Ghosts of Small Houses

…and she read in the tea leaves that time, that long ago, sepia-colored time,
that there would be a marriage and a house and children,
and pain and wounds that healed
and wounds that never, can’t, didn’t;

When they say ‘rattle around’ they mean exactly that.

It’s a sound only the solitary can hear. That empty, echoing sound. That rattle
Bouncing off the walls (never straight—how could they have built a house with walls that were never straight?)
Falling innocently from the ceiling down upon your shoulders
While you do dishes
Using as much water as you want now; letting it run down the drain unchecked, unaccounted-for.

Your house is so small, mom. Not enough room for us, the dogs, the suitcases;
I have to work this weekend;
We’ll come up for dinner—let’s go out.

Shopping takes no time. In and out, no need to linger there. No need for family packs, money-savers, bulk buys.
No need to dress all day. The bell at the front door, does it still work?
Things stay tidy. But that dust, sneaky dust, settles on it all, patina of the desert.

It can be still enough to hear the voices of those long dead who lived here before you. They chat In the basement, near the work-bench. They rap on the door at dawn
It’s time to get up, we have to go to work now
Make our lunches.
At the edge of dreams in the morning, they can be heard tromping heavy boots on linoleum,
Starting trucks in driveways
Tools clinking in the back.

The smell lingers still, fainter each year
From that flannel shirt on the hook by the door
It rises like a whisper,
Like a stroking finger across the back of your neck.

Each day is now just a blank page
Stained brown at the edges by the tea leaves.

A list grew there once.

Tis the Season...for Contradictions

…and to be busy. Too busy for many things, such as taking time for yourself and relaxing. In fact, holiday relaxing is often the kind where you collapse on the sofa after a hard day of doing and running and put your aching feet up on the coffee table and wish you had a maid. That’s why the rich live longer and are happier—not because they can buy so many more things, but because they can employ help.

To me, the ultimate luxury would not be the large home, the private island or the fancy car, it would be a staff. Someone to keep the house clean, the accounts in order, the dishes done up, have the food cooked when I got home, have fresh coffee and something homemade baked ready to nibble on. Ahhh…the thought of that sort of true relaxation at the end of a busy day makes me purr with envy. (Sometimes I think I’m part cat. Cats think of their owners as “staff”.) I can’t stand to watch old movies because all those people who live in the Park Avenue apartments wearing chiffon evening dresses and dancing with Fred Astaire seem to have household help. Sure, they were usually the comic relief in the movie, but I would never have treated them so cavalierly; I would have appreciated their presence and the work they did for me, and would have rewarded them handsomely at the holidays. Except for time off. That they could not have. So they’d have to live in.

Oh, who am I kidding? I’d probably be too critical. Or suspicious. Or worse, be too soft-hearted and make them all friends, and buy them horrendously expensive gifts, and let them have all the time off they wanted. I’m like that, really. No, I really am. Really!

I am a fundamentally lazy person. That’s why my house is always clean. I keep it that way because I do not want to clean it. Okay, I know that sounds nutty, but it’s true. I de-clutter frequently, throw out old and mouldery stuff that collects in corners, make sure the kitchen counters are free of crud, the bathroom is shiny and sanitary, and the closets are not going to kill you by dropping something large and heavy on your head when you open their doors . It doesn’t take nearly the work to keep a place clean as it does to clean it up in the first place. That can be a monumental and daunting task, one which several of my friends don’t seem to be able to manage. (Yes, I do feel superior.)

And come the holidays, I put the decorations up early, get the cards out before the second week of December has passed, and bake everything for the freezer, so it can be put out when needed. I’m a regular M---tha St---rt. (I’d say her whole name, but I can’t stand the b—tch.) Then I spend the rest of the time shopping for perfect presents, and going to see decorated tree displays wherever they are. I am a regular nut for decorated tree displays. They inspire me, and make me envious. I wanted to buy a house just so I could put a tree in every room. Now that I have a house, a tree in every room would just be more clutter I’d have to clean.

Okay, so I’m a bundle of contradictions. I feel superior to my cluttery friends, but I love their homes at the holidays…I get all organized and do everything early, but I can’t stand M---tha…I like clean, but I want to be lazy…I bought a house so I could decorate it, but I don’t decorate it because I don’t want to clean it up later…yup…the holidays sure bring out the best in me, don’t they?

Ah what the the heck….I love this time of year. And I have my own little “traditions,” one of which is allowing all those wonderful contradictory behaviors to come out and grab a cookie off my lacquer-ware platter, while sipping on their hot chocolate and doing aerobics. And watch those crumbs, and make sure you rinse out that cup…..

Happy Holidays to One and All!!!

Rest, Rosa

I was going to rant on about the breakdown of decency and values in this country, and had a considerable little diatribe going yesterday, which I didn’t finish. I intended to finish it this morning when I got into work, (in my spare moments, of course,) but this morning’s news made me think of something else.

Rosa Parks has died at age 92.

Rosa Parks was an icon in the civil rights movement, and she is one of my heroes. When I was four years old, Mrs. Parks boarded a Montgomery, Alabama bus on her way home from work. She sat in the “colored seats,” one row behind the white seats in the front of the bus. That day, the bus picked up rather more passengers than usual, and the bus driver asked the people sitting just behind the white section to stand up and yield their seats to the white folks. Mrs. Parks refused.

