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First was the house on the hill
with it's two giant elms on the top
and the rooms upstairs that gave some solace
because she was too lazy to climb the stairs

Everything was argument and fight
everything was on the edge of collapse
all the time
unending crisis after crisis
as she drank her way insane

I was trained to fight about everything
all the time
by a ruthless wordslinger
who backed it up with a wooden shoe
or a slap
or by kicking me in gut as I lay on the floor
trying to curl around her leg so she could not draw it back.

She tolerated being a mother until the day her daughter went away to college
and then she got rid of me.
First, she loaded me like a gun and shot me at my father
telling me that she might take me back if he said I had to go
but never just because I asked to come home.
And nothing in the world prepared him for what she had made me
and he was begging her to take me back in less than three months.
and I got what she told me I wanted: Her.

But if not a good mother, she was an excellent teacher
and she found that she was not winning the arguments,
not crushing me with her words,
then revelling in the impotence with which a child returns taunts.
She had sharpened me, and now I was starting to cut
and as her words could no longer beat me
it was hands, or sticks, or belts
and she knew I had to go before my patience for it ended

So off I went from the house on the hill
and she threw me out of the car at the private school
with a garbage bag full of clothes that had not fit in a year
a hundred dollars with which to buy textbooks
and an admonition to find somewhere else to stay for summer.

and it is, from this distance, my most shameful moment,
that as she drove off, I was weeping and begging to be allowed back.
I was 13

From the house on the hill to the castle on the hill
where nobody wanted to hurt me, fight me, beat me.
Everything changed, and I became insignificant
and I could not but hate insignificance
so I did the only thing I had ever been taught competently to do.
I fought.

I am 42. I have been married for half that time.
I do not hit, nor do I brutalize, and I do not drink.
But I have not managed to stop fighting for a single second.
I have managed to make rules that I follow:
I do not let myself win fights that I know I should lose
but it is not always easy to tell when I am right from when I am wrong.
And I can't manage to stop fighting, even while deciding.

There is a voice in my head that tells me that if I ever stop fighting
I can never again go home again.
But that is true no matter what I do.
that home is gone
the elm trees are long since cut for fuel
SO why fight?

Why fight, when the only person I really want to beat
has been insane, stupid and dying for years?
I seem to know nothing else.

The lightness of invisibility

Nobody is reading these "blog" posts, and that is fine. But the fact that somebody MAY in the future read these posts govern how I interact with them. It is an odd calculation that occurs when I look at the "publish post" button. Do I stand by what I say? Well, I have yet to say anything too radical, so it is easy to say yes!. But once something hits this blog, it can't really be taken back. it is just there.

On the other hand, nobody is reading this stuff, and there is exactly one person on the planet that can definitively link this blog to an actual human being (that would be you, Shirls) so I can say anything I want and as long as I don't alienate that one person, I am untraceable. Sort of. But I have been using the "lizard" pseudonym so long (about 15 years, I think), and so many netizens have met Lizard online, that "lizard" is an entity in himself, sort of a full-body sock-puppet of myself.

Since I trust the one person who can attach an organic name to this digital creation not to do so unless I agree to it, I feel pretty safe.

Well, the shit in my head has to go somewhere. There are ideas I have that need expression beyond myself. I am not getting published as an author (after years of trying), and I have almost given up on getting published, but my brain is still telling me to put the ideas where they can be seen by others. So, they are here, where they CAN be seen, but probably wont be.

Fat Man

We were made by that Fat Man. We don't know who made the Fat Man, but it isnt important, because we dont know. You have to understand that, first. It happened before us, before we were ever here. ANd that old Fat Man told us everything we need to know about BEFORE us, and he didn't tell us that, so it ain't important.

The Fat Man was walking on the earth, among the wood people and the stone people and the Dragons who owned the sky and the islands. He was a happy man, and maybe he was a little bit stupid, too, because he didn't know not to eat too much of the berries and the Bison, and he got fat. In fact, he got so fat that he sat down at he mouth of the Aullee river and never moved again. ANd the river brought him food, the nosefish and the candlefish and the occasional Bison that got too close to him getting a drink, adn he was still happy, and he got fatter and fatter. And as he sat and ate, he sang. Now, the Fat Man didnt have a language, like you and me, so he just made up sounds as he sat, so he could sing. When he saw the white clouds, he made a sound, and that was his sound for cloud, forever. Because the Fat Man never forgot anything. He had so many different sounds for things, that when he sang, he sang stories about the things he saw.

That old fat man made us. We dont know how, but we do know why. That fat man was sitting under the dark black stormy sky, one day, and he named the thunder, and as he sang his name for the thunder, the thunder rang out, and it sounded marvelous, the two sounds together, his name for the thunder and the thunder, and he fell in love with that sound. That old Fat Man could not ever make that sound alone. The Fat Man was upset about it for a while, but he thought about it. Why can't you sing a harmony with yourself? And if there is only one of you, like there was of him, why is there such a thing as a harmony?

So the Fat Man made us. And at first, he made just one of us, First Man. And maybe the fat man wasnt so stupid, even tho he ate himself fat, because he figured that if he had to have somebody to sing harmony with him, maybe everybody needed somebody to sing harmony. So he made First Woman, and discovered three part harmony, and then first Man and first Woman made First Kid, and they ALL sang harmony to the Fat Man. and each of them had a different voice, and the Fat Man loved it.

The Fat Man made us to sing harmony with him him. And that, my boy, is why you are alive. To sing harmony with the Fat Man as he sings his songs. Can you hear them, boy? Can you hear the Fat Man's songs? You got to listen real good. I have been listening all my life, and I been here 50 winters, and I only just heard them recently. Now I gotta figure out how to make a beutiful harmony with him. And that is why I am telling you about the Fat Man. You are my harmony.

But remember about Fat Man, boy. Don't eat too much.

Prayer to Discordia (Eris)

Discordia

I bend a knee to you, keeper of all things bent

I ask that you visit all things perfectly aligned
and gently rearrange them
so that their keepers must again strive to align
and in doing so, freshly examine.

I ask you to visit the slow, steady progress of many lives
and shake them,
that they may again attempt to discerne their direction
and perhaps see possibilities where once dwelt only routine.

I ask that you visit the aura of the Tarot's fool gently
upon all who own more than will fit in a bag slung over the shoulder
that they may again appreciate the carefree
and the visionary lightness of a lack of obligation.

Goddess,
make the easy and smooth
just difficult and ragged enough that I need attend my footing
but only for as long as it takes me to again appreciate the road.



P.S. Thanks for the apple

purpose

I have never before felt as useful as I feel singing my son to sleep.
As an animist, I call these moments holy
(a word I am very uncomfortable with)
because they seem to transcend language
and defy, as tho intentionally, communication.
They ROCK.