Daily Weirdness, With Possums

Posted on May 26, 2018 by Kate

Kage Baker firmly believed that the basis of the world as we know it is weirdness. Most human endeavour, she felt, was an attempt to explain, ignore, or encompass weirdness. People don’t usually like it, you see, and they structure their lives – their habits, their families and civilizations – to normalize the surrounding sea of weird that is actually the normal state of the Universe.

Artists, writers, scientists, mystics and loonies are often just the folks who fail to do that. Sometimes they can’t help but notice these things, and it makes them very unhappy. Lots, though, just don’t care – those folks tend to be creative,  and often happier than others. Unless they get committed or something, of course; and sometimes, they’re both. Van Gogh, for instance (whom Kage took as a combination mentor/bad example), seems to have been quite contented when he was actually painting – it was only the rest of the time, when the poor man could not reconcile himself with the “normal” world, that he suffered.

Kage’s solution, personally,  was to ignore as much as she could manage of that world that insisted on the consensus view. She dodged that dreadful moment of despair that takes out so many sensitive people, and managed to survive the fatal season of adolescence. The world was weird, and she could live with that a lot easier than trying to live in a world where she had to pretend not to see the weirdness. It was one of the generators of her writing.

Some of it, too, may have been due to my first research project for her: queries into gravity, velocity, knot quality and how far the drop has to be to successfully break a neck. It scotched her plans to leap from the balcony of the Student Union at Immaculate Heart College with the two volumes of the OED clutched to her bosom; and by the time she got over being 16 or so, the urge had passed. (I may have exaggerated the difficulties somewhat …)

BTW, this is not a sad recollection. Teen aged girls do that sort of thing all the time. Luckily, most of it comes to nothing fatal, and it can be a healthy and transformative stage on the way to maturity. Learning you don’t want to die is good. Kage took the lesson. A clear-eyed look straight at the world’s weirdness confers much wisdom; and a lifetime of amusement, as well. Win/win/win situation. You’re not dead, you’re not a teenager anymore, and you’re usually entertained.

I have been much delayed over the last week by a flood of daftness. Various oddities have been making life take off on sorts of peculiar tangents around here lately. It being spring, we added a bird feeder to the squirrel feeder on the front porch; and while the squirrels cannot get to the bird seed – the feeder is suction-cupped to the window – the birds can and do raid the squirrels. It doesn’t work very well (ever see a sparrow try to make off with an entire peanut in the shell?) but the conflicts provide hours of innocent entertainment. Also, lots of fat squirrels and birds.

Of course, at night the larger wildlife come out to check out what the daytime combatants have tossed out in their battles. Raccoons, skunks, possums and coyotes will all eat peanuts, and they do come up on the porch to do so. Only the coyotes are polite enough to run away when we try to come in or out after dark; the skunks ignore us (but we can’t ignore them!) and the raccoons stretch little starveling paws out of the tree branches as we pass, begging to be domesticated. But the possums …

In the 34 years my family has lived in this house, exactly ONE (1) possum has made it into the house under its own steam, and it came through an open dog door (not presently in use). One was imported by the cats, but it was unwilling and was besides easy to extract and release to the wild; the worst result was sulking cats. As of today, we have now had two separate volunteer possums in a week, trundling around the house and eating all the cat kibble.

Four days or so ago, my nephew Mike came out into the living room in the middle of the night – I was up, insomniac and reading – to inquire in a puzzled way as to what to do about the possum in his bedroom. In the general Call To Quarters, the possum vanished into the boxes of storage in the back of the closet. Mike spent a couple of days rearranging things in there, including building a ramp to an open screen to encourage it to leave. And, in a tribute to his engineering, it did! Though we never quite  figured out how it had gotten in …

However, this morning both Mike and I were awakened at an ungodly hour by Kimberly apologetically announcing that there was another possum, this time in the living room. Armed with experience and elbow-high gauntlets, this time it took Mike only 15 minutes to corner the miscreant behind the television stand and grab it. I must admit, it was both tiny and pretty cute, and completely ungrateful to be evicted into the plumbago bushes out front.

This time, it not being the middle of the night, Mike went hunting for the means of ingress. He discovered that possums had chewed away the edges of the gasket whereby the clothes dryer vent hose exits through the laundry room wall. He has packed it round with steel wool, stucco tape and insulation foam, so we are now fairly well possum-proof. Unless, of course, we have a possum portal. Which is entirely  possible around here.

