There's the Law and There's What's Right

'Scuse me while I ramble 'n' rant a wee.

Sometimes laws are made.  Sometimes?  Too often! 

The social contract tells us how to behave, in a general sense, and laws are supposed to help enforce the boundaries and keep us civil.

Thing is, it seems that some folks think they can and should force everyone else to think and do as they do, even when their mandates fly in the face of justice.

Recently, the state of Georgia passed a whole mess of laws restricting the ability of its citizens to vote.  I won't bore you with the details - they're horrifying and unjust and bewildering in their indecency.  Horrible people making horrible rules because they think they can do what they like and make everyone else do it, too.  If you're reading this, you obviously have some kind of Internet skills and can Google the stupidity.

Although the whole mess makes me irate, I'm really stuck on one part.  I am...riled...

Georgia lawmakers have made it unlawful to give food or water to people standing on line to vote.

Umm...

Hello, Georgia, have we met?

Because I know, if we'd ever met, you wouldn't have done that. 

You'd have run the other way, in fact.  Possibly you'd have bound and muzzled whoever proposed it and left them on a mountain top under a new moon as a propitiating sacrifice to the gods of decency.

Because now?  The Witch is...riled...

There will be a reckoning.

Lest anyone mistake the above for some kind of threat, it's not.  I don't threaten.

What I DO is feed people.  Anyone who is hungry.  Regardless of who you worship, vote for, love, admire, wear, or follow, I will feed you.  Even the lowest of humans, politicians, I will feed if they hunger.  I will always strive to answer hunger and thirst.  There is no circumstance that will keep me from doing what I can, what is just and right and compassionate.  No mortal being, no law of the land, no threat, will make me stray from that path, will bend my integrity, will keep me from it.  I've not yet met the god that would demand I stop, nor has the power to make me.

You, Georgia lawmakers?  You are mere mortals, and among the weakest of them.  You believe that you have power, that you have mastery over your subjects.

You do not.

You believe in an illusion, and one day the illusion will fade and there will be a reckoning.

Among many pagans is a blessing of sorts:  May you never hunger.  May you never thirst.

I take this seriously.  Bone deep, in fact.

There's also the threefold law, a reminder that for every action there is a consequence, usually magnified three times - harm someone, receive three time the harm (often by your own hand).  Help someone, three times the blessing will find you.

Some witches curse.  Some people seek vengeance through action.  Me?  I bless.  Sometimes, though, it's wise to fear the blessing.

Bless you, Georgia lawmakers who enacted this travesty.  May you see yourself.  May you find the world reflecting you to you, and truly See yourself.  May you know, to the bone, to the soul, to every corner, in ever shadowy place you seek to hide, may you Know what you are, what you have done.  May you feel what your actions mean to those you seek to control.  May you understand, all the way to your last breath, what kind of evil you carry within you.  May you have opportunity after opportunity to make things right, and may you find the courage to act on those opportunities even against the poison of your own souls.  May your children, and your children's children, unto the last generation, set themselves to right your wrongs or endure the consequences and curse you for it.  May you know what it means to suffer unjustly until you learn how to be just.

May you know what it is to need compassion...and may compassion find you, reach out to you, offer succor, without pain or price, because your unjust laws?  Do not make you free from need, and compassion asks no price.  Unlike you, compassion doesn't care how it may benefit from its action.  It also won't keep you from collecting your consequences, because compassion knows that some lessons must be learned hard, and it would be cruel to protect you from your actions.  How would you learn?

Between this life and the next, there is someone standing at the gate.  They have the power to determine your destination.  Consider your actions and which pathway your feet will be set upon.  How will you answer for what you've done?  What will you tell the savior you claim to worship, to follow, to adore?  

Bless you, who made this cruelty into law.  I hope you learn quickly that there is the law, and there is what is right, and sometimes the two are not the same.  We are not obliged to obey unjust laws, and you can be replaced.

There will be a reckoning.

