Quote of the day...er...week...umm...hey, look, a quote!!

"...besides love, independence of thought is the greatest gift an adult can give a child." - Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One

For old quotes, look here.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Sadly Still Apropos

Wrote this on this date in 2020.  I wish it wasn’t still relevant.

~~~~~

 Ok...I’m taking as deep a breath as I can manage at the moment, girding up my loins, and setting aside my distaste for confrontation and unpleasantry.

My rant:

Hurrah for you if you’re among the 80% who are young, healthy, asymptomatic, lucky, or who made a fantastic and timely deal with the devil.  You feel fine.  Maybe you don’t have it or won’t get it.  Maybe it’s super mild and you recover quickly.  Fanfreakingtastic.

Whoopdedo .

Who are you go spouting off about how this COVID-19 isn’t so bad, and people really shouldn’t be so panicked, so worried about it, and we can all just sit back and relax because you had it and it went just fine?  Perhaps you might consider the other 20%. 

You know, that other 20% of people who are older, immune compromised, or who happened to draw the short straw in the genetic lottery, and will get hit by this hard and fast?

All this quarantining?

All the social distancing?

It isn’t about the 80% who will be ok.

It’s about that other 20%, the old, the injured, the chronically ill, the people who have high risk factors. It’s about keeping them out of hospitals. It’s about not inundating our scarce resources with more patients than they can handle. 

I get it, you don’t like that you’re being told you can’t go to the bar, the restaurant, the movie theater, the concert, the dance party, dying the river green, the beer fest, or whatever it is that you find so terribly important.

It’s a real bummer that you have to interrupt your life.

Much as with vaccines, this is about protecting those who are most vulnerable, and the least able to get the care they will need to survive. Social distancing is the same thing as herd immunity. No, I generally don’t need a flu vaccine. You better bet, though, that I will be getting one every year from now on because I know people who can’t and whom the flu would kill.  If I bring the flu to them whether I have it or not, if I simply have it on my hand and touch them in some way, I endanger their lives.  That’s not ok.

If not endangering the lives of the vulnerable is such a huge inconvenience that you feel you should be exempt from it?  Fuck. You.

Yes, that’s right I said fuck. You.

I realize that it seems like much ado about nothing. A tempest in a teapot. Foolishness on our part. If everything goes as it should, then almost nothing will happen. Then we will hear the voices crying out “See?  I told you we didn’t have to do this!”

If nothing much happens, then all of this quarantine and social distancing worked.

The whole purpose of this is so that nothing much will happen.

I would far rather sit at home, missing out on income, performances, interacting with the people whom I love, knowing that I will be able to do these things in the future, than do them now, help spread this nasty disease, and risk murdering any of those people whom I love because of my selfishness.

In the beginning, I was one of those who said oh, it’s no worse than the flu. What’s all the fuss about?  Then I started reading.

Having access to the World Wide Web means I also have access to worldwide news. I have access to people who are living in the middle of this hell, people who are able to write about their experience and share it with those of us who aren’t yet experiencing it.

I am glad that 80% will be just fine.

I am terrified for the 20% who won’t be just fine. I am terrified because of scant resources, because of a lack of global response, because those who imagine themselves to be our leaders are pooh-poohing the need for care and action now, not later, and I am terrified of the attitude of those who think that just because they won’t be hit hard doesn’t mean anyone will be. That laissez-faire attitude is horrifying to me.

It’s like we’re saying that the 20% don’t matter, they’re disposable.

For the sake of full disclosure, I should tell you that I am vulnerable myself. I have a number of factors that put me in the high risk category. If I get this thing, it could hospitalize me or worse.

My son is also among the vulnerable, despite his youth.

I have friends and family who are among those considered most vulnerable.

You’re upset, and want to mock me because I’m choosing to stay home? You are trying to minimize the seriousness of this, so that you can go out and do the things that you feel you ought to be able to do? Thank you so much for telling me and those whom I love that our lives mean nothing to you, that we’re less important than that concert you want to attend or going out to eat.

