aren't you momma's good little boy...

- left as a comment on this post -

My response, too big for the comment box:

What's this?

Anonymous vitriol in my tiny comment box?

Funnily enough, I was just thinking - idly sure, but thinking none the less - that I have maintained this public and more often than not personal web log for over two years now and have never been touched by the caustic likes of anonymous vitriol or any other purely negative energy as a result.

Sure, I have entertained controversy in this space. Some of you may remember the narcissist blog question that I unwittingly stirred up between Tom Shugart, Tony at Abuddahs and myself a while back. Some of you may not.

In any case, I must admit that a comment like this gets my goat. Luckily, I have more than one extra goat kept for just such contingencies and am thusly able to maintain a balanced view on the matter.

I realize, for instance, that by defining anything as negative or positive, I am capitulating to the limits of dualistic thinking.

But it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, that comment , like I have wretched up bitter bile; and I wonder if the motive of the comment in question is just what it seems to me to be or if it is merely idle trolling.

If the former, I say that I (pardon the expression, please) piss on the idea that I or any other male human is in any way emasculated by loving and being loved by a good (oops, there I go again with the Dualism!) woman. Nor by celebrating that relationship in poetry, song or interpretive dance.

I piss also on all narrow definitions of gender identity, or sexual persona if you will, just as I piss on any poisonous seed of bigotry or intolerance I find trying to root in my head. Flush it away. Please.

The sooner we stop identifying ourselves primarily as Male or Female and start thinking of ourselves as Human, the better.

There is a quote, attributed to Jesus in the apocryphal Book of Thomas, which often occupies my mind:

Not until the male become female and the female becomes male shall ye enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Pretty subversive thinking, huh? I mean compared against the firmly established media, state and church rules which define what a man or a woman is or isn't. No wonder it's apocryphal.

But I digress, certainly, quoting Jesus in response to a dirty, yes, but also tiny amount of anonymous vitriol.

Still, that goat of mine was gotten.

It was no doubt an easy one to snag as it was one of those goats of ever-braying patriarchal thinking which underlies concepts such as "momma's boy" and "wimps" and machismo.

The suggestion of some Oedipal subtext in our union is not a new one. Sarah is 17 years older than me, after all. The question of our perceived "age difference" seems to make this an inevitable line of inquiry. Not to mention the fact that I find strength in women a powerful turn on in general. I freely admit that. And Sarah is a woman of rare strength.

I try at times to capture that strength and it's transforming affect on me in words. It is like attempting to cage a fleeting, golden moment. Pompous I may be, but then I am not afraid to call myself a poet. Anonymous vitriol is a kind of poetry in itself, of course. It is of that vile stain on the fabric of suchness, that blackness, that creeping field of null and swarming shadows against which we measure our own light.

Anonymous vitriol, you are doing your part in the push and pull of Eternal Delight.
Maybe, in the future, however, you could do it someplace else.