imbroglio et fettucine...the blandness of argument

some of my senior friends are going to Italy.  I should like to stay home while they post letters from Palma but eh...I know they'll see Florence and the Vatican, and it'll wait...I'm just learning to be comfortable in cooler weather of the moment, cooking if I can seize the time, delightful repasts that fill the house with delectable aromas...painting on the side deck, thinking about dueling it out with the creekside some more...will dig up a good portion of the grape hyacinth that goes crazy in this yard, toss it back there, mow it down with the weedwacker , look for willow starts...get more yummy dirt, say a eulogy for the turd lawnmower to die of a slammed crankshaft (kaablong...dink)thuggy thuggy won't start again, ebbers...not trying to be cute, hate writing like that but do talk it, like going up to sol ducky...where they need haus kippers...hehe...that's going to be interesting, fluffing out the mausoleum of a stone col'drinker...I just thought it wo uld be interesting since he has a pool and they're so few and far between here...like when the river and the strait is across the street and it comes up in the yard like it is in the winter.
so for now, this is just words being blopped onto the screen and there's no stories being told today about Al and the life of a NYC cop although I was going somehwere with that one once u[pon a time although I think he became that Cafferty character with the pregnant belly, egads that makes me squint, at least, hehe
hmmm..
yep, there's the subject at hand, how women view men that they want to know intimately..
well, first you get your ideal, w hich for me is the actor Russell Crowe, that to me is the ultimate manly man because I really like the way he looks, now granted I know as a person he'd be a chump full of change probably, but that's as it is...am I any great shakes as a female? I  dunnno, but I'm myself and I think that means something...so
you gotta go for looks first off, because that tweaks the heart muscle in and laying over that the female organ of nursing...I don't say that any other way because I don't, what it does, that FOON..is get like someone blew a lot of air into the balloon and it's encased in this bridle harness of a garment known as la brassiere.which you know is pretty well filled up when you're lookin' over this guy's credentials in the 'do I turn you on?' department and he's filled out like well, the guy who reads the kids' their bedtime story and brushes his teeth before  he crawls in next to you and blows some warm air behind your ear (please don't tell me what a major tunnel the real RC has been known to be because this is the doppleganger theory taking hold here, ok)...a person can be the essence of the very intense emotional outlay trigger by looking the part, but what you want is that he know the part...so wouldn't you want your husband to be that...I don't think any of  us is perfect, but I do want him in frayed bermudas on Sunday afternoons looking in tidepools and being macho when we find the octopus...and what is macho?  it's like, ah, he knows how to chop lettuce and change oil, he can finetune the carbeurator and he is an English Lit major like me...he wasn't in the service, he was a detective in LAPD, he was a pediatric surgeon, he had his own hamburger stand...he shaves and wears cologne, but just a little bit to let you know if you get that close up to him that he smells very good and your toenails have permanently curled up and you'll have to get a little chainsaw to bust them loose..
so what does that do for you? well for me it keeps me going because my spouse was fremlicarta...I don't say the race or whatever because it doesn't matter, it isn't anymore...it cannot be because there's this...which I didn't mess with but it evolved... into this other ideal which you know, I don't get much chance for that kind of social interaction where I am and I don't go hunting it out like I have done in the past...yegads was I ever into that but a bit, what challenge, what fun...but...now I see that it can be that I am the soccer coach, blowing my whistle, spinning the ball on my pointer finger, tucking it up under my arm and exhorting the little soccer boys to run, run...while I blow my whistle at them...women don't whistle at men but sometimes they are quite worthy of it...our hearts are like magnets, glinnnggg, across the universe we find one another and there's it is...I love you, you love me, we are fitted together like inseparable pieces of a puzzle of our lives...the main sections of it, our family beside us, our dogs, cats, trees, houses, cars, faith, hope charity, that love...our dinner menu, what we eat for breakfast, read in the paper, heat the house with...I could go along the floor rolling over and over picking up the dust of your footsteps so I would glow and be a bit dirty...I shouldn't have gotten so particular about what I wanted from a marriage but I have because each day is the light into the next one, the eternal sun of it...and my little fetish works to sustain me in that it is continuitous unto itself and some good examples provided...he should be of a certain height and breadth, or he should be as intuitive as I need him to be, or have a gravely voice or know how to hit a baseball, what he should be is a man and what I am is a woman and that's what I want...no pale imitations, no guys polishing their shining armor until they can see their own face in it...some kind of guru of his own class...which I don't know what that is but he's about as into what he wants as I am...and so we become into it together and our children number over one dozen, I thought fourteen was a good number, gadzooks anyways...that's enough bubble gum to tar the driveway and glue on the roof...enough eggs for forty million pancakes and twenty cows for thirty million gallons of milk - an eggzageration but not that much...a guy that would do that for me there would have to be that many kids coming out of it...because he'd see them as I do...little windows of the soul with voices and armpits and teeth and eyes and toes and bedtimes and music lessons and hikes and beachcombing..
from the moment they're born they're like the page of poetry we were reading before we created them...why you liked it why I found it so eloquent, where you want to put the polish on the Guillietta...where I want to weld on the wing of the Cessna...we debate helmets for the motorcycle ride, I'm Triumph girl and you're just the beefcakes BMW because everyone knows those who ride Harley bild'm..more or less...I think of you on the paradise of a lost shore and then I walk the beach with the little white dog and it's a good story and one that sustains me, I'm never without it and it's part of my faith and hope and love that I have it...it's the containment of my female self within the large aspect of the marital bond...it's what makes the muffins rise, the spaghetti sauce get that certain sheen...the mushrooms brown up nicely...the flower open...the ground be quenched by rain...what is love...
well I wanted to go into it more but now there's this gray raincloud hanging over things...I don't think it bears mentioning since this is the decades of experience piece about what marriage is...you brought the Italian cold cut sub to it and I brought a cream soda and a celeriac because we both know that those good for you drinks like vitamin water are ok but they need a little zip...we had a slice of cheese cake walking through the park, the squirrel got some nuts, I told you I was nuts about you and felt like all I wanted to do was read the original score of one of Mozart's more popular pieces...and you said the same thing only you said that you wanted to rebuild the engine on my Accord because you got a reading on the compression that told you the block was very good for the work...neither of us could decide who was the more eloquent, I thought maybe that if I said that you were electricity you would tell me I was the rain, we're just electrical together, conducting...and I would say to that do you dance, which I could see your stomach would kind of curl up and you'd exhibit a sort of shyness then while I'd go off to the dance floor and sort of dance it out, how I felt...with my eyes closed because I'd be embarassed to see you see my face, so I understand that you won't dance, but I guess you do that too only you take me in your arms and whirl me close to you, a kind of control thing wherein the pressing the flesh gets the message across, you see, there's the stern paternity issue that the actor gives off but that's the actor, the real person, the ideal...another thing, a joker, practical joker that loves laughter which in my world would be like the night in the day...there would be an absolute absence of darkness in that humor...he'd giggle because he'd be delighted to have confounded you and you'd look at him and say, you will remember that you did this to me because I am going to get even with you...and I would
but I'd do something like rent a huge billboard on Madison Avenue that reads I LOVE YOU...YOUR WIFE

