can’t resist…
Just one or two more listens to Up On The Sun. Not too much more/too much more… It is such a paradox, the sweetness of that song and the abrasive, ugly things Curt Kirkwood says that I also find so funny and honest. I am too tired to write about the trickster who appears across cultures and times and literatures and indigenous’ peoples’ belief that the trickster is important you cannot access the divine without laughter and embrace of paradox the trickster character provides. I was studying it for our April 1 programs at work… maybe later I’ll have something to say about it, but for now I can only offer the transcendant lyrics of Meat Puppets songs along side Curt Kirkwood’s assertion that life is a pile of shit and he’s here to put frosting on it.
I wish I could put the song on constant play, but I don’t know how and don’t have time to find out.
Maybe we have something to talk about…
I have six little moonflower seedlings in big pots downstairs. They’re destined for the northwest fence in my back yard, if they’ll ’make’ there. I haven’t had moonflowers in years. I hoarded some seeds many years ago, either from my mom or some very dear elderly friends, and planted them at my little shack down in the holler. But my boyfriend’s fat silver doberman dug up and ate the precious seeds and spent days after hallucinating on the couch. Who knew dogs could have drug problems? Needless to say I am tickled, tickled to finally be headed back in the moonflower direction. I have no fat silver hallucinogen-seeking doberman, and I think my dogs’ drug addictions are limited to chocolate and whatever’s fermenting in the compost pile or kitchen garbage can.
That two weeks each spring when I am actually thrilled that I live here in Alabama has stretched out for several weeks already. I got my grocery shopping done at lunch. I got the really ugly patches of my yard mowed after work, before the rain. I have a book club meeting at my house tomorrow. Shaky baby is snoring on the floor because she had such a big day today. I didn’t get to read to her, but I did yoga with her AND read to her last night, and I need the mommy time.
My Curt Kirkwood-looking husband is in California for his grandma’s funeral, so shaky baby spent the day with a wonderful friend of mine so I could work. I didn’t even have to take any time off. I’ve been giving, giving, giving lately, feeling very depleted/hard done by, and even though I paid my friend, I still feel like she pampered and nutured me– she picked up my baby at the library, brought her back to me shortly before quitting time, said so many nice things… Shaky baby appeared to have had a wonderful day– outside constantly wedged with her friends into the teeny tiny baby pool or playing at the water table, providing a bridge between the two boys, ages three and six. My friend said good things about the day, and sent me home with dinner. I’m not sure if the dozen or so insanely delicious falafel I ate were vegan, but I know the chocolate chip cookies I made this morning are, so that balances out, right?
I have two friends who really know how to mother girls. I mean, it’s not that I’m not feminine. I am, at least in many, many ways that matter. I am a feeler and a perceiver and very sensitive to others’ moods and prone to try to see both sides as best I can. I cry about really good, and sometimes even about really tacky, literary or cinematic emotional situations. I sometimes find upsetting situations hilariously absurd, and can’t stop myself from giggling, which pisses my husband off no end. I know how to love babies, at least other people’s babies, now that I’m no longer in the throes of lost sleep or soaked in breastmilk and spitup with my own any more, I really, really do know how. I have the magic touch, I swear, and babies give me so much joy. If those things aren’t feminine, I don’t know what is.
But I’m sort of, well, girly impaired. I’m a hippie. I don’t even wear makeup, although I’d like to, but I’m such a snob I’m waiting til I can afford vegan cruelty free expensive stuff. I am too tight and too busy to go look for girly clothes for work. I absolutely cannot, cannot accessorize. I wear a ton of rings, and a particular necklace that is very, very precious to me, but pearls? Scarves? Forget it.
I can’t remember the last time I purchased perfume, probably ten years ago. I finally, FINALLY got me some wonderful hippie smelling shampoo and deodorant from Lush… smelling good is so important, but I have just bypassed it for so long. I hope I don’t stink, I do strive to be hygienic… but smelling good (well, good to me, hippie good, or Clinique Aromatics good)– no brainspace for that, lately. I used to pride myself on it.
My other closest girlfriend C is a TOTAL hippie. That’s why I like her so much. She wears no makeup, never smells of anything whatsoever except maybe baby wash, wears a dorag on her head like a Swiss Miss or a Mammy, has prominent tattoos, says what she thinks, is very difficult to piss off (which isn’t to say she isn’t nurturing, sensitive or anxious, because she is as much so as any of us, perhaps more) and she is totally no nonsense, and it is so relaxing and freeing.
I have to add here that we’re all more or less hippies in my set– extended breast feeders (at least a year if not longer), cosleepers, organic food buyers, attachment parenters… so it’s just degrees of hippie, not whether we are or not. 
H, the hippie friend who kept shaky baby today, always sends her home with her hair done in such a girly way. She looks like a different child– a little girl. She said to me, do I look seven? That comes from when I told her her Easter dress looked older, and she said, you mean, seven? So now I guess seven is the pinnacle of ladyship to her.
I do her hair, too, but I either jam a stylin’ hat on her curly mop head, do two (or more) spiky pigtails that look zany rather than girly– and that truly fits a pretty substantial side of her personality– or I do the southern smock and monogram pull to the side with a fat cloth bow. I’m pretty utilitarian, a one or two trick pony. I hate it that she prefers dresses… I put her in these Prince or Adam Ant or Liberace or Nancy Griffith-esque, late eighties-early nineties 18thC or froufrou military or psychedelic clothes that seem to demand those stylin’ hats or zany spiky pony tails. My friend just pulls shaky baby’s ponytail back a different way, and she looks… just like a little girl.
My other friend K got shaky baby truly girly stuff for her birthday– a tea set, a tiny cubic zirconia and sterling butterfly necklace, little Chinese stamps for her scrapbooking. This is the same friend who remembers hostess gifts, thank you notes, all the sweet little things.
My husband and I got shaky baby an automated baseball batting practice machine.
Both these particular girlfriends put on their makeup every day and look so lovely. I just don’t know how to do that!
I finally see the effects of age in my face… or I finally admit it to myself. I see where a little facelift would come in right handy. Wouldn’t it be better to get it now, instead of waiting til later when it was real bad? I think losing 30 pounds or so has contributed to the breakdown of my facial flesh… I’m sure it wasn’t hard living or stress or actual chronological years. It sure would be nice to have my high smooth cheekbone look back. Wonder what that would cost?? Is there any truly vegan, cruelty free product that will push and plump the crepey flesh back up? How much time would I have to spend with my legs in the air (yoga! duh!) to remedy this? Probably the next hundred years. I was looking over a slideshow today of 5 hair makeup and clothing makeovers that ’took years off’ the subjects’ look. H’mmm…
One of my glamorous girlfriends is slightly older and one is slightly younger, and they both look lovely all the time. So I know, at the bottom of it, it isn’t about age at all. Now that I’m pushing forty I’m just going to have to sit at their feet and learn.
If you see it closer then the finer points will show…
Not too much more/Too much more…
Eat Pray Love and Penn and Teller’s Bullshit
eat pray love and penn and teller’s bullshit
I can’t believe I didn’t have a religion category for this blog before now. Crazy! I think about religion, and pray, all the time. What the hell, how did I avoid giving it a tag here all these two years I’ve been doing this blog?
Tell me spirit, what has not been done? I’ll rush out and do it… or are we doin’ it now? I’m so behind on my contemporary independent music. But this My Morning Jacket song just sticks so sweetly in my head, and it’s so right.
What I have on my mind is something I’ve been thinking about for a good month, but haven’t been able to sit down to write about it for various reasons. Tonight I’m so tired… but I’m going to try to knock it out quickly.
My women’s book group read a book called Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. There were so many transcendent moments, and so many laugh out loud moments. She writes in a clean, self deprecating style that, if you’re not careful, will slip the profound sweetness of her experiences right past you. She had me from the first sentence, where she is lying on the floor in her bathroom at two a.m. in a pool of tears and snot, bawling because she doesn’t want to be married any more. She doesn’t want babies… she is depressed… she has always looked outside of herself to figure out who she is and what she should do… she is at an all time lifetime low and she has no idea what to do with herself. Somehow, though, doors open and she travels to Italy to eat for three months, to India to an ashram to pray for three months, and to Bali to learn from an old medicine man and find balance.
I’m calling this a three meeting book. I have only been able to meet once, but there was a meeting about it before that, and we need to have one more because some of us still couldn’t make it and I know so many of us have so much more to say. We read Shirley McClaine’s Out on a Limb in January, too. With both of those books, I just want someone to tell me– is there or isn’t there? Within us, or outside of us? And I just want to share it with the girls as much as I can.
Then around that same time I watched one of my husband’s Penn and Teller Bullshit dvd’s with him. It was about the funeral industry, life after death, twelve stepping, and a wonderful trick on bottled water drinkers– they filled different fancy bottles from a hose in the back of a restaurant in LA, and had people saying all kinds of ridiculous shit about the different kinds of water that had supposedly come from raindrops collected in the rainforest or whatever.
So to sum up, Penn and Teller said you need to live now, and be cognizant of the bullshit you or your family will face from the funeral industry when you or they are vulnerable when a loved one dies, and if you are fortunate enough to be able to do so, call your mother.
They also said that the bad thing about twelve stepping was that it forces people to admit that they are unable to handle addiction or its effects alone and must call on a higher power to help them out. Now, is there anything wrong with that, really? Not for me to say. I think their beef was more that folks are forced to go to AA meetings and espouse some kind of religoius belief whether it’s right for them or not, when twelve stepping isn’t the be all to end all in recovering from addiction, their success rate is no higher than any other method, that such meetings reinforce one’s sense of one’s own inadequacy, weakness and helplessness which helps to create the addiction in the first place, and that the slogans and rules and sense that you can’t kick it alone and you must continue to come to meetings smack of cult.
I dunno… I kinda like my twelve step stuff. But the bit about how the power of positive change– or negative choices– resides firmly within oneself is pretty important to me, as well.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I turn outward to see if I am okay, look for reinforcement as to who I am and whether I am good enough or ’doing it right’. I bust my ass, throwing parties, cooking dinners, helping others, serving, in my career and in my family and in my social life. Am I okay? Dunno, let me look at my paycheck, or around my house, or ask my husband, or my best girlfriend, or my mother, or God, but God doesn’t usually answer (or does s/he? that was one of the discussion questions for Eat Pray Love, and I am just not sure, in the context of her story, or in real life.). The greatest source of my okayness is actually my daughter, and that has got to be fucked up. Or is it? I think the love of a parent or a truly loving caregiver for a child (or other helpless entity) is the closest we get to God in this world– and all of us have experienced it, whether as a child or as a parent, no matter how briefly or how it is manifested.
But I’m so drained. My happiness, or sense that I’m doing it right, come from things I have to work really hard for, things I never can get quite right, not from some certainty within me. I’m spread so thin, and while I haven’t had the breakdown or the opportunities Elizabeth Gilbert describes, I think I recognize her crisis as my own, and as one every thinking person must go through, and as the nature of coming of age in our society.
And I’m still working on that. Stay tuned.
Well, I don’t have the answer to is or isn’t, within or without, angels and heavenly fire or spaceships and aliens or– just ravings written down long long ago to try to get people to act right. I think a lot of thinking people don’t honestly know for sure, either. It’s not that I don’t worship, or find happiness… my garden, my child, vegan cooking, literature or art that touches me, certain friendships or moments with family… so many things are both idols and sources of true understanding of the goodness in this universe.
But I do, at least, have an answer when people push me to go to church.
My marriage counselor encouraged me to go to church on Easter. She turned the knife by telling me to take my baby– I’m a bad mother if I deny her that comfort. I tried saying my husband is a bit of an atheist, and she said, well you go, because it nourishes you. I tried saying, I hate church in this town because church is segregated and she said, well mine isn’t. Sigh.
I feel like such a dumbass, going only at Christmas and Easter, although I have to admit it did my heart good to go to the Unitarian church Christmas Eve this year. The message was right up my alley, if you’ve read my annual post about the true meaning of Christmas–every time a baby is born it is a holy night. But…
I didn’t have time to, or didn’t feel she had the time for me to, explain. Three years of healing school… many years more of study in various religious traditions, not to mention feminism, marxism, and historicism… I actually embrace my husband’s atheism, at least for him, although my spiritual life has had a bit more dimension than his… hell, the hand of God has reached down and literally touched me a time or two. It was unmistakable. But… healing school… Jewish and Sikh friends… Penn and Teller… But now I think– well I can’t explain my whole belief system right here and now. But at least for that case, I think I have a pat answer that will shut most people up.
Don’t get me wrong. I love church. I miss it. I am telling you, I can spout random scripture for any situation. But…
So here’s my pat answer.
I’m actually ordained to minister by the Estuary in Nashville. I am my own church. Sometimes I worship by doing yardwork. Sometimes I worship by being the best parent, librarian, or social activist I possibly can be. Sometimes I worship through delicious vegan cooking, or through tending to relationships. Sometimes I worship through my healing work or consumption of literature or through my own writing or through spiritual study.
I don’t have my liturgy and apologetics quite written down yet– but I am my own church and I am pretty solid in a lot of my beliefs. I am ordained. And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. And that’s a key part of my beliefs.
As my dear friend Annie Pearl said to me when we were both working in a terribly dysfunctional, abusive office (that’s not her real name, but I call her a pearl because she is just so amazing, one of my dearest mentors)– when you are a leader, it is just you and the lord. You can’t go giving your power away. You have to suck it up and stand up straight and do the work.
But it’s not just when you are a manager of a large agency or business. It is when you are trying to figure out what do do about your marriage. It is when you are suffering from loss, grief, illness, or paralytic anxiety. It is when you are biting your tongue when you are at your wit’s end with your child, or trying to figure out what do do with your life, or what you have done when it’s too late to change. It is just you and the lord. But really, it’s just you, and, well, you.
It’s just me. That’s not hubris talking. That’s humanity, humility, anxiety, and doing the best I can. That’s an open mind, an open heart, and some serious imperfections and knee jerk psychological defenses talking. I don’t know. But I do know it’s me, and me.
And I don’t need to go to church. Well, maybe I do, but not for that reason. I am my own church. And it’s just me and the Lord.
pick a fire goddess. Or, it’s either fuel or spark.
I don’t understand it, but it tickles me. My husband cannot get a fire to burn.
This man can make any combustion engine run, no matter how shitty filthy broken down it is. He’s from Cali, not where you’d expect your talented self taught shade tree mechanic to come from, but his stepdad’s people was from West Virginia, so maybe that’s where he gets it. He’s saved us a fortune on cars and lawnmowers. Literally. One time he and my brother (two anti-man’s men if you ever saw any) were talking about our broken lawnmower, and he said the profound words, ‘Well, it’s either fuel or spark.’
Wow.
In our wonderful Brady Bunch house (not really, just from the same era) we have a real fireplace.
I love it so much, although I am a bit scared of it cause I don’t know when the chimney was last cleaned and everyone knows the creosote builds up and eventually catches and burns your house down. And then there’s the carbon monoxide, of course–
Anyway. We had a huge dead tree in the yard when we moved in, and as men do, a little over a year ago my husband and about eight of his friends congregated to scratch themselves and take it down with chainsaws, rope, and beer. I was too frightened to be home that day. When I did muster the courage to come home the tree was just a pile in the grass. The house and fence appeared undamaged, and there were no head wounds or severed limbs to be seen, praise Jesus.
I should have known when I caught him attempting to throw away all these long pieces of bark. It was a huge amount of huge dry pieces of bark, and (I’m guessing) he thought it was useless because it wasn’t big smooth manly logs. Sigh.
STOP DUDE! I said. Why? he said. That’s kindlin,’ man! I said. I didn’t say, what the hell are you thinking, don’t you know how to build a f*ckin’ far? Okay, maybe I did say that, but quietly, so as not to embarass him in front of his dude friends. He gave me this look like I’m some kind of idiot and we boxed up the bark and saved it for months and months. (And I was picking bits out of the f*cking lawn for months and months, too, cause apparently if a chainsaw don’t cut it men don’t pick it up, and someone had to get it up in order to mow our jungle).
He took some of the big smooth manly logs camping with him– part II of the saga which started with scratching, chainsaws, rope and beer. No burns or severed limbs from that trip, either, unless there’s something he isn’t telling me. There was plenty, plenty more wood from that old tree, and we stacked it in the carport for the winter.
Last winter it seemed like it just never was the right time. This winter, part III, we’ve used it constantly since Thanksgiving, any time it was even a bit cold.
So, since I didn’t take the hint at the time of the manly tree topplin’, I let him build the first fire of the season this year. My stepson looked on. And it wouldn’t catch. I said, let mamma help.
Next fire of the season, I heard him telling my step son– want me to show you how to build a fire?
I couldn’t resist. I do have a competitive streak, which my stepson finds reasonably funny (at least I think he does). Not just that– but he really doesn’t know what he’s doing. I can’t let my boy go down like that. I said, don’t you think I should be teaching him how to build a fire? He (husband, not stepson) flipped me off and kept working. I can’t remember how that one worked out– not very well, I don’t think.
I love that fireplace so much, I took to cleaning the ashes out each morning after and laying a proper fire, so that it would be ready when I wanted it. I had a lovely dancing fire one night when my girlfriend came over for supper. I had a lovely dancing fire the night my husband left to go out of town for a work trip. Shaky baby and I built and lit it together and curled up on the couch with blankets and watched The Secret Garden (1993) for the first of, um, like five times so far.
So one night this week shaky baby was begging, can we set the fire? Can we set the fire? (Do I have a l’il pyro on my hands?)
Baby and daddy got to work. About ten minutes later it wasn’t working out. The frustration filled the whole downstairs.
I said, do you need help? He said, f*ck you, I mean, yes, I do.
Okay, you cook, I’ll start the fire. Off he went.
Later, I tried to explain it to him. It’s either fuel or spark, I said, just like the lawnmower. Then I thought about for a minute, cause he had spark and plenty of fuel.
Oh, fuel, spark, and, you know, air? I think that’s what you’re missing.
He loads that fire place UP. It’s so chock full of wood the fire cain’t breathe. The nice biguns. And how ’bout we clean out the ashes once in a while?
My fires are a tender, patient bricolage. First there’s a loose pile of bark. No, first there’s removal of ashes. Then there’s a loose pile of bark. Then some slim branches, then some slim logs. Then the coup de grace– a few balls of newspaper under the iron thingy that holds up the firewood, the touch of a lighter, and a dancing fire emerges in a minute or two. Then and only then do I throw on the big manly logs.
My fires burn fast and hot. But at least they burn!
Tonight I got a beautiful fire going with wet wood. Yes, wet. It has rained for a day or two and the woodpile is getting low and soaked. And with a little love I got that bitch going beautifully. I loved sitting there next to it, watching it steam and slowly catch.
I said, a couple of times, to be sure he heard me, did you know I’m the fire goddess? I made sure to tell shaky baby again when I had her to myself, too.
Pick a goddess, any goddess. Let’s see, there’s the outcast Pele, with her foul temper. I see that in myself, definitely. There’s Maman Brigitte, known for her hard work and cursing and drinking, could be me, and Li the lucid middle daughter, could also be me. Good so far. 
Izpapalotl seems to be resurfacing from the collective unconscious via graphic novel and other current art.
And I’ve always thought of St Bridgid as the patron saint of hospitality, always there for folks to come and be warmed and fed and comforted, and her kindness to stray dogs is spot on, but it appears fire was her special familiar. The stories are frightening if one thinks of them occurring now… but they resonate most for me.
I don’t know. There’s something precious and nurturing in building and enjoying a lovely fire. It’s evidently not the easy common sense I thought it was. My husband’s a bit of a star, in some ways (some more playground and some more to do with grownup skills and extremely accomplished in a world that completely leaves me behind), especially lately with his new job, and it’s comforting to me to know how to do something so basic, so, well, competent.
I think I need to invent my own goddess. Lord knows I’ve done enough studying of what qualities, destructive, freeing and healing, chaotic and nurturing, I have and want in my life. And what with reading Shirley McClaine’s Out on a Limb, I’m all ready to go review all the Biblical references to aliens assisting the tribes in the form of fiery wheels and burning bushes.
It’ll have to be another post, though.
mama’s Bible
Monday, October 15, 2007
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mama’s bible When we were living in Hill Country Population 767, Texas I was between six and ten years old. Back then we got S&H green stamps at the Superette. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S&H_Green_Stamps I guess mom got sick of fooling with them. And I guess that’s what they depended upon to happen. But S & H didn’t count on me. I licked them and stuck them and counted them and saved them up to get a Bible with a white imitation leather cover. I probably had to save my pennies to pay the shipping and handling, too. I had to have it. It zipped shut. I think it probably took a while. We were educated, but we were damn poor. I made my Dad, who was an angry atheist thanks to his tour in Viet Nam (and I don’t blame him one f-ing bit), sign it for me on the This Holy Bible Presented To page opposite the picture of the Dead Sea at Sunrise inside the front cover, as if he and Mom had given it to me. 7/10/78. He did it. I was eight years old. I trace the roots of my bizarre, at least bizarre for such an agnostic, deconstructed, materialist, women’s studies corrupted, call-it-the-Universe type belief system, ability to quote just the appropriate scripture, to that time. I was a GA (shudder). I won a prize (probably a large quantity of Super Bubble) one summer at Vacation Bible School for reciting the name of every single book from Genesis to Revelation. Mom and I went every week to hear Brother Gary Buckner, a round faced blond man who was probably younger than I am now, preach at First Baptist. I got saved and ‘warshed’ there when I was eight or so, dunked by Brother Gary in the big baptistry with the heavy clear glass panel on the front. This means I perceive that I have not only my salvation, just in case it’s needed when the book of life is opened, but also the insider’s right to question and even tear down the belief system of my childhood. It’s easy to say all these things that I do, from the inside. What about those who don’t have that assurance, and can’t muster enough belief to go and get it done, but continue to worry– what if? And what do those people think, whose livelihood it is to ’save’ people and dunk them year after year? Do they think something really happens? Dunno. But I certainly marched out as quick as I could to get the cross marked in holy water on shaky baby’s hairless pate in front of various loved ones and my church congregation. I didn’t even wait around for her to choose for herself. Now she’s in too– what she chooses to do with it is up to her. Anyway, last night I was looking for the context for the title of a book I am reading– Like Trees Walking, a fictionalized story about the last lynching in Mobile, in 1981. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAdonaldD.htm [watch out, upsetting picture here, but also a good account and some thoughtful writing quoted] You know, the case Morris Dees used to break the Klan? I don’t think they mention Morris in this novel, and I’m still not sure what as trees walking means in the context of the book, although the words standing free of the Biblical context remind me of that chilling moment in Macbeth, when Birnam Wood moves on Dunsinane. The narrator in Like Trees Walking talks about his anticlimactic experience with water baptism.But that’s a side note. So I was scanning the shelf downstairs and I couldn’t find my white leatherette zipper Bible. First I panicked. All I could see was the NIV my aunts gave me when I graduated college. Did they think I’d read it more if it was in more accessible language? Please. Lord, let there be a King James here somewhere, I thought. Did I throw it away? I’ve certainly been in a purging frenzy over the last few years, wanting some control of what my children learn about me after I am gone. But my little childhood Bible, that I saved up S&H Green Stamps to get? Why wouldn’t I pass that on to my baby? Then I found my other King James, a big red plastic leather bound from my high school friend Nikki, dated 1993. I guess she thought I didn’t have one. Sigh. Never mind. That was the time in my life I was really churchgoing constantly, as an adult– where I became an Episcopalian. Almost fifteen years later I still have my membership in that little mountain church, that little den of intellectual questioning and historicist, deconstructionist, feminist analysis of our faith and our scripture. Anyway. Whew! Crisis averted. I could look up my verse in King James. Cause everybody knows, if it ain’t King James, it ain’t Bible. * * * As a girl, my mother used to sleep on the floor instead of in the bed, so that she wouldn’t get too comfortable and could get up in the morning to study. I’ve always wanted to know that steadfast little girl. Course, each week she also took her 35 cents allowance and bought seven chocolate bars and sat down and ate every single one right then. What a mix! Anyway I always wanted to know that little girl. I haven’t thought of it in years but I remember so clearly now how I wanted to connect with the part of my mother that was once little like me. And wouldn’t my little girl want to know me? Wouldn’t she want at least the chance to touch and hold that beat up old white Bible that her mommy used to carry faithfully to church each Sunday morning when not much bigger (and definitely less smart) than she? It’s not about passing on a family faith. Lord (yes I still feel free to call on the Jesus of my childhood) knows it’s not about that. It is about letting her connect, if she wishes, with that little girl in ways I wished I could connect with my own mother. I have it in my hand. I waited until just this precise moment to face the task of either finding it, or not. It was on the shelf here in my little attick hideaway. The zipper has long since been broken. The white cover is cracked and dirty. I can’t tell if it is thin leather, or if it is a leather pattern painted/stamped onto heavy paper. There are a couple of places marked with torn paper bookmarks or underlines, and there’s a thirty-year-old Lift High the Cross sticker from a long ago revival, but there’s not much else there. When I was really going to church, I used the big red plastic Bible Nikki gave me, I guess– easier to see and read. Still, it’s here in my lap, and I’ll probably print this little story to put between its pages, in case I die before the occasion comes up for me to explain to her where it came from, what it means and what it doesn’t. |
today
Today’s myspace post:
just today
Current mood: 
calm
Going today up to way in the country to see the dear friend who kept shaky baby back after maternity leave ended but she was too young to go to Montessori school. She doesn’t drive these days, but even so, it’s a lot to ask her to be the one to always drive down here.
She’s such a neat person. Among many other things, like me, she abruptly left a youth of recreational drug use (although for me it was pretty strictly alcohol and cigarettes only, and she grew up a lot earlier than I did) to become a mother. She is a wonderful caring hippie mommy. She trusts her instincts and is suspicious of The Man. She is much stronger about parenting in a way she believes in… at some cost to herself, I might add. I am far too selfish and unsure of myself to be as strong as she is.
She cloth diapered. For the first few years I knew her every time I came to her house there were stacks and stacks of adorable clean cloth diapers. She cooked healthy home made foods instead of giving her kids processed foods. She breastfed for a long time. She had her second baby at home, pretty much by herself before the midwives showed up. She is staying home with her children in spite of her family’s limited income. Like me she still has that punk edge, and issues aplenty, but her babies come first.
This girl and her sister– well they are ten years and more younger than I am, but they remind me of my best friend in high school. The day I met each of them I just got this good feeling from them. There’s just that deep, real, been there done that honesty and sense of humor about them that I would like to associate with country people… but I have never met anyone like these girls.
Their backgrounds are different yet similar… trailers yes, but my best friend in high school had wonderful loving parents who stayed together and these girls had hard, harsh broken home childhood– and came out just as hard headed, beautiful and determined, more so really than my dear friend from high school. You know how redneck girls are often so much better groomed– better haircuts and makeup– than city girls? None of them went to college. They are all three very smart, big fish in small ponds who breezed through high school without having to study, but without bothering to worry about college. They all have horse sense and an ability to see through the bullshit, their own bullshit, and others’, and call it like they see it, that sometimes just has me rolling with laughter. They are nice girls, but they don’t let being nice keep them from seeing and telling the truth.
I can’t describe it. There are some people who just remind you of the good parts of your childhood in such a way that you can truly be yourself, whether you’re seventeen or thirty seven, as if those twenty years never passed.
Twenty years… I’ve been thinking a lot about that number, as my reunion is coming up this summer. It hardly seems possible. I am still just as frivolous, just as cool, and almost as stupid, as I was when I was seventeen. I hit a turning point about thirty, and another as my baby began to grow and I slowly became a mother. But inside… my essence is pretty much the same. I’m a party girl. I am deeply introverted and shy– but I need my friends and community. My imagination paints huge beautiful emotional and visual pictures in my head, and after all these years I still can’t manage to write them down. I love, love, love to work, like in the garden or cooking or quilting or on the house, but I fucking hate doing the grind of someone else’s routine if I can’t see the bigger picture.
I don’t know how it can be that this time has gone by. Time goes faster and faster, and while life doesn’t necessarily get easier– okay, I must admit I prefer my problems now to the problems I had in my twenties– not easier, but… I dunno. Anyway, life becomes more and more precious every day.
I have some deeper and darker thoughts regarding just how precious life is but I’ll have to save them for another day. I want to tote the baby quilt up there
to work on while the kids play and we talk. I want to get some garbage out of the house because it’s trash day and it’s good feng shui to keep this stuff moving all the time. I wanted to take some vegan cupcakes up there too but I’m starting to run out of time.
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Currently listening : Bareback By Hank Dogs Release date: By 02 February, 1999 |
shet
Haven’t you ever heard someone say ‘get shet of’ as in get rid of?
I was talking about getting shet of my job, and my feelings about my job, by finishing my final epistles to the board of that agency.
I think these mountain expressions must come over me when I’m under stress maybe? Or in the midst of a life change? Or… maybe just when I’m around my mom and probably my high school cohort?
Shet. It’s such a wonderful, apt word. It’s like, it ain’t fittin’, though. It stands on its own. It’s a word of its own. I never, ever realized that it ain’t fittin’ came from a real word people actually use– fitting. It isn’t fitting. What??? When you say it properly it is robbed of its sense.
Shet — I looked it up in m-w.com to try to see what it comes from. Most of my little redneckisms have some root in real, normal people language, often deep in ye olde Englishe, and can be found in m-w. But shet wasn’t there. I felt a little crazy, you know? But I found a reference or two to the use of shet on the internet and felt a teeny bit better.
So just now I realized it must come from shed, as in, to shuck or lose. “5 : to rid oneself of temporarily or permanently as superfluous or unwanted .”It has taken me 25 years or more to see that word as a derivative of a normal people’s English word.
And I was an English major.
Man.
last day off
I had the best day yesterday. It was one of those rare days when I can simply resolve to enjoy it and let everything else go. We went to the park, played World of Warcraft, ate a stunningly delicious soul food supper (as soul as a white girl can make it anyway) of black eyed peas, cabbage, corn muffins with butter and Alaga syrup, smashed potatoes, sweet potato pie and sugar glazed ham for the meat eaters.
The day was cold, but it was, uh, bracing, and made us happier to get inside. One of my close circle of friends had been out of town for what felt like weeks, so we got out and walked.
And oh, was that food delicious. I surprised even myself. I really am a frustrated B&B with optional family style suppers owner operator. Except my B and B wouldn’t be precious and persnickety, not like the ones I’ve been to, with lace doilies and priceless knicknacks (though I must admit I was darned impressed by the scottie-dog shaped silver knife rests, where on earth could I get some of those?)… mine will be full of heavy, substantial, comfortable furniture, with natural or low warm electric light and not a doily to be seen. It will be the kind of place where you can put your feet right up on the expensive, sturdy antique (or Pottery Barn) furniture in the common rooms and have a stiff whiskey highball from my well stocked bar and read the paper. Though I hope that I will have well quit smoking by then, I hope it will also be the sort of place that is reminiscent of the era when smoking was customary, and welcoming to however few smokers there are left. But heck, there are always pipes, and cigars, right?
Anyhoo.
Today was a little bit more nervous as I go back to work tomorrow, but I’ve tried to keep my eyes on the prize– doing what I want to rather than what I think I’m supposed to. I ended up writing a three page public relations manifesto in service of the good works organization that has my husband, who volunteers for them, knocking his brains against the wall at least every other month. That was satisfying work, though. I met another friend at the park, managed to walk a while, made a healthy vegetarian dinner (I figured my husband and stepson would sneak out to McDonalds afterward, but as it happened that’s what they had for lunch, so too bad) and concentrated on enjoying today rather than on my almost pathological dread of going to work tomorrow. Good attitude zen work will set you free blah blah and so on. Shudder. Tomorrow.
Tonight husband and kids are at Target getting my stepson the clothes required for school. I’m reading Freddy and Fredericka, which is a ruthless and compassionate satire. How can it be both? This author is really something. The amazing details of this work, so many layers, whew. I’m not truly hooked yet, but I’m well into it, a hundred pages or so? One of the critical blurbs said ‘the fastest 800 page novel you will ever read. Okay.
let’s kick this off right
Christmas in Prison by John Prine
The entire John Prine Christmas cd
Santa Claus is a Fat B* by ICP
Ave Maria by Chris Cornell
George Winston’s December
Merengue Navideno
Frank Sinatra at Christmas
I can’t find my damn Roches We Three Kings, and I ordered another copy but I accidentally shipped it to my grandmother– stupid amazon! Oh well. Maybe she’ll like it.
What else? I have free shipping with amazon for like two or three more days before I have to cancel to keep from getting charged.
christmas parade
We went to our small city’s Christmas parade today. It was pretty corny. The best part, of course, was all the children, strutting along in marching bands or the odd gymnastics troupe. The kids were so proud, and so cute, I just wanted to cry. Okay so I teared up. A lot. It’s my baby’s first Christmas parade!
The local HBC’s marching band was the classiest act there. I am not sure what this is about. With all the money in this town??? Where were all the businesses?
I mean… next year, if we want to, we can probably fill the bed of our 3500 diesel quad cab 4×4 (heheh) up with all the children we know and drive in it, with a hand lettered poster board reading ‘Merry Xmas from the Shaky Family’ hanging off the side, throw some candy, and claim this year’s fifteen minutes of fame.
I know we’re proud of our modesty and family ways in this town, but gimme a break!! I am so tired of our community being so dang cheap. My husband, on the other hand, conceded that this town does have some small charm.
He also wondered if white people go to school here at all.
There did seem to be so few white children marching in most of the school groups. I realized though… our town is more than half African American.
So it’s very interesting, and doesn’t speak that well of us, I realize, that my friends are almost all white. I have a black coworker I adore and look up to and trust, and a dear, dear friend I know through activist work (not that I do any, but I admire him so much for doing it and love to talk to him). So, we’re still segregated, no matter what we like to think.
I also think it’s as much a class thing as it is a race thing… it just happens that the underprivileged folks are also black. Is that right? Or is it simply being stuck in the fifties? I’ve heard wise friends link our under developed economy to our reluctance to let everyone, regardless of color, share in the opportunity and wealth.
I do see black and white families socializing together more and more though. The world is becoming a better place, truly it is.
They had machines that blew foamy artificial snow. It was really neat. We were standing behind the scaffolding one of the machines was on, and this guy with a mullet, pleated faded tapered leg black khakis and brown ostrich cowboy boots kept picking up the candy thrown from the floats that didn’t make it into the crowd, and giving it to the children, including shaky baby, standing on the barriers behind the scaffolding. It was so sweet. My little one was thrilled. Because you know it’s all about the Tootsie Rolls. More tears for mommy.
We walked from the downtown Burger King all the way to the capitol and then several blocks west (?) to City Hall. We fed shaky baby chicken crowns along the way in hopes that she’d be exhausted and pass out in the car on the way home. But as we hit the last few blocks of the drive she was listening to Pete Seeger singing I Know an Old Lady… (how neat for her to know that mommy didn’t just make that song up!) and wide awake. She’s watching Mickey’s Home for Christmas or something… So much for a quiet evening and a much needed snuggle with my partner in this poor worn out marriage. So my husband went off to his software business partner’s house (doesn’t that sound good? We’ll see how it goes!) to quickly help with an install shield type thingy they are going to use on their latest project, I’m blogging, and baby’s watching TV.
I was out of town AGAIN this past week. I haven’t had time to just collect myself in what seems like ever. It’s really sad when my favorite part of my job is being out of my office. I am so glad it’s the weekend again.
I am sooo tired of my toxic job. I feel like I’ve blogged about it but I think I actually poured my ire out on my activist friend in an email. I won’t reprise here. I will only say that I am so thankful that, and I am praying hard about, the advent of two job opportunities elsewhere. If you know me and my freakish Buddhist/chaos theory/Southern Baptist belief system, you know things have to be pretty bad before I’ll slow down to pray.
What would be best… I can fantasize, can’t I? would be hearing something definite before Christmas, so that I can do what my husband advises– pull up my skirt and slap myself on the ass on my way out the front door– and take a couple of weeks off for the holidays before starting back to work in the new year. If you’re of the praying persuasion, pray with me?
Meanwhile, it’s the weekend… my reimbursement for that TWO THOUSAND DOLLAR work trip FINALLY came in… it’s almost Christmas… we’re celebrating a little friend’s birthday at the skating rink in the mall tomorrow, fun! And did I mention it’s Friday?
damned if I wouldn’t go to church on sundy
So when we got to the show, shivering in the delicious October chill of Louisville, slightly warm from a couple of glasses at dinner at the wonderful, wonderful Indian restaurant we always go to up there, some guy recognized my husband’s ancient Southern Rock Opera t-shirt. He was probably drunk (the dude, not my husband), but he made a big deal out of it and I felt like visiting royalty. We were at the ‘world premiere’ at the Nick lo these many years ago.
While the DBT’s were playing World of Hurt I took a tearful minute to scribble in the notebook I keep in my purse. It’s barely legible, but it says, in effect, the DBTs run over you like honey and it’s an effort just to breathe even though you know it doesn’t have to be that way. There was other scribbling as well… but I’m still talking to myself about that.
That show was one of the most precious experiences I’ve had in a while.
I finally had time to revisit it– inspired by listening to Sinkhole in the car this afternoon. I remembered with a happy jolt that they played it in the show. “Bury his body in the old sinkhole, bury his body in the old sink hole…” Delicious!
I also scribbled the names of the songs they played that meant lots to me– Uncle Frank, Outfit, Ronnie and Neil, Whiskey without Women, Gravity’s Gone, Shutup and Get on the Plane (companion to Angels and Fuselage).
Gravity’s Gone is a work of genius. “I’ll meet you at the bottom if there really is one, they always told me when you hit it you’ll know it/But I’ve been falling so long it feels like gravity’s gone and I’m just floatin.” While the angels were evidently protecting me when I was at my stupidest, and I’m far from dissipated now — that is, far from as dissipated as I wish I were, I love the feel and tone of that song. I have so been there.
Likewise Women Without Whiskey– granted I’m a girl, but I can’t tell you how sweetly and sadly the words ‘Tell me how to tell when I’ve had enough’ resonate for me.
In their songs there are always many layers– first the actual story– murder, suicide, jilting, drinking, drugging, dying, loving, losing, hurting– , then the emotions and the sometimes slightly cheesy lyrics, then the great fun or the huge negative pleasure or even delicious rage– and then rippling underneath, inaudible but solid and real, this drone or emotional subtext that seems to say, yep, this is life– amongst the screamin’ guitars [and Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell are really, really, really good], the buddha smiles. I think that sweet, transcending observation and acceptance, amongst all the rococo, gothic, tawdry, backerds, throwback, inbred, torrid, drama, not to mention true love and loss, is actually the true essence of The Southern Thing.
