I finally got around to reading my thank you and goodbye email from Elizabeth Warren. It made me just as sad as I thought it would.
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Clearly, I need to get out more. I’m watching a show on the search for Queen Boudicca’s treasure and I just yelled at the TV, “Boudicca’s booty!” Somebody help me.
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Mike Bloomberg on Super Tuesday: “Please, sir, can I have Samoa?” #DickensPuns
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No matter how much you do in your life there will always be people who say it isn’t enough. So do what you can and realize that most mortals have to choose their battles.
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Certain songs always make me start doing my very bad Billie Holiday impression. (And I always resent it when other singers try to do these songs because, dammit, they belong to Billie.)
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Yep, the three tones in E10 of Hellier S2 still make me nauseated and anxious even after 5 watchings. And when episode 10 finished Amazon suggested I watch A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.
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We had a squirrel living in the yard for many years that we nicknamed Twofer because he would come up and take a peanut out of our hands, shove it into his cheek and reach up so you’d give him another one. And we always did.
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Disabled people aren’t included in most emergency evacuation plans. I found this out when I could no longer easily walk down 3 flights of stairs from my office for evacuation drills. “Stay at your desk & someone will get you after everyone else is out.” Using a cumbersome evacuation chair that the one time we tried it no one knew how to operate.
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What my VRS thinks of this election: “Doesn’t matter who I want to be president, if Bernie is the eventual nominee he’ll get my boat.” It’s a leaky boat but whatever.
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I attempted to read a book by Louis L’Amour in the last couple of days but I have failed in that attempt. The writing was just so clunky I very soon ceased to care about the resolution of the mystery and consigned it to the recycle bag. Go ahead, call me a snob, I don’t care.
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We always walk beside the Veil, but most times we choose to look straight ahead.
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Big brother with a kink? The alarm went off to tell me to take my chicken out of the oven and I said “I’m coming.” (Because doesn’t everyone talk to their alarms?) And the Google speaker on my phone said “That’s good.”
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One of the web crawlers that shows up frequently on my Statcounter account is China Unicom, but I ALWAYS read it as China Unicorn.
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I was watching Vienna Blood on PBS and they had a corpse lady laying out naked on a slab with boobs on full display. Later, they had a live lady with boobs on display but blurred them out. So I guess on PBS dead boobies are okay but live boobies are not okay to show. Go figure.
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Some ignoramus has posted a video on YouTube showing Frank Sinatra with Nat King Cole actually singing the song, “L.O.V.E.†This is the wonderful and classy Nat King Cole:
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Two hours without WiFi and I was hyperventilating. Fortunately, it was a simple fix, but I may have an addiction problem.
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Tommy. His eyes were actually a soulful gray, not blue. He was in his forties and had done his soldiering during World War I. He became a special police officer during World War II so the younger men could go and fight.
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I found an old keepsake box buried amongst a lot of, well, junk. Some genuine keepsakes inside the box, but also some very old story rejection letters from some of the top magazines, stuff I sent out when I was probably barely out of high school. All form letters, of course. I decided my nostalgia did not stretch to holding on to those any longer. I Kondo’d their a*ses.
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That feeling when something seemingly minor turns dark and deep and symbolic…
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I WILL NOT JOIN FACEBERG, no matter how many paranormal and Outlander live events they host. I WILL NOT become part of the evil empire! I WILL NOT! (Although I did succumb a little bit and joined Instagram. Mostly as a lurker.)
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What to do with all these calendars that people gave me because they didn’t know what else to give me? I only need one and that’s the one with kitties that I bought myself.
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Sometimes I look at my house and pity the person who, when I die, will have to clean out and dispose of ALL THESE BOOKS. But mostly I pity the books.
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Zero results from the Iowa Caucus are just about right if you consider Iowa’s relative importance to reflecting the diversity of the United States. They give such outsized importance to Iowa and New Hampshire. Nothing against either of those states but they’re hardly representative of the rest of the country. Yet because somebody gets defeated in either Iowa or New Hampshire often they’re eliminated from the race.