For these reasons, and several other problems, I do not quite have a working tricycle yet.  That adventure is yet to begin. But I have a great lock, a Welsh flag for the back, a good pith helmet for the sun, and my wheels will be together soon. In the meantime, observing the world is an interesting past-time once again, instead of a grief, and all is pretty good in this strange old world. I am not 16 myself any more, and am quite happy about it.

More about sinkholes, giant blue worms, California tsunamis, the next date the world is supposed to end and other strange wonders tomorrow. Hopefully, the world will be tame enough for me to write more about it. Onward and sideways!

 

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An Unexpected Glitch

Posted on May 25, 2018 by Kate

Kage Baker. There, that’s my traditional beginning. I have now planted my banner on another dark Friday.

I am temporarily out of order, with something vile of a gastrointestinal order. I’ve probably been poisoned by the forces of darkness. However, I have in my possession a ruby, a very bad emerald, some pearls, some agates and some turquoise:  all of which are reputed to aid against poison. Also, some Pepto-Bismal.

I am going to bed. Shenanigans will resume tomorrow.

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Opening Credits

Posted on May 24, 2018 by Kate

Kage Baker leaned delicately on most of her friends. A few were designated pillars of the sky; she was more apt to lean on those, though even there she was always loathe to become too needy or dependent. Most people who knew her would have offered rather more of their shoulders than she ever asked  (a truly bizarre visual, now that I think of it. But very Kage.) but she didn’t like to be a burden.

After all, most of us don’t want to do that. I sure don’t. However, when I got my sorry ass out of bed this morning and sat down at my desk, I was astounded at the number of loving, supportive comments and emails I had received.It was wonderful. These past several weeks, I have seldom sat down at the desk, instead viewing my mail on my Kindle: I made few entries, answered few emails, and in general did absolutely nothing. Pretty much of a piece with the rest of my time, lately. But today I was back in the saddle.

I don’t think I deserve all the wonderful emails I got, but I am Oh, so grateful! You astound me, always, Dear Readers, with your generous support and understanding. There were well over 100 pieces of mail this morning, and for once, most were not political. They were wonderful notes from friends. So many offers to do murder, severely harm or hex my troll: not that I would ever take you up on it, but it sure does make my black withered heart stretch and expand in joy.

Thank you all.

This is late, and will be brief – consider it the opening scroll of credits, mostly there for purposes of legality and observance of the Unities. I must admit, I did spend a lot of today reading; but that was because a new Stephen King came out Tuesday, and I had to finish it. My head would have exploded, otherwise. Many of my vices are in abeyance, in these days of exploring the diseases of senescence; but the urge to bury myself in a new Stephen King novel is as great as ever. If any of you Dear Readers are also King fans, I urge you to read The Outsider as soon as possible. It’s a good, old-fashioned one.

Anyway, that is done. I am still licking my lips for the last tingling savour of the story. But I am also sorting through several of the strange and wonderful things that have happened out in the great grey greasy world lately, and tomorrow we shall examine a few of them. Cube sats and shield volcanoes. Wattle berry cakes. Giant blue planarian worms, a meter long and (quelle horreurs!) French.

It’s a weird old world, Dear Readers. Ain’t it grand?

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And Back Again

Posted on May 23, 2018 by Kate

Kage Baker blessedly lacked a few of the classic problems of the writer. She seldom got writer’s block, and never for very long. She was seldom depressed. She dodged, resisted and/or ignored comments from her audience, and thus was untroubled by them. She never read her reviews unless they were vetted by another person, and so was untroubled by most of them, too. She didn’t smoke or do drugs, and could write coherently at quite inhuman levels of inebriation.

I’m not  like that. I’m not like any of that.

It’s been more than 2 months since I wrote a blog entry. I am sincerely and honestly apologetic, Dear Readers,; but really, there was nothing I could think of to do about it. Couldn’t write sober or drunk or done up on painkillers. Couldn’t write sunk in black depression. Couldn’t write in my sleep, or in what passed for wakefulness; which was usually in my sleep, as I have spent inordinate amounts of time asleep lately. Wherein, by the way, I didn’t even dream, except for nightmares where I woke myself up talking and yelling in my sleep.

