Period, Period, Period, You Are An Ellipsis. Which is Indicative Of My General State of Being.

Bloody fucking shit bitch, mucka mucka hi mucka hiney ho, turtles in the square need a line of blow...
There has been a certain amount of nostalgia resurfacing in my life over the past few days. I think it's okay to feel this way but I am still a little unsure about the details. There's a line where public and private is drawn and being in this whole mode of finding those who you once knew, once saw, kind of breaks it up. Or makes you feel like you need to draw that line with the biggest fucking sharpie marker you can find and then if there are any unwanted tresspassers, you can blow them the fuck up with some heavy artillery, like a cadre of angry penguins with blowtorches. That work underwater.(Have you noticed that these days as long as you have a movie about penguins, you win an oscar? Something about them and their heavy bottomed waddling is probably striking a familiar tone with many Americans around the world...face it, the USA is a heavy-set environment.)

However, is it really worth the effort to go into a serious discussion on the merits and faults of public and private domains in society? No. At least I'm no longer in the mood.

Let's further alienate ourselves. Shall we bring the subject around full circle to the menstrual cycle?

Some of you who had the pleasure of hearing me speak on this subject before will remember the feverish glint I get in my eye when doing so.

The period is awesome. On so many levels. On a purely biological level, where an egg is cultivated and expelled every 28 days or so. Yes, yes, I understand that some people are very irregular. But gestation periods are for the most part very definitive. So. It would be safe to assume that without all the crazy shit we do to our bodies, sorry, I don't mean "we," I mean all you girls who have your menses, but for sake of simplicity, we, without the drinking and the meds and the THC and the eating disorders and the fad diets and the free radicals in the air and the smoking and the chemical by products of household solutions and the stress and the (this is starting to sound like a Tori Amos rant...) and the depression and the study drugs and the birth control pills and the sex and the roosters we keep in the backyard for special occasions, would probably be much more on point with our periods coming and going.

And thus revelling like pigs in shit over the miraculous albeit, annoying, bloody, and painful nature that is the ability to conceive a child.

Furthermore, that is the one thing that will always have a superior stronghold over society and men in general. No questions asked when you have feminine troubles. Gym teachers, fathers, bosses, gays, all cower at the thought. (Jesus too. He told me.) There is something so undeniably taboo and disgusting about endometrium that make them turn the other way in a heartbeat, much like the words "Kids" or "Queer" or "Marriage." A generalization perhaps, but the meer utterance of "tampon" has enough power to make a grown man cringe in fear and cry for his mama (who is at this point probably experiencing the "change" and therefore exempt.)

And that's the beauty of it. I get a weird tingling in my prostate from thinking about a bunch of people treating the period like it's some sort of pus-oozing disease. Like they have to don a radioactive body suit and wade through the muck of it all. Like it's been sand blasted over the city in a red sticky mess and the men freeze, petrified in terror over what might happen if any skin contact or inhalation occurs. They start charging through all the home depots across the world tearing each other limb from limb for the last ventilation mask in country. You know, like SARS, but not just for the Asian variety.

Power, I tell you. It's hypnotic.

A friend, floating knee deep in the crimson tide, needed to stop by a rest stop in Maryland (which by the way is a harrowing experience) to pick up a tampon. As I was loudly discussing the merits of an applicator versus the kind that you just shove on up there with your finger, but then backtracking when I noticed that the applicator tampons they were selling were made of the material of a toilet paper roll, these two two huge burly men stopped by to look for something. One of the guys had these hatchmarks on the back of his neck, you know, big old prison tatts inked in with a ball point pen, where each mark represents each person he maimed along the path towards self-confidence so naturally, I look at them questioningly and wonder if I'm next in line. So there I am, coming up to about their waists, gesticulating wildly about heavy flow days, and there they are looking at first, then inching away slowly befor hightailing it out of there.

It's like kryptonite for anyone with a penis, not just Superman.

And I mean, really, who but a woman can handle the experience of having a period or carrying a baby and enduring monthly cramps? Can you imagine a guy having a period? They wouldn't know what the fuck to do with themselves.

I'm not sure if Margaret Cho mentioned this but you know you can definitely picture a guy reaching for a dirty sock to shove all up in there on that heavy flow day. And then forgetting to take it out. And developing a yeast infection. And then wondering what to do about it. And then baking bread with it. No. Just kidding.

Ladies, you have a stronghold. Use it. But remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

(Exposed to image above by Heather Fink)