Miranda, Raven

Miranda, Raven (She Who Paints With Words) was one of the most prolific and eloquent persons to post to alt.gathering.rainbow. Her ambition was to be regarded as a poet, and there are some samples of her work here, but most of us readers were enamored of her unique prose style, and the posts displayed here were chosen to show that. Her command of literary imagery was often most on display when she was flaming someone who had angered her, and this made her a controversial figure. But for many of us her imaginative word play while doing this could be very amusing, and she could as effusive in her praise as she could be incinerating in her condemnation.

I have gathered a few of her best posts from 1997 to 1999 together here into one document, converting them from web pages produced by Google Advanced Groups Search. I have made no changes or corrections to anybody’s posts, with this exception: I have shortened quoted sections, since in some cases people quoted entire posts, including quotes of quotes therein, and to reproduce all of these would make this document way too long.

She lived in a one room house in the back yard of another house that was a full-sized residence in San Jose, California. She rented it from the man who lived in the large house, Warner S. Bloomberg III, who made his living as a lawyer, and attended gatherings using the name of Warner Dragon. She lived on Social Security disability income for her severe emphysema, and was unable to afford her own computer during the early days of her a.g.r. career, so she used his computer to post from. He had more than one e-mail address, and she could be using any of them, so sometimes she appeared in the sender column as Warner S. Bloomberg, sometimes as an e-mail address with WSB3ATTYCA before the @, and sometimes as wsb3attyca@ all in small letters. The name WSB3ATTYCA (Warner S. Bloomberg the 3rd, attorney in California) was the most common, so I have used that for all her posts before 1999, when she was given a computer of her own and started using Paintword.

The doctors she consulted for her breathing problems gave her four to ten years to live in 1990, but she endured for another 22 until passing away on July 1, 2012.

– Butterfly Bill

From: WSB3ATTYCA
Subject: Miranda Writes TCouncil (Fwd. Msg.)
Date: February 3, 1997
Newsgroups: alt.gathering.rainbow

Thanksgiving Council Report Arrogantly Submitted from the Department of Rainbow Poetics and Paint Swatch Doggeral (How many ways can you say, “It’s all good”?)

Yes; it was exquisite. The stripped-tree posts in the house wall... The strong, elegantly tattered numbers of books breathing away on the shelves dreaming their dreams, waiting for dreamers, resting up from readings with other dreamers... The prestidigitatiously capacious but perfectly proportional porch with its particularly civilized pitch of roof... The gracious art of woodstacking “on display”/at hand in the “gallery”/barn... The ancient “paintings” on the barn’s roof beam fascia suggesting ancient USA vernacular hieroglyphics, speaking no doubt of mushroom hunts and long lost love and the chronicles of gatherings and summers when one is young and the conception and birthings of Rainbow kinder and coronations of Rainbow Royalty (Which Royalty is all of us, each of us, of course, and over and over, rite after rite, planned or accidental ascensions to the ten thousand thrones; and in the darling shadows, too, we do celebrate the ten thousand unseen usurpations and the seemingly ten thousand-folded-causationed-but-singularly human and universal Fall from grace--Ah! the Oneness of Falling to Pieces that falls upon the just and unjust alike! And this Innocent-or-Otherwise but ever-Inexorable Fall is the Three Weird Sisters’ --these ladies being Time and Gravity and Flesh, visiting their religious ceremony upon us. Thus we are inexorably taught upon our blank slatedness, palimpsest for palimpsest, we happy few, we student gods!) And though I could not quite read these etchings in the glint of night fires, and by day they were replaced by some natural affect of or on or into these logs --worm borings? fungal maps? the wood’s own lineaments? some DNA or RNA doodlings writ large?-- But I could tell these were great writings of and about a great tribe there upon the rugged perfect ceiling, telling the epic tales of an excellent people of merit, mirth and sometimes more than a little magic...

And Oh! my dear Household Muse! how surprisingly generous and generously surprising you are! making with the alchemy already upon every face of the ordinary as thus: The way the large leaning cook pans in the council kitchen bethought me of Arthur, that once and future be here now kingy dude. Looking somehow like sturdy shields, these communal pots did, brought through Byzantine fires, outside the frying pan, from pre-pan Afrique, and in turn brought from strange deserts by tinkerers long adept at Wandering and a myriad of other metalurgical analogia. These wok pots were beautiful enough to adorn even a Rainbow warrior’s resting breast, though protective through the ten-thousand battles, yet strong enough for peace. And these forged or cast or poured metals doubling too as gongs in La Dance, gongs in le meditation a la winter drenched monastery for the Oft-Transsubstantiated--but-More-Than-Likely-Unholy and opportunistically fornicating-- (and yes we know this is redundant, redundant, redundant)-- and Tantric Be-Hoped prismatically arched monks and nuns gathered thereabouts to give thanks and complaints and thanks and thanks --or is that tripling what the pots/shields/gongs were to my feverish eye since the original form of these was as food making? Or can we bring this metaphorical vessel aright thus and say my rainbow family of living light supped and sipped thus from grails and wafer plates whose resonance takes its song from Om, from the naked breast of breathing, from the battles and peace makings of all times that brought us to This Now wherein the loaves and fishes and oils in our lamps as solstice creeps darkly nigh are ever refreshed renewed reblazoned and thus are best rejoiced upon if there is one squeak of grace left in us and/or one cognizant synapse...

(Was it Hoover who said “An organic chickpea in every pot?” Or was it Billyboy Bubba Prezley of the Unrequited Spates of Euphrates Fearers (alternately known as Unabated Crates of Elvis Blubber) who said, “I hosed the pot but I didn’t Hoover it?” Or was it Lawrence of Arabia who said, “I shot the sharif but you can’t put Groucho’s duck in a row in Pythagorean schema.” [Author’s note: I really must get some western antibiotics for this abscessed tooth...]

But it was all older than Arthurian, than any hippie Camelot, this station of my crossed fingers, this shelter from the Babylonian Storm, this pause in My Great and Comic Journey, this ipso facto oasis in my hole in the wall underground railroad mentality. I was much retro transmogrified soon, finding the elder depths of all this pilgrim gestaltem I had stepped into by wading onto this road, this long and winding Buddha river from California to Oregon, from altar state to altar state upon which I layed down my sacrificial son shadow burden. (Rainbow Warriors are a moveable feistiness.) Nailed to my damn cross, I was, tripped on my own petard and generally roughed up by a bunch of hooligan microbes who didn’t have the manners God gave a para mecium to split between them. Thus I fell shortly after arriving at this mountain Everypersondom under the icy snarl of Grendal, fell into a deep Beowulfian stupor in my wayfarer’s bed. Winter-bitten, flu-bitten, bitten deep enough, as I surrendered to the wash of dragon spit I drowned in, to marvel at the very very very many levels there are to darkness. I was less Eve or Adam or God in your Northwest paradise than I was maybe the great great great granny of the Edenic snake, the goddess’s own serpent servent, (That’s Ms Caduceus to you, Dr Kildare...) and been rode hard and put up wet after a foray too deep into that self same chaos that gives ALL but demands a kopeck here or there of tax, of price, of kinkage to minister to in the old spiral, the old mortal coil...

