A Birthday Memento from Bev
Bev – one of my very best friends ever – was so amused by my birthday narratives that she sent me this in the mail today. Hee-hee.
Weekend
It’s Mother’s Day – or Matronalia if you prefer – and I’m wishing all the Mommies a fun day!
Thursday night was interesting. I had just dyed my hair a bit darker than usual (I feel silly now with light blonde hair), and it was almost dry but full of that super-rich conditioner that you put on afterward. I went outside to enjoy the moonlight and the cool breezes. I lit some charcoal, and threw a couple of rosehips and bit of lemongrass on it to saturate the night. I lit a couple of candles, and as I bent down to light the third, my hair dropped into one that was already lit. Phewmp! I was on fire! Just that fast. I clapped it out right away, but now I have some bangs underneath on one side. Oh, it smelled horrible! It made me remember something I had forgotten, though. When I was a kid, I had very long hair, and I remember that I used to pluck strands of it out, and light them on fire off of the gas stove. I was in 4th or 5th grade. The smell reminded me. I wonder if my mom knew.
Readers of the blog… and my neighbors… will know that I sometimes like to sing. I crank up my iPod and go through all kinds of songs. Lots of times I’m just mimicking the singer, which can get a bit amusing sometimes. Anyway, I was doing that – singing pretty loud, but directing my voice into the deepest part of the woods out back. I really got into it, and walked out to the little picnic table. So picture this: I’m standing on top of the table, facing away from the house, eyes closed, singing at the top of my projection power – and to anyone listening, that’s a capella.
I finished the song, and heard applause! When I opened my eyes, two strangers were standing about ten feet away from me, in my yard, wildly clapping their hands. I don’t think I’ve moved so fast since an alligator chased me around my car. I jumped down – I think I must have turned about five shades of red.
It turns out that they live a few houses away, around the block. They said they’ve been listening to me sing for months, and they love hearing me sing. Or – at least they say they do. Anyway, they decided to walk over and meet me and express appreciation (and find out who I am). Their son sometimes joins me with his trumpet – or plays on his own. He seems like a sweet kid, but I only met him in person once, at the neighborhood yard sale. Now I’ve met the family. It was cool in a way – nice to think they like it. I view my singing as something that I have to do – but I don’t really expect anyone to like it.
Wasn’t Barack Obama fun last night? I thought he was a lot more amusing than Wanda Sykes. That line about John Boehner (video) was the best putdown I’ve heard in a long time; it works on so many levels.
In the next hundred days our bipartisan outreach will be so successful that even John Boehner will consider becoming a Democrat. After all we have a lot in common. He is a person of color–although not a color that appears in the natural world.
He poked fun at all the hype around himself, too:
During the second 100 days, we will design, build and open a library dedicated to my first 100 days. … My next 100 days will be so successful, I will complete them in 72 days. And on the 73rd day, I will rest.
I also liked the way he spoke back to the cynicism of the crowd. Catch his last few minutes on journalism and the media if you can.
Work takes up a lot of my energy these days. I enjoy it, but it’s tiring. I haven’t done anything creative lately. There are a number of things I’m supposed to be doing, and writing, and thinking about – but I am not in the right space to do that.
I’ve been waking up really early in the morning for the last couple of weeks, and it feels really good just to take it slow. It’s been a nice relaxing weekend so far. I’ve been puttering around the house, starting to reorganize a little. John dragged a bunch of stuff down to the curb. The place has gotten out of control. I’d like to get things into more streamlined shape before it gets too hot. I’m not a natural homebody, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to concentrate on those sorts of things until my surroundings are a bit less cluttered and disorganized.
The Multi-faceted Goddess Prayer
This most astounding of Goddess prayers is from Rob Brezsny’s book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings
Prayer for You
How do you get God’s attention? Try sweet talking his girlfriend.
by Rob Breznsy
This is a perfect moment. It’s a perfect moment because I have been inspired to say a gigantic prayer. I’ve been roused to unleash a divinely greedy, apocalyptically healing prayer for each and every one of you — even those of you who don’t believe in the power of prayer.
And so I am starting to pray right now to the God of Gods… the God beyond all Gods… the Girlfriend of God… the Teacher of God… the Goddess who invented God.
Dear Goddess, you who never kill but only change:
I pray that my exuberant, suave, and accidental words will move you to shower ferocious blessings down on everyone who reads this benediction.
I pray that you will give them what they don’t even know they need — not just the boons they think they want but everything they’ve always been afraid to even imagine or ask for.