a new day in the neighborhood

summer is here

hail with it

the yard is begging for a facelift but it keeps being miserable outside.  I'm taking EMT classes, leaving by 8:45 a.m. and so far we've been cut short two out of the three days I've gone because of response calls coming in.  I've been learning to use the blood pressure cuff and the little finger clip monitor that analyzes the space between the heart beats.  Pretty interesting stuff.  Reading, I've finished the sequel to gone with the wind  which was a real potboiler and I liked it good enough.  Wondering about the summer, if it will ever get here...
Did a painting I called "japanese spring' after the incident in Japan.  Had an easter card from my brother and apparently their airport got blown around in a tornado.  He just bought a new house in the St. Louis suburbs...I guess they're ok according to family but what a thing to happen...
Today I helped the girls next door get the gallery for our women's conciousness raising session and book discussion club.  We generally have the book club on Tuesdays the last week of the month and the consciousness raising gets done on that Thursday, or vice verssa, but we couldn't this month because the girls were away doing their thing so we're doing it today.  I helped mop floors and get it tidied up.  They fed me an egg salad sandwich, which was nice of them.

mermaid icons

I've been working here and there lately.  One day it was absolutely beautiful outside, Saturday.  We got up early and went to the beach at Shipwreck Point where we scoured the beach and cleaned the roadsides
that was pretty much fun.  After that we had barbeque with theother beach cleaners.  Then we came home and unloaded the trash we'd found.  There was a rug and a tire with a rim also.  We tossed the tire and the rug is being cleaned for the rental house.
We're back to Monday now.  Yesterday was Easter Sunday.  I went to the Presbyterian Church breakfast but didn't get up in time for services at the Rock.  Went to Easter Mass at St. Thomas and then had a long nap because the day started so early.  Later on we had Easter supper at By the Bay Cafe and then watched television till bedtime.  I was crocheting a rainbow colored legwarmer. 
Today I am dressed warm because it's raining again.  I have to go to Tops at 3 and then to the firehall at 6 for the beginning of EMT training.  Another busy week lining up it seems.
The mermaid icons have been showing up.  I found one this past week that was oriental in nature but the woman had a fish tail so it qualified as a mermaid.  Not sure where I saw it, possibly the co op when I was in there for juice and milk.  I sometimes feel as though I ought to appropriate the mermaid symbols when I see them but I should just draw them in my own version of what I've seen.  That would be the thing to do.  I have wash on the line from Saturday, getting a nice dose of fabric softener in the rain fall.