At least, I guess they were nightmares. The ones I remember best were mostly just weird: dodging zombies while carrying a Siamese cat around in my arms. Hitching rides on driverless fire engines through dark and deserted urban streets, where strange black dust spilled over the curbs in dunes. Searching constantly for bathrooms, and only finding wrecked public restrooms with broken sinks, holes in the floors, and no doors on the stalls. Usually flooded, too: major grossness.

I would guess these were anxiety dreams. Certainly, being unable to locate a single restroom that had not apparently endured a surgical nuclear strike is enough to inspire anxiety: especially when you wake up and realize you really to need to go to the bathroom and frantically leap out of bed. I’m proud to have, so far, always woken up when the toilets have been just too horrible to use. Someday, though, I am sure, I’m going to fall over the damned cat, or fail to wake up before I realize I’m still asleep. Either way, I’m going to wet myself.

The starting point for this intellectual desert was a troll in my comments section. I’ve had them before, and I am sure I will have them again. This one, however, just gutted me. I had a panic attack when someone sent me a kind note from this site – just seeing that it came from WordPress was enough to produce nausea and flop-sweat. That’s when I realized how badly the wretch had hurt me. It was just a lucky blow that landed on a weak place, but it did for me for the longest time … it was complete despair. I felt like Kage was newly dead, I hadn’t mourned her or healed at all, and the entire last 8 years was just one huge sucking morass of wasted time.

So what have I done instead of writing? I’ve read. I’ve slept. I’ve taken up modest exercise, and can now walk short distances without recourse to my cane. I’ve battled diabetic nerve complications – not in my feet, of course, where most people get them; I have less-common symptoms, like gastroparesis. That means that one’s stomach muscles stop moving. It’s due to damage to the vagus nerve, and is a bitch to treat. You are simultaneously hungry and painfully full, constantly nauseated and afraid to eat. Soft foods  are recommended, and that really makes one feel like an adult …

However: one of the things the troll emphasized was that I complained about my health far too much, which is probably true. Sometimes, to plead my case, I do like to pass on the weird things that happen to me, just on general principles. Did any of you, Dear Readers, even know that anything short of a stroke or curare could even stop peristalsis? I sure wasn’t …

Anyway, all that is in the past. I am physically better than I was. I am emotionally better than I was. And Kimberly (who has never stopped nagging me to write through all this dark time) pretty much gave me an ultimatum today. I’m afraid she’ll stop feeding me, or – worse! – stop making me morning coffee. And my dear friend Steve Skold also gently reminded me today that I really need to get back to writing. And since Steve also often feeds me and makes me morning coffee, I figured the pair of them warning me simultaneously constituted a serious poke from Fate.

So, if anyone enjoys the ensuing blogs, you may thank Kimberly and Steve. And yourselves, all of you who sent me gentle notes and made me feel safer about sticking my head up again. Any obnoxious crap is, of course, entirely my own fault.

Anyway. Here I am again. Time to pick up the pieces, my shield and sword and my dropped big-girl pants, and get back to work.

 

 

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This Time, I’ll Yell Out

Posted on March 13, 2018 by Kate

Kage Baker had one dependable solution for those moments when the world became too much for her. That was to write.

Because really, kids, let’s be honest. Unless you are Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (or on serious drugs. Or maybe both … ) something will get to you. It may be be the sudden stroke of black lightning; or, as some depressed folks call it, the bite of the black dog. It may come gradually over time, the slow accumulation of weight that makes the snow avalanche or the earth dance. But it will come, though you cry ever so much.

Everyone gets the blues, as they say. Depressive people just know about it. Kage did not have depression. But she knew how to deal with the occasional eclipse of joy, and that was always the writing: The Work. Two hours of writing did her more good than a month of Prozac would have, I think.

I, on the other hand, am depressive. I’m a responsible adult: I take my daily Prozac and try to avoid triggers. However, one can only avoid obvious triggers, triggers that are basically known, or environmental. Like, if you know something plunges you into the Stygian depths of irrational despair, you stay away from it. This is why  I never, ever look at Hello, Kitty. Don’t judge, now …

Anyway, aside from the perils of cartoon cats (she really brings me down … ), which are pretty easy to avoid, there is always the tragic chance of a blitz. I got up early this morning, but not in time for a cheery binge of Supernatural and Bones – instead, what with all the turmoil in the last 48 hour of news, I sat through 3 hours of MSNBC.  Like I said, responsible adult.

