly and totally forgotten with every single move that every one of Grace’s college students thinks up and makes.  That’s the simple observation the course covers.  In depth.

 

Or, not.  It can probe it shallowly, too, for that matter.  Because it isn’t difficult nor profound to see and to understand.  Certainly not hidden or disguised at all.  It’s everywhere in everything any one of these community pillars thinks up and, then, decides to go ahead and do.

 

And that is because of the only corollary to Grace’s core college course matter.  The one easily established and known for millennia already:  the heartbeats, thoughts and opinions, the passions and struggles,            of 53 percent of the general, daily human population is, by the media and by almost all of the legislatures and societies of the Earth, lumped into both its reporting and into its statue – making and into its decision – making as if that 53 percent acquiesce to or, for that matter, wholly support – by their silence, their softness, their submissiveness, their servility, their deference and their kowtowing – the massively destructive decisions made that so smash their Not Male comings and goings on this Planet.

 

The IMPACT on certain others, certain others known as the majority, of what these dudes think up and then implement is, well, it’s just staggering and, nearly always, life – altering.  That is simply and merely all that there is that can be said about these everyday decisionings by these guys who cannot possibly hope to start, on their deathbeds, as even interning, amateur or apprentice Ancestors if they, first, haven’t graduated from Grace’s curriculum.  Each breathing his last breath will only be that forever.  No one two years, ten years, 100 years after the guy’s death will care.  Much less, remember him.  It will merely be as if he … never walked the World at all.  Ever. 

 

Not if he hasn’t learned, while still breathing, that the job of Ancestor is the only one that there ever really is.  As the character with the Listening degree waiting in the dungeon, Sengbe Pieh his name was, after his ship, the Amistad, beached had been well – taught.

 

An easy illustration:  About a particular hot spot or raging issue, all major networks’ anchors report, evidently without glancing at their own footage, their own photographs, their own recordings, any images or words beamed from their satellites in the heavens or their nebulous and amorphously received internet transmissions, something like the following, every single night, on the World’s news, “India today denounced yada, yada, yada brought about by scores of uprising Pakistanis to the north and east, yada, yada, yada.  And the militant Pakistanis, in return threatened retaliation against the deploying Indians who now have unparalleled nuclear capabilities in the south, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

 

The honest and accurate account, whether printed or broadcast, one that would be … dah, accountable and, well, truth, might, instead, be projected to all us listeners, even those of us who listen only with our eyeballs or our fingertips, as something like:

 

“The men of the armies and government of India today denounced yada, yada, yada brought about by scores of uprising Pakistani men to the north and east, yada, yada, yada.  And the militant men of Pakistan, in return, threatened retaliation against the deploying Indian men assigned and stationed just today to man the x number of poised nuclear warhead launches in the south, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

 

But.  Do we ever hear the general, daily news reported in as flat – out an accurate and honest an accounting as that?  Let alone, account after account after account --- through an entire broadcast of up – to – the – hour news, through every single enraging issue printed in newspaper accounts?  Even when it is the TRUTH.  We do NOT.  We do not.  We never, ever do.

 

On television this morning, 04 October, this very same mother – fucking morning that a dozen years ago already a most fat and irascible lummox in one thud on my Forest door launched against it and me, the Ancestor who I am studying to be, the divorce proceedings’ papers thereby annihilating my world peace, what do we see instead?  Madeleine Albright, literally now, bursting out from the Palestinian and Israeli shitfuck otherwise known as a ‘negotiation session’ and, literally again she is, running down the corridor after one of the mother – fucking (remembering, I am, to be literal a second time here in just this paragraph alone) ‘world leaders’, some guy in a head turban thingy which seems to mean to the rest of us all that he is some sort of a religious person.  And I, do I, believe that this well – fed guy is religious because he wears this drape, calls himself a leader of something or someone led and, with the alliance of a few or a lot of other guys, cripples and kills a few or a lot of humans who aren’t in his cabal – all in the name of his Allah?

 

AmTaham used to invoke Allah, too.  I first remember hearing the word when I was probably three.  AmTaham knew everything; he was my daddy.  And when he prayed, no one died.  No one even got spanked.  “Allah, our Allah,” this archival and ancestral Missouri Synod Lutheran all his years prayed, “Thank you for our little Legion.  Thank you for this little bit of land.”  I was beside him again, both of us barefoot on the dewy, cold grass just out the south front porch door, the smaller of the two porches just off the massive kitchen but this one also with the gray – painted floor suitable for the harsh seasonal weather – beatings and the color of all the farm porch floors in Iowa.  It was 5 am, and I was watching him, no small feat for a three – year – old; Daddy was 6 foot 2 inches tall forever, and I never was.

 

We would then quietly glide inside, we angels of Allah, after a deep breathing and a – praying session,   our daily negotiation, and have coffee together whitened with real and fresh cow’s cream from the Jersey named Camel ‘til she passed.  Then her next name was Camel II, and her last name was Pearl, and she was a Guernsey by then.  Just the two of us and boiled – over coffee made in a black and blue – speckled enamel pot with its bald wire and wood grip, brewed over an open, cob – fed flame by AmTaham’s own hand, coffee with the grounds swirling and settling, sweetened and so lip – smacking delicious. 

 

And AmTaham gently negotiated with mutual whispers and sips, ones probably not the best for a little itty bitty kid, but, hey, not harmful at all by comparison to those taken in some Kashmiri embankment or aboriginal backwater rez or rat – infested boiler room in South Tremont where the one Canuck, white – trash twin died on me in her dresser drawer – crib set by her mama just a couple inches up, literally now, off that Bronx slum’s well – packed and greasy dirt floor when, 17 years hence, I was ‘practicing’ some type of maternal – child / public health / student nursing religion, “How would you like to be able, when you grow up, Legion, to get up every single morning, go out onto this land of Allah’s and feed the World, too?”

 

So I learned, AmTaham being an excellent teacher – just like this other religious guy is an excellent teacher, the one who fucked with Ms. Albright and truly fucked with her beseeching, with her begging of him – I learned from watching AmTaham but who, then yet, at my tender age of three hadn’t tutored me  on reality, I learned from him that men, that Males were wonderful, absolutely wonderful human beings. 

 

Madeleine Albright, the only one of the majority to ever be the Secretary of State in United States history, the only woman to boss that federal Cabinet agency possessed of the cunning to exact profound international impact, and this is what she has to do to try to allure the attention of this child – killer?!  The pains, even their deaths, of any one of those little itty, bitty kids bursting out and running down corridors away from the bullets and the landmines is, to him, shitfuck on his shoe soles.  Not to mention the spirits of the starved and breathing dead ones never to bound forth from anywhere.  If it weren’t – – if it weren’t so much mother – fucking and mere shitfuck to him, then he wouldn’t kill any children.  And he wouldn’t allow anyone else to either.  Period.

 

Not amazingly deep nor crafty at all.  Pretty simple, that.

 

AmTaham True is dead and gone to Allah now, but Ms. Albright could sure use him, I am thinking. 

Then I think better of that:  even though AmTaham knew everything, even he can’t get this other outwardly religious guy to actually frickin’ practice his own religion.  It’s about change and the two, implementing tools of it again:  awareness and willingness.  Daddy owned nearly everything there was to own in the way of true wealth, most especially knowledge and wisdom – not the same things, of course – and the unquestioning constancy of the love and loyalty of his family and friends.  But even AmTaham True never owned another’s willingness. 

