Life List: Red-Winged Blackbird

One time I mentioned feeling privileged to see a few red-winged blackbirds and some fool I know online had to brag they see bazillions of them all the time.  Thanks, fucko.  But as I reflect from where I am now, yeah, I have seen a fairly large amount of red-winged blackbirds.

Red-winged blackbirds are icterids – New World blackbirds with no relationship to your Turdus merula, which itself is a lot more similar to the bullshit we call a robin here.  Never mind all that.  They are very black, close to starling sized but more slim, pointy beaked.  In the adults in breeding plumage, the only color on them is a red (or in some populations red and white) bar on each wing.

They might have some kind of migration patterns, but they are also present all year long in a lot of their range.  Here you can definitely see them any time of year.  But in spring they get a lot more noticeable because of their song, which is loud, carries well, and sounds a little like a coach whistle.

RWBBs are birds of wetlands, so much so that I’ve never seen them far from a watering hole of some kind.  I’m pretty sure they eat little frogs and tadpoles and such.  Maybe dragonfly nymphs?  But the thing about water, cat tails, reeds, etc. is that you can find a sliver of that kind of biome at the side of the road all over the place.  Anywhere with a ditch, there can be water and the things that water sustains – even if they are polluted and pathetic.

That is to say, the first place I can sorta recall seeing one is right next to a highway, in the cattails next to the on-ramp.  And the place I’ve seen them the most?  The managed “wetland” lot behind the 7-11 at the intersection of 1st Ave South and 308th Street in Federal Way.  They show up like clockwork, singing their song every spring.  Very nice.

I’ve seen them near roads from here to Kansas, heard their song carry over the parking lots of hotels and even the big mall in downtown Federal Way.  Where’s the water?  Again, there’s fenced-off pond maintained by the city, pretty close at hand.  I’ve never seen the blackbird at the mall – just heard it – and it could have been from as far away as that pond.

During a birdwatching trip with my brother in Kansas, we went to a field environment in early spring and saw a bunch of them in a mix of breeding colors and drab streaky whatever.  Life stages?  Were the streaky ones all juveniles?  I dunno.  I’ve also seen them in the mix with Brewer’s blackbirds, starlings, and crows, at the Carpinito Brothers’ pumpkin patch in that farmlandish North Auburn / South Kent area.

And lastly, most recently, I finally saw them in genuinely large numbers.  I’m sure some joker will shit in my comments about how they’d see millions of them, so me only seeing hundreds is pathetic loser shit and cause for ecological despair, but I thought it was cool to see.  It was a blustery overcast randomly raining day and there were birds flocking in trees and on the mowed lawns near the alternative high school (where the delinquents and pregnant girls go).

I was getting dirtyanki (teriyaki usa style made by South Asians) at Happy Express and I couldn’t tell what those birds were.  Given the flock size and the “radio static” sound they were making, I assumed they were starlings.  Starlings would look nearly black under those skies.  But I busted out the birdy app and no, it was all blackbirds.  And as I listened closer, I could pick out elements I recognized from their more recognizable calls.

It makes me feel good.  Looking the other direction a big murder of crows were playing on the lawn and rooftop of a mossy old house, shafts of sunlight breaking through the clouds at random to sparkle the wet grass.  Another crow on my side of the street was demonstrating tool use to probe the grass at the edge of the parking lot.  That weather could not bother me at all.

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Is This Going Somewhere?

As I’ve been trying to queue articles in advance, to write at least one article for every day going however far in advance I can, I’ve been writing a lot more than I used to.  And it’s giving me a long view of the boundaries of my thoughts.  I will run out of shit to say at some point, and start sounding like your seventy year old college professor.  Salright, we abide.

But in this, I’m also getting a feeling of my work as a whole, as a very long thesis, as a possibly unified idea.  Almost like I could turn my whole blog history into a book.  Not as is; it would have to be edited and rewritten extensively.  But it’s funny to think I could just write The Big Book of Everything I Think and have it done.

Reminds me of Jenny Nicholson’s criticism of Batman v Superman, that Lex Luthor’s shithouse philosophy took up too much screen time.  Her joke solution was that Snyder could record a podcast of his ramblings as bonus material and whenever the screen character is tempted to go off, he just promotes his podcast and moves on.