No, no, no backpedaling now! Do you think this is all foolishness and that life should go on as usual?  You think that you shouldn’t have to give up anything just because some of the rest of us might be more vulnerable than you are?  OK, fine. You feel that way, and there’s nothing I can do to change that...but if you are going to go out and live life as usual, carry on as if nothing is happening, then you get to take ownership for your actions.

You, yes you, going on out into the world and doing whatever you want and laughing at the rest of us. You are murdering us. It is murder. You are knowingly spreading a virus without any care for the impact it will have on others. All you care about is you. Fine. We’ve raised several generations in this nation to be quite selfish. Heck, I remember when children of the 80s were called “The ‘Me’ Generation” because they were among the first of us to be clearly, solidly,  openly all about themselves, and only themselves to the exclusion of anyone else.

I lived through it. I’ve watched it happen generation after generation since I was old enough to understand human behavior. That was a really long time ago, by the way. You  want to be all about yourselves, fine. But I’m not going to sit here and pretend that everything is hunky-dory, and that you are not absolutely in the wrong. You are.

Doctors in other nations face having to make the choice of who lives and who dies because they are running out of equipment and medication to treat patients. Do you have any understanding of how horrifying that is? Can you even begin to imagine what it must be like to be in that position? Would you even bother imagining? 

Stay home. Wash your hands. Avoid large gatherings. Inconvenience the fuck out of yourself. It’s not about you. It’s about the people around you. I can guarantee oyou that if your behavior endangers and ultimately kills someone in your family or one of your friends, you will look for someone to blame. I would suggest that you have no further to look than the closest reflective surface.

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Oh, Good Grief



IYKYK

I don’t want a gold toilet.  Are you kidding me? Can you imagine sitting on a solid gold seat in the middle of winter? I don’t care how warm you keep your house, that sucker is gonna be cold! Can we say hemorrhoids, boys and girls? 

I don’t want a hoard or material goods just for the sake of having them.

I DO aspire to have wealth, one day…so I can help feed, clothe, house, educate, and provide medical and psychiatric care to people who need those things but can’t afford them.

I’m not usually terribly aware of think pieces, opinion pieces, or any pieces, really, allegedly addressing paganism.  I’m rather whatever about ‘em because I’m busy existing and walking my talk, and often times those trash piles of misused words are written by non-pagan, human dumpster fires who haven’t bothered to look beyond their own ignorance, fear, anger, hatred, or confirmation bias.

I’m only marginally aware of the latest kerfuffle because a friend basically flung it at me like a large handful of bovine excrement…which it is. 

No, I’m not posting anything specific about the piece - like I opened this list with, IYKYK, and if you don’t, I’m not feeding the dumb motherfucker’s page count and you’re welcome.

If anyone can point me to the pagan golden toilet distribution center, though, I’d take it as a mitzvah - I could sell one of those bad boys and fund some serious food/medical/housing needs for a few folks I know.

Thursday, November 23, 2023

Happy Thanksgiving

Here followeth a Casa de Crazy Thanksgiving Day Tradicion:




And a new (old) addition to our warped holiday hilarity:


We hope you have a pleasant, tasty, mellow, comfortable, healthy, not-at-all-contentious Thanksgiving day if you are in the USA and an all around good one if not in the USA or not celebr
ating.

