abu ghraib

You know that life has taken a turn for the worse when you find yourself with a 6:30 appointment at the Sears Portrait Studio.

A few days ago I found myself there with my sister H for a session that was arranged by my sadistic mother. Really, it’s my own stupid fault. Mom is always begging me to send her pictures that I am far too lazy to actually send, so she decided to teach me a lesson.

The Sears Portrait Studio is pretty much exactly what you’d expect, plus a little extra. You have your choice of animated backgrounds and sad props. The photographer was literally barefoot. The whole thing reeked of Caucasian despair.

I knew we were in trouble beforehand, of course, but I knew we were in special trouble as our photographer set up the very first shot. She asked my sister and I to stand back-to-back with our arms crossed—bad enough. But then she snapped a few pictures and said, “Okay, girls, now look at each other over your shoulders.”

Things quickly got worse. “You, the older one,” the photographer said, pointing at me. “Get down on your belly.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Get on your belly so your sister can sit over you,” she shouted, as though I was slow.

“I’m not sure what that means, exactly,” I said, “but I just don’t think I can do that. Can we just stand sort of normal and take pictures that way?”

The photographer sneered at me and scratched her bare foot. “We can take boring pictures if y’all want, but I’m trying to do something cute.” It was all downhill from there.

Later, at a restaurant, H sucked down her first glass of whiskey and said, “Clearly, that woman did not understand our situation.”

I snorted with laughter and disgust.

H continued, “I wanted to say, ‘Look. I know you’re an artist, but my sister is going on 31, and she doesn’t feel comfortable with these positions you’re suggesting.’”

Alas, H held her tongue, so some terrible things happened. Obviously, I should never show anyone these photographs. Never. Ever. Ever. But I’m the sort of person who believes in laughing at trauma, and anyway I believe that Christmas is inextricably tied to sadism and masochism. And so, at great personal risk to myself (from the wrath of my sister, who hasn’t yet bathed in the sweet light of the shame-loss phenomenon), here is my Christmas gift to you:


"My Slow Cousin"
For this shot, I am playing the role of H’s halfwit cousin, Nancy. Nancy has been in the Home for Dumpy Hayseeds since she had that tractor accident on her sixteenth birthday. She doesn’t smile much anymore (owing to the Lithium), so someone has to wave her favorite pudding cup next to the camera. They soon discover that even the promise of pudding isn’t powerful enough to mask the emptiness behind her eyes, but they go ahead and take the picture anyway.


"Infantilization Fetishist’s Pick"
So this is what the fucked-up photographer at the Sears Portrait Studio considers a “fun pic”: asking a 30-year-old woman to lie on her stomach like an infant. This took place about three-quarters of the way through the shoot, when I was too demoralized to refuse a second time. It just goes to show what forty-five minutes at the Sears Portrait Studio can do to a person. “You—get down on your stomach!” she said. “Awesome,” I replied, and then surreptitiously flipped my laughing mother the bird.


“The Illusionist”
For this pose, H is playing the role of Crystal, my crippled stepsister. Crystal has spent her life in a wheelchair, but she sure has a whole lot of spunk. The family has asked the photographer to make it seem like both girls are “normal,” thus the stool. Unfortunately, Crystal’s gimp slump gives away her handicap, so the photographer (out of pity) shoots me from an angle that doubles my body weight.

“What Disability?”
Here, the photographer asked Uncle Ricky to prop up Crystal in a normal person’s chair. It almost worked.


“Murder-Suicide Pact”
No role-playing in this one. Here, you see two young ladies who hate their mother, the Sears Portrait Studio and, above all, themselves.

introducing: garden and gun

I am smack in the middle of the annual epic holiday homecoming, which hasn’t been much of a much as of yet. My sister still finds JC depressing, but I think it’s a hoot and a half. It was hard to grow up here, but now I’m in love with the memories of my misspent youth, which was mostly spent trolling the Miracle Mall. There, we spent long afternoons and evenings playing the X-Men video game at Super X (I was always Colossus) and hanging out with people who had names like Gunner and Billy. The latter lived in a shack and strangled cats, but he also taught me to love Slayer. I remain grateful.

These days, when I visit, I find pleasure in simple things. Take, for example, the Cracker Barrel, a place I found embarrassing as a teenager. Now, as an adult, I LOVE eating there—a fact that can be partially attributed to shame-loss, for sure, but also has something to do with a phenomenon that my friend C calls “Slouching Toward Applebee’s.” His theory goes something like this: as we get older, our tastes grow more and more lame.