If I ever make the big book of all o’ my thunks, I will just publish it as a web version where I can link people to my points whenever I feel tempted to repeat myself.  And they will ignore it and move on with their lives, and I will slouch on my couch in practiced ignorance of my ignominy, smiling to myself about how I told ’em what for.

Take that, kids.

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Life List: Barred Owl

So picture this.  Boggy park with elevated walkways so you can visit without feeding leeches.  Lots of trees in varying states of liveliness and decay.  Lots of birds but they have lots of places to hide.  On a cold quiet day you might catch barely any at all.

The path leads down to a small lake.  Lake Hylebos.  You stay your minute, turn around to head back.  On that tree stump off the path, was that dead snake there before?  That’s weird.  Why are robins and other birds flying around and screeching?

This was the only time in my life I’ve seen the predator-mobbing behavior of birds other than crows.  The robins and possibly others (I remember that less well, and it was impossible to see everybody involved) were harassing a barred owl, out in daylight to eat snakes and take names.

I saw the owl fly to a shadowy tree branch where it rested.  As much noise as they kicked up, the other birds didn’t want to get too close.  This was at the outer limits of my vision, and my cellphone’s ability to see isn’t any better than my ailing eyeballs.  But we strained to keep watching for as long as the bird was willing to sit still.

A barred owl is a pretty generic owl, grey and brown and white and cryptic.  The most noteworthy things about it are a lack of feather horns and having dark eyes instead of the typical yellow.  It’s like they’re a strigid owl trying to evolve into a tytonid owl – ghostfacing like a barn owl.  The cool thing about it, to me, is that I never ever get to see owls.  And I got to see this one!  Yay me.

But it’s not that special, apparently.  I’ve seen a photograph of one taken from right under the Space Needle, in the middle of Seattle Center.  I’m always hearing fuckoes tell me they saw a great horned owl in broad daylight as well, perched on a mailbox in their suburban home, or somesuch.  I’ve never seen that shit and probably never will.

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Postmodernism Eating Itself

Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance: If a society tolerates all types of speech and political expression it will be challenged and subverted by those who wish to suppress freedom and tolerance.  In order to defend the tolerance of a society, one must be intolerant of intolerance.  If I’m reading the article right, he said that while outlawing intolerant speech would be undesirable, rational discourse should be used to help maintain the popular dominance of tolerant principles – that intolerance defends itself by suppressing rational discussion.  But that at the end of the day, a tolerant society must reserve the right to say a dangerous enough expression of intolerance is illegal and can be suppressed.  I expect the way that was written into post-WWII German law would sit well with him, whether the actual application of those laws would or not.

I’m not here to discuss the plus and minus or the exact nature of how to best adjudicate the tolerance v intolerance in an ideal society.  Taking the paradox only on its face but not going all the way to the conclusion he offers.  And having done that, I want to look at a phenomenon affecting modern politics that can serve as an example of the paradox in action.

The current flavor of fascism is a direct result of the very postmodernism that it postures against.  There are other factors and influences, especially the “therapy culture” that emerged in the boomer generation, but in the course of my life, this is the one I’ve seen time and again.  The tolerance that was used to justify this intolerance was grounded in postmodern values.

Postmodernism has many aspects, but I’m going to use the broadest version here.  Modernism was the idea there are right ways to do things, truths that can be discovered and known.  Postmodernism was about uncertainty, vagueness, and especially the idea there are multiple “ways of knowing” – functionally, that opinions can be as valid a view of reality as facts.  The cry of the postmodern fascist, when they have lost the bully pulpit and know they’ve lost the argument as well, is a Lebowksian, “That’s just, like, your opinion, maaan.”

The Sokal hoax was, on its face, convincing enough.  Given that Sokal himself is part of that raft of neo-nazis and enablers in Epstein Pal Krauss’s new book, I suspect there are valid arguments that his stunt was bullshit from go.  It was meant to illustrate that postmodernism bad, reality is in facts and concrete things.  And yet the Krauss cohort is a clown car of people who habitually and fiercely ignore good strong science that refutes their biases, and that use flimsy and handwavey science to support what they want to believe.  “Facts don’t care about your feelings” cries lil Benny Shaps on monday, “Your intolerance hurts my feelings” on tuesday.

Faux News popularized opinion-as-reality.  It’s possible to cherry pick reportage of factual things to support ideological positions, but it’s so much easier to spew propaganda when you realize “somebody said a thing” can be “news.”  Then it’s Editorial Page: the Ostensible News Network.  You can’t say anything anybody says is wrong, because that’s just, like, their opinion, man.  I’m using my freedom of speech! You hates freedom?

