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The following blather is meant for all, but particularly for new visitors to PTMYB, particularly those who may lean to the more conservative side of the political spectrum and/or those who live in what, for better or worse, has been codified by the media as a "red" state. (Those of you who have been visiting for a while: The silly stories about food will be back, really, they will.)

If you are new to this page, there are few things that may not be self-evident about me, so I will elaborate (probably more than is necessary, and I thank you in advance for your forbearance):

1. I am not a Christian, by which I mean that I don't pray, I don't practice, and although I am too leery of labels to call myself an atheist, I am probably closer to atheism than to any other point on the religious spectrum. Having said this, I was baptized as a Lutheran when I was a squalling infant, and I did have a church wedding at First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, which I picked because a) the minister is a smart and fabulous guy and b) First Unitarian hosted a lecture and discussion with the Berrigan brothers during the height of the Vietnam War. I am married to a man who is also not a Christian, although he did go on a bit of a pilgrimage between high school and college, looking for answers in various Christian sects, even working and living for a while in a mission in Del Rio, Texas. In the end, he decided that he was not a believer, either, but in that time, he managed to amass a wealth of information about Christianity, and he knows the Bible better than almost anyone I know. However, even though we are not Christian, we are not going to smack your hand if you are. (We also won't smack your hand if you're Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or none of the above.) In my short and unstoried life, I have seen a lot of the damage that religious zealotry can do, but I have also seen the good that can come from generous, principled religious thought and deed. I know that those of you who do find strength in your religion, who pray, who practice and are definitely theistic, you are smart and honorable people who find solace and inspiration and courage in faith, and I applaud this. Moreover, even though Lloyd and I pretty much celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday, we do celebrate Christmas. We will wish you a merry Christmas; we will wish our Jewish friends a Happy Chanukah, we will tip our hats to our druid friends -- yep, we've got 'em -- who celebrate the Solstice. Ten days after Christmas, we will say Merry Christmas again, to our Greek neighbors, who celebrate Christmas on the Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian. We will not look sneeringly down our nose at you if you don't say Season's Greetings or Happy Holidays to us. In fact, I'll appreciate your kind thoughts so well that I'll put you on the mailing list for hot cross buns, which I make at Easter.

2. I live in New York City. I was born in Pennsylvania, and Lloyd was born in California and raised in Washington state, but we have made New York our home together for the past 12 years. Eventually we will have to leave, because we will be priced right out of the city and the surrounding metropolitan area, but until that moment comes, we are New Yorkers, fully cognizant of the city's myriad faults, but still grateful for its myriad pleasures. For every moment that I am convinced that we are surrounded by crybabies and litterbugs, there is another in which I see people give lost tourists directions on the subway; where waiters find lost wallets full of cash and actually return the wallet to its rightful owner, cash intact; where you can eat a slice of pizza in a fluorescent-nightmare pizza shack and suddenly realize that the guy with the huge platinum pompadour who just walked by the window is indeed Jim Jarmusch. There is a story, probably apocryphal but I hope it's true, in which Russell Crowe was shopping at Tower Video on Lafayette Street, and his haul included a Hunters and Collectors concert DVD. Apparently the clerk was not familiar with H&C, and, as the story goes, Mr. Crowe was so appalled by this that he ran across the street, bought the new H&C cd and gave it to the clerk, his gift to her, so that she could learn just why they are considered one of the best bands Australia has ever produced. (Myself, I would have bought her a copy of Human Frailty so that she could hear "Throw Your Arms Around Me," one of the most gorgeous, sent-from-the-angels pop songs ever written, but that's just me.) Again, I probably only wish that the story were true, but if it were, it would not surprise me in the least. It is the New York music-nerd version of a right neighborly thing to do.

Why am I so keen to establish my non-Christian, New-Yorker, nice-guy (so to speak) credentials? Because, dear friends, old and new, I am sick of the culture war. I am sick of the whole idea of it, and I was sick of it long before "culture war" entered the lexicon. I am fully aware that there are plenty of people who live in cities on both coasts and points between who are dismissive and snotty about rural and suburban areas, and they should be called on that snotty dismissiveness, but dear friends, that bad attitude cuts both ways. We city-dwellers do not have a moratorium on smug superciliousness; if you (the editorial you, not you in particular, reading this) are the salt of the earth, but you look down on us simply by virtue of not being just like you, it's still smug and it's still wrongheaded, every bit as much as it is when New Yorkers (or Angelenos or Chicagoans or Seattleites or Bostonians) do it to you.

