Live and In Person

If any of you darlings would like to meet Pretty lady in person, you may drop by The Blogger Show at Agni Gallery on the lower East Side, next month. The reception is on Saturday, November 3, 6-9 PM, if you enjoy that sort of thing, which Pretty Lady doesn't, particularly. So if you would like to meet Pretty Lady all sweaty and giving orders and fussing about placement, come by the gallery on Thursday or Friday between 11:30 and 5 for a chat, while she is hanging the show. Pretty please. You can help!

Website Complete

Pretty Lady's author has finished revamping her website. After much pulling out of hair, she dispensed with the cascading style sheets and flow formatting, and opted for Extreme Simplicity.

If there is a web designer out there who happens to think her website looks like 'a mom and pop shop,' he is welcome to re-code it for free, upload it to a sample site and submit to her criticism of his design capabilities. If he is not willing to do this, he may please keep his opinions to himself. Thank you.

Bravo

Well, Salon.com is hitting it out of the park today. What a lovely deconstruction of the Cardinal Flaw in modern environmentalist thinking:

A new politics requires a new mood, one appropriate for the world we hope to create. It should be a mood of gratitude, joy, and pride, not sadness, fear, and regret. A politics of overcoming will trigger feelings of joy rather than sadness, control rather than fatalism, and gratitude rather than resentment. If we are grateful to be alive, then we must also be grateful that our ancestors overcame. It is thanks to them and the world that made them possible that we live....

If popular psychological wisdom has it that you have to love yourself before you can love another, my story suggests that you have to love life before you can care about anything. The wager is that, to some small but irreducible extent, one must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be capable of donating some of one's scarce mortal resources to the service of others."

It makes Pretty Lady shudder, the number of progressive, conscientious environmentalists she meets who seem to feel hatred and shame at the very fact that They Exist. Their lives are a constant state of handwringing at 'reducing their footprint,' and Unending Guilt at daring to wish to selfishly procreate.

Pretty Lady would like to tell these people, sternly, to stop it at once. Joy and gratitude are contagious and highly motivating; Guilt and Shame are the opposite. If you wish to Save the Planet, the best, and possibly the only, method is to Love the Planet, starting with your very own self. After all, you are part of it.

In Praise of Common Sense

Heaven forfend that anybody should accuse Pretty Lady of being neurotic, controlling, hypersensitive, or a hypochondriac. But gracious. She could have told you this:

Children shouldn't use cellphones. No one should drink diet sodas sweetened with aspartame. And think twice before getting X-rayed with a CAT scan except in a bona fide life-threatening emergency.

In addition, most commercial cleaning products are enormously and unnecessarily toxic; Pretty Lady could have told you that, from the age of six, when she used to get a dizzy, nauseated, sick headache, sore lungs, and inflamed nasal passages every time she cleaned the bathroom. One may get one's bathroom perfectly clean with castile soap, baking soda and lavender oil, and it smells infinitely better than Comet.

Pretty Lady does not, truly, understand why or how modern humans have become so divorced from their basic, animal common sense. Surely that creepy, numbing, plasticky flavor in a diet soda would Tip One Off that aspartame is Not Fit for Human Consumption; it is like drinking liquified nerve gas. Why is it that we sit around, in the manner of domesticated cattle, guzzling this swill until a government employee tells us, thirty or forty years after the first anorectic teenager dies horribly of aspartame poisoning, 'Oh, BTW, that stuff's toxic.'

And why, when we are so all-fired worried about cancer, do we endure the chronic signals of our animal intuition as regards smaller discomforts, such as headaches, backaches, stomachaches, bloating, sniffling, sneezing, intestinal complications, accelerated heartbeat, insomnia and shortness of breath? Friends, these symptoms mean something. They are one's body sending the signal, "That's Bad Stuff out there. We are eating and drinking and breathing Bad Stuff. I've Got It Covered, for now, but couldja ease up for a bit? This ain't easy."