I’ve heard this play out so so so many times at the street level.  In my high school classrooms in 1993, in the arguments of randos on buses, in arguments with people I know.  Person expresses factually wrong idea, is shown to be wrong, and says it’s an opinion, or even cites the first amendment.  Maybe I’m wrong, but it feels to me like a natural extension of the idea that all opinions about truth have some validity – an essential postmodern idea, embraced by the masses without ever acknowledging the source.

There were variations on this that predated my youth, but based on the attitudes of teachers and adults and opinion-havers of the world as I observed back then, it seems to me that it was an idea whose promotion began with 1960s mysticism, developed into therapy culture in the 1970s, and stayed with us in that form ever since.  Liberal schoolteachers were big fans of the idea, trying to encourage kids to debate because that’ll make us smorter.  I got smortified off having to hear what skinhead Ron thinks about the just society.

The funny thing is, I don’t even think the idea is wholly lacking in validity, nor is postmodernism itself as a larger package deal.  We’re all so powerfully influenced by our cultural environment and personal situations that assumptions about the nature of any given phenomenon can seem like Objective Truth when they are no such thing.  And yet, those feelings and perceptions have a power that creates a sort of reality, a sort of truth, which is in some ways the only truth we can truly apprehend.  Agnostic shit.

But the postmodern justification of and promotion of fascism shows the weakness of this liberal idea, employing it to ultimately work against itself.  Fascist propaganda was just opinions which are all valid, until fascists won control of the media, the government, the church, big business, etc etc.  At that point, all opinions are no longer valid.  Fascist propaganda is “fact” – and fascist control of science publication and journalism means there is no official source you can point to that isn’t soon to express only the facts that the Aeternal Reich wants you to see.

It’s sad how George Orwell, Karl Popper, and any number of other intellectuals going back to the dawn of the written language can call these things out, illuminate them so clearly and simply a child could understand them, and yet collectively we fall for the trick unto the end of (our) time.  Fascists working against education is certainly part of that, but there is a flaw in the human animal that is doing no small amount of the work for them.

We’re not as smart as we like to think we are.  When you see the fancy talking heads spouting big words in defense of callow bigotry, using lofty language to make it seem like black is white, bad is good, up is down…  You’re seeing smart people outsmarting themselves.  The flaws in their thinking are obvious as all hell to you and I, but they are fucking impervious to truth.

Reality is what we make it and we are what that reality makes us.  The vast majority of this country’s media is painting the picture of reality the Kochs and the Murdochs and Muskerbergs want people to see.  It’s everything around them.  They are swimming in hate speech and propaganda nonstop, all day all night, cradle to the grave.  It used to just be radio, TV, and newspapers.  Now it’s algorithms in social media sorting people into camps that can be marketed to more effectively, fueling division and strife, and even genocide if it makes the page views go up, makes money for the shareholders.

As much as they’re my hated enemies, I don’t blame US conservatives for having shit ideas about basically everything.  It’s the world as they know it.  A perversion of liberal principles, unashamedly hypocritical.  Contradictions don’t mean a thing, because this stuff thrives on goldfish memories.  The human animal is not as smart as we’ve wanted it to be – as every flavor of modernism supposed we would one day be able to achieve.

But being unintelligent does not mean you deserve to be misled.  Blaming fools for being fooled is letting the foolers off the hook, and in this situation, those foolers are just the worst motherfuckers in human history.  Hook their fucking asses.  I don’t know that we can ever really beat this type of shit, but I do know we have to keep trying in any way we’re able for as long as we can.

If the world goes nasty, you owe it to yourself and the people you care about to make your own piece of that world as nice as possible.  Just sucks knowing what you’re up against in that fight.  But power on my people.  I love you.

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Life List: Bewick’s Wren

Wrens can be hard to be sure about.  I know an expert could just clock ’em in a heartbeat.  I’m not so good with LBBs.  There’s this one type of wren I’ve only encountered in marshy environments and assumed was a marsh wren, but upon looking at wren photos tonight, it looks much more like the pacific wren.  Who’s who?

