Month: April 2019

If you don’t like homelessness, here’s an idea: Make it possible to rent an apartment.

benfell

Don’t get me wrong. Western Massachusetts is beautiful and the people I encountered were entirely nice, at least on a stranger-to-stranger level of interaction.

And driving down the road here is a balm for a California driver: There are trees, lots and lots and lots of trees. Often there will be houses on both sides of the road but you can barely see them for all the trees. There is space, lots of space, between houses and you can see that the backyards often open up into woods. There are lots of woods, just scattered about all over the place. Read more →

Joe Biden blows his #MeToo moment

benfell

To summarize, a number of women have come forward to say that Joe Biden made physical contact without consent. He says he intended no offense:[1]

Former Vice President Joe Biden said Friday that he’s not sorry for his past actions that some women have said made them uncomfortable, but that he’s sorry he didn’t understand more at the time.[2]

But he mocks affirmative consent,[3] “referenc[ing] the controversy with a pair of jokes, telling attendees that he had received permission to hug the union leader and put his arm around a child he invited up on stage.”[4] Read more →

  1. [1]Brett Samuels, “Biden: ‘I’m not sorry for anything that I have ever done,’” Hill, April 5, 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437582-biden-im-not-sorry-for-anything-that-i-have-ever-done↩
  2. [2]Brett Samuels, “Biden: ‘I’m not sorry for anything that I have ever done,’” Hill, April 5, 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437582-biden-im-not-sorry-for-anything-that-i-have-ever-done↩
  3. [3]See Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti. eds., Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape (Berkeley, CA: Seal, 2008).↩
  4. [4]Brett Samuels, “Biden: ‘I’m not sorry for anything that I have ever done,’” Hill, April 5, 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/437582-biden-im-not-sorry-for-anything-that-i-have-ever-done↩

I share the poet’s rage

benfell

I got suckered tonight on Park Presidio Boulevard in San Francisco.

I was taking somebody someplace from Marin County when I saw a motor home in the right lane. It’s the sort of motor home one might expect a homeless person to be living in and I noticed writing that I couldn’t make out until I’d actually pulled up behind it (there was less traffic in this lane for some reason):IMG_20190402_192922
Photograph by author, April 2, 2019.

It reads:

I who write on walls,
pull my shit in little balls,
and those who read these words of wit,
eat those little balls of shit!!!

Yup and yuck. Got me. And not in the way I want to be gotten. Read more →