Myself, I have become more than a little tired of the "New York is the greatest city in the world" meme. I believe that by virtue of chasing the maximum dollar value of every inch of real estate space possible in this city, we are pricing ourselves right out of what makes the city great. It is becoming harder and harder for artists to make a living, harder to find work, harder to find living space. I think much of the talk about the greatness of New York is ourselves coasting on our laurels. Whenever I hear anyone talk about Philadelphia, where both of my parents were born, where I met Lloyd and where the pith and marrow of my best childhood memories comes from, as a junior-league New York, kind of cute but not a *real* city, my back goes up. When I came back from Arkansas this summer, having spent a month in a town with an active, engaged local government and an arts council and a summer film series and a farmers market, a place where many of the local businesspeople are cranky old hippies but they still welcome back the returning vacationers from Texas and Oklahoma and Missouri as if they were long-lost cousins, I told many of my friends what a wonderful part of the country I'd been to, and I still heard a distressing amount of Deliverance jokes. I brought back bottles of Arkansas wines -- yes, Arkansas has wine country, and some truly wonderful stuff is being produced there by wineries such as Post Familie, Wiederkehr and Chateau Aux Arc -- and I don't want to tell you how many people made the joke about the jug with the three X's on it. It's not funny, and it certainly doesn't do anything for countering our reputation as a city full of world-weary poseurs. (As it turns out, the Arkansas wineries are located in or around Altus, also known as the home of the family hapless enough to host Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie on the first season of The Simple Life. As I did not watch the show, I asked my brother, who did, "So did they mention any of the wineries, or did they just make Altus look like Hooterville?" "What do you think?" he replied. Huh. That's what I thought.)

So I know. We need to get over ourselves, really, we do. But so do some of your neighbors. They did not invent love or kindness or community or looking out for one's neighbor, any more than we invented hate or alienation or suspicion.

By now I know you're wondering, good heavens, Jen, whyfor do you rant so much? I have had this rant before, but this morning I found myself ranting it all over again, reading this story from the AP wire. (Note: This is going to get more than a little graphic, so if you are easily upset, you may want to just stop reading here and write me off as a damn crazy ranting fool.) This is a grotesque and upsetting story, about the murder of a pregnant Missouri woman and the theft of her unborn daughter, by a woman who confessed to lying to her family and friends about being pregnant, who confessed to murdering this woman, tearing her daughter from her womb, bringing her back to Kansas and passing her off as her own newborn daughter. Hours before Lisa Montgomery's arrest, she and her husband went to the Whistle Stop Cafe in Melvern, Kansas with the baby and showed her to a crowd of neighbors who had believed that Mrs. Montgomery had been pregnant for months.

It is a horrible crime, sickening to contemplate, and I'm sure it was incredibly shocking to the people who were at the Whistle Stop that morning to learn that the missing Missouri baby who was the subject of an Amber Alert was the same baby the Montgomerys introduced as their own. Nevertheless, I think it was something worse than just shock that prompted this comment from Kathy Sage, the owner of the Whistle Stop: "You read about this stuff...It blows you away when it's here. This stuff is supposed to be in New York City or Los Angeles."

Let me repeat that. "You read about this stuff...It blows you away when it's here. This stuff is supposed to be in New York City or Los Angeles."

Ms. Sage, let me assure you, as a New Yorker, as a non-Christian, as a member of a population routinely accused of treating People Not Like Us with contempt: this stuff is not supposed to be in New York City or Los Angeles. I assure you, if one of my neighbors came into the Italian deli where I buy my cheese and polenta on a nearly daily basis, with a baby to whom she had just given birth, and we found out three days later that she had murdered a pregnant woman and stolen her child from her body, we would not just be horrified, we would be shocked. We would be in pain for the man who has just lost his wife, the mother of his child; and we would be sickened by the deception practiced on us by a killer. And yes, I'll say it again, we would be shocked, because this stuff, as you put it, is not supposed to be anywhere. Not New York, not Los Angeles. Not Melvern, Kansas or Skidmore, Missouri. Not London, not Paris, not rural China, not Central Africa, not in a packed tenement neighborhood or an isolated farm belt town. This is an abomination no matter where it happened, and your suggestion that it is less so in my backyard than in yours is contemptible. And I'm sorry, but your shock, while understandable, does not get you off the hook.

Let me tell you exactly what stuff is supposed to be in New York. During Friday night's extended pub crawl to celebrate the lovely bunni's birthday, we ran into a friend of hers, an NYPD officer, who hadn't known it was her birthday and who left the bar abruptly, with a promise to be back and a direction for us not to leave. He returned 20 minutes later with two dozen long-stemmed roses. These are my neighbors. These are my friends. This is how we celebrate the presence of each other in our lives. As far as this overwritten, food-obsessed blog goes, there is room here for all of you, each and every one of you. All I ask is that you remember that we are all precious in someone's sight, we are all someone's dear friend, and that we are all deserving of peace, love and understanding.

Here endeth the lesson. Go forth and consider this beautiful picture of bunni and her roses, which she has given me her express permission to post.