Extravagant Socialization

For all of you darlings who are wildly curious as to how Pretty Lady spends her evenings in the glamourous city, Chris has kindly written a most detailed description of artistic debauchery:

Then an amazing thing happened. The piece became interactive. We all began to talk -- something nearly impossible at most noisy Chelsea openings -- and discuss the exposed details. One person noticed that the rusty ironwork poking through the brick was the support for the fire escape outside the window. We all speculated on why the brick was black on the side facing us (tar for waterproofing was our best guess). We talked about the history of New York City and the neighborhoods we'd seen change. Joe and his friend Vince spoke in shocked tones about how different Central Park North was even in the few years Joe had lived there; I myself was surprised because the area was one of the triumvirate of fabled Bad Neighborhoods of my youth -- Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the South Bronx. Another visitor told me how even the South Bronx is being gentrified, which is a little like hearing that Disney's opened a new park in Antarctica. And speaking of Disney, we lamented the loss of Times Square to Disneyfication. Then, emboldened by her consumption of one lukewarm can of Budweiser, Stephanie did a balance beam routine on the exposed joist, but didn't do any flips despite our encouragement.

Pssst: there's a photo of Pretty Lady and her Gentleman Friend at the bottom.

Please Read This Blog

Pretty Lady is agog! This lovely lady has certainly captured her attention. She has a feeling that many mysteries are about to be revealed.

How to Know a False Prophet

Pretty Lady feels so blessed. So many of her dear friends are so concerned for her immortal soul! Every time she enters into a rousing discussion of faith, metaphysics, miracles and the Holy Spirit, some kind person is certain to warn her about False Prophets. And how correct they are to do so! False Prophets abound; one can, in fact, find them upon every street corner.

The essence of the quarrel Pretty Lady has with her friends, however, is to the mode one uses to recognize these pretenders to the Holy Word. Pretty Lady, as her intimates have cause to know, can be Irritatingly Abstract. She has a dangerous tendency to jettison simple litmus tests, such as Bible=Word Of God; Anything Else=Suspect, in favor of methods which, no doubt, appear to her friends to be Murky and Labyrinthine. So, in the hopes of putting some minds to rest (or possibly into a state of High Alert), she will outline her particular and experiential standards for determining whether an apparent miracle-worker is all she cracks herself up to be.

1) A False Prophet will appeal to the Ego.

Pretty Lady in no way means to demean the profession of street-corner psychic when she presents the following, purely hypothetical, case study. Street-corner psychics have their livings to earn like everybody else does, and like other professionals, their skills are obtained by a combination of Talent, Study and Drive. The practice of street-corner divination is not, in and of itself, more inherently destructive than the practice of law. It is all in how the talent is applied.

However, Pretty Lady picks this particular hypothetical case study in order to underscore the fact that mere pyrotechnics of divination, transpersonal perspicacity, and metaphysical understanding in no way indicate that a person's motives are genuinely transcendent.

For Pretty Lady has met many a street-corner psychic whose powers of clairvoyance are undoubtedly genuine. These persons spout off reams of Actual Facts, for which they could have no direct physical source of knowledge, with the ease and rapidity of a person falling off a log. They put their fingers squarely upon each specific psychological button necessary to bring their client into a state of thrall, and nearly to the verge of tears.

Then they matter-of-factly declared that they can solve everything, for the bargain-basement price of $200 plus tax.

Before encountering this gigantic Red Flag, however, there are usually subtler signs that a person is using a flamboyant psychic talent for motives baser than that of Universal Peace. Flattery need not be insincere to be manipulative; it need merely be divisive. A person who declares, 'Wow! You're really wonderful!' may be perfectly fine. A person who declares, 'Wow! You're So Superior to those other people over there! You deserve your due!' bears watching.

2) A False Prophet will prey upon your fears.

In Pretty Lady's experience, a cardinal mark of the Holy Spirit is the simple message, verbal or otherwise: Have No Fear. Telling one's flock, 'There are tons of things to be afraid of out there, but I will save you!' is not at all the same thing.

So when this purely hypothetical street psychic explains that there is a Mark upon you, a dark one, of someone else's jealousy, envy, dislike or competitive sabotage, and that there is an Urgent Need for you to Defend Yourself against this darkness, be very, very wary.

(Pretty Lady notes that, in the abstract, an appeal to the Ego is, in effect, an appeal to fear. For the Ego is the manifestation of the divided Self, at war with everything around it. Fear is the Ego's source of sustenance. You cannot have one without the other.)