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I get nonsense phrases stuck in my head sometimes. When I was doing research for the WIP on Nazi occult matters recently, the nonsense phrase in my cranial echo chamber was, “Otto Rahn on the Autobahn.” Research earworms. I have a weird brain. Fortunately, “Otto Rahn on the Autobahn” made me laugh.
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Ray Bradbury famously said about writing, “Jump off a cliff and build your wings on the way down.” I’m at that stage of my current WIP where I’m wondering if I’ve jumped off the wrong goddamned cliff.
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I’ve been reading Last Mountain Dancer by Chuck Kinder on and off for about a month. It’s both an interesting and irritating book so I’m not sure I’d wholeheartedly recommend it. I keep reading because it’s about West Virginia where Kinder was born and raised and when he talks about that place, the book sings. Then he goes off into the woods talking about his extramarital affairs and his bad boy ways and it gets boring. (I am so done with middle-aged male angst.)
But yeah, when he talks about what a remarkable and strange place West Virginia is on so many levels it’s worth the read. He goes into many legends, those arising from the tragedies of Matewan and the coal mine bosses, as well as Mothman and other less well-known oddities. It turns out his mother was born and raised in Point Pleasant, WV, home of Mothman, and that her maiden name was Parsons—which will have some meaning to those who follow Hellier.
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I was watching a show on Hadrian’s Wall and Vindolanda where they’ve discovered lots of messages to and from soldiers. In one of them the soldier refers to the tribes they were trying to keep north of the wall as “Britunculi”: “nasty little Britains.†My people!
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Hellier has made me way too map conscious. Every time I see something weird about a place I always have to find out where it is in relation to Point Pleasant or Somerset or Hellier or whatever. And it’s kind of amazing how much weirdness connects up.
I say this knowing full well how much the human mind longs for linkages and synchronicities.
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Lewis Black: “Trump is good for comedy the way a stroke is good for a nap.”
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Patrick Stewart was on Colbert the other week talking about when he was younger he and Ben Kingsley were here in LA doing Shakespeare, along with some other actors of the RSC. He said he and Ben went to Hollywood because they were excited to see the hand- and footprints at the Chinese theater (Sir Pat recently joined the famous hand- and footprints there). But the whole time he’s talking I was remembering being a young undergraduate at UCLA where Sir Pat and Sir Ben were doing those Shakespeare performances. During the day when they were not rehearsing or going to Hollywood all of the actors from the RSC would come to classrooms where Shakespeare and theater were being taught, talk to the students, and give impromptu performances. I was lucky enough to be in two such classes. One was Shakespeare, the other on Modern Theatre. I snuck into a third class taught in the theater department and held in an auditorium, but the other two were small English department classrooms. I was lucky enough to sit no more than 6-10 feet away from Sir Pat and Sir Ben while they answered questions and did impromptu performances. Utterly thrilling, even though neither of them was famous at that time. They were just masterful actors doing amazing performances up close and personal. Sir Ben still had his hair back then. Sir Pat did not. But his voice was that rich dark chocolate even back then. PRESENCE, both of them, and I never forgot.
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There’s hope, I think, even thought the GOP did not have the guts to do the right thing. During the impeachment trial I called my doctor’s office and the answering service picked up. As she took my message I heard the impeachment trial playing in the background. America is listening. We won’t forget. I hope they still remember next November.
RIP Mr. Terry Jones, one of the pillars of my faith.
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After two weeks and holding of fighting with my drug plan insurance over a medicine which keeps me alive that I was running out of I finally used GoodRx to buy it out of pocket. It wasn’t cheap but it gives me a three month grace period to sort things out with the insurance. Insurance is nothing but legal extortion. But even with the hassle I know how incredibly lucky I am to have such a plan. I won’t get back that out of pocket expense, but I do expect things will get sorted eventually and I will get help paying for this medicine. I know many people are not that fortunate.
