Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker always viewed the week between Christmas and New Year’s as free time. Also, unreal time – another dimension of sight and sound, to paraphrase the New Year’s Eve Twilight Zone marathons she loved dearly.

Those 7 days, she firmly believed, were like a pocket universe. Very little happened that really mattered, at least in terms of the wider world outside Kage’s own head. She resisted having the “real” world impact her as much as possible anyway; the week between Christmas and New Year’s was even more so a time of isolation. She always contrived to be mentally snowed in as much as she could.

Various of the calendar-wise ancients had days set aside in a similar manner. The Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayans – the Meso American civilizations that had idly calculated their dates thousands of years into the past and future – they all had empty squares on the calendar, days when, for all intents and purposes, the world just didn’t exist. They instituted the spare days in order to balance their calendars so they came out even, especially where solar and lunar calendars had to be brought into alignment. (Europeans still haven’t found a graceful way to do this …) Most of them viewed the extra days as extreme bad luck as well, days when reality thinned and luck failed and the tendency of the malignant Universe to munch on humans increased exponentially.

The Meso American Universe was not a cheerful place.

Kage’s Universe, though, was a pretty optimistic one. She took the last week of every calendar year as a respite and a break. She played games, she read books – other people’s books! – she lived on the seasonal goodies around the house. So did I. That’s what that week is for. And if a story idea or two came out of all that sleeping in and living slowly – well, that was just a bit more gravy for the leftover Yorkshire pudding. Leftover Yorkshire pudding was one of Kage’s perfect foods.

I’ve been lazing my way through this final week of 2013 with a determined sloth that qualifies as a performance oxymoron. The winter days have been brief, and I’ve rarely seen ’em anyway: sleep has been my main occupation. I’ve been living on panettone,  hard salami and Jordan’s almonds (three of my perfect foods). The Christmas prime rib is now in its frozen remnants, awaiting its reincarnation as beef stock; the New Year’s ham is perfuming the kitchen.

This is the peaceful nadir of the year. The world has spun  to a standstill, and is now beginning to slowly turn once more – for the next half year we will fall into the light again. Although Los Angeles has been basking in its usual halcyon summer phase – 75 degrees and clear skies – the earth is cold. It breathes out steadily at night and the temperatures plummet; no question that it is well and truly winter. But it’s – quiet. Blessedly quiet.

I’ve blown off just about all my tasks this week. Enduring my way through an attack of shingles has helped with the urge to move as little as possible – the chickenpox was bad enough, back when I was 11; I really did not need the shingles to remind me of it. But the conflagration in my nerve endings is beginning to ease, and it appears I will survive.

It’s just the last little kick in the ass from 2013. It wasn’t my best year. I’m glad to see the back of it, and I hope to do – and have – a better year in 2014. This peaceful empty space at year’s end has helped a lot.

And so has the yearly recap of my blogging activities supplied today from Word Press. It appears we filled the Sidney Opera House 10 times over or so, Dear Readers. Thank you all very much for that – I couldn’t have done it without you.

Tomorrow I will step back into the stream of Time. For now, though, I am still. That’s all. Just – still.

Happy New Year, all.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 26,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 10 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Kage Baker always relaxed by Christmas Eve. The great holiday rushes were effectively over – what hadn’t gotten done, wasn’t going to get done: the curtain was rising on the holiday inexorably, bright with lights and gaudy with tinsel, and Christmas would arrive whether we were ready or not.

So we might as well be ready. And so she always was.

Our last Christmas Eve together was a disaster movie directed by J.J. Abrams from a script by Steven King, based on a Brontean tragedy. With special effects by the Warner Brothers. Anvils and exploding rocket skates, man.

We started out comfy and safe, Kage feeling expansive in a lap robe in her armchair while I produced a really fine prime rib and Yorkshire pudding dinner … We ended up on the bathroom floor – me because I was throwing up my internal organs, and Kage because I’d dropped her and couldn’t get the strength to get her on her feet and back to bed. First we cried, then we laughed hysterically, then we crawled to a phone and called for an ambulance. We were still giggling at the absurdity of our life when the nice guys from the Fire Department came and took us to the hospital.

“Take her first!” we chorused, each pointing to the other. The EMTs ignored us and took me first, over my objections.

“My sister has cancer!” I protested.

“Yeah, but you’re having a heart attack,” they answered. This produced a cheer and a traitorous “Ha! Told you so!” from Kage in the background.