Easier is the wren I see the most often.  Bewick’s wren is super common in the Puget Sound Trough and has strong enough markings to distinguish from whoever else might be on this side of the mountains.  I first got a good look at them in my first Federal Way apartment, some better looks at another apartment in that city, and at last down here in Auburn.  They are all the hell over my neighborhood, chirping up a storm at the appropriate times of year.

Bewick’s wren is a little brown bird with a pale chin and belly, and a strong light eyebrow streak.  Beady black eyes like Hello Kitty, of course.  Thin stripes on wings and tail, orb-like proportions tho not as strongly as on bushtits.  Wrens of all types, to my understanding, are most notable for carrying their tails in the air.  Gotta show they ass, in the parlance of our times.  They love hanging out in bushes, especially along the tops of taller ones, six to ten feet or so.

Ren is a name that shows up in japanese cartoons from time to time.  The one I remember offhand is a little girl that got resurrected by a magic sword in Inuyasha.  There’s Ren Höek of course, a “problematic fave” of mine from sex creep John Kricfalusi’s classic kid’s show.

It can also be short for Lorenzo, apparently?  There was a guy in NWA named Ren, nicknamed “The Villain.”  Ice Cube called him Lorenzo in that famous old ditty Fuck tha Police, we can assume that to be his birth name.  Do rappers have dead names?  I’ll call him Ren or The Villain if he wants me to.  Gotta stay true to the principles.

Wonderfully, the German word for wren translates to “Fence King.”  Smol but regal.

What other qualities can we infer from this bird’s presence in prose and poetry?  They’re sneaky as fuck when it comes to crime, gonna smoke ’em now and not next time.  Make you think they’re gon kick your ass, but drop your gat, and wren’s gonna blast.

Shit like that.

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1000th Post

My 1000th post on this blog network was queued to be a birdpost about an LBB.  Observe it later today.  This is no kind of celebration of my multifarious thunks, my grande historie of letters.  So.  Gotta think of a way to honor myself properly.

Remember when I was Great American Satan?  God, that was so long ago.  What an innocent child I was back then, cavorting in alpine meadows and singing to the little birdies.  Lalalalala.  But seriously, this is a good time to explain again why the name change.  Great American Satan is derived from the words of Ayatollah Khomeini, as mocked by USian propaganda that was intended to depict the muslim world as uniquely backward.

It was islamophobic.  I still proudly stand against almost all of the shit ayatollahs believe in, but can’t disregard the fact my country is the greatest purveyor of evil in the world.  We genuinely fucked Iran for oil, for military adventurism, for capitalism – and most of the countries in the world besides.  The only reason we regard Iran’s nasty theo-fascist ass as an enemy is because they beat us, and refuse to make Nikes like Vietnam does now, or give us sweetheart deals on oil like nasty theo-fascist Saudis.  Now we’ve gone full fash.  How could I mock anybody in the world who has a bone to pick with us, no matter how shit they are?  This bone must get picked.

But back to the real subject at hand:  Beauteous I.

How do I love me?  Let me count the ways.  Didja know Edgar Allan Poe was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s biggest fanboy?  He had some over-the-top praise for her, at least.  History seems to have validated his opinion; the average fool remembers some of her words, if not her name.  She’s well known and well regarded in her field, I think.  Poets correct me if I’m wrong.

I have to think that blogging will never rise to the level of famous prose and poetry because of the disparity in effort, and this is a good thing.  A blogger might have a bon mot go viral, especially masters of microblogging, but few posts will outlive their moment.  How many can you remember?  PZ’s Grenade, tho that was more about the circumstances than the craft.  Intent! It’s Fucking Magic! by Genderbitch?  Journalists of the dead tree variety, to the extent that exists, suffer a similar impermanence.  I’ve seen journalism described as “writing on running water,” and it’s telling that I don’t remember with certainty who coined the expression or if I got the phrasing right.

Having a thousand posts of a blog, that is something of an achievement.  It takes a special kind of self-regard to keep spitting the contents of your head into The Void, day after day for years on end.  Most FtBers aren’t up to the task.  Before I started using queuing to achieve a post per day, I wasn’t doing daily posts either.  Often I’d miss a week or two, sometimes I’d miss a whole month.

And yet I was always more of a presence here than most of those sidebar characters.  This I recognize as well in my writing group: I often do the writing activities, far more often than anyone else but my husband.  He succeeds at noveling months more often than I do, but I have more morale for seeing the writing prompt events through.  Everybody else?  They try, sometimes, but it doesn’t even come close.

