Goodbye, Anna Nicole (or, the Mystery of the Billion Dollar Baby)

Inevitably, every time a god or goddess dies, we cry bloody murder. From Monroe to Diana to Cobain, inevitably the murder investigation begins. And so it should. How lucky are those savages who aren’t even questioned when their crime is tucked smoothly away, filed neatly if tearfully under suicide, overdose, accident, natural causes. It’s good to wonder. And then to say goodbye.

But then there are situations that seamlessly blend Passions-style pathos with Dynasty extremes. Live on camera, but more real than the players even know. Anna Nicole Smith’s tragic story ended in a bizarre series of brutal events, including quite a few unanswered questions about her and her son’s demise.

I might dismiss the whole kitten-caboodle because really, who cares about Anna Nicole Smith? She was a socialite bimbo, clearly a very minor talent, likeable enough, and seriously, obviously troubled. Her contribution? Negligibly nothing. Practically illiterate, the poor little girl from Texas got lucky when oil Tycoon J. Howard Marshall came into the bar where she was working as a peeler.

But I’m one of those people who think all human life is sacred, and just because Anna Nicole was clearly not the brightest crayon in the box gives me no right to dismiss her. Just because she shimmered in the glitter and the sleaze of sex and drugs, I have no right to demean her value. After all, the only ones whose lives have not been both enriched and mired by sex (or the even more enjoyable proclivities) are liars.

It sure wasn’t just the riff raff who appreciated her buxom charms. From the Texas truckers to the tycoons, Anna liked ‘em larger than life. She was a real hit with the ladies, too, living out the fuzzy joy of soft-core videos of bubbly pink hot tubs and naked ladies frolicking about. Who is to say that simply sharing what she had with this world- her beauty- and vamping it up and camping it up were not unique and special gifts? I cannot underestimate the power of a woman’s body.

Anna’s life and death both feel like a neon joke, a blow-up Barbie decked up in the tinselly ritz of Planet Playmate. A sweet moron, Anna’s celebrity was her curse. Sure, she loved the attention and being able to afford everything her little heart desired in pink, to wear cute shoes and keep her blonde hair impeccably huge. But the girl didn’t know what she was doing.

Her life was a running joke about botched plastic surgery, extreme and multiple drug problems, possible mind control, deeply disturbed friendships, questionable signed contracts, mental illnesses, conspiracies, diet pill industry drama, financial mayhem, liposuction galore, prescription drug hell, methamphetamines, estranged family politics, child abuse, incest, binging, maybe purging, videos of her pregnant and our of her mind, the unexplained death of her healthy 20-year old drug-free son Daniel, and of course, those billions she may still inherit from the death of her 92 year old hubby. Everyone in line for that money is gone, including J. Howard’s son, Anna, and her son. Everyone, that is, except Little Orphan Dannie. As far as that goes, Dannielynn could have starred in her own reality TV- Who’s Yer Daddy? the miniseries.

Still, I didn’t think she was ‘swindling the old man of his millions.’ Is a man, old or otherwise, helpless when he decides to go and spend his money on strippers? The old dude’s ashes are apparently buried with her, at her request. It doesn’t matter if they both knew it would be a brief union and that she’d get a lot of pretty dresses. He waited for her for two years while she demurred his proposal. She made him a happy man when she finally said yes. I’m sure he knew full well what the cards were.

I didn’t bother with Blonde Ambition: the Untold Story Behind Anna Nicole Smith’s Death when it came out because I wasn’t paying thirty bucks for a hardcover with huge font that was pumped up through the media as the story that blew Big Gay Larry and Howie’s cover (her lawyer and her ex). And then, in a cloud of pink cotton candy, poof, she was gone, and I forgot all about the big naked blonde from Texas.

Plumb forgot, that is, until I pulled out my favourite gingham clog stilettos for a summer patio affair. They were a fun little Wal Mart investment, $14.95, and I’d called them my “Anna Nicole shoes.” They were definitely for blondes, southerners, Texans, and I love them. And that’s how it went through my mind, “Hey, I wonder if that book’s in at the library.”

While I can’t vouch for every last observation or data Rita Cosby writes in a book that isn’t particularly riveting one way or another, her credentials are not exactly novice. She’s a smart and gutsy journalist whose groundbreaking ‘exclusives’ include an interview with war criminal Milosevic, numerous world leaders, presidents, and politicians galore. She was also working quickly to get the facts out, so she didn’t wait around by her typewriter to see about a more poetic pacing for the story. I haven’t followed Cosby’s work before, so who knows, maybe the scandals she digs up are just publicity stunts, but even with what are just known facts, there are too many unanswered questions in this series of unfortunate events.

I’d say anywhere there is sex and celebrity and half a billion dollars and suitcases of dozens of kinds of drugs, paternity circuses, a dead son’s frightened consultation with a private detective a month before his end, and more than one unexplained death, it stands to reason that murder lurks nearby.

Blonde Ambition: the Untold Story Behind Anna Nicole Smith’s Death
Rita Cosby
Grand Central Publishing, New York
2007

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. You can order her poetry collection from indigo.ca, or through her site.

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In Which the Author Goes on at Length About Greg Bottom’s Book The Colorful Apocalypse: Journeys in Outsider Art

The more I see as I’m running up that hill is that pathology is everywhere you look. The word ‘normal’ has little meaning, beyond showing a societal and cultural construct of what it esteemed. That what may appear on the surface in any given setting is not really there becomes more and more clear. “Normal” possibly doesn’t exist, and certainly it is minority, within any given society and the mores therein. I mean, growing up, I thought I was absolutely neurotic, with my weird little rituals and a full cast melodrama at home, the little fantasies, the anxieties. In the 20s I spent a great deal of time in therapy working through the mire. I was gung-ho for the pills, too, curious as hell, if Prozac could make me better than well. Guess I wasn’t one of the lucky ones. Paxil made me suicidal. Wellbrutrin was great, sort of, was it? It was hard to tell if it was placebo, or if my thoughts were really calmer. It could have been me starting to mellow out. I think truly it was probably the yoga that I began around then, also in search of balance.

Then, sometime around 30, I wondered what the hell I was struggling so hard to be sane for, when the entire damn world was a nut job. The only illness is in trying to make sense of the thing. I was prone to extreme analysis, as a writer, but I wanted to start thinking about other people’s madness and not mine.

You start to put pictures together. Whole pictures. You see various levels of shit. So you know you fit in here: not as balanced as some, not as bad off as others. You stop thinking of what it ‘should’ be like, lose the weight of unrealistic goals of capability and grandeur, start accepting the way things are, realistically, and work harder on the possible stuff, let up on the rest. You start being real grateful for how well you’ve managed- some blow their brains out, some have lost children, some see little flashing lights in the sky or cameras in the trees. You’re fully functional girl, come on now.

