What's This?

According to the program the second group performing at the Bhangra and Bollywood Show at Folklife this year was Taal. Taal is the generic term for the rhythms of classical Indian music, or rhythms period, or the name of a famous Indian movie that Roger Ebert gave excess thumbs up. The announcer told us it was not the name of this group. He said the correct name was something that sounded to me like Chunny Chunny. I have looked up everything I could think of that could be a spelling of a word sounding like chunny to me, and have not found these people. Hopefully I will get an answer to who they are soon, on YouTube.

Until then, here is an amazing performance of Indian dance by a group of young ladies of indeterminate ages.

I Love Little Girls...

... they make me feel so good!

Video Find of the Day

We had a Real Change board meeting tonight, and Director Tim's twin girls were kept entertained in the front office. He told us they are into vampires now, for some reason I missed. That is as good a cue as any to trot out Oingo Boingo videos. This first is only as suggestive as the little sirens deserve. And, it features vampire action!

Oingo Boingo - Little Girls



My favorite Oingo Boingo album is Nothing to Fear. Here are two videos of songs from that album. I looked for "Wild Sex (in the Working Class)" but sadly could not find it. Maybe someone would post that later? Hmm?

Oingo Boingo - Nothing To Fear (But Fear Itself)



Oingo Boingo: Insects (Nothing To Fear)

Helen & Mrs. Graves

Second grade was in a new room, with a new teacher, Mrs. Graves. I will never forget Mrs. Graves. She started the new year out by taking me aside and letting me know "in no uncertain terms" that she would tolerate none of my "shenanigans." My reputation had preceded me.

[Left: Not Mrs. Graves, but a close facsimile.]

The class as a whole was warned against horseplay. One of her very strong rules was that boys do not hit girls. I said, "What if the girls hit me?"

This was not a rhetorical question. Soon after school started I found myself being regularly being kicked in the shins by a brunette with pronounced bangs and a wide face named Helen. She thought she was being seductive, I think.

Mrs. Graves answer to that was, "You're a boy. You should be able to take care of yourself."

I still, to this day, don't know what she thought that was supposed to mean.

Does it mean that if I were a girl, I'd be incapable of taking care of myself, I'd have to have someone leading me about the nose all day long, helping me walk, breath, and sit up, and wiping my drool away?

I don't think so.

Did she mean that because I was a boy that I could prevent girls from kicking me in the shins by using my "Boy Shakti" to lay them out sideways and upside-down until they cried for their Mommas?

I don't think so.

One possibility that occurred to me was that "Boys don't cry" and that therefore, if I am a real boy, getting kicked in the shins by Helen wouldn't matter to me, because he who doesn't cry doesn't suffer.

[Left: Not Helen, but a close facsimile.]

That idea was impossible, because I couldn't believe that even Mrs. Graves was that fucked up in the head.

So what was it? You tell me. I still don't get it. Someone's kicking me in the shins. I'm not allowed to hit back, and when I ask for help, I'm told, "Boys can take care of themselves." Catch 22, 23, 24, and 25. You're a boy, you get kicked in the shins, shut up, fuck off.

Recap + Continuation

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring of 1956, when I was 6 "going on 7". The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

It might be a good idea to stop a moment and summarize the dramatic chain of events of this period so far.

It started with me in first grade telling the class what menstrual huts were. That confirmed my memory of early childhood for my Mother, causing her to ramp up her abuse of me. That motivated me to call my Aunt Alta in DC to beg her help. Aunt Alta snitched, resulting in me being tortured severely by Mom. The torture brought my two personalities into cooperation with each other, causing what psychoanalyst might have called an ego-inflation, and set me up for an outstanding messiah complex episode. Said episode consisted of leading a peace party to the Fort Devens Hispanic neighborhood, which would fail in negotiating for peace only to win the peace after all by me punching the chief war-monger in the nose, but not before he'd done far worse damage to me. The peace was then marked by a march through the Hispanic neighborhood that was not in my personal best interest, and which concluded with three days of unconsciousness at the Post Infirmary.