Not only that, my milk went bad before the pull date.
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Life is never going to be exactly as you want it to be. There’s always going to be some little zit on the end of your nose that makes you look at life cross-eyed.
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I really need to get some new cats. It’s been a year and clearly my brain has rotted with Kitty Need because when Betty White came on TV on her birthday I said in kitty voice, “Is da Betty White girl.”
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When it rains at night I like to turn off all media and just sit there reading while listening to the rain.
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Sometimes my life seems like the bumbling slapstick sitcom dads of the 60s.
Pick something up from the floor, lose control of it, have it fly across the room, walk across the room to fetch, it kick something else, stub my toe and send that flying, bend over to retrieve the other thing and have it fall out of my hand again. You know, the usual.
Sometimes I even hear an opening theme soundtrack while I’m doing it.
(Which is way before the time of many of you and very American teevee sitcom.)
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Next time you think corporations or billionaires care about you as an individual human being remember that soylant green is people.
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Well that’s embarrassing. For quite some time I’ve had a tag for my blog of “aesthetcism” when what I truly meant was “asceticism.” Hoist on my own Picard.
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Public service announcement: don’t get the shingles shot unless you’ve got a couple of days to spare for feeling like crap.
(You should definitely get the shingles shot if you are of a certain age because a couple of days of feeling like crap is way better than the shingles.)
I’ve had three friends who were “taken by surprise” and it was a very unpleasant experience. Months of misery. One of them had what they call internal shingles, which means her nerve endings were on fire for months. Horrible.
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When you know you’ve used VRS too much: you are leaving a voicemail for a friend and at the end of the sentence you say, “Period.”
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Writing is the thing I most want to do in the world and yet every day I reach a certain point where I say to myself, “Have I written enough that I can stop now?” Sometimes I push beyond that point if I think there’s still water in the well. Other times I know the well is dry and I’ll have to wait until it fills up again overnight. The urge to quit is always there, sometimes more insistent than at other times, but always whispering to stop.
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You know the worst thing about Hellier? I have hundreds and hundreds of books and I’m at a stage in my life where I’m trying to slim down the library because I don’t have room for all this and Hellier is forcing me—forcing I say—to buy more books! So many damned books!
I was reading a recap of Whitley Streiber’s new book, A New World, at http://radiomisterioso.com/2019/12/10/whitley-strieber-a-new-world/
and something reminded me of the God helmet/Estes method session with Dana and Connor in Hellier S2 :
“He said that they ‘communicate completely differently than us’ without ‘an evolved language.’ Strieber’s experiences led him to conclude that they lead an existence that is nearly unfathomable to us…”
I ran across an old reading meme and decided to do it again. Because life is short and why not waste time? (Although I don’t believe reading or talking about reading is ever wasting time.)
Question: Do you have a regular place you read? What books are currently waiting there?     Â
Nan by Elizabeth Kingston A novella set in the world of her medieval romance trilogy which I devoured in a month. Well-written and with incredibly dimensional and nuanced characters, these are books I will hold on to: The King’s Man; Fair, Bright, and Terrible; and Desire Lines. (I hope there will be more!)
The 37th Parallel by Ben Mezrich A Hellier inspired purchase. So, you know, paranormal non-fiction.
Fairies: A Guide to Celtic Fair Folk by Morgan Daimler Research reading for the current WIP, concise and easy to read.
Tarot for Writers by Corinne Kenner Using tarot for world-building, character, and writing prompts. I haven’t gotten very far into it and I’m not sure it will be completely useful for the way I write but whatever.
The Archetype of Initiation by Robert L. Moore A Jungian approach and quite fascinating. Also inspired by Hellier.
The Underworld Initiation by R.J. Stewart Because one cannot have too many books on initiation, right? More of a mythological/psychic approach.
I’m actively reading all of these except the last, cycling them in and out. I think reading both books on initiation simultaneously might get confusing, so I’m saving Stewart’s book.
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