A Perhaps Unusual and Amusing Post About *Elevator Guy!* By Jennifer Michael Hecht

Dear Bleaders!


This starts far from Elevator Guy but gets there. Read the funny story and then you will see the point. Here is the story:


I recently saw a video of a Pig raising puppies along with her piglets that I found so evocative that I posted it to my facebook wall. After I did it, it made me think of a poem I once wrote about a Woman and a Chicken and a Joke about a Farmer and a Pig. So after posting the pig link with a poetic comment (I'm a poet as you may recall), I posted the poem Chicken Pig, which I only thought of after posting Pig puppy piglet video, and poetic comment.


Then I noticed the photo of me that went up when I posted the poem was Very Young. And I wrote on the comments, tagging my old friend Stephen, This: 


I remember this dress it was a white cotton shift and I was wearing it that time, 23 years ago when you were late to pick me up at the train station at Takoma Park and that young man followed me off the train and then kind of followed me at the "station" and it was dark and I was alone and he eventually got so close that I turned around and said, Hello? I was scared, curious, worried, but not sensing danger from this lithe and okay seeming but clearly following-me tenaciously young man. And he said, "I'm sorry to bother you, but I have often thought about, kind of like a wishful daydream, that I was born a girl, a woman." Oh I said, surprised and tipsy on the good absurdity of the freshly rained spring blacktop parkinglot holding my odd follower and me. He continued, "If I could be a girl or a woman I would want to be exactly like you, with your long hair and natural white dress and casual face." And we talked a nice talk in the weird lit night. Then you, Steve, showed up in your slow car and took me back to our version of planet earth, the house with the kitchen in the back where we all stayed all that times those years. Right?


After I posted this on facebook, I noticed it had bearing on the whole "ELEVATOR GUY" STORY and I posted it to my facebook page, with some remark to connect the two and suggest "Hey, you never know when it comes to *INTENTIONS* though you surely do know when it comes to actions. 


After I posted the above, A guy I'm facebook friends with who I do not know in realDlife who wants to remain anonymous asks me in a facebook im:


"So your premise is that we should consider that there may be more than just a crude proposition with elevator guy right?"


And I say "Yes his intention might have been sweet or weird or nothing. His act was not the best. She did a fine job of pointing that out."

I add here that Richard Dawkins's response on PZ Meyers page was more dramatic and wrong than anything Elevator Guy or Rebecca Watson did.

He used violent language imaging violence against women, and he did it when women were talking about being uncomfortable. -- Uncomfortable In a public movement He asks to be considered a Leader of. And my response is to say, I hate when guys do that. I sidle away from them when they do. More info? Richard Dawkins has always responded to me as if I were furniture in his way, or lint on a friends bow tie. Even at intellectual clubs where I was the member and he not and we had both been invited to speak about secularism on a stage of some sort. The last time I met him he had heard the tale end of my talk and others were gathered around me, this was later that night, telling me what my talk meant to them, RD cam over and cut one woman off and said I heard the end of your talk it was good, I once said the same thing in the first paragraph of the last chapter of (one of my books) [I, jmh, i can't remember which right now]. I looked it up and it was a similar wistful point about being human as being part of time and the universe...

Dawkins was very wrong to write what he wrote, in that language. His point was dull and small and wrong but his language was awful and gross and I don't like being near that sort of thing. But I don't see the need to boycott his books as RW has suggested. Anyway, I don't read them, though I own and have looked at them. Sorry but for someone not raised in Christian dogma, his antireligion books are too boring to actually read.

I think you should punish him and enrich your life and the life of your community by reading my books especially, Doubt: A History which provides for you a history of atheism and religious (and philosophical) doubt and atheism throughout all of history, all over the globe. Or read The Happiness Myth or The End of the Soul, or Funny, or The Next Ancient World.

You can read much of all of them online, or all of them at your library, but if you buy a book, I eat and if I eat, I live to write again.


Thank you, I love you, Don't kill yourselves (see my posts on BAP), Don't feel guilty for not going to the Gym, Don't overtrust science and science news, and be good. And go outside! and look at nature it is in 7D, not like your laptop or smart phone!

Listen to your Poet. (me)

Love,

Jennifer