Here are the links if you want to view on YouTube:  Alice's Restaurant , Thankful and Turkey Drop

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Thankful

 I have a few traditions on Thanksgiving. Not many - the menu; Mom recording the Macy's parade so we can watch it together at Yule and fast-forward through all the crappy pop music, commercials, and talking heads to see the twenty minutes of balloons, floats and high school bands we’re actually interested in hidden among all that junk; and my day-before-Thanksgiving list of some things for which I am thankful, in no particular order and in no way complete:

What remains of my left foot, Nubbly, which perseveres and does its best not to pain me even when I deserve it
The doctors, nurses, and techs who probably saved my life and helped me get back to living it
The care that family and friends gave me while I return to upright living (or what now passes for it, which is pretty darned good) once more
The Evil Genius
Blossom (who was Sprout but reminded me that she's a bit grown, now and isn't a sprout any more, and I'm not weeping over that, you can't prove anything)
Mom
The house in which I live (beloved Casa de Crazy)
The vehicle which takes me where I need/want to be
Gypsy
Kerri
T, who may be my ex-husband but remains a staunch friend
Mr. Grey
Mizz A
Kit
Sam-I-Am
PJ, who is gone from this world but always with me
Mizz Beth
Martha 'n' Milo (who lives always in our hearts)
Avalon
My band mates
Dica
Donna
All of my friends who put up with me when I am most myself and therefor least likable. They are the net beneath me when I fly and fall
Kira, Jon, and Ric, with whom I am privileged to make music
Bread
The scent of leaf loam and woodsmoke in the crisp autumn air
Apple cider
Books, music, and art
Clean, plentiful water
Clean air
Clean clothes
Freedom
Nature and the ways she finds to show me something new of herself every day
Words
Song
Dance
Adversity, that joy is all the sweeter (Okay, okay, the joy is sweet enough, so basta with the adversity for a minute, please)
Every creature and plant that I consume to sustain myself, because without the life I take, I would have no life to live
Love - that it exists at all is a wonder, and I feel blessed to know it in many forms
Chocolate, gift from the Gods (yes, even the perversion called "candy bar") (Mmm...candy bar...)
The cats by whom I am kept
Honeycrisp Apples
Strong hands
Strong spirit
Strong will
Laughter
Cussed determination not to curl up and die just because life can sometimes be a succession of truly awful, bleak, and desolate days...but sometimes it isn't
My couselor, Jessica
The Internet
You

I hope you have a blessed day, and that the things for which you're thankful outweigh the things for which you're not.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all, from us at Casa de Crazy to you out in the Blue Nowhere and beyond.

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Counting Down

 It is Thanksgiving week and there is much happening here at Casa de Crazy.

We’re celebrating at Mom’s this year unless she doesn’t feel up for it so the kids and I are terrorizing the cats...er...tidying up a bit.  Poor house is a right mess as a result of some serious depression, chaos, and stress (so what's new?), and it WILL BE CLEAN for Thanksgiving.  Or, at least, the parts our guests will see will be clean.  Probably.  Maybe.  I hope.

This is a somewhat traditional post for me - every year I write a little something about this week, as it is the lead-off to The Silly Season (aka Christmahannukwazakyule) and often one of my busiest here at the Casa.

So, here we go.

Tuesday (today) - Baking a keylime pie, mashing turnips and carrots, cleaning, cleaning, and more cleaning.  Wash all of the good* dishes and serving dishes, clean off the dining room table, dig out Thanksgiving table linens, pull out the "formal"* flatware.  Panic over the cream supply - will half a gallon suffice?  Is two pounds of butter sufficient?


Wednesday - More housework.  Lort, the housework.  Then there's the laundry.  Oh, lort, the laundry.  Moving the trailer so it's not in the way of guest parking, and also so it's in its winter home.  Prepping the dressing.  Still panicking about the butter…

Thursday - Turkey goes in to bake.  Dressing goes in to bake.  Green beans are steamed.   Finishing up any last minute cleaning.  Children are shooed outside to frolic.  Friends and family trickle in.  Set the table.  Fill the water pitcher.  Watch TV and baste the turkey.  Make food, food, more food.  St
art Dutch apple pie baking and start chocolate silk pie thawing (because Marie Callender does pie so well, I'm happy to let her).  Serve.  Eat.  Coma.  Dessert and coffee/tea.  More coma.  Play games.  Pack leftovers to go for guests.  Pack baked goods for mom to take to the bake sale.  Eat more.  Sleep well.

Friday - More food coma and take the kids to visit/frolic with friends, or stay home and collectively hermit.

Saturday - Start baking holiday goodies for shipping to family and friends.

Sunday - Rest.  Possibly interspersed with napping and more baking.

How is your week shaping up?