Mrs. Parks was a quiet, unassuming woman, a member of the NAACP. She had not been planted, nor was she told by anyone to defy the law—but defy it she did. It set off the firestorm of the civil rights movement in our country. Her subsequent arrest was the spark in the powder keg of segregation, which then exploded. Then it changed our laws.

I admired Mrs. Parks and what she did. She wasn’t special, just a decent, hard-working woman, weary from a day’s labor. She didn’t use name-calling, firebombs, guns, rhetoric or blame to make her point. She just sat in her seat and refused to be a second-class citizen anymore. This small and minor act was the only weapon she had. But it wasn’t just the act, (Rosa Parks was not the first woman to be arrested for refusing to yield her seat,) it was her basic decency that proved how heinous a philosophy was segregation. It is the basic decency of most people of color that makes all prejudice heinous, makes it so unacceptable. We cannot continue to think of skin color, national origin or ethnic association as making us different. Mrs. Parks made that clear, as obvious as it seems to us now. Yet it is still not as obvious in our actions, or our minds.

Recently I saw the film “Crash.” Racial prejudice and its consequences is the core plot element in this film. It shows that we are not always what we think we are, even when we think we have no prejudices, or try to do the decent, honorable thing. The film is well done, thought-provoking, and makes its point harshly, but with intelligence. It shows us that despite our new laws prohibiting segregation, our regulations about busing, banishment of “separate but equal” accommodations, and all the hard-won freedoms made for and by people of color, that we have still not evolved enough to overcome prejudicial thinking. It makes me sad, and it seems synchronistic that I saw the film the day before one of the linchpins of the civil rights movement died. But it’s even more important than that to me.

I remember my ninth birthday party. I was born in July, and my party was always an outdoor event, usually a picnic, to which I would invite everyone I knew—classmates, neighbors, relatives—to share in hot dogs and watermelon in our back yard. That year I invited my fifth grade classmates. All of them. Most of them showed up. Including the one black girl in our room.
Her name was Jewel. She was quiet, shy, pretty. Her parents were far better off economically than mine—our family had always skated right on the edge of outright poverty. She came from “up the hill,” and one of her parents was a businessman, the other a professional. They wore suits to work, and drove a new car. Jewel wasn’t a close friend, but she was a friend. I was glad to see her. She alighted from her parents’ car with a gift in hand—one of only two who brought me something. I greeted her and showed her the back yard, where everyone else was already tucking into picnic fare; but before I got to follow her back there, my mother pulled me aside.

“Don’t you think she would be better off with her own kind?” my mother asked me. I puzzled over this a moment—as far as I understood, Jewel was with her own kind—we were all fifth graders. I must have looked oddly at my mother, because she got flustered, embarrassed, and repeated the phrase—don’t you think that little girl should be with her own kind?

I remember the feeling I had then. Stunned, shocked, humiliated. I couldn’t look at Jewel for the entire party. I couldn’t talk to her. I had finally understood what prejudice was, and it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. My own mother had committed a crime—that of being a bigot—and I couldn’t talk to her anymore either. Of course, despite my shame, that resolution was merely temporary, though I had lost a key element of trust in an instant. Yet, this incident was never spoken of again between us.

Fast forward to 1993. My mother is ill, severely diabetic, and must go on dialysis. She has been resistant to her insulin for years, and it’s killing her, unless she gets the lifesaving procedure. She sets up her appointment at a local dialysis center, and arrives—late—and finds out that she can’t make dialysis fit into her schedule. She argues with the attendant at the center, and makes a scene. I know this has happened because I’ve been monitoring it all from my desk at work, via my uncle, who is trying to make my mother see that she’s causing her own problems by being inflexible. Nothing seems to work—but she gets her dialysis and goes angrily home. When I get home that evening, I call her and ask how it went.

My mother launches into a diatribe of her own: the attendant was not cooperative. She was rude. She wouldn’t let my mother have the appointments she wanted. She was deliberately trying to inconvenience her. And the reason? Because she was black.

I was transported once again, back to that birthday party, when bigotry came rushing at me like a ten-ton truck to run me over. Then, I was silent—the subject had been dropped. This time I wasn’t. “Mom,” I told her, voice shaking, “I know you think you’re the victim here, but I can honestly say that it probably didn’t matter one little bit what color that woman was. You were rude to her.”

The silence on the other end of the phone is a moment frozen in time for me. My mother’s bigotry was larger than she was. When she recovered her wits, we fought. We screamed at each other over the phone line; we said horrible things to each other. The upshot was that I told her I did not want her talking like this to my children, that I had not raised them with such ideas, then I told her I wouldn’t talk to her either, until she apologized for her bigoted statements.

That was the last time we spoke.

My mother died the following year. I did not know she had been sick. My family didn’t tell me until the day of her funeral; they thought I was being hard-headed, that I had thrown away my family for my principles. Perhaps I did. But there are some things I will not abide—and prejudice is on the top of that list. A family that promoted bigotry was not a family I wanted to belong to. My mother, and our relationship, was sacrificed for that belief.

Rosa Parks might have understood. There are just some lines you don’t cross, and some thoughts you can’t allow to be part of your life. I lost my mother; lost the chance to tell her one last time I loved her, (which I did, no matter how she felt,) lost the opportunity to show her that one could live without being bigoted. I was not a good example. I was hard-headed. But I stuck to my principles, and paid for them. It hurts, to this day.