I’ve been drawn to outsider art since I stumbled on Margaret’s Grocery during my Kerouac trails in days of more bravado. Zappa For President! our humble pick up voted, rolling past all the blues into a topsy-turvy red and white lego-esque world where we bought warm Coca Colas from a dim little counter. Margaret told us that her husband, the ‘Reverend’ was the artist who had turned every surface in sight into a red and white painted tribute to the Lord. Bible verses, my mother tongue, were scrawled everywhere. My girlfriend and I were young hippies, visionaries who believed in the goddess and LSD. We were vegetarians. Luminaries. I was the bard; Julie Ann was the one who’d be able to make a fire in the woods and kill the bugs that came near me. Now THIS strange little market was something worth analyzing. But analyze it? I couldn’t even describe it.

Years and years later I chanced on a pricey art mag that was resplendent with colourful, juicy, crazy pictures and magical thinking. It was right up my alley- voodoo, mermaids, Bible stories, and schizophrenics. All that messy childhood and the New Orleans I’d taken in, mixed with a madwoman in a book shop who told me to paint my way through upcoming sorrows, had made me newly into something of an artist. I’d dabbled in art as a teen, but now I felt compelled to follow the orders of the lady in the yellow dress. She had told me that I simply had no idea how many friends I was going to lose, and if that I were to live through it, I’d better paint. I didn’t know, but a few days after the conversation, one of my best friends was diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. I picked up my paintbrush.

I set store in fate. Now, fated again, I found a magazine that had ‘voodoo art’, something I found quaint because my very first art show was called “VOODOO- art can bend your mind.” And inside an issue of Raw Vision Magazine was where I saw that strange old Lego world of Margaret’s Grocery. Outsider art- the unschooled, message-driven, unrefined, multi-media, apocalyptic, rapture-pending, hallucination-spun work of insane visionaries.

Oh, fuck. How I hoped to be an Outsider Artist! At last I’d found the art world I fit into- not the established academia or art snobbery, where everyone knows no one knows. Not the world where a red square would sell for two billion dollars, but the world where a man would paint from the inside out, his truth and its changes, on anything he could find.

And yes, I was “unschooled”- at least in art- not even an artist, yet, really. I was raised on Baptist truths though I’m un-baptized- not even God wanted me back then. I painted on boards and glued magnetic alphabet pieces and doll parts into assemblages, too! But alas, I wasn’t really all that peculiar. Outsider artists are outsiders- they are former slaves who took up painting at 83 and made 15 thousand works. They are instititutionalized geniuses who drew intricate patterns out of everything from pencils to feces. They are people so poor that they practically painted crates to make Margaret’s Grocery. Sometimes God told them to do it, and sometimes it was the devil.

So began a fascinating passion for me- not so much the ‘study of’ but an experience of outsider art. I’ve read Raw Vision and other books. I’ve been to a few museums and plan to travel to Baltimore, always have, as soon as I have a dime to spare. Magical religious stuff and addictions are interesting to me, so the art of people with those experiences is something I take in. I always stop for ‘folk art’ signs and love learning about the expressions of the marginalized or the unusual. While I’ve questioned whether I’m being patronizing- oh, aren’t those poor little poor insane people nifty?

But the truth is, I’ve always been fascinated by the other artists too- you know, the other crazy poor little poor artists, like Van Gogh, and a whole host of other suicide ones whose paintings sell for millions. Once again, it’s that thing- crazy? Yeah, and so is everybody else…You know, like Britney, flipping her lid out loud. But then there was Berlioz, the French composer of Symphonie Fantastique, an obsessive love poem for his heart-throb, who planned to murder another of his fiancées out of jealousy and was found walking through Paris in a woman’s wig, carrying a bag of oranges. See what I mean?

Now if you are one of the very few ‘normal’ ones in ‘healthy’ relationships, with a ‘balanced’ lifestyle, relative ‘health,’ few ‘problems,’ a moderate but never fanatical spirituality, (sorry, atheism isn’t quite normal yet- it’s ALWAYS been fringe) and you have no relationship whatsoever to drugs, alcohol, or prescriptive medicines, you might be thinking “now, those are all artist nuts.”

Sure. Creative types tend to be highly visible. But today I saw a lady pushing a baby carriage at the store. Inside the carriage was a Pekinese dog in a bonnet and booties. A man called this morning but it was the wrong number. When I said, “no worries, have a nice day” he yelled, “Who do you think you are, Marilyn? I know he’s there with you!” And last week came the news- not of blow jobs in the white house, but of blow in the white house. When the Zero Tolerance old-timers are running a White White House on the cocaine-fueled Harvard days of yester-yore while blathering on about how God hates Muslims (and faggots), you might think you’re at the end of the world. But you’re not. This is just everyday life, and it always has been.

Greg Bottoms is an amazing writer. His unforgettable memoir Angelhead; My Brother’s Descent into Madness was one of the stories that made me look around at my life and think, honey, this ain’t nothin. Although drugs made two men I loved into paranoids, neither of them tried to kill my father or anything like that. Beyond the story itself is his poetic ability to convey the nuances, the terrors, the underlying currents of humour that occasionally tuck into the most devastating of circumstances.

After his brother’s death, Greg went looking at some art by a handful of religious outsider artists who seemed to have some experiences in common with his schizophrenic brother. He saw some parallels that merited deeper exploration, and so he went deeper.

“Each of the artists in the book experienced an extreme religious epiphany after a time of daunting anxiety and stress and intolerable pressure—this epiphany led to the outpouring of art, in exactly the same way that it did for the “schizophrenic artists” in Prinzhorn’s book. These epiphanies—in a secular, scientific light—would be diagnosed as mental breakdowns, of course. So perspective and semantics become an interesting part of the investigation, so to speak. The human mind must rationalize and relativize experience, keep reshaping it, naming it, making it useful—when it can’t there lies an abyss just ahead,” Greg said in an interview with the University of Chicago Press.

In his foreword, he writes: “That’s how these travels began: absurdly, one might say, or at least haphazardly; with a tinny radio voice, a notebook, and a sudden, unwieldy uprush of memories, the themes of my personal past-illness, breakdown, the myths and symbols of Christianity- flooding through me again like a great, gray wave. I set for myself, that day in the car, a few simple tasks: to travel and look and listen and record. I didn’t know what I would find.”

I went with Greg to visit Norbert Kox, an ex-biker who paints ‘apocalyptic parables’ and Myrtice West, who started painting her visions after her daughter was murdered.