 

Another easy illustration:  On an enraging issue this one is:  race.  Or, is it about race?  It isn’t really    about race at all.  Race and racism is just the spun camouflage.  When he delineated them and I first heard him do so, I thought C. Everett, our former First Physician, was right about i) the abrogation of personal accountability, ii) greed and iii) racism as being the three diseases that, if not immediately and completely stemmed and eradicated worldwide, would, in such short order, that is, inside my lifetime, totally destroy it, the World.  He isn’t.  He isn’t right.

 

Pompously presumptive of me?  Uppity?  Damn straight.  About time, too.

 

“Deal with it,” so sayeth da’ judge.  My judge.  All of them.  And that must have come to a total of about 25, I am thinking.  Let’s see.  Counting the two judges at district court who ruled finally and all of ‘em whose chicken tracks just appeared out of the wild, the blue or nowhere at all on all those legal documents issued and decreed as law, before those three last district decisionings, and the five at the state’s court of appeals level two different times (the chief being on each of my three – judge appellate panels there both times) and the one only who calls himself ‘a justice’ that it took at the supreme court level flicking my case – and my life – away from himself with such the disgusted and nose – in – the – air flapping of his left wrist and his one – sentence ruling, yeah, well, the count of 25 judges altogether just might be about correct.

 

Same number of words in that ‘Deal with it’ phrase tossed at me often enough by Herry as well as ‘the court’ as there are in some others’ winning choice of three – word phrases flung about with as much meaninglessness at other women, “Free at last.  Free at last.  Thank who?  We’re free at last?!”

 

Noooot quite.  Not before the marches.  Just those in my lifetime alone.  The ones on Washington or      Pine Ridge or Selma or Afghanistan or Rwanda or Salvador or Ukraine or Jakarta or Belgrade or Saudi     or Khartoum or Soweto or Jordan or Manila or Kashmir or Quebec or Pretty Woman’s street corner in Bombay or a second – level Lorraine Hotel room in Memphis in May or one at New Year’s because of trafficking from Qing – Dao or the North Slope’s Arctic Ocean beach splattered with sealing skiffs. 

 

And we – we women – not peaceful and not free after all of that marching either. 

 

All of the marching and all of the warring and all of the breathing episodes impacting all of us DEhumans – the majority throughout recorded history, that being about 12,000 of something called ‘years’ and put down into a time – and – event construct called a calendar.  Whether a religious calendar or a not - so – religious one, these calendars with events placed on them then that are made, and made important, by only men.

 

Throughout all recorded history and over all the World then, … peace?  Peace?  Justice?  Equality?  Freedom?  Free?  All of us folks of the majority then?  Including Herry’s great black fuck, Edwina?       The fellow teacher at his same inner city middle school?  Whom he wouldn’t marry?  Ever, he said.   Whom he wouldn’t even bring home to meet his mommy, Detanimod, or any other of the Edinsmaier    wolf pack?  But with whom he certainly felt, free at last, to glut and to fuck?  For four years straight?         It wasn’t that she was ten years his senior, the bearded and good, good draft – dodging and so very, very ‘liberated’ and ‘progressively leftist’ and ‘peace – espousing’ and ‘nonviolence – advocating’, so ‘reverent’ Dr. Edinsmaier himself told me.  Herry said it was her race.

 

But.  But.  That wasn’t it.  That’s what he said it was.  That is what Dr. Koop says.  And that – racism –     is what it would so successfully and so selfishly be concealed as being, too – – by the not – so – reverent – after – all Reverend Doctor King Junior who himself, along with the ease and with the aid of all of the other ‘religiously’ complicit and silent men in the civil rights movement, brought the majority of us DEhumans exactly squat in the amount of ‘good’ and of ‘peace’ and of ‘nonviolence’.  Actually … logically and mathematically, realistically and literally here, Martin Luther King Jr, massively continued in and only contributed to the furtherance of the negative number that is the amount of peace and freedom from brutality and tyranny done by the minority onto the majority.  And he and they, the minority all right,       all knew it.  As they were thinking it up and making it their bloody, mother – fucking choices to go ahead  and perpetrate their mother – fucking violence upon us DEhumans … anyhow. 

 

Even Martin Luther King Jr’s most mordacious and trenchant biographer to date, Michael Eric Dyson, who writes on pages 163 and 164 in Chapters 8 and 10 of I May Not Get There With You how it was that King himself, like so much chaff, threw around the word “motherfucker” behind closed hotel suite doors, refers in his book’s dedication to his own wife – in the year 2000 – as his “wife, friend, lover”.  Still.

 

Well, heeellloooo, Mr. Dyson!  Let’s just be redundant and then redundant some more, shall we?  Or, are you truly only revealing by your so entitling of her this way, Mr. Dyson, what we all already know to be your and other so – called men – of – conscience’s definitions of entitlement for the word “wife”.  That

Ms. Dyson wasn’t, and isn’t still, by her simple act of marriage to you alone, already your friend and lover.  Already your best friend and your only lover.

 

Back in his mid 20s then, they’d all be wrong about Herry’s not marrying Edwina, about 36, being racism.  And they would all know, as they were spouting this, that they were choosing to be wrong.  That they are ingrained hypocrites entrenched in something else entirely.  The something they always, always already knew as they did their pontificating about Herry’s not wedding Edwina being due to racism that not one of them was ever, ever, ever about to give the hell up.  Hell.  Throughout about the most recent 12,000 man – made years, throughout christianity, islam, judaism and a shitfuck of other man – made ‘religions’, women, big girls and little itty bitty girls and all of the fucked mothers among them, have had to always, always, always – suck it up.

 

Crying racism is such a great, great cover – up for the core content and its corollary taught here at    Grace’s college.  These men and other men would say it is ‘the most’, racism is.  The most controversial, the most inflammatory, the most galvanizing and, therefore, unwaveringly bound to put into words and  into riots everyone’s bottled – up and stunned state at the hideousness of how racist and, therefore, how evil Dr. Edinsmaier truly is.  He would never marry Edwina because she was black.  Incense them so, this non – deed of his would, that they would be right ready, tonight, to march some more they would.  If not demand his complete undoing.  Or some such.  And they’d still all be wrong.  And, all of them, know it.

 

Except about one thing:  Herry is evil.

 

See, in addition to all of that of Herry about which we already know, Herry quite literally fucked a whole lot of folks, all of the critters female of which I ever knew including most probably all of the cattle, dogs, pigs and chickens which, according to Rolodex inventory cards scripted in his own hand, he also fucked.    You can close that jaw of yours that dropped way back in Chapter One when you read about the wine – bottle dildos, now can’t you?

 

Herry, who didn’t think I ever knew about those ‘ladies’ as well as the others with whom he’d shit all over me in the dark nights of the Forest master bedroom – but about which I did know – Herry, the (raised – up – a) christian, well – nourished, well – educated and apparently well – fucked, English – speaking caucasian, never entertained wedding Edwina because, for him … now get this:  She was the wroooong woman.  Maybe she was even the wrong species.  Probably she wasn’t, although I don’t know, sheep – like enough for him, ya’ know, soft, servile and deferent enough for him.  “Baaaahh, Herry, O, baaaah, my darling Herry.”  But, for sure, she was the wrong DEhuman.  The wrong woman.