I am the champions, my friends.  I don’t mean to denigrate my colleagues; I am simply wondering aloud, why is this so hard to do for so many?  Why is regular blogging such a challenge?  Since it’s the majority of aspiring writers that have this issue, I can’t regard it as something to be ashamed of.  The freaks that post all the time, there’s probably something wrong with us.  But I dig being that kind of freak.

So raise a glass for your humble Bébé Mélange.  Life is indeed a gas, powered in part by satan and america and some flavor of greatness, as much as I’m trying to move past those things, generally.  And read the next post for some bullshit about birds.  You enjoy life.  I’m watching you, and if you do not, there will be consequences.  Everything is coercion now, it’s cool.  Compulsory fun for you.

Take your medicine!

This is just random crapola.  But then, that is the essence of blogging.  I hope other people get something out of it, but I would definitely be doing it for myself alone, if I had to.  The world needs my opinions, obviously.  One day, in circling the trashfire like a confused turkey and poking at the mess, I will accidentally into the answer for Lasting World Peace, or otherwise solve the big intractable questions that have dogged us since time immemorial.

Be here for it.  Thank you.

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Death Magic

See my previous couple of posts for some thoughts and feelings on magic and death.  Continuing my most recent thoughts and building on them, welcome to this post.  Although it’s being written pretty stream-of-consciousness, so if anything coherent comes of it, that’s just luck.

I had a brief moment watching a playthrough of Elden Ring wherein I genuinely felt the magic of spooky weirdos in the service of death sorceries.  Reminded me of when I feel tha magic in other media, like the weirding way from Dune, like Jim Morrison bullshit in that Oliver Stone Doors movie, like… I dunno.  The part in Lord of Illusions when the ground is crumbling away from Nyx’s feet and he’s still levitating like it’s no biggy.

So this has me wondering how I might use that inspiration to write better magic in my own stories.

Y’know I still don’t have a good strong idea of just what Josefina in J&B is capable of and how it works.  It would be super useful to have that figured out before I write the last half of that book.  The last scene of my first big chonk of that book has her teleporting short distances and anchoring a spirit creature to the ground so Blasfemia can finish it off.  I do know at least one big impressive thing I want her to do at the end of the story.  What can build toward that?

A bit off topic but related and I may double back to it before I’m done here.  In this one I was thinking about my thinking about my notions on Death Magic.  Previously I said that magic in this context is less about exerting one’s will over reality than interacting in a more profound way with the big important concepts in life – love sex chaos death etc.  It’s about emotion.  Surrealism is not much without feeling behind it.  It helps surrealism hit right if the feeling is one of the big ones; magic too, I think.  Maybe.  Like I said, working off the top of my head here.

How do I feel about death?  What is it?  I don’t like it.  Like, I don’t wanna die.  Really don’t.  There’s a goofy song by Depeche Mode called Flies on the Windscreen which states its case with the opening lyrics:  “Death is everywhere!  There are flies on the windscreen for a start, Reminding us!  We could be torn apart.”  This is real as shit.  Death and dying are everywhere you look in this world.  Part of life, of course, but if you’re feeling it, it’s sure easy to let that turn you into a goth.

The further I get from the moment that inspired this, the more the feeling is faded, like a dream.  I may have been drifting toward sleep in that moment.  God I feel like I could sleep any damn time.  When I retire, I’m gonna sleep six hours, wake up for two, then sleep another three.  And it’s gonna feel awesome.

Anyway, how can I get back to that moment, remember what it’s like?  Gotta focus on my feelings.  How do I feel about death, really?  If I strip away the bullshit and the philosophy, but don’t go so simple as to say “it sux and be scary.”  What is death, to me?  It’s so hard to focus.  I closed my eyes and felt it out.

First thing that came to mind was the inevitability of it.  It’s looming there like a monolith… more like the walls of a prison and I’m inside.  Second thing, the absurdity of it.  More specifically, of people’s responses to it.  There are the religious faithful, which we can scorn or pity in our own ways.  More absurd tho are the things people do with their lives.  The fact death looms large in front of orngdolf shitler renders the way he’s choosing to live his life profoundly absurd.  But that’s true of most of us as well.  When you consider that you could die at any moment but you’re still going to work and living like a human being, instead of wilding out, doing anything you love and that you’re capable of…  It’s depressing, appropriately.