Reading about the artists from the perspective of both the academic (but not ‘art critic’- Greg’s a writer and professor) and one with some proximity to madness personally is refreshing. Greg’s journey is not a volume of poetry, but it could be. The book is slim enough to digest even if you just want to wade into the colorful but macabre world of outsider art. But there’s enough depth to sustain even those who’ve read everything about madness, religion, or outsider art.

Greg says himself that he kind of fell into being a writer by mistake. “I remember feeling a jittery uneasiness, like an itch below the skin, about having been portrayed as some hero-survivor, a success story. I felt, in fact, after a couple of interviews about the book, that I had done nothing more than sell my tragedy in an au courant literary form, the trauma memoir, which courts, in this cultural moment, self-aggrandizement, even if that …is half-buried under iron or self-depreciation. What had I done for my brother, or for schizophrenics? Made a few bucks for myself, become a ‘writer’ and received some praise for my ‘bravery’-bravery?- and crisp prose style.”

That Greg lets run-on sentences like that fly is a relief to my wordy, digressive prose style that I always hope is strangely alluring but fear may simply lack succinctness. I’m aware of my wordiness, my use of commas to pause the flow, just for a lull of it, and to keep showing the flow with a new thought, one I hope is poetic, emotive, luminous and illuminating. It amounts to just loving words so much, and being so damn emotional, at the same time. When editing, I look for a period at least every other line, give or take, otherwise I’m in there, making the sentences shorter. They do not come out short, naturally!

Now, it’s true that Greg’s got a few books out, but still refers to himself as a ‘writer’ inside quotations. He’s hardly a renowned literary figure, though I suspect that will change due to the personal quality, the integrity, and the swiftness of his eye for peculiar and pertinent details. His writing is smart and lovely to read at the same time. That he is almost shy, almost reticent about imposing his observations on our psyches makes him all the more astonishing, for somehow he earns my trust in the foreword, where he talks about being an unbeatable REM-loving teenager. “We wanted to be bigger than life, bigger than tragedy,” he confesses. The way he talks about meaning, you know he’s really looking for it. And after what he’s been through, meaning isn’t something contrived from a first year psych of religion class.

As a writer, Greg may be just a few books in, and I’m not in any of his classes, but I say fully that he’s my teacher. He could say what he wanted to say- despite those commas and hyphen-sliced racing thoughts and introspections – in 175 pages. One can delve further, into many great writers and thinking that he mentions. But for what it is- something vast and yawning, still about the dead brother, the growing up with madness stuff many of us are still trying to sort out- chasing that in ourselves, but growing confidently as we relate to a world half absent through loss- well, so we find each other.

Now I’ll say that not everyone’s a big fan like I am. It seems two of the artists believe that Greg intentionally misrepresented them due a huge conspiracy on his part. A writer that never says anything bad about his subjects still got blasted for his woeful misinterpretation of their art. In fact, the Thompson and Kox number on the cover was conspiratorially reduced in print to evade some of the numeral additions that would lead up to 666. Greg had me feeling for you guys, you and your schizo world where the Masons, the Illuminati, the false church, and Mary the Whore of Babylon are everywhere. Now that you have recoiled from his intuitive and gentle gaze, I can only say, “nutters.’ Sorry, friends. I loved a man very much, but it ripped me to shreds, a man who thought there were fibre-optic cameras in my pet’s eyeballs, a man who thought I’d created a web portal called Spy on Bob, when the site was for a video game called SpyBot. He thought I worked for Mac Computers along with my father, taking swabs of his saliva and acne juice while he slept.

If these artists can’t see the gentleness, the tenderness of Greg’s interaction, if they can’t see outside themselves into his world of loss and paranoia and hell, they are missing out on an unusual and spiritual blessing- the one of being contemplated. When someone contemplates our creation, we must never take that for granted, even if the conclusion is different than was our intent. There are six billion voices out there. If someone listens to ours, say thank-you Lord, even when we are sure they’re not quite getting it.

It seems the accusation is that they are portrayed as a bit off the rocker. That he was reading his books about mental health, looking for a diagnosis, because of his brother. Hello? Yes, that’s right, more or less. I mean, come on, I love it when the mad are functional enough with their systems of survival. But let’s not wear kid gloves here and pull around at semantics. Crazy? Hell, yes, my artist friends. As Greg says in one of his art-defending posts, this time his own, the Catholics and the Jews and the Masons could all be suing these artists for what they say about conspiracies. But they don’t want to waste their time, I surmise- with someone not fit to withstand trial.

Let me illustrate here that these wonderful artists evidently misunderstood that other artists also have perspective, legitimate perspective, that their universe of truth is nowhere near the only reality. One criticism they made was that Greg’s book was called “The Colorful Apocalypse” but that there were no colour illustrations inside the book! These are people with whom Greg never meant to engage in any kind of exchange except peaceful- but they are indeed people, like many fundamentalist Christians, who believe their perspective is the only true one, and that all the Catholics are going to hell, and so are the ‘heatherns.’

I live in that world Greg mentions, the world some people experience, full of magic rituals and special signs, and the world where every coincidence means something. I realized early on it was a little unusual to mention my peculiar beliefs in certain circles. The church folk thought Tarot and other symbolic fromage of the Old Age were devil rituals. The secular university colleagues thought both Tarot and Christian iconographies I was fond of were for weak-minded spiritualists. I got more religious than ever, but kept it to myself. Then the signs started leaping around so strongly- the lady in the yellow dress for example who told me I had no idea how many friends I would lose just before a string of events where about ten very close loved ones would die in a medley or tragic circumstances, seldom relating one to another, just random death coming my way from every angle. Given that the art she encouraged me to make is truly what has kept me from flipping out, I say loudly and clearly that I believe in signs. So what? Take me away? Like many other nutbars, I’m a contributing member of society, of no harm to anyone, and quite productive in work, in church, socially.

Things are nutty, tenuous, hysterical at times. But I’ve found the ways of ordering chaos that work for me, little ways, baby steps, but no going backwards. That’s a big deal. I’m moving forward.

Tonight there’s no way Greg could see into my home. But if he did, he’d conclude I’m fairly normal, on the Richter scale but…the art on my walls is making sense of a lot of things. Hopes to Escape, one says. I don’t look like a widow, says another. One, a gun to your head, a gun borrowed from Roy Lichtenstein the art crowd might notice. These are all about the crazy world of methamphetamine madness, one that nearly emptied me even though I was not on it. Three beloved are dead. There is one survivor. And the good wife, me. So fucking solid.

