High Heels

High Heels

            I’m sitting on the carpet, a sort of pre-historic berber installed in all cheapo San Fernando Valley houses in the late 1950s, built by a company called Alden and they all look exactly alike.  I’m watching my mother put on her makeup.  Though she doesn’t do anything but stay at home and take care of kids, she still performs this ritual daily just in case somebody comes over to judge her fitness as an early 60’s suburban housewife.  To my child’s mind makeup a complete waste of time, but another part of me knows that at the age of 4, 5 or whatever I am, I don’t know shit and I’m not going to stay this way forever.  Someday I’m going to have to be a grown up lady and do all kinds of ladylike things that don’t currently make sense to me.  One of these things is painting my face with loads of glop, cursing my lack of eyebrows, rummaging furiously through bathroom drawers, and having spikey curlers all over my head.

            To my left the linen closet is open and on the inside of the door hangs a full length compartmented pouch filled with shoes.  I have previously noted that for some reason, while boys and men have a pair or two of shoes, women, even penniless women like my mother, have dozens of them.  They come in all colors—some are shiny, some not; the shiny kind are called patent leather, though back in those days and up until just now when I’m thinking about it, I would think of them as “patton leather.”  Patton, like the general.  The point is, kids draw conclusions from the limited information they have, filling in the blanks with Captain Crunch crushed into the linoleum of the kitchen floor, bats, aqua-marine  colored crayons and Etch a Sketches.  As my little kid confused eyeballs wander back and forth from my mother and the pouches of shoes hanging from the inside of the linen closet door, I am, of a sudden, visited by a horror.   Someday I’m going to have to wear shoes like that.

            Technically, I’m not allowed to touch those shoes.  My mother is not the kind who enjoys her girls playing dress up with her stuff, primarily because most of the decent stuff she’s got was bought before she got married to a guy who as yet hasn’t been able to find a steady job, and had four kids.  She already has to give up too much these days for the sake of the mouths she must feed.  It’s the same principle throughout the natural world.  A mother bird with a nest full of gaping yellow beaks is not going to get to eat any worms herself and has to rely on fond memories of all the wonderful worms she got to enjoy before she got herself into this ridiculous predicament.  But I’ve just got to get ahold of one of those shoes and examine it for the simple reason that there must be something going on that I’m missing, because as far as I can tell, all these shoes are shaped exactly the opposite of the human foot.  Instead of being wide at the front, they’re pointy, and the heels?  The heels are all spikes and clumps or impossibly high platform type things that look like they’d make walking almost impossible.  I scooch my fanny over-- only see half of my mother now—and as I pull one of those shoes from its pouch, my worst nightmare is realized.  This shiny black leather thing looks like nothing less than a torture device.  If you tried to wear it, it would slide your foot down a hill, scrunch all your toes together and if you attempted to run you’d fall flat on your face and break your neck.  Shit!  Life would be almost as boring as what I’ve learned in church about all the dead people sitting at the right hand of God on clouds day and night and doing absolutely nothing.  Why is it that everything grownups do is so mindbogglingly boring?

            Have you ever noticed that grownups hardly ever run, not for fun anyway.  Oh, they may get up in the morning and after waiting a sufficient amount of time for their disgusting kale, carrot, flax seed oil, banana and more kale smoothie to digest, throw on their running shoes and go pound the pavement for 45 minutes so they won’t get fat and have a heart attack, but they rarely do it for fun.  While walking my dog at the park yesterday, I watched a couple of girls maybe 9 and 10 years old with their little dogs on leashes, burst into sprints any old which way whenever the mood struck them.  The joy of their motion, their little dogs’ tails and ears perked up delighting in the game, was unlike anything I see in adults, especially in my age group.  I can’t remember the last time I broke into a run for any reason.  Oh, wait, there was that one time.  It had something to do with sufficient amounts of alcohol at the USC faculty club and a rare getting-away-with telling reality to go fuck itself.  I ran from the college to the house in South L.A. where I was living, which takes about 15 minutes, and for just that time I felt 25 instead of 55.