And like a responsible, informed adult, now I want to go stick my head in a bucket full of Scotch. Or maybe chocolate. Anyway, I am falling slightly down the rabbit hole … but this time, I’m telling people! In writing, no less. So, all will be well, eventually.

I’m still kind of hoping for that damned giant meteor to hit. In the meantime, there are books, and blueberry waffles, and my family, and Harry, and Whopper Malted Milk eggs, and the sweet Spring rain falling now. And The Work.

Yep. That, all of it, is what matters.

 

 

 

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Daylight Aberrations

Posted on March 11, 2018 by Kate

Kage Baker simply detested Daylight Savings. She didn’t really care about getting more daylight for the merchants’ convenience – as she observed, we were in modern times and had lots of artificial lighting available.

And people had managed even back when streetlights were flambeaux or candles, and stores were lit after sunset with whale oil lanterns. Or, as she acerbically noted, “You know, like, they closed.” She actually felt that the Monday after DST started should be a therapeutic holiday.

The main things Kage disliked were simple. First, she objected to arbitrarily mucking about with dawn and sunset: it was not only unnatural but not historical. She could pardon considerable unnaturalness, but in-authenticity really narked her.

Second, Kage hated being robbed of her sleep. She felt the loss of the vernal advance in time very keenly; she did not feel the equinoctial take back was sufficient recompense for the initial theft. So she hated it. I told her that if she didn’t obsess about it, she wouldn’t notice it; the human temporal sense is not that sensitive.

“Mine is”, Kage would aver with a glare. I didn’t know if she meant she wasn’t human, or that the rest of us were sensorially deficient. Even odds, probably. In any event, she ignored it as much as possible – as she did most clocks, to be honest.

Besides, Kage felt that DST was a cheap-jack method of time travel.

In my advancing age. I have solved all my personal problems with DST by adopting Kage’s solution: I ignore it. I don’t care when television shows come on, because Kimberly tapes the few I still watch. And I sleep whenever I can, which seems to be based on a 33-hour diurnal period anyway – so who cares what the clock says? I tend to leave my Kit Kat Klock on Standard time, anyway. It enhances the retro effect.

But in deference to Kage’s habits, I do as little as possible on The Day. Today, I have binge-watched NCIS and read FBI profilers’ memoirs. And I am writing this blog, of course, to keep faith with you, Dear Readers.

But for now, my armchair beckons. There are still some chapters left with the steely-jawed FBI. And then, I think I will explore some well-tuned Cthulhu pastiches.

On this cusp between real and artificial times, it’s a good place to hobnob with a few monsters.

 

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What Happened

Posted on March 9, 2018 by Kate

Kage Baker was a firm believer in that axiom made famous by the eponymous hero of  Forrest Gump: “Shit happens.”

She believed it firmly, and not in the semi-lovechild meaning of  “stuff”. She meant SHIT, no kidding nor holds barred crap of a societal (if not literal; and often precisely that) meaning and application. In an unpublished portion of the story of Gard and his family, Kage has Ermenwyr remark: “If that happens, then flaming shit will rain from the sky: and we were well to have a steel umbrella.”

And Kage figured that was a mild manifestation.

My quiet little life has recently encountered some high tides of fecal matter. My health has taken some odd  turns. The world has been hard to take – as it has for everyone. The most difficult thing has been a run-in with a troll; who managed, in a general whirlwind of abuse, to land one or two blows that really knocked me flat.

So, I’ve been silent. I had been proud of shouting into the void. For the last few weeks, though, I been nurturing an arrow to the most sensitive portion of my ego. Does anyone listen, or care? I dunno. But Kimberly says she does, and that’s enough for me. Anyway, I’ve decided I rather like shouting into the void. The echoes are trippy.

So, more reminisce, and more whining about my health; more laughing at it, too. Some amusing things have happened – more of that. More speculation, more weird science, more extinct species cavorting in public.

More, more, more. Tomorrow.