Kyd's Cockeyed History, A Slightly But Not Factually Edited Repost

 Another year, another repost.

~~~~~
I'm cooking corned beef and cabbage tonight, much to my delight - there will be plenty for dinner and enough left over for hash tomorrow.  I'll make up a to-go for Mom, since she's staying home (and I don't blame her).  Bird opts out of the feast entirely, causing me to question whether he's really mine. I get not liking cabbage, but potatoes? Something's not right with the child.  Sprout may try a taste, or she may not.  She's trying to be more adventurous about food, but she can still be put off if it looks odd.

I'm planning on making soda bread, too, because we all like it and any leftovers can be used to make a nice doorstop or cudgel.

Seeing as I'm Pagan, you wouldn't think I'd celebrate St. Patrick's Day. Better than most, I am supposed know what St. Patrick did to get famous and earn his sainthood. However, I'm also part Irish, and I happen to love corned beef and cabbage. Also, I consider it a reclaiming of the day for Pagans, or some junk.

A bit of slightly bent history (that has, I'll grant you, been mangled in my head over the years and is rather truncated because I'm not writing a book, here)(I'm writing a book somewhere else). When I was a child, we were told that St. Patrick's day was to celebrate his chasing all the snakes out of Ireland. It is an historically serpent-free bit of earth, and the church attributed this to Paddy and his efforts...kind of overlooking that there weren't any of the slithery things on the island to begin with, if you ask me. Which they didn't, because I was a kid and most grown-ups weren't prepared for my staggering logic and keen grasp of history but rather appalling lack of respect for theology.

Many years later, people were saying St. Patrick's Day was a celebration of all things Irish, like green beer (wait, isn't beer German??) and green clothes, and green hair, and green mashed potatoes (which I won't eat on a dare because, really...green potatoes???), and rivers dyed green (I'm sure the fish are all so very thankful to be included...like Fridays and Lent weren't enough for them!)(that might only be funny if you're Catholic)(or not) and exclusionary parades, and funny little men waving their shillelaghs about (look it up you pervs!!) and that sort of thing.

 In none of the many different explanations for this seemingly random holiday did anyone mention pagans. A most curious oversight if you know what St. Patrick, who was just Patrick at the time (not really, I have no idea what his real name was. For all I know, it was Fred), was actually doing on the Emerald Isle.

He was born and lived sometime between 490 and 461 AD, give or take. Around age sixteen, he was either sent, or stolen and taken, to Ireland where he spent some time hanging out with sheep and being lonely. He talked to God a lot. You may notice that lots of shepherds do that. You would too if all you had for company all day was a bunch of mutton-heads. I'm sure the Pope understands... 

Christianity was rolling along like a snowball in those days, spreading out all over the dang place. Good grief, it was getting so that a simple Pagan/Heathen (there's a difference between the two, not that the church cared much) couldn't get any peace any more. Everywhere they turned, there was a church being built where a sacred grove used to be, from the trees that used to be the sacred grove, or a church going up on a sacred hill, or someone bathing their dirty feet in a sacred stream. To be fair, there was a lot of real estate lumped under that "sacred" heading in the pagan world. We're like that - we just love our planet so. Plus, you know, all those gods needed housing, and they don't all do the roommate thing very well. So the pagans were running out of places to have sex on the ground, in the woods, up a tree - they were big on the sex, those little devils - and to read entrails in their spare time.

I digressed. Sorry.

So there was this lonely kid, Patrick Whatsisname, hanging out with sheep and pondering life, the Universe, and everything. He got the idea, somewhere along the way, that maybe other folks should share his God. He got out of his contract (OK, probably slavery) and went around telling folks how terrific his God was, and how he reckoned they should convert. It seems that polite conversation wasn't doing it for the pagans, who tended to stare at him, or point and laugh. Rude beggars, huh? Now young Patrick (or middle aged Patrick, or old Patrick, I have no idea) decided he needed to be a bit more...persuasive. He had noticed something common among the pagan big-wigs. The guys at the top of the food-chain, magic/spirituality wise speaking tended to have a symbol on them somewhere...often around their wrist. On the wrist that indicated their "hand of power", or the hand which they believed their "magic" flowed from. If it wasn't a tattoo, it was a torque. Guess what the tattoo/torque was? A critter called the ouroboros. For them as what doesn't ken what that critter is, it's a snake eating its tail, and often represents eternity.
Pat realized that if he took away this "power", he took away their mystique and leadership ability. So he removed the snakes - often with something edged and unpleasant. Yes, he whacked off their hands. Or branded their skin. Or took their trinkets. Converting Heathens is such messy work!! It was for their own good, of course.  Serpents in Ireland?  Not on his watch!

