FULLY CLOTHED WOMEN, A RETROSPECTIVE

We didnt expect to his 100 posts for the year, but it looks like we made it to that pretty easily. A good percentage of the posts were original, and some of them were really pretty good. We werent sure how to close out the year. We noticed we had not done a "Fully Clothed Women" in a long time, and have a lot of material from our FB album of that name. It has been a few years since FB took any of my pics down, so we must be keeping it clean enough for community standards

So here are a few from the last year and a half or so.

Body Language. Lots of Body language.

Just look at all the Body language.

"The color is gone

everything is Autumns end,
washed too many times
And then I see something red
a firebush still in leaf
and it takes me like you take  me:
tightening my heart, 

flooding me with blood… 

as if late Autumn red 

walked naked from her bath, 

came wet to my bed 

and said, “I’ve been a bad girl."

From Peregrine @http://youreyesblazeout.tumblr.com/

"Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?"

Danielle LaPorte 

"...a girl worth kissing, is not easily kissed..." 

I guess I went on a Raymond Chandler kick. What a wonderfully expressive wrter. I should actually read one of his books this year. Here are two of about eight I did.

“She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.”
Raymond Chandler

 “There are blonde and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points...

There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very, very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you found about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial. 
There is the soft and willing alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pale and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading the Wasteland or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindesmith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also.
That makes two of them."
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

"Its not far down to paradise..."

"Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it, though, the same week I made it - the same night, as a matter of fact."
Holden Caufield from "Catcher in the Rye" by JD Salinger

.

“In Michaela's favourite restaurant, I lift my glass and cutlery spills onto the expensive tiled floor. The sound crashes high as the skylight. Looking at me, Michaela pushes her own silverware over the edge. I fell in love amid the clattering of spoons....”

~ Anne Michaels, from Fugitive Pieces

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM BULLETHOLES

Oh, OK, one more. We weigh heavily what gets into Fully Clothed Women, and why its gets there.
Sometimes we commemorate a great event, or a birth, or even a death as we did earlier this year with Maureen O'Hara. Something about this image, and the story, just tears me up. Maybe its because we are all so damaged and that sadly, a little bit of Kindness goes a long long ways.
Or maybe its because, happily, a little bit of Kindness goes such a long long ways.

                "SHE GAVE HIM WATER"

FULLY CLOTHED WOMEN, DANDELIONS, ECT.

Here is a sampling of images either removed or saved from my Facebook album titled

"Fully Clothed Women"

The Facebook police didn't remove this one.

I don't imagine they knew what they were looking at. 

I call it "The Speed of Light"

They didnt get this one of Deborah Harry either. I guess her breast is just not big enough, and the grill on the Thunderbird was just too shiny.

I knew when I posted this one of Jimi Hendrix that I was way over the edge, but I just couldn't help it. Facebook removed this image.

"Have you ever been experienced?"

They didn't get this one either. I don't know why not. Just that look on her face ought to get her banned from something. My caption for her was

"Stirred Straight Up With a Twist"

"The world was moving she was floating above it and she was"

My albums are not really about naked women. In fact, out of some 1500 images, Facebook only actually removed three. Sure, they missed a few, but the point is that the overwhelming preponderance of evidence suggests that I'm not really a pervert. I just have an eye for beauty and an outstanding sense of humor. One of the things I have found to be very beautiful are images of Dandelions. They are so completely feminine.
Follow this link by clicking here for one posted a while back with another take on dandelions

They didn't get this one yet either.
I'm sure they will be back for it someday. In the meantime...

"If I say its safe to surf this beach, young Captain, it's safe to surf this beach!"

"My cup runneth over"

I'm just throwing this one in because its pretty, and I haven't seen a bobby pin in a long long time. They did not remove it.

Yes, they took this one down. How could they miss it?

My friend Gary says it is a muzzle-load shotgun.

Finally...I really do love dandelions.

"Time works like a damp brush on water color. The sharp edges blur, the ache goes out of it, the colors melt together, and from the many separated lines a solid gray emerges."

- East of Eden, John Steinbeck

From the comments:

Gary: Time actually seems to bring me more aches, not remove them.

Me: Then you havent ached enough yet.

As I gather these images, I am seldom able to identify the photographer, but at this point I should credit some of the sources:

ThisIsntHappiness

TheSweetestSpot

DecapitateAnimals

ResidualRandomtarian

 DivanJaponaise    

PLAY MISTY FOR ME

We've had quite a week down at my local NA group.
There have been 3 members die.
Two died clean and sober, and the third, well, she died from the disease. That is to say, she OD"d.

One of the members was an old timer, 34 years clean, who made probably 5 meetings a week and was much beloved of the young folks. I didnt know until he died that he was my Great-Grand-Sponsor; that is to say, he was my Sponsors Sponsors Sponsor. I'll write about him in another post.