 

Simply that.  And not a thing any more outrageous, controversial, inflammatory or galvanizing … than that.  Not a thing.

 

Long, long before Herry ever met Edwina he knew what would, for him, constitute the right woman.    After all, he’d written The Textbook on it.  Now I am not going to presume to know who she is or what    her characteristics are.  Lord knows, I wasn’t she.

 

*     *     *     *

 

Grace could even offer a PhD program and that program would exclusively be, absolutely and without exception, required for any man in the World who wanted to hold the title of ‘husband’.  Keyword here,  for admissions into the program, being ‘wanted’.  The dissertation, also a requirement and without exception, would be each candidate’s take on what ‘wanting to be a husband’ means.  And his proving of it.  Ya’ know, the authenticating and substantiating proof part of the dissertation.  That way, every one of them, like all PhD dissertations are allegedly supposed to be, would be original work:  ya’ know – never before done.

 

This is where we would, in theory, find out who, as far as Herry believes, would be his right woman.         In theory, I say, because Herry Edinsmaier would not be accepted into the program.  Because of that key and absolutely necessary qualification to acceptance, that is, the ‘wanting’ to be a husband.  The willingness to do the work of being one in the first place.  Much less at the end of the program, that is,   inside a marriage.  To a DEhuman.  To a female human.

 

The focus of this ‘situation’ with Herry and Edwina and racism and O! just how absolutely heinous is this whole thing! is all simply a smokescreen to rapaciously continue to ensconce in shrouds, again, and preserve from the slightest divestiture for all of accounted history where the focus and the investment in this day – to – day breathing truly ought to be.  With … Edwina!   She is of the majority here!  And she is where the focus should have always been placed at the first.  This is how it was before recorded history began and this is what is soooo dangerous to men everywhere for the last, O, 12,000 or so – – since recording did begin. 

 

Flip / Reverse.  Finally.  After 12,000 years.

 

What about her finding and marrying the right man, her being well – fed, her being well – schooled,       her being well – loved and well – made – love – to?  What about that?!   What about her impacting Herry   if Edwina wanted to, so smashing anything of his or his family’s?  And he remaining, or at the very least, becoming for the first time in that written – down history of ours, soft, servile and deferent about it?  What about her forgetting about his needs, his wants, his desires, his this, his that, his anything.  Period.  And he attending, and always attending, and wanting to, to all of that only in her?  What about that?!  What about Dr. King and Dr. Edinsmaier being made, like by her if Edwina wanted to, to never mother – fuck again?  Ever.  What about that?!

 

Now the bachelor’s degree is a BL, of course, the bachelor’s degree in Listening.  No arts, no science,      no BA, no BS letters about it.  Listening degrees are granted only after passing the finals in Willingness, the other core tool given as the laboratory accompanying and required with every single course taught at Grace’s college.  Ya’ only get one chance at these finals, too, and graded only pass / fail as well.  Grace pretty much knows about your genuineness right off so no amount of choice – making on answers later is going to snow her.  Kinda’ like veterinary medical school when I attended.  You fuck up and fail one course?  … Tough shit.  You’re out.  No appeal.

 

The job opportunity for which one needs to have successfully graduated with this major in Listening is that of Ancestor.  You cannot ever hope to be one by any other major studied elsewhere or by any test – out nor by any licensure, registration or certification nor by any other means including … breathing, breathing, breathing … then not breathing.  Ever again.  You initially receive and subsequently maintain the title of Ancestor with the duties and accountabilities thereof only through earning the Listening degree from Grace’s college.  Even if you grow and bear or spawn itty bitty little kids because you fucked a mother somewhere sometime or are, yourself, a fucked mother.

 

Only minor, both undergrad and grad and also required if one ever intends to be called Ancestor, will be one’s credits earned in Silence.  Here, all of these students arriving at Grace’s college and deplaning from their enterprising planetary leadership starship will study all the various forms and uses of Silence.  Uses both for good and for bad purposes in life which are sometimes, as we all know, the same use – just put differently.  Sometimes ever so slightly, so subtly, too.

 

The basic core course, “Centering”, in this minor is, of course, learning to Hear your own Inner Voice:    the itty bitty “That of God” inside yourself.  That “that” that everyone everywhere, on this Planet at least, has.  And probably in the entire universe although about that Grace and I do not know.  Grace states that only the very disciplined will ever make it through Centering’s first class although after the first day the student gets another chance.  And another.  And another.  Ad lib.  If they are willing to try.  And actively seek out the chances.  Kinda’ like … confession.  Only this one sticks.

 

Because with each class session the student gets better and better.  She or he just can’t help it but get better.  The trick, the key to passing this in the minor curriculum is in … coming back to class.  That’s where the discipline leads to willingness which automatically leads to and results in … getting centered … eventually.  And successfully completing the minor program.

 

One of Grace’s most prestigious and distinguished visiting scholars will be Dr. Sierra Blue Elk,             PhD immunologist and attorney, presently breathing with her husband and their two children on the    banks of Spicy Creek outside of Manderson, South Dakota.  Dr. Blue Elk’s classes will study with regard  to Listening and Silence a couple of other subjects, Humility and Patience.  She will orally recount for these students, over their patience – acquisition classroom period of one, straight – up and straight – through ten – hour session, the now 1,031 years’ worth of the accounts of her immediate Ancestors of the majority.  I believe I learned about three years ago when I first Heard Dr. Blue Elk give account of herself, then her mama, then her grandma, then her great – grandma, then her great – great – grandma and then her, well, you get the idea, that this itty bitty piece of knowing of hers, that is, the 1/12 or so of the last dozen man – made millennia about which she knows intimately and by heart, went back through, let’s see now, she said 29 generations.  That she, Sierra and her spouse, had just held, a few months back at that time,    the Ancestral ceremony to, literally now, pass on to her majority child, Shoshanna, the hunting knife which is also now, uummm, 1,031 years old.  That she knows of.  This family knife, Dr. Blue Elk states, is the Oglalas’ and the Lakotas’ spiritual symbol of reason, prosperity and healthful satiety and is, therefore, very much the opposite of one symbolizing the gruesome and grisly slaying of human beings … that is, wholly unlike my neighbor Patrick’s gold cross which he so faithfully encircles that o – so quiet but allegedly very christian neck of his, his begemmed, death – producing crucifix.

 

Another of Grace’s professors, one of only two males on her college faculty for sure, the other being Wyoming’s infamous folksy country solicitor and defender Gerry Spence, is radical feminist, John Stoltenberg, who has for a long, long time so carefully in his writings, one being Refusing To Be A Man:  Essays on Sex and Justice and another being his articles appearing in On The Issues, cautioned students already on recognizing and understanding, when Listening, who the Silent and stealthily stalking wolves really are.  The Jerry Falwells, the Rushes and the William F. Buckleys, the Enriqué Bolaños Geyers, the George Wills and all of the Promise Keepers, the Geto Boys and Ice Cube and Ice – T, the Pat Robertsons, the Osama Bin Ladins and the Talibans of the Earth, the Karl Roves, the Sigmund Freunds and the Clarence Thomases, we can all Hear. 

