I am always somewhat shocked when a man displays his junk – who can ever forget Michael Douglas on Leno or Derek Hough on Dancing with the Stars? When it’s on TV you can just snigger into your gin and tonic, but when it’s in person I don’t know where to look or whether or not he wants the world to see it or just had an unfortunate case of pant size confusion. Especially fascinating are Italian men who wear their clothing to deliberately advertise their junk. From what I’ve heard, Brazilians and Argentinians are happy to stuff their junk in a package that’s meant to display their wares like cellophane-wrapped ham hocks around New Years. Then you have entire regions of American men who wear pants baggy enough to be skirts and you have to wonder . . .

What was that you said? It’s like cleavage on a woman? Oh no. It’s not. Boobs are universal. Junk is not. And junk is an illusion anyway – it’s not like the package on display is really telling the whole story. Of course, then you have the picture above – now if men with their junk all out and about looked like THAT perhaps junk exposure would be more appealing?

I grew up with only a sister so until I started my foray into womanhood the male junk was sort of a mystery. Then I had husbands, and a son, and it became just one more thing around the house to maintain. So, here is my practical guide to the junk drawer.

Five Penis Facts from, I swear this is true, CBS News:

1. A penis does have a mind of its own. Men in fact have less control over their penis than they do their arms or legs. It’s tied to the nervous system. The arms and legs, however, should remain under the man’s control, which should allow him to walk away and put his hands in his pockets. Tiger Woods and Jesse James may not have known that this is how it works.
2. As far as size, there are two varieties: Growers and Showers. A penis can grow anywhere from the width of a paperclip to the length of a Blackberry. Hey, I’m sitting at my desk and that’s all I had on hand. So, that penis that looks puny may be a grower and the one that looks temptingly like a good nudge might yield results may be a shower and it’s already given all it can give.
3. The Penis Is Shaped Like a Boomerang. The root of the penis is tucked way up in the pelvis and when actually detailed on an MRI it’s, yes, a boomerang. Which explains why it’s always getting itself stuck in the same old spots, doesn’t it? And you can totally picture how that MRI session started. The copier was broken and the techs had to do something besides photocopy their asses . . .
4. A Penis Can Be Broken. Contrary to the whole “boner” thing there’s no bone, but a penis can be fractured. Those of us with husbands over 30 ought to be really thankful because a broken penis tends to be a young man’s problem. Now, if anyone is going to take up Courgaring be warned, the younger the guy the more rigid the penis, which can lead to great joy and happiness, but also a chance of accidental breakage.
5. Most Penises in the World Are Uncut. Only 6% of Australian men are circumcised. 20% of Brits and 30% of Canadians. Who’s up for a field trip to do “research?”

Beyond the basic facts and junk exposure – there’s that question most women have pondered at least once. Why are men always adjusting their junk? Is it to get our attention? They don’t quite understand the female mind if that’s the case because when I see junk-adjustment going on the first thing I think of is: infection. I don’t adjust my boobs in public and I’d like to ask men to refrain from adjusting their junk. Although I’d have to guess frequent boob-adjustment would earn me a fan club.

Five Reasons Men Adjust Their Junk:

1. They have junk pinchage
2. Their junk is sticking to their leg
3. Their pants are too tight, causing junk compression
4. Their junk ventilation is insufficient causing suffocating junk
5. A woman is within a mile and she might like to be reminded that they have junk to share

I’m sure previous generations of men would have scoffed at this, but the current crop of men (none among the men I know – I did an informal survey) seem to be more sensitive to junk-aroma. Did you know they have begun making toiletry products aimed specifically at junk? Don’t believe me? Go to www.manjunk.com and see for yourself. I think this is great payback for the past fifty years of Summer’s Eve commercials.

If you’d like to see the worst instance of Man Junk ever on record, here’s a You Tube video for you:

And people wonder why I live intown! So, who has a good junk story? What are your feelings about junk exposure and adjustment?