But so does prejudice. It hurts us all. It hurts us more.

Thank you, Rosa Parks. Thank you for sacrificing your freedom so that the law could change. Thank you for being a decent person, standing up for your rights as a human being. Thank you for living a long time, and making us all aware, if nothing else, of what you did for us.

Rest in Peace at last.

Center: everywhere; Circumference: nowhere

I felt like creating something, so I’m building a miniature house with miniature furnishings made of balsa wood, fabric scraps and found objects. It began with a cardboard box turned on its side, it’s “walls” upholstered in burlap, with a wooden floor made from scrap wood from my basement. It has two windows, one with “glass” made of the plastic bubble from a package of screws. I have to find another package of the same dimensions now, to make the windows match.

The scent of hot glue permeates the atmosphere in my back room where bits and pieces from many junk drawers are messily left out on a card table; plastic craft bins and boxes are stacked on a shelf under the window. I put the internet radio station on, and go back there and waste hours at a time making my tiny upholstered armchair: gluing foam rubber to an L-shaped countertop support from Ikea, wrapping it in green silk, tufting the back with tiny little beads, finding the exactly-right-height “legs” from my collection of caps and beads.

It’s an obsessive hobby, exacting, absorbing work. I use small pliers, tweezers, toothpicks and straight pins to push and prod things into small spaces. I miter the corners of a balsa-wood picture frame around a Currier and Ives gift tag for a painting to hang on my little wall. I stick small silk flowers into clay to put into a petite terra-cotta flowerpot I found at the craft shop—a package of 6 for 79 cents—tie it around with a narrow red and green striped ribbon. My house has a Yule tree, yet undecorated. I will make tiny candy-canes out of wire and alternated red-and-white seed beads. I will hang garland made of silver and gold thread, use a plastic “jewel” in a star shape for the topper. There is a candle made of a spare bulb from a string of holiday lights—the little twinkly kind—sitting on a shelf above the small chair, and two “Indian vases” made of carved beads, and a miniscule wax pine tree “candle”. I found baskets that are no more than a quarter-inch across at the same craft shop where I found the little flowerpots. There will be a buffet table with a Yule feast, dishes and platters made of buttons and goblets made of clear push-pins with the points removed, turned upside-down. They look just like beer glasses. Food will be made as well: apples made of red beads, cheese made from a gum eraser, cut into chunks, grapes from the perfect round drops of hot glue that collect under the nozzle of my glue-gun in a small cluster, painted purple; maybe some sausage slices made from thinly sliced pencil erasers.

It is tempting to buy a whole lot of tiny little perfectly-reproduced miniatures, but there is something far more satisfying about making things yourself out of found objects. Soon, you find that you are looking at things in an entirely different way, and throwing out nothing. That scrap of sponge—it looks just like a swiss cheese, doesn’t it?—that origami paper would make great wallpaper—that pony bead only needs a tiny handle to become a coffee cup—that little cosmetic box could be a small dresser, or credenza. I paw through contents of toolboxes, and other places in the house—that basket by the telephone that collects everything I don’t know what else to do with, for instance—where I throw all those nagging miscellaneous objects. Windowsills which have been host to little found objects all year—stones, shells, tiny little bottles, interesting seed pods, jewelry bits—now get swept clean, and the objects brought to the back room and given new life as other, often surprising, things. All that unused drapery hardware makes good shelf brackets for wee shelves, or supports for furniture. Wooden pencils make columns, or door frames. Old placemats get cut up into pieces for shingles, or flooring. Knurled bolts make wonderful metal bowls, turned upside down and filled with colored beads. Bottle caps and jar lids make tabletops, tureens, soup pots. Paper clips in a row make a pretty little fence. Hairnets serve for lattice or trellis. white folder labels are fine as clapboard siding.

Once begun, a project like this overwhelms and overtakes your mind, and you find yourself expanding inward to a world smaller than yourself, but with infinite possibilities. You are god, goddess, creator, puppet master. You are builder, architect, designer, engineer. You are the center and the perimeter of your own universe. Your circumference is nowhere, your center is everywhere. The classic Giordano Bruno paradox come to life in your hands.

I will work this way until after Yule. Part of me wants to make these things as presents for others, but so much of me goes into their construction I find it hard to give them away later, and they perch around my house collecting dust. I remember sitting at the table for weeks in 1993, building a medieval Yule feast in a tiny wooden greenhouse, making a small fire-brazier, a tiny wire grill cover, flames from red fabric, an entire hutch and desk of scrap wood, complete with tiny knife and pencil; a plate of brownies was carved and cut from a boullion cube and glued to a button dish. It was an amazing piece when finished, and kept me from going insane at a time when my “real” life was too painful to actually live out. This year, there is no pain, no horror outside the miniature world I am creating; and my obligations always seem to be pressing on me, despite my obsession with my hobby. Yet, I can’t wait to get back to the spare room, to my glue gun, to my collected miscellany, my boxes of beads, sparklies, ribbons and scraps. I am soothed as the year ends, and caught in my own ever-expanding, ever-shrinking cosmos.

A Bookful of Dollars

I want to talk about writing. There are some things that have, in my great old age and wisdom, (chuckle) begun to irritate me beyond reason. One of them is the tendency of some popular writers to become very self-referential and egotistical.

