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(11/23/06) for Mary Kalyna. Sharing food with others is beautiful, seeing everyone's choices for creating their bodies. From plate to eye, fingernail, lung, semen and egg and everyone's knuckles and brains made from food. Beans and greens into muscle and blood. Eating is a bizarre thing, but everything's a little bizarre if you tilt your head at it just right. Saying HELLO to a carrot is saying HELLO to your friend's future body before she eats it. Life is normal, to chew a leaf, or noodle, and swallow. I Love to share food, but today I'm fasting. This is my Thanksgiving Day Fast for Peace, something I thought of the other day while watching the news, STUNNED (because I refuse to be NUMBED) by the escalating horror in Iraq. There were new car bombs and orphans, and I get angry because it's always narrated from a clean, safe newsroom in America. I want the camera to take us there, give us a minute to really be there. Instead they pacify and protect us from the blood-soaked streets of Baghdad. WHY SHOULD WE BE TREATED WITH SUCH SENSITIVITY!? We paid for the bullets and DESERVE to see what we're doing to the world. Let's see it. I want to see it. Instead of books and food, my tax dollars bought suffering for bodies, and I am very sad about this. While watching DEATH on the news they cut to commercial where everyone's ecstatic for THANKSGIVING DAY, telling you where to buy your turkey (as though turkeys were also happy to die for us) and don't forget your stuffing and yams. Everyone looked so happy in the commercial which is why I started SCREAMING at the television! "FUCK THANKSGIVING! FUCK IT! FUCK IT! FUCK IT!" I will not celebrate Thanksgiving until we're out of Iraq. We're used to sharing food, it's normal, eating our bodies into being. We're also used to tuning some things out in order to hear some other things. If you hear everything at once it will turn to noise. Right? Don't you think? When I was a kid the teacher put quotation marks around the word "invaded" on the blackboard when writing about how we "invaded" the "Indian territories." I asked about those quotation marks, and she explained that we can't really say "invaded" because the "Indians" didn't believe in owning land, so it was impossible to "invade" someone if they didn't have a "real" government, or "real" structure like the "American settlers." She meant every word of this. SHE MEANT EVERY WORD OF THIS! It STILL makes me angry all these years later! Telling kids such lies! Thanksgiving Day was created to celebrate the feast the Wampanoag tribe brought Whitey when Whitey couldn't take care of itself and almost starved. The Wampanoag had no idea of the impending systematic genocidal slaughter Whitey was about to unleash, shitting and clawing it's White ASS across the country! And now, more than a century after destroying the Native Americans, we INVADED (not "invaded") Iraq to also occupy, rob, and slaughter. FUCK Thanksgiving Day! REAL THANKS is saying NO to celebrating our death machine! Just sit still with me today America, and think about Iraq. Think about the terrible fear in everyone's lives over there. Think, think, think, know it is real, the fear and the suffering, it is very real. When the Wyeth exhibit was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art recently I heard a tour guide tell a group, "After 911 abstraction could no longer speak to our world. Pollock -- for instance -- could not speak to us after 911, but Wyeth can." I looked at one of the people standing near me and asked, "Do you really buy that crap?" He shrugged and followed the group to the next room. Wow. WOW! I marched myself across the museum to where Jackson Pollock's painting hung, and I stared and stared, and I nodded, YES YOU DO ANSWER ME! YES YOU DO! YES YOU DO! YES YOU DO! Abstraction is where the world REALLY LIVES! Stare into Pollock's painting, remembering he painted after Hiroshima, after Nagasaki, after the Holocaust. Tell me he doesn't answer THAT, tell me he doesn't see THAT, and THAT being THIS WORLD, this world of you, of me, and how we tear one another to shreds. Are you Iraqi? Are you American? Are you? Or can abstraction take us home past the borders?