Disaster on a cruise ship

This is an amazing thing

That dream you can't wake up from

I remember the date, May 1, 2005, because my father-in-law had just died and I had just returned from a soul-shredding trip back east for his funeral. I had nothing left in me, but was in that wild, I've-got-to-get-out-of-here state that always makes me slam the door behind me and travel.

On foot. I went off into the woods, and around here that means I went down the street and turned left, but these were public spaces, dog paths, old-lady-jogging places, and I needed far more surcease, more refuge. I needed to get away from the whole damn human race.

I kept walking, and once more turned left.

I was on a bridge. I was aware that a year or so ago, there was no bridge here, never had been. I had a vague memory of someone building one. Why? It led to nowhere.

Or had I tried it once, and found the rough path over the bumpety old tree-roots just too creepy and uncomfortable? I was on that path, and soon borne up by the rushing of streams.

These were hissing, shisshing, fish-and-glitter streams that rushed through my ear canals and rattled the tiny tympani behind them as if gushing through my skull. Suddenly I had the sense of smell of a horse, and, snorting, lifted my head.

The path led ever on. It twisted and wrenched. I was aware of civilization not far away, as if I could even see houses and hear lawnmowers through the cedars. But it couldn't be so, for these woods were primeval, pulling me deeper in. My feet were in a state of hypnosis. I could not refuse.

I went over bridge after bridge. Where had this path been all my life, I wondered  -  inaccessible to the dogwalkers, the granny-runners. Sealed off, yet here. One stream roared like traffic in a tunnel. It was awful, and I sped on.

As if pursued. But look. Here was the place I always turned back. Or not? I had never been on this path, so how could I remember turning back?  My scalp was electric. Beyond this twist lay the place of the faeries.

I can't describe how each tree seemed inhabited, not by a human or a squirrel but by its own fleshwood-spirit. I can't explain how each tree seethed, how burls swelled like pregnancies, wood cancer that somehow popped out of the symmetry of the trunk and made it look hideously deformed.

Then I stopped at the sight of a massive, salmon-coloured stump, the fleshy remains of a huge fallen cedar. It seemed to hum and swarm with life. I wondered where the tree had fallen, and when. And the sound it must have made, and what pushed it over. The tree-flesh seemed vital yet, not grey but livid red, full of ant-tunnels and probably housing one of those termite queens the size of a rat.

I walked beside a huge gully. I have always hated the word gully, it's ugly and hollow and hellish. I remember when I was about two or three, it could be my first memory, falling down into a gully in Delhi where my grandmother lived, and my sister, who was about 15 at the time, bending over me and saying, "Are you wounded?"

My feet slipped in spongy moss and slime. It was a pleasant day, but I was menaced. Something veered and eered. I could not see it. I turned around quickly, and it vanished.

Now strong cords pulled me, whipcords snaking out from under the ground to yank my feet out from under me. I burst into a clearing, and -

I stopped, then stepped, as cautiously as Pocohontas. The ground sank and groaned under me, giving way with each step and leaving a dark depression.  I stopped uncertainly and looked up and all around me.

I stood in an exact circle of tall cedars. I lifted my head and felt a crackling charge of energy whizzing clockwise around and around me. I chanted some sort of prayer that I wish I could remember now, something about my father-in-law. My temporal awareness had burned away like fog.

As I stood in the electrocharged circle I noticed a squirrel violently frisking its tail, jerkily making its way toward me. But it did not stop. It crept and stopped, crept and stopped until it was only a foot away from me. Then another squirrel appeared, and began to creep towards me. They sat up on their hind legs with their tails jerking and their beady eyes glistening in the sun, waiting.

I walked. Huge fallen logs, roots of trees just jutting up in the air: how had they been uprooted? Why were all these trees laughing at me? Then I saw or felt with my foot the weathered slat of an old ladder. Or something like it.

But it wasn't a ladder. It was a bridge. It was a bridge that lay flat on the grass. And it went on and on. I stepped on it and began to walk.

Perhaps the ground wasn't level here. But it was. Perhaps the ground was marshy here. But it wasn't. This thing was, it just was. I wobbled along on the rickety old slats, cursing the fucking little gnome who had put this bizarre useless thing here just to freak me out and make my hair stand on end.

Then. Then I did see something, a minor gully ahead of me where the ground fell away. But the rickety little bridge remained level. Like a horse stepping on a live power line, I jumped back.

Had I walked on it, I surely would have tumbled in.

This was some booby-trap set by a vindictive fairy tale witch, some Tenniel nightmare ink-drawing designed to scare the living shit out of innocent children. I wheeled and ran. And ran and ran, and it was a good thing that no bear ran after me. Everything unspooled and unreeled and unhappened, so that by the time I got home again, 
I was not even sure any of it had been real.





But I went back a few days later. I had to know. Yes. It was all there. I noticed a humming and a cracking. A subtle sizzling in the air, something that I picked up with the tip of my nose.

This was once a place deep, deep in the black-green uterine core of British Columbia, before the white man came and ripped the hell out of it, as he continues to do. It was a place where you had better not go, not even if you were aboriginal and knew the danger. The place of Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood and the Handless Maiden and all those other sweet children who started out innocent, but ended up lost and devoured.