3) A False Prophet will have a Hidden Agenda.

Or not so hidden; see above. Pretty Lady has heard tell of psychics who charged upwards of $900 for removal of the Dark Mark. Anyone who has an obvious vested interest in extorting money, status, recognition or sexual favors out of buttering you up and cosseting your fears is likely to be wholly Wallowing in Ego.

4) A False Prophet will tell lies.

Friends, it is time we came to understand the difference between a Lie, a Parable, and a Metaphor. A Lie is a deliberate falsehood, encompassing the misrepresentation of action, object, characteristic or motive, told in order to conceal an agenda. The true motive for this behavior is always to protect and aggrandize the Ego, at the ongoing expense of others.

A Parable, on the other hand, is a story told in order to make a larger point, having nothing to do with a particular Ego, per se. It may not be literally true in all its particulars, but the particulars are subservient to the overarching Message of the communication.

Similarly, a Metaphor is a metaphor. Basic English education is in a sad state of decline, when so many fail to understand this point.

5) A False Prophet will engage in Self-Martyrdom.

It is time to put a stop to this ridiculous notion that Ego-aggrandizement is wholly signified by worldly elevation of self. It may be just as thoroughly indicated by worldly debasement of self. A person who slashes her own wrists, metaphorically speaking, on your behalf and then declares, 'See? I bleed!' is engaging in a manipulative tactic every bit as destructive as those who stampede over other people's farmland, pillaging as they go.

True prophets have, frequently, been publically, dramatically and unjustly brutalized. But they tend not to whine about it, and they tend not to blackmail you with it. They also tend not to do it to themselves on purpose.


By these standards, evidently, it is a wonder that there are any True Prophets at all. In Pretty Lady's view, however, the wonder and the paradox of it is that the Holy Spirit may speak through any of us at any time, not being pinioned, by definition, to Ego. So how may one recognize the voice of the Holy Spirit?

So simple, darlings. The Holy Spirit is calm, disinterested, and loving.

(Disinterested: having no personal stake in the situation; impartial. Pretty Lady is royally fed up with hearing this term misused.)

It has been Pretty Lady's experience that the voice of the Holy Spirit can be astonishingly simple and literal; so literal that we often miss it. A dear and holy friend of Pretty Lady's once prayed to Jesus Christ for some guidance regarding her place of employment; she was becoming weary and bored, and uncertain of why she should continue there. She asked, very specifically, "Tell me why I'm here."

At work that day, a co-worker walked up to Pretty Lady's friend and declared, apropos of nothing, "I'm the reason you're here. I'm a mess, I've got a lot to work on, and you're really helping me."

Four hours later, Pretty Lady's friend realized--well, duh.

Emergency!

Chris Rywalt is bored! The horror! Darlings, this is what happens in today's modern Cubicle Culture. This is the root of all Flame Wars. Quick, something Interesting and Stimulating, and potentially Controversial!

Well, Pretty Lady will desperately hurl herself into the breach, by committing the inexcusible faux pas of quoting herself. She takes as her text the letter she wrote today to dear Richard Dawkins, who has embroiled himself in a bit of controversy of late.

(It has been Pretty Lady's historical habit to treat social retardation, in general, with a certain amount of Denial, Forbearance, and Compensation. But the dear man was becoming so agitated, and was inciting so many other persons to similar clueless nonsense, that Pretty Lady at last decided to intervene.)

Ritchie! Ritchie honey! Yoo hoo!

I very much hate to break it to you, darling, but you are embarrassing yourself. You have failed, dear, to pick up on the all-important Social Subtext of the theological situation.

For of course, darling, you grew up in the Anglican church. And to anyone with a smidge of social sensibility, it is perfectly obvious that Anglicans are hypocrites.

Yes, darling, it's true. Nobody really believes all that 'God created the world in seven days' and 'God will send you to hell if you're bad' business. Otherwise the Bishop wouldn't be so free with the Jack Daniels in the evenings. However, it does not follow that these stories are fantasies with no purpose.

You see, Ritchie, all these literal stories are what we tell seven-year-olds to make them behave. As they grow into strapping young (or not so young) scientists, the habit of discipline stays with them, while the cute stories are gradually shed, the way wood frameworks are no longer necessary once the concrete has set.