But I am. Just like that woman told me, I found strength through my art. The salvation is in creation, just like Greg observed so astutely in his journeys. Art is a place where nothing can hurt us, no one can stop us, nothing can enslave us. All of us, them, me, you.

And what about this Greg Bottoms character, who has now offended the insane whom he was showing reverence for?

He makes it all clear in closing his story. “As an amateur, I am never, not even on Halloween, an art scholar, art theorist, cultural anthropologist, sociologist, ethnographer. Many days I’m simply the guy cutting lawns or changing diapers. This book then, is my willfully subjective presentation of a sliver of a sliver of the world of outsider art….”

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. She is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos. She has written for dozens of magazines and web portals including Adbusters, Geez, Book Slut, Gremolata, Dog Fancy, Women Can Do Anything, The Fiddlehead, White Wall Review, and more.

Sean Penn interprets Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild

A city girl like me can’t even make a fire, and I cried over the lack of indoor plumbing during last year’s cottage adventure. I’m not exactly high-maintenance, but you won’t find me cozying up with Thoreau anywhere there’s unplowed snow or mosquitoes.

I didn’t read Jon Krakauer’s amazing Into the Wild because I’m the mountaineering type but because I find crazy people so interesting. And any kid who wants to plunge himself into the heart of an Alaskan winter is a crazy person in my mind, but Chris McCandless’s dismissal of societal hypocrisy and his love of poetry drew me in. This kid gave away the 25 grand in his bank account and began a tour of America penniless, rejecting the false security of a Harvard future, finding his parents’ society a total joke. He hated the way people treated each other, and he believed God’s joy could be found in fearless interaction with nature, not in the disappointing relationships we have with others.

Krakauer traced Chris’s steps, showing his journals along the way, right up until his final months, where he starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness. The book was stunning. I believed the journey was a sure suicide and the kid knew that- he was willing to die alone. Krakauer was certain the kid felt invincible, and his luck at other adventures on the way made him foolhardy. Either way, the seeming callousness of McCandless for ditching his family is never quite resolved. His ghost would be more peaceful for all that he lived and died by his dream quest, except it seems he had no forgiveness in him for their phony world of the upper crust. He died for their sins, and that leaves the beauty of the story so uneasy. And while I do fully relate to his puerile purity, the truth is we do have a heart of darkness, and that fact seemed so injurious to him, a kid who walked around like a raw wound. If solitary adventure made him happy, all the power, but if he’d lived a bit longer, he would have come to realize, as we all do, that we can’t fix the problems of the world just by living without toilet paper for a couple of months. I think he could have found happiness as a farmer or woodsman, making a tender mate for a lucky girl.

Seldom is a film based on a book any good. But Sean Penn moves behind the scenes and directs his protégé Emile Hirsch with brilliant sensitivity, refusing sentimentality, and writing down the bones. A more fitting tribute to a gentle and disturbed young man would have been impossible.  Alex Supertramp, as Chris called himself along the way, meets various American characters- a bunch of hippies, an old military codger, some redneck farmers (Vince Vaughn is splendid in this brief part- he’s always a surprisingly good actor). They are all drawn to the strange young man. They all ask him to call his family. For a film whose story takes place mostly as a one-man band in the Alaskan wilderness, the editing never slows. Majestic landscapes and poetic conversations are artfully blended alongside an emotive score by Eddie Veder. This is a truly unique masterpiece, and quite possibly the only outdoor adventure film since Alive for which you’ll need a box of Kleenex.

Nadine McInnis’s Two Hemispheres

There’s nothing more fascinating than madness. Once, I wondered how a mind could come unhinged: now, with a bit of firsthand experience and a few decades’ observations, I know everybody’s crazy.

Nadine McInnis shares this fascination, and reveals her own melancholic illness in Two Hemispheres, an exquisite collection of poems from Brick Books.

That artists write poetry about their depression is nothing new: the hurt heart is all of literature. But the elegant and insightful way the poet weaves her own experience of despair into deeply intuitive conjecture of others’ madness is nothing short of brilliant.

Irrevocably moved by mid-1800s portraits of madwomen of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, but left with meagre or nonexistent accounts of their cases, McInnis delves into the recesses of her own imagination to respond to the photographs. Reprinted here, the sepia images and accompanying imagination of their conditions resurrect from erasure these asylum ghosts.

The poet eloquently fuses her journey with the forgotten ones, showing the mind’s depth and vigor as equal to its fragility. The dusty halls of history come alive: be transported from the threshold of your own insanity into another era, one where lunatics wander asylum gardens. Recognize your own circle within these madhouse walls- one woman fancies herself royalty, with blood “cool/ and untroubled and blue, blue as heaven.” Another is terrified of damnation; one refuses to eat; another thinks they’re trying to poison her. These patients, “rescued from indigence,” mirror something of my day-to-day life, despite the Victorian dresses.

There’s nothing clear in our still-relevant muddle to understand the human mind and its connection to reality, whatever that is. Ages of pharmacology, of religious charity, of the sex-obsessed dream analysis of cocaine-addled Dr. Freud; the shamanistic mythologies of primeval and remote peoples, the terrifying devices and restraints, the hazy restful dreams of convalescence or abusive therapists, the deciphering of the voices of angels, the casting out of demons; the equally persuasive evidences that addiction is organic and spiritual in nature- and still we have nothing but a few helpless maps of dendrites and synapses, as if this could help us connect the dots between the two hemispheres of the brain.

Miasma, mania, catalepsy, electrodes- McInnis peers for us through the disconcerting lens of mental illness’s language, and languishes there, finding a place for herself and her Victorian lunatic friends that does not cover nor cower. We glimpse revelations of her own struggle through darkness, and into dawn.

Way back when the Titanic stormed back into popularity, the supremely saccharine qualities of the film were redeemed when Rose muttered dramatically this truth: “a woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets.”
Perhaps mysteries are not always meant to be solved- but instead to be revealed in small increments worthy of contemplation. These crazy ladies seem to revel in their brief moment of sepia stardom: their eyes, at turns hopeless, at turns defiant, at turns feisty or ribald, challenge the absence of factual case histories or dry statistics. Something of their deep ocean is revealed here. McInnis’s uncanny ability to disappear and let these other voices through is, ironically, what makes her own stories more compelling. Whether the secrets imagined are true or not is irrelevant- Salmond Rushdie recently said that what sets humans apart from other animals is our curious habit of telling stories to make meaning out of our lives.

Crazy people make stuff up, but isn’t mythology all about the universality of mystery? “True or false” may have no more merit than those ubiquitous but inanimate statistics we sadly live by. Thankfully, McInnis masterfully shows us that the meaning of life just might be the flickering dark/light interior of our imagination. That very same place inside may be the source of our disconnection and our illness, but it is also the source of our healing and recovery.