I’m not suggesting that fame has done this to them; for all I know, they were egotistical prior to becoming famous. However, there is just something very annoying about the emergence of this self-absorption when you’ve gotten to like the style and substance of a particular writer. It jars the conscience, it grates on the senses. One particular writer who has begun to make me grit my teeth and cringe is Stephen King.

I started out as a fan, with the publication of Carrie, the first book published under his real name, and the first bestseller. I devoured each book as it came out after that one. I thought each one was great.

Between the publications of The Shining and The Dead Zone was one of King’s greatest and most amazing novels: The Stand. I read the original novel in 1978; it was about a “future” in the late 90’s, not really much different from the present, except that 3/4 of the population of the world would be eliminated by a ‘super flu’ virus, and the remainder of those left would have to duke it out in a major, final showdown of good and evil. Not only was the theme universal, the characters were well-delineated, superbly fleshed-out and downright unforgettable. The action was well-paced. The dialogue was realistic and believable. The book sparkled. But, (and I credit King himself for this particular metaphor) there was something that was like biting on tinfoil when I read it.

Okay, maybe I’m being picky. Maybe I’m just not entering into the spirit of the story. Maybe. Or maybe I just demand that my writers and those who edit their works give a serious consideration to the intelligence of their readers. Mr. King made a huge—huge—mistake in this book, upon which the plot rotates and depends, and which I could not overlook.

Mr. King made the whole plot turn on a chocolate thumbprint in a diary. Problem was, the person who left the thumbprint, was eating PayDay candy bars. As you and 99.9% of the universe knows, PayDay candy bars contain not one drop of chocolate. Now how did a mistake like this sneak past the editors? And why did the King actually write this blatant error? I don’t know. I can say without a doubt that it almost scuttled my enjoyment of this book when I came across this error. And what bothered me so much about this was that it was such an easy thing to fix—yet it went through three iterations before it was fixed, and when it was, it made me angry.

First came the paperback edition of the original book: in this edition, the PayDays were changed to Milky Ways. Well, I guess that’s one way to handle it, though the mistake was never acknowledged or annotated. I supposed I could live with the change, since the plot now made sense and operated correctly. But, then came the 1990 book—the “complete and uncut” edition. The story was “updated” to the present time--this updating would also include some things that did not exist in 1978 (felt-tip markers, computers)—and one of these was the Chocolate-covered PayDay candy bar. The original PayDay nut roll was now available with a chocolate coating, so, yes, all the Milky Ways were turned back into PayDays! It was an acknowledgement of the original mistake—and a slap to the readers of that original book, who had cringed at the original mistake. Think I’m being too sensitive? Maybe. Then again, maybe not.

There was something else wrong with this edition of The Stand that had nothing to do with the candy bar debacle. This edition was “expanded” to include all the dialogue and description that the original editor had excised. Yes, all that “extra” material was put back in. And all I could say about this once-sparkling piece of writing was: "YUCK!" The book was ruined!

There is a good reason for editors. They read your stuff objectively, and they cut the crap you write: the long, unnecessary dialogues, the overblown passages—all that stuff you don’t need. Just because you’re famous, does not mean you are perfect, and dammit—you don’t need to include all that extraneous mental debris! Sometimes you should just leave well enough alone, and give your readers some credit for being able to form mental pictures all on their own. Sometimes editors know what reads best. The Stand’s original editor was pretty good. Not much that had been removed actually needed to be left in.

Perhaps Mr. King thought that it was time we were “treated” to all the contents of his files, whether or not they were actually worth reading. I, for one, became angry that this bestselling author could do this (seemingly) only because he was a bestselling author! This was an opportunistic use of the Fame Card in my opinion.

But it did not stop there.

The next egotistical thing King did, however, was to bring out his novel The Green Mile in serial form. The Green Mile is a durn good story, sure. It’s well written, has good characterizations, and a plot that moves right along. So why did it need to be dragged out into a 6-part, (almost $3 apiece) pulp-serial paperback? I can’t think of any reason at all, unless King just wanted to see how far his readership would go, and how much money they would spend, in order to read his next bestselling book. In this case, he bet on the right horse—not only did readers buy, they also bought the NON-serialized book when it came out, AND the film of The Green Mile when it came out. All this said to me was that King could not lose, no matter how much ego he showed, and no matter how self-aggrandizing he got.

Okay, I got over it. I hated the serialization, and I only read parts 1 and 2 before giving up and waiting for the re-unified paperback (I didn’t have to wait very long—surprise surprise.) But that wasn’t the worst thing King did—the worst was Desperation and The Regulators. Gad—how much more arrogant can an author get? Not only had King used a pseudonym for his first three books (Richard Bachman--he even used a fake photo on the book jackets!) he also managed to weave the ”down side” of pseudonymous authorship into a novel (The Dark Half) as well as using and re-using the same characters in half a dozen or so other books and stories. When The Regulators and Desperation were simultaneously published in 1996, one was published as King’s novel, and the other—the same story told from a different character’s point of view—was published under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman! This time, I was incensed. Not only were King’s readers being courted for his next novel, but also for his altar ego’s! And the stories were NO DIFFERENT. Why sell just one book, when you can sell it twice and get away with it? Double the ego, double the profit!

This is where Mr. King and I parted company as author and fan. I didn’t find this “publishing dodge” amusing. I felt used and abused, over-manipulated, and that Mr. King did not really care about his readers at all. I have not bought a Stephen King novel since the publication of Desperation, and will not, though I have read some of them. None of them have even come close to the poignancy of ‘Salem’s Lot, the flawed but fascinating intricacy of The Stand, the icy-fingered terror of Cujo, or the writing excellence of Misery, Gerald’s Game, or Dolores Claiborne. In fact, if you put all of King’s works in one pile, these are the only ones I think that would stand out as being truly worthy pieces of writing. The rest are just ego on paper. The unfortunately mediocre output of a writer that didn’t have to be mediocre. And that, to me, is very sad.

Changes

Sometimes you just know when it’s time to do something about your life. Sometimes you have to read the signs.

I quit smoking 14 years ago. Last year, for reasons that are still completely inexplicable to me, I started again. I hadn’t missed smoking, in fact it was, after only 5 years being a quitter, as if I had never smoked at all. I didn’t crave cigarettes, didn’t like the way they smelled, didn’t miss the psychological “oral” pleasure they had given me before. My whole life changed to exclude cigarettes, and then, suddenly, I had to include them again. I didn’t even own an ashtray.
It made me angry that it was so easy to become just as addicted to tobacco as I had been before, but that didn’t make me stop. Neither did the threat of cancer, which I had 3 years ago and survived; the knowledge that I would be even more susceptible to the nasty effects of cigarettes didn’t scare me away. I started up again as if I had never stopped, and before I knew it, I was caught in tobacco’s web.

Until this weekend. Just as inexplicably, I knew it was time to quit. And I did. I feel no ill effects from the withdrawal, I don’t miss them, and I’m not even eating more…I just “knew” it was time to put them away, and so I have, again.

What drives these urges, anyway? What cycles force our desires like this? I just don’t know. I’m not willing right now to explore the deeper meanings of these events—I’m glad I am a non-smoker again, and that I can wake up without lighting up, and drive my car, or talk on the phone without the urge, also. It feels liberating. It feels normal. Smoking didn’t feel that way—and yet I did it for a year. Whatever psychic or subconscious machinations that are deep within my brain or soul will stay there, and stay there undisturbed. I’m back to my “real” self as a non-smoker, and relieved I am able to be so.

As if to mark the occasion of this mental shift, last weekend I ran into not one, but three old friends, and connections I had thought to be severed were renewed. The first was a person who told me my last communication had been “cryptic to the point of bitter.” It wasn’t true—not at all—but it startled me that it had seemed that way to him; I wondered how many others had seen it that way as well. The second meeting was joyous—a woman friend I had lost contact with and occasionally wondered about. I was thrilled to see she was happy, healthy and had the children she'd always wanted. The third was the most startling; an old flame, with whom my dealings had been incredibly intense, and which had been both the most satisfying relationship I’d ever had and, at the same time, the most frustrating. That one just threw me into a tailspin.

All summer long I've been seeing signs and portents and messengers in the form of eagles and hawks. They seemed to follow me wherever I went, on every road trip, at every turn. I kept my psychic ears and eyes open for the message they presaged, but until this weekend, I did not have a clue as to what it was. Now I know something is coming at last; something I won’t be able to ignore. There are definite changes in the air—the Wheel is beginning to turn again, and I can almost hear the gears creaking, feel the wind of its movement whistling in my hair. I’m not worried, I’m excited. I’m no longer stuck at the end of Summer, no longer sitting still while life washes over me…Change is palpable.

And today, for the first time in months, I saw the hawks again. This time I think I'm ready.

Stuck

Summer’s officially over as of today. I’m so glad. And yet…

…Every year about this time, I feel a deep lassitude creeping over me; I don’t want to do anything. I get a sluggishness during the last days of Summer; a lethargy, a weariness to be done with all the enforced fun of June, July and August, along with an apprehension about the end of the growing season. Put away the mowers, the grills, the weed-whackers, the garden hoses. Pull up the burnt-out annuals, rake up the mulch, turn the compost pile. Mark the spots where the summer bulbs lie, so they can be lifted at before the first freeze. Get rid of the pile of garden tools on the porch, and move them back to the basement. Yank up that brown cucumber vine, pick those last peppers and tomatoes, thin out those strawberry plants. Sweep the sidewalks. All this is yet to come, as I cannot do any of it right now. The sloth has penetrated too profoundly. I’m stuck.

I feel a boiling resentment toward retail merchants for allowing the warm wonderful Autumn-colored artifacts on their shelves to share space with the opulent reds and greens, golds and silvers of the distant Christmas holiday season. The bile rises in my throat as I try to admit both color families into my mind’s eye, and cannot; the two arrays clash and vie for attention equally, diminishing both. I find I can’t get energized about Autumn with the looming pressure of December’s holidays trying to divide my psyche—it’s too much color and too disparate. One is warm, the other chilled. One is wood-grain, leaf-mould, pumpkin and spice, the other is ice, glitter, crinkled shiny paper, sweet sugar icing. They don’t mesh and they don’t share—it’s like two warring mothers-in-law fighting over the same grandchild.

And all the color and growth in the front garden has begun to feel disproportionate and out-of-control. The alyssum, so petite, so frothy-white, has started to encroach on the sidewalk it is supposed to border; I must step over it to get to my front steps. The lemon grass, a tiny, compact little clump at the beginning of June, has now arched completely across my path and wets me with heavy dew every morning on my way to work, spoiling my clothes. The datura is still producing riots of huge yellow flowers, but the leaves are beginning to die off revealing stems in twisted haunted-house shapes, and testicle-shaped seed pods that hang from them. Like some grotesque group of flashers with huge bouquets in their arms, they dominate the front fence, but the blossoms have begun to turn their angelic faces away in embarrassment.

Morning glories that covered the porch-end with sweet purple and pink trumpets just a month ago, are now hanging yellow, bedraggled and thin, and have stopped blooming, almost infuriating me in their death throes, they are so hideous. They choked out my clematis, and now they droop on the lattice in revenge, dropping seeds into the ground so that next Spring I will be doing twice the work weeding them out. Sunflowers hunch over like whipped old men in ragged clothes. The zinnias are rusting on their tall stems, the celosia has bolted. It’s as if all the plants and flowers have bankrupted their energy in a rebellion of wild growth, overcompensation and ruinous, gluttonous excess. It makes me want to hack it all down with a machete. I find myself longing for the spareness and simplicity of bare branches, gray skies and winter wind.

And, as if to stem this raging tide of intemperance, the sun has begun to curtail its brightness. The days grow shorter. The morning light grows thinner. The nights are cooler, the skies are less luminously blue. It’s about time. Perhaps this languorousness will lift soon, and I can begin to cut things back, chop them down, dig them up and cover their roots; perhaps I can haul my summer accessories inside, clean and empty my mower, stow my tools. I need to swamp out my dusty, summer-muddled house. I need to sweep and wash and freshen, replace the greens and turquoises and magentas with ambers, golds, deep satisfying reds and toasty comforting browns.

This transition is short. Soon the color and passion of Autumn will give way and be replaced by first the holiday glitter, then the austerity of Winter, and there will again be an epoch to endure. After the Solstice, my impatience will begin to grow with the length of the daylight, until the grayness becomes irritating and I once again yearn for the tenderness of those first snowdrops, the first delicate blades of green grass pushing up through the brown, the first bright tulips and daffodils, bonnetlike blossoms nodding on gently-scented breezes, and the smells of a planet waking up from its long sleep. Until then, I’m stuck with this stopped clock, this molasses vitality that refuses to move, or do, or think, or plan. I can’t do anything yet.

I’m stuck.

The Revenge of the Anal Spider?

Okay, this is starting to resemble a soap opera. A badly-written soap opera.

After a week of speculative mourning for my little anal spider, whom I assumed had been eaten by the invading praying mantis, I got the shock of my life this morning when I checked the cedar bush outside our office. She was back! This time, she had built her web another 8 inches further left, and angled so as not to catch the breeze which is still blowing hundreds of puffs of thistledown everywhere. The spider looked satisfied, her web was clean; the unique angle kept the blowing thistledowns from sticking to it. What an engineer she is! My admiration knows no bounds.

And as if that were not enough, when I went out there at lunch, expecting to see the web full of thistle, I was in for another shocker. There was the mantis! She was slowly making her way over the bush, away from the web--and as I watched her slow progress through the branches, I noticed something else: she is missing half her right front arm! The spider hung onto the center of her web resolutely, and perhaps a bit smugly as the wounded mantis tried desperately to grab cedar sprigs with her non-existent front hand. One could almost see her grin.

I'm impressed. And I can't wait for the next installment.

A more appropriate god

I think we should dump our mythology, religion and our attachment to the god of the Christians, and take up a new god—one more appropriate to our mind-set in this country. The god I would like to propose is Janus.

Janus was the Roman god of gates and doors, and is most often represented by a two-headed man facing in opposite directions. He is celebrated as both the embodiment of birth and death, backwards and forwards, harvest and planting, etc. etc. etc. During times of war, the door to his temple was open and invited all in to take comfort. In times of peace, it was closed, presumably because one did not need comfort and succor. In other words, he’s the perfect representation of our hypocritical culture.

When did we become such an ambiguous people? And why?

When I was growing up, (back in medieval times,) there was pretty much one direction your life should take: that of progress onwards and upwards. If you were poor, you wanted to be rich, if you were young, you wanted to be older. There was no benefit in being a child. Children had no rights, no responsibilities, no power. Those things were granted to adults, who were, presumably, going to act in your best interests by caring for you, seeing to it that you were fed, clothed, housed and educated. When you gained experience and years, and had made all your mistakes, you were granted these things as well, to pass along to your own children. So the progress was made, and the evolution of the species ensured. We were on a track that was headed into a future that would be better because every generation was going to be learning from the errors of the previous generations, and improving the odds of survival, adding to the collective intelligence, and health, and refining the civilization.

Yet somewhere, somehow, we stepped off this track and became hypocritical, two-faced, and the direction was lost.

Why is it okay for us to watch TV shows like “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and “Will and Grace”, but it’s not okay to be gay? Why do we cluck our tongues at unwed high-school girls who get pregnant, but we think it’s okay for film stars to have babies out of wedlock? How can we listen to rap and hip-hop, yet it’s somehow not all right to actually be black? How can we reject “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” but accept “weapons of mass destruction?” Why do we constantly complain about overweight Americans, but continue to buy and eat “The Ultimate Omelette Sandwich?” Why do we protest abortions, but refuse to provide for the homeless, the abused and the orphaned? How can we justify equal pay for equal work, still pay women two-thirds of what we pay men? How can we preach Christian words, but wage war and promote prejudice against those who are not Christian? Why do we pour trillions of dollars into the military-industrial complex, and neglect basic human needs?

What’s the problem with us? What happened to our ideals? Our focus? Our desire to live in a better, more civilized world?

During WWII, we waged war against an “evil” empire, who had taken it upon themselves to exterminate an entire ethnic population. Yet to end that war, we exterminated an entire ethnic population. We dropped a bomb on Hiroshima, on completely innocent civilians, wiping out the city. We didn’t see the dichotomy.

We didn’t see the irony. We didn’t see the hypocrisy. We still don’t. It set a precedent.

George Orwell was a prophet. This isn’t much disputed, even now. But his identification of the phenomena of “doublespeak” and “doublethink” are more poignant now than ever. “Peacekeeper Missiles.” “Operation Infinite Justice.” “War against Terrorism.” “Patriot Act.” “Homeland Security.”

From a White House press conference, October 2003:
“THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, it's a one-time expenditure, as you know. And, secondly, because a secure, a peaceful and free Iraq is essential to the security, the future security of America.
The first step was to remove Saddam Hussein because he was a threat, a gathering threat, as I think I put it. And, secondly, is to make sure that, in the aftermath of removing Saddam Hussein, that we have a free and peaceful country in the midst of a very troubled region. It's an historic opportunity. And I will continue to make that case to the American people. It's a chance to secure -- have a more secure future for our children. It's essential we get it right. “

From a BBC News report, July 19, 2005:
Nearly 25,000 civilians have died violently in Iraq since the US-led invasion in March 2003, a report says. The dossier, based on media reports, says US-led forces were responsible for more than a third of the deaths. The survey was carried out by the UK-based Iraq Body Count and Oxford Research Group - which includes academics and peace activists.

So goes “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” So goes our future. Onward and upward into the furthest reaches of hypocrisy. Janus bless us.

The Anal Spider, R.I.P

Nature can be so cruel. At least, we think She is cruel. What she really is, is efficient. It's very nearly the same thing.

My little hard-working, anal spider, who tried so hard to keep her ill-placed web clean of debris, has become breakfast for the praying mantis she failed to take note of when she moved in. Oh, the humani--er--spideranity! I found the mantis this morning, looking very self-satisfied, directly under the tattered remnants of the spider's last web. The spider was nowhere to be seen. I assume the worst. Mantises only go where they can eat, and that poor spider was a sitting duck--er--arachnid.

I feel bad. I was hoping she'd find a nice little thistledown-free nook near her original location, and be able to spin her web once more and start catching insects and lay eggs, and *sniffle* raise some kiddies....
... but it was not to be. Ma Nature has decreed that everything is eventually a meal for something else, and my poor little spider was designated as food for the mantis instead of being one of the lucky ones who gets to breed and continue. As much as it saddens us sometimes, it is the circle of life in high relief; sort of like watching a beautiful gazelle brought down by an equally beautiful cheetah on the Discovery Channel. You don't know who to cheer for. The cycle can only continue when everyone is fed.

The Anal Spider, Part II

Chapter two in the saga of the anal spider.

Remember how I told you she had rebuilt her web, all clean and nice again? Well, it got clogged up with thistledown again. Oh, she tried her best to keep it clean and free of the thistle seeds--she really did--but she ultimately lost the battle. You should see the muscles this spider has developed from all the picking and weaving she's been doing. She looks like Schwarzenegger with eight legs.

So for a day or two, she picked them out, dropped them down beneath the web and wove and re-wove the strands. The bush underneath her web has amassed quite a pile of the little white seed puffs. Of course, they're everywhere, but beneath the web but they are also stuck together with little pieces of tattered web, forming a sticky clump.

This morning when I checked on her, I saw that the web was gone again. I could practically hear her little slippered feet stomping away in frustration as she muttered 'Mother Nature--what a slob!'

And just an hour ago, I went out there again, and--yep--the web is back. But it's been moved.
This is one smart spider, I thought.

She'd moved her web over about two feet to the left. The bushes beneath it are free of wind-blown thistle down--it's practically the only place in the garden that is free of the stuff. And she found it. She rebuilt the web, and perched herself in the center, and is now eagerly awaiting the arrival of unsuspecting bugs so she can make herself some well-earned dinner and get those eggs laid.

Only one problem: she failed to notice the huge praying mantis on the bush next door.

Ads of the Week

Here are a couple ads I found amusing. The first one could be a concise summary of the Hurricane Katrina efforts, and the second was just a paean to bad sentence construction.

The Anal Spider

Last week I noticed a large, precisely-woven orb web with an unusual spider between two shrubs outside my office. The spider was interestingly colored, not a variety I'd seen before. I watched her sitting in the center of the web, and wished I could see her move, so I picked a piece of the cedar shrub and tossed it into the web. Well, she moved. She moved fast, and rather petulantly, and immediately went over to the little sprig of cedar and began dismantling the web around it. She then picked up the sprig, which was larger than she was, and rather annoyingly dropped it onto the ground below the web, and then went back to her perch, as if to say, "Sheesh! You build a web, and someone has to mess it up!" Just her attitude and her actions made me think of an irritated clean-freak, with a touch of OCD. I was rather abashed. I felt bad that I had messed up her web, and self-consciously apologized to her for it. I think she actually crossed her arms and gave me a "look".

We also have a large thistle growing near this web. It's blooming and thistledown is everywhere. Later that afternoon, I noticed that the spider web had more than a few of those little puffy thistle seeds (you know the kind--they look like the things you blow off of a dandelion head) caught in its threads. The spider had attempted to pick them out of her web, each time, dismantling more and more of the orb web in the process. I felt rather sorry for her. She obviously wanted a pristine house, and was losing the battle. This thistle is making so many of the seed puffs that it's almost impossible to go into our front office door without disturbing them--like walking through powdery snowdrifts. The poor anal spider had her work cut out for her.

The next day, the web was gone. Only a strand or two remained. She had given up and lost the fight to keep her house clean. So I thought. I didn't see any more of her until this Monday when I came to work and found that she had built a new web, in the same place, all clean and precise just like before. She looked satisfied and smug as she sat in the center of her nice, new, clean web. This time she would win the battle. Before the afternoon was out, however, the thistle seeds were back, and covered the web again. You could just see her shoulders slump, her head hang a little lower, and a tiny tear form in the corner of her compound eye.

But a couple hours later, the web was clean again. Never underestimate the power of the female need to be tidy.

The Mutant Gardener

I love gardening. I have an extensive herb garden, and lots of flowers, mostly in the front of my house. I guess you’d say I have a green thumb. This year, I concentrated mostly on flowers that I planted with an eye toward the various color combinations and the seasons they bloom, so that I always had something blooming; but as every gardener will tell you, sometimes things grow you didn’t plant, and sometimes things happen to those plants that you didn’t expect.

This year, one of my black-eyed susan daisies grew a quadruple center. At left are a couple photos of this phenomenon. It was as if four flowers grew on one stem, and bloomed, and four cone-shaped centers grew together with their petals all squashed into the spaces between. It was pretty strange and sort of ugly. And, it got me thinking about ugly flowers, so naturally, I had to do a web-surf to see if there was a website devoted to the ugliest of the worlds flowers. And of course there is. (There’s a lot of them, in fact.)

In my web travels I found what has got to be the world’s ugliest blossom.
It’s called aristolochia gigantea. The genus aristolochia has some of the most bizarre flowers ever grown on this planet, and none of them are very pretty. They all look like some mutant afterbirth, or some horrid alien being.


Pretty hideous eh? Not only are they ugly, they smell foul. Like carrion. Makes my little four-centered daisy look positively enchanting.

Take a look at this variety (right):
This one is called aristolochia fimbriata.

The gigantea, though, has to be the worst of the worst. I found several pictures of it.

Here is another one, if you even start to think that it isn’t too bad:

This is what the poor thing looks like just before the blossom opens. This “bud” looks like some kind of strange internal organ. And these things are huge! They’re about a foot across.

So--hideously ugly, stinky and too big to hide. What more could a Mutant Gardener want? Well, how about a flower that looks like it’s dripping snot? Yeah. I’d want one of these. This one is called aristolochia grandiflora, though I fail to see what is so grand about it.

This genus has the most hideous blooms I’ve ever seen. It’s amazing what you can find in this world.

It's Sunday

This is me. Taken about a year ago. The face is still the same, but the hair is darker now. I change my hair color and "do" all the time; I get sick of one look very quickly. Urban camouflage.

Worked a concert last night. The performers were The Weepies and Melanie. I'd never heard The Weepies before, and they were really great. Melanie, on the other hand, didn't show up on time, got pissed because there was no honey for her tea, and has lost most of the appeal she used to have. Ah well. She drew a decent crowd at our little theater--so far, the biggest concert we've done since August. When I got home, my knees were about ready to combust spontaneously. They really hurt, but 4 aspirin let me get to sleep.
Don't ever think arthritis isn't a nasty disease--it can make you cry.

*******
Seasonal musing: it's nearly the Fall Equinox, or as I call it, Mabon--the second-to-last holiday in the year. My year goes from November 1 to October 31 and has eight major holidays as follows:

• Samhain: (Hallowe'en to the rest of the world) the New year and Year's End at the same time. You honor and feed the dead who went before, and you pack it in for the long winter ahead.
• Yule: (that's the Winter Solstice, not Christmas). The celebration of the sun's return to longer days and shorter nights, even though you can't see it quite yet.
• Imbolc: (midwinter for us) a celebration of light and contemplation, and renewal, and getting ready for the spring coming ahead.
• Ostara: (Spring Equinox) the "official" return of Spring.
• Beltane: (May Day) the time of planting and growing and celebration of fertility.
• Litha: (Summer Solstice) Midsummer originally, but actually the time when the days begin to grow shorter.
• Lughnasadh: (pronounced LOO nuh say) the first harvest festival, and a time to celebrate all the hard work you've done all spring and summer.
• Mabon: (The end of the growing year) A thanksgiving and reaping time, when you get ready for the end of the year by feasting.

Here's a wheel of the year that illustrates the whole cycle

New to the Blog Biz

Howdy. I'm a bit new to this, so bear with me.


I got into the idea of a blog through joining a CD club; where 12 people get together on the net and exchange a CD every month. Each person is assigned a month to put together a mix CD of their choosing, and they mail it to the other eleven members of the club.

The idea of a CD Club appealed to me immediately. How cool--to put together a mix with your own tastes and music that means something to you, and have others listen, share and comment on it, seemed like a great idea. I think it will be a great way to learn about different people, and the CD will be a great surprise.

As for this blog, I'll get into the writing part as I go along, but for now, I'll just post this and see what happens.