Neil Gaiman has a great letter from a librarian on his blog and it’s worth reading.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2007/02/last-last-word.html

Some books you may not have realized were censored:

Aesop. Fables.
Anonymous. Go Ask Alice.
Boccacio. The Decameron
Boston Women’s Health Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Brothers Grimm. The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass
Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness
Cervantes. Don Quixote.
Cinderella
Dante. The Divine Comedy.
Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders.
Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe.
Eliot, George. Silas Marner.
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Eliot, George. Adam Bede.
Eliot, George. Silas Marner.
Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby.
Frank, Anne. Diary of Anne Frank.
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera.
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Sorrows of Young Werther.
Hanford, Martin. Where’s Waldo?
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter
Homer. The Odyssey.
Hugo, Victor. Les Miserables.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World.
Keyes, Daniel. Flowers for Algernon.
King, Stephen. Carrie.
L’Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time.
Lawrence, Margaret. A Jest of God.
Lawrence, Margaret. The Diviners.
Lawrence, Margaret. The Stone Angel.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird.
Lewis, C.S. The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.
Little Red Riding Hood.
Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte D’Arthur.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman.
Miller, Jim, ed. The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll.
Molière. Tartuffe.
Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women.
Orwell, George. 1984.
Orwell, George. Animal Farm.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Rumpelstiltskin.
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye.
Sanders, Lawrence. The Seduction of Peter S.
Sewell, Anna. Black Beauty.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear.
Shakespeare, William. Othello.
Shakespeare, William. Richard II.
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice.
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night.
Speare, Elizabeth George. The Witch of Blackbird Pond.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men.
Suzuki, D. T. Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels.
Thoreau, Henry James. Civil Disobedience.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit.
Tolkien, J. R. R. Lord of the Rings.
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Voltaire. Candide.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Little House In the Big Woods.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Little House On The Prairie.
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. On The Banks of Plum Creek.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie.

As an English major I’ve actually read every single book on this list. And I’m proud of that.

If you care about censorship and want to take a stand, please visit:

http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/

Why am I writing about censorship today? Because until today I was part of a blog group of romance writers. I’ve just tendered my resignation because a post I wrote was read in draft form and found to conflict with the moral sensibilities of some of the other writers. The blog group had everyone from writers of erotica to inspirational writers. For those unfamiliar with what “inspirational” means – that refers to books that are in the romance genre, but that are sweeter, more innocent, and of a bent to be more acceptable to those of a religious nature. I support the rights of those writers to speak about religious topics, but apparently the support of divergent view points is not a two-way street.

My post – the one that was questioned by the group and suggested had the possibility to do one or all of the following:
A) Ruin careers
B) Keep people from being published
C) Be used as ammunition should one of the other blog members ever be sued for sexual harassment
D) Cause us to be labeled as man-haters
E) Lose the religious audience
F) Shame other members in front of their families

Well, it will appear in this space next Monday. I would welcome you to see for yourself if my post had the power to do any of the above.

On the first day of spring my beast of a kitteh gave to me: One dead white bunny.
On the second day of spring my beast gave to me: One stiff robin.
On the third day of spring my beast gave to me: A still twitching chipmunk.
On the fourth day of spring my beast gave to me: A field mouse, gray with pink little paws.

He stopped there THANK GOD because if I came out the front door and screamed for a fifth morning I’m pretty sure my neighbors would have been miffed. They’re musicians and they don’t get up at the ass crack of dawn like I do. BTW, all their musician friends greet my chief killer cat by name affectionately as if they are on intimate terms. I think he’s over there sitting in on jam sessions when he’s not out killing things.

So, how do I know all these delights were meant for me? (really, put the sandwich down) They are always left on the front door matt and are in perfectly preserved condition. The bounty he takes for himself ends up in pieces and parts and requires a hose to get off the porch. I hated dissection in school, but I passed, so I can tell you what a mouse spine and a chipmunk liver look like as the water wooshes them off the porch.

The carnage had stopped for a while until this morning’s offering of a beautiful little gray mouse. The creepy part is that said mouse had been totally licked clean – maybe like a kitteh Popsicle or something. I gave the cats a little bowl of milk yesterday. Really, I would prefer to have been thanked another way – maybe by a nice lap snuggle or a keyboard crawl.

Have you ever been given a gift out of the “heart” (get it!) that you really would prefer to have not gotten?