Don't go there. Don't go there, my girl. This is a place of enchantment, but in the archaic sense, the faerie chant seducing you with coils of magic that will never set you free.

All is changed, changed utterly. I go to that place sometimes still, and like a soft drink left out too long in the sun, most of the fizz has gone out of it. But the trees are still murmuring to themselves, nasty little things they don't want me to hear
.

One day I realized the weird wooden bridge on the grass was gone: just gone, and then I wondered if I had imagined it. So I decided to go a little farther, clambered down and up that gully, and kept going.

A few minutes later, I had no idea where I was.

This was a profound disorientation. I couldn't turn in any direction. The view behind me was even more unfamiliar than the view in front of me. Panic crept up my scalp and I started running, desperately running. Like a hunger, like a thirst, like a stab of unbearable desire, I needed something, anything that looked familiar.

I ran until my lungs ached, and then: I burst out. Burst out of the forest, as if the forest had an actual door. I found myself on a road, a main road, paved, travelled, but completely unfamiliar. I had no idea how I would ever get home.

I walked and walked. I didn't have the nerve to flag a car down. Then I saw something. A bus stop. But I had nothing with me. I wriggled my hands into the pockets of my jeans and came up with a frayed yellow bus ticket that had probably gone through the wash.

I waited and waited. A bus came, a bus I had never heard of before, but it had to take me somewhere, somewhere familiar, somewhere in the civilized world! I made myself look normal, or hoped I did, and got on. I had the thought that I should have some sort of passport, to take me from one mode of being to the next.

I went home to recover, then as I was getting ready for bed I discovered a small bulge in my jeans pocket. I took it out and turned it over. It was a small stone in the exact size and shape of a cat's paw: neat toes and pads on one side, smooth elegance on the other. I didn't remember picking it up. For some reason I put several coats of nail polish on it. I have it still in a case with my jewelry, a bizarre trinket that wouldn't mean a thing to anyone else.

Psychedelic apocalypse

Superbloom in the California desert

The California desert blooms with unearthly splendour after a season of severe drought. An eerie and vivid side effect of the devastation brought about by climate change. 

Rat Surprise!

This was either the morning rat making another appearance, or (shudder) another rat. Both of them ended up in the same place.

Bentley smells a rat!

This didn't need to happen, oh no, not on an Easter Sunday morning when all you hope for is a cheery visit from a fluffy little bunny handing out candy eggs.

What I got was a rat.

I have never SEEN a rat before. I have had nothing to DO with a rat, ever. But there it was, hunched on top of my bird feeder, its snakelike tail drooping down, looking more dead than alive except for its skritchy little whiskers and trembling little nose.

I didn't want to think about an entire colony of rats living in the tool shed. So I told myself, over and over and over again, that there HAD to be just this one rat, this lethargic-looking thing that we could easily poison or snare in a trap, or, at very least, scare away.

Bentley was coping admirably. Though he was obviously traumatized, he dealt with the enormous stress in his usual courageous manner, by flopping over on his side and yawning. Bentley laughs at death.

The thought of an infestation in my house or even in my tool shed makes me want to move out. This was a HORRIBLE  creature, but it got worse, because later in the day while we were having a lovely, jolly barbecue in the back yard, this happened:

This. . . this THING came skulking beside the back fence and began skittering along at a dreadful pace.  My God - it was either the same rat, meaning that the rat would keep returning indefinitely, or. . .

It was a different rat.

"Maybe it's pregnant," my daughter-in-law said to me. OMG. Can't be happening. The grandgirls were screeching and whooping and wanting to adopt it, insisting it was "cute".

This is the same creature who brought Europe to its knees during the medieval plagues. NOT cute.

As a family, we will survive. We've surmounted many a disaster up to now. That absolutely does NOT mean we'll surmount this one. In fact, by the law of averages, our survival is about to collapse like a house of cards.

Oh God, I cannot look at this gif much longer or I will become ill. And yet, I cannot let it go. The hellish sight of  vile scampering vermin will be with me forever.

Thanks for the Memory

Thanks for the memory
Of rainy afternoons, swingy Harlem tunes
Motor trips and burning lips and burning toast and prunes
How lovely it was

Thanks for the memory
Of candlelight and wine, castles on the Rhine
The Parthenon, and moments on the Hudson River line
How lovely it was

Many's the time that we feasted
And many's the time that we fasted
Oh well, it was swell while it lasted
We did have fun, and no harm done

So thanks for the memory
Of crap games on the floor, nights in Singapore
You might have been a headache, but you never were a bore
I thank you so much

Thanks for the memory
Of China's funny walls, transatlantic calls
That weekend at Niagara when we hardly saw the falls
How lovely that was

Thanks for the memory
Of lunch from twelve to four, sunburn at the shore
That pair of gay pajamas that you bought and never wore
Say, by the way, what did happen to those pajamas?

Letters with sweet little secrets
That couldn't be put in a day wire
Too bad it all had to go haywire
That's life, I guess
I love. . . your dress

Do you?