We bickered and giggled in the ambulance, and in the ER; I’m sure all the staff people thought we were insane or on drugs. But we weren’t. It’s just that when things get bad enough, you have to laugh or give up. And neither of us was willing to give up.  We came close later that night, when we learned that Kage’s cancer was back, and in her brain … but we stuck together. It was still Christmas Eve, if an increasingly rotten one; and we were still together.

The readiness, as Shakespeare said, is all. We were always ready for whatever was coming; or so we thought. Kage thought so to the very end, and kept reminding me to do so also.

I’ve tried. And I’ve failed. So I’ve tried again, and again:and I guess I’ll just keep trying to get up off that bathroom floor; because, what the hell else is there to do? It’s Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day is coming. And that is a wonderful thing, certainly worth getting up off whatever floor you’ve gotten stuck on.

Dickens Fair was a wonder and delight. I am home with my family, the bird is singing weird little parrot songs to himself while the dog watches for wolves and orcs out the window; the cats are happily stoned on Christmas catnip. My family is around me and all is well.

So I wish you all the best on this night. Cling close to your loved ones and wait for the morning to come, because it really, really will. Even if you have to spend the night on the bathroom floor – hang on to whatever companion Fate has sent you, and trust to your ability to get up tomorrow. It’s much, much better to laugh through this crap than not.

A Happy Christmas to all of you, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker loved Christmas. A little cautiously, because she had a low tolerance for cute or sentimental: but deeply. Hers was a midnight-by-starlight love, a candles-through-stained-glass love, an ancient memories love.

In her heart, Kage was always out standing on a cold hillside, the light of a new star on her brow like sacred oil and divinity rising on the night wind to fill the hollows of her bones. Gods walk at midwinter, are born and die and rise again.

Kage was into that.

Our Christmases had gotten pretty comfy, by our 50’s. We had a regular series of rites and customs – the lights went up, the tree was brought home and decorated, presents were hidden (badly) and then wrapped and brought out in triumph. She addressed all the tags, in Gothic uncials; I wrapped all the presents to our family, because I have a mild charisma over tape and ribbon. There was roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on Christmas Eve. There was a (small) flaming plum pudding, accompanied by a recitation of the pudding hysteria scene from A Christmas Carol. We stuffed enormous silly stockings for one another and hung them out at dinner time, to torment the other until midnight.

It was middle-class and middle-aged, and that made it a victory over the cold.cruel world.

Of course … it was offset and balanced by Extreme Christmas. After a month spent racing up and down I-5 in the dark, spending all our weekends 200 years ago in London, some solid warm comfiness was an even greater pleasure. Especially for Kage, whose taste for running around in the dark was thoroughly satisfied earlier in the year by Halloween. By the time Dickens hit its last glorious weekend, she was ready to settle down for a month or two.

I spent many a last night of Dickens racing the sunrise South to Pismo Beach, with Kage asleep in her seat. And many an ere-dawn heading further South to Los Angeles, with Kage asleep again after a fast shower and a two-hour nap. I usually managed to hit LA with the Christmas morning sun …

This is the last weekend of Dickens, now coming upon us. Tomorrow, I shall load up the last delivery of lemonade, marzipan and ginger cookies for my cast, and head North with nephew Michael. Kind friends will take us in for a couple of nights, while we celebrate Christmas in London with the last of our brain cells and strength.

Old friends who couldn’t make the run will be coming for these last 2 days; folks as dear as blood to me, making their own wild journeys to spend Midwinter with their families. I’ve missed 2 of our 5 weekends myself, so I’ll be throwing myself into this weekend with extra fervour.  I’m not best pleased with my record this year, but I’m still on my feet and I will see the season out!

And then … there will be our private frenzy, as my cast and I begin the breakdown of the set. Everything smaller than an actual wall gets taken down and packed up; the mirrors, tables, bric-a-brac and dishes we’ve borrowed from our mothers will be stuffed into our cars to go home ASAP. In a week, between Christmas and New Year’s, we’ll be back for the bigger stuff, to haul it away and into storage for another year. But first – the grand take down.

It’s a hilarious time, usually. We’re eating the last of the sweets and drinking anything that didn’t get gulped during the day; we’re exclaiming over weird things found in the kitchen and improvising daft costumes with bits of garland and doilies and stag antlers … taking down yards of wallpaper with a butter-knife to lever out the push pins. Figuring out which black topper belongs to whom, or which pair of inappropriate stockings, or which sleepy, cranky child.

