No More Excuses

In the midst of all the heartache, here I am believing I have no more excuses to ignore my few, precious Dear Readers. So here I am in the midst of a post-truth, post-Trump mindset. Here are the things I am working to accomplish:

Nissi at rest. She is maybe 6 months old here, black with tuxedo like white markings. Here she is napping on the corner of a grey couch. 

• Training the puppy is going well. She is so much smarter than I thought, so it is much more like having a toddler in the house than usual.
• My head hurts. 
• My teeth need attention. Professional attention. I am working on it, appointment after appointment - now I have to see a hygienist four times a year to try to save what I have left. I am starting to sometimes actually look forward to being rid of them some day. 
• I need to write more. A lot more. These brain droppings are cluttering up the works and so I exorcise them with you.
• My gaming will never be better than the upper echelon of mediocre, and it is only very rarely even that good.
• Learning Spanish is slowed to a stop, but I have not given up. Thanks, Duolingo.
• I have the fortune to discuss the nature of reality with the author of Quantum Sorcery - have you read that yet? I learn, aid, and keep the candles stocked - apprenticeship!
• I can now draw a sad coffee cup that other people can recognize and say "nice" without appearing to bullshit me. That is kind of cool, will keep working on it.
• My cleaning projects had unexpected progress, which is great. Our black carpets frequently get vacuumed before they turn grey from pet fur.
• Woot! My craft room is accessible and useful again. It does need some work. It will always need some work. D valiantly offered to get a new sewing machine if I got the room right again - I will be talking about that soon.
• I gathered all the stuff to start learning recorder, but there are too many people home all day for me to feel comfortable going back to fourth grade right now. I can read music and I played clarinet for a decade, this so not be super difficult. But thanks to my teeth (see above) I cannot play clarinet without killing my head, so recorder it is. Well, it will be once I have some private time on the regular again.

My Buddhism may be causing this existential crisis. I have not the resources to take any great practical leap: week or month long retreat. Hell, I can barely afford a new read. But I feel like I am on the burning edge of something... I am not sure if there is much difference between a leap and a fall - besides the landing.

Sometimes I feel something... precious. Dust mites in the sun glinting like diamonds, special in their transience, their worthlessness. Connection to the suffering of others, an empathy uncontrolled in reach and depth, dangerous without the rest. 

A frustration with the things I own owning me, but raised too poor to give away all that I should, let alone minimizing as I sometimes want. Once a poor person has a thing, unless we must leave it behind it is very difficult to give things up. 

An unnamable desperation to stop feeling so fucking desperate. A coming together that keeps falling apart. 

I hope you are getting by, Dear Reader. Find comfort where you can. We are regulated to the fringe again: Outlaws that have done nothing truly wrong. 

Every Day is Hallow... Aww, You Get It!

I love Halloween. Every day is Halloween! I have been a horror hound since I can remember. I fell asleep at the drive-in during An American Werewolf in London, and then had nightmares about the undead Nazi attack. 

(I know it is All Saints Day, but I was pretty sure that if I made two posts in one day that the fabric of my universe would fall apart... So enjoy this with your hangover. Or not, you be you.)

The annual ritual of walking to the VHS rental place for the best of what it had to offer around this time of year was always awesome. This was back when a single, new-ish release would run you about $80, so everybody rented. Only the Star Trek movies were important enough at my place to actually own. Everything else around the house was from the brand new bargain bins of tapes, where we could find the occasional old sci-fi treasure or a Roger Corman classic. The Terror with Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson - we had it. We also had Nicholson in Little Shop of Horrors, he was the dentist's "masochistic" patient. It was a bit part, but I am pretty sure the reason the movie lived on...

I remember the first time I watched Michael Jackson's Thriller, I watched it as a John Landis short, because there were almost no black people on MTV until then, 1983. The Landis/Jackson dispute over rights was finally settled this last August. Thriller is one of those amazing mixings of genres that elevates both to something new and different. Without Thriller, there is no Dragula. 

Wave hello to the grandfather of horror there at the end, Vincent Price!

For years, our mom made us dress as "hobos" (I know, I know) because our great-grandmother liked the costume. The Minions go-to costumes are, of course, vampires, because there is no shortage of white makeup and cheap velvet around here. 

You know what, I can come up with maybe twenty or so decent costumes that include, involve or even mimic disability. Sigh.