 

But.  But.  Mr. Stoltenberg writes, “Men of the liberal / progressive left have their own effective means of treating women like second – class citizens:  by defending the pornography industry, for instance, which as social propaganda for the subordination of women leaves Leviticus and the letters of St. Paul in the dust.     I don’t agree with eroticized male supremacy in any guise, nor do I agree with Promise Keeper’s scriptural or doctrinal justification for it.  Rather, I tried to point out that nowhere on the progressive / liberal left have men taken it upon themselves to collectively pay attention to their everyday ethics.  In that respect (certainly compared with the aspirations of Promise Keepers), progressive / liberal men don’t really occupy the moral high ground they often like to think they do.  And women who have cast their political lot with them need to understand this.”  Cast her lot with the socialist, peace – now ‘progressive’ men whom a girl cannot so easily hear or see as … monstrous.  But who, nevertheless, soooo fuckingly are.  Men who have, nowhere, paid attention to their everyday ethics, collectively, individually or otherwise… men such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and Dr. Herod Edinsmaier.  The course will be called “Dances With Monsters.”

 

*     *     *     *

 

There are many more courses to the minor, of course, especially about the bad things for which Silence is used.  Most cruelly, passive – aggressive oppression in husbands and fathers comes to my mind.  And how to kick their addiction to the use of the icebox treatment on wives so rampantly routine.  The addiction that, in addition to the mother – fucking, torments and tortures the entire family.  Like when the child, Zane in the case I am thinking of with Herry in front of both his younger brothers, is ordered to turn to and tell his mama, me of course, to hand over the checkbook for Herry’s going to gas up.  And I’m sitting right there.  That kind of torture to both mama and children. 

 

Another course studying Silence’s terrorism:  “Men Who Conspiratorially Shut Up Too Much.”  This course covers the analysis of and solution to the pogroms wrought by men who think of themselves, as        I would wager, for example, Ralph Nader thinks of himself as and as Scholar Stoltenberg calls them,   “men of conscience.”  Who, however, are simply acting.  Acting, by their Silence, like the ordinary men that they truly are, always have been and will always want to continue being.  Acting, by their Silence, to cause such total and overwhelming destruction.  The men, their machismo behaviors and the results of same studied about in this class include all of the Ciudad Juárez and El Paso Border cops, all of the Secret Service men and all of the other politically and corporately ‘protective’ men including vice – presidents and congressmen in just about every United States president’s tenure, some, of course, that spring to mind being JFK or Franklin D. or Tommy Jefferson or WJC and the much, much – too – numerous – to – mention men of the evangelistically orating, save – us – all – from – Satan’s – slavery business which spans every race in the World.  But it would also include Anthony and Buck and Zhang and Hank and Osaka and Osage and Mwumba and Igor and Nez and Marlon and Singh and Pierre and Llagiigñiq and Carlos and Rex and Zuni and Boris and George and OJ and Diego and Yul and Mohammed and McCain and Brataslav and Hawkeye and Mario and Farouk and those two other neighbors next door, Al and Patrick. 

 

How it is that these guys stay shut up, amazingly enough, even after their buddies’ or acquaintances’ wives and girlfriends and daughters and grandmothers and nieces are, well … screwed!  Or cut!  And sewn shut!  Or foot – rotted!  Or purposefully left abandoned to the hyenas!  Or burned!  By pyre fire or by acid!        Or stoned!  Or wire – hangered to death!  Even after, amazingly enough again!, these females who are supposedly loved ones are dehumanized by linguistic rape, ya’ know that rape:  “free speech.”  ‘Free’ as in, “My ‘freedom’, certainly not hers, to my words – and even though my thinking them and my saying them or my writing them or my taking pictures is an act, an action, I cannot be stopped from it … from uttering these words – cuz I have my ‘freedom’ of speech rights!  Screw hers!  Fuck her rights – hers to have ‘freedom from’ … woman – loathing and ‘freedom from’ … criminal men like me with my hate speech!”  The erotically violent neighbors about whom these so – called men of conscience, really ordinary men and, of course, erotically violent themselves as they visit the pornography sites anywhere including the one between their own two earlobes, … withhold words.  Who themselves, while outwardly Silent, are secretly applauding or sometimes even openly clapping right out loud after “not guilty” verdicts are returned!

 

In Grace’s graduate program, these courses could all be offered at the master’s level, too.  So if the televangelist, the freedom fighter, the prime minister, the boss doesn’t really ‘want’ to be a husband or go on for the PhD, he can still get a master’s degree in Listening.  By completing the master’s program in Silence.  Grace teaches here.  Maybe.  Maybe not.  A quilter herself bringing warmth to the Heartland for some length of time now, Grace may not be able to stand being out in the cold alone on this one.  She may simply not even allow it at all for that matter.  Since she is the Chief Administrator of the Listening College, she may not even get this master’s program up and running – – if it has to involve bringing to her campus direct from his Raunch Ranch the Guest Bad Example teacher, Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, the literal cows’, dogs’, pigs’ and chickens’ mother – fucker to whom Legion True was once married and by whom mother – fucked herself  – – which is what some on its Curriculum Committee are recommending to Grace. 

 

See, the livestock and I weren’t the only creatures Herry hosed. 

 

Grace loathes Herry and is one of less than a handful of people who know of three other instances of crimes and criminal behavior of Herry’s that have all gone … completely unpunished, let alone, undisciplined, untethered and which are, as far as she and I are aware, today still unchecked.  She is pretty sure she couldn’t be safe around Herry on her own terrain herself, let alone, able to guarantee the safety of her DEhuman students around him.  Even if Dr. Herod Edinsmaier were brought to campus in manacles and shackles like the ball – and – chain subject matter about which Herry’s lecturing will cover – even if he were brought to campus by that most Expert of Safety Experts on family and relationships whom Herry loathes as much as Grace does Herry, former Mennonite minister and current psychologist and therapist, Keith Log.  Grace has very much yet to be convinced of the pluses of having this particular sojourning teacher on board.  Even one time.

 

These criminal behaviors of Herry’s are ones that he still unleashes on society today, not the least of which humans in that society are his very own sons.  As well as when they were itty bitty.  And Grace knows this.  The first crime was that leg – brushing and thigh - stroking committed at the youth basketball game in the St. Cecil’s gymnasium, the game between Grace’s middle son, Nathan, playing opposite Jesse one Saturday morning.  The leg brushed and the thigh stroked at least three separate and distinct times when she was looking the other way down court at the ball – shooter, that is, the other way than in the direction of the guy sitting right next to her belonged to Grace.  The hand of the brusher – and – stroker guy sitting right next to Grace belonged to Frotteurist Edinsmaier.  And you can also bet that Herry did the sitting down next to Grace; it hadn’t been the other way around.  As, now, he would have it told. 

 

Herry committing the crime known in legalese and by sexual addiction experts like Patrick Carnes in      Out of the Shadows:  Understanding Sexual Addiction, as taking “indecent liberties?”  Taking crimes like Herry’s – frottage and frotteurism – that is, sustaining the press of his pulsing penis up against that strange woman’s buttocks in a packed elevator when she’s forced briefly back into him or the catch – and – release of her breast in the crush of the crowd at the baseball stadium concession or the ever so slight brush of a thigh in the bleachers at the Saint Cecil’s youth ball court?  The wonderful and good Doctor Edinsmaier?  Doctor Herod Edinsmaier?  Herry?  Herry committing these?  Well, gosh, golly good goddam, NO! 

