Against All Christianity

It is a bad time to be a Christian. I don't have a lot of time this morning, but here's my short list:

1) Planned Parenthood - I loved that Planned Parenthood helped me when I was a young woman. No, it's none of your business what they did for me, but as a Christian, I believe in the separation of church and state. The United States was founded by people trying to avoid religious persecution and now this? Get your laws off my body, people.

2) the 2016 election - I'm sick of it already. Do I really want a "Christain" president who calls immigrants names and maligns them? If a single one of the these "Christian" zealots who call themselves candidates were of another faith, Muslims for example, and saying the same things they're saying, people would be angry. Why aren't more people angry about closing the borders on our nation built of immigrants?

3) Starbucks - It's a freaking coffee cup, people, not a statement against all Christianity.

It's embarrassing. It really is.

Thank you for listening, jb

Higher Intelligence

Teddy is so sensitive to the cat's messages that he won't even go into the kitchen after I put out his dog food. Damned cat.

When Mike or I add water to the water dish they share - now don't go telling me to put out more than one water dish because neither of them will drink from the spare - Seth guards the water for a bit after he drinks his fill. He just stands there staring at Teddy who won't look him in the eye, who paces back and forth a bit as he contemplates the fresh water in the bowl. Now that is just mean. Eventually, Seth ambles off as if guard duty is beneath him and Teddy rushes in for a quick drink. I wonder if he is eternally dehydrated.

Because Teddy's food dish is next to the water dish, Seth will guard that too after I put the wet food in, the good stuff. It really aggravates me when the glop gets the little brown tinge on the edges because it dried out as Seth guarded it and Teddy gave up on eating it and went to sulk on the couch. Oh, I don't put out anything new, but I hate seeing those dry brown edges. I buy good food for Teddy, but it ends up looking like last week's leftovers.

I blame the cat.

I seriously believe that cat's will be considered the higher life form if we are discovered by intelligent beings from another planet. See, we were smart when we started feeding wolves. They were scavengers and cleaned up our messes. Plus, they were good for hunting, understanding how to work as a pack the way we do. I'm convinced that Border collies were the first breeding program because they could cull one of the smaller bison calves from the herd and the tribe would eat well for a week. That is definitely a symbiotic relationship.

The cat, however, is a parasite. Oh I guess you could argue that they took care of rodent populations better than wolves. You could also say that they purr to heal themselves and I've heard that there is a similar frequency to aid healing in our own bodies. I swear that my father would roll over in his grave to hear me talk about frequencies and healing in the same sentence, but who am I to say? They use ultrasound for healing, don't they? That's a frequency we can't hear.

So, you could argue that cats are people too, that they contribute as much, that they are symbiotic and not just parasites.

Personally, I think they saw the way that wolves got treated and were jealous of all the attention. Then they came into the tepees and decided to make it all just a bit better for themselves than the dogs had it. They would not follow orders. They gave orders. A long stare meant to provide kibbles and fresh water. A certain meow meant for the human to sit down and provide a warm lap and some much deserved affection. Forget the dog, that sound seemed to say. What you need is to attend to me.

Sorry. I have to go clean out the litter box before Nick takes the garbage to the curb. See what I mean?

Thank you for listening, jb

In the Spirit

I've been asked to host Halloween in front of the church again. Four people asked me last week and one asked today. Yes, I told them all. I like being that person, the lady that hands out candy and cocoa with marshmallows at the church. I don't like handing out fliers on Halloween. I don't want to proselytize. I want it simply to feel like a gift, a place for children to roast marshmallows at our fire pit, an open door with a sign toward a bathroom, a generous source of candy and cocoa, an open place for teenagers to hang out when it gets late and they're out of toilet paper.

I love the gathering. People come to say hi, some friends, some acquaintances, some strangers. Some, I don't even recognize at first because of their costumes. I love the feeling of community, the cheerfulness. This town is generous on Halloween. People decorate, buy eight or ten bags of candy at a time, spend their evening handing it out to the hordes who walk the streets. I've walked with Mike and Nick and often an extra child or two. People have offered me wine and extra chocolate. They've chatted and hugged me in middle of the street. Once a man sat on his porch with a mask, straw hanging out of his sleeves and cuffs, and reanimated whenever someone had the courage to take a piece of candy from his basket. It was freaky fun. Nick stood on the sidewalk for a long time that night before he got the courage to take a piece of candy, courage at the age of six. I loved it. For a while a family on the outskirts grew a small corn maze and once, a small business in the middle of renovation converted themselves to a haunted house complete with a coffin bearing a live dead person who sat up just as you thought you were done. For a few years, there were homemade movies replete with local children acting as zombies that were shown in the Masonic Lodge. It was fun to see Nick's friends on the screen even if the movies were terrible. I miss those movies.

So, I feel like we're giving back on Halloween, me and anyone who shows up to help that night. We'll have a tent with lights, marshmallows and sticks to roast them on, cocoa, candy, and a place to stop for a while and warm your hands by the fire.

Last year, I tried to take some pictures in the dim light. The pictures were awful, but every single one of them showed a transparent orb in the foreground. I probably had something stuck to the lens of my camera.

Or maybe Spirit came to church that night and played.

Thank you for listening, jb

The Effects of the Flu on Stew

I need to tell you something. I feel really badly that I didn't tell you at the beginning of the spring because there have been so many gaps here and you deserved an explanation for why I seemed to have abandoned you.

Despite a total lack of supporting evidence that I'm qualified, I'm editing material for a book. It's a long process and I don't usually like to write about writing, but I promise I haven't intentionally left you, all twelve of you, in the lurch about what lunatic thoughts I've had in my head in the past few months. I'm trying to clean my ideas up as I edit, but my head is revolting, rebelling, not actually disgusting though that's not far from the truth of the matter. My mind doesn't want to be cleaned up, so I'm having trouble editing the spooge that flows out of it. I keep telling it to behave but it's like a nasty little sister, swishing its hips and snorting at the same time with its middle finger up its nose. My sister used to hate when I did that.

So after I'm done with my editing, prodigious volumes of futile editing, I'm hoping to convince a publisher to print at least twelve copies of my book, one for each of you, and to send me on a world tour so I can put my book directly into your hot little hands. Would you read it? Well, you're still here and after years of dedication, so it's the least you deserve, don't you think?

Here are some titles I've been toying with:

Finding Joy in the Lunatic Mind
Dog Poop Stories and other Adventures in Holey Plastic
Bitch Mom
Love and Misadventures in a Canoe
Insomniac
Ravings and the Corporate Manifesto on Getting More for Less
Distortion of Memory and Why I Jumped Out of the Damned Tree
and
Simple Rantings

Do you think that more than the twelve of you would buy a copy? See, I haven't done a thing toward the publishing end of it. Not one thing. All I've done so far is write crap and look for typos and other garbage to delete. I may have deleted a whole volume by now. Think of the size of Diana Gabaldon's first book of Outlander and she, so successful in the words that she wrote. I wonder if my volume is like antimatter to her volumes of matter? Every beautiful thing must have its opposite.

Have you ever noticed that? Beautiful women so often have ugly hands. For all the mountain and lake scenes, there are a dozen ugly soy fields or littered alleyways. Everyone with a favorite teacher or coworker has had the control-freak teacher or avoided the creepy guy who worked three cubicles down and seemed to walk to the parking garage the same time as them every night. Good and evil, yin and yang, matter and antimatter.

I need to stop now.

The more recent news is that I avoided writing about the effects of the stomach flu I had this week. I'd bet you would thank me for that. The worst part was what it did to my mind to have to cook for my family anyway. I made stew. Ew. See, as I stirred the thickening pot, odd ideas crawled into my mind. I hate when that happens.

I didn't yet have an appetite, so it was hard to cook. It was hard to see the similarity between Teddy's dog food and what I was making. It was hard to think of the microscopic creatures that might fall from my face into the stew as I stirred it. It was hard to think of what might have been living in my very breath as I looked down into the steamy lumpy gray gunge.

Nick and Mike ate that stew enthusiastically. I couldn't stomach it. I'm better now, but I still can't.

Thank you for listening, jb

The Fine Art of Using Scissors

I hate that Nick and I still have to argue about homework getting done. I hate it. I do.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to do it myself.

For example, tonight, I looked at Nick's grades and noticed a missing assignment in math. Nick is in the advanced class for math. Math isn't hard for him. Yay! I can brag a little here, becuase, let's face it, I need to brag a little, damn it. I need it because of this:

Nick, it seems, is currently getting a B in Math because he was missing an assignment to put a cover on his math book and bring it in to show his teacher.

Yes, my son is bright. Remember that I just told you that he's in the advanced class? Did I tell you that the dreaded common core test results came back and he scored in the advanced levels for math and science?

Did I?

Did I tell you that? I needed to tell you that.

So what the hell is going on with wrapping paper around the outside of a text book and showing it to his teacher? What? The? Hell? Why is this hard?

Nick actually tried to blame me for not buying him a book cover. Who the hell sells book covers anyway? Don't they call those things paper grocery sacks? You pull out tape and a couple of grocery sacks and a pair of scissors. It always takes two sacks because you forget to close the book while you do the back cover. Then, you can doodle the hell all over that text book cover and it never gets messed up, not even when you spill milk on it. That grocery sack is built to handle a little Cheerio flavored milk.

But it took twenty minutes of arguing and the involvement of both parents to get that damned math book wrapped. Apparently, my husband has a very different view of how a book should get wrapped. Engineers. And you'd have thought that Nick was seven, the way he acted like he couldn't handle the scissors and the tape. Didn't they cover the use of scissors in second grade?

Am I being too sarcastic here? Or am I right? A book cover. In Nick's advanced math class.

The hell.

The damned thing is wrapped already.

Then there was more arguing about who had to put the damned scissors away.

Really? Really?

Thank you for listening, jb

The Drama of the Game

I'm starting to see the fascination with football. Nick's team lost tonight. It was very nearly a shut-out, but one kid, number 85, got his act together and caught the ball in the end zone. Except for number 85, who started to shine at the end of the game, who made the team's only touchdown, the offense was off its game.

It was a really cool moment for me when I asked if anyone knew who 85 was on the field, when I said that kid was playing a great game and a big man two seats down from where Mike and I sat turned around and grinned and said that was his boy, Andy. I love when I can do that for people.

The team's defense was pretty good, but needed to catch up after a rocky start. Then, they sacked the quarterback a couple of times. It was Nick's friend, Jim, who was up there doing sacking and tackling and generally being a great defensive player.

We yelled a lot for Andy and Jim tonight. I may be losing my singing voice this season.

Nick didn't play at all this game. The coaches kept the first-string players on the field all night, but it wasn't enough. Nick didn't seem to mind all that much. He's sitting on the couch right now doing his math homework.

The interesting thing, the really interesting thing, is what Nick explained to me on the way home from the game, the thing that explained everything, the thing that made all the pieces fit into place in my mind.

During the game, Jim's mom, who keeps a running commentary about the plays so that I can understand what's going on, asked about two players who usually run the offense, whose names are usually called over and over by any kind of announcer that we have for the freshman team. I told her that maybe they were injured, that I didn't see them on the field.

It was more interesting than that. Nick told me that these two kids got caught stealing and drinking and now they're off the team for two years. Nick explained that they won't be allowed to play until the middle of the season in 2017. Nick went on to tell me that these kids let the team down with their actions. Wow! That explains a lot.

And the cool thing is that Nick totally gets how this works, including how he might not play for an entire game now and then, and especially how the actions of the team members off the field can totally impact everyone on the field.

Football can be a little bit like a soap opera.

Thank you for listening, jb

Trying to See the Darkness

It's a clear night. Eleven minutes before the climax, Mike, Nick and I drove down the road to find the blood moon.

And there, by the Little League field, it hung, red and difficult to see in the headlights of other like-minded people, over the farm with the windmill and two horse barns and a long white plastic fence.

I thought of ancient people and their fear at a moon that bled in the sky. I was a little frightened myself, though I stood among quiet strangers with binoculars and real cameras. I wanted to know these people, to shine lights in their eyes to find friends. I wanted to hug a stranger as the full moon darkened in the sky.

Everyone whispered so that I didn't recognize voices. We stood staring over that farm as the red shifted to orange, curled and lightened around the bottom edge of the moon. I thought of how a solar eclipse is more crisp and how in the lunar eclipse, the light bends around the earth to shadow the moon with the infrared end of the rainbow.

I wanted to see the moon more clearly. I blocked out headlights with my hands, even the lights from the horses' barns. I looked through a hole in my fist. I closed my right eye, the weak one. It was only a bit clearer, the ordinary moon's face darkened in sadness, anger, surprise?

No, just physics. Red light bends less than blue light. Am I right? The beautiful blue light of the usual moon was blotted out by our shadow. The moon was nearer than usual, at its perigee, hanging large at the horizon which added to the red.

I wish that someone with a real camera took a series of shots to capture the strange light of the moon. I took pictures with my phone. They were lame and blurry, but I took them anyway.

I took the stupid pictures because something happened tonight, something I needed to see, to stare at, to ponder. I needed to stand quietly among strangers in an empty field, looking out over a farm with horses in their barns, a sky full of stars, and a moon that speaks of bloodshed.

I needed to try to see.

Thank you for listening, jb