Been there done it, HorrorDays style

I have had the requisite
• Day of cooking until I hurt myself and limped around all the next day
• Perfect turkey sandwich
• Turkey tetrazinni casserole, as good or better than, Mom’s
• So much stuffing that I had to freeze a quart
• Fully satisfactory amount of creamed onions
• Disturbing encounter with someone I care about resulting in emotional and physical injury. Which is different than it sounds... I have a kinked neck from the stress
• Drunken Friday night out with the girls bitch session
• Dinner with the neighbors, slipping away after pie
• New cooking secret discovery. Cranberries taste better with booze in them.
• Making of the best gravy of my career
• Procrastination about homework
• First shoveling of snow
• Not taking the tent awning down in time before wet, heavy, snow killed it
• HorrorDay blog entry

AM earworms

Rhinestone Cowboy - Who is that? I think that would be Glen Campbell.

Don't laugh too hard. I actually bought Witchita Lineman a year or so back just for the title song and The Dream Of The Everyday Housewife. If you need to blame someone blame my brother. You should have seen him in his Glen Campbell side bangs in fifth grade.

AM Earworms

Everybody Hurts - R.E.M.
Limbo Rock - Chubby Checker?

I think this has to do with the fact that if I stay in bed more than about six and a half hours my back starts to freak. Last night I passed out early and for the first time in a year or so slept about nine hours. Granted I woke up 4 or 5 times, but I actually got something resembling real sleep for the first time in ages. I wanted to do a sleep study about the whole, I always wake up four to ten times a night thing, but they made no provisions for smokers, and then wanted to do a twenty four hour study. Because freaking out on not smoking won’t affect my sleep patterns or physiology at all.
PS They wouldn’t even talk to me in a rational, reasonable, way about trying to find a work-around.

What’s up with WA?

I know my friend Barfy reads me from there, but what is with the Seattle, Tacoma, Bellingham, Snohomish and one or two others showing up recently?

AM earworms

Yesterday
Gilbert & Sullivan, petty sure from H.M.S. Pinafore, the one about the sisters and the cousins and the aunts.

Today
Something classical, I could never tell you it’s name. Now it’s Peter And The Wolf battling it out with the Psychomnia theme. What am I, the lowest of the highbrows?

Finally

Something to care about. Psychomania will be on at midnite. I could watch that a thousand, million times.

“and after all, we’re all just ordinary men”

I am normally a person who is very much caught up in an “us and them” struggle. I come quite easily to hate and “despision”. Even when I was much, much, younger and really committed to changing my paradigms I was only able to sublimate my fear and hatred, not cut it by much, and certainly not eliminate or to use the more fitting terminology, cure, it. I am so, still, not cured. However, this new job, has provided me with an un-looked for, surprising, opportunity, at a time when us and them rhetoric is so bitter and pervasive, to get a better understanding of where that dichotomy falls flat in my own psyche.

You see, the gentleman that I work for is a dyed-in-the-wool, old school, white, southern, (possibly Baptist), racist. He’s a Mason and a misogynist. In short, a possessor of oh, so many, of the qualities that exemplifies “them” to me. He barely reads, he’s crabby, picky, demanding, and so very all knowing, with no hesitation in saying whatever shitty, peckerwood thing pops into his head.

But here’s the weird, crazy, and I guess I have to think, great, teaching to me. Not only do I find him lovable but I want to make sure he feels loved and cared for. He is old, he is sick, and life is slipping away from him, while he is simultaneously watching his wife of about sixty five years disappear as she keeps wandering farther and farther down dementia highway.

I now have the perspective that most of “them” is just a whole bunch more of these folks. Life is hard, and they are scared, tired, and baffled that they did just what they were told to, yet things just didn’t turn out at all peachy, or rosy. They did, and do, the best they are/were able, or else they would do/have done better.

I suppose that feeling so threatened by the “thems” is a feeling of looming, oppression by the weight of their historical dominance. The childhood hurt of always being the other. The anger at being churched against my will. Being stared at, talked about, ostracized, it all builds up like keloids. I will keep (at least) trying to calm and cut that hatred.

I will though, reserve the right to feel completely alienated from, angry with, and diametrically opposed to the other them. That cabal of black magicians whose God is the actual mammon, and who have clearly shown that they will throw anyone or anything into the pit to remain our owners.

Fuck you guys. You are the aliens. And I will always fight you in some form, as someone very much wiser than me says, “just because you’re a Buddhist doesn’t mean you have to be a doormat”.

Downed a peg

I have had to rethink my opinion of myself as somewhat expert on cats. I am now baffled and befuddled because I have never had indoor cats before. My young male is driving me and my little girl (cat) batshit. He is SO aggressive. And so mischievous, and so unrepentant, and so becoming an ankle biter, and so into everything he should not be. And I am SO turning into a total bitch and making widespread misery.

A few weeks ago I found myself truly, screaming at the top of my lungs at him and Oliver had to stop me spraying him with window washer because I couldn’t find the water spray before disaster seemed imminent.

To be fair, it’s only when he’s awake that it’s such a problem....

So there, I’m square

I take some solace in the fact that a certain local journalist who is all up in the hipster scene and therefore thought they could easily transition to blogger hasn’t posted since the first week of August. I appear to have only slacked completely for a couple weeks at a time at worst.

AM Earworm

To Sir With Love - Lulu
After wiki-ing Lulu, it turns out that she appears to be kinda stupid and fairly crazy. Is this what getting the OBE does to people?

Bus ride blogging

I think I have figured out why I have been a complete wreck, for months, about this election. I’m thinking it has taken the weight of the oppression beginning to lift off to get some clear vision about it.

Call me paranoid or cynical or even nihilistic (the latter of which I would aver strongly) but I have been living under the apprehension and conviction that at any moment, jackbooted thugs (or as Nigel points out, innocuous looking, civilian dressed, death squads) could potentially come kicking my door down and I could just “disappear” merely for thought crimes, for just being who I am.

One might think that perhaps I shouldn’t read books like “1984” or “The Handmaids Tale” or magazines like “The Objectivist” because apparently, even more so than when I saw “Night Of The Living Dead” unedited, at night, at a theatre when I was 10 or 11, and then had nightmares about it for like, 15 years, these socially apocalyptic books apparently have infiltrated my thought stream on the very subtlest of levels and work around in my gizzards when I don’t even realize they are festering so deeply.

In my pamphlet I’ve been working on, about proverbs and lies, one of the first lies I wrote down was “people don’t just disappear”. Because they do, indeed, just disappear ALL THE TIME. It just happens a lot less here than in say, Brazil or Darfur or China. And I think the likelihood of it happening here was increasing every year that the warlock/criminals calling themselves Republicans were in power. Another lie which Frank Zappa reminded us not to believe was “it can’t happen here”.
So, I really hope that with all the flowers and unicorns and sunshine everyone is grooving on (which I don’t blame anyone, it does feel really good at the moment), that we all brace ourselves to do the work, to try to accomplish what needs to be done to try and make this a country where at least it happens here less often.

Oh Man

I feel like I can breathe for the first time in 8 years......