Samuel Butler

it was the above named author that put me in mind of new zeland, the book erewhon...which I read in a very tumultous time a few years back.  i was soothed by it and intrigued by the author, who lived about hundred fifty years ago and I know nothing of him.  it appears he was a 'serious' satirist'.  i suppose the clowns who now write for saturday night live would do well to study him a bit...I again exposed myself to the humor of snl.  it again defeated my laughing whereas the purloined video tape (yes, Mrs Woolf, we still have them about) of Adam Sandler doing a takeoff of his sabbath singing would have been the kind of humor to toast my gabotchniks.  there's no depth to humor on snl.  the little fatboy 'big k' doesn't do it.  well he never did.  he's still a kidnik, what do they call those? boychicks?  yeah, that's him...lemmee see...the last macro of the corpse of john belushi...something like that
I sound kind of putzki myself making fun of a show still trying to be on the air
well yeah, we used to write for it, in black humor at 3 am on yahoo chat on sat/sun mornings, sat eve sun morn and laughed until we fell out of our chairs
where's the ability to do that anymore? can I find humor in the fact I'm staring the financial stew with a twisted stumick? nah..I was writing about the Butler book 'the way of all flesh' which kind of rung true, although it too smacked of the worry over one's pitiful financial picture (I look like the grim reaper in the mirror on that one, ishh)
butler's book, the way of all flesh, expounds on the limits of child abuse, in the educated...it was a good thing thought by this narrowminded minister who married a woman he couldn't hardly love but he did and had three children with her once he figured it out...I came away from the book, because it was hardly bearable to read that this minister assaulted his oldest boy for having a lisp, he couldn't say his 'c''s...it was painful to read and quite shocking
i could think in butler's day that the presentation of this child abuse would have been the thing to think on if one were looking toward the victorian era and the happy family of victoria and albert..that this righted the path to that end and thus a family was endowed with the graces it was intended
i would think also that love comes naturally if all else is in place and that such ideas as whaling on a child for speaking as a child wouldn't even have been a consideration...ah, but it was the father/minister himself that had been born without a good cause..that he came into the world was possibly to contain the essence of his wonderful grandpapa..who, as butler tells it, was one of those lights of the world that lands just in the middle of a common everyday settlement of people, individuals of all sorts, to whom his light spreads and things are good...he gives (the grandpapa) by his being among us, the joy of our existence...let's us know, here's why we're here...so his vessel of soul is maintained by his progeny, of whom he only had the one son..who was a prig, a bore, a bastard at heart and so on...according to butler
but, as we bear on in the book, and we do, we can't be putting it down because we're stuck in airports the long day, all day, from early on, we're reading it to find out a little on the advent of victorianism, which it is...and it does create the very fecund environment of victoria and albert and their many children...I do n't want to know about them, but I do know that if anyone read butler's book in his day, they would have thought the child beating passage most cruel..and also the alcoholic wife of the beaten son...who never seems to cut a break in his life until he's grown past most of it, including the raising of his own two lovely children (better off without me, he says)...bummer
what is life if you have kids and aren't there...I dunno, I figure I am, somehow, most of the time, but I'm me too and perhaps that's it, that's the sacrifice of the past centuries that we would now know ourselves a little better, go to a psychoanalyst of some sort and get our rages, dispossessions and so on, ironed out...I should hope that's what we've learned...It's kind of like treading familiar ground, this butler book, kind of peeping in the window and listening to incessant yammering of the quasimodo sort, where the dragons of no faith are ever in the cobwebs and the dust bunnies of life...
he doesn't go in for that sort of detail, butler, he tells a little of a house the beaten son occupies for a time, but only at the onset of the habitation (I'm talking in the vernacular of the book here), rather he goes on a mile about faith, belief in faith, faith as a constant, faith as a moral bankruptcy that it is so poorly interpreted
certainly we had lovely books on the saints growing up - oh yes, my catholicism is coming up like a newly forming volcano here, but I leave it aside to examine the fortitude of the epistle (the way of all flesh)...I also pad away a moment to investigate my own hearth..
 there, situation adjusted, fingers a bit stiff with cold, certainly that is the season, it's dribbling rain outside - we're used to it but it is dreary, so the thoughts about this book are of that sort, that its issues with theology lie buried in the attitudes of the family explored.  there is no joyousness in this family, and I don't recall its name other than it was of the cloth, throughout, the beaten son even ordained into it but not a minister, at last, rather a newborn theologian asking his readership (if there was) to qualify their beliefs in the foundation of his own thought.  That I had a challenge with.
