Category Archives: Society

Poly Want a Secret?

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Holidays.

Even the most traditional family has trouble getting everyone together at holiday time. Take my daughter and her husband. They have one set of in-laws and one set of out-laws but her mom was in North Puffin, I was in South Puffin, her brother was an hour away, hubby’s brothers are scattered across a couple of states and his folks live down in Vermont’s Banana Belt.

My daughter opted to strangle a turkey she had raised herself and invite everyone to her house to chew the feathers off. Them as came, came. Them as didn’t didn’t. Still, she got her mom, her brother, nieces, and the odd ex-brother-in-law and a couple of others. It was a houseful.

I missed Thanksgiving at my daughter’s house because Nancy and I spent our first-ever holiday together (it was grand) down here. She and I are known to all y’all but that’s not the norm.

Even the most traditional family has secrets; poly families often seem particularly closeted.

I ran into some friends at a Halloween party (they came dressed as vanilla wafers, all five of them): Paul and Polly Dent who first made our acquaintance over there, Evelyn and Owen McGregor, and Nicole Norris who was never married to Chuck. The Dents have two younger girls, one in elementary school and one in junior high. The McGregors have a couple of college age girls (Vickie, the elder, and Toni, the younger) and a pre-school granddaughter plus Raymond, a son in his mid-20s from Evelyn’s first marriage. It is an estrogen-rich household.

That’s the marital status.

Here’s the organization chart: Paul and Evelyn are lovers. Polly and Owen likewise. Nicole came into the group as Evy’s other lover and has fallen in love with Paul. Owen vacations each year with Cece, a lovely SCUBA instructor who lives here in the Keys. It is not your “traditional” family. Heck, it’s not even your traditional polyamorous family.

Confused? Need a spreadsheet? I have to keep emailing gekko to keep track of these guys for me.

The entire group (other than CeCe) shares a large, rambling Victorian farmhouse on the Eastern Shore, a house built for the hunkering down in the long winters. It has nine or ten bedrooms (there were more but they converted at least a couple of them into baths), three parlors, two dining rooms, a music room, a theater, and office space for Paul and Nicole, who mostly work at home and for Evelyn, a lawyer who brings a lot of work home with her.

Polly said she was going to hire the White House protocol officer to plan Christmas this year. Between them, thanks to the usual American marriage/divorce/remarriage, they have 18 parents or in-laws, I think, about 13 of whom are speaking to each other.

In addition to the place card nightmare, they have a secret.

Toni McGregor was 16 and unwed when she gave birth to now-four-year old Tina, the McGregors’ first grandchild.

When the test strip turned blue, Evelyn made everyone promise not to tell anyone. “Particularly not Cece.”

It was a damn fool promise, particularly since the window of opportunity for secrets like that is something less than 270 days. After that, the cat climbs out of the bag no matter what Evelyn wants.

That is not her only misgiving. She loves her life but it embarrasses her. She doesn’t want anyone in the family to know that Owen and Polly are lovers and she expressly doesn’t want anyone to know about Owen and Cece. Particularly not the Dents’ kids. Or Raymond. Or you. Or me.

She’s been known to melt down at the dinner table over the secrets she needs us to keep.

“I hate going home for the holidays,” Vickie McGregor told me, “but I can’t go anywhere else because I can’t talk about the things that are important to me. Like what goes on in my family.”

Queen Victoria and her namesake would not have liked each other. The queen might have been a bawdy wench but God help anyone who mentioned that out loud.


Sculpture by Ania Modzelewski

[Editor’s Note: gekko and I shared the four-part polylocution that lead up to these afterposts. Please visit The Poly Posts for the entire series and for other resources.]

Fly United

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I drove all the way down here to the land of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Key Deer.

I wanted to fly.

1,780 road miles it is from North Puffin to South. 2,000 or more frequent flier miles.

I wanted to fly.

I hate to fly.

Cicero taught us “A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble.”