The Physical Effects of Wearing High Heels

            According to a bunch of podiatrists on the Internet, (my research methods are exhaustive, consisting mainly of typing the question, “what are the effects of wearing high heels?” into the Google search engine), the habitual wearing of high heels are a nightmare for a human body.  Feet are the platform on which the “corpus woman-us” is built, and the wearing of high heels shifts the weight carried by this platform onto the balls of the feet.  This thrusts the knees and hips forward, requiring the spine to hyperextend backward to maintain balance, sticking the wearers’ butt out a little, which is why it is generally accepted that these shoes make a woman look sexier.  Scientists call this the “red-butted baboon presentation principal.”  This principle makes the male of the species eyes bulge out while it jumps up and down screaming and ordering another round beers for its bros and a sloe gin fizz for that little lady at the end of the bar, even though she’s had a hell of a day at work, is drinking Jameson’s neat, and wishes said male would drop dead, the sooner the better.  If that’s not enough, then comes a load of foot problems like hammertoe (don’t know what it is but it sounds awful), bunions, ingrown toenails, neuromas (a painful crushing of the nerve between the compressed joints at the front of the foot, and shortened Achilles’s tendon, which makes walking more difficult.  Then comes osteoarthritis in the knees, hips, neck, and lower back pain caused by chronic stress on the vertebrae.  This is all so the manarchy might notice your legs and sticky-outy butt.

            But there’s another, more sinister aspect to high heels that even I, as a pre-schooler, could figure out.  I’ve never heard grown women talk about it but we all know it’s there and it passes through our minds like a moth banging against a lightbulb every time we put the damn things on.  You cannot run in high heels.  It simply cannot be done, and if you’re forced to flee something or someone, you’ve got two choices.  Either kick them off or get caught.  Kicking them off is not much of an alternative.  Try running through streets covered in asphalt, cement debris, broken glass, and potholes or even a countryscape of grass, sticks, rocks and varying terrain.  How far are you going to make it before you trip or suffer a disabling injury?  Human beings wear shoes to protect their feet, always have always will, and because of this possess feet wholly unable to resist both man-made and natural obstacles.  They get cut, bruised, broken and damaged beyond usability in a shockingly short period of time.  In trading the usefulness of shoes for the demands of a fashion sensibility crafted by the manarchy, we give up a shocking degree of safety.    I wonder how many violent sexual assaults come down to the fact that the victim simply could not get away.

            Back when I was a kid, relatives used to come stay with us quite often.  There were a few reasons, not the least of which was that my parents had made it to the promised land.  It sounds ridiculous now to refer to Los Angeles, let alone the San Fernando Valley as “the promised land,” so choked with cars and half crazed residents paying half their income just for rent or the mortgage, but that’s what it was back in the day.  It had to be because for malcontents, crooks, queers, creative types and weirdos of all ilks stuck in backwaters of Tennessee or Missouri, tarred and feathered in tradition and boneheaded habitual behavior, the West Coast was as far as you could run to.  People rushed to Los Angeles and vicinity not just to be movie stars, though that was a big thing, but because they wanted to get away from whatever was driving them mad back home.  It’s why even today, God love it, the west coast is full of weirdos so tightly packed they’re literally falling into the sea.  One of the people who used to come visit us was Cousin Ruth.  Nobody was sure whose cousin she was, but she was from Missouri (pronounced “Missoura”) chain smoked Kool cigarettes, had a raspy voice and hairy face-- I recall petting it.  It was very soft.  Anyway, the day of my realization about women’s shoes I ran to her crying, told her I never, ever, wanted to wear those things, and was I going to have to when I grew up?  Was I?  Huh?  Wasn’t there any way I could get out of it?  If there wasn’t I never wanted to grow up, not ever.  She took a drag off her Kool, exhaled slowly while she was thinking and as I stared down at her feet, bulging out the tops of a pair of pumps which actually has quite sensible heels, she told me we were lucky because it was way worse in China.  In China, they wrapped little girls’ feet up in tight bandages to stunt their growth so that when they were adults they just had to stump around while everybody else did stuff for them.  I pictured these delicate and hobbled Chinese girls in their silky robes and chopsticks in their raven black hair, trying to serve tea but spilling it every time because they fell off their mangled feet.

            Somehow, it was small consolation.

Breasts and Titties

Two: Breasts and Titties

            Women’s breasts are wonderful things.  Soft and curved, they come in all sizes and shapes from flat to long to oblong to round, some gazing off to the side, some starward in indefinable yearning.  Sometimes, one is a little bigger than the other, which generally corresponds to the dominant side in the same way right-handed people usually have slightly larger right hands.

