Graveyard Shift

In honor of tomorrow, here's a sweatshirt I bought for one of my sons a few years back.

You'll have to visualize it. Kelly green, with appropriately Celtic-style lettering that says:

"Mom, Dad, I'm Gaelic."

 

I liked my blog the way it was before The Change: black and green. Made the mistake of trying out one of the new templates, assuming I could tweak it to get my own color preferences. I'm not particularly computer literate, but I figured out quickly how to make changes under the old regime. Not now, though. This makes me disconsolate.

It's not that I mind the way my blog looks now, it just doesn't please me so much. Anybody remember Hee Haw? "Woe, despair and agony, ah me! Deep dark depression, excessive misery. If it weren't for bad luck [I'd] have no luck at aaaall...Woe, despair and agony, ah me!"

Have a nice day. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

Went out this morning in search of Granny Smith apples (or any kind of apples, really) for the kick-ass vegetarian stuffing I'm going to make later today. It's supposed to fill a whole hollowed-out pumpkin and be baked that way, but I just do it plain.

Of course I forgot the damn apples yesterday; didn't remember until I was falling asleep last night. No supermarkets open on Christmas, no Mom & Pops in our town, nothing but three open gas stations with convenience markets attached.

No joy at the first one, but the second yielded some nice apples and a cup of weak but drinkable coffee. The streets were covered with light fresh snow and virtually empty. Kind of peaceful, in a creepy way.

Christmas Day always reminds me how very out of step I am with the country as a whole. Usually I'm just fine with that, but every now and then it feels...well...lonely.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate the day. Me, I'm going to take a long nap and then start cooking. I'll probably drink some of the Robert Mondavi Pinot Grigio that goes into the stuffing while I'm chopping shrooms and apples.

A votre sante!

Yesterday my mother-in-law, my daughter, two of my sons, one son's fiancee, three of the fiancee's sons and my two grandsons squeezed into our little house for a several-hour marathon of present-opening, food and LOUD conversation. I retreated to the bedroom in horror partway through, but it didn't help much. By bedtime I was so wired I couldn't sleep, and now I'm facing another "festive" day groggy and out of sorts.

When you tell people that stress is bad for your MS, they nod sagely and say they completely understand...but you just know they don't get it. It's like what a dog hears: "Blah blah blah Fido blah blah blah." "Blah blah blah MS blah blah blah." Why bother?

So last night after people left, we decided Christmas Eve (which will be just us) needs to feature a favorite movie that's about as far from It's a Wonderful Life as possible. The winning movie is Nightbreed...I am *so* ready for a Peloquin fix!

Ho ho ho.

Back when I played Magic (collectible card game, for those not familiar), my deck was green and black. Life and death.

Magic cards are divided up into five colors: black, blue, green, red and white. Most players build their decks out of two colors. Any one color has weaknesses, and using more than two colors is unwieldy. There are also gold cards, which combine two or more colors.

Green and black is an unusual choice; very few gold cards feature that combo. The single card that got me hooked on Magic in the first place was a green-and-black called "Dark Heart of the Wood"...that, and "Elves of Deep Shadow" which is just green but beautifully grim.

Here's the verse that's chanted right before lights out every night of sesshin (a two or more day Zen retreat).

I beg to urge you, everyone:
life-and-death is a grave matter,
all things pass quickly away;
each of you must be completely alert:
never neglectful, never indulgent.



I said it wasn't easy.

Online relationships are strange.

You can make what feels like a solid connection with someone. Sure, it's kind of sad and frustrating not to live just down the street from him/her so you can hang out. The rest of it's good, though, and life's about taking whatever we can get. No big deal.

Then a friend gets into trouble far away, and suddenly it's a big deal after all. You want to be there, you want to help, and tapping away on the keyboard just doesn't cut it.

Interacting online is a lot like having sex with a condom. It feels pretty good, it can be fairly safe depending on how you go at it, but it's not the same as flesh and blood communion.

Sometimes it's all there is, though.

I live in a smallish town surrounded by open farmland, in a small house surrounded by larger houses that block the view in all directions. It's a nice house and a nice town as such things go, but I can't help feeling trapped.

Went for a ride this morning very early, just as the sun was coming up. Vast stretches of open, rolling land dotted with lines of trees planted long ago as windbreaks. The first rays of the sun casting deep blue shadows across fields of pristine snow. The moon still visible in the cold, limitless sky. Something in me, that I hadn't realized was tense, unclenched. Ahhhhh.