 

Grace remembers and Grace knows.  And, still, I was stupefied when this fact was taught to me after its occurrence:  that Herry had gone and done these crimes to my very best friend.  And, of course, gotten sooo clean, slick away with it!  All I could say was, “Stupid me.  Again.  Stupid me.  With my frickin’ brilliant brain, just how much of a dullard do I continue to good and goddam be anyhow?!”  What is that that Stoltenberg teaches?  “… And women who cast their lots with these men need to understand this!

JYeee – aahh.  That’s what Professor Stoltenberg teaches all right. 

 

If that’s all I could say about Herod’s assault upon Grace, imagine what Lionel had to say about it when he was taught?!  More correctly, more accurately and most importantly, imagine what Grace herself, on whom these crimes were committed, thinks?!  More on that laaaater …

 

The second behavior Grace abhors was a teaching Herry had done at one of the schools his sons were attending not much later than when they’d been playing basketball in St. Cecil’s gymnasium.  Not exactly  a public school and very much a private school, too!  the Home – Schooling school.  Herry, always – a – teacher Herry, wrote what he considers the book on relationships with women in the family and presented much of it to that School’s students, his sons, over the course of their own entire adolescences.  Part of one chapter in The Textbook states therein, “Fannie and I had one of our fights again; but, fortunately, she’s quieted down again.  Our shouting matches are way worse than your mom’s and mine ever were.  I hope my experience doesn’t poison you three on women.  Instead, I hope it emphasizes the importance of knowing someone well before tying yourself to her.  Sometimes your self – respect will not let you abandon a burden which you have accepted.  I’ll probably have to wait quite a few years to find out if that’s me being a fool or me with my usual brilliance and genius.” 

 

Genius?  Herry’s not been, if ever an Ancestor in Training, too mother - fucking concerned about his genius and brilliance I am thinking.  And what a word “poison” is, huh?  About like “envenom” as an action verb.  Hhmmm, a real tasty choice of his when teaching on family, women, loveliness and loving, huh?  “Tying” as in ‘hobbling’ and ‘binding’?  Yeah, ditto as in teaching on family, yada, yada, love, huh?  “Burden”?  “Abandon”?  We are soooo not even going to go there.  Incensed, marching, demanding whose undoing for what racism?  Racism?  O, no.  So not racism this venom is.  Sexism.

 

The Textbook manual continues, “One of the reasons I have enjoyed being a father so much is that the affection came naturally and didn’t require any effort.”  Whoooooa!  Like that we didn’t notice? 

 

That, Dr. Edinsmaier, everyone noticed.  All the mother – fucking time, we all noticed it.  All the sons,      all the girlfriends and all the wives.  All the work and college and middle school student subordinates and allegedly equal – level colleagues.  All the sisters, even the itty bitty two or three of them that ya’ fucked and were indecently free with when they, at their ages of five or six years, sat on your and your older brother’s 16 – and 18 – year – old frotteurizing laps!  Because you and your Bro Atwater were such great teachers, Dr. Edinsmaier, everyone noticed and everyone learned.  Because you and he and the Home – Schooling Headmaster, Mr. Juggern Aut Misein Edinsmaier, were all such fine and thorough teachers.  Master teachers, really.  The affection came ‘naturally’?  As incest, by definition, does? 

 

It came easily, I am thinking.  Didn’t require any work.  No, I’ll just bet it did not require any at all.  All it took was what Juggern was perfect at and, you, Herry, gained from him, the teacher who came before you, perfect mastery in yourself:  conspiratorial and complicit Silence. 

 

That chapter of Herry’s relationship textbook ends with his describing Keith Log and the entire host of all of the relationship masters – all of them other than narcissistic Herry, that is.  “I despise these so – called family experts who say that to maintain a relationship you have to work at it.  Both Fannie and your mom were envious because they thought I should like them the best, but it was obvious that the real objects of my affection were you three boys.  I told your mom once but it was fruitless.  I never have found the kind of connection with a woman I wanted and now, for a little while at least, I’m not out there looking.  No big deal.  I like being around women and have met some that are most pleasing.  In the past I think I knew some like that several times but didn’t appreciate them because they weren’t exciting.”

 

Textbook this is?  Textbook case, you mean, on Sexism this is!  And, what’s really funny is that even as this male wrote what he considers is the treatise on it, he knew it for nothing more than that:  Herod’s wanting attention and privilege and power and control some more.  The focus of attention off of her, the majority, and onto him.  Only and Always.  His idea on ‘handling women’, his ‘telling them explanations of how it is’, his ‘telling the experts off’, his sorrow over not connecting.  JYeah, rrriiiggght, Edinsmaier.  Ya’re makin’ me cry here!  I’m so tore up for ya’!  And then, they’re just so good, goddam “not exciting” enough for him.  I am left thinking, “No wonder Dr. Edinsmaier never did sheep.”

 

That third criminality which Grace loathes involves Herry’s voice, ya’ know, that voice about which we discussed a lot earlier.  Well, Grace is afraid he’d used it again in her classrooms.  As recently as just into the newest millennium of those past 12 or so, that is, in January 2000, Dr. Herod Edinsmaier used that voice of his to laugh at a rape and the subsequent pregnancy with, now, a born child, who resulted from that rape.  And Dr. Edinsmaier let rip that snide guffawing of his not only to me but also at my very same encounter with it to his own kin.  To his own kin.  Just like The Textbook on fathering sons through narcissism seeps into his Boys – and all of them, the males then, getting taught to treat any girls and women the sexist way they tell ‘em it’s gonna be and when.  That snide guffaw in that syrupy slop of his, commenting as it was on the rape of a woman with all of its life – altering consequences, seeped in to      the ear and in to the brain and in to the heart of Herry’s very own first daughter – in – law now married to his second son.  Not known, Herry is, for uttering unguent.  Not even with those soooo smooth vocal cords o’ his.  Ever.  Not even after a rape perped on his own daughter – in – law.  The Good and Wonderful      Dr. Herod Edinsmaier, over the telephone, actually laughed … after his being told of a rape.

 

So, see, Grace may not be constructing this master’s program whatsoever – if the likes of Dr. Herod Edinsmaier or anyone of his parlance, demeanor, countenance, innards and brain has to be invited to teach some of it.  Grace has the highest degree of empathy developed through her Listening for nearly all other people I have ever seen her with or known her to acknowledge.  This I’d said earlier. 