 

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How I Do It, Now That I Am Old

Posted on February 2, 2018 by Kate

Kage Baker never kept much of a story idea file.

That’s the file where you keep the ideas that might become stories. It’s full of articles of interest, isolated signs or photos of provocatively dubious provenance, and disjointed phrases that somehow made your hair stand on end. Sometimes there are whole written but orphaned scenes – detailed in their brief existence, but with no support or progeny. Sometimes there’s a character description, or a note that you need to write a story about a character with a specific tattoo; or maybe a wooden leg with a whistle carved into it that sounds The Ride of The Valkyries when they run real fast ..

It’s your own private slash pile. Most of the entries will never see the light of day. Kage kept some notes in her file, but it was really only because I nagged her to do it. She rarely went back and resurrected an idea from those halls of preserving amber. I’ve used a couple of them, when writing “Pareidolia” and finishing the second Ladies of Nell Gwynne’s novel: which is where I discovered that Kage had only kept enough records to placate me ..

I might have a few sharp words about that, if I ever got the chance. Probably not, though. I’d be too happy to turn the whole thing back over to her. Once I got done hugging her and crying, anyway.

Myself, I do keep notes; advancing age is poking holes in my memory process, and I have to take larger steps in order to keep up with it all. Of greatest help have been two of the tricks Kage did use, on the winding road between brilliant idea and tortuously-hacked out story.

  1.  She just didn’t wait – when an idea struck Kage, she followed up on it immediately. This sometimes required her to set aside a project already in progress (usually, actually) and write on the new one until the inspiration slowed down enough to let her trade back and forth. But it meant that she was rarely idle, almost always had an idea in the works and 2 more in the wings, and had the smug confidence of the thrifty housewife who has laid in enough flour, salt and butter for the winter.
  2.  While she didn’t keep the damned idea file on her computer (my life would be sooo much easier if she had!) she kept her notes. Her physical notes. Her physical notes on everything – both in topic, and in range of materials. This is why I find old plots, characters, reveals, landscapes and in-jokes all over in the boxed remains of our shared life, preserved on everything from scraps torn from printer jams, to flattened candy boxes, to unwanted pockets ripped off hoodies. (Really. You cannot imagine Kage’s determination to write on something when the fit took her.) As long as you can get used to it, it’s not a bad system. Luckily, as a confirmed bibliophile, I love the perfume of gently aging paper, so wandering through the old manuscripts, piles, envelopes and Baggies of scraps – with Kage’s spike handwriting poking out everywhere – is always a bit of a treat.

Do I keep actual bits of paper? Yep, I do – not as many, but I do. Most of the disjointed bits of writing end up on the envelopes from old medical bills and notices, simply because I have a lot of those stacked up on my desk. It saddens me, though, to have to report that after a few months, my notes make about as much sense to me as Kage’s decades-old   ones … but it does add an element of surprise and adventure to trolling through the stacks.

I also try to write as soon as an idea occurs to me. This means a lot of getting up in the middle of the night, but half the time I am awake anyway. Depending on how comfortable I am, I can fire up the desk top, or write long-hand in a moleskin notebook in lavender  ink: and, Dear Readers, never underestimate the effectiveness of handwriting by candlelight in some romantic, senseless colour – these romantic urges can lend an urgency that quite carries the story forward.

Lately, I have been writing on my Kindle. I use a little Amazon Fire notebook for my Kindle stash, and it has the room and capacity to let me compose online. So I do. Half of this entry was composed while I jeered at Congress at 1 AM this morning. Especially recently, I cannot rest without without catching Rachel Maddow, whose reporting still possesses the rare trick of informing me without enraging me: so as I listen to Mordor’s armies assembling in the East, I write. In the recliner, with my legs up and a pillow in my lap to hold the Kindle, and usually with the ginger Maine Coon cat sticking her huge feathery paws in my ears from where she reclines on the chair-back. Just now, this is a perfect combination of comfort, utility and annoyance, and keeps the creative flow going.

In the end, though, I do what Kage recommended most of all: just wing it. Sit down and write – anything, everything; to be a writer, you must just write. You’ll find a place for it all somewhere. Eventually. As long as you don’t stop.

Never stop. Unless, as some joke says, you can be Batman – but if you’re Batman, you’re an obsessive loonie and can’t stop anyway, right?