But I was not all that ill. I was ill enough with a nameless, numberless ague so that sleep was what I hunted, sleep was my weapon, and sleep was the predator that digested me without so much as a by your leave. And so I mostly counseled fervently with fevered dreams and dreamily with my family the other quarter of the time.

But I was not all that ill. I have lived to return to my lair and here write about these marvels, which is life its very own self to a writer. And I was not so ill that I would impart to any but the most delicate and sage ear--that’s why this is on the interarachnid for all your pristine and golden auraculations-- that I dreamed my illness was the dross-burning sacrifice that purified the council. That I had jackass-and-clown cartoon amusements in my sleeps about the bafoonery and grotesquery of hippie (sic, human) egotistics. That I dreamed I entertained such caricature energies, such burlesque spirits keeping them busy and distracted while the family parley vouzed unfettered by these. Hallucinate, if you will, an assembly of semi-malignant Sunday Funnies hominoids drawn with OwsleyGoesAgnosticforDisney software. These distortions were convening in the animations of my sleeps to signify nothing, whisper sour nothings such as express that darn old ever-proliferating Me Thing. They had sort of an anti-Last Supper, like a Complaints Giving feast. I myself am unscathed by these crazy soirees, with said haints, of course, because I do not believe in spirits, --silly, scary or sublime-- so I am free to party down with them with gusto and impunity. (Obviously, Dr. Freud, I contain within me these self same foibles, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to suit ‘em up in the right size costume or remember where they’d let their mask drop forgotten on their twisted paths while they pretended to be other, probably more acceptable things, than the mean little, ego sucking traits they are.)

Whether or not this my version is in any way true, and of course it is Nth degree verdaditude, it more fully tells the story of 1996 Thanksgiving Council than without the proffering of these words. And what I really refer to here is that my dreaming mechanism personified, gave anthropomorphic forms to human foibles as manifested stereotypically in many and most of people’s meetings, including ours, while this our recentmost council was going on and I was helpless to rise and go in to it. Whether or not I was the red herring scapegoat (and this is what I get for being part swede, part jew and a hundred percent communist Indian lover); whether or not I was Crazy or Trojan Horsing around with the ghosts that wanted to eat Thanksgiving Council, I do know irrevocably that my wide-open imagination in whatever dream state and my training in “that which is epic” allows me to make this report with gladness and unshakable certainty: Our Council of Thanks was fraught through with, woven round about by, blessed resonantly with an ineffable and priceless archtypicality. If we humans/hippies/whatnameyees are the stuff that dreams are made of, then collectively we earnestlings, we rainbow us-lings are the stuff that mythos are made of:

To wit: Long after we have shed our speciation, homo sapiens designation, gene pool and all, still will we be Rainbow. It is beyond our local detail and struggles and gone-before-they-get here hours and blinked-away-a billion-to-an-eyelash millenia and this planet even: To wit: We are beyond ourselves despite ourselves: To wit: That light that informs us informs the manifest universe from everlasting to everlasting: To wit and hence: The Rainbow Family of Living Light!: To wit and e.g.:

Weak as I was, I didn’t have to invent magic, which most places is my noblesse oblige. And Babylonian Dictus demands that you dance the dance of the seven veils or whatever more intense and expertly in direct proportion to how weakened you are. But my family filled every breech, clutched every transmission, vacuumed every vortex, covered my back with hipper than hell gossip, covered my back with barnacles like on them big whales, covered my back like Redford and Newman and viskey versey. All I had to do was keep breathing and generally and specifically throw myself onto the breast of the Abyss, who is the child of Nirvan and Existencia, and she has the wings of a feathery goddess and will take you where you are to go before you can say “The Law of Non-Locality” and there you still are in the bosom of your family inside the Rainbow in Buddha’s lotus palm. And ya can do what ya want. You can stand there crying like an orphan in the sun. You can syndicate any boat you row. I mean this is some kinda rainbow! I mean I love my family with all my heart. I mean when the unconscious ones of Babylon accented breath say to me “WHATERYOU? AHIPPIE? FERWHAT?” I just says, “What ‘ave you got?” Meaning it’s a tribal deal. It’s a tribal sort of multi-level, fully dimensional, ubiquitous, all-permeating, forever and always, as long as the grass shall grow, ineffable, unaccountable, sort of catch all, fuck all, grab bag, disparately intertwining, bewitching betwixting twainings of goldplated plaitings of the roads not traveled and the well traveled road to hell and why don’t we do it in the road with a condom since all roads lead to Rome, and Damascus and Mecca and Hope and Crosby and to the top of the mountain having all met at the cross roads in a white room by the station under the boardwalk with my baby, and then the scientist becomes the experiment and the petri dish sort of, which-motel-am-I-supposed-to-go-hang-out-with-the-deprogrammers-at-and-who-gets-to-steal-the-towels-this-time? type of experiential myriads of seemingly different lifetimes, some of which are atypically but definitively non-schizophrenic regardless of how many sets of Krishna, Vishnu and Kali arms you may present with at the shrinks office, and they all turn out at summer’s apotheosis, at om’s heart to be me! Oh it’s me! ‘tis me! And here I am en familia! Sweet me! Sweet Rainbow! All the sweet me’s folding and enfolding love love love. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Business, per se: And all the crabby whiny soiled undone and transparent but tie-dyed footsoldiers I have ever been, grousing ‘cause “my marshmallow LSD dream fell off my ego stick and into the fires of hell I had overlooked there on my shadow side, and no one ever told me “nirvana” is not a synonym of “heaven” and karma does not mean tit for tat, or eye or tooth and I’m not a happy camper ‘cause I thought the Rainbow’d make me happy I didn’t know I’d have to do nothin’...” I just can’t wait to see ‘em, those version of I and I there in that sweet sweet summer time. “Now see here, Rothschild,” I’ll bespeak to them, “Buddha is damn well a hollow chocolate pinata best used at over-eaters anonymous meetings, karma is not the equivalent of what goes around comes around, and this is your ass and this is a shovel and could you pretty please with downstream love create a hole in the ground here so your shit can become one with the earth?”

