One Holiday Down and Thirty Days To Go

     Happy Holidays, Fair Ones.

     Well, Thanksgiving passed without a hitch. No turkey, no stuffing, no pumpkin pie but I did suck down a nice bottle of Dubeuf Beaujolais Nouveau 2010 and it was just marvy. The kitties and I had a peanutbutter sandwich (organic) in order to make the roof of my mouth more sticky, this needing some of the red stuff to wash it loose.

     The holidays ended when my family died and this is the first year that I really do not give a fig (like in figgy pudding) about the holiday or any holiday, for that matter, with the exception of the Pagan versions, which are much more heartfelt. It is not so much that I have given up on the holidays, as Bob Dylan says, ‘my sense of humanity has gone down the drain’.  I am an Outsider. I have said it often and it finally fits at the time when I need to walk the Edge the most – the holidays. I do love my two cats, Inkie and Budderz.

     As we are brought up in american family culture, the holidays get pre-programmed into our brains by many forces (parents, grandparents, siblings, other kids, the media, the church). They make us think we are less of a person for not being part of the crowd. Maybe I choose to be Outside but after trying to be on the ‘Inside’ in Pennsylvania, all I can say is ‘fuck that’.

     Some years, I get a feeling of despair, starting around mid-October. Samhain helps but then we are womped alongside the head with a string of holidays that can cause the depressed to jump over the edge. More suicides are committed and more relationships break up during the Xmas season than anytime of year. Perhaps it is the futility of being loved. Most people don’t have the slightest idea what love is anymore. Many people have told me that ‘love is dead’. I find that hard to believe but, Gentle Readers, it sure feels that way to me.

      Human nature is basically cruel and contentious. Did you ever drive somewhere and have a car in front of you going slow, like maybe 15-20 miles under the speed limit? Then you pass the car and they speed up and tailgate you. People go out of their way to be pricks but I see very few going out of their way to be nice or to care about the feelings of others. Most road rage is kind of private, usually between you, the offender and any witness who may happen along. Acts of kindness are televised, written up, bragged on, tagged on FaceBook and recorded on YouTube.

     Look at our old friend, Jesus, who some people call Son of God and Son of Man at the same time. The Son of God does pretty well for himself, turning water to wine, destroying temples, pulling beards of the moneychangers, raising the dead and a number of other conversation-stopping party tricks. The Son of Man, his alter ego, doesn’t have it so good.  “The foxes have holes and the birds have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Not that I think I am Jesus, but he sure nailed it.

     It is not normal for people to think of others. We think about ourselves. Thinking about others went out of style when we stopped depending on them. When we do for others, our reward is usually waiting in the Land of Karma and will not be felt on this worldly plane. We should do for others for no reason but that our hearts are filled with love. I wish they still were. I wish people still needed each other and showed it.

     When I was a kid in upstate New York, we got some monster snowstorms. Snow covered the ground from Halloween to Easter, from Samhain to Beltain, and I have the childhood pics to prove it. The point is, all of the men of the neighborhood banded together and fought each storm with shovels as a group. They shoveled up one side of the street and down the other, ending at a house (usually ours) where several bottles of Canadian Club whiskey appeared to cap off the work. People were together then. There was not so much personal desolation.

     We have electronic devices to communicate so we do not know half, maybe three quarters of the people we chat with. We have no connections, we have no need for loyalty, we can log off.

     Many years, I had happy holidays and some years I had lonely ones that sucked. This is the first holiday season when I can say, free and easy, that I just don’t care. I would rather be the one out crying in the wilderness than to kiss ass to have a seat at a table. If you have a family, cherish it. Mine is gone and that is life. I am not bitter, I don’t think…I have just stopped caring and I really never had much faith in others to begin with, so nought is lost.

     Enjoy your families. Enjoy the present moment. It is all we have.

awww…kitties…and a warning about cosmetics from Italy!!!