            Aside from being infinitely varied, women’s breasts, indeed all mammalian teats, are complex and intricate machines for the production of milk.  The minute a woman becomes pregnant her breasts start to change.  This is caused by four hormones called estrogen, progesterone, prolactin and oxytocin.  Estrogen and progesterone stimulate the development of extra milk ducts and keep her from producing milk until after the baby is born, prolactin signals her breasts to make milk, and oxytocin makes her feel calm and blissful while nursing her baby.  This fact, along with just about every other fact about using breasts the way they were intended, was never told to me by anyone before I had my first child.  In fact, I knew almost nothing about female breasts except that men were always trying to grope them or get a gander down my shirt when they thought I wasn’t looking.  In other words, what men deemed important about female breasts.  What a delight it was to find out how wonderful the things actually are and what a bonus it was to discover that once the baby latched on, my entire system would be flooded with something that caused an almost opiate-like high.  So much previously unknown became clear to me: the reason a cow, weighing 5 times as much as the farmer, allows him to milk her; and it’s also why some women choose to have baby after baby, or nurse the ones they have until they are ready to graduate from college.  Who of us hasn’t been shocked by the sight of some hippie at the “Mommy and Me” group letting her five year old come up, unbutton her blouse and have at her.  That woman is no earth mother; she’s just a bush league junkie.

            Speaking of good feelings associated with motherhood, when my kids were toddlers and I’d hold their hands to make sure I didn’t lose them, the feel of their tiny hands in mine caused a sensation similar to the oxytocin rush of breast feeding.  Oxytocin caused a positive feedback loop reinforcing me in the act of protecting my child.

            Biochemistry is a gas, man.  But back to breasts.  Remarkable things and I feel genuinely sorry for people who don’t have them.

            Unfortunately, most of the people who don’t have them are called “men,” and a lot of them are really pissed off about it.  I don’t like the word “patriarchy,” because it’s a little too soft for what I want to talk about here.  Patria means “father” in Latin, and “father” connotes a kind of cherishing or protective character, neither of which is necessarily there.  As far as I can tell the male of the human species is dominant due to denser musculature, greater physical strength and propensity for violence.  The “manarchy,” (Trademark) is so jealous of the fact that females have breasts and they do not, that they’ve created a whole culture bent on both minimizing the miraculous nature of the female breast and maximizing it as an object of sexual fetish. These things have caused womankind immeasurable grief.

            It’s important to mention here that you don’t have to be a man to be a member of the manarchy.  Well, maybe to be a Gold Star Member, but you can get a regular membership for the low low price of toadying up and forsaking yourself almost entirely.

            But back to breastfeeding.  According to Parenting Magazine, these days approximately 70 percent of American Women at least give it a try.  This is up from about 50% in the 1960’s and who-knows-what percent because no one ever talked about it, in the 1950’s.  Sometimes there are legitimate reasons a woman might not nurse her baby—perhaps due to poor nutrition or other disease processes she doesn’t make enough milk—but there are also cosmetic reasons.  Many women cherish the look of their breasts more than functionality, believing that breastfeeding will cause them to sag.  Sagging, so the argument goes, is the worst thing that can happen to a breast because men like them round and firm.

            I just thought of something funny.  During the mid-1980’s, when I began to get “broody,” radical feminist lesbians had a slogan.  “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”  What a dopey saying.  Unless you’re a radical feminist lesbian, women do sometimes need men and sometimes men need women.  There’s nothing wrong with that need unless it’s so powerful it makes you give up something important of yourself.  But back then there was a lot of weird thinking going around.  For example, we had Reagan and it was a time of extreme narcissism.  Everybody was walking around thinking that their core beliefs about the nature of all things, were the right ones.  So some gay men thought all men are really gay; the heteros were just faking it, and some radical feminist lesbians thought the same about straight women.  Later on, if you’d claim to be bisexual, the extremists on either side would insist you were lying to yourself and just too chicken to come out.

            These days many of the young’uns are embracing a fluid sexuality, which is great; I’m all for it.  I’m also totally lost.  But that’s okay.  Beyond the age of 55, you’re not only allowed to be totally lost, it’s expected.