 

Well, Dr. Herod Edinsmaier isn’t one of those people.  Nowhere near at all.  And also because of the finished products of Herry’s teaching.  Grace has seen the fruits of his teaching up close firsthand.  Two of those student sons of his, Mirzah and Jesse, are experts now at double standardization when it comes to females and are quite out loud about it most every day.  The two of them, for their entire lifetimes ahead now I am thinking, are most well untaught with regard to that one universal commandment Herry abhors.  Ya’ know the one:  The Universal Value.  You knew it well when you were five, six, seven and eight years old no matter what ‘culture’ you were those ages in:  The Golden Rule.  That unteaching by Herry went into making the two of them excellent, actually ‘constitutional’ – like, defenders of the Double Standard.   It is their right, they state.  They are fully and, in all matters, entitled as are many, many liberal and progressive men like Martin Luther King, Jr, and Thomas Jefferson or regressive and conservative men like acid – throwing Taliban fathers and clitoris – cutting African fathers unteaching sons before Herry, to oppress and to do and to say unto any and all women whom they choose to that which they would not at all stand a second still for if it were done or said or oppressed unto themselves.  Furthermore, Grace gravely wonders if these sons of Herry have put in to their lives, as Herry himself has with Ms. Fannie Issicran McLive, wives who are two of those women Professor Stoltenberg describes who cast their lots with this type of double standard – wielding, ACLU bible – thumping, my rights / my rights / I’m – entitled – to – my – rights kind of guy. 

 

*     *     *     *

 

Takers Grace calls all of these men.  Not workers.  Noooooo.  No workers they.  Entitlement and oppression rule so they take.  They start out as moochers, freeloaders taking from and off their young friends.  Then they move into more adult manners of taking and taking and taking all the while smooth talking and o – so righteous and selfish talking and on into just outright mother – fucking talking – …         – to their mothers on the telephone, for example.  The women who have taken up with the men who are like this do the same and encourage it in themselves and in their boyfriends.  It’s funny, it’s cutesy.  They, those women, are so cutesy, too, and fawning.  Certainly servile and how was it that Herry’d taught Mirzah?  “Some that are,” he’d intoned in The Textbook, “most pleasing to me.”

 

“It’s Legion,” she said as she handed the telephone receiver to Mirzah.  Not, “It’s your mama.” 

 

Not, “O, Hi, Legion.  Say, I want to apologize about that picture thing last summer and repair the awful damage I did to you and your acting aspirations when I so mother – fucked with your heart and told you lies about me and my talents at photographing head shots.  I feel so ashamed and have known since your explaining your feelings to Mirzah how unfair I was to not only do that but also to then not say I’m sorry for such a long, long time afterward.  Please know … yada, yada, yada.” 

 

Not, “O, Hi, Legion.  Well, did I ever screw you up, huh?!  Mirzah also thinks that I did, and I truly owe you reparation for that fuck – up of mine besides an apology.  What do you think I can do to … yada, yada, yada?”  Instead, “It’s Legion.”  And the telephone is handed away to Mirzah as, in whispers, I hear the following discourse.

 

“Huh, yeah. It’s me, Mom.  I’m kinda busy.”  Noise of video games in the background.  Along with whispering noises.  And, yes, he did have ‘company’ about which Herry could have taught him to say, “May I call you back at 8 o’clock?  Right now is not such a good time to talk cuz I have company and need to complete this computer thing.” 

 

But Herry instead taught him, “Huh, yeah.  It’s me, Mom.  I’m kinda busy.”  Then nothing more but the sort of Silent Treatment unto others that Mirzah wouldn’t stand a second still for if done to him by me       or by anyone else and that Grace is so concerned would be what Dr. Edinsmaier will model in the Silence graduate program for the master’s degree in Listening.  The Not – Quite – Whispers Barbs and Quills           I Want You to Hear But I Haven’t Said Them Out Loud So They Don’t Count As Me Being Mean Saying Them;  I Just Whispered Them treatment.  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.  What else?  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Nah, nah, nah. A – huh, a – huh, a – huh.”  Then.  “I know but she won’t get off the phone,” whispered aside to the woman in the room and with Mirzah’s hand not covering the phone terribly carefully.  And not meant to either.  Mirzah’s rights here.  To speak this way.  Unimpeded.  With the casting – lots woman goading him from the background. 

 

Not quite as Silent is she though as the woman, Dr. Mi Sprision O’Revinnoco, who is Mirzah’s aunt and whom Daddy Herry made certain Mirzah and his two brothers, over years, were well taught by in the ways of women casting their kismet with progressive and liberal although actually Stoltenberg’s ordinary men such as himself, her doctor bro.  Dr. O’Revinnoco is Herry’s very, very quiet and o – so fabulously famous MD pediatrician / PhD cancer researcher / blood sister and daughter of ol’ Juggern Aut Misein E. himself.  Somewhere around the fourth, fifth or sixth child to Detanimod and Juggern.  Born to Juggern the Sire reproducing, at the least, 11 breathing ones, one not – breathing one at term and two other ones who miscarried out of Detanimod much earlier on.  Born to Juggern whom I have never, ever seen throw his arms around and embrace Mi Sprision one time, let alone, give a peck to on her cheek, much less do the same to his wife, Detanimod.  Much less to any one of his three younger daughters, Kay, Celeste or Murielle.  Certainly not to the wife, Detanimod, whom his own mother, another one of those lot – casters known as that just by her own words alone to Juggern, said was just fine pregnant and most certainly could work as the horse Juggern Edinsmaier wanted her to be – at any time and in any place – and was not at all to be coddled, babied or handled in any way, much less, gently.  Including, Detanimod could – Juggern was told by his own mom – get up in the mulberry tree and pick those mother – fucking berries, right alongside the rest of the non – pregnant population she could.  No matter that she slipped, no matter that she pulled, that she pulled badly, truly, truly badly, so badly that … she miscarried.  And this was just her first pregnancy … with 13 more of them … by him, by his literal mother – fucking  … yet to follow.  No matter that particular little thing there.

 

Now as we all recall, people who are pediatricians are of a certain group of folks out there in society called ‘mandatory reporters’.  When any one of these workers sees or hears or knows of abuse and violence and crimes done to children, they are required by The Law of Allah’s Land to report it to all of the ‘proper’ authorities charged with the immediate ending of the child or children’s terror.  Including Sister Doctor   Mi Sprision O’Revinnoco and her quiet manner and her lot – casting with Brother Doctor Herry.  So Silent she didn’t quite, in all her brilliance and genius, – she didn’t quite manage to report the violence that was the invisibility of the Truemaier Boys’ own mother to them – to them, the ‘proper’ authorities.  For years and years and years.  When she knew of it from its start.  Casting her lot she has.  And still does. 

 

The offense, the crime of hers actually?  Concealing knowledge of treason – according to Black’s Law Dictionary.  Of treasonous mother – fucking and treasonous child abuse by one who has not accomplished it outright, outwardly or blatantly herself but by one who has done it, nevertheless.  Through her Silent participation and assistance in it.  Through her complicity in the acts of her brother and ‘the courts’.   Where have we all heard of this same complicity before?  Cowards all.

 

For shame. 

 

I did.  I did feel shame.  I felt shamed by Herry’s freeloading.  Herry’s taking.  Great shame.  That’s the difference though – I felt it.  Not Herry.  That certainly doesn’t ‘help’ Herry change, my feeling the shame for what he does.  Herry was such a moocher off of his ‘friends’.  Even after he married me and we had kids and they had kids.  I cannot begin to count the number of times I left his friends, Abby and Devin, who had two little girls and were so struggling to make their ends and themselves meet, with the absolutely extreme abashed and mortified feeling that Herry and I, because I by my Silence had allowed this, had just fucked these people.  We would leave but we would return again another time.  To their apartment.  Not to ours.  Not ever to ours.  We would return all right … but not the favors. 