It’s a joke and we’re all the punchline.  It’s meaningless.  It’s the return to zero.  Even the Universe is ultimately going to die.  When I’m having trouble focusing, it’s the quiet in between the notes of the static.  It’s the low point on the brainwave graph.  Again, it’s all around and looming and cannot be escaped.  So what was the feeling that intrigued me there, in something I normally avoid the contemplation of?

Maybe it’s the way I’m horny on goths.  In my cowardice, when I see somebody who does not look away from death, they become powerful to me, magnetic.  Was I just being horny on the concept of this character?  Doesn’t feel like it.

Truth.  The fictional depictions of magic that move me are the ones where a character knows something about reality and it confers on them a kind of power.  Fia the Deathbed Companion doesn’t look away from death.  She intentionally focuses herself on it fully, and though she has some magic powers from that awareness, the most magical thing about it is the awareness itself.  Drink a big glass of poison and in the moment before it kills, live forever.  Live the thing that others fear.  Don’t fear the reaper.

I don’t think killers are cool.  The cool assassin man from movies, nay.  It’s fun to watch the action as no-names go flyin’ from the paired pistolas of Chow Yun-fat, but he’s gotta have a good reason to do it, and they gotta genuinely not be human in any way.  Chaff, or Snidely Whiplash’d.  Killing people sucks and the extent to which it happens IRL makes the fiction less appealing to me these days.  But the mortified character, whether dying saintly or transcending life more grotesquely, cenobite style – that’s an interesting character.  Powerful.

I dunno i dunno.  Probably feel different about that tomorrow.  I’ve thought before that when I die, I wanna look like that bog mummy.  You know, the one that looks so peaceful, like he laid down to take a nap and crumpled into the earth just a bit, to lay there forever.  That guy died violently, of course.  Nice to imagine otherwise.  Let my sleep be peaceful and dignified – not that I’ll be there to care about it.   Still.

The death wizard is already dead and not dead yet, fully aware of and in communion with the walls of this prison, a part of the Universe in a way most are not.  That’s power enough.  I don’t know what it means.  Still haven’t figured that biz out.  Still can’t conceive of ways to express this idea on the page that don’t feel like aping what’s come before, or worse just come off like some dungeons & dragons.  This’ll have to do for now.

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Jongleurs of Love

I wish I remembered this dream better.  The other night the alarm woke me in the middle of scheming on a heist, with my crack team of specialists.  There was a lady who specialized in hacky sack and a guy who was some kind of juggler or master of throwing knives.  She was in her mid 20s and a lil butch, he was slim and balding and more like mid 30s.  However, their propensity for tossing things around caused an animal magnetism between them, and they fell in love.  Not like passionate tear off your shirts love, but always being together in solemn companionship love, like they’d been married for years.

Anyway, my subconscious thinks you need to have interests in common for twue wuv, and that’s probably informed by my conscious experience.  Met my husband in art school.  LTRs in the comments, do you have a lot in common with your lover, or are you on that “opposites attract” bit like Paula Abdul and that animated cat?

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In other things, I’m still thinking about magic.  Was watching some dudebro play Elden Ring on yewchoob and his guy was obliged by the game play to be embraced by Fia the Deathbed Companion, and acquire “a baldachin’s blessing.”  I really like the way some types of damage in that game, like frenzied flame, deathblight, and scarlet rot, are themes that unite factions and monsters – and are themes you can take for your own, influencing in some cases how the game ends.

In particular I was moved by this odd moment in my head when the goofy fantasy notion of Death reached out a bony finger and touched my feelings about really real life tragic death.  There’s something in that.  I get focused on how magic is an extension of the will, mind over matter, but it’s also a heightened relationship with the fundamental forces of nature, the big concepts that dominate our lives like sex and love, chaos and death.  A feeling powerful enough to move one’s self, change one into something more and less than human as it passes through your bod.

Reminder I’m not trying to say magic is real.  I’m just feeling out better ways to represent it in fiction, to touch that transcendant feeling of it.

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It’s a Kind of Magic

I find myself lusting for magic again.  I may have mentioned before that my soul is forfeit because I made an ill-considered deal with the devil while walking home from a shift at Pizza Hut in the ’90s:  Show me magic is real and you can have my soul.  Why make such a foolish deal?  Because the world can seem so very dull and pointless.