Some pagans today go on "snake crawls", a sort of pub crawl where they wear snakes and proclaim their paganism. I'm not quite that...er...proactive. I also don't necessarily think old Pat went around mauling everyone he met in an effort to build church membership and win a nifty prize. But it's the bloody aspect of what he supposedly did that earned his name in Christendom and for which his holiday is celebrated.

So again, why would I celebrate the day? Well, I'm all for a day when families get together and discuss history, theology, spirituality, and the like. Traditions are important - they give us a foundation on which to build our lives. People should discuss their history so they don't repeat it - whatever side of the issue they're on. Also, as I mentioned, I am part Irish. I can celebrate that heritage even as I acknowledge its imperfection. And I am Pagan - and I am celebrating the fact that I can be pagan today without (much) fear of having my (largely not visible when I'm clothed) tattoos painfully removed and other unpleasantness (except for the odd zealot who thinks I'm fair game, but I'm used to that. I live in the Bible belt, after all). Precisely because we didn't get wiped out, I celebrate. And have you ever had a really nice corned beef and cabbage dinner? I mean, yum! Oh, but I won't be wearing green. I wear blue. Don't even think about pinching me.

Love, Love, Love

 Love.

It's a word with baggage.  An overused word.  A word applied to fabric softener and dish detergent, to songs and fast food, sports teams and automobile parts and that one particular shade of vermillion.

We love clothing and cosmetics and movies and tv shows and certain brands of cracker (but not those other ones - those other ones are horrible!).

Sometimes we say "I love you" like it's painful.  Like we're ashamed of it.

In our cultural (of the Western sort, particularly USA style), we have an idea what it means to love, and maybe even categorize it a little, but mostly we don't think about it awfully much.  We're shy of feeling it, terrible at and terrified of saying it, and generally wish we had more of it while simultaneously pretending that we're just fine without it thankyouverymuch.

Recently, the Evil Genius, his father, and I were discussing the use (or, rather, misuse) of "philia" as it is often appended to words.  That led to looking up words for love, particularly Greek words, which led to...well...this post.

It has been a minute since I read about or studied Greek (except their food, of which I am a devotee), so I only vaguely remembered that there are a handful of different types of love in the ancient Greek world, and I couldn't recall more than a couple of them, so I hopped on down the rabbit hole of the Internetz and found myself a list that seems, to my faulty memory, to be complete.  No need to disillusion me.  I am contemplating rearranging my vocabulary to include these words, because who doesn't need more verbal tools?  No need to disillusion me there, either.

Folks, je vouz presenter le list of love words.  I hope you find 'em handy and help spread the...er...love.

Eros - romantic, passionate love.  You know, cheesy romance novel love.  Passion, lust, pleasure, yes please and thank you.  Interestingly, it seems this was a terrifying kind of love to the ancient Greeks because it meant losing control, loss of free will, an unthinking drive to frolic among the wildflowers and make with the whoopee, ohhh, yeahhh.  Intense romantic and sexual feelings that demanded action, baby!!!  Eros can wreak havoc, rob one of sense, and bring a body to their knees.  It is a conflagration that is as likely to consume and leave nothing but ash behind as it is to settle into something more easily felt, experienced, and lived with.  I dread this love, because on the rare occasions I've brushed against its edges, it has been disastrous.  This one, for me, is to be endured until it, hopefully, ebbs or ends.

Philia - affectionate love.  This is the friendly love, a platonic love that doesn't require or even want, really, any sort of physical attraction.  This is a gentle, warming love.  I can relate strongly to this one.  I philia my friends so hard!

Agape - a selfless, universal love.  This is the love for the stranger, for nature, for deity.  It is an abstract kind of love.  Sometimes it feels - gently - overwhelming.  Agape is unconditional, boundlessly compassionate, infinitely empathetic.  It is a love extended to all, and I mean all.  I grok this one deeply - this love suffuses me to bursting.  It is my salvation and my curse.

Storge - love of/for the familiar.  This is a protective, kinship kind of love, what we feel for family and, occasionally, translates to patriotism.  It's a love of loyalty, of what we know, of the puzzle into which our weird, curvy parts fit perfectly.  I have an enormous storge for my family, both the born into and the chosen into.

Mania - obsessive love.  This is the love that can turn into anger, violence, and destruction with hardly any effort.  In fact, it takes more effort to keep it from becoming those things.  This is stalking kind of love.  This is co-dependency, jealousy, and violence.  This is the toxic love that poisons, devours, and kills.  This is the love that teaches us that not all love is such a good thing.  I think I've dipped my toes into this kind of love, but thankfully never fully immersed in it.  

Ludus - playful love.  This is a sweet, funny kind of love.  It's the teasing love of flirting with a crush, the affection between new lovers who laugh, joke, float along on a wave of endorphins and happy little discoveries.  You know, the annoying kind of love!  Yeah, I want some, too.