And A camp. Are there words? Can I get a witness? Or a Jehovah, someone to comment afreshly on this biz? Whoops! All the Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons are this self same A camp! How self-reflexive! Well, in the beginning was the word. And the word was UR. And that meant first. And that meant bear. And even at Ur, that first civilization, which is so old that God was a bear, was the first bear, the first forefather forebear, there was alcohol. And at the beginnings of everywhere where there’s the beginnings of civilization there’s alcohol. So it’s hard to tell whether drink brings on civilization or civilization brings on drink: This is anthropology in a brandy snifter. So leaving Babylon out of this taxonomy, and without taxing the language too much so that I myself babble, [Author’s note: I realize it’s too late, but humor me, please, as I babble on.] let me say that it’s all good. And the Rainbow does extraordinarily well with the alcohol/alcoholic issue compared with Babylon-as-usual especially. The way “they” those I-and-I’s as differentiated from so-and-so’s... hang out out side the Gates of Eden recapitulating their good old “outcast from society you can’t reject me I was born rejected from my mammy’s womb” cast of mind is really good theatre. Besides which, authentic and perfect high holy that I be from everlasting to everlasting, I drinks a bit, me and Beau Jangles, me and Bobby McGee. I has my two brewskies an eve and once in a while go hog wild and have a third, gulping these over a six to nine hour period. So sometimes I am a veritable A camp unto myself sulking just at the edge of the rainbow shadow and I’d just as soon shoot you with my pout as dig a respectable shitter like a good little rainbow girlscout. God knows I like to sit around in the dark and hate the world, mock love and make loud, incoherent noise for 10 or 15 minutes every five years whether I need to or not, too.

But the major message I’d convey about A camp is that the Rainbow ought to keep doing whatever it is we do and keep the alcohol issue marginalized gatheringscapewise and paradoxically forefronted in council in order to stave off Babylonian pickles about pickledness and yet somehow not leave out these thusly spirited brethren and sistren. So that we gather all the Family in but do not let the greater camp become Babylon Itself by bowing down to any mudcake pandering power-tripping onetrickpony monolithic might-is-might casuistry and alcohol lubricated tautology nor nothin’ else singlesame neither of no addiction domination selfsame selfsame is/is biz biz. In other words: Don’t matter if it is an external chemical causing thought stoppages or internal idee fix obsessive auto brain chemicals causing monolithicity. I say set my people free! It’s this magic trick zen Deal With It/Don’t Deal With It sort of wu wei type thing that we do when we do that rainbow voodoo juju that takes my breath away and fills me with the breath of living light simultaneously and all at once.

(And please note that addiction contains the word dictus, as in dictator as in dictum. As in, “You been dict around by drugs, dude!” As in, “We be tired of being dict around by A camp!” And the sociopsycho problematics here are that no more than it is healthy for one person to suffer such dominance from their own addiction, neither is it healthy for the tribe to suffer the addict’s/addicts’ rule... It’s one thing for an individual to abdicate from free will, another for those individuals to abrogate the group’s freewill. But this is the social/individual dharma in a wingnutshell is it not? To heal? To see through that which we call our blindness? To let disolve the hardhard chains? As in, “We have met the dicts and we is thus.” )

Further BowBiz: The old nonmonolithic, non-penis pole, non linear, this is the last straw I’m making patriarchal pyramid bricks with, that good old, good old circle feminine and goddess shape thing ought to answer some other stuff; as: Issue A:) A teepee for Woman Rest for sisters wanting to serve at and feminize moreso the front gate. This is a unilateral vision at present, but I bet it would resonate with sisters if we could get a teepee donated for this purpose. A yurt would do. A sacred separate space for respite from the Yang-by-nature parkinglot gate shanti sena scene. Issue B:) Part and maybe parcel of the barter circle “problem” is that it is not a circle//and it ought not be on an artery; just simply not allowed to be barter row, shake down street. I can envision elders going in at first sketchings to create the real deal bartering imbued with spirit and ritual a la Cheyenne Lakota Rainbow “do what you must, but do it well, my children” energy and forge this thing into a circle off the beaten path. As always, the best defense is a seasoned rainbow warrior who can flesh and blood model the higher form of anything; who comprehends the theatricality of bartering in the Platonic Ideal and the archetype and in the completely feasible fleshed-out realms all at once and can relentlessly but gently model these things for those who are in the thrall-of-the-material bought, sold, traded, or merely in passive covetousness. Barter is ancient. Its lessons are ancient. Let elders teach the fine points and the sense of ritual of the thing rather than condemn and alienate. Let magicians prove in next summer’s barter circle that a feather is better than a dollar bill... &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& So that’s how it was, Family, as I hallucinated it and imagined it, that thanksgiving brigadoon, shangra la, underground oz, and hobbit eden--(on the seventh day God got stuck in a honey pot). Then I held it in my woman’s arms and lovingly rocked it and hummed to it and kissed it and counted it shell and all and so the dream hatches like a plot and sleeps and rests and matures and lives and rises into bright poet’s ink ever more arching circling spectruming and flying and so rises and awakes into your dreams through the agency of the sand man, that Hermes rascal, and his modernized dust toys, these silicon chips, which he sprinkles into our eyes like little little prisms broadcasting rainbow light by which we read truth which is our nightlight to dream time by, in this darknight of the babylonian ozone shadow. Fiat Lux! Though I send this out from the silicon valley of that shadow of chips, I will fear no censorship, for the FBI is only semi-literate, too, being mostly babyboomers by now, like the rest of us. But your rods and cones peruse me, you leadeth me beside myself with pleasure, my pot of gold runneth over.

“These hours of freedom are precious indeed,
All else is slavery, ignorance and greed”

PPPS: Today Jan 19, 1997, is the thirtieth anniversary of my running away from home at 17 and going to SF and stumbling on Haight Street, which I hadn’t known about before hand. WELL! I felt like Robinson Crusoe finding Friday’s foot print! I felt like Adam waking sans rib but finding Eve. “What’s a rib? Who’s counting? Look at this! Hippies! God made me some more me’s! God made me some brothers and sisters to play with! I’m not alone! There is an I-and-I! ‘Mirror mirror on the hoof, who’s the hippest of them all. Please I want a hippy soul mate, make him handsome, rich and and perfect like before the fall.’ “ [Author’s note: I really must stop this.]

From: x9...@aol.com
Subject: Miranda Writes TCouncil
Date: February 4, 1997

Ah Miranda, as a waifish vision, you’re wandering delivered you timely to the galley barn on that mist clad chilled night to parcel out a serving of liquid warmth into the cup of a despirited sailor--now once again you arrive to uplift the soul, as timely and gracious as ever. Love to you-Sailor

Enjoyed meeting you at the Slug Farm, enjoy your writing, maybe there is something more to this rainbow family than meets the eye. Just wish Sailor wouldn’t have to be away so long on this up coming scouting journey. Your words have really affected him, he’s been pretty down from looking at all the maps and worrying about finding enough gas money to check everywhere for the absolute best site. Please write more soon.----Ruth

I don’t want to talk on this machine, oh, I am already doing it. Ruth stop typing, oh shit. Well,uh, Hi Miranda--Just Mark

From: Vince Henri
Subject: Miranda Writes TCouncil
Date: February 5, 1997

> Mirror mirror on the hoof, who’s the hippest of them all. Please I want a hippy soul mate, make him handsome, rich and and perfect like before the fall.’ “ [Author’s note: I really must stop this.]> Love, Vox Miranda/Raven, she-who

I going to put this in a place where I’ll get in to it
once in a whale
and hope to get out

“Was it good for you?” is unnecessary
but I’m not sure I can hold my breath that long
not to say quality was sacrificed for quanity
Oh No Oh Yes It Was It Was
Good for me
I think ? ?

