What the sex is political speech anyway?

A woman was arrested for contempt of court in Lake County. Jennifer LaPenta walked into a courtroom wearing a shirt saying:

I own the (female body part) so I make the rules.

Well, sure. I can think of an entire lexicon of slang for various female body parts, but in the interest of art and good taste, I will assume her shirt said Georgia O'Keefe. As in, "I have the Georgia O'Keefe at this party, so I'm gonna paint this iris purple." In and of itself, I don't even see how this could possibly be offensive to anyone, much less Lake County Associate Judge Helen Rozenburg. I mean, one might predict a level of empathy for the shared struggle of women to achieve equality, as women still only earn about 78 percent of what men do for equal work, among numerous other examples of injustice. Back to that in a moment.

From a legal standpoint, this t-shirt's flowery prose is a tricky issue. I am sure we are all reminded of the landmark First Amendment case from 1971, Cohen v California. Paul Robert Cohen was arrested for disturbing the peace after wearing a jacket at the Los Angeles Courthouse that said "(Slang for sexual penetration) the Draft." It's a noteworthy difference in this case that he did not wear the "Posh and Becks the Draft" jacket inside a courtroom, but that he did wear it in a hallway. Anyway, as Justice Harlan writes in the decision:

We cannot lose sight of the fact that, in what otherwise might seem a trifling and annoying instance of individual distasteful abuse of a privilege, these fundamental societal values are truly implicated. That is why "[w]holly neutral futilities . . . come under the protection of free speech as fully as do Keats' poems or Donne's sermons," Winters v. New York, 333 U.S. 507, 528 (1948) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting), and why "so long as the means are peaceful, the communication need not meet standards of acceptability," Organization for a Better Austin v. Keefe, 402 U.S. 415, 419 (1971).

This really is a brilliant bit of legal writing, right down to the famous lines:

For, while the particular four-letter word being litigated here is perhaps more distasteful than most others of its genre, it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric.

Well-said, unless you're some kind of ninny about the "evils" of moral relativism. However, it would seem that since the young woman in our case wore the shirt in the courtroom that she violated the authority of the court--rather than "disturbing the peace," which was the charge in Cohen. That is, Judge Rozenburg must have seen the t-shirt as a challenge to her authority--even though the woman wearing it was not a defendant or there for any official reason whatsoever. No, it would seem that in spite of whatever lofty notions we may have had about women's rights and solidarity, that the judge in this case has asserted that she, in fact, has the bigger Georgia O'Keefe. Take that, glass ceiling.

To the Chicago restaurant industry

I'd like to write a short, open letter to many of the fine restaurants and bars in the city of Chicago (and wherever else):

Join the fucking 21st century. The concept of consumer credit has existed for centuries, and the credit card itself, in various forms since the early part of the 20th century. In the 1950s credit and charge card companies began issuing cards to folks for use to make purchases at retailers and restaurants--Diners Club was the first independent card. Note what the fuck it was called: Diners Club. Because people want to use these goddamn things in restaurants. Since debit cards became widely available and convenient in the 90s, the use of cash has been declining:

There is evidence that paper money is being used less often, according to the Federal Reserve. Though cash payments are difficult to track, the number of noncash transactions in the United States grew from fewer than 250 a person in 1995 to more than 300 in 2006. Data on the stock of small-denomination bills and destroyed bills indicates that the use of cash peaked in the mid-1990s and has been declining since, two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found.

And now there's an app and scanner for cellphones that can read credit cards. Do you realize what this means? Now bookmakers, prostitutes, and drug dealers can theoretically accept your Master Card in exchange for their products and services.

So tell me why, when you've gone to all the hassle of obtaining a liquor license from the city of Chicago, all the various permits and other bureaucratic nonsense that it takes to open a restaurant in this town, you insist that your customers not have the convenience of paying for their meal with a credit or debit card? To you I say, fuck your bogus wannabe taco stand. I am going across the street to spend my money where I am valued as a consumer, whether I have cash in my pocket or not.

It's not just cheap brandy

It's the cheapest.

In spite of my liquor-ish transgressions last evening, I have work to do today. And I think that writing a blog post about nothing in particular is what I need to do to get started. I suppose that the first thing on my agenda this morning afternoon (after this blog post, of course) is to write another blog post. That "professional" shit I was talking about before. I think that if I get enough swear words out of my system here (shitfuck) that I'll be able to create the appropriate content (fuckass) for the work I need to get paid for (goddamn bitchassfuckshit).

Then I will use that swear-free article as part of a writing sample for a portfolio that I will send to another employer who would pay me a lot better if they hired me. Nothing against my current employer, but this part-time stuff ain't paying the bills right now. Anyway, I've never made it a secret that I'm looking for a full-time job that would launch me into the dwindling ranks of America's middle class. I think it would be fun to have health insurance and all that shit. I injure myself sometimes. Plus I think I might have a cavity in one of my molars.

After that, I need to clean up the kitchen. The perpetual disaster that is my kitchen. I plan on making pizza tonight (which always wrecks the kitchen). I picked up some prosciutto at Trader Joe's the other night. That will be delicious on my pizzas. Come over if you want a slice.