Two Hemispheres
Nadine McInnis
Brick Books, 2007

If you would like Lorette C. Luzajic to write for your publication, or would simply like more great stuff to read, visit her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Anthony DeCurtis Talks Rock and Roll

Creative types will find plenty of fodder for inspiration in Anthony DeCurtis’s brimming hodgepodge, In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work. Longtime a contributing editor of Rolling Stone, he’s compiled some favourite interviews here, showcasing a diverse range of talent that includes Bono, Lucinda Williams, Elton John, Woody Allen, Eminem, and Michael Stipe. Topics range from what it’s like to work with Dylan to religion in music to how a song is crafted from beginning to end. And while the cast is star-studded, it’s nice to talk with artists about their work and not who they slept with or how many calories they ate at lunch- this is Rolling Stone, after all, not Us Weekly.

Getting to know the artists- in their own words- means missing the usually intuitive and in-depth interpretive journalism the Rolling Stone is famous for. But there’s much to be said for listening directly, not funneling our ideas through another’s lens, however astute they might be. It also makes this book supremely readable- you can hook up for a few minutes with your favourite songwriter, and then flip around to see what Bono said about recording with Johnny Cash. Musicians and writers will likely find it worth sticking around to read the bits that focus on artists they aren’t necessarily familiar with or fond of: it turns out that I found Marilyn Manson a rather interesting guy with some parallel experiences to my own!

In Other Words: Artists Talk about Life and Work
Anthony DeCurtis
Hal Leonard Books, 2005

The Alchemical Woman: A Handbook for Everyday Soulwork by Catherine W. Davidson and Ramona P. Rubio

No doubt the general population will cringe at the barrage of goddesses, gemstones, symbolisms, and other new age/old age themes that ooze out of this slim little volume. The homemade feeling of the book and the clumsy collages, mixed with illustrations of various archaic deities, gives the book a craft-circle presentation that may not help make it a bestseller.

That said, I’m a big fan of alchemy, long dismissed by rationalists as crackpot superstition. The thing is, none of those staid scientists understand the transforming power of imagination. While I don’t recommend anyone stir elixirs for hours, study formulas and charts, and hope to change lead into gold, the symbolic value of making treasure from raw materials shouldn’t be underestimated.

We spend so much facing reality that most of us run from it, perhaps hopping from one unfulfilling relationship to another, perhaps by numbing our souls with drugs or alcohol or shrink-sanctioned pills. What harm could a little mythic transformation do? Those who enjoy rituals and dream or writing explorations may find something here that unveils a bit of mystery. Magic can give depth or shimmer to the humdrum agony of everyday life. Filled with poems, reflections, stories, and exercises, Catherine W. Davidson and Ramona P. Rubio, both Ph.Ds, put you to work.

I spent too much time in the 90s with healing crystals and feng shui and the goddesses inside me, so this manual feels a little retro and outdated. Still, though none of my eager herbal concoctions, spirit paintings, or chants granted me the fortune, love, or fame I thought I wished for, I did access my deep spiritual reserves and power during those times. And though I am reluctant to ever utter the words ‘spiritual journey’ again, any religiosity that is tinged with femininity is still a resplendent change from, oh, most of religious history. Plus, we read fiction and watch movies and don’t call it alchemy, but it is. The narratives of family and friends and strangers and the fantasies let us experience something new, something else. For women who have been through great darkness, these rituals can help you see light. Indeed, the authors say the book’s stages prepare us to deal with the shadow and light of the psyche.

Still, given the breadth of knowledge Davidson and Rubio must have gleaned from their in-depth studies of mythology and psychology, I was expecting something a little more polished. And though the website claims of health, wealth, and happiness feel like snake oil vitamins, the work is enthusiastic and generous. But I can’t help thinking there are enough ‘beginner’s’ manuals for magical therapy stuff (and more than enough indecipherable yackety-yak for Rosicrucian or Golden Dawn initiates.) Something in the middle would be nice for a change- Thomas Moore’s work always comes to mind for the thinking (hu)man’s spiritual psychology.

What would be nice, simply, is something that isn’t so gosh-darn cheesy.

Visit www.culturaltapestries.com to order, or for more information.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

The Full Monty: Monty Reid, Phlip Arima, and Yannick Marshall read for the Art Bar Poetry Series

There among the new and the true walnut/bean-ball pastry shops, other Korean restaurants, and lingerie depots, nestles Toronto’s perfect dive, Clinton‘s Tavern. This humble palace, at 693 Bloor Street W, near Christie, has hosted more than its share of cool bands and given roof to creative roots of every ilk. The sunny patio, dank back room, and front saloon draw all manner of melancholy poets, tattooed vegetarians, wrist-cutters, salty old-timers, Susie-the-braless-wonders, bearded intellectuals straying far from the U of T grounds, surly not-yet rock stars, rippling rip-jeaned demigods, dreadlocked Rastas, coked out sous-chefs, and other assorted characters that form the backbone of anything interesting in this city.

Resplendent with necessary orange floral rec-room sofas, mismatched chairs, and Converse’d feet, the Clinton’s vibe is familiar and welcoming. There’s no better place for a burgie and a beer on a hot day.

Now, the Art Bar Poetry Series has been running for 17 years, the longest running poetry reading in Canada, and they’ve moved to a number of venues, finally landing perfectly off-centre where they belong. The weekly get-together for poetry lovers, entirely volunteer-driven, has shown persistence and patience and it’s paid off. I applaud the series for consistency and longevity, two true hallmarks or conviction and passion. Over the years, the little poetry-reading-that-could has become the mainstay of the Toronto literary scene, showcasing a wide variety of published poets and an open mic each Tuesday night. Currently, the very funny red-haired spitfire Cynthia Gould hosts.

It’s June 10, 2008 and the line-up of the evening includes Phlip Arima, Monty Reid, and Yannick Marshall.

Now, Phlip’s a former director of the series, and he’s infamous for his unusual performance style. He seems like an interesting fella with some great material, but I admit I’m a little intimidated by his strange style of reading. Words fail me – I honestly can’t describe it. It’s not rap, it’s not slam, it’s more performance art, a way of speeding the words up and down and pushing them out. I suspect the effect he’s aiming for is to have them pile on top one another and push the barriers of a staid reading, and his performances are certainly popular, but I must confess I preferred the work that he read more conventionally. His latest work, Breathe Now, is available from Bushchek Books. And bonus, there’s a full-frontal nude male on the cover, still a rarity and always cause for celebration! (I think it’s Phlip himself but I’m too shy to ask!)