What I'd like to share with you today is about the 35 year old woman who also passed on, and passed on clean, leaving behind two children.
I did not know Misty well. I never once met her. I did not know her outside of Facebook. She attended a group on the other side of town, and we shared mutual friends in the recovery community. From pictures I could see she was pretty; from her posts and comments she was smart and funny, and she liked to write updates that reflected what the program of Narcotics Anonymous was doing for her, and share about the funny things her kids did, and she would post pictures of herself getting the kids ready for school and stuff.

On my Facebook page, I keep a lot of picture albums, like a tumblr of sorts. I have done a few posts and mentioned my album titled FULLY CLOTHED WOMEN before. I also have other albums named MY FAVORITE COLOR, and ITS NOT SAFE HERE, THIS ISNT HAPPINESS.
Another is called CRASHINGLY BEAUTIFUL, and it serves as a tribute and vehicle to post from a great blog by the same name.

Bear with me here.

If you can imagine, I get a lot of people that send me images all the time and they say "Maybe you can use this in one of your albums". The images are usually of what they what they think would be a candidate for the album FULLY CLOTHED WOMEN, that is to say, women without any clothes on. These images never have any real artistic value, or else they are 100% pornographic, and I just want to say to them :
"Why don't YOU post THAT FILTH on YOUR page"
But instead, I just delete them from my computer before I get infected with something.

Bear with me again, I'm about to wrap it up.

Back in September, I got a message and an image from Misty. She said "Maybe you can use this", and it was a wonderful image. I said yes, let me go find something to go with this, and it didn't take long over at Crashingly Beautiful to find a Thomas Merton poem.

So I posted it. Its the only image that I have ever posted that was sent to me by someone. Now Misty is gone, and I never once met her. It begs so many questions.
What did Misty like about the image? And what was it about the image that made her think I would like it as much as I did? All she said about the poem I put with it was "Perfect", and that was enough, but what else did she think? What was it about the poem that inspired me to match it with the image? Did it really fit? Does it fit any more or less now, with Misty passed on to her silence?

IN SILENCE

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your
name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you
speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?”



–Thomas Merton, “In Silence”

FULLY CLOTHED WOMEN

 "I do respect her but...still love to watch her strut"

"Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world."

— Marilyn Monroe

"But first, are you experienced?"

FULLY CLOTHED WOMEN II

“The men in the room suddenly realized that they did not want to know her better. She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close. And she held her sword, and she smiled like a knife.”



TERRY PRATCHETT

FULLY CLOTHED WOMEN

"I was reading a book about pleasure,
how you have to glide through it
without clinging
like an arrow
passing through a target,
coming out the other side and going on."
 - Tony Hoagland
from The Impossible Dream

FULLY CLOTHED WOMEN

"I've said this nineteen dozen times but you still don't believe it. Man is the one animal that can't be tamed. He goes along for years, peaceful as a cow, when it suits him. Then when it suits him not to be, he makes a leopard look like a tabby cat. Which goes double for the female of the species." 
Robert Heinlein

ITS A WONDERFUL LIFE

Last night I turned the TV on and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was on. The old Claymation one with Burl Ives. If I had a dollar for every time I've seen this show starting when I was 6 years old I could buy the North Pole. It was the part where Rudolph meets the adorable pretty-eyed doe with the little red polka dot bow, who flutters her huge eyelashes and tells Rudolph she thinks he's cute, that got me all blubbery, and I cried and cried.


It was just so sweet, and even a funny looking red-nosed bashful reindeer with a nasally sinus voice like Rudolph deserves to have someone with huge eyelashes that thinks they are cute to flirt and prance and caper about with them.
Then Rudolph tries to join in the reindeer games, and his fake nose he tried to use to hide his own spectacular schnozola falls off, exposing the big glowing red one, and all the other little boy reindeer started to tease him about his nose, and I cried some more. Then the coach of the reindeer games, in a very Trump-like fashion, starts to bully Rudolph too, and declares Rudolph unfit to play in the reindeer games, and I cried and cried and cried. I was a sopping wet mess.
So I figured what the hell, we may as well get this over with and put on "Its A Wonderful Life" and cried pretty much from start to finish.
Because Hey, its Gosh Darn Christmas.
Mercury is in Retrograde.
Let it bleed.


Melville says everything flows to the sea.
I that is so, then everything flows FROM "Its A Wonderful Life ".
Its got everything. Hockey, High School hijinks, real estate, Uncle Billy, car crashes, bar fights, skinny dipping, foxy librarians, bank crashes, bells, wheelchairs, spiders, ice cream, drugs, war hero's, singing cops, cab drivers, Italian Americans, malfeasance, crows, angels, angel wings, and Fully Clothed Women.
And Zuzu's petals.