My sister happened to come over somewhere in the midst of me getting Miss J out of the bathtub and into her skinny jeans. Have you ever had to get a fully grown, drunk, woman out of a bathtub and into a pair of skinny jeans? I should add that Miss J is my height – so please don’t picture a petite little 17 year old. My sister and I have both been drunk girls in bathrooms at one point or another – typically, I can speak mostly for myself here as my sister will have to answer for herself – in our own or at least friend’s bathrooms, so I’m not calling pot shots out at anyone, okay. But if you are going to go out on an all day bender perhaps skinny jeans are not your best option. So, my sister and I got the drunk girl out of my bathroom and into my kitchen. “Oh, look a dog. Cute doggie. I like dogs. Oh, look, are those children . . . there are small people here?” (cue my husband literally shooing the children out the front door and off to get pizza with his arms akimbo like a blue oxfod wearing father goose.) And no, I don’t usually wait until 7:30 to feed them, but it was Cub Scouts night. I am sure there’s not a badge for drunk girl saving.

So, Miss J’s phone was dead. The one person Miss J wanted more than anyone else in the world was – her father. This part did surprise me. My father would absolutely have killed me. Luckily for Miss J her father was listed on the white pages website. Thank God he’s of the generation that still has a landline and actually answers it. So, Miss J’s father is on his way and we’re still feeding Miss J Ritz crackers, water and ibuprofen. Have I mentioned how happy I was that Miss J declared, “I’m not a puker” when I handed her a bucket to put on her lap? The skinny jeans had been enough for me.

So, here’s where this is going. Miss J, while attempting to smoke a cigarette with me holding my hands underneath hers so she wouldn’t burn herself (I don’t smoke and yet I facilitated a drunk girl holding a burning object – surely there is a badge for this in the Senior-level Girl Scout handbook!) looked up at my sister and said, “are you married? cause my dad is totally going to hit on you.” (he did not, for the record) So, should I feel guilty because the only thing I could think of is “wow, this would make a great story – the couple who met over a drunk girl in a stranger’s bathroom.”

Limbs catch on the insides of their eyelids;
the cross-hatch becomes the river Elbe
on a mortarman’s much-folded field map;
or slim brown legs tangled in sheets, not his;
or the cracks in the mirror’s silvering
as it hung above the bar where time ran out.

The men rise up from the earth, now specters
from tales told by my elderly neighbor.
Their failures cling to me like the fallen
petals I’ll find buried in my knotted hair
when I wake in the early morning hours,
asleep in my nightgown, feet bare, chilled,
the house key against my palm, my failures
forming shapes in the tangled weave of limbs.

I keep trying to get the people close to me to understand, but unless you’ve been somewhere, how do you know what the landscape looks like? I have this overwhelming desire every minute of every day to create something. That’s why the vines grow and the buds come out and the webs get spun. My interior life is all about solving problems and making stuff – I don’t walk down the street without re-imagining what everything *could* look like. I don’t meet someone or see someone in line somewhere without instantly describing them in my head as if they were a character I was introducing. I don’t go through my days half asleep. My head is buzzing. All the time.

Being misunderstood is probably the most profound of all human problems. I’m pretty angry sometimes because my time to be creative is limited. That makes me grumpy. And I know grumpy gets old to the people upon whom you inflict the sharpness and bitterness of a constant grump. I’ve read endless biographies of artists and writers and a common theme really is the tendency to make enemies out of your loved ones simply because the constant frustration of a creative life spreads like a ratty old quilt across a bed. Lumpy, full of holes and with a tell-tale musty smell at times. I just wish everyone understood that if I could make myself be upbeat and happy and carefree I WOULD!! But that’s not the temperament nor the brain I was given. I was given this rich interior space full of creativity and brimming with the ability to “see” what things could look like transformed. It’s crazy-making even though I do try for sanity. The one strategy that works for me over and over again is searching out the creative struggles other people endure.

I love the Dar Williams song, After All. Perfect description of creative angst and my favorite line is:
It felt like a winter machine that you go through, and then, you catch your breath and winter starts again, and everyone else is spring-bound.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28N_A-dy52Y

Anyone else end up being misunderstood?

If you saw my post “During the Reign of the Oak King” today on Petit Fours, and would like to see some pictures of my studio, then here they are! Most of my pictures are focused on the ideas I used to create things and the sewing equipment I’ve planned around. Writing really only takes up the space between my elbows.