 

Favors for others, doing unto others?  That involved work on Herry’s part.  Or, in reality here, only mine since Herry wasn’t going to lift a finger to prepare for company or for taking a hot dish over for someone’s supper who’d just walked away from a car crash or do the weekly grocery gathering or the shoveling of someone’s drive while his hip or his mind healed.  O.  Herry would grandly whip out the ol’ checkbook and donate gesturing and posturing sympathy.  Grandiose bucks, too, the displays.  But not the work.  Never the labor.  Let alone, sustained, day in / day out, get – on – with – the – work – of – breathing work when someone rather needed that.  Not Herry.  And not the other men of the Edinsmaier brotherhood either.   Like ol’ Juggern Aut Misein preached to that fraternal clan, “That might mean you loved someone, and then you’d be wanting to have sex with ‘em, wouldn’t ya’, since that’s how we’re all raised up to believe ‘love’ of someone means.”  Cold, hard cash was so much more … well, cold and hard.  And certainly … detached.  With a check there’s no getting up close and personal – as by doing the actual work of breathing.

 

Herry was ashamed, too, of course.  But he, as was Mehitable, was ashamed of what we weren’t!  As in – we weren’t wealthy enough to lavishly splash our materialism in front of his bookoo rich and prestigious doctor friends.  So they were not invited to our humble abodes.  We went there.  To theirs. 

 

Except for the one time, and only the one time ever in 12½ years of mother – fucking marriage to this freeloader, this taker.  Dr. Freddie Goldstein, one of Herry’s boss pathologists during his residency, came  to our duplex apartment for a small August birthday party which I gave for either Zane or Jesse, I don’t remember which.  Dr. Goldstein stayed four, maybe all of five minutes, not even long enough for, and refused, my offered piece of homemade birthday cake.  He never sat down.  Nor did Herry invite him to either.  He was out the door pronto.  But, hey, next weekend we were there.  Standing in Freddie’s expanse of a kitchen at its massive food prep island snarfing down and gargling his and Ella’s sandwiches and wine and sparkling juice after we’d, all five of us, dripped water in on its floor from where we had just come by way of the living room, then den and then hallway, Ella’s and Freddie’s hot tub. 

 

No Golden Rule – practicing by Herry, Legion, Mirzah, Jesse and Zane there.  Not a stitch of it off that well – worn sampler hanging on so many children’s bedroom walls.  Well, Mirzah learned this well.  He can take.  And not even utter a thanks.  “The man, he is especial,” they say in Mexico.  He does not even need to think about thanking anyone for anything, let alone, a mere woman, his servant.  Who should anyhow, that woman, be so grateful to da’ man for takin’ such good care of her.  Whether related to him or not related to him.  “What’s Mexico got to do with it?” you ask.  My point exactly.  It doesn’t matter where you are in the entire Globe, one thing truly is universal.  Whether you want it to be or it is bloody inconveniently impinging upon your entitlement rights and, well, narcissistic selfishness:  treatment of all others – including the DEhumans who are the majority – as you yourself would want to be treated all day every day.  Period.

 

*     *     *     *

 

To graduate out of any of Grace’s programs at all levels and with the ability to work in Ancestoring, all students will need to successfully complete the Final Course, Breathing.  One thing and one thing only will be taught in this course:  The Relinquishing of Male Supremacy.  The nowhere that Professor Stoltenberg alludes to in the Dances With Monsters course outlined earlier. 

 

And I am the professor of this, the Final Course.  

 

All, absolutely all, of the World’s problems, issues and situations requiring change or solution stem from and, therefore, can only be relieved and solved and their horrific impact much, much diminished by one thing:  the relinquishing of male supremacy and dominance over Not Males in all matters.  Whether the problem or the issue is family and personal relationships, religion, poverty (hunger, warmth), war, energy, media, environment, money and power, law, government and (in)justice, education, entertainment and sports, business, science and technology, health care and research, population, ad infinitum.  Why is it that there is not absolute and constant outrage over honor killings and cripplings and slavery in every area of Allah’s Lands?  Why is there not, now, in all these places zero tolerance for this behavior?  Why is it that TIME Magazine, just one of many, many examples of the Earth’s media, chose as its “person” of the entire 20th Century Albert Einstein --- and did not choose as its “person” of that Century Rosa Parks or Elizabeth Cady (Stanton) or Matilda Joslyn Gage or 24 – year – old Harry Burn’s mama, Phoebe, from East Tennessee, or Margaret Sanger?  The courage Ms. Parks managed to muster one ordinary day in the literal face of one very specific male bus driver whom she personally individually knew and by whom she had been terrorized for quite some number of years!  Or the undaunted perseverance of Ms. Cady (Stanton),      a married woman with seven babies of her own over whom to mother but who still took over 50 years of her very own breaths to bring literal liberty to 17,000,000 other humans when they finally – some eight million of them – walked into United States voting booths for their very first time ever 02 November 1920 – is mind – staggering.  Then there’s my personal favorite – Ms. Margaret Sanger.  She spent a half a century – and many, many … many nights of it in jail herself – to finally bring to over 53 percent of the ENTIRE Earth freedom from the violence that was their prison sentences wrought since TIME and sex ever began:  freedom for her from the fifth and the sixth and the seventh and the eighth and the ninth and the tenth and the eleventh and so forth and so on … pregnancy.  When Sanger brought to you and to me …   the Greatest Invention Over All of Time Throughout All The World:  The Pill.  To be sure, what Einstein did was remarkable, too.  But.

 

True this is:  What any one of these other three people, Sanger, Cady (Stanton) or Parks did, was sooooo much more impacting.  Someone else, possibly even a Not Male would have come along and done, in the last Century, what Einstein did.  Other Not Males, for decades and for centuries and for millennia before Sanger and Parks and Cady (Stanton) had been trying to do but not getting it done, what these three women did get done.  Those billions of people, over the last 12 millennia or so, were not succeeding.  And these three “persons” did.

 

Not until these three DEhumans, Parks and Cady (Stanton) and Sanger and their Not Male might, moxie and minds, did so, so many others benefit.

 

Still.  TIME Magazine, other media and male people, in general, on a regular, consistent, daily, usual basis do not even bother to recognize this.  Much less, loudly and long celebrate this.  And to celebrate this over and over and over.

 

 

Instead, these male people announce how tired they are of even just Hearing of these accomplishments and so tired, these men are, of even just Hearing from us Not Males that we want appropriate recognition for our heroism.  Let alone, our accomplishments and heroism consistently elaborated upon and heralded daily within every textbook and throughout every elementary – through – graduate school course Worldwide.

 

Itty bitty illustration:  New Year’s Day, Newest Millennium 2000, New York, USA

ABC TV ‘programming’ consisted of three football games, noon, 4:30 pm and 8 pm Eastern.  What is that?  In this course called Breathing, that will be taught as nothing more than male privilege and dominance in all of the areas that are everywhere every day! – – family and relationships, technology, business and entertainment.  At least.  Again. 

 

Because what the majority of the Earth may want to be entertained by instead on this, their day off from work too, simply … does not matter.  And hasn’t – hasn’t mattered since the very beginning of television – some 60 years now.

