A couple of years back, I started referring to my friend Rebecca Brown as “the divine Ms Brown” (as in “the latest piece by the divine Ms Brown…”). Not that I have any desire to worship her – or anyone or anything else for that matter – but her writing definitely touches on the transcendent. The word fit.

Then I realized that another friend, contemporary-art curator Robin Held, deserved a better adjective than all the “amazings” and “wonderfuls” constantly used for her. I started thinking of her as “the iconic Ms Held.” That fit too.

I could always stick with the usual words, of course. But when “awesome” is used for everything from the latest video game to a new flavor of ice-cream, it becomes meaningless. There’s no real awe there, just as there’s no real wonder in “wonderful.”

“Amazing” is popular, but seems to indicate surprise that any woman could be strong and intelligent and outspoken.

“Incredible” begs the question.

And as for “courageous” – if it takes courage for a woman to speak her mind and be active in the world (at least in the West), then we’re in worse trouble than I thought.

There’s a whole range of monikers we could use instead of the standard wonderfuls and awesomes and amazings.  I began jotting them down, and found that I could put names of women I know to every one of them. I’m pretty sure you can do the same:

— the badass Ms X

— the incomparable Ms Y

— the unstoppable Ms Z

— the outrageous Ms A

— the formidable Ms B

— the dynamite Ms C

— the fearless Ms D

— the fearsome Ms E

— the notorious Ms F

— the path-breaking Ms G

— the ferocious Ms H

— the inimitable Ms I

— the indomitable Ms J

— the brilliant Ms K

— the magnificent Ms L

— the dynamic Ms M

— the genius known as Ms N

— the epic Ms O

— the mind-blowing Ms P

and this isn’t even the whole of the alphabet.

Some of these tags are stronger, some less so, but you get the idea: We need better accolades for strong, intelligent women. And quit with the weak female-only ones.

Words like “gutsy” don’t cut it — who ever describes a man they admire as gutsy?  “Ballsy?” — oh puh-lease…  “Incredible”? — really, you find it hard to credit?  “Innovative?” — aren’t we all?

So let’s innovate.  No matter what gender you are, feel free to pitch in and share better suggestions in the comments.  And start using them. Liberally.

Think big, think strong, and celebrate strong women with strong language!

There’s a free all-welcome election-night special at Town Hall Seattle tonight, so’s we can all bite-our-fingernails/celebrate/drown-our-sorrows in good company, and they asked me to prepare a short squiff on what I most wish for the next four years for the US and Seattle.

So I’ll present a Top Ten List, tongue only partially in cheek:

Number 10:  Justices Scalia and Thomas get an irresistible urge to write their memoirs, and resign from the Supreme Court.

Number 9:  Frank Gehry does a John Gault, tears down the Experience Music Project,* and puts up a building he can be proud of.

Number 8:  Citizens United spawns Corporations United, giving individuals the right to avoid taxes like most of the Fortune 500.

Number 7:  Seattle writer Rebecca Brown’s next book wins the Pulitzer Prize.

Number 6:  Medicare eligibility age is lowered ten years per year until we finally have Medicare For All.

Number 5:  Seattle stops obsessing about being a “world-class city” – the sign that it already is one.

Number 4:  All presidential candidates in 2016 are women.

Number 3:  We bring all our soldiers home – and keep them home.

Number 2:  Tim Eyman** moves out of state.  Or better, out of the country.

and in the realm of purest fantasy:

Number 1:  The Mariners*** win the pennant, the championship, and the series.

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What would your Top Ten be?

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*  Adulatory articles about Gehry never mention the Experience Music Project.  Rightly so.

** Tim Eyman’s flood of anti-tax ballot initiatives aim to hamper good government (and almost forced the Seattle Public Library to close down branches earlier this year).

*** Seattle’s baseball team nearly always ends up at the bottom of the league.  At least they have a beautiful stadium to do it in.  Go, Mariners!

Hallmark card lovers, avert your eyes.

This piece by the transcendentally gifted Rebecca Brown is in the Valentine’s Day issue of The Stranger.  It’s called “Make Clean Our Heart Within Us,” and it makes me laugh and makes me want to cry and kind of blows me away.

Bleach it. Scrub it. Sandblast or power-wash it, hose it down. Dip it in lye.

Please, be my guest.

Nothing I have tried has worked: It’s crusty, brown, and scabbed. A lump. It has been bit into, chewed up, gnawed on, spat ou—no—wait—not “out.” It can’t get out. It’s stuck inside. Beneath “‘dem bones” and skin and other stuff.

Tear open the skin, dig in and grab and break ‘dem bones and yank. Do it by hand.

Or leave it in and nuke it. I don’t care. I gave up that malarkey long ago.

It’s weirdly shaped. Like an octopus with not enough arms and also twisted with osteoporosis. Or a plastic child’s toy such as a baby shoe, doll, or action figure melted in the sun in that top part of the back of the car, made slowly soft and droopy, and burning, hot—it hurts to touch—until after the sun has gone away and it cools to a hardened blob.

One often thinks of it as red, but maybe it’s not if the blood’s seeped out. Maybe it’s kind of pinkish, even white in some places, almost translucent, as pretty as a pearl, almost. Except for what it is.

Did it look worse when beating? Like a gelatinous clod of something from a grade B horror movie (such as the mushrooms then the people, in Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People [1963], directed by Ishiro Honda, who also did the Godzilla movies, in which, after a storm at sea, a boat washes up on a mysterious island. Shipwrecked together are a wealthy playboy, a professor-psychologist, a famous sexy female singer, an ingenue, a couple of others, and of course the skipper of the ship and his loyal sailor, just like on Gilligan’s Island which debuted on American television the following year. Who giveth unto whom? Who taketh what?), pulsating, throbbing, burbling, its slick or dull or smooth or shiny but certainly pokeable surface expanding and collapsing, expanding and collapsing like miner’s lung or heaving cow or great pink scarlet bubble of Bazooka Joe bubble gum some rowdy kid is just about to pop.

St. Catherine traded hers with God.

I remember seeing a picture of it. She’s standing on the ground and He is hovering in the air a bit above her. He’s on a tasteful little throw rug of a cloud. Her hand is up and out to him. Can I see something red in it? A thing to be got rid of? Or to keep? A thing of want. His hovering hand is open, too, and heading down toward her, but I can’t see if his hand is full or empty. Her hand is white and His is very, very white! As pure and clean and pure and cold as snow.

Has he just given His to her? Does she give hers to Him? Did one or the other do it first? Or did they do it simultaneously? Who opened whom? Each other or themselves? There must have been a lot of blood. What happened to the blood? What happens when the traded heart does not fit in the other’s waiting hole?

Whose great idea was this, anyway?

If it was His, was he just—uh—uh—ribbing her? Not ever thinking she would take Him up on it and—uh—uh—do it literally. But then when she said Yes, she wanted, Yes she would, Oh please, and started clawing at her chest, whatever else was He supposed to do?

Or did she simply stick her hand inside and pull? Like those amazing Filipino healers? They don’t use anesthetics! Tools! Or anything! They rearrange or take the bad things out of you, a secret done with just their hands, and with some poor pathetic miserable fuck who’s desperate with belief. They also only do it to someone else, not to themselves the way St. Catherine did. Though, of course, St. Catherine was not a Filipina, but Italian, from Sienna. I went there to her church one time and saw her mummified head. (It looked like a giant raisin.) The rest of her body is somewhere else. Rome, maybe? I don’t know where the heart is.

Or if there was a tool involved, what tools would they have had back then in Italy? A knife, a sword, a saw? A pair of tongs? Did someone else, not Him, give her a hand? (“Give her a hand…?” Hmmm… Don’t go there.) Was someone passing by who saw her clawing at herself and crying, crying, crying inconsolably because she couldn’t, she just could not do it, could not get it right, she could not break herself, so then did someone (angel? Or Samaritan?) appear to help and if so, was this then a miracle?

Or had she asked a friend to help?  Though of whom could one ask a thing like that?

What’s too unclean to be made clean must be removed alone. For superpower Him, this would be easy. But not for her. No, not for her. She had to work at it.  This took her long.  This took her years.  This took her life.

Pull the muscle and meat away like pulling the fat from the rib of a pig.  Now, yank it out.  Now give it to Him.  It may be good, what’s given back, but by the time it does you’re halfway dead.

My hands were never white like hers.  And the other’s more than mere unclean;  it’s fucking filthy.

To try would render filthier.

At least that’s my excuse.

If this whets your appetite, as it were, for more of Rebecca Brown, check out two of my favorite books of hers:   ‘American Romances‘ and for the very brave (you have been warned!)  ‘The Dogs‘.