Fully Clothed Women

"Probably for every man there is at least one city that sooner or later turns into a girl. How well or how badly the man actually knew the girl doesn’t necessarily affect the transformation. She was there, and she was the whole city, and that’s that."

— J.D. Salinger, “A Girl I Knew”

THE PURGE

Between all the teenage angst, tears, sweat and underwear, and my various endeavors with "Fully Clothed Women" , "Crashingly Beautiful" and the latest album I havent ruined yet "This is my Favorite Song", and the many silly things which have  been the focus of my attention lately, I may not have mentioned that I have my own place again, having been on the road, renting rooms the last 21 months.
All my possesions and mineral resources have been in storage all this time.
I'm doing some unpacking and have reached a severe impasse.
The plan was to get rid of any book I would never read again. I can't do it. I've never been able to "let go".
I need a new plan, one that is possible.
And all these out-of-focus sunspot old and mildewed pictures.
What do you do with those? If you say "throw them away", then I don't think there is anything else I care to hear you talk about.
So, there.

Having said that I will list some of the books that can be scavenged from my front porch.
No Charge.
"Love in the Time of Cholera" ( sorry Oprah, never got past page 100. I really did try)

"Ordeal By Sea:The tragedy of the USS Indianapolis"

"The Great Gatsby"... I just opened it and found I have passages highlighted, and so I will have to keep this one. No, lets not. 

"The Stand"(its a paperback, and the print is finer than a silver needle. And the story sucks)

"Dr. Wayne Dyer: Pulling Your Own Strings" (He lost all his credo to me when he came out on PBS in a Dojo and sandals, and talked about selling all his worldly possessions and moving to a small island in the Pacific. Maui, to be exact. How spare could it be?"

"Dylan: An intimate Biography" Really?

"The Friars Club Encyclopedia of Jokes" (Teaser: "I dont believe in superstition. It brings bad luck." Gone, gone, gone.)

"Life of Pi" (The movie sucked too)

"Message in a Bottle" ( Oh, God, I remember the night I picked this one up at the Tom Thumb, 3 am, raining and freezing. It was a lousy year)

"Parenting Teens With Love and Logic" (still in wrapper)

What did I keep? 

"The Number of the Beast", "The Way of the Sufi", "The Fellowship of the Ring", "Waiting for Godot", "The Sun Also Rises", Asimov's "Foundation", The Fountainhead", Lonesome Dove"  and one well worn Larrouse Gastronomique.

We have a few boxes to go.

And for any of you who may have stuck with this post this far, please give me and my Higher Power a thought as I will be sharing my story at the Valley of Hope in Grapevine tomorrow morning.
Thank you. 

THE SPORTSMEN'S BANQUET

I had never been to a Pottery Barn before yesterday. I had read about them, seen pictures, and heard stories, even heard a story one time about how someone left the Pottery Barn door open, and all the pottery was getting out. But it was in that estrogen soaked environment that my mind began to wander, and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts, and describe to you what happened at the Pottery Barn yesterday.

I should say straight away that I prefer the company of women to men. You can make of this what you like. I know that at dinner parties and various functions, invariably the guests will split up into two groups. Usually the women will congregate to the kitchen, or perhaps a sewing room if one is available, and the men will wind up in the garage, or perhaps repair to a new type of room I keep hearing about…the “Man-Cave”.

I’m not sure I like the sound of that one at all.

Once there, the men, perhaps smoking cigars and drinking cognac as they did on the Titanic, will begin to discuss various manly enterprises (enterprises that I really don’t seem to have much interest in),such as muzzle velocities, gear ratio’s of the ’68 Olds Positrac rear end, and how much they made on E-Trade last week. Of course the conversation eventually degenerates into some discussion over “pussy”, with huge clouds of smoke and many loud guffaws. This may sound hypocritical from a guy with Facebook albums such as “Fully Clothed Women” and “Its Not Safe Here”, but I just don’t care for it. Perhaps there was a time in my youth that I might tolerate this kind of talk, join in even, but those years seem to be past me.

There is a moment in most relationships with guys I call the “Screeching Record” moment, where you are chewing the fat with your good buddy you have known for years, and out of the blue he points to some nice looking soft woman and whispers huskily, “Man, I’d like to have me some of that”. And in my mind, its like a record just skipped across 3 songs, including “Color My World” on my Chicago III album. I’ve known him for years, but didn’t know he needed to talk like that. I’m stopped in my tracks,and wondering if I’ll ever be able to look him in the eye again.

Anyway, like I said, the women go to the kitchen, and sip chamomile tea, and talk about education for children, world peace, how to get a coffee stain out of a white shirt, dust ruffles, and recipes for Blackberry Shortcake. I find all this, and the way they say it, endlessly more fascinating than the men in the garage discussing .22 cal varmint loads and where Goodyear gets its rubber.