It all works out. No one knows how. It’s a miracle …

 

 

 

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The Moon In Wine

Posted on February 1, 2018 by Kate

Kage Baker would have loved last night’s Super Blue Blood Moon. Once I got her out of bed, that is, and she had forced her eyes into focus. Then, the lunar fire balloon in the West would have had her clapping her hands in glee.

(I am assuming, of course, that had Kage still been living, she and I would still have been happily in our aerie apartment in Pismo Beach. The moon would have been visible out our living room windows, a red opal sinking into the black, 5:30 AM waves.)

Still, it was amazing and wonderful from my front porch here in L.A. Kimberly and I tottered out to view together, after Kimberly had scouted to see precisely where it could be seen, before she let me go dot-and-carry picking my way out with my cane. She seems to feel gravity will pounce like a velociraptor and drag me to the ground … in which she is probably not far off. In any event, I did not fall down and we saw the moon and it was marvellous.

It’s funny how much easier it is to get up early, now that I am old. It’s still easiest to simply not go to sleep at, and thus be ready to spring up for whatever middle-of-the-night revel is at hand. That’s been my technique for years, assisted by making sure I never know precisely what time it is … it works fine. Kimberly, too, was ready and willing to sally forth in the dark to view horological wonders. But we never even tried to wake up Michael, and this morning he assured us we did the right thing. He’s in his twenties, and not a night person yet.

Kage was so totally a solar, diurnal life form that it was almost deadly to wake or keep her up late. You could see the flames beginning to gutter in her eyes … but seeing the moon last night would have been worth it, though she’d have clung to her pillow and pulled the coverlet over her head.

But for such a sight! I hope you saw it, Dear Readers. The moon truly looked like an alien world, transformed by the red penumbral tide. It was scarlet, crimson, ruby red: no mere copper shadowing, but the whole broad silver face of the moon drowned in burgundy. The mares and impact craters stood out in an even deeper carmine, as if the shadow of the eclipse were a literal fluid that had flooded the cold lunar plain.

It was like the negative image of a green rose.

It was like tasting the sun in a glass of Merlot.

It was like the Red Queen dancing in a ballroom of black glass.

Caveat: I wrote all the foregoing about 14 hours ago, firmly in February the 1st but also in the wee o’dark thirty hours. I was sitting up watching the late rerun of The Rachel Maddow Show, which might account for the generally hallucinatory air of the entry. The world in which we presently live is weird as hell – which it may, in fact, be: unless we have just fallen through a warp in time-space to an alternate dimension of evil and stupidity … and I cannot avoid the suspicion that this is an even worse version of the normal alternate dimension of evil and stupidity, since none of the villains have had the courtesy to sport identifying beards.

Nonetheless, I was in a transport of delight remembering the moon: as well as a rage of despair, listening to the madness and ills of our nation. The combination of hope and despair is somehow symbolized by the extraordinary sight of that beautiful, improbable moon. It’s the only time in my lifetime it will have been seen, and I did not miss it.

And, who knows? It may yet be a hopeful omen. The ancients took just about every weird thing in the sky to mean the imminent fall of a king, which is something that America needs right now. It’s been a good move for us before.

Also, it was just plain gorgeous. I’ll tell you what is was a sign of, Dear Readers: Beauty. Beauty remains, is wild, comes as it wills, and cannot be prevented.

And so, there am I happy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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January 31, 2018

Posted on January 31, 2018 by Kate

Kage Baker had been tucked into her big feather bed for the last night, this time eight years ago.

She was sleepy but lucid as the sun set; she sat up against her pillows and saw the sun down into the sea, as she could from her bedroom. I remember it set into a broad band of carmine, and that the road of the sun seemed to run straight across the water to her window. The wall behind her head was gold and amber. She said she was much more comfortable, and lay down with her hands on her breast, like a still life of herself.

That wasn’t unusual at all. Kage usually slept like a figure on a catafalque, flat on her back with her hands clasped on the edge of the covers, pale and still. We used to sometimes put odd things in her hands, like a lily in a folk song, so she lay there with, say, a wooden spoon or a bottle of rum or a stuffed mechanical rabbit … camping jokes, you know; sleepover pranks.