What fall ?
you mean when we lost what we hadn’t found
and have been screaming from our intermost being
“Is there anybody out there ?”

Dear former prince;
What is the elevation of the gathering whose loci is as yet widely nameless? It being an emphysema question.

Signed; Raven, formerly known as Miranda, formerly known as princess of the wide flung unencorporated rainbow realms of sector gsx. Just call me Peace retroaffectionately.

Ask again when a site has been found. It’s too wet and nasty around here for the scouts to have gone out yet, so impossible to even contemplate now where we might end up. Of course, Kevin Costner is shooting a movie on the east side, we can always just piggy-back in on his permit - tell the F.S. we are extras -

Alternatively, maybe the psychic hotline can give us some clues where to scout - Dionne Warwick, are you listening?

Actually I meant the altitude at the equinox gathering but now that you bring Dione Warwick up........

Have ya’ll noticed the type of intrusion sales mail we get--spam???? It is specially targetted for us? Is this our image in the world? Mouse pads and that Kenny the psychic shit? I mean don’t “THEY” know we are just waiting until Charles Manson gets out so he can make us some nice koolaid? I mean, what do we need psychics for? It is preposterous and a phoney gambit to even put question marks on these statements. I already KNOW ALL. And Kevin Costner can just kiss my Dances with Wolves. Or, no he can’t...what do I mean? I mean I’d rather be a movie than see a movie. I mean I’d rather go to a gathering than win an academy award.

Oh but it is weird that you bring up Dione Warwick, my beautiful sister, carla--whoops I mean prince--because I had just been over on WSB’s other service and writing an email that fractured “Kentucky Bluebird” and then thought of fracturing another song that would comprize an oblique Warwickian reference when I wrote the word Babylon in that first song and accidentally added an “e” on the end. So now I’ll share it with my Family, Kenny the psychic--and why would a psychic need the internet?--and whatever federal agents are slobbering over us--for the good of the nation, of course:

My Babylone has a first name,
It’s “S-A-N Jose”,
My Babylone has a second name,
It’s “I’ll be leavin’ here anyday”
‘Cause Satan has a soul sucking way
In B a b y l o n e.

See, it’s a commercial for the innocent glories of modern life. And I’m this very cute, childlike but somehow decrepit hippy sitting on an innercity porch/stoop and instead of a piece of Oscar Meyer balone [ooh I’m retching just thinking of that] I’m chewing on a plastic foodstamp credit card like ironbear has been telling us about. And I have a definite glaze in my eyes like as if I’ve been snorting prozac. Snorting prozac and washing my neurons in tv waves and in mourning because I’m in OJ withdrawal. (Hey! There’s an image! How about O.J. and Charles Manson in the same prison cell?)

--Miranda, Raven, She who was formerly known as the flower child in the Encyclopedia Brittanica 1968 year book article picture about Flower Children, but you can call me Peach for short

the altitude will be about 300 ft. above sea level---the weather will be cooler than last year due to the earlier date of the gathering, high 80’s to low 90’s so it will be a little more daytime oriented than last year where everyone hid under a bush during the 100+ heat--also it will be cool at night 40/50 so bring warm clothes. and water lot’s of water----------------------s

p.s. BW and detour made it here fine now we hope to find a driver for them to get back north-have a nice day, peach

Brothers and sisters have been asking me to put some of my poetry on here. This is a rare rhyming poem I wrote a couple of years ago. I chose this one to also honor Ram Dass, what wit the be here now riff at the end. I’m goingto start tomorrow and put on equinoxgathering poems to be part of the gatherings! Peace, love and light, your servent, Miranda

These masks and bones, this hide that wraps her ‘round
Shall someday soon or long fall on the ground
Being animated no more by me,
By that “I” which I shall no longer be,
Having rejoined intelligence that broods
In the deep and starry plasma of moods
I both super-perceive and sub-suppose
These hell-less, heaven-less dear, dear cosmos
To be, whether I live or decompose.

It’s not fashionable nor politic,
And in some quarters I’m an heretic
To leave out the comic book pantheon--
Demons in the dark; Jesus in neon.
Well though super critters are fine and all,
I’ve heard another drum, another call.
When religion and physics start to jive,
The human earth mind is coming alive.
And when we’re here and now we will arrive.

The frozen gates of babylonian bureaucracy have thawed under my lazer like writings momentarily and creaked open enough to let a positive decision from a judge slip through regarding my disability claim. Yes! I have won what was supposed to have been mine automatically thirty months ago! I have a subsistence income and medicare, now! (well; within 60 days!) Now I am enabled to better serve my children, my poetry and the rainbow! Love and Light, Miranda, Raven

> The frozen gates of babylonian bureaucracy have thawed under my lazer like writings momentarily and creaked open enough to let a positive decision from a judge slip through regarding my disability claim. ..

love ya rainbowbrother
hey now - did you ever make it to nationals??
i am hoping to meet you under tree someday???

I am happy for you that you have found some security. This is good news! Blessed be and peace be with you!

This civilisation (NYC, or Berlin, or BAbal oror..) helped you!
Believe it also!

And please note: I took action here! and MADE this happen! The track my case was on as of last December, it was supposed to have taken 12 to 20 months longer than now. But I found that absolutely unacceptible. I studied the thing meticulously, set a game plan and fucking pushed pushed pushed with all my might within the law and ethics. I do not add this braggingly. I add this inspiratiopnally! We want a self-sustaining rainbow? We work at it! We just cannot accept the Man's version of us and how things ought to be!

> And please note: I took action here! and MADE this happen! The track my case was on as of last December, it was supposed to have taken 12 to 20 months longer than now. ..

Black Planet
Radical Books Direct
718 S. Broadway Baltimore MD 21231
410.662-0878
http://www.blackplanetdirect.com
resources for the activist and ideas that can transform your world!

From: nor...@googlegroups.com
Subject: My Good News, II
Date: July 29, 1997

Glad you have some relief, but...do remember, the same Babylon you would condemn had the social services set up to provide you this relief, relief your brothers and sisters could not provide. Where else could you go where by proclaiming you can no longer work (and perhaps backing it up with testimony from a Babylonian doctor) to get handouts, perhaps for the rest of your life? Perhaps Babylonia is THE great Rainbow kitchen! Just thinking out loud, flame as needed... Ben

> Where else could you go where by proclaiming you can no longer work (and perhaps backing it up with testimony from a Babylonian doctor) to get handouts, perhaps for the rest of your life? ... flame as needed... Ben

Let's raise enough to get our sister up and running ........ say about ohhh..... $250,000.00. That should be enough to support Miranda for a while and pay the doctor bills.....K? How much you got to free her from the “Babylon system”.... cough it up....walk the walk

Someone commented to a family member who, after a long series of hearings, is finally going to get disability benefits:

It's negative stereotyping to call diasability benefits “handouts”. Social Security is not a handout, but a form of insurance

If a worker who pays into Social Security gets sick and collects benfits, why imply that it's a form of cheating or begging? To justify denying poor people what they need to survive? So that middle class workers can feel superior to those on welfare? So that white males can feel superior to so-called “welfare queens”?