Awfully strange things get left at the Green Man Inn.

But within a couple of hours, we’ll get to the point where we can all finally go home. Or partway home, anyway – I’ll be setting out, as usual, to see how far I can get down I-5 before I start hallucinating giant pineapples beside the road. But I’ve reserved a hotel room only 2 hours down the way, so I guess Mike and Harry and I will make it before I drive us into the Aqueduct … I have every other year. We’ll be up again at dawn to speed the rest of the way home. We’ll be hoping for enough snow to look pretty in the Tejon Pass, but not enough to close the Grapevine. And home is all the sweeter when you come to it straight off the winter road, to where the lights are lit and the tree is adorned and the fatted calf is (literally) waiting for you!

But first – that drive through the dark: my private, sacred journey. By starlight and moonlight and the fey sheen of frost on the silver hills; through the shining black heart of Winter, where white bulls wait in caves for boys born of maidens to save the world. Balanced on the silver spike of the solstice, where dark and light waltz together through the longest night.

Down to the wire, in the holy dark.

Down to the wire, and the light, and the sun.

Kage Baker was, as is well known,  fascinated with the unlikely preservation of “lost” objects. She was  equally fascinated by the sudden discoveries of things not only new, but unexpected. The sudden identification of something that turned out to have been scuttling round the world for simply ages (or sitting on a museum shelf misidentified as the wrong end of a dinosaur) was as thrilling to her as photos of the tidal flats of Titan.

One was as likely as the other, Kage reasoned. In fact, that the geology of rocky planets should follow a common pattern was perhaps even more likely than that a hairy decapod should be hanging out at the bottom of one of the more barren stretches of the Pacific.

Although, after all, why should there not be a fuzzy, eyeless, albino crab ( Kiwa hirsuta) in the ocean depths? She firmly held to the concept that damn near anything could be produced by the vagaries of the physical universe. Human experience gives us pretty stunted measuring tape, really.  Also, the imagination of mere man was not up to the weight of what blind chance does with breeding populations and shifting continental masses. Besides, that hairy, eyeless, albino crab was first found lounging around a thermal vent in the vicinity of Easter Island: and to Kage, the mere existence of such a beastie at the foot of that Island of the Weird was practically self-explanatory.

I always suspected that at some intellectual level, it was all faerie stories to Kage, anyway. She appreciated the photos of such astonishing finds, but maintained that actively searching for them exhibited a degree of faith rivalled only by theology students. Someone had to expect to find something. The weirder the expectation, the more fun in the finding. And when  they weren’t expected, the finds were even more fun.

For instance, there are amoebas a foot across at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Single-celled organisms 6 miles down, the size of softballs. No one was looking for them, either; but there they are. Son of the Blob, anyone?

In these modern times, there is an entire sub-species of graduate student who pursues their higher degrees by re-examining relics and fossils and ancient butterfly collections left hopefully to museums. Many of them are Company Operatives – the grad students, not the fossils. The Company goes to extreme lengths to make sure no bits are ever left behind; especially now that we can analyze genomes … there’s a story for that, in my files.

The tigrino species I mentioned a few days ago were long believed to be one species only: and as a matter of fact, they are visually identical. It’s only at that genetic level – which can only now be examined – that it becomes apparent that  there are two of the little beasties, and they never, ever, ever interbred.

A new species of tapir was just found and formally described; it breeds in Brazil, but it also inhabits shelves, in pieces, all over North America.

What were once thought to be several species of Triceratops are now being cautiously re-considered as being ONE species of animal with a wild variation in appearance over age. It’s as if specimens of aged humans were considered to be a separate species from those of young adults.

As a matter of fact, that very example was notoriously perpetrated on our relative Neandertal: the original skeleton from La Chapelle-aux-Saints was of an elderly, arthritic man. His remains were assembled by someone who somehow didn’t realize that fact (Pierre Marcellin Boule, who really should have known better). The resultant crabbed, crooked, stooped ape-like body plan was held as gospel until the late 20th century – when someone re-examined the bones, and discovered the Neandertals were, yes indeedy, human … and just this year, the original cave has also been re-examined, with modern tools and methods. The results are showing that our not-so-distant cousins are not only real members of the family, they were burying their dead with honours about 30,000 years before the rest of us wandered in out of Africa.