It's pretty.

Thanks. . . for the memory
Of faults that you forgave, rainbows on a wave
And stockings in the basin when a fellow needs a shave
I thank you so much

Thanks for the memory
Of Gardens at Versailles, and beef and kidney pie
The night you worked and then came home with lipstick on your tie
How lovely that was

Thanks for the memory
Of lingerie with lace, and Pilsner by the case
And how I jumped the day you trumped my one and only ace
How lovely that was

We said goodbye with a highball
And I got as high as a steeple
But we were intelligent people
No tears, no fuss, hooray for us

Strictly entre nous, darling, how are you?
And how are all those little dreams that never did come true?
Awfully glad I met you, cheerio, toodle-oo
Thank you.

Thank you.

Black cat blues

The Modern Kitchen

NOTE. I don't know what year this little educational gem came out - the tags on it say 1950s, but I think it was much longer ago than that. Just the idea that boiling water in a glass container is revolutionary dates it to the '40s or even 1930s. But what really places it in time for me is the background music, a song called You Took the Words Right Out of My Heart, which appeared in a movie called The Big Broadcast of 1938 (Bob Hope's first film, and the first appearance of Thanks for the Memory - I might do another post on that one because the lyrics are so great).

Bentley beauty shot

Balloons don't suck, but they blow

My God, I am so glad I am not the only one who hates this horrible, disgusting practice! It is ubiquitous for all sorts of occasions, happy or sad, weddings and funerals and christenings and divorces and this and that, and apparently not one person considers the consequences, or else they'd stop it. For some reason most people don't even think about where all that latex goes, or just sort of assume it dissipates into the air and disappears. If we can't see it, it can't be there, and certainly couldn't be doing any harm.

I'd like to know the stats on how often this is done every day worldwide, and how many TONS of filthy shredded latex end up casually discarded in the environment, the air and the water and the forest and city streets, along with countless masses of those nice curly lengths of ribbon that can choke magnificent marine life to death. Slowly.

Aside from all the animals it kills, balloon releases are kind of like firing tons of used condoms into the air and somehow seeing nothing wrong with the practice, even viewing it as something so beautiful and meaningful that other concerns are trivial and unimportant. Yet if you say anything about it, you get hurt or astonished looks from people, as if you've said, "I like to stomp on Easter chicks". 

And just try NOT attending a balloon release in protest. Whether you explain it to people or not, it will be extremely awkward, the kind of thing that prompts a down-inflected "oh," while you honestly wonder if they think you're just an antisocial crank. "Oh come on, we know you don't like it, but they're going to do it anyway, you know? Be a good sport."

Everyone loves balloon releases, don't they? They're a way for people to express their deepest emotions. To "let go and let God". And for heaven's sake, they can't be harmful or they wouldn't sell them. (You're not one of those whackjob environmentalists, are you?) There it is right on the package: biodegradable.

Alternatives to the colorful aerial spectacle, whatever they might be, aren't given much play because nobody has really thought about it. It hasn't occurred to them they could do something else. Why should we, when we can go down to the dollar store and have them fire up the helium tank? It's what we always do, we do it every year, the kids would be disappointed if we blah blah blah, and anyway it hasn't done a bit of harm. 

Has it?

What's behind this bizarre and extremely selfish practice is something so naive that I can barely wrap my mind around it. People still seem to think God lives "up there", and that these overinflated multicolored condoms are somehow going to carry everyone's grief and hope and joy STRAIGHT UP TO GOD, where it will of course be dissipated into pure light by the power of divine grace. Soggy multicolored condoms raining down from the sky don't even enter the picture. So it's worth "whatever", isn't it, all that stuff you're so bothered about? It's a spiritual practice, for heaven's sake, and God wouldn't mind if we do it just this once.

https://balloonsblow.org/

Low-flying planes: this is bad for my health

Why are there helicopters and planes flying over my town, day and night?

My face was in shadow for this, but perhaps that's just as well. Bentley is in silhouette.

Strange tendencies

Strapping 12" wheels onto your ankles. What could possibly go wrong?

Creepy Easter bunnies!

I wasn't gonna do it. No, I mean I REALLY wasn't gonna do it - that thing I do every year, where I find photos of really hideous, creepy, scary Easter bunnies and post them here. As a matter of fact, I've barely thought of Easter at all this year - that wonderful time of violent death and bloody crufixion and Cadbury cream eggs.

Then somebody asked me, "So what are you guys doing for Easter?"

I thought: you mean we have to DO something? I thought Easter was a holiday, and the whole purpose of a holiday was to do nothing.

Then I told myself: no, Margaret, you will NOT make a photo montage of Easter bunnies in hideous costumes with screaming little kids attempting to flee from them. It's sadistic, isn't it? - because these little kids aren't just upset or uncomfortable. They are TERRIFIED. They fear for their lives. They hold their arms out begging for rescue, while their parents. . . their parents take pictures.

These montages at least explain WHY kids cry like that. I can't say as I blame them at all.

Techno Bike Wheel Chicken

Bentley's morning laps

Magic fail!

         When Magic Goes Terribly Wrong 

Ginger ninja