Pragma - enduring love.  Pragma is a love built on a strong foundation of commitment, understanding, the long haul.  It's a love that has gone through some shit, learned to compromise, found patience and tolerance, and matured.  I have witnessed this love, and envy those who experience it.

Philautia - self love.  No, not that kind of self love.  Or, well, why not that kind of self love?  But really, this is the kind of love that speaks of appreciation for self, of knowing, of caring for one's self.  This is the kind of love that turns inward yet help connect us to others - as we learn to love ourselves, quirks and peccadillos and all, we learn to love and appreciate others.  Like many, I'm working on this one.

I'm going to add a link, here, to a non-Greek post about another kind of love - perfect love - because I think it's pertinent.

I don't think any of the above loves stand alone.  I believe that we can experience constant combinations and evolutions of the emotion, which is probably why we find it so confusing.  Love is one wild ride, but it's a wild ride that we want, need, to experience if we are to live fully.

I agape you, and now Imma go storge my kids and philia the cats.  How's your love life?

Washed Up

 "Something there is that doesn't love a wall..." - Robert Frost

Having been born in, and having spent my youth rambling around, New England, where Mr. Frost noticed this phenomenon and then wrote about it, I can attest to the fact that, indeed, something there is that doesn't love a wall.  Nature up yonder, at least when I was roaming through the woods with the smilodons, has mood swings.  The onset of cold weather brings an onslaught of frost heaves, which cause havoc on roads and other pavement, and on anything stacked that isn't also stuck together with cement or grout or old toothpaste (don't tell ME about how sticky it is) or good intentions (some of the very stickiest stuff in existence).

I'm not writing about walls, today, despite the promising beginning of this post.

I'm writing about my dishwasher.  Wait, what?  That's a leap.

Something there is that doesn't love a dishwasher.  Especially at Casa de Crazy.  Dishwashers just...lose their will to live.  Oh, they try.  They put up a good fight.  They groan and grind and sometimes whine a little, and they do lots of whooshing and shushing and, not to put too fine a point on it, washing, but sooner rather than later?  They up and die.

Entropy is inevitable.  Things with moving parts will break down.  Heck, things without moving parts will break down.  We will all eventually slide with cold-syrupy slowness into the long, lingering, heat death of the Universe.  Don't panic, you have plenty of time to press your good trousers and tidy up your hair.  Chugging along in all its entropic glory, the end isn't so much nigh as it is a few minutes off.

My dishwashers, though, seem to want to get a jump on things.

I am well aware that they need occasional cleaning out and perhaps a gentle pat and "Good job, well done you" to help them last.  I know about pre-rinsing as an aid to longevity, and about not overloading.  I try not to run the thing more than once a day, and will often go two days between runs.  I run the hot water to the sink, first, to prime the pipes.  I chant the incantations at the proper hour and make offerings quarterly as prescribed by the manual.

They die anyway.

The current fancy drying rack didn't make it two years.  Two.  Years.

The one before it went for about five, I think, before melting to itself on the inside.

I can't recall if there was one before the one before this one, I've lost track.  I do know I am pretty good at almost keeping up with the washing by hand, and that a defunct dishwasher makes a fine drying rack but you have to leave it open with the drawers?  Baskets?  Slide-y out-y thingies? out, which may lead to barked shins if one is careless about where they place said shins in the dark.  Also, it's a good idea to wipe down the inside of the dishwasher door and maybe the tub as well every now and then because despite it being clean dishes hanging out in there to dry, there will be a buildup of schmutz.

The inner workings of the dish machine are a mystery, to me.  Honestly, it could be trolls or golems in there, and I wouldn't know.  Pretty sure it isn't pixies or imps, though.  Repairing the things is well beyond me.  I'll have to have someone in to do it.  Eventually.  For now, I stand t the sink a few times a day, wash a handful of things, then wander off to do whatever it is I do when I wander off.

It's not exactly a pressing matter, and if I have it repaired or get a new one, it'll just break down as soon as the warrantee is up, so why be in a hurry?

Something there is that doesn't love a dishwasher, at least around here.

Superhero (I Am Not A)

 I have had many opportunities in my life to prove to myself (and anyone who questions it) that I am definitely not a superhero.

If the lack of flight-without-aircraft (and a pilot, and a flight crew, and a ground crew, and...) isn't an obvious clue, there's also a distinct lack of laser vision, super (and sometimes even ordinary) strength, x-ray vision (boy, could I have used it a few times - think of the ER savings!), super speed (unless you look at it from a sloth's perspective, and then I'm The Flash, baby!), and a number of other egregious holes in my superhero resume.