What this lovely reverend is attempting to tell you, gently, dear Richard (and friends! of course! Pleased to meet you all!) is that seven-year-old stories are not the sum total of theology, but rather a necessary developmental framework. For discipline, sweethearts, in whatever context, is necessary for the human mind to expand its apparent limits and envelop the cosmos.

And by 'discipline' I do not mean mere spankings. I mean the habit of training the ego-will to attend to things larger than itself--to the scientific method, if you will, or literature, or ethics, or to the peace which passes all understanding and lies at the root of consciousness itself.

Darlings, it's so splendid!

Pretty Lady wished, of course, to elaborate upon the splendidity of transcending the ego-will, but she has work to do, and felt that she had expressed herself sufficiently for an introductory letter. So she will leave it to Chris, and to other emergency de-borifiers, to discuss.

Civics 101

Pretty Lady is disgusted. She is not disgusted about the self-evident racism embodied in this story; she has made her position on racism, she hopes, extremely clear. What disgusts her is the wilful, mulish, self-aggrandizing stupidity of the police department representative who could make this statement with a straight face:

“Where there are more police, expect more police action,” Major Levins said. “Some people think ‘I can just hang out with this gang member as long as I don’t do any crime.’ Well, expect to be talked to. We can’t ignore them. In fact, we kind of want to figure out the relationship between all these gang members and their associates.”

Let us leave alone the fact that it is difficult to have an open, productive, informative conversation with a person who has just been seized without provocation or warning and is face-down on the pavement with hands cuffed behind his back. This point, Pretty Lady feels, has been made. Not attended to, but made.

Pretty Lady must, however, answer this officer's implied question. Gang members in a community are the community authority. It is as simple, and as obvious, as that. Members of said community must deal with this authority in the exact same way that Pretty Lady must deal with a police officer who pulls her over because she was accelerating the teensiest little bit, not having seen the 'school zone' sign. One must be agreeable, and polite, and apologetic, if one does not wish for trouble. It is a universal paradigm.

A police officer who does not understand the community in which he is policing, enough to acknowledge its obvious structure, can never be the community authority, no matter how many innocent bystanders he throws to the pavement. He is not part of the community. He will not be attended to, he will not be obeyed, he will not be respected. He has no authority.

Duh.

Please Ignore This Woman

Pretty Lady specifically requests that all of her lovely adored readers do nothing at all to help an extremely special friend of hers, who requires a miniscule amount of financial assistance to solve a mimimal blunder that she inadvertantly performed while visiting and caring for a seriously ill friend in need.

No, this lovely lady does not deserve a second thought from any of you. She never thinks of herself; why should you? She is continually preoccupied with appreciating the underappreciated, understanding the misunderstood, defending the helpless and clarifying wrongs, so that they may be righted. These unimportant and self-indulgent activities are clearly deserving of no attention and support from the rest of us.

Although Pretty Lady has inside information which suggests that small contributions, in the two-digit range, from an equally small number of contributors, could completely alleviate the embarassments in which this beloved friend finds herself, she requests that you withhold your assistance. Particularly as making Paypal donations is so simple, rapid and painless.

For what, in the grand scheme of things, does it matter if a loving, generous, selfless, brave, insightful, stoic, kind, wise, brilliant soul loses the precious home for which she has striven a lifetime, for want of a small contribution from you? You will forget about it quickly. It won't bother you at all, after awhile. Go look at videos on YouTube; there! Forgotten already.

See how easy that was?

UPDATE: Not quite so miniscule. You see what Pretty Lady means about the insight.

Come the Stones

Pretty Lady has said it before, but unaccountably, no-one has stoned her. She suspects it is because they didn't believe her; or, more likely, they weren't paying attention. So she will say it again. Pretty Lady is racist. Racist, racist, racist. A veritable bigot. Prejudicial, jingoistic, agoraphobic, narrow-minded, unempathic, and uninterested in the problems of others.

Just so we're clear.