This may well not be the agenda of the person who replied. But I fear it is the agenda of many who label welfare benefits as “handouts”

Homeless Organizers' Support Team (HOST)
Fax: (617) 623-5353
E-mail: wg...@earthlink.net

Not knowing Miranda at all, I can't honestly say whether she is truly needy or not. But I do know that far too many folks in the Rainbow Family and elsewhere get money cause it bums them out to work. Hell, it bums me out to work and I'm trying to think smarter about my life and restructure it to meet my needs in a happier way without taking money from the government

I agree, don't dis the system if you're living off it. As someone who pays taxes all the folks collecting SSI are living off of me and other folks who pay taxes. I love paying taxes to support those who really need it and I love paying taxes for education and to protect the land and for the arts. I get pissed off about paying taxes for the military, cops, and folks who are no different than me, but want to sponge off someone else

I've been following this thread with some interest, because I find it amusing and at the same time disenchanting to realize that Sister Miranda did, indeed, ask her family for help, and got very little, if any. Now you all are going on and on about whether Family members should “live off” the government, when no one on this list was willing to help out said Sister. Until we all put our money where our mouth is, I'd rather not hear any more about this, please. To turn our backs on a Sister in financial straits, and then to say that she shouldn't get money from the government, is the same as slapping her in the face, which I find *very* disrepectful. And to judge whether or not someone is “disabled” is rather like living in a glass house. If anybody on this list 1) has never received public aid, and 2) sent Miranda money when she said she needed it, feel free to be righteously mad at me. Otherwise, get off your self-designed high horses, and give Sister Miranda <Raven>, she who is a light shining in the darkness, a break

> ... And to judge whether or not someone is “disabled” is rather like living in a glass house. If anybody on this list 1) has never received public aid, and 2) sent Miranda money when she said she needed it, feel free to be righteously mad at me. Otherwise, get off your self-designed high horses, and give Sister Miranda <Raven>, she who is a light shining in the darkness, a break

From: nor...@googlegroups.com
Subject: My Good News, II
Date: July 30, 1997

> Not knowing Miranda at all, I can't honestly say whether she is truly needy or not. But I do know that far too many folks in the Rainbow Family and elsewhere get money cause it bums them out to work. ..

HO! Something else I haven't seen discussed, like, how much of that money our sister is getting was stolen from her in the first place by the gummint thru taxes, license fees, and other official extortion? They make us pay for their wars and prisons, their foreign aid (bribes), graft, pay-offs, inflated salaries, subsidies to corporate fat-cats, on and on..

From: WSB3ATTYCA
Subject: bad news behind my good news
Date: July 30, 1997

> Glad you have some relief, but...do remember, the same Babylon you would condemn had the social services set up to provide you this relief, relief your brothers and sisters could not provide

And I, Miranda, Raven say: I never condemned Babylon--though I must say, it could do a better job in teaching reading/ reading comprehension as is evidenced by such unstudied, ill-informed emails as yours, Ben. First, as to your misapprehension that I have previously been “condemning” of Babylon: I've never made any such statement. I am further bemused at your need to defend the honor of an abstraction such as Babylon. But, moreover, I can goddamn well bite the hand that feeds me if I goddamn well please: This is Amerika, god damn it! Fuck babylon! Fuck the cruel murderous, maiming bureaucracies! The Social Security Administration is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people and the illnesses of tens of thousands every year because of lags like in my case

Second, Babylon *Did Not* set up the Social Security program. Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, as part of the New Deal. I believe it was signed into effect under Truman. It is a program of great worth that raises the United States above the level of suspicious, paranoid, abusive and murderous beasts. Babylon, bureaucratic brainlessness, surely does administer this program. Badly. I have made many observations through this two and one half years of this horrid ordeal of trying to get this disability that should have been automatic and dispensed on an emergency basis. One of them is that these social programs are created out of the very best impulses and angelic ideas of the human species. However, the bureaucracies that administer them are from the dark, shadowy, suspicious, beastly side of the human nature. Thirdly, my brothers and sisters *have* provided me with this income due to my disability. Comes out of everyone's taxes you know! And I thank those very real people! Each and every one! For each and every penny! From the bottom of my heart!

> Where else could you go where by proclaiming you can no longer work (and perhaps backing it up with testimony from a Babylonian doctor) to get handouts, perhaps for the rest of your life?

To which I, Miranda, Raven respond: Have you even read enough of my emails to agr to know what disability I am under? (Boy. I hope that I would investigate such a thing and know where of I spoke before saying such uneducated and hurtful things to another human being.) I am getting disability payments for COPD. COPD is Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Emphysema. Severe emphysema. With a very small intermittant asthmatic component [of negligible importance.]

Here is what it is like to have emphysema: Imagine that three or four times a day you stand up from a chair or you walk a little too fast or sometimes you just turn over in bed and the consequence is that you suddenly feel as though your nostrils and mouth are covered with duck tap--after having run a long distance. And your hands are tied behind your back. And do not think please, that you can rub the wall or a tree with your face and get the duck tape off your mouth and nose. You can't because you are also lashed to a chair that is bolted to the floor. In other words you cannot move. You cannot move because your muscles and nerves are not getting enough oxygen. You have reached acidosis from some small amount of exercise. It is not that you would rather not move, not that moving is difficult/uncomfortable. I mean that you are paralyzed

Additionally, there is the constant and unpredictable fatigue. I wrote a letter for eight hours one day in the middle of May. Then I slept for eighteen hours. Ever go to a Deadshow, barter fair or gathering and not be able to get out of your rig except for maybe four hours over a four day period because you cannot wake up enough to do the things you love to do the most and be with the people you love the most and you have traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to see? That is what severe emphysema is like. And people cannot see the disability. A lot don't even understand it when they see an attack. And they are snide, sarcastic, abusive if you cannot hurry up, or if you ask for help.... Sometimes they write silly, stinging things about handouts and privileges and goldbricking...