Kage loved it when the world turned upside down. That’s why she so loved the photographs from Mars, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Some are just exquisitely weird, but others are fantastic because they are not exotic. Titan’s tidal flats look like Kage could have wandered across them, digging up clams – sunset on Mars resembles the same hour on a cold winter Mojave desert. Frost looks the same no matter if it’s oxygen or carbon dioxide; mud looks the same whether it’s soaked by water or liquid hydocarbons.

Photos have just been released of a huge system of lakes on Titan. Apparently the polar regions of that little world are like Wisconsin, with a surface cracked and caved and littered with lakes. Of course, the lakes are essentially turpentine … but apparently lakes act the same no matter what fills them. We’ve even been able to take peekaboo radar snaps of the bottoms, which look exactly like – lakes.

Cool beans, as Kage was wont to say. Let’s hear it for second looks.

Kage Baker believed in dreams.

Every writer does; every writer of fiction, anyway. You have to believe in a dream with a certain precision, tenacity and detail in order to turn it into a story. And that’s pretty much what fiction is: whether it’s about the socio-sexual-political situation among  intelligent molluscs on a planet orbiting Sirius, or the coming-of-age saga of your introduction to payroll taxes, it begins with a dream. A daydream, at the very least.

But Kage believed in dreams in a very old-fashioned way. Perhaps if she had not been so subject to repeating dreams, or vividly coloured dreams, or flat out prophetic dreams … but she was. Curiously, although she had unnervingly accurate dreams from earliest childhood, she never professed a belief in psychic abilities. She would roll her eyes and say solemnly: “I got the Sight. I’m psychotic.”

She told famously spot-on Tarot cards, too. On which her comment was always, “The cards never lie. The old gypsy woman, she’s full of shit: but the cards never lie.”

Nonetheless, Kage monitored her dreams closely. She thought about them. She recorded them, which was sometimes useful for story ideas; it’s a technique a lot more common among writers than is usually admitted, I bet. She would never tell a dream before breakfast, because somewhere she had formed the opinion that that would actually force it to come true – and since she didn’t always want that, she just refused to tell any. Not that that trick actually worked, exactly …

Kage thought it was what she talked about before breakfast that came real. It wasn’t. It was what she wrote about.

Have you ever become interested in something – something new and unknown to you – and then suddenly found yourself bombarded with references to it? Almost everyone has, once or twice – you’ve never heard of, say, Variated Coloured Katydids, and then you get pictures, emails and articles from National Geo all over the place in one week. (Try this on Google Images – you will find green, white, yellow, blue, khaki and hot pink. Really.) Like that: only with Kage, it happened with all sorts of topics; and they were often ones she brought up herself in her stories.

It went far beyond the stories Kage wove around the finding of “lost” animals, art and cities. It was the verification of things she made up in the first place.

Her vision of the future  in the UK was so peculiar when first published that some British fans asked her what she had against England. Absolutely nothing – it was merely what she feared would happen to a place she loved. The demented progress of the Nanny State has developed in the last 20 years into a frighteningly close approximation of Kage’s satiric critique; I found a reference only today about a woman in Britain whose child was taken from her in a forced Caesarian when she was diagnosed with panic attacks … and look at the recent revelations about the habits of PETA, if you think Beast Liberation is only a product of Kage’s fevered brain.

Not to mention the amazing things of which chocolate is now suspected.

I must admit, I’m impatiently waiting for fusion power and anti-gravity to surface. My hopes are bolstered by the continuing progress in artificial intelligence, cybernetic augmentation and the unfolding history of water on Mars. Those are all subjects dear to Kage’s heart. And at my last count (only last week!), 4 new species of human have been added to Homo sapiens’ family tree: something Kage was sure was the case. For all I know, the Little Stupid Guys are still out there in their hollow hills, raising their rare daughters to shake up human society in unimagined ways.

That last would be neat. It’s exciting just to find out that there are purple squirrels and giant fruit bats and two species of tigrino (I didn’t even know there was one); that Europa has warm geysers taller than its atmosphere; and that there really is water at the bottom of the ocean.  Every little bizarre factoid that gets revealed is like a note from Kage.

And that’s a dream I really wish were real.

Kage Baker, being a native Californio, admired weather. She wrote lovingly of it, notably in the opening paragraphs of The Life of The World To Come. She studied it constantly, especially in her lives as a gardener, a traveller, a performer in outdoor venues.

That may sound paradoxical to non-natives, but it’s a fact: Californians love weather. It’s because no one outside the state thinks we have any – we’re defensive of it. Also, depending on where you are, you can find nearly every climate on Earth within a day or two’s drive of one another. Lastly, it must be admitted that some of our weather requires keenly attuned senses to fully appreciate it; or notice at all.