But the real full Monty is Monty Reid, a paleontologist with three Governor General’s Award nominations and three Stephan G. Stephansson awards for his poetry. He’s got fourteen books out, but the new one, from Brick Books, is The Luskville Reductions. I can’t resist picking up a copy and you should, too. Luskville is the chance locale where the dissolution of Reid’s marriage took place, a French town near the Ottawa valley. Reid is a man of few words. The pages of this book are certainly reductions- a few carefully selected words in which to say it all.  Though the book is actually one long poem, it doesn’t matter if you open and turn to a phrase or verse at random, and this is how Reid reads for us.

Yannick Marshall celebrates his first book from Kellom Books, called Old Friend, We Made This For You. He’s a very handsome young man, of Jamaican and St. Lucian descent, with a magical and sultry voice that really lets the history he writes about show through. The works he reads are evocative of slavery days we’ve swept under the rug. Instead of feeling accusatory or overly political, his poetry simply transports us to a place we may not have been to, shows us the spirited life inside a senseless captivity.

Each Art Bar session concludes with ten readers from the audience, short takes of three minutes or less. Tonight there is a range of profound and astonishing oeuvres, and I get the feeling it’s this way all the time. There are one or two lady poets, but tonight was mostly the men baring their souls, getting naked for us in the backroom of Clinton’s. Cynthia Gould calls it “thought-provoking male voices night” and so it was. I take Reid’s book home with me and read it cover to cover before I fall into weird dreams of a nude stranger on the front lawn of my apartment building. He’s waving a fistful of chapbooks at passing cars.

www.artbar.org
Tuesdays at 8 pm
pay what you can, no pressure
Clinton’s, 693 Bloor St. W.
Visit the writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. You can order her poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos through her site, indigo, or amazon online.

Rushdie and Me

There are few I would consider marrying, but I’ve long been certain that Kramer could be the next one. We would be giant, over the top, demi-intellectual goofballs together. The sheer amount of merriment that would ensue sure beats the melancholy underworld I’ve been living in most of my life. Kramer could meet me halfway. Little Miss Chatterbox and Cosmo. Kramer’s oddball beauty just might be everything I’m looking for in a man. He could make New York fun. And I suspect that his depth is considerable, despite a surface veneer. He hides his true genius and creativity, and yet, what you get is what you see. The key to Kramer is in not trying to figure him out. The joy of him is that you look back and realize that everything he says is true, no matter how crazy it seemed at the time you first heard it.

Yes, yes, I’m fully aware that Seinfeld’s kooky neighbour does not actually exist, and that’s a big relief because I’m in no hurry to get married again. And much as I’d hoped for it in adolescence, I want nothing less in life than to move to Manhattan. Fictional or not, Kramer and I spend a lot of time together through these newfangled, magical wonder boxes- turn on; dispense laughter. And Kramer never loses the ability to surprise me. One day he comes home from the sauna and tells Jerr- Bear he saw Salmond Rushdie, of all people, taking a steam.

Now, a conversation with Kramer might be exactly what Rushdie needs in life. The man, though wryly funny, could use more belly laughs. It can’t have been easy, becoming the poster child for offending Allah, just by writing a book. I sure hope that if any of my blustery words weren’t always as reverent as they ought to be, God could handle my outburst. I’m pretty sure we are supposed to study and learn and question our world, not just reach for what we’ve been told, and I’m pretty sure God doesn’t need armies on earth to censor our explorations if they veer from the truth- then every single one of us must be taken down. The cosmic world is a little more flexible than some adherents of faith think.

But that bit of fuzzy logic didn’t occur to the Ayatollah of Iran, who certainly drew attention to a newly successful author, an ordinary looking guy named Rushdie. He put a fatwa on Rushdie’s head for blasphemy. It’s ludicrously arrogant to think that no one should ‘insult or malign Muslims’ and that anyone has the right to kill for doing so. How can we seek truth if we cannot discuss it, and in discussing it, may offend some players? The book that caused this furor was, of course, The Satanic Verses, and the poor writer, now a popular award winner, went into hiding, fearing for his life. I guess by this principle I will also be executed, then, for portraying a pic of Georgie Bush with a lump of white paint by his nose and the caption, “I inhaled.”

I had a hard time myself, having read hundreds of books that defamed my childhood faith of Christianity, seeing what was so offensive here. I’ll give anyone’s faith its due, but true faith means having ethics, and the beginning and ending of ethics is always ‘thou shalt not kill.’ But here’s what caused the world of terrorism to erupt- the title, for starters. It allegedly implied that the Holy Koran’s verses were the work of the devil. (What was so devilish was that these verses, which in historical allegory were withdrawn after their first transcription, encouraged intercessory prayer to three pagan goddesses of the Middle East. The crescent moon, strangely, may still evoke the namesake of Allah, in Allat, the moon goddess….) Additionally, the prophet Mohammed’s wives appeared here in a brothel and the name of a Mecca-like place translated to something like ‘ignorance,’ which was deep sacrilege to the faithful. The list goes on, but surely by these standards, Christopher Moore, who wrote Lamb, about Christ’s adventures with Bif and Maggie and a zealous evangelist, had better head indoors.

Indeed, there were endless death threats and multiple bombings of bookstores, assassination attempts on publishers, and more. I thought the prophet Jesus warned us that we would be persecuted in his name and would have to stand up to all kinds of offense, including Moore’s very funny novel. We were instructed to turn the other cheek, however, not to bomb and murder wherever we didn’t like something.

Rushdie’s prolific career started in 1981, pretty much after he threw in the towel. Born in Bombay to a Muslim family, his first work was a sci-fi experiment. He says he wrote three other novels that “mercifully weren’t published.” He was also working in advertising and questioned whether he should just move on from writing. “Maybe I’m just pretending to be a novelist,” he told a mesmerized audience last night (June 9, 2008) at the Danforth Music Hall. He said this following a reading from his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence. Sitting there, all I could think was, wow, must be nice to be out! Indeed, Rushdie got tired of staying in, and eventually the fatwa was lifted, but fresh upheaval and new threats haven’t driven him back in.

Thankfully, after tossing up understandable concerns about becoming a writer, Rushdie promised himself that he would never give up. Midnight’s Children came out 6 years after Grimus, and it blew everyone away. Rushdie won the first lot of more than 25 of the most prestigious literary awards in history. A few years later, the uproar over Satanic Verses meant a career of death threats and chaos. But Rushdie doesn’t talk about all that, even when an audience member asks him about Islamic terrorism today. Instead he tells fledglings like me frankly “there are enough books.” If we are wondering why we want to be writers, then don’t be writers. The only excuse, he says, for becoming a writer, “is that you can’t avoid it.”

