Talking the other day with a male friend about feminism:

“The battle has already been won,” he said. “Men are emasculated.”

“Not emasculated enough,” said I.

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Ashcroft on the one end and on the other, a different kind of censor, the pious liberal [sic]. They both want to tell me what I can and can’t say. Where does that put me? Not in the “center,” surely. The only thing that is in the center is the tiny erect penis, perfectly formed, shimmering gold, that springs out of the center of my forehead, precisely where my third eye would be.

I had the idea that if I were to stroke this lovely little phallus it would exude exquisite, hitherto unexperienced wafting fragrances…

something like frangipani????

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I apprehend her, I have to say, as just another man trying to circumscribe my speech, behavior, and imagination. Metal clamps: perhaps the vestiges of her “manhood”, stirring?

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Female-ly gendered emotional argument tactics” lash out — then cower — “I’m a victim.” She did this. I do this frequently.

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Metaphor as a thought crime?

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As zygotes we’re undifferentiated. I really try not to forget this.

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It’s an exaggerated analogy, but what if I were to get my knickers all twisty every time someone used the expression “a pain in the neck.” As a person with chronic pain whose scalenes (neck muscles) feel at most time like steel cables, should I take umbrage? How can those myriad insensitives not understand my plight? It is true that this disability is not something for which I am likely to be killed out of hate (although my congenital “disability”, ethnic judaism, surely was, and may be again in the future), it is certain that I have experienced job loss, greatly reduced income, callous treatment on the part of supervisors, co-workers, some “friends,” and some of those in the legal and medical professions, not to mention the daily tension and pain I can do no more but “manage.” “A pain in the neck,” indeed.

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Petty tyrants everywhere. The preacher on the 5 train, haranguing the full car of weary people. How easily is my admittedly restive irascibility aroused!

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A cornucopia of ideologues…

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My teaching keeps getting more and more radicalized, the worse the situation in this country gets. I am an ideologue too.

I asked my students the other day, “Is America a free country?”

Most of them said that yes, comparatively speaking, it is.

One said, “yes, but there’s been a regression.”

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I like acting.

Yesterday, walking down Fifth Ave. with Gary right after my belly dance class, talking with him about all the recent debates, I grabbed my crotch, sneered, and made a fuck you sign to the world. For a minute, I really was Sid Vicious.

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