*These are dishes that Mum and I bought one piece at a time from a grocery store a long, long, looooong time ago.  Service for fourteen including serving dishes, either free or bargain priced with purchase of a certain amount of groceries.  I love them.  Not fancy, but pretty and simple and I like them.

**Not sterling, but some rather lovely and solid stainless steel flatware from the Oneida Company, back when there was a Betty Crocker catalog and we clipped Betty Crocker points from boxes and saved them in a tin on top of the refrigerator.  Service for twelve, and some day I hope to expand it and add more serving pieces and other cutlery, but that'll have to wait a bit because it's a discontinued pattern and getting the pieces I'd like to have will cost a small fortune.  I adore my pattern, bought a few pieces at a time through the mail with little bits o
f cardboard and postage paid.

Friday, October 20, 2023

The Maass

 Long ago, when monsters could gather in numbers without fear of persecution, they would join their fellows once a year on their most sacred day and they would dance their most sacred dance.


Bedecked in their finest regalia, they moved in patterns traced into the earth by monster feet for millennia.


Called The Maass, it was both a celebration and invocation of community, of togetherness, of connection.  During the exuberant dance, each monster made contact with all of the others, renewing their unity through touch. 


Humans would keep to their homes, shivering with fear and ignorance at the terrible ruckus they heard in the dark hours.  They whispered of fearsome creatures creeping about in the night and left offerings, treats to appease the ravenous beasts and keep them from devouring tender human flesh.  On the night of The Maass, humans began disguising themselves, sometimes creeping forth to find and watch the gatherings of the monstabulary, hoping to learn more.


Human ears cannot comprehend the monstrous tongue.  The humans listened and heard “The Mash” and wrote of it in secret journals.


Eventually humans lost their fear, and their respect, and the monsters learned to hide, to stop gathering in easily targeted groups.  The monsters hid, but they kept dancing.  Alone or in numbers small enough to be overlooked, they danced, even as they were hunted to near extinction.


One day, one of the secret journals left by past humans was unearthed.  Written by a somewhat mad man who had given haven to many types of monsters in a bid to preserve them and keep their heritage from slipping into oblivion, it detailed the monsters’ daily lives and sacred days.  The Maass was written of in the holiest of forms - as poetry.


The young man who found the journal recognized the importance of his discovery.  He knew that the world must know of the beauty and stately grace of the dance, but he also knew that humans are full of fear, and that fear leads to anger, to blocked ears and closed hearts and minds, to torches and brandished pitchforks. 


Secretly, quietly, he worked to find monsters who would teach him this dance, to help bridge the gap between misunderstood monstrerkind and ignorant humanity, but there were none to be found.  Gone?  Or still in hiding?


In a bid to bring them out of isolation, he turned the poem about The Maass into a song, performing it in venues all across the land and sending it through the air in waves.  No monsters came, but he never gave up.


His descendants still play his invitation to the monsters on their most sacred night, still hoping for an answer, still hoping that the rustling shadows will resolve themselves into the beautiful milieu of the monsters spinning their magic out into the world and weaving it back together.


The world needs their magic.


Perhaps if enough humans raise their voices, one day the monsters will once more come and do The Mash.  The Monster Mash.


Now you know.

Sunday, September 17, 2023

Walkin' With Joshua

 Another dream about my favourite not-my-savior.


There's a lot for him to worry about here on the Earthly plane, and he likes to have someone to hash things out with from time to time.  You know, he never gets snarky - and if anyone has the right to a little snark, I would think he does!

So we had another little get-together, he and I, a few nights ago, and I figured I'd share it because I'm a little shy of blog-fodder right now, and why not put my delusions up in The Blue Nowhere for everyone else to laugh at?

"Hey, J, how's it hangin'?"
"Now, K, do you really think that's appropriate to ask me, of all people?"
"Why not?  You got 'em.  And I bet no one pays much attention to 'em.  Good grief, most of the people who claim they're your adherents refuse to acknowledge that you're a man in every sense of the word.  That must make weekends a bummer."
"Yes, well, I have other concerns."