But finally to the Pottery Barn, where I learned yesterday the difference between a pillow case and a “Sham”, which is, not much. I bought some way overpriced dishes, and got to talk with the lady as she wrapped them for me. She found out that I had been a chef, and wanted to know what my “specialty” was. I told her that my specialty had been cleaning out the walk in.

“What is that?” she said, having expected for me to give her a recipe for Blackberry Shortcake, or Balsamic Vinaigrette maybe.
“That’s where I go through the refrigerator, and determine what needs to be thrown away right now, and what we need to use up before it goes bad.” I tell her.
“Oh” she says “Like I have to do at home sometimes. I’d hate you to see my refrigerator right now”
“Oh, I know” I said “It reminds me of the Sportsmans Banquet they had every year at a country club I used to be chef at.”

‘”What’s a Sportsmen’s Banquet?” she asked, and that’s all it took to send me flying.

“The Sportsmen’s Banquet is an event held every year, where all the manly men have their wives pull from the freezer all the meats and fishes they have killed and frozen over the years, all in various stages of decay and neglect,and they bring them proudly for the chef, being me, to cook for them at a big manly banquet, where they smoke cigars and drink cognac and talk of their safari they will be taking to the Trophy Game Ranch down by Kerrville. They bring you fish wrapped in newspaper, the headlines which read “JFK ASSASSINATED”, or frozen in a milk carton cut in half; they bring unknown meats in Walmart bags that are disintegrating in front of your eyes. They bring you an elk shank or bear tenderloin, freezer burned so badly you just want to cry. It is a "wound to the heart", as the great chief Sitting Bull would say, watching his beloved buffalo disappear slowly from the plains. There are big zip-lock bags of dove and quail that seem to be all liquid,except for the feathers. As they bring it to you, its pretty easy to imagine it sat in an ice chest for five days as they sat around a fire and told fart jokes at night, then on the counter for a day once home, then finally into the freezer 4 years ago where it settled to the bottom next to Uncle Jacks beef tongue from 1965. And now you have it, the duck that was shot in Nova Scotia all those years ago, and the beef tongue that the proud huntsman would like you to make into some kind of garnish for a smoked salmon tray, the same salmon that was caught on the duck expedition in 1972. It’s a deadly mess, it really is”

Now during this little speech a group of women has gathered, because , well, I dont really have an inside voice, and it just tends to draw a crowd sometimes

“So what do you do with all this bad meat?” one asked.

“Put it on a cart and take it straight to the dumpster, get on the phone and order some elk, bison, Smoked Salmon, duck, quail and beef tongue from a local purveyor, pretend that you are serving these guys exactly what they brought in. But these guys are smart. They run oil companies and stuff . They know what you are doing, and they just pretend what they are eating is what they brought in. Everybody is happy and no one dies the next day.”


I turn back to the clerk, who has finished wrapping my dishes.
“My husband has some elk in the freezer. I’ve been asking him to get rid of it for years” she says.
“They have Elk at Central Market” I tell her.
We exchange knowing looks.
“Thank you so much” she says “Have you seen these Egyptian Bamboo place mats? “They would look very nice with your new dishes.”

FULLY CLOTHED WOMEN IV

The Facebook police have come in the night and removed one (1) picture from one of my albums. It was beautiful. Probably taken in the 1920's by a famous photographer, it was a nude woman hanging chistmas ornaments from the ceiling. They hung down all around her, they looked like galaxys and stars that were in orbit inside the softness of her universe, caught in the pull of her shining gravity.

I don't mind losing the image, I still have it in my files, but I have no idea what caption I may have put with a picture like that. And the comments from friends are gone forever.

That is what I will miss. That is what I can't replace. The photographer is Andre de Dienes.

So apparently Face book right now is going through my thousands of photographs with inspirational naughty witty eductaional captions, and removing any that might show a stray tit. Their bollocks is your boon.

I'll be moving some images from my albums to store here for future reference.

It was fun, pushing the envelope at Facebook. 

Sculpture by Auguste Ottin, 1883

Here we see the beautiful Campaspe, mistress of Alexander the Great, taking of her clothes in order to be painted by Apelles. The legend is that Appelles fell in love with her, and painted Campaspe so well, that Alexander kept the painting but gave Campaspe to Appelle as a gift.

Her beauty was later heralded by John Lyly in this poem, which I find interesting because it tells us so much about Cupid.


Appelles Song
"Cupid and my Campaspe play'd
At cards for kisses—Cupid paid:
He stakes his quiver, bow and arrows,
His mother's doves, and team of sparrows;
Loses them too; then down he throws
The coral of his lip, the rose
Growing on's cheek (but none knows how);
With these, the crystal of his brow,
And then the dimple of his chin:
All these did my Campaspe win.
At last he set her both his eyes,
She won, and Cupid blind did rise.
O Love! has she done this to thee?
What shall (alas!) become of me?"

"Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

...But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

— W.B. Yeats, “He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven”