Suckdog Love Booklet
$1.00
NOTE: This is a 28 page downloadable PDF file, not a physical printed booklet.
The era when this booklet came out — the late ’80s — was so different from today I sometimes believe it never happened. You could still live a double-life. There were phone booths for anonymity and no cell phones for traceability. You could make prank calls. No GPS. No Youtube. People didn’t walk around with cameras in their pockets. What you said and did wasn’t recorded and easily and instantly disseminated to any and all. You had control over who knew. In this booklet’s case, I photocopied it in batches of five and sent it through the mail to people who signed that they were over 18 and not a police officer. Oh boy! You could say and do and think anything and not get in trouble back then! Oh, the freedom of the mind and the flesh we enjoyed! The freedom to make terrible mistakes.
Have you noticed how much you edit your thoughts now? Those of you old enough to remember life before the internet, life before everyone gets 15 minutes of fame and an eternity of wrong-doings immortalized, will notice the difference. Today’s youngsters have never known anything but the paralysis of being watched.
In the mid-00s, at my second divorce proceeding / custody battle, the first question opposing counsel asked was: “What was the name of your band?” At this point I was in my mid-thirties and hadn’t performed in ten years and performance art — a sub-sub-culture of shock and awe where we tried to out-stupid, out-racist, and out-misogynist and out-homophobia each other in an effort to make art bigger by pretending it wasn’t art — was long dead. And still the name “Suckdog” drew a gasp from the judge, who surely in all her years presiding family court had heard worse! It similarly offended the guardian ad-litem, who made me get drug-tested and insanity-tested. This is what the doctor said:
“Without doubt, and by her own admission, Ms. Carver has clearly gone through an extended period living out a controversial, experimental, and challenging lifestyle, apparently consciously attempting to match her writing and stage performances with an explicit philosophy of unnerving and disrupting the feelings and conceptions of people around her, particularly in the audience. Without getting into an extended discussion of the relationship between creativity and/or artistic expression on the one hand and mental illness or instability on the other hand, it would seem to be self-evident that an ability to perform in front of people in the provocative and extreme fashion that she has engaged in required some perhaps indeterminate form or level of instability in her personality functioning and development.”
Really? If you can act crazy, you must be crazy? Sane people don’t experiment? Healthy people don’t ever say “What if?” and run with it? What about people who notice crazy mores and reflect them back? Nobody sane could ever say sodomy, incest, and bestiality are good for children yet not really mean it, just wanting to hear what it sounds like out loud, just wanting to see how the other person reacts? The mind can be a dark place, Doc. The world can be dark. My childhood was. May as well have fun with it. You could, back then. I miss it.
Lisa Carver
23 Farmington Dr.
Dover, NH 03820
11 March 2010
