Brown Like a Cougar’s Tail

Last night I went to our MAT Thanksgiving celebration that Sarah and Christine grandly staged. Moloko (from South Africa) was talking to Logan (militantly from Putney, VT, who’s doing his internship in SA).

Moloko to Logan: You’re so handsome. You’re going to come home with a South African wife.

Me: But he’s so white.

Logan: I’m darker than you are.

Moloko: You’re not white. This paper is white.

Me: Logan, you’re pinky-yellow.

Logan: I’m darker than you. [I go over to him and we compare arms.]

Me: Look. We’re the same.

Logan: Well, the inside of my arm is darker than the inside of yours.

Moloko: You two aren’t white and I’m not black. I don’t look like your camera.

Me: No, you’re the color of the underside of the end of a mountain lion’s tail. We’re the color of its chest.

And thus the issue of color was settled.

—”In Iraq, you have to wash the water before you drink it,” Sabah told Lauren and me. When I asked, she wouldn’t reveal her chronological age (she’s younger than I), but said she feels she’s over a hundred. She described life in Baghdad: abusive American soldiers and daily bomb blasts. Then there was the time she was driving a screaming, bleeding, pregnant friend to the hospital. American tanks stopped in the middle of the road, blocking it just for fun. They jumped out onto the top of the tank and started dancing to rock-and-roll music. —”If I’d gotten out of the car to ask them to move, they would have shot me.”

Later she was asking me questions about gay people in the US. She is deeply religious and couldn’t accept what I said, though she really tried. The Qur’an talks about gay people who were warned to stop their hanky panky, but wouldn’t. —”They were turned into rock. Black rock. You can see them between Iraq and Jordan. When you drive through at night you can hear them screaming. One time, in the daytime, I took pictures with three cameras, but no pictures came out.” The rocks, she means, are like ghosts.

Onto another topic: Eleni sent me a YouTube link to a movie trailer for The Wild & Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, a highly disturbing and exploitive movie about a backwoods family that brings to life every ugly stereotype of the region. If it had been set in Westchester instead of Boone County, I’d be happier. However, there was one great line from the preview: a frighteningly scudged-out guy shook a bottle of prescription painkillers so that the pills rattled loudly, and told the camera, —”This is the Boone County mating call.”

The trouble with paying one’s bills after over a month is that a) it takes all day, and b) when you get to the bottom of the paper heap you find dead bugs.

I took the following picture on my way to school at 4:45 today. I’m still here. It’s 7:00. Time to go home to the barn. I’ve been in Vermont for three D-moons now.

You can see Venus (I think that’s Venus) through the trees on the left.