Purina says it is National Cat Day, so I believe them. Why not? It is for the kitties!!! Featured kittie is Good Girl Inkie, aka Bad Girl Inkie, since it is so close to Samhain and we need to talk about black cats.
I got Inkie about five years ago, when she was six months old, at the Easton Area ASPCA. Bless them for taking care of all the creatures that they do. A friend picked Inkie out before we got there. She and her daughter spent a lot of time visiting with the kitties in the ‘pound’ and had made friends with Inkie, known as ‘Spears’ back then. When I first saw her, she was in a room with maybe 15-20 other cats. She was perched on a high shelf, keeping watch, as is still her style. I got her and a longhaired male, named General O’Duffy, who died of feline peritonitis a few months after I took them both home. It was a sad thing and Inkie didn’t understand and kept attacking her little (adopted) brother in play. Duffy could not defend himself and Inkie loved that. She got yelled at quite a bit then because she was the only cat physically capable of the mischief which occurred in the house.
General O’Duffy died and was buried in the yard with the others and it was down to Inkie and me. She was a bit skittish, as I had been yelling at her a bit too much in my frustration over Duffy. She would only allow me to pet her after I chased her around the house and caught her. She soon developed a stomach problem, losing weight and constantly suffering diarrhea. I took her to the vet many times, trying to find a cure and every month we would try something new but she never gained weight.
The last time I took Inkie to the vet, we checked her out and got her medicines and I made a remark about ‘just needing to find her a brother’ and it so happened that they had a six-week-old male. Someone had left a basket of month-old kitties on the vet’s doorstep and the little grey and white guy was the last one left. He had been pampered and cooed over by the whole staff and they were sorry to see him go but you can only have so many cats wandering the office comfortably.
At any rate, I got them both home and inside, then opened up the carriers. The little guy, soon to be known as ‘Budderz,’ was no bigger than my hand and Inkie attacked immediately, hissing and looming over him, at least five times bigger. He remained unphased and spent the evening on the sofa with me, where we watched South Park and found him a name. When I woke the following morning, Inkie and Budders were shoulder to shoulder at the livingroom window, watching the birdies, heads moving in unison when the feathery prey jumped about the lawn out front.
They were best of friends! That was great but the better thing is that Inkie changed almost immediately. She gained weight, lost the diarrhea and, after a number of months, started ‘peeping’ at me and stopped running away when I want to pet her. What was it about that Budderz, huh? Was it that Inkie needed companionship? Did she need competition at the food bowl? As it is now, Inkie is a big fatso…not real fat, like some I have seen but fat enough that she can lose balance easily (which is also partly due to her breed, mostly Angora, which leaves large tufts of fur sticking out an inch and a half from between her toepads) making her slide on surfaces which Budderz can rule with tactile grace. Sometimes, nearing Winter, her new coat is so thick that she has to have a ‘butt-hole-tunnel’ cut out so that the odd turd (and aren’t they all?) can pass to the litterpan without being held in place by fur. It is funny when she tries to jump up on her favorite windowsill. It is wooden and slick but there is a pear tree with birds and azaleas with bunnies and all sorts of attractions, so she will approach the window and rest her front paws on the sill to peek out and see what is there. Then the show begins…if she wants to get up on the sill, she makes a few false starts, like a person does at the end of a diving board before finally letting go. Inkie may make up to twenty of these little fake jumps before she jumps. On one recent occasion, a friend and I were watching while she tried and she looked and saw us laughing, then gave up and ran away. She hates being the fool.
Budderz, on the other hand, always plays the fool. I think it is because of all that human attention before he was six weeks old. He knows that nothing will hurt him, so he fears nothing. Yell ‘No’ and he will look at you for a second. Pour water on his head and it will bead up and roll off like drops from a duck’s back. The only thing he gets serious about is his laser light. It is in the bathroom, which now makes all reading there practically impossible. No matter what time, day or night, he knows if I am in the bathroom and that the laser is there. Not to be Halloweenish, but i did create a Frankenstein. I have had those lasers before but no kittie has ever took to them like Budderz. He is a good boy but Inkie is the black one and so, back to the subject.
Do you know that black cats are killed in order to make cosmetics? It is terrible but since it happens, only the consumer can make it stop. Buy all-natural cosmetics and soaps. Check the ingredients. Inkie would thanks you. Posted below is an itefrom from Reuters, printed November 17, 2007…

ROME (Reuters) – Saturday is “black cat day”, in Italy, an initiative by an animal rights group to try to stop the killing of thousands of the cats by superstitious citizens convinced they bring bad luck.

Black cats have a bad name in many countries, but nowhere more so than Italy, where a papal edict in the middle ages declared they were instruments of the devil. Black cats were thrown into the fires to join witches burned at the stake.

The Italian Association for the Defence of Animals and the Environment (AIDAA) estimates 60,000 were killed last year, to ward off bad luck but also for use in satanic rites and in cosmetics laboratories where black fur gives the best results.

“We want to halt this massacre, educate people and restore dignity to black cats,” said AIDAA President Lorenzo Croce.

The group has set up 200 information points in towns and cities around Italy, where passers-by will be given literature on black cats, asked to sign a petition and urged to adopt one of the 5,000 in cat refuges.

AIDAA has also sent a letter to Pope Benedict, a well known cat lover. “It would be great if he would speak out in recognition of our initiative and say the prejudice against black cats is a lot of nonsense,” Croce said.

Maybe there will be a Black Cat Day again this year? Now that I have printed this, I will have to let you know how the Papal Father reacted to this plea from the kittie lovers. I am sure the Pontiff was quite concerned!

Thoughts For Samhain, Part One

     As Samhain is the end of the year for me, as it has been for Pagans since before the Romans forced Christ on everyone, I reflect on the past year…

     Last year at this time I was picking up the pieces and catching up on work I had missed by being the Volunteer Coordinator for the PA Sustainable Living and Renewable Energy Association. That was my fifth year with the festival, having tabled there for various groups.

     This year is the year of the non-volunteer for me. No more trying to help the community through activism. No more lending a hand to non-profit agencies that do not appreciate the work done for them. I kept my position as Keeper of the Gate at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, however. I like it there and have 13 years in so far. Even so, I cut back on my duties to just two weeks a month.

     Speaking of Hawk Mountain, last week I had the unusual experience of hitting a vulture in flight with my car. Leaving the mountain after my shift, sneaking home on twisty back roads, I spied two kitties sprawled in the center of a small intersection. They were watching for birdies and catching the heat as the sun hit the macadam beneath them. Not wanting to make a ‘schmutz’ out of any stray kits, I kept it in low gear and continued, watchful for pussies.

     Rounding a curve, a large black and grey turkey vulture stood in the center of my lane, picking at some roadkill. Slowing as much as I could, since there is always some annoying ass flying up behind you in order to tailgate, the car moved across the double yellows into the passing lane in order to miss the rapacious creature. I went too slow. The raptor flapped and lifted from the ground, flying in the direction of my car. It happened so fast that I barely saw it bump the windshield. It left a smudge and I thought that was it until a week later, when I noticed the soft, light feathers sticking out from the strip of metal that holds the shield in place. With feathers still stuck to my car a week later, I just hope I didn’t hurt the vulture too much.

     Maybe that is why I stick to Hawk Mountain. There is always a surprise from Mother Nature. It will still be very busy there for the remainder of fall and I enjoy every minute.

     While volunteering is a good thing, it was cutting into things I need to do for myself. Why I do not have the good sense to put myself first, I’ll never know but I have gotten started on that path.

     So, with that said, I still thought that a bit of activism would not hurt me too much. At some point in there, when the state stopped funding to the libraries, I went out to protest at the local library…the first time I ever held a ‘protest’ sign, even though I have been ‘protesting’ since Earth Day 1970.

     On December 2, the hearings for PA HB 1393, the house bill for the legalization of medical marijuana, were held and I was there to testify as a cancer survivor. The whole thing was a circus of emotions. Women carried signs with pictures of youths who ‘died from pot’ and silly stuff like that. There was testimony from doctors and experts, but mostly from people giving empassioned stories about other people who died and how pot helped them. Not a single person who had a medical condition and was helped by MJ was allowed to speak. It was mostly a horse and pony show for the Philadelphia NORML group, who are still posting videos of themselves testifying ten months after the fact. So I and my missing rectum became part and parcel of the house bill and PA history…for all the good it did.