I can’t tell you why it feels to me like magic would make it interesting and worthwhile.  There’s evidence a lot of people out there feel this way, especially those who are able to fool themselves into believing, at least in fits and starts.  Probably cultural damage of some kind.  It doesn’t really make sense.

Some people have very magical thoughts, like they’re the center of reality, important and big in some way.  It isn’t always a good feeling; you see this a lot with paranoia-flavored mental illnesses.  Tough to feel OK with life when everybody is out to get you.

I didn’t really want to write about that.  I’m just trying to put a finger on this feeling again.  The place it’s most relevant to me is in the creation of art.  I can’t make myself believe in some cult bullshit or mainstream religion either.  I can’t eke a transcendant spiritual feeling out of the things that I do believe, in my heart of hearts.  All that stuff just overwhelms in a bad way.  But fiction, that’s another thing altogether.

This feeling connects to other thoughts I’ve had in the past, as expressed through blog posts on The Doors, on levitation, on action, on Faust.  Is it wrong to want the weirding way?  To be a scanner, or if I’m ready to go, to get scanned?  I want my will to move the world, just a little bit.  Push.

I am reminded now of the Floaters-themed personal ads on my levitation post, and how they should be updated to reflect my current name.  Here I go…

Cancer, and my name is Bébé
And I like a lover who gots somethin’ extra in their jayjays
Whether that’s a big belly or a dingly dang dongus
There’s no way you and I can go wrongus
when you
Take my hand, come with me baby, to Love Land.
Let me show you it’s queer and/or gay
Sharin’ your love with Bébé
I want you to Float On… Float with me baby…

Way off topic.  The important thing is that y’all tell me how you do it.  Projecting your will like Charles Gray in The Devil Rides Out.  Stop holding out.  Slip me the runes.  I can handle it.  It’s time.

JUST GIVE ME THE PRIZE!

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Life List: Song Sparrow

There are sparrow sparrows, from the Old World where Karl of Linne was doing his big naming project, and decided they were the for real deal.  Then there are embirizids or New World Sparrows, which include most of what this amurrican would ever talk about.  Of those, the song sparrow is one of the most common and most commonly heard.

I feel like there was a Calvin and Hobbes comic with a very realistically drawn song sparrow in it, but don’t recall for sure.  At any rate, they are streaky brown and grey things like every other sparrow around here so who cares?  But they sez god jeezy has his eye on the sparrow, so… get judged, fools.

I didn’t know song sparrows were so common because they aren’t so easy to see.  Maybe if I had a bird feeder to watch all day.  For years after I started paying attention to birds, I never saw one with the clarity to ID it.  Only once I used the birdy app to recognize calls did I find out just how common they are.  And, having become more familiar in that way, I finally took some notice of them visually.

Still not very often.  One time they blew past me like lightning at the rhododendron garden in Federal Way, one time I saw them cross the footpath in the wee hours outside my old place of work, and one time I saw them in the rose bush in front of my house.  But if you know the calls, they are everywhere, all the time.

And yet… I don’t know the calls.  Just don’t have a good memory for ’em.  The list of birds whose calls I recognize is much shorter than the ones I know visually, and the more varied and complex a bird’s calls are, the less I can remember them.

Why am I writing about a bird I barely recognize, am not impressed by, and have no stories about?  I needs an angle…

Song sparrows are drab little brown birds that compensate with a fancy song.  Some people are like that.  I was reaching for this in my head and first person that came to mind was Teena Marie, the very ’80s singer who did not look amazing.  She looked fine, like any rando you’d meet working the counter at the bank or the grocery store, but had a big voice – and she wrote her own songs?  That’s a skill that a lot of singers don’t have.  Good job.

Then I find out she died of unknown presumed natural causes, not even 55 years old.  Life is cruel and sheisty.  Hey, I’ve got 6 years until I’m as old as she was when she checked out.  Gotta watch my back for scythes.

Anyway, the art of writing a tune is real business and I don’t think I always appreciated it, until listening to a bunch of bob dylan covers on a random lark one time.  The best way to tell if a song is really well written is to divorce it from its original style completely and see if it still stands up, and the more covers you have, the more evidence you have to weigh and consider.  Nobody’s gonna cover Teena Marie, so we’ll just have to decide about her qualities for ourselves.

As far as I’m concerned?  She’s alright.

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