 

The IMPACT of androcentrism on breathing everywhere:  that is what my Breathing course will cover:  “Androcentrism = a perspective on society and social life that discounts and ignores the separate social experiences and social situation of women and views culture and social relationships exclusively through male eyes.” from http://openet.ola.bc.ca/sociglossary/andro.html of Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, British Columbia.

 

Women and girls, the gender and the majority, are simply not into warring, dominating, coveting, consuming, lying to get whatever, Your Honor, ignoring the lives and plights of children or other adults.  Not when they become enlightened about other people’s lives.

 

Breathing will cover then in its Willingness laboratory practical Roles Reversed Right Now:  The Flip / Reverse.  The lab’s essence will focus on Not Males doing unto Males now exactly what it is that males   do and have done unto females and females’ children.  Right now.  Everywhere.  As well as for all those 12,000 other years.  And … in the same proportionality. 

 

In the laboratory, we will consider and explore how males worldwide would handle it if they were         told, over and over and over and over, just … how tired all of us females are of Hearing of their accomplishments or watching them given accolades and ‘honors’.  Like the honors they have been awarded after they’ve killed their sisters, scissored off the clitorises of their own daughters, thrown acid into the faces of their own nieces, abandoned and starved to death their own grandmas, stunk up breathing DEhuman bodies with over 1,000 years’ worth of rotting, three – inch feet … and stolen away their           ex – wives’ children.

 

The trophies and prizes awarded, all of them along the same line as these same male honors now given out worldwide, will be reversed.  Right now.  And not just 53 percent of the New York Stock Exchange celebrants on the lab theater’s stage at the pretend New Millennium’s Eve will be female but 100 percent of them will be.  As was the real case with the real males on the real platform there on the real 31 December 1999.  Not just on the itty bitty boys of any and all races will 53 percent of their penises be cut off but    100 percent of their penises will be cut off wherever in the World this is now routinely and religiously perped on itty bitty girls.  Not just 53 percent of the men will be fucked by ‘the court’ and ‘the appeals courts’ but 100 percent of them will be father – fucked because of their absence of privilege, control, wealth, power and the right stuff between their legs.  Not just … Well, you get the idea again, I’m sure.

 

The males in the role – reversal lab exercises will be told, in soft, whispering tapes running at all times day and night in the classroom and the laboratory and the library and out of all the computer terminal speakers, that females are not only tired of Hearing of these shitfuck honors but that we are also choosing to ignore the males themselves.  As they have chosen to ignore women, children and all of these issues by their male Silence, male complicity or outright male loathing and enmity in all its 12,000 years of hating forms for things female and things child – like.  One lab assignment will be for every student to entitle their report, and then recount her or his grasp and understanding of “Males’ Endurance:  Living Day to Day Like This.”  All examples of Double Standardization and The Golden Rule Untaught will be covered and included in this laboratory report.  It will take a long, long time to complete.  It will be a long, long report.

 

The next to the last assignment will be a lab report on the immediate, constant and daily reactions, uproar and outrage everywhere to males having to live day to day like this — with roles reversed, with the females treating the males day to day in all such manners as DEhumans are treated in reality – the likes of which uproar and outrage has been seen unmatched anywhere since, O, at least 10,000 years before some male called christ.  This particular lab report will be very short.  Probably consisting of only one sentence –     the likes of which complete, turned sentence will go something like, “Fuck, NO!”

 

The last lab assignment will be the student proving their sincerity about and their Willingness to Do The Work (that’s the lab report title) to bring about the outcome of drawing one’s daily quota of BREATHS.  Kind of a three – word mantra the Breathing Prayer begins with, a beginning that just came to me the very next morning, about 5 am over coffee whitened with no – fat milk and brewed, well, reheated actually, in the Radarange monstrosity of a microwave in that rented, not – so – mammoth Land of Allah’s that was the Havencourt Drive apartment with the massive orange and brown chunks for an itty bitty kitchen instead.  The beginning that just came to me at that hour after da’ judge – like men ‘dealt with me’ in their one – sentence ruling for their very last time. 

 

The Breathing Prayer does not begin with ‘Free At Last’, not even close.  Has nothing to do with ‘I Love You’ or ‘Love Your Whatever’.  Not even that Shawshank Prison one of ‘Keep Hope Alive’ either because, ya’ know, as a female, I’m just frankly tired of Hearing it, so, and literally now, mother – fucking tired of Hearing about hope myself.  Hope doesn’t do The Work of anything.  Hope kills us.

 

Working does The Work.  Hope is like Herry’s talk, talk, talk --- and No Work.  It certainly isn’t ‘Let It Go’.  Letting It go without an accounting, without accountability by the parties accountable means only that the It goes nowhere.  The It really only continues, is allowed to or that It is gotten clean, slick away with.  With no consequences.  So where’s the learning accomplished then?  Nothing is let go of when there hasn’t been accountability and remorse for the It.  And The Breathing Prayer isn’t even ‘Deal With It’ although that one is nearly my favorite mantra now.

 

But is, instead, way, way simpler and easier than these.  In fact, Grace pointed out to me just recently, with her Listening mastery and all and I still learning Listening from AmTaham and her myself, that AmTaham must’ve somehow Prayed it long before.  When an itty bitty three – footer was looking Blue Skyward to the man and his Allah.  She said My Prayer must’ve come from Hearing it from My First Ancestor a half century ago and his Hearing it from the Allah in his Ancestors given them from the Allah in ... and so forth and so on.  Back.

 

Even though only some male’s hand got to write it down, there it is in Ecclesiastes 1 : 3 – 5:  What profit hath a being of all its labour which it taketh under the sun?  One generation passeth away; and another generation cometh:  but the Earth abideth forever.  The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down and hasteneth to its place where it arose.

 

Sun Comes Up.  Sun Goes Down.

Sun Comes Up.  Sun Goes Down.

Zero Tolerance Now.  I Will Work.

I, The Ancestor.  Zero Tolerance Now. 

Sun Comes Up.  Sun Goes Down.

 

First Surgeon Koop was wrong.  Purposefully.  So he knew it – that he was stating wrongly.  The three diseases – in order of their destructive power – which will, in my lifetime, annihilate the Globe – – if not, right now, immediately stemmed:  i) sexism, ii) abrogation of personal accountability and iii) greed.

 

Amazing Grace and her Listening College.

 

*     *     *     *

Curriculum – building is fatiguing.  But.  Nowhere near as exhausting as being a mother fucked, we have learned.

 

Soccer ended.  With the parents in a scrimmage the last practice date.  Mommies and daddies versus the

six – and seven – year – olds.  It was no contest.  Parents lost, of course, 4 to 1.  In goals scored.  But not in their itty bitty opponents’ eyes and hearts.  The end – of – the – season kids – versus – the – parents scrimmage became something known among families the Globe over as a … tradition.  Not for lack of truly, truly trying, we never got any better.  We parents never won.

 

That’s what something small can do.  Something itty bitty.  She or he teaches.  That last day Mona showed me a watercolor inking done by someone named Brian Andreas that she had purchased in Des Moines at an art fair, an abstract of two humans, one an Ancestor in the Making and the other an itty bitty being inside her belly with these words next to her, “In my dream, he told me to hold the secret of his birth safe and teach him when … he forgot.”


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