            Right, preoccupation with how the manarchy wants female breasts to be.  The first time I ever saw surgically altered breasts was in the late 1970’s.  My neighbor had lost both breasts to cancer and though I barely knew her, she saw me in the backyard one day, came outside, lifted her shirt and said, “look!”  They weren’t perfect—she still had visible scars—but they looked okay, and she was a young woman; I was happy for her.  Several years later, it must have been the early 90’s, I was standing in the shower at the local gym.  The nozzles were all out in the open lined up on opposing walls and as I turned around to rinse the shampoo out of my hair I saw two half grapefruit shaped things with nipples looking as if they’d been aligned by the International Strategic Defense Committee, on the chest of a 40 something female.  My entire sensibility was jarred.  The breasts didn’t match the person behind them.  It was like seeing a hog with antlers.

            Since then, like most people, I’ve seen tons of fake breasts.  They always look the same: half grapefruit, melon, or in rare and Stormy Daniels cases, basketballs.  Nipples perfectly aligned.  But what I want to know, but can’t from these women is, “how do you feel about your breasts?”  This is because they don’t have their breasts.  They have someone else’s.  Someone else’s design, size, materials, projections, fantasies, preferences, and desires.  I want to ask them, “what does it feel like to you, when someone caresses those breasts?  Is it the sensual thrill it should be or is it simply good because the person who is doing the feeling is all puffed up because his girlfriend has breasts like a porn star?  How about breastfeeding?  Current studies find that only a third of women with implants successfully breastfeed.  I guess you can’t know what you’re missing if you are genuinely missing it, but what must it feel like after giving birth, when your milk supply lets down and it’s crowded out by a pound and a half of silicone.  I can’t imagine even trying to breastfeed if my chest contained huge wads of liquid plastic.  It makes me think of a newborn sucking on a tube of bathtub caulk.

            There’s a way of thinking about our bodies in western culture.  Most of it comes from Aristotle, Rene Descartes, and religionists of all stripes.  It is the belief that our bodies are something we inhabit, in the form of souls, in the way a person driving a large piece of machinery, a backhoe for example, inhabits the cab of the thing.  The operator in the “human being as backhoe” theory, lives in it for awhile telling it to do things like pet the dog, get a job, drive the car and eat the dinner.  Once the machine wears out—I mean, seriously, how many 1957 Carmen Gias do you see on the road?—the operator or soul, goes somewhere else.  Who knows where?  Christians say Heaven, Buddhists transmigrate into another incarnation.  Almost all religions have a story about where the “essential” self goes, that is, the part of you that is other than the physical body.  But let’s suppose, just for a minute, that there is no such self.  Suppose the complex arrangement of trillions of neurons existing not just inside the brain but including every single part of the body, ARE the essential you.  There is much more scientific evidence for this point of view than what any philosopher or religionist has ever come up with.  Any musician will tell you that sometimes fingers, for example, “learn.”  It’s why they must practice constantly to perform reliably.  The neurons in fingers do not have as complex connections among themselves as the network in brain, but with repetition they can be taught, that is, habitual neural pathways can be built.  Within this model the fact of the female breast as a part of who we are can be not just incorporated, but entailed.  If in fact we are our own individual bodies in all their marvelous unique complexity, what does it say about us to disown any of our parts for the sake of a cultural catastrophe invented by penis wielding bullies.

            I love my breasts.  When I was young they lent me soft beautiful curves.  When I became a mother they nourished my beloved babies.  These days they may not be as firm, perky, or of the same altitude they used to be—in fact they seem to be in a race to become one with my belly button—but they are a part of me no less than my feet, or hands typing, brain thinking, or eyes reading this, are.  I would no more forsake them nor accept the judgement of others, than I would cut off my hands.

Hillbilly Elegy: commentary, review

Commentary/Review:  Hillbilly Elegy

            Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir by J.D. Vance.  Vance, a former hillbilly and Yale Law School graduate's greatest claim to fame is that he got out.  Attention: he has not written a White Lives Matter book and the publisher, Harper, wants to make sure we know this.  There are 11 solid pages of "Praise For" blurbs right up front. With most books there are a few on the back cover and maybe a couple of pages in the beginning if it’s really good.  So when I picked up Elegy I figured it must be the best book ever written in the entire history of the world.