Perhaps the reason that no heavy, jagged objects have yet emerged through Pretty Lady's windows, despite the above confession, is that she lives in New York City. She has often noticed that native New Yorkers, of any color or creed, are up-front about their bigotry. Naive as she is, she had never heard the term 'towel-head,' used to describe a cab driver of Islamic extraction, before moving here. She had not been the subject of open contempt, due to her inferior goy nature, from a gentleman wearing a top hat and side curls. She was unaware that, in certain quarters, the expression 'stoopid f***ing Pollacks' is standard, particularly when referring to the wiring schemata of formerly Pole-occupied apartments.

Despite this pervasive racial pejoration, however, the streets of New York seem remarkably free of riots, marches, sit-ins and Unfortunate Incidents. In fact, in Pretty Lady's psychically sensitive experience, the level of Fraught Tension is considerably lower than her experience of the liberal, progressive, Consciousness Raised Bay Area, where she spent a good many of her formative years.

For in New York City, a group of young black males boarding the train is simply a group of young black males boarding the train. In the Bay Area, a group of young black males boarding the bus is an opportunity for all of us to Remain Calm, Now, and not get all anxious that this group of young men who are not necessarily thugs is about to Cause Trouble, no, we mustn't jump to conclusions, despite their downright aggressive demeanor, and the fact that one of them just swiped your wallet.

Indeed, in the liberal, progressive Bay Area, nobody is racist at all. Everybody has a black friend, an Asian friend, and a Hispanic friend, and they all walk down the street together. Everybody is exactly the same; the same age, the same socioeconomic bracket, with the same interests and pastimes and vegetarian tendencies. Only skin color varies. Everybody is bisexual, too.

(These liberal, progressive, homogeneous Bay Area attitudes are very stringently enforced; anybody who deviates from them by so much as a whisper, however misinterpreted, is universally ostracized without explanation and never mentioned again. Pretty Lady can't fathom how those Rodney King riots ever took place. )

Perhaps the reason that New York retains its veneer of abrasive intolerance is that in New York, there are simply too many races to keep track of. To be properly non-racist in New York, one would have to have an Ethiopian friend, a Nigerian friend, a Hasidic friend, a French friend, an Irish friend, an Orthodox friend, a Polish friend, a Russian friend, a Puerto Rican friend, an Ecuadoran friend, a Syrian friend, an Iranian friend, an Afghani friend, a Slovakian friend, a Cuban friend, a Japanese friend, a Chinese friend, a Filipino friend, a Thai friend, a Hindu friend, and an Indonesian friend. People's schedules are simply too busy for maintaining all these friends, not to mention the cost of all those language classes. It is much easier to remain insular and unenlightened.

Surprisingly, however, everybody gets along, most of the time. Perhaps this is because we all have to work so hard just to pay the rent. Economic desperation transcends mere bigotry; New Yorkers, by and large, are able to say "I don't like your kind, but maybe we can work together."

In fact, it is Pretty Lady's inchoate theory that 1) deep down, we are all racist, for the very good reason that survival of the species demands that we be wary of funny-looking strangers; and 2) racism suppressed does far more damage than racism openly and cheerfully expressed. When a person is busy defending herself against charges of bigotry, however justified, this allows little energy left over for actually getting to know people, in an open, honest, organic way.

Pretty Lady Has a Brilliant Insight

Hello sweeties! How long has it been! Pretty Lady's life is All Chaos, but she is nevertheless bringing order to it, particularly in the corners where the dust bunnies tend to collect. She is proud to report that several areas of Stagnant Energy in her household have been well and truly Cleared, and more shall be forthcoming. She cannot tell you the peace she feels, when walking into the walk-in closet and discovering that this is, in fact, possible.

(Confidentially, she is engaged in this de-stagnification process on account of her Gentleman Friend, who is taking the gargantuan step of Moving In. As she told him, one's own personal chaos may be marginally tolerable, but Chaos Squared is not. So a new era of Orderly Adulthood is dawning in our lives.)

However, Pretty Lady had to take a break from purging closets and packing Christmas ornaments for storage in order to share with you all her groundbreaking, revolutionary, life-changing Insight. This Insight, if properly understood by the majority, could save the world; at the very least it might preserve a number of arcane friendships. Listen closely:

A boundary is not the same thing as a judgment.

Pretty Lady must pause, here, to allow the ramifications of her genius to sink in. Then she must paraphrase herself:

Setting a personal boundary in no way implies that another person is being judged.