Whereas we may all at some point be recognizable as churchgoers, when the chips are down, we have only our faith to turn to.  Do we?  would we if we knew what I now know about this particular English family?
Well, in a quick moment I recollect that we're never going to be the supreme being that God is.  If anything, The Way of All Flesh makes this a graphic presentation.  Here is the main church in England, I don't think Butler even calls it 'Anglican' though I suppose it must be, what else would it be? I came away not knowing for sure if it was the Anglican church, but I guess if one attends Cambridge and becomes a minister from it, then that must be what he was ordained to be serving in..hmm
What the book does is tell all that is without foundation in belief.  It comes up with the platitudes of belief - that God serves the daily prayer, but we don't see the characters being sustained by this, rather that they survive somehow in spite of it.  Only the original patriarch, the grandpapa early on in the story, has any joy of being in him.  Only he recognizes the true worth of life, that it is to be lived to the fullest.  Butler suggests this grandpapa may have been steered a bit by taking a wife it would appear to be not the most satisfactory spouse, but even this the man makes a good sort from, and they have a child.  It is this child that raises the ugly head of the best of our existence, our original sin in not recognizing life as a state of paradise.  Grandpapa knows well that life is this paradise.  He lives  his life out in this joy as Butler tells it.  Further on his family would have disappointed him no doubt, but had he been there to sort it out, surely it would have been a better thing.  Each child would have known his place in that man's heart one feels assured of it.
In the end the beaten child, whom I now feel confident (again the language of the story) to name as Ernest, whom he was.  Ernest lives to share with the rest of us, through Butler, how we may accomplish our life to the best of our ability.  We may be like a boat at sea in many storms, but if we listen to our inner voice, which we wou ld probably define as 'our soul', we may achieve the peace of knowing our place.  To reflect on how we got here, well, if it doesn't s uit, why bother.  That we are, and shall be, that's what we must do.  The book is an exercise in this  achieving element.  To be saddled with a set of behavior tools that don't suit us, as Ernest was at his father's knee (again and again) may take away our awareness of the essential goodness of being, most of it being compromised by situations that confound us, we may also know that having been born as Ernest was, in the bosom of the church, we may learn from it what not to take away from it.  That while God may be with us from the moment we are born, he does not sit idly by letting us be coddled by his presence.  Rather if we are the people in his service, we may be challenged beyond our ability to actual be human, and become as automatons of the written word of those with whom we share this life.  Did they know heaven on earth, could they understand suffering and death, were they not vile greedy sorts that consumed all in their path?  Some of them, perhaps, but they stand as effigies of the wrong way, and if they are the ones representing what He wants for us, then we know from that it is not what He wants for us.  So that is why Butler wrote the book for his time and for those after, that we may understand from it that we can choose our way, we can be strong, or we can crumble.
Certainly some of those characters in the story did crumble, or were made into clay statutes of their time, like Ernest's parents, who were outwardly the ones we would look up to, as minister and his family, their behavior was exemplary.  This is what also called them to be so cruel to their children as they thought it was called upon them to do so.  Their nature was not allowed to flourish and respond to the light of faith but rather to carry it out as some sort of dire military service, which in their recklessness was never made obvious to them.  They didn't squirm other than to respond to the base needs of their personalities.  As such, you can only surmise to get through it, the story, that this is faith on the surface when confronted with the choice to do evil.  I should survive it even if it calls to me like a siren.   Butler does reflect on Scylla and Charbydis a bit, in the case of Ernest and his choices as a youth, but we know that these are only for him signposts and he learns what the wrong turn can lead to. 
my fingers are still cold and I don't hear the fire crackling...I shall return momentarily
 here's momentarily...fingers again cold...fire is absolutely NOT cooperating, although I've finally made it go..
well...lots to think about with butler's book, but it boils down to live the life you've been given with as much good grace as you can give it..don't dwell on shortcomings but make the most of your opportunities, be enthusiastic, innocent and yet, trust in the Lord, for he knows all and will sustain you in spite of the major obstacles that a person like Ernest must face..to retain one's niaevete in certain danger is to be vindicated, however long that takes, it shall happen...and whatever theology one encounters, temper it with the experience of life for there is where you shall see love and grace in their element, and in no other place, however fine the speech...hehe, like here, haha