After a day in bed I was allowed to move around the infirmary pulling an IV stand with me. I could hang out with other kids who were there for whatever reason. Some of them had come in after I did. So I was able to get news from outside. The news was great: the peace was in effect.

So, aside from my misgivings that it took violence, I was pretty happy when I was released to my parents about a week after admission.

Back in school, by then it was probably April, my exuberance expressed itself in a funny way. I remembered I had a plan to try to kiss all the girls in my first grade class before the year was out, and it occurred to me that time was running out. So when the teacher had to leave the class unattended for a while I made the announcement to all the girls in the class that I would kiss all of them that wanted me to.

I'm not making this up: They lined up. All the girls. Well, maybe one didn't. As I recall one didn't get kissed the first time through.

That's right. I kissed all the girls in line and then they got all back in line for a second pass at me, and the holdouts from the first time joined in the second.

I look back on that and I think, what a great lesson to learn! f you're wanting something, try asking!

So there I was kissing the girls for the second time and wondering how many times I could get all the girls to come back around, when the teacher popped back in and caught us all.

Within the hour I was in the principal's office with my parents. My parents had to explain to the principal how they were going to break me of being a monstrous pervert. Over and over again I was told, "Don't you know kissing spreads germs?" I had heard of cooties but I honestly thought they were just some BS that was made up by unpopular people to explain why they were lucky nobody wanted to kiss them.

Turns out, cooties are real! The very next week all the girls and I were out sick and miserable, with an ugly gastro-intestinal disease, with all the vomiting and diarrhea you could ask for.

Right about the end of that week of illness, I recovered, and I was heading outside to play when I met Aunt Alta at the door. She was carrying suitcases and "so happy" to see me and "so worried " about me ever since she'd got my phone call. I asked her why she told my Mother what I told her and she said, "I knew I couldn't be here for you right away, so I had to tell your Mother you needed help until I could get here."

The sheer absurdity of that explanation, given that what I needed help with was escaping my Mother, completely sucked the wind out of me. It brought up all the feelings of anger I had when I had asked for help previously and been betrayed or told to shut up.

The Alex/Alaka'i side of me decided at that moment that Aunt Alta was just a representative haole, that the problem was that I was surrounded by haole, rather than real human beings, and it was time to renew the quest to return to Hawaii. But by now I knew there was no way to get there by ordinary travel. So something extraordinary was called for.

Social Development

My relationships in grade school took an abrupt new direction when I finally learned to tie my own shoes. It was sometime into November, the weather was getting chilly, when the whole chasing the rabbit through the hole clicked.

Immediately, I told Dave I didn't want to be in his gang anymore, and I hoped he wouldn't mind. I was really getting tired of standing along the sidelines watching the other gang members harass someone. Besides, Dave had annoyed me by telling me that my imaginary friend George wasn't real. I knew he wasn't real. That's what "imaginary" means. Duh. But he didn't have to rub my face in the fact that my best friend wasn't real.

To Dave's credit, I wasn't given a goodbye beating. A lot of gang leaders would have arranged one. Maybe he was too new to the business. Maybe by the time he was a teenager and more experienced he would have learned to incorporate those little finesses that define gangdom to the connoisseur. When he wasn't in jail.

Not being part of the dominant gang did mean that my lunch began to be stolen from me regularly. Not by the old gang members, Dave wouldn't allow that. But by other kids that would have stolen my lunch before but had been afraid of Dave's guys.

On the other hand, girls liked me more. I was independent. I went my own way. I didn't have to come running when Dave called. I could tie my own shoes.

Meanwhile, Kathy, the wife-to-be who was placed in second grade, got put in a different class that took a separate lunch time, so we now never saw each other at school. The move had something to do with her being a disciplinary case. I don't recall if she was put back into the other first grade class or what. My parents claimed they knew it was bound to happen -- that was why they didn't let me skip a grade. But I was a disciplinary problem, too!