I give you this information in place of such troglodytic absurdity: I spent years and years trying to work and support myself in any number of ways despite this and also spinal disabilities. I was driven down to the point that when I landed here at Warner's and applied for disability in Feb 1995, I had no shoes! It was in great shame and humiliation and a sense of personal moral, ethical and spiritual defeat that I applied for Social Security. I didn't go to college for eight years to spend the best years of life getting a subsistence level income! It wasn't some mad, crazy, childish demanding like a “proclamation!” Then Ben says:

> (and perhaps backing it up with testimony from a Babylonian doctor) to get handouts

“Perhaps”? “Perhaps”? My medical file is like 18 inches thick, Ben. That's quite a few drs, babylonian or not. And they all testified to the extremity of the COPD. (COPD is not something you can fake, by the way. They take blood. They can tell the oxygen/CO2 levels.) That is the way it works to get disability. Not by self-proclamation! (Was your language/scenario inspired by Rush or Newt?) And yet the bureaucracy denied me for thirty months!

And handout? Handout? Oh, Tom Bolan does a good job on this already in an email, as does good bro Ed-I. I'll only add: Yeah. I fucking wrecked my lungs, wrecked my body, wrecked my health, wrecked my life for this free ride...Whoopty doo!

And last? Oh yeah the last indeed! The last as in death! As in that Ben thinks I “get handouts, perhaps for the rest of ...[my]...life?” So let's talk about the rest of my life. As in how long? Well, first, I'm 47. I first knew I had severe emphysema at forty. Some medical books give people with emphysema levels like mine ten years to live, some four years to live. Feeling deprived of a similar government entitlement yet? Really attractive numbers, right?

> Perhaps Babylonia is THE great Rainbow kitchen! Just thinking out loud, flame as needed......Ben

To which I, Miranda, Raven say: No. No you weren't. You were not thinking at all, Ben. You were not thinking silently nor out loud nor neither in your typing nor in sending your email. But that's ok. No flame. Either next time or some other time down the line, perhaps you will remember this un-thinking adventure and you will close your mouth and you will in fact have a real thought or two.....In the mean time: Love, Miranda, Raven

From: Randall,Holly-SEA
Subject: bad news behind my good news
Date: July 30, 1997

Forgive me, Miranda - Raven, but my feelings upon reading your reply to Ben were, "Whoa, easy sister". I, not being the person under discussion, did not see the heavy-duty attack in Ben's words that you did. I did not get the impression that he meant at all to criticize you but to hit on some points that I would imagine had crossed others' minds as well as his own

I guess I'm saying that I feel you were, perhaps, a little hard on the brother - but then, really, it is up to Ben to defend himself and explain where he was coming from. Ben? Just my .02

From: nor...@googlegroups.com
Subject: bad news behind my good news
Date: July 30, 1997

> > “Glad you have some relief, but...do remember, the same Babylon you would condemn had the social services set up to provide you this relief, relief: your brothers and sisters could not provide.”
> And I, Miranda, Raven say: I never condemned Babylon--though I must say, it could do a better job in teaching reading/ reading comprehension as is evidenced by such unstudied, ill-informed emails as yours, Ben. First, as to your misapprehension that I have previously been condemning” of Babylon: I've never made any such statement

To which I, Ben, Scorpio say: (See how pompous this intro can make one sound?) I guess I stepped on some old toes, here. I believe if you re-read my brief post, you'll find it much less vindictive then you may have originally read it to be, and certainly less so than your response! As a tax payer who has seen many abuses of my hard-earned money by those who would milk the system rather than work for a living, perhaps I am too sensitive when it comes to DES issues. As someone with asthma and the son of a working mother with emphysema, I do know that having to fight to draw breath can get the best of most anyone, and I certainly don't begrudge legitimate claims (as I'm sure yours is) using my tax dollars. But if not for people who can and do work within the system paying taxes, the less fortunate would surely parish. And no, your are wrong; biting the 'hand that feeds' is very hypocritical. The system that you choose to have support you is not open for criticism from it's beneficiaries. Appreciate the system, or find another way and save my tax dollars for someone who does

> Either next time or some other time down the line, perhaps you will remember this un-thinking adventure and you will close your mouth and you will in fact have a real thought or two.....In the mean time: Love, Miranda, Raven

I guess the only real thoughts are the ones that echo your own. 'Love'? It sure didn't sound like it. Peace (and I mean it)

From: Leprechaun
Subject: bad news behind my good news
Date: August 4, 1997

> I guess the only real thoughts are the ones that echo your own. 'Love'? It sure didn't sound like it. Peace (and I mean it).
> Ben

Ben, you can't expect everyone who is personally offended and morally outraged to express themselves exactly the same way you do. If you could only read the emotions behind the words, Ben. Why can't you give someone's heartsong validity?

There was love there, and there was frustration.
Your “witty” reply adds insult to injury.
I feel sorry for you that you are unable to see it

words-words-words-words-words-sounds-sounds-sounds-sounds-
heart-heart-heart-heart-heart-song

)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
FreeWay Kitchen-- We do Everything ((((
the Free Way. We love You. ))))
(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

[The following two posts were part of a longer thread that is also on this website.]

Sisters. If you don’t treat men like Gods then you ain’t the Goddess. We of the well healed Rainbow brotherhood do hearby declare that we will no longer deal with sisters that need to be healed. If you are already healed are respectful and thinking clearly without prejudice and sexism we invite you to join our party. Let’s get naked and Gather together in love and wisdom and prosperity. Joy is available for those who are willing.

They have liposuction for this unsightly problem in men. Fortunately, you are-- was it well heeled--or a heel? And therefore you can afford to get your ass healed. (And if you heal your ass, maybe your mind will follow.) Or is it held? Or is it just plain old hell? Or heil? I can see the ceremony now: “Heil, Goddess Ass!” Or is it “Heil be seeing you in all the same old ass slings like this verbal trap you’ve backed your back ass wards back into once again...” Oh well. I’m sure your brothers will tell you all about the permutations of yo’ fine ass, since not many well healed brothers can resist a goddess ass. But isn’t it hard to worship your own ass? Is it a dance? You sort of whirl around? Or is it done with mirrors? Or maybe it’s one of those things like our lady of the french toast/wall crack/road kill where pilgrims come from all over to see the likeness of Mary in these items: You’ve got a mole formation on your butt that dot-to-dots like a Venus of Willendorf? Oh! Oh! I know! You are the donkey! The ass Mary rode in on! No matter what, you’ve got more than a slight problem here if you liken your posterior to a goddess. How well healed is any male who doesn’t wholly know his ass from the ground?

I know; I know. Some will think I’m being mean. But you know what? This isn’t mean. I’m tweaking the ignorant. Too bad. Delete me. I am in a foul and pestilential mood. and I get more graphic below.

I’m fed up with gods. The hour of the gods is over. You see, today is my son’s 21st birthday. Where is he? In jail. It isn’t as bad as the Johnny Cash song: “I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole.” He’ll be out in two weeks. But this is the only twenty-first birthday he’ll ever have. And why is he in jail for stuff he’s gotten himself in jail for a half dozen other times? Because I treated him like a god. Because I gave him an inflated sense of himself. His name in fact is Moses. I raised him when I was still in thrall to patriarchal thinking. So he doesn’t get it that he has to take responsibility for his own actions. He thinks everyone ought to treat him like the holy prince I treated him like. So everything that happens to him, he thinks, is because of other people’s actions; because of circumstances. Because people aren’t as “nice” and long suffering as his mother!