It is possible that some few of Pretty Lady's readers may not yet fully understand the wide-ranging implications of her statement. Thus, she must illustrate:

When Pretty Lady declines your very tempting invitation to: engage in a threesome with you and your dear husband; accept you as a full partner in her fledgling business plan; vote the way you do; subscribe to a similar theological philosophy; repeat nonsense syllables over and over in her head because you told her to; or any similar activity--she is wholly and merely declaring that such activities are not for her. She is not, by any stretch of the imagination, stating that you are a Bad Person for being polyamorous, casual with money, politically extremist, theologically rigid, or Buddhist. She is merely claiming personal sovereignty over territories wherein she is the undisputed expert--her own preferences--and leaving the territories of others entirely untouched.

Pretty Lady understands that to the six well-adjusted individuals upon this planet, this statement may come across as a complete tautology. You six were obviously born wise; let Pretty Lady alone to continue enlightening the rest.

There are many well-meaning persons that take the statement, 'Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged' a wee bit Too Far. Pretty Lady has been one of these persons in the past, which is why she knows. These persons can be spotted by their calm, understanding demeanor when their then-lover declares, "I'm going to travel through the world, leaving a trail of bastards behind me." They betray no hint of personal indignation when their desirability as a monogamous, committed mate is thus casually impugned; at least, not until they snap, and end up on the police blotter of the Post.

The trick is that these codependent little ladies are, indeed, judging someone. They are judging themselves. They are judging themselves for, deep down, not particularly liking the idea of casual abandonment by cavalier impregnator. Thus, in remaining silent, in failing to state their preference for a more reliable brand of mate, they are desecrating their own souls in the name of non-judgment.

Similarly, persons of a more rigid bent may choose to follow every Biblical law to the letter, except for the abovementioned exhortation. They, subscribing wholesale to a transcendent Moral Law, feel perfectly comfortable in excoriating others for failing to do the same. That is the definition of 'transcendent,' isn't it? 'Transcendent'='Applies to everyone'?

Pretty Lady's reply: No. Not in that way.

Because in order to transcend the individual self, one must first differentiate. That is, one must set a boundary. 'All is One' does not mean 'We are all the same.' It most particularly does not mean 'We are all the same, and if you are not the same as me, then obviously there is something incorrigibly wrong with you, which must either be immediately altered, or eliminated completely.'

Thus, in order to attain the inner Peace which passeth all understanding, it is first necessary to know oneself, and to be fine with that. Then one may begin to know others, and be fine with them, too.

This is 'Politicians Are Disgusting' Week

Pretty Lady asks you to watch this video.

She then asks: Why was the gentleman arrested before he was asked, courteously and decisively, to be brief?

Why did the arresting officers feel a need to pull a gun on an obviously unarmed gentleman, when he was already outnumbered four to one?

Why does a former Presidential candidate have insufficient presence of mind, ethical clarity and personal charisma to request that the police desist from brutalizing the person with whom he is currently conversing?

Why do some citizens of this country feel that it is Irrational and Out Of Line to resist, when a group of police officers come up out of nowhere and attempt to cart you off to who knows where, for no reason, while in the midst of an interesting and non-violent conversation?

Why do the vast, vast majority of citizens of this country sit passively by while the police randomly brutalize an individual in their midst?

Pretty Lady must repeat herself: icky-poo.

Icky-poo

Pretty Lady has been telling you and telling you. Rudy Giuliani is No Good. Although she perfectly understands the reasons that a Career Politician might forgo the opportunity to inform himself about crucial matters affecting his potential constituency, in order to scoop up a few hundred thousand grand, that doesn't mean she approves of it. But what really chaps her hide is that this person is totally unable to perceive an ethical paradigm which does not include the arbitrary Taking of Sides and doing egoistic battle unto the death to defend them, right or wrong:

When the group's report came out last December, Giuliani offered a different reason why he quit, saying he didn't think it was right for an active presidential candidate to take part in such an "apolitical" panel. Giuliani also took pains at the time to distance himself from some of the group's findings.

In other words, Truth and Justice and Appropriate Action mean nothing to this man; Presidential Candidates, in his stated opinion, must avoid such dangerous things.