And then maybe I can get back to work on that novel. Or memoir. Or a short story, maybe. Or the novella. Or maybe I can drink beer and watch The Simpsons. Whatever works, ya know?

Where I've been, why I've been there

I haven't had internet access at the house for a while. This is due to nonpayment to my previous ISP, which is something I should probably feel bad about, but fuck em. If they insist on providing services to poor people, it's their own damn fault. Just like all the banks that gave out loans to poor people. What I am saying is that we poor people can't be trusted to pay our various debts. We should all be locked away in debtors' prisons like they did to Charles Dickens. 

I've been working a little bit lately, and the promise of more work is ahead. So maybe I can start to climb out of this hole. I got a new ISP.

Anyway, the point of all that is that I've used the lack of access as an excuse not to post updates to this blog, even though I occasionally popped into the coffee shop for free wi-fi. I have also used the lack of work as an excuse not to write so much. Some fits and starts, kind of, but mostly just watching shit that Netflix sends me in the mail (have you seen The Wire? I mean, goddamn!) and listening to Cubs games on the radio. Getting back to work will help me to force myself to write. Especially since my work is about to involve writing. Doing a blog, some marketing type stuff. Sans the f-word, though, I imagine. But still, it's getting paid to write stuff. 

So that's where I've been. I am back now. We'll see how things turn out.

Mobile

Just trying this on my phone. Internet destroyed. More later.

PTSD, among other things

I think about PTSD sometimes. For instance, I recently applied for a job assisting veterans with mental health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder. I haven't heard back yet from the potential employer, and I'm not entirely sure I want to, in spite of the growing desperation in my employment situation. Tonight I read an article by a woman who was diagnosed with PTSD after childbirth, a kind of strange diagnosis perhaps, but certainly believable, considering her circumstances. I am writing a short story that sort of deals with the subject of PTSD.

Regarding my own "issues," I doubt that I ever suffered with the disorder part of post-traumatic stress. I drank too much after I came home from Iraq. But I wasn't exactly a poster-child for sobriety before I left. I just had a lot of that active-duty combat pay in my bank account, and single-malt scotch tasted good and made the weird dreams go away. I probably had a serious predilection toward scotch-abuse long before I ever joined the army. In the past, occasionally something might have triggered a fucked-up kind of memory or instinctual fear. The best example I can think of is one moment when I was entering a freeway on-ramp and I drove right over some piece of trash in the middle of the street. I clenched up in dread as I expected that the rubbish in the road was some kind of improvised explosive that would blow me sky-high. But I was in Nashville, Tennessee, where there have been few (as in zero) incidents of roadside bombs in recent memory. And after that, I just kept driving. I think that someone with a real case of PTSD would have probably had to stop and shut down and suffer for a while.

But now I am rethinking this whole issue. It is February and Football Season Is Over, baseball season is two months away, and basketball, hockey, and the Winter Olympics all make me miserable. I am without sport to entertain me. For some strange reason in my personal economy, I still have cable on at my apartment, and I have the MLB Network, which broadcasts a lot of off-season gossip and shows that try to determine who the best right fielder was during the 1960s. I can think of three who were all the best: Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, and Frank Robinson. They also do these recap shows on entire seasons of Major League Baseball, and tonight they are showing 2003. The year we invaded Iraq. The year I went to Iraq. The year that the Chicago Cubs went to game six of the NLCS with a 3-2 lead in the series, all the way to the 8th inning of game six with a score of 3-0. After a flyout in the top of the inning, they were five outs away from their first pennant since 1945... and then the Bartman "incident." No rational person still blames Bartman for the Cubs' loss, much like no rational person would pay $22 to walk around a "science" museum that shows off mankind's recent relationship with living dinosaurs. No, the Cubs pissed that one away all on their own. Yet it still haunts me. I  recall thinking what a great moment this would be, while I'm stuck in a stinking shithole war-zone in the Middle East, if the Chicago Cubs could possibly alleviate my agony (I was really whiny about being in Iraq, by the way) by just making five more fucking outs and going to the World Series. We had satellite television, on which we could get not only all kinds of European soccer and pornography, but also rebroadcasts of the baseball postseason. And it was in October 2003 that my dreams died. Later that month, I came back to the States on leave, and after being home for no more than a day, my girlfriend broke up with me. I wandered around in a drunken haze for two weeks, barely caught the several flights I needed to make it back to Baghdad, where I suffered from an increasingly serious lack of motivation regarding my military duties, and then two months later got myself crushed by an overturned High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle and sent home with a tube in my chest.

So if you ask me if I suffer from PTSD, I'll probably say no. Until you mention the 2003 Major League Baseball season.

Mayor's son called to active duty

One complaint a lot of people have had over the past decade is the lack of prominent politicians' sons and daughters voluntary service in OEF/OIF. Say what you want about the cesspit that is Chicago politics, but you gotta admire that the son of Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley is going on active duty in the army. Who knows where he's going to serve, what his rank is, or what he even does (I don't really feel like taking the time to research it, because it really doesn't matter to me at all). It's just nice to see that the burden of military service is not entirely upon the shoulders of regular working class Joes.