You know who else landed in jail the same day this week for the same reasons only thirty years of godhood added on? (No direct causal relationship between the two events. Just both things happening at the same time so that I’ve gone around hanging my head like as if I’m a cartoon character.) You-know-who in Tucsan who lost his hand making a firework last August landed in jail Tuesday. Yup. My rainbow-reknowned x, the god lord himself. Violation of Probation. His mama worshipped the ground he walked on, too. She and I cleaned up an awful lot of messes made by this god. I helped clean up the pieces of his hand last summer. Those were quite human, those black crisps of flesh. Then I worked at this god for months at my own expense, to my own detriment trying to get him to see the courts/cops weren’t kidding. That they don’t think he is a god above their punishments and management. But like any god, he knew better. So this god of alcohol, drugs and fireworks is in jail tonight. And for many a night to come. Just another healed Rainbow brother! Just another god! A god who often spoke of perfect women just like in the original email in this thread! A god who had a lot of notions, ideas, rules about how women should act because he and all of his healed brothers sat around and counseled on it! (I called it the retarded bachelor’s club. I’m sure you all have ‘em in your town. You know: Sitting around drinking, smoking while creating the perfect woman by male consensus. It’s a lot easier that way rather than learning how to live with actual women. Loving and living and learning gets so messy and...and...and confusing! It goes against all the RULES! It requires changing! Sloughing off egos! Gods never have to do that!)

And here’s an interesting insight: Where is the retarded bachelors club tonight? Are they there, helping Mic? Helping Moses? Helping Mic and Moses take responsibility? Naw. They’re somewhere else, smoking, snorting, shooting, drinking, bragging, blaming, criticizing women, ignoring their children, damning the government, and just generally being the gods they are; perfect unto themselves. Do they show up at court or visiting hours for their fallen brethren? Write letters? Send money? Naw. Not for the most part. They are there to buy from and sell drugs to these guys, but they can’t go to court and give them moral support. Heck! The other day? No one would even go over to Mic’s or make any phone calls! Guilty! Scared! But I called Tucsan! From San Jose, Ca! Then when I reported he was in jail, people crept over and got the details. And would any of those folks who made fortunes off of him for decades help me do an intervention for this very sick man who was hallucinatory for days at a time? No. It was Mic’s right to kill himself. It was none of their responsibility. And of course my name began with a b for trying to help him with AA/NA--which is a compromise of godhood!

And where are the grown up men who taught my son to use and buy and sell meth amphetamine when he was only 16? Where are those perfect god-like creatures tonight on my only son’s twenty-first birthday? Where are those gods who taught my son he had no responsibilities to me, to his family? Because he is a free, autonomous god?

So, you see, I’ve been through this god-making process. I’ve seen the needle and the damage done. And I’m sick of it. I will foster nor condone this set of sicknesses no more. The gods die tonight. That is my celebration of the 21 years since my flesh opened and this son was born. I serve this madness no more.

As for the goddess? Oh! Don’t be fools, men. This is not a binary matter. And it is no question of sexism. For seven thousand years, god, jehova, a punishing angry, arrogant god has dominated. It is not that I am a goddess. It is that I am a woman, I am of the goddess energy, the feminine forces of the universe move through me. I do not set my self as a goddess. I am human. I am flesh. I have the god force, the god spark in me. But for too long--this afore said seven thousand years--women have been denied their creative, divine identification. That is why I and many another women has been so cut off from the earth, from heaven, from reality, from the creative flow of energy through the universe and so has denied her humanity, her needs, her desires, and so served men who *did* have identification with god by gender. And look! LOOK where THAT has gotten us! The planet is a horrible mess for these very reasons! No thanks, brother! No more gods! If you want to be a happy god, it is up to you to make your own happiness. It is SLAVERY, SUBJUGATION and just plain old infantile to expect or make women create your happiness by treating you like a god. As to the goddess my sisters and I refer to, she is no playboy center fold robot, you can be sure. She’s not there to make you happy. She is not even there to love you as you think you should be loved. The reality is better than the specs you could come up with!

Anyone who thinks to flame me about this, fuck off. I’ll not be opening any posts I don’t know the author of, nor any who I know to be hostile. So friends, family, please don’t copy down any hostile emails about my boy. I share this story not for pity. I share it because of the wisdom to be had from the learning I portray.

From: WSB3ATTYCA
Subject: Love, Love, Love [<R>]
Date: December 14, 1997

As I, sans glasses, scan agr this rain shredded, full moon scuttled a.m., I am blessed with waves of love for y'all. Though I'd originally planned on gatherings and events, and most “certainly” T Council, I found myself preaching but mostly practicing the gospell of love; of rainbow love amongst the tattered black leather clad broken hearted youngens on the streets of santa cruz. Tweekers that is. My son's lost tribe; the shadow of the rainbow. Yeah I followed my boy down for autumn. It is dark down there in the underworld--unles ya got ya a rainbow ya carry everywhere with you! Even in hell it helps to know I'm Living Light. It helps to know everyone is living light, unconscious though they might be of it. And then! To gently, calmly, assuredly help the doomed see that they and the entire world are drenched in and are comprized of hope, light and love! Well! If it is only for one brief glimpse! What a great store of energy is released! Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Excellent! Above and beyond the parenting or eldering or mentoring amongst his black leather orphanage, I got through to my son after years of his being lost. Mostly we've maintained a good relationship, all things considered. But what occured was a parent-child rebonding. He was able to defer to my greater wisdom as we calmly thought through some of his problems. Then he was able to change direction in certain behaviors, after realigning whole areas of mind set. He is 21, but he's been utterly unmanageable since 14. My love of him got me through. I had given up on any reasonable responsiveness ever eminating from him several years back. But as Bob Dylan said: “The only thing I knew how to do was to keep on keepin' on.”I'm not calling these past months a reward--having a rational, responsible kid--I don't believe in rewards and punishments. But it sure is fine! It has been a start. Once, at the end of Oct, after seven weeks of unrelenting tribes of demon seedlings, I sat with some 'Bows at the edge of one of the two tweeker parkinglots in 'cruz and smoked a bowl. I broke down in tears. Kind. Ya know? Kind!!!!!!!!!! So I love y'all and remind y'all how much work there is left to LOVE these lost youngens and others who'd do well to come home. And I need to too! Miranda, Raven, She Who Will Have the Gypsy House on the Truck by Christmas Midnight! Anyone in the area is invited to come by and help... As I write this letter, send my love to you, remember that I'll always be in love with you...

