The Children at Xmas
The children are over, it's great to have them, it's Xmas after all...
No presents this year, sorry kids...
They're used to it. But they're over and of course I've got to feed them, from an ever diminishing stash of groceries, - enough, as it were, to last me a week if I ate lean, now enough to last me until tomorrow morning. And no budget to replace them.
The son, sleeping on the living room floor surrounded by unpacked boxes, the daughter just swinging by to check up, games of Scrabble, Chess, conversation...
The conversation, it only ever goes so far. There is the Great Wall: Between parents and children, I am, I fancy, more liberal than most, more truthful, less bullshit, better advice, we can talk about women, men, drugs, still there is that wall, we each draw it around ourselves, me, you, the places we don't share, we need this, but we isolate ourselves...
Breakfast for the boy, bacon, eggs, waffles, I've found the old waffle iron in the locker, the apartment fills with childhood smells, we laugh and reminisce about when I'd make chocolate chip waffles for the kids, only, maybe, they weren't chocolate chips, they were little mouse turds from an old roommate of ours...
An old plate, found in the locker, the boys childhood plate, for me, only 10 years ago, for him, half his life:
8-13, his plate, by assignment, he recognizes it, goes through a few brief moments of remembering...
It's not important, this lack of food thing, I've been here so fucking often before, I need to sort through some of these boxes, find some shit to sell, start the big downsizing, how can I have this much crap? Really? And a 1/4 of it isn't mine, it's the kids, their childhoods I'm hanging on to, even if I manage to empty the locker there will still that stuff that needs to be saved, future heirlooms, I am cautious about throwing their stuff away, because - a mobile childhood saw that mine was discarded, and I'd be curious to see some of my old favorite toys.
The boy and I make a trip to the locker, fill the LadyJeep, a few discoveries, I'll share when I unpack, repack, there are more boxes of photos (sorry Breony, not that box but I'm getting closer), the living room now full, maybe 30 boxes, books, knick-knacks, objects of inspiration, art supplies, time now to sort, sell, donate, repack, repeat.
- Details
- Category: People
Found Magazine
A curious website - or, ordinary website with some curious content. Curated and user-submitted found objects - scraps of paper with writing on them, notes to self, birthday cards, postcards, old photographs, you name it, it's here.
Link: http://foundmagazine.com/
- Details
- Category: Link of the day
The Black Arts - Richard Cavendish
This was excellent. A well written history of Magick and it's adherents, less credulous than Montague Summers, and a lot more accessible, but no less informed. Familiar names from history, people I know of well enough to know, Yeats, Crowley, Bulwer-Lytton (think: "A Dark and Stormy Night..." by Snoopy, or the contest by the same name), the formulas - in general and by example in specific, the importance of tradition, the strengthening and prevailing of will, the Magick, often, little more than an avowal of commitment.
There are anecdotes - some quite humorous, for example St. Germain: "There is a pleasant story of him describing a dear friend of long ago, Richard the Lionheart, and turning to his manservant for confirmation. "You forget, sir,' the valet said solemnly, 'I have only been five hundred years in your service.'" and Arthur Machen - "The Astronomer Royal of Scotland, and an elderly clergyman who had succeeded in making the elixir of life thirty years before, but had always been too frightened to drink it. Now that he really needed it, it had evaporated."
And then there is the damning crossover of Magick and the Church, however bad the Satanists were, the Church always managed to outdo them - and very often with their own priests and in their own halls.
It is - as the author asserts - more about poetry and metaphor, the forever evolving and changing currents of thought of which our current "age of reason" - if you would call it that, is just another. There is much to ruminate on here, the author, well reasoned, agnostic, and there are dozens of ideas, scraps, things to be gleaned and winnowed, an excellent history or guidebook if you're inclined to dig deeper...
- Details
- Category: Books
The Great Solitude
Thrift shopping, assemble the necessities of life. What do I need? I have - finally - a place of my own; small pleasures, a table, a lamp, a chair, a bookshelf, what could I need from the locker, and I sit down to quietly think...
Here it is, finally, The Great Solitude, found in the heart of the city, not the mountains or the forest, never were they lonely, but this apartment with it's echoing and unfurnished rooms, long hardwood floors that overhang the alley on concrete pillars, safe refuge for the homeless looking to set up a tarp, park a shopping cart, smoke a bowl of crack, the moonlit parade of furtive shadows that loiter and flit between the cars and dumpsters; here, in the heart of Calgary I've found the perfect solitude.
- Details
- Category: Calgary
Page 362 of 997