Thursday, September 30, 2010

The Human Factor

I believe humans are causing climate change. In fact, I feel personally responsible for tipping the balance of the planet.

I stumbled into Spa World after three hours in traffic, using my Groupon before it expired. Scrubbed, rubbed, sluiced, pounded, jetted, steamed. Dozed. Surreal. Drove home at 1 a.m. in feet of rain sheeting and obscuring every line on the road on I-66.

Have a new computer. Catching up.

The last of my area family has moved to Maui. More than half of them are there now, including a cat and several dogs. I want to eat sushi and scrambled eggs in Paia.

While brushing teeth, before falling asleep, reading this. Had no idea so many giant freakin cargo ships simply vanish every year. I did know, however, that Laird Hamilton is a god among men.

My recurring nightmares are of waves eroding the beach where I'm trying to run.

Busy as fuck. Trying not to spill over.

Photo: Hot damn, on top of everything else, Susan Casey is gorgeous.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Witch, Please.

Here we've got a superpower Mabon moon and we're talking about this Christine O'Donnell trash? This pretty much says it all, but of course I've got a thing or two to add.

OK, dear, witches aren't Satanists, for the most part, and Satanists aren't nearly as common in real life as they are in right-wing delusions. They aren't trying to recruit you or get you to do anything on their altars, from have a picnic to give up your second--or is it third or fourth--virginity. As much as you might long and wish and desire it, no real witch is going to try to overcome your reason and send you into a swoon you can't resist until you are one of us, one of us, in some bizarrely half-assed sublimated fantasy. I'm not going to come twinkling through your window. I don't twinkle, don't give the hard sell, and barely even say hello to anyone without enthusiastic consent.

Real witches don't recruit, unlike those odd Gothy kids down the road by the meth trailer you probably "dabbled" with, if that's what the kids are calling it today. They aren't really witches. They're just disenfranchised alienated jobless people who, if you were a decent politician, you'd be trying to make a better world for. A real witch group is at least as hard to get into as it is to convert to Judaism or Catholicism. It takes some work.

Real witches can be kind of grumpy and solitary and enjoy their own company and a few friends. I know it's a little harsh, Christine, but we're just not that interested in you. Sorry.

We are interested in civil rights, however, so I guess that means we'll have to deal with your crap til someone gives you a Forever 21 gift card and you get distracted and lose interest in politics.

I was actually pissed that Bill Maher kept giving her airtime, but he's a sucker for attractive wackjobs, and I can't really blame him. It didn't surprise me that Sarah Palin got behind her, because she's such a spooky little narcissist that she'd have to fall in love with her clone. Cloned right down to spending the money misguided people donated to her campaign, trusting she'd use it to try to get things done that they wanted, on any shiny thing that she wants right now, right now, because she deserves it, gosh golly darnit!!!

Photo: Loved this, and Donovan, when I was little. Jimmy Page on Sunshine Superman guitar. Season of the Witch was closing credits on To Die For, about yet another evil pretty bubblehead.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

"It Really Ties the Room Together."

I'm late to this, and really, haven't even had time to see the episode, but I read about it, if that counts.

13 Ways of Looking at Sasha Grey's Grooming

I. She says she chose her porn name after Picture of Dorian Gray. Any woman who loves Wilde can wear her hair any damn way she pleases.

II. Benjamin Franklin had wise words about loving older women, topped off with the statement "All cats are gray after dark."





III. In another life under another name in the '90s, someone like me might have spent an interview with filmmaker Vincent Gallo discussing "'70s bush" as well as his conceptual art project, leaving a plaster cast of his not inconsiderable penis in every state in our great nation. He was ahead of his time.

IV. The hair on my head went gray at around age 20, almost 29 years ago.

V. Those who object to utterly bare under the argument that it makes them feel like a they're with someone illegal don't really have much of an argument. I mean, they're welcome to their tastes, but isn't there any other way to gauge the maturity of the person you're close to? Conversation always works for me.

VI. Having said that, one of the funniest lines in The Sopranos was spoken by a guy released from prison, who grumbled that all the women now "look like Girl Scouts."

VII. Those who vehemently object to hair under the argument that it disgusts them aren't even worth writing about. Especially those who do it via Twitter. Good god.

VIII. A friend was over the other night after breaking up with someone. She found him entirely too judgmental and snobbish. (I agreed.) She said: "He's so ready to find fault with everyone else, but HE really needs to get his BACK WAXED!"

IX. I would never say that. I like hairy guys. Who are clean.

X. When it comes to women, I refer to the highly apocryphal parable of Lancelot.

XI. Oct. 16 is Oscar Wilde's birthday. I think he would have liked Sasha Grey.

XII. She sure is pretty.

XIII. Distance runners are well served by a landing strip.

Photo: Looks like Bacon! But it's NOT! The artist's name is Nick Harris.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Shamanic Shambolic Shamwow (Plus Poetry Challenge!)

I've been attending a shamanic group that I'm enjoying a lot. I went in because I was interested in adding more of a healing dimension to the kitchen witchery (eclectic solitary urban pagan) stuff I do all the time. Side effect has been getting several poems out of the gatherings. (The guy who leads it does pretty amazing healing massage as his "real work"--if you're someone who knows me and you want contact info, ask me via email.)

One thing one's encouraged to do in the dream journeying is to ask for a gift, something I find very difficult to do. The dream journey on Friday, I ended up in a big old farmhouse kitchen and I got a gift without even asking, something very simple. I gave myself 10 minutes to write a pseudo metaphysical riddle poem about it. If you guess what it is, you could write a pseudo metaphysical riddle poem about what you'd like for a reward.

Reward

The root that reaches to Pluto's realm
Pulls in his riches, gold, copper, and bone,
And presses to share in the properties of stone.
Seeking its sweetness, my hand probes,
Pulls, encloses it in warmth, cleans
Until it softens, shrinks away.
I have work to finish. Now it
Bobs before my obdurate plodding as
My promised reward. Hold me to it.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

"Let's Go Someplace Darker."


X. The Wheel

This Must Be the Place


You were gifted with the vision
Of the clockwork, which,
Being a scientist, you saw as
Gears, but more than gears, a
Sprung spiral. Two ticks in an ascending
Key, and a dip. And another turn.
And remember, it never goes back.

I'll surrender you the sword
If you give me the Sphinx:
I can track the descendants
Down, unwind four seasons, then 16,
Then 32, turn the number inside out
And learn its secret thus. I see us

Kneeling on marble, stumbling on sawdust,
Padding over moss, swinging from gallows,
Dancing on grain, marching through sand,
Sleeping on leaves, sinking in mud.
Cathars, killed and ill-sorted,
Burned with our books;
My fingers, once fine, scrabbling in
The blighted vines;
The fine-featured carpenter who has outlived
And grieved for three wives, and still without a daughter;
Spies, yes--(as we investigate the impossible)
It is impossible that we
Were never spies, and thieves, those, too.

In all these ups and downs, well,
There's enough pleasure to make it worth the strain.
I remember times I was on my knees for you;
Even these, I would never deny or erase.
And then--here's another--you tracing
The shape of my eyes on a stone.
Another turn, another turn.

My daughter had a dream the other night in which, she said, she was a little curly-haired girl, and a nice police officer was showing her a view of the ocean, saying: That's Atlantis. I asked her if she saw Atlantis being covered by the water, and she said she hadn't been paying attention in the dream, so she only saw it afterward. We talked about reincarnation, and I told her that some people I know who believe in it say they remember their lives, but they all seem to want to be very fancy people, and that there had to be some ordinary people in our past to remember, shouldn't there be? She agreed.

I have a few I remember, but I'm also wide open to the thought that these may be archetypes useful for me creatively and psychologically. No matter what the truth is, that's how they get used, so there's not a lot of value to me in trying to determine the truth. As in most things, I'm primarily interested in how it plays.

Friday, September 3, 2010

Smile and Wave. It's What You're Paid For.

I get paid to write for these companies that are full of people so much smarter than me, so they must know. They all want web sites with pictures like this:


Even though we know the majority of those wearing headsets, forgive me, don't look like those three. And they all want me to say they "deliver value."

I was walking my daughter to school this morning, and I saw a cement mixer go down the avenue, and it was a nice, dirty, hard-working cement mixer, and big letters on the side of the mixer read: DELIVERING VALUE.

So I am a miserable woman for 3/5ths of my life, and a lot of people would like me to be a lot more miserable, and part of the misery is knowing that old lady writers like me are a dime a dozen in DC, and anyone else could take my job. Here's a taste.



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Yes, it is true.

We are dying and our planet is dying while we dick around with this. And we includes me. Why did we design things this way again?

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