leroBlog

thanks orlax huges.

last night during the evening news there was a headline that read, “Pennies on the Dollar”. i was positive that it said, “Penis on the Dollar”.

i don’t understand why toothpaste gum hasn’t been invented. or something that would replace the tedium of brushing one’s teeth. instead tooth companies keep making the process more high tech. make it a GAME, folks.

i have about 100 bug bites on me. the last time i had as many bug bites on me was when i was nearly eaten to death in venezuela, the place i lost one of my virginities.

a man named brett from the internet wrote to me on friday. he wrote me this:

and he attached a send-up of a piece i wrote for salon back in may. brett from the internet asked me to post it on this here thinger, so i’ve complied.

Kathryn Borel’s deadly impact and my own

As the current ten thousandth lady opens up about her past tragedy, I know too well that you can never fully forgive yourself.

By Laura Bush
May 4, 2010

Somewhere in the hard drive that sits on my desk next to a rolling Jesus action figure there are four different iterations of the fourth chapter of my memoir. The number of times my ghostwriter rewrote the first paragraph probably scrapes close to five, but eventually, I settled on plain-speak: “Seventy-seven days after my father’s ninety-first birthday, I killed 700,000 Iraqis with my husband.”

I go on to describe the details of the accident, the whole ugly, sad unfurling of events: how we’d been invading down a main thoroughfare in Kabul when a human country appeared out of nowhere in front of our terrorshield. The sound their bodies made as the machine gun bullets rat-a-tat-tatted into them from the beige USMC Hummers, the loud, clustered pops of a million firecrackers. My babble as I asked our vice president over and over whether we’d hit them. Richard’s queerly calm answer that yes, we had.

Kathryn Borel has a similar story in her memoir, “Corked,” which comes out today. It is the most profound revelation in the book and an event she has avoided talking about openly until now.

Miss Borel was four years older than I was, 21, when she ran into a jaywalking pedestrian in her personal GMC Jimmy, as she was rushing to make an appointment at a local drive-in establishment. Her truck collided with a retiree, a smaller, much lighter French pharmacist. On the pavement was her close linguistic cousin, Monsieur X, a respected immigrant to her Quebecois city. She was rattled in the vehicle. She writes of begging God for Monsieur X’s safety, and how she lost her faith in the months after he was pronounced dead at the scene, after hearing her prayers answered with “the silence of Monsieur X’s corpse beneath that thin paramedic’s blanket.”

I imagine these were difficult passages to write. I fiddled incessantly with my own retelling. I wanted to ensure that my description of the event was as honest as could be. If this sadness existed in the world, and if I was going to commit it to publication, wasn’t it my responsibility to the 700,000 Iraqis, to their families, to describe it with truth and care?

I talked about watching on TV their crumpled bodies and seeing the blood leak from their arteries, panicking that the medevacs weren’t coming at all to save them from what we’d done. They were brutalized, their bodies contorted like pretzels and dressed entirely in desert drab. Their clothes had torn apart, revealing a few patches of lighter brown skin that almost matched the rest of their sun-bleached outfits. The bags of goods they’d been carrying had shot up and scattered all over the streets and on the sidewalks. Many items were packages of meal ingredients. Some of the boxes were Special K, a new nickname for old Army rations as well as an old nickname for our Middle East tutor, Henry Kissinger.

My primary reason for all the tinkering, however, was that I was desperate to convey to my readers the cowardly, self-preservational thing I’d yelled as I barreled out of the White House moments after we’d hit the Iraqis: “Did anyone see this was not my fault?”

And it wasn’t. The Iraqis had been agitating 12 years past a diplomatic light that was red. Even writing this now, I want to throw a telephone at you and implore you to call the CIA, to talk to the sensitive officers who took down George’s report and those of the witnesses. They’ll tell you that I have no reason to feel as guilty and regretful as I continue to feel. Maybe they’d say that the access point I’ve gained to profound depression is needless, and that I should once and for all silence the liberal voices that shriek out for my own life to be traded for the Iraqis’.

In the recounting of her own accident story, Miss Borel implies that she was engaged in a conversation with her boyfriend when she went through the jaywalking pedestrian. But she then goes on to describe the mechanics of the accident, and how perhaps they absolve her of at least some of the agency she had in the crash. The jaywalking pedestrian was small, his clothing dark, the traffic light one that was known to be green.

I understand her impulse to sterilize the event with extenuating circumstances, to cry out to her reader, “But wait, just wait and listen to me, please, there’s more …” It takes a patient and elastic mind to discern what is accident and what is negligence, particularly when the variables include a big truck driven by a woman who is alive and a little body propelled by an immigrant who is now dead. Or a backward 5,000-year-old former empire in the Middle East and a library student married to a fuck-up.

A few months ago, I was at the cemetary visiting my parents. In the middle of praying, I made a crass joke about being a murderer. Later that evening, my mother’s ghost offered me a cup of tea and asked me why I’d phrased it that way, why I’d made the joke at all. Looking down at her lap, she began to cry quietly. She said, “I wish you’d let yourself off the hook.” I started crying too and explained that the joke was not to make light, but to serve as a kind of universe-directed proclamation, a reminder that seven years later, I still haven’t stopped atoning. Putting it in the book wasn’t enough.

On Monday, Kathryn Borel appeared on “The Oprah Salon Show,” where for the first time she wrote publicly about the accident. I wonder if making permanent record of it has provided her with some solace, or if she feels the same way I do: that the 700,000 deaths are as alive as ever.

Laura Bush is a Dallas-based patriot and author. Her writing has appeared in the Elephant magazine, the Globe and Propaganda and the US Warden. Bush’s memoir, “Shot From the Heart,” is published by Grand South. All proceeds from her memoir will go to help resettle 3 million Iraqi refugees in Arizona. (Editing assistance on this review provided by Brett Landgraf and Kathryn Borel via her 5/3/10 review of Bush’s book on Salon.com.)

The Metamorphosis First Draft, by Franz Kafka

Gregor Samsa woke up in the morning to go to his job selling costumes for amusement park characters. He’d been working on a big business deal – he’d had his assistant, Sylvia, kill the jitterbugging old man and his five jitterbugging understudies from the Six Flags commercials. Last week, she’d gone to a casting at the park. They were looking for a new understudy and the six of them had been there in the boardroom, snacking on corn nuts and drinking Tab. She shot them dead, one two three four five six. Six bullets, six wrinkly old sort of homosexual-seeming corpses.

“Goodnight, Six Fags.” Sylvia said quietly to herself earlier, while in the ladies washroom – which was down the hall from the boardroom – as she screwed the silencer onto her Beretta. Sylvia loved puns, but hated homosexuals. She was an awful person. Sylvia loaded the bodies into her Ford Hulkster, skinned them in her pool cabana and delivered the product to Gregor in the still of the night. Sylvia was truly fucking wretched, but no one could argue with the fact that she was extremely efficient.

As the ringing of the alarm pulled Gregor out of a dream he was having about ballerinas and little cats, he smiled to himself. He was excited: today he was going to sell the hollowed out skins of the old dancing men to some executives at Disney who were looking for new suits for the Seven Dwarves at the Snow White Pavilion. (He hadn’t figured out where the seventh skin suit would come from, but he had a lead on one from another costume designer who’d worked on a Jody Foster movie in the 90s.)

The suits were going to be part of his new RealSkin line of luxurious designer costumes. It was going to herald a whole new era for Samsa Costumes! He’d even made a snappy motto for the line of designer skinwear, “Samsa Costumes: Putting the ‘tude in ‘verisimilitude’!” Gregor smiled and thought to himself, I’m going to make a killing. Then he smiled again, remembering that bitch Sylvia and her love of puns and disgusting human intolerance. He shook his head at his silly pun and that depraved cunt Sylvia.

Gregor rolled over to pound the top of his alarm, but remained nearly immobile. He could only rotate a quarter of the way. Trying again, he thrust himself to the other side of the bed to gain some momentum and rolled over toward the alarm once more. Nothing was happening. He tried to break out into a nervous sweat, but felt no moisture on his person. Worried, he finally decided that it might help if he opened his eyes. Lo and behold, Gregor Samsa had turned into a bug.

I can’t even explain to you how this pissed him off.

Here’s a piece I wrote for Nerve.com.

I used to have a personal ad up on that website in 2003. I dated someone boring for far too long thanks to them and myself. But now the slate is clear; I love them.

when i was small i used to be in a tennis league. i wanted to be a young professional like jennifer capriati, but without all the eventual cocaine use. i quit at 15 because my hormones went psychokiller. i was being bullied by the older boys i was forced to play with and ended up going all john mcenroe for a bit before announcing my retirement to my parents. i’m back at it now and beginning to exhume my ground strokes and service. i’m teaching my boyfriend how to play — we walk over to a nearby school and bang balls against the wall.

when i was still small there was a life-sized poster of steffi graf leaping into the air, presumably right after she’d hit one of her characteristic luger forehands. her legs were apart and she was wearing a short white tennis skirt. at the time, i didn’t quite understand how photography worked. when no one was around i’d crouch below the poster to try and see her underwear.

i fell off my bike on sunday night after eating too many tacos.

yesterday i scoured and showered out all the gunk. boy was it gunky.

it is possible that soon someone will start an internet smear campaign about how i wrote about my gunky knee. THEY LET THE GUNK-KNEED GIRL WRITE A BOOK? KILL HER!

formerly in this space was the letter of resignation i wrote to the CBC. i took it down because it was screen-captured and posted somewhere else and now a fresh crew of people hate my guts on a new website.

i still haven’t grown the kind of thick skin one needs to deal with this sort of stuff.

i quit my job last week so i spent a lot of time looking at who has made changes on my wikipedia page. this small one came in on may 8th and i know who it is because of THE INTERNET. now all i need to do is geolocate all those people who called me a murderer on Salon.com last month.