countdown to Christmas

I'm pretty sure nobody reads this blog, per se...so I could elaborate on my secret Christmas plan here if I so choose.  But I guess I'd better be careful about it...thinking that to leave from Bellingham on December 23, which would be a creative move on my part, hehe..I'd have about sixteen hundred miles to do and could do eight hundred each day, which would take two days, sleeping momentarily here and there...which I've been doing anyways, arriving on the doorstep Christmas day, sometime.  I'd so like to do it but I'm not probably going to, for reason and another, and am looking into airflights and so on, to see how that goes..
It's going on noon right now..the wind has been howling all night.  An excerpt from Handel's Messiah "For Unto Us a Child is Born" is playing on the Canadian radio station I listen to.  The fire has been burning steadily for several hours but this old house doesn't like to warm up.  I feel like a good book and some hot food a little later. Meanwhile, I'll keep busy figuring out the accounts and wondering what comes next..it's a challenge.

art

I s'pose that if I weren't who I am, I might not even care about the topic, or what it means.  art is something that is contained within one's environment.  Not all of us use it, look at it, like it, or are even aware of it.  I'm kind of in the middle of it because I do it all the time, I find it is the curvature of my earth, so to speak...the interpreter of my existence in real time.  The spirit of me, talking.
I was helping a healer heal someone the other day.  Still kind of regrouping from that one because my mom called up just after we were at the home and told me there was a rumor going around I was bringing a 'devil man' to the lady's house (the one who needed healing).  I got a picture of "Guernica' in my head as Mom was talking.  Yep....ignorance isn't bliss if you're dying and could be helped.  But, one must take the high road or not get there, either.  So, "Guernica"....
Kind of a stark example of what I mean about art being the rudder of my little ship...but I had this other thing, about faith I wanted to share because I guess my friend who's dying is going to die.  I can't do anything about it because that is what she wants...even though I tried to press the logic into her about what it was that was going to happen...there won't be any Jesus at the end of the tunnel for her because he's there watching her suffer and wondering why she wants to do that.