No one’s sense were more keenly – or more peculiarly – focused than Kage’s.

Californians are sensitive to ultra-violet light: it lets us tan in the winter, on snow, through the windows of glass skyscrapers. It’s what gives Northern California the crystalline shimmer of December light even in the depths of August; it’s the starlight distilled out of sunshine. Kage was acutely sensitive to it, and only partly because she was the palest of redheads and could get a sunburn off the dashboard lights in the car …

Californians are super-aware of air pressure, too. Anyone who lives near a coast is; and California is essentially just one loooong coast with a couple of terraces fenced in by mountains. The low, rounded hills of the coastal ranges are ineffective in stopping the on-shore flow from the  Pacific – a vast invisible wave of wind, mist and air pressure rolls 250 miles inward to pile up against the toothy Sierra Nevadas. Then it crests backwards and falls down the west-facing slopes once more, to wash through the long central valley that was once a sea in its own right, and drown the coast in reversed fogs.

When those winds come foaming inland, they bury the long slope of California in legendary dense fogs: you’re more likely to hit a white-out in Buttonwillow than in Pismo Beach. Kage could feel the fog rising like a tide in her bones, and was always insistent on clinging to the coast herself. Those 100-car pileups don’t happen in Malibu, but away inland among the rice and raisins of Fresno.

When the winds crest short of the eastern mountains, though, and come back ... that’s when they get dangerous.

When non-natives think of California, odds are they envision the nearly-1,000 miles of beaches, or the snows under bright blue skies: basically, everyone thinks of water. But the other prime ingredient of California is flame. And when the on-shore winds hit the Sierras and flood back down across the land, they come with fire in their wings.

Call them Santa Anas (only sloppy foreigners slur it into santanas; that’s a great band, folks, but not weather), sundowners, off shore flow, whatever – something in the mountains sparks like flint, and the winds come back hot. The halcyon days, the brief winter days of soft air and warmth – at the best of times, that’s what we get. When California has her back up, though, what we get are furnace winds erupting from the canyons like dragons, blowing off roofs, taking down trees and power poles, and looking for something to burn.

It’s a weather chimera. One that is apparently cross-eyed, as Kage once observed, since it never seems to know exactly what it wants to do … as a native, she could feel the winter inferno coming; and she both loved and feared it.

Last week, we had frost and freezing temperatures. The lawns here in the LA Basin froze white; crunchy and sparkling, they died. Now they’re brown and dry, and the winds have risen by 40 degrees in temperature, and 40 miles an hour in speed. We are now under three separate weather alerts: a wind warning, a coastal flood warning, and a fire warning.

The wind blows hard, dismembering trees and roofs; it also whips up the winter waves so they flood the beach cities. And it drinks up what little moisture the cold earth and dessicated hillsides have retained after a 9-month dry season: and now, anything at all can  light the winter candles on the heights …

Only in California. Only in the winter. Our weather is immense, weird, lovely and deadly; you can learn to predict it, but there’s a disaster at the end of every forecast. No wonder it fascinated Kage, who loved puzzles and mysteries.

In a land where cities can drown from the west while they burn from the east, she was right at home.

Kage Baker liked to occasionally disappear.

One of her great secret joys consisted of going off somewhere and not telling anyone – at least, not telling anyone who wasn’t integral to the going away. Usually that was just me, Professional Sidekick and chauffeuse. Someone has to drive the car, you know? Kage packed and found our routes and lodgings; I loaded the car and negotiated the roads through the Great Unknown. Harry usually knew, too, but that was because he was ordinarily packed into the back seat, keeping a sharp eye out for seagulls (which he hated) and McDonald’s (which he loved).

I must admit, here, that I was a lot more than just the driver in this daft past time. I, too, loved knowing we were off on a road where no one could find us. The thrill of vanishing into the nearest horizon cannot be excelled. Kage taught me to enjoy that realization that no one could find me, that I had gnawed through the bonds of responsibility and was free … it was a hard lesson for me.

But from literally her 21st birthday, Kage would gleefully take off from time to time, exclaiming that NOW there was no one to whom she had to report! No one could find her! No one could call her! When cell phones began to proliferate, she steadfastly resisted them: actually carrying a damned phone around with you sort of negated that secrecy thing … I got one first, but even then I never turned it on except to make an outgoing call. By then I was just as happy as Kage was to be off, alone, unseen, un-waited-for; off the leash, apron strings and reservation, lighting out for the Territories as fast as we could run!