It is with that sense of ambivalent nostalgia that I approached a magazine called Garden & Gun: Soul of the New South. My mom found a free issue in her mail a few months ago and immediately recognized its import even though she doesn’t care much for gardens or guns. She called me and we had a real laugh, then she stashed in my room for my review.

At first I was totally skeptical. I was disgusted by its Bloody Mary recipe, which called for garlic powder and pork broth. I was unimpressed with the food writing, including an article about okra that talked about the digestive properties of okra “goo.” And then, when I saw that both Washington DC and the Bahamas are included in their regional roundup, I decided the whole thing was a bunch of Mason-Dixon Line hooey cobbled together by Yanks. Anyone who is actually from the South knows that DC doesn’t count.

But then something happened. I suppose it was around page 53 when I started to suspect that this magazine was written just for me. You know those people who think that God talks to them through the computer? That’s sort of how I felt when I read this:

When the jewelry designer Gogo Ferguson was introduced to Bill Clinton at a cocktail party on Martha’s Vineyard, she could only wonder why he kept staring at her earrings. Did he know she made them from raccoon penis bones? She didn’t ask.

Revised opinion of Garden & Gun: totally, utterly awesome.

Having read the thing cover to cover, I still can’t figure out who the fuck it is being written for. There was an tribute some guy wrote for his dead dog, an excellent profile on the artist John Alexander, and a piece on mail order pork. There was a short article on the Center for Birds of Prey, a place outside of Charleston where some yahoo holds raw meat in his hand to feed falcons. And then there are the ads, which all look fancy but are actually for things like rifles (natch), galleries that sell portraits of hunting dogs, Land Rovers, and remote swathes of property—the most rural cousin-fuck crickhollers you’ve ever seen in your life.

There is also the Gun & Garden media kit, which describes the magazine’s average reader as aged 48 with a net worth of two million dollars, and a website that describes their mission thusly:

Garden & Gun is a Southern lifestyle magazine that's all about the magic of the new South – the sporting culture, the food, the music, the art, the literature, the people, and the ideas. It espouses a strong conservation ethic that grows out of its connection to the land, and it reveals the beauty of the South.

...all of which, of course, raises a number of questions. Foremost: WTF? And then: what is this new south? And is this nebulous new magical sensibility at the core of whatever I am?

There are no easy answers, but I can tell you for sure that it is now my fantasy to become a contributor. I have LOTS of ideas. Probably I should write a column on nemeses, such as those little green lizards in South Carolina or those tiny sticky frogs that rain down on that most blighted faux-Southern state, Florida.

Who am I kidding? I’m pitching the wild turkey story.

hot for quinto

I heart the Potter Puppet Pals. I have been singing this little number for the last two weeks:



My favorite part is when Harry comes out.

I like this one, too:




And just in case you're not yet convinced I'm a loser, I'm unspeakably excited about this trailer I saw before Bond (which sucked, BTW):




JJ Abrams is a world-class expert in making dork shit look hot.

knowing me, knowing you

So Facebook has this thing called People You May Know that features three new faces every time you log on. It’s a predictive tool based on the shared connections between you and the people in your network, so sometimes you might see a high school acquaintance, while others you might see someone you’ve never met—that kind of thing. But lately a certain someone has been popping up with an alarming frequency, which got me thinking about the people we know and the people we don’t know.

Lately he’s there most times I log on, this Person I May Know, and let’s just say the ironies are rich and layered. There he is, someone I knew awfully well for awfully long, relegated to this weird Facebook limbo, sandwiched between two middle school classmates or whatever. Then again, maybe his place there is symbolic since I’m not sure I ever really knew him at all, at least until I stopped knowing him, so to speak.

Worse, this whole meditation was a grim reminder of the fallout surrounding the acute phase of my knowing/not knowing that person, when I shot straight past that stage where you worry that maybe you can never know anyone, really, and into the much darker territory of maybe everyone is knowable insofar as everyone sucks.

People You May Know, indeed! It was like spooky pothead logic, except without pot, where I was sitting here like, whoa, Facebook totally knows my life. This aptly named People You May Know thing must have been designed by some kind of fucked-up Saussurian genius.

And that’s when I was struck by the greatest irony of all—namely, that I was having a full-blown ontological crisis just before my Facebook Scrabble game, a crisis that was inspired by some retarded website where I actively dislike at least one-quarter of my “friends” anyway—which, in turn, made me feel like a sentimental loser. But then I considered how much worse it could have been if I were on MySpace, where all the People You May Know are pervs or drifters or 12 year olds, and I was back on top.