Bright lights, mid-sized city

Drunk women caterwaul. I live in the heart of the nightlife district of a city always full of tourists. Get a couple of sissy drinks in them, and gals who wouldn't think of saying something untoward at home in Toledo squall out long and hard on the streets of Music City. 

Throw in the locals, including college students from Nashville's 957 institutions associated with a niche religion (Send your budding Church of Christ-ers here!). These mostly Southern girls raised on the idea of female submissiveness and a literal hell can get pretty wild on a Saturday night. Beyond the usual "I am soooo drunk," I hear stuff like "Kill him, Brandon!" and "I don't give a good gee-dee what my daddy says!" Yep. That is a serious statement in the South, y'all.

Photo: Lower Broadway, Nashville. From Vermont Digital Newspaper project

Oh, MM

It's late September and I really should be back at school.

Etheridge Unplugged.

Pictured: The Old Well at Carolina, Chapel Hill campus.

The women I want to meet in Nashville

Mandy Barnett
She's from Crossville, y'all, and has a big, ballsy, beautiful singing voice. Need I say more?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvtOzCPxKtM

Maura O'Connell
A voice that rivals Mandy's, and a wide, pretty face with Irish  eyes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l87JpWkbI0

Minton Sparks
I confess. Got a major crush on this poet/songwriter/spoken-word artist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q4EHAwYNms

Making a mountain out of Mary Magdalene

I am shocked that the Vatican denies that Jesus might have been married. Not.

Come on, y'all. I like the husband/father Christ better than some lily-white fainting lamb.

'Webb drops the hammer on Romney'

The former defense secretary is not happy with Mitt's essentially calling veterans moochers.

"Those young Marines that I led (in Vietnam) have grown older now. They’ve lived lives of courage, both in combat and after their return, where many of them were derided by their own peers for having served. That was a long time ago. They are not bitter. They know what they did. But in receiving veterans’ benefits, they are not takers. They were givers, in the ultimate sense of that word. There is a saying among war veterans:  'All gave some, some gave all.' This is not a culture of dependency. It is a part of a long tradition that gave this country its freedom and independence. They paid, some with their lives, some through wounds and disabilities, some through their emotional scars, some through the lost opportunities and delayed entry into civilian careers which had already begun for many of their peers who did not serve. 

And not only did they pay. They will not say this, so I will say it for them. They are owed, if nothing else, at least a mention, some word of thanks and respect, when a presidential candidate who is their generational peer makes a speech accepting his party’s nomination to be commander-in-chief.  And they are owed much more than that — a guarantee that we will never betray the commitment that we made to them and to their loved ones."

Pictured: Multi-Launch Rocket System at Fort Sill, OK

Today is a great time to be The Gay

So says this thoughtful piece on how every-day dangerous and scary it was to be out not so long ago.

"I had grown up in the fifties and the sixties, when practically the only public homosexuals in America were James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Gore Vidal, and (the bisexual) Paul Goodman. There were no gay images on television (unless you count Paul Lynde and Liberace), no politicians in favor of gay rights (much less any who were out of the closet themselves), and no news coverage that didn’t share the tone of a notorious page-one story in The New York Times that appeared in 1963. It carried this headline: Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern."

Change, thank you Buddha, has come partly due to the AIDS epidemic. During that desperate decade before drugs made it a chronic yet manageable disease, people saw their sons and nephews and brothers die painful, wracking deaths in the closet, as the world whistled by.

That horror woke us up quicker to the fact that we are all God's children.

Mid-afternoon doggehs

Today you require canines. I understand.