"I know you do.  But I don't think it hurts to remind you that you may embody your father, but you are also human, the link between mortal and divine."
He gives me the look, you know, the one that says a body's getting a little sassy but making a good point?  Yeah, that look.
I offer him a cinnamon roll.
"Thanks.  Can we take these to-go?  I feel restless."
Sometimes he can't sit still. I think when he has a lot on his mind, he needs to move around, work the thoughts out physically.  We go for a walk.
"K, why are you Pagan?"
"You really have to ask?"
"I don't mind that you don't worship me or anything, I'm just wondering."
"Why?"
"It seems like so many people say they follow me and worship my father because that's what they're told to do."
"Uh-huh."
"Well...you were told the same things growing up, right?"
"Yup."
"So why didn't you listen?"
"I have this annoying need to think and make decisions for myself."
"Bothersome."
"You have no idea.  Oh, wait...maybe you do.  Although it seems to me that ultimately you were deprived of the very thing the rest of us have in spades - free will."
"I can see where you'd think that, but I had a choice."
"If you say so."
"I do.  So you decided that my father's house wasn't for you?"
"Pretty much.  Many of the things done in your name?  Not okay.  The abuses sanctioned by the church, or covered up by the church?  Not cool.  I'm not into judgement or anger or hate, and those things seem to be rampant in the places people say they worship you."
"I wish we had more people who came to my father's house because they chose to.  I like knowing someone follows me because they want to and not because they think they have to."
"Well...you know...that's the trouble with dogma, JC.  No room for thought with all that rote."
"I wish your Karma would run over my dogma."
"Lame."
"Sorry."
"So why don't you speak up about some of these things going on down here?  You know...gay marriage?  Health care?  Oooh...or a really hot one, reproductive rights?"
"What am I, crazy?  You think anyone's listening?"

I have to stop a minute and give him a hug, because he's damn near tears and I feel sorry for him.  All he wants is for people to be kind and to live decent lives, maybe help each other out once in a while, even love one another without judging.  It can't be easy.  Imagine if you had all those people asking you to smite, punish, hurt others because they think that's what you do, when really you're just kind of a Buddhist-Hippy-Free-Spirit who wants to drink a little wine, eat a nice non-fish dinner, and maybe sit by a fire and talk about everything and nothing with people who have no expectations beyond the next drink.

"J, I don't think you're going to find any resolution on this Earth.  I think too many people have abused your name and spirit for there to be an easy answer.  I think you're going to have to come back, roll up your robes, and start smacking people upside the head with the figurative mallet (or, you know, the real one if you prefer) to get your point across, and that's kind of contrary to the message, dontcha think?  If they'd even believe that you were you in the first place."

He sighs and sits down on a swing hanging from the branch of a tree that isn't there.  I go behind and give him a push, then another, and one more, sending him arching high up over the nothing in which we dwell.

He give a whoop and a "Whee!" and we're both laughing because how can we not?

I love this boy so much.  As with my own children, I want him to be happy, to not have to carry his burdens, to make sure he knows that I am a safe person, a safe space...because, as with my own kids, I cannot protect him from his choices, from himself, from the demands of Life, the Universe, and Everything.  I can only give him these tiny moments and the compassionate honesty he so craves, and maybe the tools to help him navigate rough waters - the ones he can't just calm himself, I mean.

"You're not wrong." He says when he climb off the swing.  He offers it to me but I'm not really into it at the moment.  I'm more interested in not getting sticky fingers from carrying an imaginary plate of cinnamon rolls.  "I should go, let you get back to whatever you were doing before I interrupted."

"I don't even remember.  Dreams, such ephemeral things.  Go on, then, and take the rest of these with you.  I just know I'm going to wake up and feel the need to wash my hands."  I shove the plate of cinnamon rolls at him.  The frosting has gotten everywhere, including my hands.

Another sweet smile, another joint-popping hug, and he's gone.  He'll be back.  Maybe next time I'll make cardamom thumbprint cookies with orange marmalade and vanilla/clove drizzle...and make him carry the dang plate.

Also, I was right - as soon as I woke up I just had to wash my hands.