In the mornings she always looked like a lady in a tragic ballad, all her hot bright life dimmed to a porcelain quiet. I, on the other hand, usually arose looking like I’d slept upside down in my bed, hair sticking out sideways and my nightgown on inside-out … then we’d get up and Kage would open those black eyes full of fantastic worlds, while I found my glasses to see anything at all.

There’s a moral there, I am sure.

Anyway, Kage looked utterly composed and calm when she lay back against her pillows for that last night. She was so calm and motionless, it was hours until we watchers figured out she wouldn’t wake up again. It took her breathing changing to clue us in, as it slowed and began to rasp and halt for seconds at a time. And that was how she stayed, breathing but with less and less interest, until 1:15 AM. And then she died.

The moon was in its last quarter that night. It rose late, in the far east over the hills that hid the inland from the beach; I didn’t see it until I went out on the porch hours later to watch Kage’s body borne down the stairs. It was dead and cold and gave no light.

Tonight, though … tonight is a Super Blue Blood Moon. A Blue Moon means it is the second full moon in a month, and a Super Moon means it’s at the closest point to the earth in its orbit. It also is a night of lunar eclipse, which brings in the Blood factor: although we will not see the full eclipse here in California, we can see the reddened shadow it casts on the disc of the moon. Thus the Super Blue Blood Moon.

This is a concatenation of events that has not occurred in 150 years or so, and it won’t happen again in my lifetime. Not unless there is some ghastly advance in geriatrics, anyway, that condemns me to another century of life in this increasingly uncomfortable world. It would doubtless be of the ironic Tithonus* variety, too, wherein I did not die but also was not returned to youth – eternity as a withered apple, out of breath and aching in every joint. I most sincerely hope no such advancement in medicine is visited upon me, as I am now maintaining a cheerful point of view by believing in a better life to come.

The cyst behind my knee makes me walk like a combination of Igor and the Little Mermaid: every step a crooked lurch, that feels like walking on knives.  This also tweaks my back, and so I sleep very little – I have to move every hour or so, shifting between lying down and sitting up, to get any physical ease of the constant discomfort. Ever see a cow or horse or dog, walking in endless circles in an attempt to escape some pain? That’s me, but with a cane. And I don’t see the orthopedist for 3 weeks.

Don’t even suggest your favourite painkillers, Dear Readers. My doctor will prescribe nothing stronger than acetaminophen with codeine: there’s an opioid epidemic, you know, and God forbid I should become addicted. Where is this epidemic happening? I’d love to know. All I can figure is, someone in Arkansas or Nebraska is taking all my drugs. I am profoundly angry and depressed. Also, just plain cranky, as well as usually too tired and aching to sit and write.

But Kage always said – if things get too horrible to bear, then kick it all  over and start again. Go back to some beginning place, make a new start, pretend you are trying it for the first time. Throw away the habits that hurt and find some new ones.  I can never sleep on the anniversary of Kage’s death until the time rolls round and past on the clock. So I’m making lists of thing to try, as I sit waiting for 1:15 to roll around.

I have resumed knitting, a soothing activity I had laid aside some time ago in the chaos of trying to write. My agent just sent me ALL the contracts and analyses of Kage’s books, so I can lay them all out and see where to make some enormous new step. Finally, I summoned the courage to suggest that my agent try to sell some of MY work as well as Kage’s older stuff: and she said yes, mirabile dictu! I have stopped reading in bed, and am counting grams of carbohydrates.

Tonight, around 5 AM, I shall totter out on the front porch and look at the astounding Moon. I don’t take it for an omen – it’s only a lovely hiccough in the endless orrery of the night sky – but it will be a better moon than the pallid wretched thing I watched rise 8 years ago. I’m anticipating it with some genuine expectation of joy.

Maybe I’ll take up vaping. Maybe I’ll get a tattoo. Maybe I’ll finally try to see if I can live on the appealing diet of bacon and oranges. Certainly, I will try to write; and some of the time I will succeed.

Kage would understand.

 

 

*Tithonus was a young handsome prince with whom the air-headed goddess of dawn, Eos, fell in love. She made him immortal but forgot to give him eternal youth; he eventually withered into a tiny, bent, grey, creaking little creature: a grasshopper. At which point, his absent-minded inamorata kicked him out, and now he wanders the world annoying ants and Mormons.

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