FELLOW TRAVELERS
55-year-old Olga Bezmelnitsyna and 41-year-old Sergei Gorlov (called “a middle-aged couple” in the report) were fined £500 for outraging public decency after a series of incidents on a 12-hour flight from Brazil to London. The cabin crew received complaints from passengers about the pair and found Bezmelnitsyna face down in her companion’s lap. Despite being warned she was caught later in the flight with her hand on his groin with his trousers unzipped. I guess she wasn’t done.

Jeezum, all they needed was a blanket.

And a 44-year old man and his 39-year-old female partner (also called “a middle-aged couple” on the radio) were arrested upon landing in north Queensland. The Jetstar cabin crew said they found the pair together in the plane’s toilet and that the man “became abusive to staff after they were discovered.” I guess he wasn’t finished, either. He was charged with disorderly conduct on an aircraft but his partner was merely fined.

This is all because airlines stopped giving out blankets.

The news was all atwitter about the Alec Baldwin/American Airlines kerfuffle last week. No other sex to report, I guess.

No, I made that up, mostly because he tweeted about it after the fact.

PETTY BUREAUCRATS
“I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog,” Cicero wrote.

The AA fiasco began with a celebrity using a mobile device to play Words With Friends. He was on an airplane. I presume the Friends were not. The cabin doors closed, and the passengers were asked to turn off all electronic devices. Mr. Baldwin refused. He acted the ass. I understand that.

One passenger told the reporter that the other passengers were all Tweeting about Mr. Baldwin’s ejection for … Tweeting. “The flight attendants didn’t threaten to eject the rest of them.” he said.

Ah hah! Bureaucrats in the skies!

TSA
Lenore Zimmerman, an 84-, 85-, or 95-year-old woman on her way to Fort Lauderdale, said she was strip searched in New York after she asked to be patted down instead of going through a body scanner because she worried it would interfere with her defibrillator. She said she was taken to a private room and made to take off her pants and other clothes. She missed her flight and had to take one 2-1/2 hours later, she said.

TSA said in a statement that no strip search was conducted. “While we regret that the passenger feels she had an unpleasant screening experience, TSA does not include strip searches as part of our security protocols and one was not conducted in this case.”

I think they found her diaper.

Somebody is lying. I suspect TSA.

And a second granny — 88-year old Ruth Sherman — says she was strip-searched at JFK. She said screeners at JetBlue took her to a private area to check the bulge caused by her colostomy bag. Linda Kallish, in her 60s, also came forward with a nearly identical story.

TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein would not provide the agency’s definition of a strip search. “It depends,” she said.

People who believe the TSA have baptized themselves in the Kool-Aid™. We’re willing to let some stranger stop and search us under the presumption of guilt simply because we travel. They “randomly” select us — or they sort of search all of us — on the off chance they might catch a bad guy.

That’s why we call it “fishing” instead of “catching.”

Back in the old days, I flew to South Puffin on a one-way ticket. I had my pony tail, computer bag, and I checked my “brown cardboard suitcase” (a heavy IBM server shipping box that carried everything I needed down here including a full size cooler). The bureaucrats “randomly” selected that box and me for added scrutiny.

That was the right thing to do.

When they spent their time on the grannies, they missed the wife beater, the smuggler, the embezzler, and father stabber. Father rapers. Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me. And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me.1

“Bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of progress.” wrote Dr. Jim Boren.

Actually, I rather like to fly. I just hate to fly with the people who grease the wheels. And Mr. Baldwin.

Sex, Sex, and More Sex

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Twenty-nine percent of ordinary Americans have had sex on a first date, and about as many have had an “unexpected sexual encounter with someone new.” Among people who are married or living in a committed relationship (or formerly married), sixteen percent have cheated on their partner (nearly twice as many men as women) — while more, thirty percent, have fantasized about it.

Twenty-seven percent of Americans who reported being happy in marriage admitted to having an affair.

Ordinary Americans are pikers.

Voice of America reports that “When U.S. businessman Herman Cain suspended his campaign [Saturday] for the Republican presidential nomination following allegations of sexual harassment and a lengthy extramarital affair, he joined a long list of U.S. presidents and presidential contenders whose personal lives have attracted scrutiny.”

The long list is pretty much all of them.

Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Dwight Eisenhower, Newt Gingrich, James Garfield, Warren Harding, Gary Hart, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then there are the Mark Sanfords, Arnold Schwarzeneggers, Eliot Spitzers, Anthony Weiners. Apparently about 97.7 percent of American presidents and 110 percent of American presidential candidates.

What did we expect? From the Victorians through Viet Nam, public morality did inhibit any open acknowledgment of sexuality but things have (sort of) changed. Most American homes today probably have copies of Playboy and Fanny Hill and the Joy of Sex but the owners still keep them out of sight. On the other hand, a couple generations of soap operas have been hotbeds of in-your-face adultery. They reflected American life or at least American political life.

Now we tell ourselves stories — stories about how prim we are and how licentious our neighbors are — and those stories hurt us.

Countries with an ultraconservative attitude towards sex and sex education like the U.S. have a higher incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy.

I have some simple advice for these people in public life:


Grow a pair!
You guys (and I mean all of you political philanderers from any affiliation) think you’re winning the dicksizing contest.

You ain’t.

You’d like We the People to believe you are King of the Bedroom or at least the oval rug but you can’t even stand up for your bigger self when your littler self gets caught standing up.

Here’s the answer. When the admittedly brain dead reporter asks, “Did you really have sex with three women, and a goat?” tell the truth.

“Yep. What’s it to you?”

About the only follow up to that is, “Was it good for the goat?”

Actually, a decent reporter should ask the spouse to comment. It would be a good teaching moment for relationship building. Maybe for polyamory. Or at least for truth in advertising.

Giving Thanks

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Thanksgiving is a patriotic holiday, sandwiched as it is between Veterans Day and the “official” beginning of the Christmas Shopping season.

Pilgrims, Progressing SouthI’ll come back to the sandwiches.

Everyone not living under a rock knows that Thanksgiving Day is America’s primary pagan festival, celebrated to show thanks, gratitude, and love to the gods for a bountiful harvest on a New England day that fields have been barren for weeks and are now mostly covered in snow. This holiday has moved away from its religious roots and is now a time to participate in the largest single slaughter of fowl in the universe.

Here in the States, we mark Thanksgiving Day on the fourth Thursday of November each year. Our Canadian neighbors celebrated it six weeks earlier, on the second Monday in October. The snow falls earlier on Canada’s by-then barren fields. We saw one of those neigbors at the Kmart yesterday, looking for a potato masher. She was pleased to get two thanksgiving meals; she was less pleased to cook two thanksgiving meals.

Our collective memory of the holiday is sort of wrong. In American as Pumpkin Pie, Plimoth Plantation tells us that

Prior to the mid-1800s, Thanksgiving had nothing to do with the 1621 harvest celebration, Pilgrims, or older immigrants. Thanksgiving started as a traditional New England holiday that celebrated family and community. It descended from Puritan days of fasting and festive rejoicing. The governor of each colony or state declared a day of thanksgiving each autumn, to give thanks for general blessings. As New Englanders moved west in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they took their holiday with them. After the harvest, governors across the country proclaimed individual Thanksgivings, and families traveled back to their original homes for family reunions, church services and large meals.

I expect to have a “traditional” Thanksgiving meal this year, whether I cook it myownself or drive over to the Cracked Conch with Nancy and Joe and Willie and maybe Ed if he makes it back from Provo. We’ll have a small turkey with bread (not oyster, thank you very much) stuffing, cranberry sauce, smashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes, cole slaw, and pumpkin pie for dessert.

That basic menu has remained unchanged for a couple hundred years but that’s all the older our menu is. The three-day pig-out of 1621 at Plymouth (the “First Thanksgiving”) may have had ducks or geese, but yes they had no potatoes, and bananas were equally scarce. No apples. And no pumpkin pie. Likely no turkeys who were wily even then.

I don’t care. I shall have pah.

I AM™ a lucky boy lucky. My family is scattered across a couple thousand miles but we are all speaking to each other. Anne’s broken leg is healing. My island house value sank a little more so my future property taxes may be lower and I did not get four inches of snow yesterday. The insurance company finally decided I really should have had collision coverage and paid the shop. Next week, I shall have white meat turkey sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise on good crunchy sourdough bread for lunch every day of the week. Most important, I have been blessed by friends.

People decorate for Halloween and for Armistice or Remembrance Day and for Christmas but Thanksgiving, not so much.

Ben Franklin thought the turkey should be America’s bird so I’m thankful to have found a big inflatable turkey in a local yard for this week.


ahh, supper

Dead? Dead

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Burlington, VT (October 28)–Our own local group of Occupy Wall Streeters began a weekend encampment in City Hall Park in Burlington today, but it’s unclear whether they’ll be allowed to stay in the park overnight. Under city ordinances, people are forbidden from sleeping in parks after 10 p.m. or setting up tents and bedding for that purpose. The Vermont Workers’ Center, meanwhile, “encourages everyone to stop by with family and friends to celebrate the right to peaceably assemble and to exercise the right to free speech.”

It’s a real conflict. Most of Burlington’s city government is pretty much on the OWS side but there is a farmer’s market in the park on Saturday, so Occupy Wall Street is gonna end up Occupying Main Street and fouling local commerce.

“Real change can happen and it feels to me like it’s starting to simmer…” my friend Enola “Fanny” Guay said.

That may well be, but the issue still comes down to a single question: Do the protesters have a defined goal?

I was in college during the anti-war protests of the 60s. Looking back on my actual experience, there were a lot of different, non-homogenous groups running around but they all had one over-riding goal: they would shout and shout until the war came tumbling down.

I don’t remember any protesters shooting each other.

Burlington, VT (November 10)–Police are investigating three deaths — two fatal shootings and an apparent overdose — at or near Occupy protest camps last Thursday.

A young man was fatally shot Thursday evening just yards from the Occupy Oakland encampment outside City Hall. And a homeless veteran died after shooting himself in the head in a tent in Burlington’s City Hall Park, where the local Occupy movement has set up tentkeeping. Police here cordoned off part of the park as a crime scene sparking a confrontation with the protesters.

Also on Friday, a 42-year-old man was found dead inside his tent at Occupy Salt Lake City in Utah. Officials believe he died from a combination of drugs and carbon monoxide poisoning.

[Image]This sign is making the social network and email rounds.

“It’s obvious the sign maker and all the Facebook copycats are either blind to or unwilling to discuss the class advantages and good luck that bolstered their hard work,” Fanny Guay said.

That’s Fanny-speak for “we need to take away that advantage so no one can get ahead of anyone else.”

It’s particularly worrisome that most of the OWS simmering comes together that way. After all, most of Vermont’s flower children had liberal college educations that their parents provided. Many of Vermont’s flower children have grown up to accumulate the advantages and luck

And here in Vermont, it is mostly the children and children’s children of privilege who band together to protest.

All curmudgeonliness aside, OWS could be a good thing if they stay peaceful. Protesting our problems is an American tradition and Wall Streeters getting $100 million bonuses from tax money is a problem.

If the simmering does come together, the OWS might have something to shout and shout about, a cause that allows every man, woman, and child to live in an identical, government-owned house, with identical, government-provided healthcare, watching identical, government-programmed television. As long as everyone can have a television.

I wouldn’t bank on it.

For now? It seems like all noise and no tumbling. And it’s dying a blusterous death.