            It’s not, but it is an interesting account of the catastrophic combination of tribalism and traditions born of living in poverty.  Vance’s tribe springs from Scots-Irish immigrants that landed in Appalachia, mostly becoming coal miners, but moved to a small town of the so-called rust belt of Ohio when the coal mines began to shut down in the 1970’s and 80’s.  He gives an account of his life from his earliest memories to the present with kind of unflinching representations of the extended family he grew up with.  “Kind of,” because he’s stuck with the memoirist’s dilemma.  Some of the people he writes about are still alive and he doesn’t want to hurt them.  There is his mother, who winds up a homeless heroin addict, while his sister and aunts remain virtuous and stalwart to the end.  Vance himself, having survived a childhood full of domestic violence (though little of it directed at him), substance abuse, poverty, and an emotionally enmeshed extended family so dysfunctional that it doesn’t have time for anything but rescuing kids from abusive parents, divorce, bailing each other out of jail, going to rehab, battling obesity and diabetes, and dying early due to unhealthy habits and extreme stress, grows up, pulls himself up by his own bootstraps—U.S. Marine issued-- and attends an ivy league law school by virtue of extreme smarts and the fact that such institutions take a few poor people in to prove they’re not elitist, (which of course, they are.)  Unfortunately, Vance grows up to be a conservative Republican.  In the Afterward he claims he didn’t vote for Trump, but I don’t believe him.

            This book was published in 2016, which means it was written before the current shit storm of the Trump White House commenced.  But for all its virtues, and it has many, the greatest of Hillbilly Elegy is that it explains the mentality of the people who put Trump in the White House and continue to support him.  They are white and they are furious.  The latter is not necessarily directed at anyone in particular; it’s aimless.  It is simply the ambient emotional state of a particular segment of the population, and they like Trump because he is aimlessly furious too.  One day he is mad at the Democrats, then next woman, then Latinos, then Muslims.  Later he is enraged by the FBI, or Rex Tillerson, or Alec Baldwin.  Rosy O’Donnell.  Venezuela.  Then come educators, environmentalists, animals—especially that pesky eagle that attacked him while he filming a commercial.  After that you’ve got the EPA, all regulatory agencies, LGBTQ people, Californians, black people, the Pope and Elizabeth Warren.  This ranging, aimless anger is the most defining feature of Donald J. Trump, and as Vance describes succinctly, is the defining feature of every wife beater, mean drunk, dinner plate hurling, drug seeking, chain smoking, jailed or recently paroled member of his Hillbilly family.  This fact combined with their incredible clannishness—they are suspicious of virtually all outsiders and value family loyalty above all else-- successfully insulates them from every possibility of learning ways of life that might provide escape or an iota of happiness for any one of them.  In other words, Hillbilly Elegy is not so much an account of a segment of the population of the United States, but a roadmap describing how one person got out.  Most of the individuals he describes are “losers,” but he, by virtue of twists of fate, one of which is that he was genuinely loved by his grandparents, escaped.

            Books about anything are always products of a selection effect.  By definition, people who write books share several qualities in common.  One, they can read and write.  Two, they can think (usually), and three, they are alive.  Whenever I’ve read great tomes on the reasons for a world war, it is by necessity written by someone who survived it.  I’ve always wanted to hear the point of view of the guy hanging in shreds on the wire strung across the battlefield for the exact purpose of trapping him in that exact predicament.  Did he think the war was a good idea?  Serial killer books are always, and again by necessity, written about the psychologies of the perpetrators and not the person who is now a skeleton chained to a drainpipe in a moldy basement somewhere.  Analogously, Hillbilly Elegy is written by a survivor of cultural, socioeconomic, and familial chaos of a type rife in virtually all sectors of the American public in which clinging to destructive traditions is the only clear option presented.  It would have been a much more interesting book if penned by the heroin addicted, homeless mother.  But of course she can’t write, or think, or probably, remember her own name.   

The Affordable Care Act and Me, by Catherine O’Sullivan, June 2018

            Not having health insurance scares me, a lot.  In 2013 I didn’t have it, wound up in the ER with a nasty infection, and walked out with a bill for 3,000 dollars.  Oh, I’d tried to buy it, but this was pre-ACA and someone had decided I had a pre-existing condition, so I was denied by every insurer available.  Then things changed.  Obamacare kicked in and not only couldn’t they deny me coverage any longer, my grown kids were able to stay on their father’s insurance until they turned 26.   Seeing that neither of them had jobs with benefits, this was a big help.  