Kage herself only got a phone in the last couple of years of her life. And that was mainly because she found a neat phone case with a skull-and-crossbones on it in rhinestones. She had a strong sense of personal fashion.

So, what’s this litany of my dear dead sister’s tendency to run off into the Wilderlands got to do with the fact that I haven’t posted a blog in 5 weeks? Everything and Nothing. I am a trumpet hung on an empty branch, and the speaking wind that flows through me is not my voice, but hers …

Rehearsals for Dickens Fair began in November and promptly ate my life; that was cool, they’re supposed to do that. The Green Man Tavern at the Cow Palace unfolded like the jewel in the lotus and Extreme Christmas took off in glory and delight. My crew has been wonderful, my drives up and down I-5 have been marvellous and strange. Nephew Michael has become a superlative navigator. I’ve lost 30-odd pounds this past year and my corset fits again! All was well.

There were some small problems. My legs began to ache in a new way, which has turned out to be vascular insufficiency to  my limbs: but I’m 60 now, that sort of things happens. I got me a cool cane, rosewood with an antler handle, and have found it a most useful prop (ha ha). My blood sugar settled down to something approaching normal and managing diabetes became – well, if not simple, at least easily accomplished.

Then I fell into the Slough of Despond.

For the last 5 weeks I have been slogging through the cold mud of depression. Why I would be depressed is no mystery, though unfortunately that particular bold of self-awareness is no help in dispelling the murk. Creativity has withered; words no longer come to nest in my brain, except at 2 in the morning when I cannot sleep. Then, they positively swarm – until I get up and sit at the keyboard, when they all slide down some central abbatoir-drain in my mind with a contemptuous gurgling noise.

It’s like watching your favourite television show and not realizing it’s the season ender and a two-parter until the credits role. Then you’re left screaming in frustration on the couch.

Nothing has dispelled this, though a lot of nice things have happened that have let me stagger on in the discharge of my duties. We have a new kitten. I got a cane. Dickens is going well. I have a necklace of Christmas lights that really lights up. Christmas is coming. So is spring. Hell, for that matter, so are my next birthday, the Winter Olympics, the Synchronicity and a cure for cancer! But none of them are here now.

Right now, Dear Readers, I am hip deep in cold mud. The sky is overcast and promising snow. I can see the edges of the stream where I am stuck, slowly extending growing claws of ice that stretch out toward me – if they get here before I get out, I consider it likely they will drag me further down.

But on the other hand, I have this stick. And a pocketful of York Mint Patties, than which no winter chocolate is better. The wind may yet swing round to the south and melt something useful out of the permafrost. A sleigh full of tipsy holiday-makers may swing by in search of a Christmas tree or their grandmother.

I’ll get out of here . And in the meantime – I’m back.

Kage Baker was a connoisseuse of the vagaries of Time. Even when she wasn’t creating them herself. Its contractions and dilations, its sweeping tidal bores and shallows – the way a hangover will last 3 days while the evening that provoked it zipped by in about 20 minutes. It all fascinated her.

It was, at bottom, the relativity thing: or so she surmised. Time is relative, Einstein stated. He may have meant cosmic time, such as the observer would encounter when approaching lightspeed aboard a handy photon; but Kage felt it was observable in all times and places. You just had to adjust the F-stop on your attention. Or something.

The best and most interesting example of this phenomenon was Fair Time vs time between Fair weekends. When one was at a Faire – Renaissance, Dickens, whatever – the two days of the weekend stretched out into about a week and a half. Days were lengthened like a sojourn in Faerieland; nights distributed immortality widespread. The time spent in those other times was deep and rich and longer than accounted for by a mere clock face.

Conversely, the weekdays between those weekends were contracted and shortened. They zipped past, so quickly that it was hard to get the laundry sorted, washed and re-packed for the next Friday. It was usually Wednesday before you realized Monday and Tuesday had somehow occurred. When you spoke to fellow Faire-folk, the previous weekend was “yestreday”; the one to come, “tomorrow.”

It was the best of time alterations, because this one wonder of all the joys of life actually lasted longer than it should. Time doesn’t always fly when you’re having a good time! When that time is good enough, it envelopes all the rest of your life and you live in the perfect moment for ever … or so Kage observed. And so did I. And so did most of our companions in Faerie.