Here's a little prayer from Louisa May Alcott...

A little kingdom I possess
where thoughts and feelings dwell
and very hard I find the task
of governing it well
For passion tempts and troubles me
a wayward will misleads
and selfishness its shadow casts
on all my words and deeds
How can I learn to rule myself
to be the child I should
honest and brave nor ever tire
of trying to be good
how can I keep a sunny soul
to shine along life's way
how can I tune my little heart
to sweetly sing all day
Dear Father help me with the love
that castesth out my fear
teach me to lean on thee and feel
that thou art very near
that no temptation is unseen
no childish grief too small
since Thou with patience infinite
doth soothe and comfort all

I do not ask for any crown
But that which all may win
Nor seek to conquer any world
except the one within
be thou my guide until I find
led by a tender hand
thy happy kingdom in myself
and dare to take command

So the happy kingdom of myself is the awareness, for me, that I can make art, that there is art, that art is what sustains us on the mortal plane.  Brotherhood and the entire can of worms that is humanity, the spirit thereof, if you will, is about being interpreted as such, by art.  Take the movie Hotel for Dogs, for example.  I just saw it so it's fresh in my mind.  Two kids really taking care of some animals with some clever little rigs that feed, exercise and attend to the needs of stray dogs in the big city.  The happily ever after comes with the kids actually running a dog hotel with foster parents.  Wonderful story.  Good for everybody because the comical inventions to keep the pets fed and so on are extravagantly efficient along the lines of a PeeWee Herman story ...
the point is that it was art that explained the kids' need to care for the dogs...better it would be human interest but then that would be "The Soloist"...with Robert Downey, Jr.  Jamie Fox got big kudos for his performance as Nathaniel Ayers, the mentally ill guy that played Beethoven's cello so well.  It was, after all, Beethoven who was playing the music for Fox's character.  Had to have been. The strings would not have resonated for anyone else, quite as well, because Beethoven is a consumate artist.  He has gone to his rest centuries back but he's still here, coming to us as a broadcast whenever his music is performed, by anyone.  Fox included.  Ayers' situation was convoluted because as they said at 'The Lamp' where he was allowed to have the gift cello he played on, 'we don't treat 'em unless they want it, they have to ask for it' , meaning that it is convenient to dispense with someone and also to keep the person dispensed with, if they can't function without some help. 
Point of the Soloist story was that Downey's character, Lopez, wouldn't give up on Mr. Ayers, whereas I, who have been in the field with the psychotics and so on, know a different tack on his situation and that would be that mmm, yes, Fox is psychotically dangerous, but not to himself because to himself, he's not hurtful but does just as he pleases, only sometimes when forced into the corner where he has to confront the issue of WHY he is creative with music, he has to admit he stole it - that ability - from Beethoven himself - and that makes him want to confront who so ever is nearest (I call it the 'food' factor)...physically assaulting them to the point of committing murder.  It's getting so those of us poseurs who only control the art, that is, disseminate it (havening lots of issues with that at the moment but there is another story there as well) are becoming like the restaurant in the old neighborhood "Food for Thought", which I think is a great name for a restaurant and I want to run one by that name someday...

   Well, I feel as though I digress a whole hell of a lot and don't get to the point of the issue by being bogged down in things...real time issues, when the truth of the matter is that I enjoy my day off more fully than I'd ever done till now...the dog standing by the door wagging her tail because she wants a walk...to sit here and write when it would have been time to rush out the door to an office..well, the office has changed but the art hasn't.  I had the most marvelous studio in a warehouse recentlyand all I did all day was kowtow to the muse when I realized that the muse cou ld be exploited I decided it would be a societal thing and so here I am, en tow, to make that happen.

The topic was 'art'...more to come