Anyway, I was therefore lonely for female company. And, at that time, I had no abstract concept of faithfulness. I could be engaged to marry Kathy, that didn't mean I couldn't kiss and hug anybody else. I mean, it was just kissing and hugging. I wasn't marrying any of them. If they'd let me and I knew how, I could have had intercourse with them and it wouldn't have occurred to me that I was cheating on Kathy in any way. The only way I could violate a trust was to promise myself in marriage to another girl.

So I spent more and more time with the girls, getting to know them, and asking for kisses and hugs. Even after I told them I was promised in marriage to another, very few girls turned me down.

An unfortunate incident occurred. A new girl arrived who was gorgeous. I hit up on her at a recess. I got so wrapped up in flirting with her I didn't notice the first warning bell to end recess. By the time the second bell rang I was sucking her face and had a hand halfway up her thigh, and without looking around said, "That's just the warning, we still have five more minutes." Then, after what I thought was five minutes more, but was possibly closer to thirty, I peeled myself away and looked around expecting to see some other stranglers, but there were none.

I was late getting in from recess often, but never this late, and never with a disheveled girl in tow. When we tried to sneak into the classroom the teacher caught us, screamed liked she'd seen a nest of rats, and dragged us to the principal's office, who yelled at me more, threatening to call in my parents.

Apparently they suspected us of fluid exchanges, we'd been so late. I didn't know what the hell they were going on about. I had done everything I could think of to do with her, and none of that was what they were on about, so I wasn't able to confess anything more.

Finally the principal calmed down and deposited us back in classroom. I felt terrible for having ruined my new friend's first day in the class by dragging her down to my level of delinquency.

The principal did call my parents and told them to talk to me. I had to face the same weird questions over again from them. It wasn't quite so bad, because they had trouble with the idea that I shouldn't be liking girls so much.

The result of it all was that I lay low for about two weeks and thought carefully about my previous behavior. I concluded after long deliberate consideration that I hadn't done anything wrong but that I should be more systematic in the future. I decided to see if I could kiss every girl in my first grade class by the end of the year without getting caught.

The Quest

[Continued from the previous post. Same warning. I'll be talking about sexual abuse I've experienced as a toddler. ]

Being home with my Mother got worse with time. The soap rapes evolved into finger rapes. She locked me in a closet periodically, sometimes for long periods. I don't know what she did that needed me out of the way like that. Maybe it was to take naps, or maybe she was going on long walks without me.

Then something good happened for a change. The little girls that lived on the block got to know me because two of them [pictured] belonged to the white family that occasionally took care of me. They started coming around every day and asking my Mother to have me to play with in our front yard. I believe this started sometime around the beginning of summer, maybe in June 1951, before my second birthday.

Basically, all the little girls took turns being my Mommy. They were all way better at it, too. It was heaven.

Some of it was a little too heavenly. I still had the increased libido symptom from the head injury. The girls wanted to change my diapers even when they didn't need changing. My Mother told them go right ahead, just keep using the same diaper if it isn't too dirty, and pretend it's clean.

I have a vivid memory of the very first time the girls changed my diapers. I had an erection, and the next thing I knew they were all gawking at it, with jaws dropped, and a couple of them were touching it. I was quite happy with that and squealed gleefully. Then the oldest girl, who may have been 7 or 8 and who'd actually been the first to feel it, said it wasn't right to touch it too much. They should just touch it to clean it (she thought she should be the one, since she was the most mature) and no more.

Not much later, maybe the same day, I remember my Mother telling them to have me go without diapers outside because she didn't want to have to wash them. I found myself standing in the middle of the front yard with an erection and four or five little girls staring. Then I looked over at the house and saw my Mother looking out from a window, with the same leer she had when she was raping me. I was frightened by it. At the time I couldn't know what the leer was really about. I now see it as the earliest indication for me that my Mother was capable of sexually abusing other children.

