Being of a Victorian sort of temperament myself, prone to myriad spells and nervous disturbances, I long for a society that slaps such souls not with clunky, unendearing labels like "PTSD case" and "multiple personality disorder", but the less pathologizing and more picturesque "highly-strung", "fragile constitution", "susceptible to vapors", etc. I need a fainting couch, not a prescription drug regimen. But unlike many other fetishists and Anglophiles, I'm without affection for the actual historical era. For one thing, I find the literature unreadable, the only such period in British writing for me from the 16th century right up through Spring 2009. Were it not for the Emily one inspiring Kate Bush's goddamn unbelievable song "Wuthering Heights"*, I'd say bugger the Brontes all three at a time, e.g. Reading Tennyson's like eating white sugar out of the bag, with a nearly unusably overwrought spoon. Dickens? It's almost like that shit was written for cliff-hanging serial publication in middlebrow publications. OH, THAT'S RIGHT, 'TWAS!

*terrible, anemic guitar solo excepted

But you know what I'd love to see today? The hour of the promenade. Everyone would gussy up in their featheriest finery, and pretty much walk around a large scenic circle to appraise every else's finery and choose whom to snub and whom to compliment backhandedly. I've realized that staring and judging are pretty much the only interactions I desire with strangers and acquaintances, and I seem unable to lose my love of assembling a distinctive and just-batshit-enough ensemble. I don't want to talk, but I do want to look, and I do enjoy nonverbal but eloquent exchanges. Eyefucking, for example. At the moment, in modern-day, sans-promenade Oakland, I have to make do with the Whole Foods, and my fellow shoppers, mostly being cowards afraid of glamour, seem uninclined to appreciate my distinctive color sense and bold new ideas in layering. No one has yet said "I like that sensibility" as I look over the root vegetables in an elegantly contorted fashion on account of my overly tight shorts and competing shirt-straps.

I am uncomfortable with the thought that there may be exist feminists more radical (though I prefer "incendiary") than myself, so I'm careful to keep a simianishly tight toe-grip on the furthest fringe at all times, right. And yet. Breaking up pigeon mating rituals, grunting "Leave her alone, see how she's walking away from your stupid puffy chest?" . . . I suppose even the most flawless, indeed righteous topiary still needs to be well-acquainted with the pruning shears, yes?

But vivid excesses and profound logical lapses are to be expected in my case. Maintaining such a cruelly keen and spit-honed edge on my manhatred while being so raveningly heterosexual that Paul Cadmus drawings give me actual clitoral boners when skimmed in bookstores - it creates structural weakness in the mind's framework, i.e. imbalances.



"Cadmus? Hey, hold on!," the reader protests. "Doesn't this make you not a 'raveningly heterosexual woman' but a 'weird girlfag with no erotic home in the world'?" Well yeah but this is a blog not a book-length treatise on my gender orientation pain, so keep your astute and penetrating insights quiet.