I'm watching a cult video made by a lesbian couple in New York City. It opens with one of the filmmakers going out to a bar to meet her girlfriend. But it's not a women's bar. A mixed crowd. Very, very mixed. And she doesn't meet her lover, she picks up someone. Well, gets picked up--reluctantly. But he's blunt, pushy, amiable, and just won't hear no. Yes, he. A man? No, not a man either.

A moose.

I think "Only in New York!" But I keep watching. Addictively awful. See, they go to her flat, talk, have some drinks, flop down on her bed, nearly breaking it--do you know how much the average moose weighs? You'd need a truck scale to find out. Fortunately, she climbs on top, or this tape would be filed under horror.

They fuck, or try to. For twenty minutes the video just shows a close-up of a giant moose penis, like some Martian dildo, part way into her, as she tries and tries to get it to fit. She urges him "Come on! Are you a man or a moose?"

Twenty minutes of this! It's so bad I start reading the back of the video box. The reviews say "BOMB! It even fails as porn--it isn't sexy, it isn't funny, it can't have been fun--just work, work, WORK." Wow, I've never seen a box calling its own tape garbage. But I have to agree it's profoundly unsexy. That moose wang is so grotesque it makes me wonder how she can even want to get it in.

Then I realize how specist this is. I'm being unfair to moose esthetics. After all, moose guys are built to please moose girls, not us. We may look just as weird to them. But tastes differ. He wanted her, she wanted him. Their orientation is their own business. "Though I wish," I find myself thinking, "they'd KEPT it their own business."

But I can't look away. Moose have something magnetic, and it's not just this one. Bullwinkle had it too. A blunt blundering quality I... envy? Blundering their way into anything they like. Right inside a strictly lesbian sex video. Right inside the lesbian!

Except he's still not inside. He just won't fit. Do moose ever fit? Don't we all have a moose or two in the family, those big amiable lunks who just push their way into things without sensing it's not fitting?

And so...

And so I go to the unemployment office, to visit my lover--my twin sister. Yeah yeah, lesbian incest, so what--I don't complain about your party quirks. We're happy. Well... except for the money problem.

See, my twin's a poet and short-story writer, starving in the new economy. She's been standing in the unemployment line for hours. Well, days. Well, months. She's moved up to third from the end. Progress.

She sits in line and reads the great poets and polishes her unprofitable craft. She's the sensitive sort. When she reaches the head, they'll make her a bar bouncer or a tollbooth operator.

My double tells me "I've had time to think hard about how I came to this. I see two big problems in my life, things I need to confront." One doesn't come into this story, it had to do with dreamwork and spirituality. I don't think the Unemployment Office can help her much with that.

But her other big problem is here. Really big, and really here. Looming above the rest of us, as he stands behind her, in the unemployment line. A big, brown, hairy lunk, reared up on his hind hooves, a good eight feet tall, filling out unemployment forms with a clumsy moose-sized pencil. I can't help glancing uneasily at his monstrous penis, creepy even now while it's flaccid.

I think, numbly, "He sure gets around, this moose."

"Hi, glad ta meetcha," says the moose, in a strong Brooklyn accent. "The name's Foinbrek. She's told me all aboutcha." Foinbrek? What kind of name is Foinbrek? Well, a moose name. Oh--maybe it's just Brooklynese for "Fernbrake"? That would make more sense--a patch of bracken ferns is probably a feast for a moose. Or a bed, I dunno. But I ask, and the moose spells it out "F-o-i-n-b-r-e-k!" Firmly nonsensical. Well, at least I can look him up now. Know thine enemy.

Or rival. I may have to coexist with him. I sure can't fight him, he's a giant even for a moose. Probably outweighs all the caseworkers in this unemployment office plus their doughnuts.

Did Jung ever have these problems with HIS archetypes? Did a moose ever steal his girlfriend? "I wish," I think savagely, "I could be haunted by a better archetype."

And I wake, still smelling that indescribable papery mustiness of unemployment forms mixed with moose.

MORNING NOTES

• Moose =
  1. my own body! I see men, I see me, as big, hairy, ugly. Hey, give me credit for improvement, I didn't add dumb! But I find it hard to imagine a woman wanting a big grotesque penis inside her. Watch out, Wayan! This is what happens to souls who incarnate as one sex too often. Then when you have to switch sex at last, incarnate as one of those awful creatures... well, you got Trouble with a capital T.
  2. An archetype of the big, pushy fool too dumb to respect barriers. I have a friend like that from Brooklyn. Thick-skinned, smashing through barriers more sensitive people would respect... He's like a Soviet icebreaker, and we follow in his wake, wincing at the shattered ice, but also benefitting from the space he's opened up.
• Lesbian sister = me. Oriented toward women, especially small delicate fem ones. Not just sex--most of my friends are female too. Men baffle me.
• Trying to get a big, weird penis inside me = I'm trying to take in, to incorporate, the crude animal masculinity I usually avoid. Icebreaking. Trying to learn to love what I'm just not built for. So far, hard work--and not much progress.
• Why lesbians like moose (no, NOT mousse! This is not a bad hair dream) = a pun from the TV show MASH. I saw an old episode in which an American soldier living with a Korean woman calls her "my moose." My Korean dictionary doesn't list it under any spelling I can think of, so I can't tell you if it was period slang or the writers got it wrong, but on the show, Radar says "moose" means girlfriend or wife. So lesbians do hunt moose... my dream-twin just bagged the wrong kind!
• Negative reviews on the box = I'm wary about sexual experimentation: for me, breaking down inhibitions is more work than fun. On the other hand, the dream Oriole Girl warned me that some of us who've suffered abuse just have to go through a practice stage where sex is more work than fun.
• Foinbrek = short for "fine breakfast"? After all a moose might have a fine breakfast in a fernbrake. Brooklyn accent or not.
• My anima's in the unemployment office = when I got laid off from my day job, I got by on art income plus unemployment. My caseworker was shocked that I got (or that I reported!) any income from creative work AT ALL. It's just not part of the American paradigm to drop out and make a LIVING in the arts. You're supposed to starve as a lesson to the other kids, so they'll endure their crappy jobs and never unionize...

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