     Also in December, I threw a stick into the mighty Mississippi River. I had flown over it before but never got that close. I had fallen into a bunch of people I used to know on Facebook and one of them lived in St Louis. It was a chance to drive many miles, like I used to love so much.  I was able to cross six states in 12 1/2 hours of non-stop amphetamine-fueled driving and then, five days later, back across those same states five days later in 10 1/2 hours.

     When I think back to youth, the roadtrips are always a highlight. I loved breaking land/speed records, like the time I made it from Chester, PA, to Gainseville, FL, in less than twelve hours. I won’t say much about the visit but I will say one thing for Facebook – when you find somebody on there that you haven’t seen for 38 years, there is probably a good reason for it. Facebook lets you relive the things you forgot about doing in high school, while reminding you why you stopped hanging with these people. They are fucking boring!

     Face it, if somebody is really your friend, they will call you or see you. If they pop up on FB after decades of non-communication, think twice before you make plans. You may revisit the wrong part of your youth. That is not to say I have not chatted with people I am glad to hear from…just think twice, that’s all.

     The wintry winds of the first few months of 2010, along with the piles of snow which came with them, found me stuck in the house, reading a lot and trying to price a bunch of antiques and old books and magazines I want to sell. I picked up a few copies of’  ‘The Outsider,’ which had been nestled in my shelves for years. Printed in 1961 and 1962, they featured works by Bukowski, Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc. I had paid two dollars an issue for each issue at a antique/craft shop in Old Forge, NY, twenty years ago. This seemed like a good place to start.

     Online, I discovered that ‘The Outsider’ literary journal had been the subject of a recent movie by Hunter S. Thompson cinema-biographer, Wayne Ewing. An article I found said that in issue two (I hold issues two and three) there was a poem by Jack Kerouac that was the focus of some scholarly study. The Outsider was hand printed and collated. Due to this, a certain poem was found to have several versions printed and nobody was sure which one had been what Keroac had written. A professor in England was working on it. The article said that only twenty copies remained in existence. I was happy to report that I held copy number twenty-one.

     To reach the professor, I contacted the author of the article, one David S. Wills, founder and publisher of literary journal, Beatdom. I gave David the details of the version of the poem that was in my copy of The Outsider. Somewhere along the line, we fell into e-conversation and I told David about meeting William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. As a younger man, I had corresponded with Ginsberg and I told David about a postcard I got from Ginsberg, where I actually got the peacenick to say ‘fuck you’ to me, twice…yet in a kind, sage way.

     Mr. Wills asked if I would be kind enough to write the story up to be used in Beatdom and, happy to do so, I sent it along. It appeared in issue six and Mr. Wills was kind enough to accept submissions of other essays for following Beatdom issues. Now, I still have the two issues of  The Outsider and my house keeps filling with more books, including Beatdom.

     About this same time, I was still feeling the actvism and went to a meeting of NORML in Philadelphia. Being a member of a group of potsmokers couldn’t be a bad thing, could it? The meeting was hard to deal with. It was unstructured, with people shouting out and ideas popping up like jumping beans. I wanted to do some work. I wanted to help make pot legal. I was told that more got accomplished on the group’s website than at the meetings. I tried the website and will only go as far as to say that potsmokers should not join groups. Nothing gets done. I saw an idea for making t-shirts and selling them, which had been floating around the site for over a year. I offered my services – myself, a six-foot table and a car to table at events in a five county area, if they wanted. Naturally, they said they could not use me since they did not have enough literature to fill a table. A few asinine suggestions later and I was convinced that NORML was not for me…too young, too foolish, too lazy. So much for that scene.

     At this point, my blog is much longer than planned, so I shall finish it tomorrow, so as not to rush.

     Cheers!