From: WSB3ATTYCA
Subject: 12/28 fatty fine agr council!
Date: December 29, 1997

You Rock! Rainbow Family of Living Light! I love you all a whole whole whole lot! My heart is singing happily as I know my heart song was heard! I saved all this up till now because it is so important I didn't want it to peak before May/June. And besides, in other ways, like bringing yin energy into some shanti sena movies, it was a very high gathering for me. Nirvana has its ups and downs... But yes! This is excellent awareness reflecting, efulging all over the place on our newsgroup today! “The Tribe Dialogues!” I like the bike rickshaw ideas. We can work this out! As to fund placement: I'm the world's smallest pea brain when it comes to money. Dragonfly: What is the protocol here? For like a handicapped access fund? We've got three donations promised already. This is cool! I like solutions, plans, too! You know, lots of people have ceased gathering because of disabilities... If we got our act together I bet we could get them back! Thank you, Brother Long Arrow, for starting this very important ball arolling! Good service! Miranda, Raven, She Who Heads For Dreams That Are Now Even More Healing Painted. PS: I do know that what you say is true about scouting considerations, brother s.<R>

From: library
Subject: 12/28 fatty fine agr council!
Date: December 30, 1997

At various times in the East (PA,VT,Que) we have carried people in on “sedan chairs” These are either made by actually attaching a wheelchair to poles, or by lifting up some other chair -- with the wheelchair being carried into the gathering separately. This probably works better than a rickshaw over very rugged terrain. But I like the rickshaw idea --less work than weightlifting. Perhaps handles could be placed on the sides of a rickshaw seat so it could be carried over bad parts of the trail -- and wheeled over the good parts

From: WSB3ATTYCA
Subject: gypsy house on q.l.! <R>
Date: January 26, 1997

Zounds! My beautiful jewel box gypsy house is at last on my beautiful 1971 gmc truck, whose name is Quantum Leap. This all is under the header “the impossible just takes longer.” Miranda, Raven, She Who Is Happy

From: x9...@aol.com
Subject: gypsy house on q.l.! <R>
Date: January 26, 1997

> Zounds! My beautiful jewel box gypsy house is at last on my beautiful 1971 gmc truck, whose name is Quantum Leap. This all is under the header “the impossible just takes longer.”

Congratulations!!!! i know this has been a long time effort and look forward to seeing you on the road

i have also just finished (well almost) a new rig andn so share that feeling of joy in seeing a project come together again,

From: Starwatcher
Subject: gypsy house on q.l.! <R>
Date: January 26, 1997

From: Madelyn Powell
Subject: gypsy house on q.l.! <R>
Date: January 26, 1997

From: WSB3ATTYCA
Subject: gypsy house on q.l.! <R>
Date: January 27, 1997

Not much after I can get out of the driveway. Gonna go down and play with Waylon, Willie and you too, Brother Marc! <R>

From: WSB3ATTYCA
Subject: gypsy house on q.l.! <R>
Date: January 27, 1997

Well, now, My Beautiful Sister, that's really lovely to read. Went right to my heart! I hope to get around and see the whole family! But, specifically, I will try my darnedest to come and sample your hospitality! Had planned on it from the gitgo! You Know I Am Lovin' You! Miranda, Raven

From: WSB3ATTYCA
Subject: Angie, respect double redux
Date: January 28, 1997

My name Miranda? Shakespeare invented it. As near as the experts can tell, it didn’t exist until he named Prospero’s daughter miranda for the Tempest. By the way, “The Tempest” is about the new world; the only such foray Sh. made--and I mean in writing; he never came to the Americas. It was his last play. It is about an imaginary island in the Caribbean. It has many discussions about utopias, oppressing indigenous beings, and the endangerment of brilliant european persons/culture through the dilutions and ignorance and indolences that must arise by dwelling in the n w. So here was an Eng. playwrite, inventing the name Miranda for the occasion of this play out of Spanish bits. But the Spanish weren’t insulted. They seized upon the name lovingly; many taking the name on, as we know, for a family name! Of course this family name quickly came to the americas--and I daresay more than a handful of native americans also bear this name...

One of the reasons I never took a hippie name until recently was that this name is a lovely hip name, and also in keeping with the fact that I am a poet and have a degree that is specifically in Sh. studies: BA in Classical English Poetry, Emphasis in Shakespeare. The name itself can variously be translated as walking/dancing mirror//walking/dancing seer.

Then of course, there’s the specific place my father got it: While mommy and I had me (15 minutes labor!), Daddy went to the movies. “King’s Row”. Ronald Reagun. Zap. This was South Bend, Indiana. Gipperland. And RR has crossed my path many a way... I got this name because it was Ann Sheridan’s name in the movie and my father loved her. She was the brains behind a very wimpy weak RR without making a fuss about it. She took his last bucks after he’d squandered inherited wealth and she made him and the world think it was all his idea to make a killing as a real estate tycoon/slum lord.

But also, my last name was and is Howe, which in Gaelic means “royal burial mound.” So I’ve decided--and this is through my Arthurian Studies which were also long and long, that that means I carry the seeds of the once and future king because how(e) else might a woman be a burial mound except by the agency of rebirthings/life givings/incarnations-through-the-womb. Now never mind that this Howe name is actually vis a vis my jewish grandfather run away to sea from glasgow at age 14 to apprentice himself to a tailor in chicago in 1905,and thus the Howe was probably Howitzer or Horowitz in Lipzeig a generation or two before Jacob Howe’s termination of glasgow tenancy. (Are you with me? Fine.)

So that brings us to America. But let us slough off the chill climes of Chi town, city of big shoulders, and return to the Caribbean. I have a sister born on the day Hiroshima was bombed--the first anniversary I mean. I have a brother born on Pearl Harbor Day in 1953. I have a brother that shares Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday. But the only thing I have ever found in history of import that my birthday is anniversary of is that Columbus’ men mutinied and confined him to quarters. October 10. So. We have a Miranda, a spanish name invented by an English poet, which means walking/dancing mirror/seer who has a double king affinity--King’s Row and royal burial mound (king’s Roe? [eggs in the burial mound womb]; king ferdinands boat rowers?) born on a day of mutiny that ineffectually (to say the least) desired to circumvent the discovery and brutal exploitation of a whole hemisphere.

Hmmm....So just call me Ishmael. That’s Ms. Ishmael. -Lastly, for tonight: Your cyber name there, that there won’tkneel kicks ass! Bob Dylan wrote (a Zimmerman turned Irish nomered...): There was a man named Mahatma Gandhi. He would not bow down he would not fight. He knew the deal was a down and dirty, he knew nothin wrong wouldn’t make it right. Peace, Angie. We are on your side. The human side. Miranda, Raven.

From: Butterfly Bill
Subject: Angie, respect double redux
Date: January 31, 1997

> My name Miranda? Shakespeare invented it. As near as the experts can tell, it didn’t exist until he named Prospero’s daughter miranda for the Tempest.

“Miranda” could also be the feminine of the present participle for the Spanish word “mirar” - to look, or look at. “Mirando” or “miranda” would mean “looking”.

- Butterfly Bill, He Who Gets To Idle Away A Whole Evening In The Computer Center Tonight