about the album "Camgirl" by Crippling Alcoholism

She's doing whatever you want. She recoils. Her injuries are minor. See her on camera sitting up suddenly, taking a moment, taking inventory. She's a new camgirl now—a girl drowning in the disappointment of being at center of another breaking metaphor. Watch her face and body. Do you picture every sad moment that happened in her life? Every step dad line up, every line up her nose? Why don't you picture that?

something about Tom Perrotta’s "Mrs. Fletcher"

Tom Perrotta excels at combining middle-class drama and satire. His stories, including Mrs. Fletcher, sprout from small sagas in American suburbs. The titular character is Eve, a fifty-something divorcée and mother of an entitled, popular, teenaged son named Brendan. Brendan is starting college, and Eve is starting life in an empty nest. The coming year defies expectations because it is Eve rather than Brendan who begins to dabble and explore. Perrotta's easily digestible novel sets up tension between a mature woman starting a new chapter in her life and her immature son's struggle in a new environment in which he is no longer at center. This is an enjoyable story of contemporary sexual politics.


Notes:

• Mrs. Fletcher was published in 2017. The book was adapted recently into an HBO series.
• Here is a fair review in The Washington Post.

Craigslist ad, "Bass Ho Walking the Streets and Looking for Work (NoVA)"

Hey sailor, need someone to play bass for a gig?

I'm a bassist with over 20 years experience in multiple genres. I have hundreds of tunes under my belt and can learn, read, or fake my way through anything else. I have chops for fingerstyle and slapping. I know how to do this, and like any Ho that's been doing this for a while, I have some tricks to please the customers. I have reliable toys and a ride as well.

Why go with a ho?
- A Ho knows what they are doing, and can get right in on the action with little warm-up time. I don't need a movie and dinner to do my thang.
- A Ho knows not only how to please one client, but all different kinds of clients. I love you long time...
- You don't wanna deal with the crazy ho after you had your fill? No problem, I'm out after I get dressed and paid.
- I got no agenda other than makin money, so you have all your artistic freedom, control, etc.
- You can still go back to your steady if you want, I'll still be around if he/she goes out of town and you're lonely.

So if you find yourself needing a bass player for a gig or more, hit me up. But like any Ho, I ain't doing anything for free except unless it's for my pimp (my wife). And if I don't got her money when I come home, Lord help us all......

I've been checked by the doc, and I'm clean, so let's rock! 

Note: URL [https://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/muc/6163711118.html]

About self

We spoke first in terms of the soul and the vessel, then the spirit and the flesh, and then the mind and body. Now we speak in terms of identity and biology.

about the slept-in Impala

something about "The Elementary Particles" by Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq's "The Elementary Particles" diagnosis society with irreversible decline brought on by failing social values and an addiction to the promises of technology and positivism. The social-sexual revolutions of the 1960s implanted an unwavering allegiance to individuality, and this in turn cost us community and the possibility of intimacy among friends and lovers. This trend coupled with cold, hard science pushed us all apart, leaving a developed world of lonely, desperate, frustrated people. Isolation, depression prevail.

This tale of shifting value systems is played out in the lives of half-brothers Michel and Bruno. Their mother was a sexually liberated woman who had no time or interest for children. Being an easy target for bullies, Bruno led a difficult childhood; Michel fared better, being brilliant but clearly withdrawn and romantically oblivious. Bruno grows into a sexually frustrated and obsessed adult, Michel into a molecular biologist. Late in life they each find a sad but redeeming relationship with women but even this last hurrah only underscores our doom--both women die, leaving the half-brothers half whole and forced to recollect the pieces of their already broken lives. Bruno finds not-unhappiness medicated in a sanitarium while Michel goes on to ensure the death of humanity by pioneering asexual reproduction.

Not a bad book. But I wouldn't call it good.

Inconsequential

People who follow politics and political coverage often criticize the media for not explicating policy proposals and instead focusing on polls and swing states. Such critics see the media as too focused on distractions. Now, following Tuesday's Presidential debate, an online public hears Romney's "binders full of women" comment and amplifies it, silencing other discussions for a day or so.

Maybe the "binders full of women" is sort of amusing, and within that amusement is the sense that some things are odd about Romney. Some things are, but nothing evidenced in his comment is revelatory unless you've never thought about who Mitt Romney is beyond his brand, "successful businessman".

The larger discourse on women voters and women's issues seems far more revealing about what we're like, and how we perceive ourselves and those around us. Women are sort of treated as a political g-spot in need of some serious finessing. This gender-oriented political discourse seems to say that a candidate needs to understand and address things women "care about" without appearing to stereotype women or lock them in the home. This CNN article on Romney's women-talk during the debate cites a political science professor voicing such a concern:

"His discussion of work-life balance appeared condescending to some because of the reference to women cooking dinner."

So the candidate must embrace gender difference but frame his embrace in terms of equality. Maybe most or all political discourse aimed at a specific segment of the voting public includes some version of outlining that segment, then erasing those lines, of conjuring their image, then making them disappear, but women are a good, current example of this, I think. The finessing and specific, pointed targeting of women leaves an impression that women are both foreign and essential to political discourse. A political writer in The New Yorker touched on all this when addressing political ads aimed at "women voters":

... that ad, like every ad targeted to women voters for the last half century, including those made by both campaigns this election season, assumes that women are wholly different species of citizen than men. The political imagination of American women, at least according to American political advertisers, begins with our cervixes and ends at the kitchen door.

Notes:

• The "binders full of women" meme nearly obscured the best bit of political gamesmanship by anybody of either party in years: Obama's "Proceed, Governor".

• Embracing gender difference while seeking equality is sort of similar to how feminist theory works in academia, I'd say, from my very limited experience with it.