Now you’d have to be pretty imaginative to come up with any possible commonalities between an unknown pop culture and vitamin writer like myself, and the recently knighted Mr. Rushdie. I’m not even a fan, really, though I intend no disrespect in saying so. The lavish plots and painstaking historical details, the majestic span of human endeavours and dilemmas, the depth of the characters are all astounding things, and so, Rushdie is my teacher. But I confess to finding the going difficult and convoluted, and I find that his ‘magical realism’ lacks the kind of resonance and natural flow I find in Allende or Marquez. I suspect two things here: one, I’m just not smart enough to really absorb the reading and its contexts, by one who is generally regarded as a genius. And two, just plain old personal taste.

Still, I was pleasantly surprised to find that we nonetheless had a few things in common. Sal’s dry humour, which I think underlies a great deal more of his writings than is perceived, reigned clear. While there is certainly an inflated aspect and also something of a defeated one showing in Rushdie’s persona, there is absolutely an earthier charm, a faint silliness, and a sure grip on how comical the absurdities of the world are. There’s even something vividly gracious about a man who doesn’t scoff for what must be the 2144th time he is asked “how did you become a writer?” and “what are your favourite books?” I appreciate humour, more and more, as one of the most important ways of bearing life’s bullshit. I think Rushdie would agree.

Second, I’ve always thought Rushdie’s work a little wordy, and to be frank, most of those who know me find me rather wordy as well. I admit I go on and on. I edit quite a bit out, trust me, and I’m still left with an extraordinarily verbose verbiage. I cannot say in ten words what I might say in four thousand.

I decided to embrace my wordy weakness and named my other blog Little Miss Chatterbox. Minimalism may be the trend for distracted modern audiences, but a quick overview of literature assured me I’m not alone. Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Alexander Pope, now these are not exactly the most terse writers I’ve ever read. James Joyce, Shakespeare, Rushdie, me- well, we all tend to digress a lot.

“Stories are what define us,” Rushdie says, in defense of humans prone to loquacity. “We are the only creatures in the world who have developed the curious habit of telling each other stories.” This, he says, is an amazing way we have of making sense of ourselves. Certainly, it’s a technique he uses. “I go forward by going sideways.”

The real question here is what the million-dollar man was doing with Kramer in the sauna when there was a price like that on his head. When Kramer asked his name, the writer in the towel said “Sal Bass.” Jerry wasn’t so sure it could have been Rushdie, but Kramer knew that the ‘sal’ part was too much to be a coincidence, and that the ‘bass’ part alluded to fish- you know, to Salmond! Foolish hilarity ensued.

See, the uber-elite literati pooh-pooh television, but I think we take great joy in TV shows and in movies for the same reason we give importance to literature. Rushdie himself enjoys the occasional acting foray (though it was actually Sal Bass and not Rushdie who played Sal Bass/not Rushdie in the Seinfeld episode.) These are our stories. I’m not the only one who views life as Seinfeldian. The meaning of life is, quite literally, the reason of the show. It’s a show about nothing, and so, it is about everything.

Now, Rushdie’s a remarkable man, and while I was honoured to learn from his passion and experience during this terrific reading and interview, it still holds true that I wouldn’t care to run into him in a steam room. He may be smarter and have a better job than Kramer, but he’s a bit formidable, blustering, just through with his fourth wife, and well, not all that good looking. Kramer, on the other hand, has an offbeat quirkiness that makes him look hot with a cigar in an old-fashioned jalopy, despite the pompadour and trademark leggy clumsiness. I’m also pretty sure that Rushdie would find my work and my life too breezy, too girly, too soap operatic, with too many talismanic trinkets lying about. Despite his penchant for writing magic, he doesn’t believe in it, and I do.

But I digress.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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The Flaw of Attraction

On top of reiterating a million clichés, Rhonda Byrne and the Hicks’ team are living one: laughing all the way to the bank.

The feuding authors of The Secret and The Law of Attraction, essentially the same crap heap (it’s MY secret! no, it’s MINE!), profess to love one another despite the misunderstanding over who deserved what million.

We’ve heard the secret before. Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and Dale Carnegie’s The Power of Positive Thinking were both celebrators of abundant thinking. But long before the newfangled new age, of which I am sometimes a poster child, there was the good old fashioned Bible, and there was witchcraft. Both camps had an astonishingly similar message from the days of yore: whatsoever shall you sow, so shall you reap.

That’s it. That’s the secret. Save your money. How pretentious for Byrne and Hicks to take credit for ancient inspiration.
The secret has made me angry the past while. After a few years of feeling great, the medication that I was using for my thyroid disease stopped working sometime around last October. I became very ill and frightened. I signed out every book the library had on thyroid problems and began sifting again through the information for clues that could help. I continued to make sure I was getting enough sleep and nutrients, supporting my system as best I could. But a whole host of infections and hormone problems made my life a living hell over the winter. Still, life went on. This is nothing compared to what some people suffer, and as always, I try to accept reality and make the best of it.

A well-intentioned but woefully misguided friend dared to suggest that the problems were BECAUSE I was reading about it. My energy hence was on the illness, not on health.

News flash: had I not had a flare up, I would not have had to take any action. I was reading about it BECAUSE of the problem. This IS positive thinking- taking responsibility and action for my health. If thinking about fuzzy flowers and happy romance could make my thyroid better, I wouldn’t have had a problem in the first place. It wasn’t in my head, anyhow. The doctor found, even after upping my dosage, that my levels were plummeting. Because of my take-charge attitude, trying new treatment paths, I’ve found some answers and a better medication.

I absolutely do believe in positive thinking, but I do not believe that negative thinking is to blame for the world’s problems. This is an incredibly immature and self-centred worldview. There is positive perseverance and then there is reality. If our thoughts were the only important thing, every little girl would grow up to be a rich and famous ballerina and have a perfect husband. Every little boy would grow up to be president or the mob boss with a harem of strippers at his side. I believe you have a better chance of fighting a tumor if you think positively. I do not believe people give themselves tumous by thinking negatively. Outside of our thoughts, we also consume chemicals beyond our control. All the positive thinking I do to wish the world a greener place with real food has so far not impacted the reality of the crisis our air, water, and food are in.