La Rosita cranks up for the after-game rush –
the heavy smell of corn oil hanging over the parking lot
drifting toward campus, slick tendrils sliding
toward the bleachers. Masa coalesces
into the hands, slippery and smooth, of three sisters in the back
who slap the balls like new babies
into the churning tortilla press. Their father handles the long wooden spoon,
leans his face into the heat of the chile verde,
testing with his nose for cumin, green chiles, garlic.
Their ears perk for the roar of the crowd’s choral
lamentation or exultation depending on the score.
This is their science: put the carne asada on the grill when the marching band
thunders into the first mournful notes of the alma mater.

We agreed to meet after the game – sit with other faculty –
bump our fingers into one another reaching for the cilantro.
Maybe the garnishes in the Styrofoam bowl – sour cream, juicy tomatoes,
jalapeño slices, translucent onions
make me reject the safest choices,
see in your eyes a brightness, a delight, a delirium.

Eating cilantro for the first time is an act of faith.
The small chopped leaves so like clover, the long, long stems
still with the smell of damp earth – these things should taste like the lawn,
should be grassy, sharp, bitter, but instead they infuse
spicy foods with the mellowness of morning sun on soggy fields.

And the air, as it often does with these things,
sucks itself up and away in the crush of teenage bodies
and the hum of victory dances,
when you take my elbow and steer me out into the busy night
and toward the empty campus, to the low white plaster buildings
done in the smooth, old, Spanish style, falling
against the wall under the shadow of the eucalyptus,
and into your hands, slippery and smooth,
“Come Inside. Come Inside.” you whisper.
And I reshape myself to your palms.

Notes on Evensong Evensong is an Anglican tradition dating back to the 1500’s. Evensong is the choral service sung at vespers. In this poem the singing of the crowd triggers the events of the poem.

The bottle of Jameson picked a bad moment to bang against the plastic container in the bottom of Marchand’s knapsack. She stopped and ducked into the doorway of a mausoleum, her fingers deftly wedging the whiskey bottle into place again. She crouched lower as a flashlight played out in a faint arc in the Jewish section, illuminating the dull red of shedding leaves. For October the night was slightly warm, but Marchand wore a black sweater to blend into the shadows and was thankful for the warmth against the chill she felt coming from inside her body. The guard patrolled in a pattern, allowing Marchand a slim belief that she’d complete her mission before he caught her, but not if the bottle that had cost her a day’s tips gave her away. Atlanta was not New Orleans; she couldn’t pay a guard to look the other way for a bridal ancestor ritual.

Marchand timed her advance through Oakland with the clacking of the Marta trains running every thirteen minutes along the northwest perimeter of the cemetery. She knew exactly how many steps it would take from each stopping point to get her across the original six acres and onto the back side of Oakland where the McCarty plot faced the old Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill. This deliberateness, the precision of her plans, had not come as easily to Marchand as she would have wished. But a skill acquired in counter to the natural order of her personality had given her spells a resonance that increased their potency.

Brick walkways, humped and misshapen by a century of rain, were laid out in a tidy grid. Moving quickly, she turned left at the juncture of four paths. At the highest point in the cemetery the Austell plot rose up in a solid brown mass; huge blocks forming the base with Gothic arches and spires rising up into the sky. Marchand crouched against the iron gate and waited; cold pinpricks rose up on her back from the metal pressing through her sweater. From this vantage point she could see the lights from the taqueria just across Memorial Drive and the slight wind carried the heavy scent of cooking oil. In the thirteen minutes she waited the sound of cars traveling down I-20 rose in a distant swell before the trains drowned them out again. Oakland had once stood out in the country, but the thick brick walls rimming in the forty-five acres now provided a bulwark against urban encroachment instead of errant cattle. Inside the cemetery the Victorian world, with its heavy symbology and efflorescence of ritual mourning and devotion, held its power in spite of the industrial complexes and light pollution pushing in on all sides.

Marchand dashed from her spot at the sound of the approaching train and headed down the final path to her destination. The contents of her knapsack remained silent and complicit.

Contest Question: Oakland Cemetery is located in the heart of Atlanta and is open daily for contemplative walks. It’s a beautiful place. In my story the events of Hurricane Kartina are bookended with the tornado that ripped through Oakland in March of 2008.

While Marchand is in Oakland she uses a vegetable as part of an ancestor ritual. What vegetable does she use?