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Showing posts with label greatful dead. Show all posts
Showing posts with label greatful dead. Show all posts

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Low BID

Poor Turnout But a Good Time

 


Pulaski Park bus stop graffiti

 

The rally in opposition to the Business Improvement District (BID) last night was something of a dud. Not many people showed up, and even the official Poverty Is Not a Crime banner (below) which has appeared at all previous rallies was missing.





Still, it's always good to see activists in action, whatever the numbers.





The littlest protester was Laranetta - age one week old.





Writer and radio personality Mary Serreze came by on her bike.





Also there was Northampton's sweetheart Kelsey Flynn.





It wouldn't be Northampton without dining suggestions. 





The real celebrity appearance however was the arrival of the King of the Panhandlers Motown Bernie, shown here with protest leader David Beyer.





Chanting and waving signs, the small band headed towards the municipal office where the City Council was meeting.





Once inside, the protesters lined the back wall of the Council Chamber.





This was the first City Council meeting in Northampton I've ever attended. I went to plenty of them in Springfield, and as in Springfield, Northampton has a public speakout before the meeting begins. However in Northampton the public speakout period is televised. In Springfield the local machine wouldn't allow it, lest subjects be raised, views expressed and facts be revealed that they did not want known to the wider public.

Here is Motown Bernie addressing the Council.





Sadly, the whole protest had an air of futility to it. The BID has already been approved, and everyone seemed at a loss as to how to stop it from being implemented. There was hope that at some point the Americian Civil Liberties Union might get involved, but until then it looks as though the pro-BID forces are victorious. 



Around Amherst

It's raining like mad today, which makes me yearn for the peaceful sunny moments I spent earlier this week at the Amherst Resevoir. 





At UMass I like the new landscaping going on behind the science buildings.





This parking lot definitely was not here when I was a UMass student.

 



People sometimes ask me what has changed the most about UMass since I was a student in the late 70's. They're surprised when I reply, "All the new parking lots." When I was a student going without a car was just one of the sacrifices you were expected to make for your education. The idea was that you would walk today to get the education that would buy you a Cadillac in the future. Damn we were gullible in those days.

Today almost every student has a vehicle, and actually in my day there were in fact some students who had cars. They were mostly girls whose rich daddies bought them for them as high school graduation gifts and who covered all the bills. Those girls had lots of dates, even if they were fat and dull. 

 

Two Artifacts From 1985

Robert Hunter and Jorma Kaukonen in New York City; plus a ticket for the Dead in Worcester.

 





Thursday, July 24, 2008

Lover #2

Of the female persuasion. 

 



 

Although I was born queer as a three dollar bill, I have nonetheless managed to have sexual intercourse with three (count 'em) three women in my life. That doesn't represent the whole of my heterosexual experience - I've messed around with women to varying degrees over the years - but only on three occasions have I actually successfully completed full scale cock in cunt intercourse. Ouch, that's kinda crudely put, but you know what I mean.

Last time I told you about the woman to whom I lost my hetero virginity, Kim Rousseau, and promised to tell you about the other two encounters in the by and by. Here are the circumstances behind the second occasion where I had full hetero sex with a woman.

I think most straight women are more accepting of male homosexuality than most straight men are. Women don't seem to be threatened by gayness the way straight men are, perhaps because women have no societally imposed sense of masculinity to defend, with less of a tendency to consider a person's sexuality the central fact about them, at least not to the degree that men do. Naturally sex figures into a lot of things women do, as it does with every human, but the only women I've known who were totally against homosexuality have been very religious. I don't worry about what such religious women think about me because I have a hard time respecting the opinions of people whose judgement is so poor that they believe in a God who fusses over people's sex lives.

However, I've also encountered another kind of woman, more rare than the religious type, who regards a man's gayness as a challenge. I think it's a female version of the same lust that makes straight men get excited by seeing women in a lesbian encounter. Somewhere in the fantasy is the notion that the women will somehow be "set straight" by a male who suddenly appears in the midst of their lesbo encounter and who then fucks the women into heterosexuality. The female version tends to be intelligent, sensitive types who like male company but not the boorish horniness of straight dudes. When a girl is out looking for a little meaningful conversation, seeking out the gay section of the bar can be where she finds just what she's searching for. Sadly, straights in their bigoted cruelty sometimes call such fun and interesting women "fag hags."