Pretty Lady Needs No More Vacation

She has had Plenty. And it has been splendid; the up-close tickets for 'Wicked,' the strolls in the Botanical Garden, the fancy Birthday Party, the trip Up North for the annual Apple Fling. Splendid. Excellently so.

And now Pretty Lady is home, and the bills are overdue, and the landlord cashed the rent check and forgot to write it down, so she has to go through all her bank statements to prove she paid it, and she is facing suspension at the food co-op, and her clients have probably found other bodyworkers by now, and she cannot get into the closet, and the front door lock needs either a locksmith or a good dose of WD-40, and Pretty Lady is so stressed out that she just read every letter to the editor at Salon instead of getting down to work.

Enough vacation is enough. Please kick Pretty Lady in the behind.

Art Blog Update

Pretty Lady, happily accompanied by a Surge of Inspiration, has updated her Art Blog, after an unconscionable silence. She was hoping to be able to unveil her splendid new Website as well, but the Cascading Style Sheet issue has utterly confounded her. So she is giving you darlings a Sneak Preview. Cheerio!

Daniel McGowan Update

Long-time readers of Pretty Lady's may recall that she has expressed concern for a gentleman in her community who was Disappeared for alleged 'eco-terrorism.' Although she is still less than pleased with the method in which his arrest and detention was handled, she is most impressed with the manner in which the gentleman has taken responsibility for his actions:

This plea agreement is very important to me, because it allows me to accept full responsibility for my actions and at the same time remain true to my strongly held beliefs.

I hope that you will see that my actions were not those of terrorist but of a concerned young person who was deeply troubled by the destruction of Oregon's beautiful old-growth forests and the dangers of genetically modified trees. After taking part in these two actions, I realized that burning things down did not fit with my visions or belief about how to create a better world. So I stopped committing these crimes.

This last year has been a very trying time for my family and I would like to extend my deepest love, admiration and appreciation to them for standing by me through a very difficult time. I would also like to apologize to the workers of the companies I targeted. I never intended to hurt people, so when I read about things like family photos being destroyed, I felt great remorse. I am truly sorry for the harm that I caused.

Your Honor, after May of 2001, I put myself back on the path of open and positive activism. Since then I have focused on helping victims of domestic violence, campaigning for the environment, and advocating for prisoners. While my commitment to pursuing a better world has not and will not change, I have changed the way I am pursuing those goals. My agreement with Mr. Paul, Mr. Block and Ms. Zacher to come together and resolve this case by taking responsibility for what we did is an important step in moving forward to have what I hope will be a positive impact on my community.

On the Obsolescence of Religion

Religion, Pretty Lady has it on excellent authority, is Obsolete. All those religious people out there should just stop their silliness, already.

You heard Pretty Lady. Just give it up.

Pretty Lady was terribly relieved to hear this, because now that human society and culture have transcended the need for transcendence, we will all get along just ducky. There will be no more wars, no more Hard Times, and no more disease, death, and devastation. Science, she has been assured, will take care of all that.

Yes, Science, defined as 'a method of empirical research into the qualities and functions of the physical universe, which involves the formulation and testing of falsifiable hypotheses,' has solved every single problem confronting the average human being. Should a benighted human need guidance, consolation, or a bulwark against Despair, this person need merely to apply to the nearest library, where all the information he ever wanted to know regarding quantum physics is readily available.

Of course, there will be no more need for consolation, because nobody ever loses loved ones through death anymore; neither do they fear their own deaths. Science has cured it! Similarly, Science has managed to perfectly balance the global economy, so that not a single person ever goes hungry, unsheltered or unclothed, and is never late on the rent because they own their own homes, free and clear!

And when we get into conflicts with our neighbor, Science comes in and sternly tells us to stop it. There is no reason to complain, because Science has made us all happy, happy, happy.

No, there is no need anymore to maintain a state of mindless Faith that no matter how black things appear, we need not succumb to the paralysis of Despair. Science has answered every hope we could possibly imagine. It has brought peace to our hearts, money to our wallets and love to our homes. It has brought kindness and understanding to the bitterest and most foolish of souls; it has amended inequality everywhere. It has caused complete surcease of sorrow, of pain, of agony.