Unlike that poor drunk Van Winkle, we enjoyed it.

It’s been 8 years or more since I was at a Renaissance Faire, but it doesn’t seem that long. Surely it’s been only a summer or two, and I am still a lithe and tireless 30, or even a stout but sturdy 40 … the mirror, my Dreadnaught-class corset, and the noises my knees make insist this is not so, but damn it all: where did the time go? As Kage used to solemnly tell customers, “We are where the snows of yestreday go”: but where does what evades even us go to hide?

Kage preserved a lot of it in books. And what she wrote tended to come true. But she never wrote what happens to me once she was gone.  If she had, I’d have insisted on winning the lottery … although she evidently wrote down somewhere, in some secret volume I have yet to find, that I live to a great (and unwanted) old age and write till I die.

In the meantime, Dickens Fair is now in progress, and already the great and wonderful time alteration is in effect. We were up North for days and days, gathering costume bits and auditioning splendid actors; sitting in the sun with old friends, and telling lies and old stories to the youngsters; remembering how to waltz. The drives to and fro on the I-5 were veritable treks – we saw possible alien invasions, strange lights, stranger people, and found bacon jerky.

And now the week between Then and Soon is nearly out. The laundry has only now made it into the dryer, there is frantic hat-making and skirt-measuring going on, not to mention finding the right stockings. They were packed in the correct drawer a year ago, but have since crawled away to breed somewhere else. One of my lace gloves is completely missing; the other is inexplicably on top of my yarn stash under my jewelry cabinet. And tomorrow we leave for the North again!

Where does the time go? Kage knew, I think. I don’t, but wherever it is – socks or no, I’ll be on my way there tomorrow.

Kage Baker was pretty serious about her civic responsibilities. She believed in a contract between citizens and the government, wherein rights are guaranteed – the Constitution does say so – but privileges must be earned.

By both contractees, by the way – she felt that the government was not automatically entitled to diddly squat, save by the consent of the governed. It needs to be watched as carefully as a small child appointed cookie monitor, she said once –  “because little people and little brains don’t grasp large concepts easily. Just cookies.”

What the ordinary citizens don’t grasp of their responsibilities, rights and privileges has driven professional philosophers to despair for millenia. Science fiction writers at least have the chance to get story ideas out of the mess. And Kage was a keen observer of this hysteria, which was the primary source of her vision of the 23rd century.

She envisioned NIMBY gone mad (ship the mentally inconvenient off-planet!) – animal activists liberating animals incapable of surviving in their current locations (chickens become extinct in urban Britain) – a new, secular Puritanism (“none of the God, all of the guilt”) – the emerging nations establishing economies by supplying “vices” to the First World (the Celtic Nations smuggling cream and whiskey, Jamaica smuggling coffee and rum). In Kage’s future, the primary danger to the ordinary citizen was that they had handed all their responsibilities to a faceless bureaucracy with the demand to be kept safe and comfortable – the bureaucracy responds by turning the world into a heavily monitored kindergarten.

Kage herself felt that you absolutely had to seize and exercise your responsibilities; otherwise, you had no right to demand your concurrent privileges. The one paid for the other. It’s a very simple equation. So she paid her taxes, though she took every legal deduction: blind obedience is not in the interests of the governed. She obeyed the laws, though she was grateful not to have to worry about having to choose between lawfulness and felony: she couldn’t have obeyed  the Jim Crow and Dred Scott statutes, she said, or stayed quietly at home when women marched for the vote and the young to end a war.

She walked a few picket lines, joined a few chanting mobs. She stayed on the edges, where the crowds were thinner and you  could reach the drink stands and spot the police.

Kage was, despite an unusually high level of probity, also quite willing to ignore laws she thought stupid. No one is perfect. And it’s the American way! It was just that her idea of reasonable civil disobedience was illegal fireworks, and drinking bottled cocktails in the car (her, not me. Drivers did not get to drink – that was insane). She never even tried to get out of jury duty, but used marijuana in the privacy (and safety) of her own home.

When the prize was a living wage for agricultural workers, she boycotted grapes – but, being a Californian, she also boycotted Florida oranges out of regional patriotism. Proselytizing was not her thing, though – preaching was vulgar, she felt – she just quietly tried to influence her immediate environment with some sensible locavorism. That was why she was so delighted when they began distilling Absinthe right there in dear old San Francisco …

All in all, Kage led an life aware of and involved with her community. She was simply very quiet about it. Her views were clearly outlined in her books, of course, but you had to examine them closely to discern which side of the insanities she described so well  she personally favoured … an examination influenced, of course, by your own species of cerebral termites. She actually got a few letters praising her idea of shipping social misfits to Mars, or scolding her for not more thoroughly espousing Goddess worship, vegetarianism, or the abuse and/or canonization of animals.

But that was all right, because Kage also believed in living by the consequences of your actions. Had she ever been arrested for engaging in what she considered logical civil disobedience, she’d have gone resolutely to jail. She stood by her statements. She stood by her actions. When she was wrong, she took her lumps; when she was persecuted, she yelled loudly about it.

Today’s lecture, Dear Readers, is partly to illustrate some of the deeper sources of Kage’s vision of the World-yet-to-come. It’s also a way to segue into my unhappiness with my brand-new flu shot.

I did my duty for herd immunity, you see, and got a flu shot. It will also theoretically cut down on what my insurance might spend to make me well if I were to fall ill with Influenza, or to cure any collateral victims I infected. And since I went to Walgreen’s for the shot, their charitable outreach program paid for a second shot to be given to someone who could not afford their own. Thrift, virtue and self-preservation! I was smug.

I have also spent the day in bed with a reaction to the damned shot. It’s not abnormal to run a little fever and have a few aches; it does mean I won’t get the full-blown disease later on. At Dickens Fair, I spend my weekends with 4,000 strangers every weekend – and my 1,000 actual friends are all inveterate huggers. So a mini-flu is a small price to pay for the protection of getting my vaccine. And it also gave me an excuse to write about Kage Baker’s philosophy, and how it got into her writing …

Besides, it was my responsibility. My privilege is to be protected by society – my right is to have access to the means of assuring my safety – my responsibility is to get off my spreading arse and do my part.

From the Eccentric Gospel of St. Kage, Scholar and Visionary. Intercede for us, Beata Domina, now and in the hour of our indecision. And its consequences.

Amen.

Kage Baker liked the idea of Guy Fawkes Day.

Not the original, mind you. The murderous plot to blow up Parliament with a super-bomb of gunpowder, so as to restore a Catholic government to England – that, Kage found both abhorrent and stupid. She didn’t favour any Christian sect over another, but she was well-informed about the Catholic vs Protestant controversy in England; and by 1605 (the date of the Gunpowder Plot), a return to Catholicism would have damaged the country badly. Read her analysis of the very same problem, a generation earlier, in Garden of Iden, and you’ll see.

Nor did she like the 2005 Guy Fawkes meets Winston Smith parable, V for Vendetta. Quite aside from the fact that at that point it was hard for Kage to imagine Elrond Half-Elven as a political terrorist, she thought it was … well, cheesy. She thought 1984 had done a better job. And the identical masks offended her. “Like the government’s not gonna notice all these freaks in plastic masks!”  she said in scorn.

No, what Kage liked about Guy Fawkes was quite simply the traditional British celebration: to wit, bonfires, fireworks, and running about in the dark on an autumn night. “English Halloween, and it has fires!” Kage would exult. “Now, that’s a holiday!”

I think she considered it could only have been improved if old Guido (his nom de guerre, you know) had actually succeeded in eliminating the more useless members of Parliament. She used to comment wistfully that it was still a workable solution, if applied to Congress … this year would have convinced her even more.

Today, Dear Readers, is of course Guy Fawkes Day. All over England – or at least in any community not too overtaken by the Nanny Government – children have run about all afternoon collecting “Pennies for the Guy!”, building bonfires and effigies and setting fire to both. These days, the Guy effigies are often currently unpopular politicians, and their immolation doubtless lets off a good deal of steam among the members of the public. People celebrate history. Youngsters of various assimilated cultures enthusiastically begin their awareness of British politics by setting fire to straw men.

On second thought, maybe America would profit by the tradition.

In any event, there’s bonfires and rockets and squibs and crackers, and hopefully no one will catch themselves on fire or set the Council office or the local off-license shop ablaze.  And the population in general will remind themselves that blowing up the authorities is not necessarily the best way to effect a regime change. That’s surely a worthwhile lesson.

So, Happy Guy Fawkes Day, Dear Readers. I am going to at least light a candle and murmur the old rhyme I learned from my Welsh Grandad, right along with my Mother Goose:

Remember, remember the Fifth of November:

Gunpowder Treason and plot.

I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.

With, as Kage always added, a hey nonny nonny and a hotch cha cha!