Back in the early days, the fledgling AFC, while not perfect, made things easier for a lot of people, especially the ones like me for whom working 40 hours a week at a meaningless job just for the insurance, is untenable.  Over the last few years I’ve witnessed Obamacare getting steadily worse, with higher copays, ridiculous deductibles—my most recent was 5600 dollars, but hey, if you’re hit by a bus or get cancer, who wants to split hairs, right?  However, lately things have spiraled right into the crapper.  I blame the Trump administration and its gutting of the ACA from the inside.  When everybody hates the Affordable Care Act as much as I do, repealing it will be a breeze.

            It took me awhile to figure out something was up, and looking at the last 5 months or so it’s not surprising.  A dentist biopsied a thing on my gum, which turned out to be nothing, but anytime anyone scrapes or digs something off or out of you, we’re talking heavy dough.  I was told my insurance would pay for it, but soon began receiving bills from the dentist’s office.  It seemed strange, but every time I called I was told to ignore the computer generated bill, and they would put it through insurance again.   In addition I was seeing a provider about once every three weeks through CODAC, and one day their office called and said that I couldn’t come anymore because my insurance wasn’t paying its portion of the bill.  I figured it was a mistake I could iron out.  Wrong.  I called Health Net (my insurance provider) and the guy told me that my insurance has been cancelled as of January of 2018.  “Whoa, what?” I said. “But I’ve got papers and booklets all labeled “proof of health insurance, 2018,” and I did, too.  I know because I was waving them in my hand as I talked to them on the phone, (as if that could help, Do’h!)

            “Sorry,” said the guy on the phone, and after some sniveling and apologizing, he connected me with Healthcare.gov.  They were quick to inform me that their records indicated that the policy holder (me) had called and cancelled the policy.  I hadn’t.  I never would have, not in a million years, but no matter who I talked to and how many times I stated this fact they insisted that I had, in fact, cancelled my health insurance and they knew this to be the case because otherwise, it wouldn’t have been cancelled.  They assured me that they have very strict procedures in place including security questions to insure that only the policy holder can make this kind of change.  The longer I spent on the phone the more I got the feeling they thought I was either incredibly thick or otherwise addled, for not remembering cancelling my own insurance.  Because I had done this, they assured me, I did not qualify for “special enrollment.”  Nobody’d died, I hadn’t gotten divorced recently, and I hadn’t had a baby (it’s a good thing too; I’m 60 years old.)

            Finally, after about an hour and a half on the phone with various flow-chart wedded dunderheads, I pulled out the old standby.  “May I please speak with your supervisor?”  Eventually, I got to someone who sounded like she had some degree of neuronal activity.  She was able to bring up a whole new category.  Something called a “disenrollment error.”  I wasn’t sure whether she was admitting a mistake on their part, or implying I’d sleepwalked and accidentally cancelled my own health insurance, but she gave me an iota of hope.  She said they’d investigate and while it could take up to 30 days, and I’d have to pay all the premiums I’d missed at one time, they might reinstate my policy.  I took off for a couple of weeks for cooler climes, figuring everything would work out.

            Yesterday, upon my return, I found a letter dated May 11, 2018.  It says, “After reviewing your case, we’ve denied your reinstatement.  Our records show your Ambetter Balanced Care 9 plan with an effective date of 01/01/2018, has been cancelled effective 01/01/2018 due to voluntary withdrawal.”

            I’m fairly lost at this point as to even how to argue this.  The letter goes on to say that I didn’t pay an invoice dated 1/15/18, but I can only assume that since the insurance was cancelled two weeks earlier, it was never sent, which would explain my never getting it, but not the fact that I have a cancelled check for a payment on 1/4/2018.

            During my panic in the midst of this, I looked, for about 5 seconds, on the internet for health insurance alternatives.  My phone started blowing up with calls from private companies trying to sell me insurance.  This lasted for several weeks and I still get one or two calls a day; my inbox is still full of junk mail from fly by night health insurers.

 I assume I’ll be penalized for not having health insurance when I file my income taxes next year.