So, darlings, if any of you has a problem that Science cannot solve, you are merely Delusional. Pretty Lady rather suspects that you are even Not That Bright. She might go so far as to say that you need a remedial course in Basic Logic; at any road, you are not her problem. She has no problems. Science has taken them away.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh.

Nightmares

Pretty Lady didn't get much sleep last night. The news that the government has taken to stealing babies in the U.K., sometimes even before birth, upset her so profoundly that she flailed around and hallucinated that, in some mysterious way, the mosquito that made it into her bedroom was in some way intimately connected with the rise of totalitarianism in one of her favorite countries. Truly, it is horrible.

Furthermore, she is finding herself confronted, yet again, with the dismal fact that persons in her own field, who should know better, are still subscribing to the hopeless cant of that bastard Karl, in a shallow and self-righteous denial of Obvious Reality. So, wearily, Pretty Lady shall take it on herself to illustrate why religion and opiates have nothing in common, in the light of their relative effects upon the proletariat.

Now. First, a show of hands: how many of you darlings have been close friends with a heroin addict? Please? Pretty Lady does not actively avoid persons who make habitual use of opium-based narcotics, but the trouble is that these individuals are not particularly friendly, in the usual sense of the word. They will engage you in conversation in order to extract money from you, of course, but largely they tend to be Poor Listeners. And their follow-through is nil.

In fact, the singular hallmark of opiate addiction is that the individual concerned progressively jettisons every value apart from his or her relationship with the drug. One friend commented, "N. would never be able to love me back; heroin would always take first place." Persons who lived in Desperate Ghettos would tell stories about junkies so stoned that when apprehended for theft by a man on a bicycle, they would make a dead-eyed grab for the bicycle, while actually in custody. "Man, I need this shit!" was their pathetic cry. Junkies are notorious for child neglect, impotence, and Living in Squalor.

Because heroin, as they say, kills the soul. One may know a true junky by the fact that they have no light in their eyes.

Now, Pretty Lady grants that the more infantile of the religious set can occasionally be annoying. She grants that they may talk a lot, and that they are not always the best of listeners. But she submits to you that this sort of thing is a symptom of immaturity, far more than religiosity; furthermore, that whatever their failings as individuals, these people are engaged. They take their responsibilities seriously, as parents, spouses, providers, and members of the community. The fact that they subscribe to a system of rules governing their relations with others has an expansive affect on the mind, rather than a contractive one.

The fact is, darlings, that the notion that religion, in and of itself, anaesthetizes the mind to the perception of social injustice is a lot of rot. Religion does nothing of the sort. It merely alerts the mind to the fact that materialism is not the be-all and end-all of existence, and thank goodness for that! We are then free to seek increased social justice without the burden of Total Responsibility, for whether or not it is clear to us, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

For it has not escaped Pretty Lady's observation that when society as a whole attempts to equalize itself in a materialistic context, without faith in a Larger Pattern, disaster occurs. Our egoistic selves go into a neurotic panic and start seizing babies, attempting to impose Cosmic Justice from the point of view of an ant.

On a tangential note, an individual from over at Edward's has attempted to challenge Pretty Lady to a debate, in a display of jejune optimism. Pretty Lady must inform this gentleman that the term 'ego,' in a spiritual sense, can be defined as 'the perception of self as separate from the whole'; in this context, transcending the ego, through spiritual discipline, to perceive one's Self as unified with the Whole, is the precise and definitive opposite of 'fetishization of the ego.'

This is elementary.

Do not flee! Pretty Lady Lives!

As is, perhaps, obvious, Pretty Lady has been messing with her template. Through no fault of her own, some of her links got lost, as well as her Finetune playlist and her Rent Fund button; if anyone is heartbroken to discover that their link is not among the rescued, please do not hesitate to sound the alarm. Bear in mind, however, that if your blog has not been updated since May, Pretty Lady axed you of her own accord.

Truthfully, Pretty Lady feels a bit self-conscious in here! She wonders how an absence of cloying pinkness will affect her style.

Note, additionally, that Pretty Lady has found another ad sponsor; one with enough sense and practicality to dispense with Puritanical hypocrisy, and support Pretty Lady uncensored. She hates to be crass about it, but One Must Eat. And one may even get free chips! Enjoy!