Dear Goddess, you wealthy anarchist burning heaven to the ground:
Many of the divine chameleons out there don’t even know that their souls will live forever. So please use your brash magic to help them see that they are all wildly creative geniuses too big for their own personalities.
Guide them to realize that they are all completely different from what they’ve been led to believe about themselves, and more exciting than they can possibly imagine.
Make it illegal, immoral, irrelevant, unpatriotic, and totally tasteless for them to be in love with anyone or anything that’s no good for them.
O Goddess, you who give us so much love and pain mixed together that our morality is always on the verge of collapsing:
I beg you to cast a boisterous love spell that will nullify all the dumb ideas, bad decisions, and nasty conditioning that have ever cursed the wise and sexy virtuosos out there.
Remove, banish, annihilate, and laugh into oblivion any jinx that has clung to them, no matter how long they’ve suffered from it, and even if they’ve become accustomed or addicted to its ugly companionship.
Please conjure an aura of protection around them so that they will receive an early warning if they are ever about to act in such a way as to bring another hex or plague into their lives in the future.
Dear Goddess, sweet Goddess, you sly universal virus with no f*cking opinion:
Please help all the personal growth addicts out there to become disciplined enough to go crazy in the name of creation, not destruction.
Teach them the difference between oppressive self-control and liberating self-control.
Awaken in them the power to do the half-right thing when it is impossible to do the totally right thing.
Arouse the Wild Woman within them — even if they’re men.
Dear Goddess, you pregnant sl*t who scorns all mediocre longing:
I pray that you will inspire all the compassionate rascals communing with this prayer to kick their own asses and wash their own brains.
Provoke them to throw away or give away all the things they own that encourage them to believe that they are better than anyone else.
Show them how much fun it is to brag about what they cannot do and do not have.
Give them bigger, better, more original sins and wilder, wetter, more interesting problems.
Most of all, Goddess, brainwash them with your freedom so that they never love their own pain more than anyone else’s pain.
Oh Goddess, you wildly disciplined, radically curious, shockingly friendly, fanatically balanced, mysteriously truthful, teasingly healing, lyrically logical master of rowdy bliss:
I ask you to give your unconventionally unconditional love to all the budding messiahs who read this prayer; love them with all of your ocean and sky and fire and earth.
Cultivate in yourself a fervent yearning for their companionship. Play with them every day. Answer their questions. Listen to their stories.
Inspire them not just to nag you for what they want, but also to thank you for the uncanny gifts you flood them with.
And if there are any pockets of ignorance or hatred these insanely poised creators might be harboring, any inadvertent idiocies that keep them blind to your blessings, please flush them out as soon as possible.
Dear Goddess, You psychedelic mushroom cloud at the center of all our brains:
Bless all the inscrutable creators out there with lucid dreams while they are wide awake, and their very own spin doctors, and solar-powered sex toys that work even in the dark, and vacuum cleaners for their magic carpets, and a knack for avoiding other people’s hells, and a thousand masks that all represent their true feelings, and secret admirers who are not psychotic stalkers.
Arrange for a racehorse to be named after them, or an underground river, or a boulevard in an exotic vacationland, or a thousand-year-old storm on Saturn or Jupiter.
Teach them to push their own buttons and unbreak their own hearts and right their own wrongs and sing their own songs and be their own wives and save their own lives.
Dear Goddess, You fiercely tender, hauntingly reassuring, orgiastically sacred feeling that is even now running through all of our soft, warm animal bodies:
I pray that you provide all the original sinners out there with a license to bend and even break all rules, laws, and traditions that keep them apart from the things they love.
Show them how to purge the wishy-washy wishes that distract them from their daring, dramatic, divine desires.
And teach them that they can have anything they want if they’ll only ask for it in an unselfish way.
And now dear God of Gods, God beyond all Gods, Girlfriend of God, Teacher of God, Goddess who invented God, I bring this prayer to a close, trusting that in these mysterious moments you have begun to change everyone out there in the exact way they’ve needed to change in order to become the gorgeous geniuses they were born to be.
Amen. Awomen.
Wow. That really charges my battery – how about you?
Ahhhhh-gggg-hhhhh!
I’m not ready! One week until Christmas! AGGGGhhhhh!
It’s My 5-Year Blogaversary!!
I’ve been blogging as VirusHead for five years. Wow.
My first post:
11/21/2003 The Problem with Fundamentalists
Bamford Comedy on Cults
Laughter, as the Reader’s Digest always said, is good medicine.
I’ve really been enjoying some of Maria Bamford’s comedy. Her routines on her sister and dad never fail to crack me up.
So I’m really savoring the synchronicity today as I came across this bit of hers on cults.