The way this thinking goes, then my cat is to blame for his rare blood cell disorder that cost thousands at the vet. He was thinking unhappy thoughts, right from when he was a kitten when it started. I believed he would get better when the vet gave him steroids, and so did he, but he did not. I did not believe he would get better when I started feeding him meat-only cat food, because I had given up hope. But lo and behold, science moved along despite my hopelessness, and his allergy to rice and starches was real. When I feed him the anti-allergenic stuff, he does not develop the lesions. This is not because of my beliefs or his: it is because his allergy to the grains was real!

If thinking or talking about an illness is its cause, then most doctors should be dying off with every disease in the book. Reality check: ignoring your condition won’t make it go away. Accepting reality, learning about it, and striving for wellness with optimal self-care remain your best bet.

It would only naturally follow then that the countries that do not have enough hospitals should have fewer sick people. After all, malaria is just a negative vibe. These people are just so miserable! The mosquitoes are only infectious because they believe it!

Ms. Rhonda says not to worry about aging- only thinking about it would bring wrinkles. I can guarantee, however, that regardless of what she believes about aging, she will get old and die. Every single person on the planet in history who made it past 50 had wrinkles, even gurus and Madonna. So we only die because we expect to? What about the mentally retarded people who don’t even know they are alive? Their brains say they are twelve years old. They believe they are twelve. They still physically age and die. We are talking about reality, people. REALITY sometimes bites.

We’re talking about wishful thinking. And we should all wish, and dream big. Otherwise we won’t accomplish anything at all, too true. But not every little girl who believes she’ll meet a prince and move into a castle does so. Not all of the men who think they are hot, muscular demigods are. It would only reason with the law of attraction that just by reading good porn men should end up with those babes in their bed every time. But reality check: fantasy is fantasy, completely separate from reality! There are a lot of people out there who wish cocaine was cheap and good for you, but it ain’t. And it won’t be.

There are many who believed they wouldn’t get fat on cream puffs and fried chicken, but reality intervened. There are many, many, many who thought they’d never become drug addicts just for trying out some heroin. “It can never happen to me.” Now that’s positive, risky thinking. But it doesn’t work. There’s a little thing in the way called reality.

Millions of smokers truly believe that they will not get lung cancer. Each one seems to have a 104-year-old uncle who smokes two packs a day. This uncle does exist. There is always the exception. Not every smoker will get lung cancer. But lung cancer will happen regardless of whether or not the person thinks it will.

You can believe with all your heart that the world is flat. Everybody did. But that didn’t make it so.

I would always be wary, anyhow, of prophets who insist only they can understand the language of God. I always balked at Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God, in which he claimed that God spoke directly to him. I think God whispered directly into his bank account, but of course, that was because he was thinking of wealth, while I was thinking of making a living. We both got what we asked for, right? Then there is this Abraham business, where Esther Hicks ‘translates’ the spiritual laws from the spirit source. Only she can read the vibrations, and she and her husband Jerry write them down in The Law of Attraction.

While I see a better attitude, one of gratitude, an all-around tonic for a more pleasant existence, and I believe in the ripple effect of random acts of kindness, and I do believe that like attracts like, I also don’t see every problem as something to be fixed. Like my teacher, Thomas Moore, I believe that the theatre of life has a dark side that we must embrace, experience, and witness in order to fully evolve spiritually. Not everything is roses, and not everything is all about us. Also, this is REALITY and there IS poverty and hatred and strife and war, and little ol’ me did not single-handedly cause the giant distresses I witness. I believe in hope and in love, but again, there is reality, and what we want doesn’t always work out. If I could attract what I hope to with my wishes and dreams, I would be bringing back a whole host of people from the dead. If just thinking positively could have saved these friends from depression or methamphetamine or cancer, it would have. Or maybe because I felt grief when tragedy happened, instead of elation, more followed!

Of course, the two-year-old girl must have been guilty of very negative thinking to get a brain tumour and die.

Now maybe these writers are not the sick fucks I’m making them out to be. Maybe they are asking 30 bucks in return for genuinely uplifting books that could give some hope to the hopeless, and I’m making too much of it.

Besides, such deep inspiration is invaluable. Listen to this jewel from Law of Attraction: “When you are clear about everything that you want, you will all of the results that you want. But often you are not completely clear. You say, for example, “I want the colour yellow, and I want the colour blue.” But what you end up with is green.’ Deep, deep thoughts. I’m pretty sure when the starving orphans in Lithuania asked for charbroiled steak and a side of lemon-maple drizzled asparagus, they still got rice mush.

Vibrant, thriving people influence our lives for happiness. Is it really too much for me to let these people become rich off of your suffering?

Well, even if I put all my energy into stopping that from happening, I can’t stop it. Oh, shit, there I go forgetting that my thoughts are the only players! But seriously, our world will be a better place when we start thinking that the starving children in Africa with AIDS brought it upon themselves for being negative. The relatives we love who have cancer thought themselves to death. War happens because all those people wanted it. And so does rape, for that matter- haven’t men been saying forever that ‘she asked for it?’ Well, according to the secret, he was right!

“The law of attraction is the law of nature. It is as impartial and impersonal as the law of gravity is,” writes Byrne. It’s clear the Chinese were having negative, evil thoughts, and so they paid with their lives in the recent floods. Bible thumpers were long saying New Orleans drowned because of its history of evil vices. And those monks certainly attracted those atrocities with their cheerful passivity.

“Often when people first hear this part of the Secret they recall events in history where masses of lives were lost, and they find it incomprehensible that so many people could have attracted themselves to the event. By the law of attraction, they had to be on the same frequency as the event.”

Or, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I doubt that the crack addict’s child who got shot by coming out of the room during the wrong drug deal was actually responsible for the senseless act of violence. Sure, the energy vibrations were negative. But I bet that kid spent a lot of his life praying and believing that his mother would get better. The fairy tale is not always the outcome of our deepest hopes and beliefs. Placebo medicines work, but not always. Group expectations are often but not always fulfilled.

It would have been much more fair and reasonable to say that some things are the result of sin and evil. Some things are the result of chance. So let’s think positively and control the things we can. But that wouldn’t have made these people millionaires.

Think I’M the one being negative and no one meant that little children should get raped if they aren’t happy enough? Well, “Abraham” says otherwise, in a direct response to the rape question.

“No matter what the subject is, it is important to understand that there are no victims. There are only co-creators. You are all, as magnets, attracting unto you the subject of your thought. And so, if there is one who gives much thought to, or one who speaks much about rape, then it is very likely that they will be the victim by their words, of such an experience. Because, by Law, you attract unto you the essence of that which you give thought to.”

So next time your two-year-old cries that Uncle Bill is hurting her, you’d better give her a good spanking.

On the other hand, we all can get away with rape, murder, and robbery with the age-old excuse: the devil made me do it.
Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.