I met such a woman one night at the old Rathskeller, which was located beneath the former Drake hotel in downtown Amherst. I was a student at UMass at the time, and had gone to the Rathskeller with some friends to see the local space-rock band Martian Highway. Late in the evening this really nice looking chick came and sat at our table and starting flirting.

As, the night wore on and the drinks flowed, there were numerous outdoor pot breaks. What was odd was that the woman was ignoring my hetero friends and paying the most attention to me. Finally at one point I realized that my friends had all left and I was alone with this hot looking chick, who of course I had no sexual interest in, but whose conversation I found intelligent and entertaining. Around last call she boldly said, "Let's talk about sex."

I had to laugh. "Can't you tell I'm gay?"

"Yes," she replied, "and I find that fascinating!" She said she wanted to ask me some questions about what it was like to be queer, and as the band had stopped playing and last call was past, she asked me if I had a place we could go and continue the partying and conversing. I told her I lived in a communal home in Northampton, but she said she wanted us to have some privacy. Instead she suggested that we go to her place, a rented room in a motel just off campus. 


When we got to her room she showed me she had a refrigerator full of beer. I broke out my supply of weed, among the finest in the Valley, which is the only kind I would buy. We drank, we smoked, and then she suggested we get comfortable and take our clothes off. Since I often partied nude with my gay friends that was no big deal, but then after talking a while she suggested we fuck.

"I'm queer," I reminded her, "plus I'm really high."

"I'll get you up." she promised, then reached for my crotch in an attempt to prove it. I thought it would be rude to deny her the chance to try. She was good at stroking it for a girl. In general, only a man truly knows how to fully pleasure another man's junk.

Well one thing led to another, and soon we were kissing, hugging, our hands and mouths going everywhere. She was teasing my earlobe with her tongue when she whispered, "I'm gonna fuck you straight!" I laughed, but I didn't resist.

She really got into it. All of her inhibitions seemed to melt away as she became a totally sexual being that seemed to exist for only one purpose - to provide me with sexual pleasure. Nothing was taboo, nothing was refused or withheld in the total surrender of her body to the single goal of bringing me to orgasm through heterosexual means.

It worked. By that I mean she finally brought me to orgasm in spite of my drunken queerness. It was fun, but ofcourse I was still as queer as ever. We fell asleep, and when I got up the next morning she was gone. No good-bye, no note, just gone. I almost thought it was all just a weird erotic dream, but then how did I end up nude in this strange hotel?

Later that day I ran into my companions of the previous evening, and they confirmed the existence of the woman whom they said had mysteriously appeared at our table. I also discovered to my surprise that she had been discreetly urging my friends to leave us behind so that we could be alone. I hadn't realized that she was the reason that my friends had all left early and without telling me they were going.

The whole incident was pretty mysterious to me, until one day a while afterwards I made a startling discovery. I won't give any details of how I found out, because that would be awkward for people who I don't want to embarrass, but in any case I later discovered that the girl who had surrendered to me with such abandon that night was a prostitute! More than that, she was actually working the night she made herself my sex slave. And beyond even that - most shocking of all - was the discovery that the person who had paid for the prostitute was my own father!

Imagine how I felt when I discovered that my own Dad had bought this prostitute in a Springfield bar, and paid her to come up to Amherst to find his son, who he was afraid was in danger of becoming "a fairy" and who gave her the instructions to "fuck him straight." Wow, what a thing to deal with emotionally!

Of course it didn't work, I'm genetically programed to be queer and a mansion full of Playboy bunnies couldn't change that. There's also the environmental factors, what Allen Ginsberg called in his poem Howl "mountains of cock and canyons of ass" built up in my psyche by all the homosex I'd had since I was twelve years old. That sexual conditioning can't be erased in one night.

But I don't think my Dad completely wasted his money. I did have fun, and I look back and I'm glad that I had a chance to really have my way with a woman with no restrictions. I'm not sure that would've ever happened to me with quite that degree of lasciviousness had someone not paid to make it happen. So thanks Dad, I appreciate the gesture, however futile.

To read about Lover #3 click here



Today I went to check out the remains of the two famous willows at the UMass pond who were tragically destroyed by lightning last night.





Their death represents the loss of two of Amherst's oldest residents. Here the two trees are seen overlooking a tug of war (it's obviously a picture of the losing team) in the early years of the 1900's.

 



The willows were a famous make-out spot. Anyone who was ever in love at UMass sat with their beloved beneath those willows. No doubt much of the Valley's shock and dismay over the death of the trees is in part a mourning over lost youth.