The girls played with me almost every sunny day, all through the summer. Then I started hearing them talk about something called "school". I had no idea what school was. I picked up the idea that it was a place they were all going to go and learn things. I imagined that they might take me with them. They talked about how soon it would be. It would be a week. Or it would be some days. Or it would be tomorrow.

Suddenly one sunny day no little girls came to play with me. I was back to having Jemmie Browning as my only Mommy.

That would not do.

I made up my mind I was going to go find this "school" where all the little girls went, and I was going to surprise them and they were going to be happy and get to play with me at the school just like they did in our front yard.

So with the start of the new school year in September, 1951, at the age of 2 years and 2 months, barefoot and still in diapers, I set out from our house in Schofield Barracks, without my Mother's knowledge, on a Quest for the Schofield Elementary School.

My Early Humor(s)

As you all should know, the word humor comes from the ancient Greek word for bodily fluids. The ancient Greeks were polytheists. That is why they allowed that different people could have different bodily fluids, or that any one person might have several bodily fluids at once, and that all that was alright.

At first, the Greeks recognized seven basic kinds of humors, or bodily fluids, namely Sanguine (blood), Choleric (yellow bile), Phlegmatic (phlegm), Melancholic (black bile), Pissy (urine), Spunky (jizm), and Mammary (milk). But right from the start political correctness reared its ugly butt, and ruled that the last two were too gender-specific, and had to be replaced by Emissions. That was subsumed into Pissy, even though everyone but the Germans knew Pissy and Spunky were totally unrelated. Yes, they did too have Germans back then. The Greeks called them mounts.

Finally, Pissy was eliminated altogether by the post-Socratic theorists, who said Piss is yellow, Cholera is yellow -- so they're the same, see? Yeah, and like Bush is shitty, and my shit is shitty -- so Bush comes out of my ass, see? I'll talk more about theory, and theorists, and how much I love theory and theorists, later. Right now I'm talking about humor(s) (see title).
Here is a rare photo of my emotional state at age four. As you can see, my Father was still asserting that our family would never in a million years own a television, or wake up out of the Dark Ages, or stop beating me bloody and leaving me in ditches. My main humor at this age is the Phlegm humor. I am cold and moist, sluggish and pallid.

This is a snapshot of my emotional state just one year later. To the untrained eye there is virtually no change, except that I have now divided into a fat man and a weird black cat. But if you look very closely you will see that the Army-McCarthy Hearings have come and gone in the background , and my Father got a TV so he could scream at McCarthy in real-time. Having a TV and watching the Army-McCarthy Hearings changed my main humor to Sanguine. I became hot and moist, amorous, happy, generous, optimistic, and irresponsible. Still moist, but a hot moist. I sought out girls to play "house" with. These were generally imaginary girls, as the nearest house with a real girl in it was a mile away, at the time.

As I began school we moved closer to civilization and I encountered actual other humans and their spawn. Among these were religious bigots. I have since come to understand that Christian religious bigots fall neatly into two distinct classes, and that this is all you need to know about them. The two classes consist of 1) Puritans and their ilk, who don't want anyone to laugh, because amusement springs from the Devil, and 2) Evangelicals and their ilk, who expect everyone to have a big fuckin smiley face and laugh and be joyous because "Haven't you heard the Good News? Christ is here!" -- Halle-fuckin-lujah.

My attitude was and is the pagan attitude of I'll laugh when the Laugh God moves me to laugh and I won't laugh when the Laugh God wants a smoke break. Get your religions off my bodily fluids.

A study of my early humor(s) is not complete without a reference to the man pictured below, Percy Dovetonsils.

This man is wearing funny glasses to view the world. That does not mean he does not see the world. It means he sees the world through funny glasses, as opposed to rose-colored glasses, say. Metaphorically, he uses humor to see and understand reality, get it?

I want to end this post on that note, combined, or amalgamated, with this additional one, said by some guy played by Jack Nicholson, which I would like to place with the first note in a sack, so they can fight each other and roll around the floor for my entertainment: "People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch."