Lit blog

PandoraGlitters said:

At least sitting in someone's talent seepage won't ruin your pants. Where were you sitting, again, Eve? Maybe it'll rub off.

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WickedEve said:

My religious fanatic, slightly redneck, simple cousin has a boyfriend and the family just loves him. LOVES HIM! They don't love Hugo.

"Tammy's new boyfriend even mows her grass. I hope they get married." She's only known him for a few months.

"Well, Aunt Marge, Hugo and I have been together for about a year."

"Uh, huh. Really? I can tell that Tammy is in love. Isn't that wonderful? She needs a good man to love." Okay, I guess Hugo is a bit of a beast, but...

I call Hugo. "Hugo, you need to mow my grass!" That was a couple of months ago.

And now squirrel is living in my grass. I can see his tail, as he sprints through the high green of my lawn. I lost my Schnoodle dog this morning -- found him later crawling on his belly through the backyard jungle.

Hugo has agreed to mow. Only problem is that he has to borrow my dad's riding lawn mower.

"You tell that Hugo not to run over the elm tree roots. You know how big they are. Get your Uncle Barney to come up there and show him how to use it right."

"Daddy, there are bees in the grass and a squirrel."

"All mowers are different. Hugo needs to get to know my mower. Your Uncle Barney will show him. Just call him before he goes to Wal-Mart."

"Does Barney have the key to it?"

"Yeah, and he knows the combination lock to unchain it, and he has a key to under the house where I keep the special gas for it."

"It'll be okay, Daddy. Really."

Hugo is afraid to touch the mower. There are two squirrels outside the window as I type this.

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WickedEve said:

He just gave you sex, didn't he?
Okay, I know you say things like that about him, no matter what.

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unpredictablebijou said:

I think, Ange, that sometimes you can judge your true importance to people by how much energy they put into being angry at you.

Not that that's comforting, as such, but looking back at my first "marriage", I recognize now that a lot of the anger people felt at me was because they had really idolized that particular partnership and felt so betrayed when they were forced to see that it wasn't everything it was cracked up to be, everything they wanted to believe it was.

If it hadn't been important, they wouldn't have hated me so much.

It sucks that any of us has to learn stuff like that. At least in here, we all know what's what.

Let's throw an unAnniversary party for Ange and ee in the bistro today. We'll get Caliban to build a bower, and Juno can sing.

bj

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Angeline said:

At least now we know that you come by your weirdness honestly.

My mother spent years telling me what to do when she dies. Like I wouldn't know.

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champagne1982 said:

I wish they'd teach doctors and other professionals that if you want to call me by my first name, then permit me to call you by yours. Annnnnd unless I introduce myself as "dude" then that form of address is really better left for your buds in the bar, or surfers, or skaters, or cowboys named Dude.

eta: Who let that lil old lady use my body for this post? I think I feel this way because of the intimacy my surgeons and I have shared. I appreciate the fact that they keep a bit of formality with me, since my dignity is all I have left sometimes, in the hospital. Try keeping it when you're vomiting or using a bed pan or... well, you get my drift.

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normal jean said:

My mom's family has a "family" cemetary on a mountain t op in Boone NC. But I told my kids they had better not put me there, that side of the family always treated me and my sibs like we were trash or something.


I told my girls they could keep my head and share it, hubby says that's cool with him too. I once read about a tribe that keeps the skulls of family members and after the flesh is gone, they paint them and pass them around like souvenirs.

I know that sounds gross, but in a way, it is immortality. The oddest burial ritual I ever heard about was an African tribe that digs up their dead every yea, parades them throughout the village, they have a sort of picnic with them, then rebury them till the next year, then do it again.

My youngest, Kristen, is studying anthropology and says she is going to specialize in burial rituals, she is off to a good, though gruesome start.

don't ya think?

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Angeline said:

It's just my father and sister, and when my mom passes she'll be there. But it feels strange to me to think of my whole family there and me? Where? Of course once I go it won't matter to me where they stick me. If I were an observant Jew I'd be making arrangements to ensure I'm not cremated. I think that's one of the things that can get me into Gehenna, Jewish Hell. But a) I don't believe any of that shit and b) I would argue I've been in Jewish Hell plenty of times already. Like my cousin's bar mitzvah, for example.

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Anschul said:

I'm with you Dollface. I plan to be cremated and have my ashes tossed onto the rocks on a precipice I know near Williamstown, Mass. I spent many a childhood summer there, and continue to go there every couple of years. It's the most beautiful place I know. Clean air, wild blueberries, the sound of falling water, green as far as the eye can see, which is all the way to Vermont, New York, and New Hampshire.

And as for odd rites, you know the legend that Jerry Garcia's ashes were split between the Russian River (or San Francisco bay, depending on which legend you listen to) and the Ganges, I'm here to say "Bosh." Maybe some of the were, but I know for a fact that some of the ashes were dumped into beautiful little globes of crystal and given to people. I know. I have one.

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Anschul said:

I'm with you Dollface. I plan to be cremated and have my ashes tossed onto the rocks on a precipice I know near Williamstown, Mass. I spent many a childhood summer there, and continue to go there every couple of years. It's the most beautiful place I know. Clean air, wild blueberries, the sound of falling water, green as far as the eye can see, which is all the way to Vermont, New York, and New Hampshire.

And as for odd rites, you know the legend that Jerry Garcia's ashes were split between the Russian River (or San Francisco bay, depending on which legend you listen to) and the Ganges, I'm here to say "Bosh." Maybe some of the were, but I know for a fact that some of the ashes were dumped into beautiful little globes of crystal and given to people. I know. I have one.

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Angeline said:

The only place I can think of where I might even possibly want my ashes are maybe in a park on the lower east side, like in one of the ashtrays in Washington Square Park. And some old sax player could throw his empty coffee cup (or wine bottle) and cigar ashes on me. There's a certain poetic synchronicity with my life in that. But maybe that would be considered unsanitary.

ee's grandparents owned a home on the Russian River and he grew up spending his summers there. I think if we won the lottery and could afford to live anywhere, he'd want to be there. As long as we kept a flat in NYC, too, I'd be down with it.

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Anschul said:

I knew that, Sweetie, we decided that we might have been just up the river maybe at the same time ('72-75). Maybe you could have just a few specks of ash dust dropped on the bank there--It's a pretty beautiful place. But if you tell me which park, I promise to visit often, and maybe tip a cigar ash or two.

I plan to live forever.

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unpredictablebijou said:

I told a friend last night it had been a week for Art and Death.

Last year our shop landlord used the empty space next to our shop for a little art show, doing a favor for a friend named Fito who painted very angry, very misogynistic canvases that had a lot of catholic imagery. The work was disturbing but not unskilled. Powerful, but nothing you'd hang in your living room. The art show hung for about a month, and then the space stood empty again for months until the bike repair guy rented it later.

About three weeks ago, Fito killed his girlfriend, left her body on the train tracks, and then hung himself in prison over the weekend. Things like that don't happen here, and the whole town has been in an uproar.

Our landlord's son got the job of emptying Fito's last apartment and getting rid of everything. He's aware of the energetic issues of that task, and had come in to buy some sage to do a cleansing on the space. We have some nice smudge sticks grown locally, and he got a couple. Later that same day a woman came in quite randomly and handed me an armful of beautiful dried white sage branches. She had gathered them at a sundance in Arizona last year. She said she was assisting one of the Grandmothers of the tribe, and got to keep a bunch of the sage they had harvested as a gift for helping.

"I don't know; I just felt led to bring this in to you, so you could have it in the store," she said. I told her I knew exactly where the sage was supposed to go, and gave her some stuff from the shop, even though she hadn't expected any exchange for the gift. That afternoon when the landlord's son stopped in at the shop, I gave him a bunch of the new sage, and he was impressed by both the gift and the synchronicity of the moment.

So last night my landlord stopped by and said they were having a small fire in the back parking lot. They were burning all of Fito's possessions; a stack of 25 big black trash bags sat in a pile nearby, and one by one the bags went on to the fire.

I sat across the parking lot, on the back porch of the restaurant next door, and watched from a distance as the fire flared, died, and flared over and over. They began right at sunset, and by eleven it looked like the last bag had been put on and the fire was dying down into a huge pile of embers. So I went back to the shop and got some more of the sage, and a plum-sized chunk of dragon's blood resin I'd been saving. Dragon's blood is another substance strongly associated with cleansing and banishing negativity. People use it a lot in house blessings.

There were only three people left tending the fire; the landlord, his son and a friend of theirs. I gave the armful of sage to Craig, the son, and handed him the dragon's blood, which he recognized for what it was.

Suddenly we were quiet, watching the fire, Craig holding the armful of sage branches. The family friend spoke up. "I heard about that sage, that's weird how that came in just at the right time."

Craig said, "Well, things happen when they need to."

"I want a branch of that too, okay?" said the friend, who struck me as a very regular guy, not into religion or spells or that sort of thing at all. So Craig handed him a long branch. He stood for a moment, smelling the sage, and obviously thinking about this strange but necessary ritual they were doing. Then, meditatively, he walked up, tossed it onto the fire and stood back. It reminded me of the way people toss earth into a grave at the end of a funeral.

Craig's father said, "I want some too." He got his branch, and did the same thing. It was a finishing, a blessing, a prayer that this could now be truly over, that Fito's anger and madness could be truly destroyed, going up in the smoke with our prayers and the scent of the sage.

I put some on as well, thinking, rest, Fito, and rest, poor beautiful Jana, be at peace now. And may the living who have yet to work through their grief feel a resolution at this moment, a sense of strange peace, a closure on all the evil and sadness of this past month. I prayed, and tossed my sage onto the fire. Then I bowed out of the scene, and left the three men standing quietly around the dying embers of their former friend.

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Eluard said:

You know, much as I like you as a poet, I think you're an even better writer of these kinds of prose vignettes.

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