I want to live out in the country again. That, or at the other extreme. You'd think living in a city would be bad news for a claustrophobe, but at night everything opens out and the sense of infinite possibility makes the little hairs on the back of your neck rise. In a very good way.

It's this not-city, not-country stuff that gets to me. I guess a lot of people feel comforted by small towns, but that's the thing. I don't want to be comforted. I want to be ALIVE.

Unless I want to be dead, but that's a whole 'nother thing.

...and my sense of impending doom is growing larger with every passing day.

Christmas cards? Not written, much less sent. Packages? Not packed (can't even find one of the things I was going to enclose), much less sent. Presents bought for the locals? Maybe half, and I've run out of ideas.

What was going to be a small, comfy gathering at our house has mushroomed (no offense to mushrooms, which I quite like) into ten adults and five rambunctious little kids in our very small house, and I don't even like everyone who's coming. This is not a good scenario for a person with MS; the stress almost guarantees that I'll have a flare afterwards. Can I just say no? Not bloody likely.

Hello? Buddhist/pagan here. IT'S NOT EVEN MY HOLIDAY!!!

And as usual, the Solstice will go mostly unobserved because of frantic preparations for Christmas. And I'll feel sad about that once the hubbub has died down. Hell, I feel sad about it now.

Look out, Scrooge...here comes The Ghost of Christmas Resented!

(Wishing good holidays for those who do enjoy the season, though.)

Ubuntu Linux rocks!

Did I mention that I have MS (multiple sclerosis)?

The cheerful thing to say at this point would be "I may have MS, but it doesn't have me"...but that wouldn't be the truth.

MS has me any time it wants, no warning, no foreplay, no thank you ma'am afterward.

It's been having its way with me for a long time now, and I have the cane & rolling walker to prove it. Not to mention fatigue, pain, spasticity, cognitive issues etc. Best of all, my finger memory (musical term) is screwed up and I can't type for shit any more.

That's just not right.

I remember a bit I saw long ago on the Smothers Brothers TV show. I was a forlorn college dropout then, coming off a disastrous two-year marriage, recently out of a mental hospital and with a lot on my mind, but it's stuck with me all these years.

Dick is badgering Tom, wanting to know Tom's religion. Tom is spluttering, as usual when he's under pressure. Dick keeps coming at him rapid-fire, what is it Tommy, c'mon tell me, I bet you don't even know, on and on. Finally the answer comes. I do too have a religion! I'm a...a...Zen Druid!

I'm with Tom, laughing aside. I'm a Zen Witch.

Well, maybe not laughing aside. It's pretty funny really, and the story of my life. Never being able to settle firmly on just one thing. Maybe that's part of what attracted me to Zen; nothing is ever either-or, it's always both-and.

I've been a student of Zen for roughly 30 years, and a practicing solitary witch for maybe 13. Discovered Zen when I picked up a copy of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind in a co-op bookstore in CA, started meditating within a couple of days. Witchcraft (no Wicca for me, thanks) goes much farther back, to seeing Bell, Book and Candle and reading Fritz Leiber's Gather, Darkness! when I was a pre-teen. Didn't get that I could turn "witch" from a noun into a verb for a long time, though.

Bookstores. Libraries. So much to read, so little time. If I stitched together all the books I've owned--let alone all the books I've read--they'd trail after me like the gorgeous, tremendously long knitted scarf in Like Water for Chocolate. Heavier, though.

In traditional Japanese Zen training, a monk would sit zazen (meditate) in a graveyard or charnel house as a means of learning to see death clearly and be unshaken. It's not exactly a matter of facing your fears in the Western style, where you struggle with horror and master it. It's more like noticing your fear as it arises, then letting it go, over and over again until the dead--and death itself--no longer have the power to knock you off your center.

Putting in your time with death.

Graveyard Shift.

Then there are the things that alter form in the night; vamps, weres, wraiths.

Graveyard Shift.

The name comes from the heroine of a favorite book, Nina Kiriki Hoffman's A Red Heart of Memories.

Matt (matte): Having a dull finish.

As in Liquitex Matt Acrylics.

Absorbs light, does not reflect it back.

In Zen terms, nothing extra, nothing left over. Suzuki Roshi said, "When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself."

It is what it is. I am what I am.

Matt Black.

Watch this space.


It's a Zen thing.