Bedroom Dodgeball and Other Tales

Dear Lady Monster,

Some years ago I had a single sexual encounter with a woman who sought me out for a long time. We finally met, and some months later she took me home. She showed me a photo album full of pictures she had taken of me at a public event several years prior. Things turned sexual and then got strange. She had a large collection of homemade rubber masks. She had over 40 of them, each on their own manniquin head. They were all masks of zombie rats. She insisted we both wear them during sex. I was not comfortable, but I tried to perform anyway. I could not. There is nothing sexy for me about looking down and seeing a dead rat looking back at me during intercourse.

She also thought that randomly throwing deflated soccer balls at my buttocks from across the room, without warning, while screaming, "Suck on Satan's pecker" was foreplay.

I’ve long admired street photographers, those expert snapshot takers whose images somehow combine transient beauty with eternal truth. At the same time, I’ve wondered what kind of personality you’d need to be one.

You’d have to be warm and sensitive enough to notice the human drama unfolding around you, but you’d also have to be callous enough to record that drama regardless of how it affects the people involved.

It sounds like a contradiction, and that’s the perfect description of the subject of Finding Vivian Maier, a film written and directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel.
Well, that’s one of two perfect descriptions. The other is “enigmatic.”

On 13 June 1980, Pan Africanists, African scholars, political activists and scholars of various disciplines were stunned by the news – Walter Rodney was dead at the age of 38. He died in Guyana, his home, as a result of a car bomb that also injured his brother, Donald. Recently returned from Zimbabwe in southern Africa where he had celebrated the independence of that nation from settler colonialism, Rodney had once again thrown himself into developing a Guyanese coalition of all who were historically disenfranchised in the South American nation – the poor, various ethnic groups and women.

Shortly before the Columbus City Council election last November, The Free Press ran an article about the candidates’ positions on whether public access TV should be restored in Columbus. (The Free Press, Oct. 31 – Nov. 6) It’s now clear that when the article came out, the incumbent candidates were hiding more than just their positions on the issue. They and the rest of council were deceiving the public.

Independent candidate Nicholas Schneider made his support for public access TV a major issue in his 2013 campaign. Republican candidates Brian Bainbridge and Greg Lawson also expressed support for restoring it. But the Democratic incumbent candidates, Troy Miller, Eileen Paley and Priscilla Tyson, kept silent about the issue.