The Wild Wild

I. Likable?

I had such an endearing phone conversation with Marz last night. Sometimes I ask her these ridiculous questions, like, If you saw me on the street would you recognize me?
(She says she would.)

Last night I asked her, "What size am I?"
"Medium sized," she said.

"How old am I?" I said.

"Older. Older is younger than old."

"Am I likable?"

"Well, I don't know about likable," she said. (I hooted.) "You have a presence though. I would say instead that I endorse you."

She always has such an unexpected, good, left-handed way of putting things. I'll take endorsement.

Of course some people, plenty even, like me, but that's different than being likable.
We went on to agree that Maura is the very definition of likable.
What is it? She looks at people with an open face, radiating her readiness to like them, or at least to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I have to laugh. Do I look at people radiating a readiness to judge them as ... possibly rather dim? Probably.

II. Wild West Trash Culture

Not related, exactly? but I actually hit someone at work the other day.
Willy is/was a newer coworker sent & paid by a federal program for hard-to-place, older (or old) workers. He's often drunk and has been harassing the women ever since he arrived--"I'd like you to cook me a steak", said with a drunken leer--and greatly annoying the men too. One of my male coworkers said, "I almost docked him."

A couple other women and I had told Willy to back off, and Big Boss had told him to "leave the ladies alone", but the other day Willy bumped into me from behind--clearly not an accident.
"Leave me the fuck alone!" I said.
When he grinned as he apologized (not), I punched him on the upper arm, pushing him away.

Then I went in a rage to Big Boss, who dismissed him.
Finally. BB gives people [sometime too many] chances, but--crucially!--without actually giving them any HELP.
"Change your ways," he warns people, but does not help them do that.

He didn't help me in any way either, or address the fact that I'd hit (!) another coworker, even if justifiably.
Again, I sort of have to laugh. At any other place I've ever worked, this would be a big deal. In any other workplace, Willy wouldn’t have made it in the door, or if he did, not lasted a day. But here again, my workplace is the Wild West, and this was just another scuffle by the denizens at high noon.
When you're in the Wild West, you adopt its rules or you keep moving on.

I think BB has no help to offer--no human resources psychology or any such thing--nothing beyond a kind of rudimentary Christianity.
Religion saved his own life, literally––he'd turned to it as a young man after a cousin was killed in a drug deal that he himself had almost been present at––and that's all he has in his tool kit.
It's a good tool, but it's limited, as if a carpenter only had a hammer--no saw, no screwdriver, no pliers.

Horrible to say, but with people like Willy--deeply alcoholic and scarred by social ills and poverty--(and perhaps none too bright to start with? or was it alcohol that damaged his brain to the point that he couldn't even sort incoming donations into categories?)––you need way more than a few tools--you're looking at something more like a tear-down.
It is horrible, horrible, the devastation wrought by the lack of resources--emotional, financial, spiritual, social, educational.

And over and over, I see that the creative force can help--if a person has a creative spark and can access it.
I always point to Mr Furniture and the Excellent Emster as examples of people who came from nothing, have nothing, but create––extravagantly!–– out of their own inner selves.

Em came into the store yesterday (she no longer works there but often visits and shops)--she experiences much of the social devastation that Willy does, but she's a FORCE OF ART.
(As an aside, I'd even say she's likeable, though appears a tad wild. She carries a knife, for instance, but it's just for self-defense, she's got a sweetness and generosity to her nature.
When a coworker was living in their van this summer, with two dogs, for instance, Em immediately and unhesitatingly said the coworker could camp out at her place, use the toilet, etc.--though she already had four people crammed in a two-bedroom apartment.

In contrast, Asst Man said he felt bad for our coworker, but of course could not open his two-story house, yard, or even garage to her.
(I too said coworker could use my bathroom to shower, etc, but that the dogs couldn't stay with me. She was showering at the gym, where she luckily already had a membership. I ended up lending a down-payment on an apartment.)

Anyway, yesterday Emmler gave me one of the shirts she's been screen-printing (on thrift store shirts), and selling:

TRASH CULTURE INSTITUTE.

How much do I love it? Entirely much! (Well, I wish the text were larger, but aside from that. IT IS MY CULTURE!)

III. Touch me.

I'd texted Em the photo of Girlettes as Spirits for All Souls Day and explained that I love Catholicism because it has the best, weirdest toys and rituals and crazy stories and holy times, like November being the Month of the Dead.
Religion, she's told me, is entirely foreign to her--she's not against it, it just means nothing to her, and she'd asked me what it meant to me.

Of course religions can be high-control, but the Spirit is WILD, and religions that leave room for that (such as I've experienced in Catholicism) are full of the Creative Spark that sometimes saves.
(And sometimes it's religion's order and structure that save, as in the case of Big Boss, who was wandering in the lawless wilderness and needed some rules for living.)

As an example of wild and sensory Spirit, yesterday I told E about Jesus' friend Thomas doubting that the resurrected Jesus was real, and the very sensual--even sexy--paintings of Thomas touching the wound in Jesus' side as proof. Depictions entirely sanctioned--even financed--by the Catholic Church.
(examples here)

I love many of them, and I sent her a couple examples this morning.
I do not love the most famous one, by Caravaggio: Thomas is repellent in it--reminds me of Willy, so I didn't send that one.

I sent:
"The Incredulity of Thomas", left,  by Guercino (1621), with Jesus looking lovingly (bemusedly?) at Thomas reaching into the slit in his side.
And, right, by Francesco Salviati (1540s), with Jesus' pubic hair, curved hip, and the tender shadow on his inner thigh...
[These are both cropped close-ups of the paintings.]