On February 15, the PTB decided I needed yet another reminder of my not-superheroness.  On no less a day (not that it's really a big deal, and I genuinely mean that) than my very own birthday*, I ignored my desire to stay a-bed and took the Evil Genius out for a practice drive.  Wait...no...umm...I mean I let the Evil Genius practice driving.  Yeah.  Because I don't need to practice driving the Evil Genius, what with him not having wheels or a mechanical motor or even reliable steering.  Anyway.  I really didn't want to be out in the world, but I had told him we could go driving so he can get his hours in (Redneck Central has a graduated licensing system and he needs a certain number of hours before he can move to the next level) and I try not to disappoint my children more than once a fortnight, so out we went.

I plan routes to be interesting and maybe a little challenging - hills, blind turns, multiple lanes, turn lanes, right turns, left turns, lane changes, traffic lights, parking - and cover things likely to be on driving tests and part of the driving experience.  On the 15th, we were supposed to head to a local parking lot and work on the various types of, rather obviously, parking.

He asked if we could do a loop on some local roads, first, and since more practice is better, I agreed.

He was doing well, no big surprise, and we were on a back road, making a left turn, when things went rather sideways.

Literally.

He'd stopped, checked traffic, and was just beginning the turn when there was a sort of powder, screechy, crunchy, popping thud.

An oncoming car hit us, her driver's side nose to our driver's side nose.  Airbags deployed, crumple zones crumpled, anti-lock things anti-locked, and things generally got messy, loud, smoky, and quiet.

I'll skip all the details of dealing with the wreck.  That's not what this post is about.

Onward.

Thanks to safety features in both vehicles, there were no dire injuries.  I can vouch for the fact that airbags work.  Oh, boy, do they work.  With terrific enthusiasm, they work.  In combination with locking, 3-point seatbelts (standard issue), they do a fantastic job of making sure that the human body doesn't wind up being distressingly intimate with the dashboard, the windscreen, or possibly the pavement outside the vehicle.  They work painfully well.

And here comes the most recent proof that I am not a superhero.

I didn't take a ride on the bus - I was busy dealing with the incident and didn't feel the need - but I was hurting.  I mean, airbags, wow.  As things began to motherfucker that hurt!, I quietly chanted the mantra "You're a witch.  Deal now, feel later" and dealt.  Once the incident was cleaned up, my son reassured a few million times, the other driver hugged, looked after until rescue came to carry her off for a precautionary ER visit, and my beloved Calliope (the Tahoe) hauled to Casa de Crazy via tiltbed and dropped off on the driveway, I asked Mom (who drove down from Dragon's Rest to rescue us because Mom) if we could maybe, possibly, pop on over to the local ER, because holy carp, airbag!

An aside - I wound up at the same ER as the other driver and unintentionally got to listen to the crew talking to her about test results.  Soft tissue damage, nothing wrong with spine, no broken bones, no internal organ damage, whew!  Also, aside from some rather reasonable psychological bruising and some uncomfortable physical bruising, the Evil Genius was ok and opted out of the ER (or as he likes to think of it, Plague Central).

I only went because the ouch was escalating rapidly, and it was an ouch I hadn't experienced before, so I didn't know how to label or process it.

When they offered me a pain killer, I actually accepted it.  That's kind of a big deal, for me.

Tests and scans performed, I was sent home with a couple of prescriptions for anti-inflammatory and muscle relaxer and the admonition that it will hurt for a while.

Yeah.

About that.

I slept in the recliner for a week, when I slept.  Are we sure nothing is broken or bent?  Really?  Because wow.

The second week, I alternated nights in bed  - fun getting horizontal and then for the love of all that's holy, don't move! - and the recliner.  For those two weeks, I ruthlessly quashed coughs, sneezes, and hiccoughs (sonofabitch!!!) and didn't move or breathe unless I had a desperate need to.  I let myself get slightly dehydrated for a few days because drinking means peeing means standing up means sitting down means standing up again means leaning to use the flush lever means sitting back down in the recliner means oh, I don't think so.

You know how, in movies and tv, the hero gets kicked in the chest or punched in the middle and just kind of shakes it off, or pops right back up, keeps fighting, and the next day looks and acts like nothing happened?

Not me, yo.  Almost three weeks after the incident, I am still moving gingerly, awkwardly.  I'm much better, really, and thankful, but still hurting and rather over it. 

So, yeah, no super healing or invulnerability, then.

I am super impatient, though, so maybe that's one of my powers?  Because two days after the incident (hmm, The Incident may have to be my next band name, I'm thinking maybe some kind of Indie Folk genre), I thought I should be fine, and apparently my poor old body has other ideas.  We are in negotiations, but I think I'm losing.

Life goes on, and we'll get back to what passes for normal around here, and I have one more reminder that I am in no way a super anything, except in a rather mundane, human way.  Dammit.


*And would you believe that this wasn't actually the worst thing to ever happen on my birthday?  Because it wasn't.