Miss March

My Lilies

March is fickle, so they say.

I think of March as an elder woman, going through menopause, hot one minute, cold the next, who pees when she sneezes. Don't be offended, I mean no disrespect to the last month of true winter and into the first month of earliest spring.

March, as they say, comes in like a lion. She huffs and puffs and brings the sudden, unexpected snow shower, the damp rain, the first fogs and the first warm days. March is when you prepare the earth and get it ready to grow flowers and herbs and vegetables. It is the mucky month, as liable to be muddy and soppy as dry and frozen. Mom called and said that she saw a big black cricket, the fiddler of the field, hopping about in the leaves she was raking, leaves that had fallen down behind the huge saw blade I painted last spring just before I went to Virginia. She planted my multi floral lilies on each side of it. I wish I could see it. I wished I could put my hands in dear old mother earth and smell her richness and feel the dampness of her on my hands as I prepare her for the fertility of the season.

I long for the early morning symphony of the mockingbirds that nest in our holly tree, the repeating call of the south fat robins and watch the cocking of their heads as they listen to the minute traffic of the earthworms below the ground. I want to watch the swallows shopping the several bird houses trying to pick the right one where their young can be hatched and raised and finally fly away. I want to sit still in the evening and watch the starlings squabble over the bird bath. They come in a large group and I imagined them, like little vacationers. I could see them with little beach towels around their necks, one of those tiny inflatable float rings, little ray bands on their heads. Now I'm getting silly. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a tiny beach ball floating on the tiny ripples of the bird bath.

But March is the promise of spring.

The Ides of March

Well, you know the old saying "When it rains it fucking pours" (or something like that). Well, my doctors came in and closed the Pella blinds. The cute doctor that sounds like Stephen Moyer came and sat on the end of the bed to let me know it looks like the bone marrow is dying. I've been placed on the bone marrow list as a top priority.

I sat there and I just couldn't believe it. I had slept late today and drank most of my ensure milkshake and watched Empathy on line and wrote some on the forum about Alex Skarsgard maybe getting the nod to play Thor (he plays Eric on TB) and wrote for a while in my journal when the doctors came in. Dr. McWilliams, my oncologist and Dr. Havers (the Brit) held my hands (something they have never done) and told me that I had the fight of my life ahead of me.

They say it is fairly rare and I am going to be sick for a long while or until my blood marrow can be rematched. So, because I have no immune system to speak of, I will be kept in even stricter isolation, put on broad spectrum anitbiotics and be placed on the stem cell research list in case there is a chance stem cell theraphy can be of any use. God Bless Barack Obama.

Okay God, can I quit now?

Mythos

So, I am on this forum, True-Blood.net, and I have never met a greater group of folks. We spend a lot of time talking about the books and the show and just talking to each other. They know that I am sick and they are really supportive and they get a kick out the stuff I write and post on the forum.

One of the threads that I have posted on the forum is about the mythology connected to the Vampire and Werewolf and shifters in the world of Bon Temps. I have a gotten a few comments, but I think most people are afraid to post because they don't want to cite their sources, which is something that I asked everyone to do with this thread so folks can look things up on their own. Mostly I wanted to see what other things I might learn about werewolves so I can add it to what I have already learned about werewolves and shapeshifters.

Though they don't contribute, there are a lot of hits on the thread so I know someone is reading the thread. So there is some interest there. I like teaching, I miss it very much, so this is a real outlet for me.

One thing that is interesting is that I get to see just how much I actually know about the whole topic of the supernatural myself. And I must seem freakish because I know an awful lot about the creatures of the night. And this was long before I became Witch. I have always felt an affinity with the world of Other. Ghosts, Faery folk, Vampire, Werewolf, Witch, they are joined in my world view.

And I know that the monsters of old are mythology or primitive attempts at understanding mental illness. But I do know that there are real Vampires, not the allergic to sunlight/garlic sucking your blood animated dead guy Vampires, but there are psychic Vampires. And there are no real Werewolves who turn into wolves on the full moon and howl and slobber over poor girl on the moors, but I know there are people who are very in touch with their animal side, their totemic animal of protection or affinity.

I think it is strange that I didn't get a degree in folklore and anthropology. I guess I don't like the notion of science and history being melded together but I enjoy the stories and how societies and civilizations tweaked the elements of the tales as they evolved with man's view of the monsters that lurked in the night.

Isolation

So here I am in isolation. It is so weird. I am in a self contained room with it's own foyer where I am protected from other people's germs. They have to get suited up to visit me. They all look like advertisements for really safe sex.

My room is in the ICU. I have these glass walls in the front of my room that are made private by these blinds, like the Pella blinds that are enclosed in two panes of glass. When they do medical procedures on me, they close those blinds and do whatever it is they are going to do me, whether it is check my catheter or give me a bed bath or draw blood. I like the blinds open during the day. I sit and watch the doctors and nurses and aides talking to each other. I can't hear them so I make up dialogue for them. My sister and I used to do it when we sat in the restaurants at home when we watched passers by walk on the street by the windows.

I have assigned special names for the ones I don't know intimately. There's Dr. Needle Nose, Nurse Piggy (she isn't fat but she does have a snout and when she laughs, which I can hear through my bloody double glazing, she does sort of snort and grunt), The Goth Nurse (she's pierced on her face and has black nail polish and black hair. How does she get away with that? She must know some evil dirt on the administrator), and Elvis, the orderly (who does look something like the King and tends to lead with the hips when he walks, like he has a terminal boner).

See, I'm a people watcher, always have been. I like to sit in crowded bars and restaurants and watch people. I see you do everything. Girls, I see you pull the panties out of your butt, scratch your itches, pick your noses and fondle your boyfriends under the table. Boys, I see you pull your balls away from your body, pick your nose, spit, pick your teeth, and cop a feel of your girlfriend's tits. But you never see me. It's because I don't stare. That's essential for the people watcher. Your eyes flick from person to person like a hummingbird, stopping only long enough to look but not to stare. I also listen to your conversations. Especially when you are on the phone. I listen to you giving your address out, your phone number, even your social security number on the phone. Stop it, someone less honest than me will someday hear you.

One of the things I notice is that people are inarticulate. They barely speak English. They don't have enough vocabulary to speak to someone else unless it is littered with obscenities. I'm no prude, I like to use good strong words from time to time, especially four letter words. But to salt and pepper your language with those words doesn't make you sound tough, it just makes you sound stupid. Stop it and buy a word-a-day calendar and brush up on your vocabulary.

One of the things I have done is downloaded the Sookie books from a file sharing place and I read them as a PDF. It is better than a book and passes the sanitary test. I still have my calendar but it is enclosed in a plastic sleeve. It's that picture from Fangtasia of George Bush as Vampire biting the neck of Lady Liberty. Bill is April. I love April.

I get out the last of May.

I watch the VCR, watching True Blood. I know there is a website that you can use to watch the show as a bootleg but it has Japanese captions running underneath it and it gets on my nerves. I notice that the nurses on the late shift like to watch it through my window at night. If I am awake, they write things on the dry erase board and ask me questions about the show. I write them back on my dry erase board or use my call button.

I actually got eat something. It was orange jello. It tasted bizarre and tangy on my tongue. I kept it down too. I miss my cat. Ishee is not a friendly cat, but he loved me above all my family. He sleeps with me and lets me pet him from time to time, mostly he just bites me. I wonder if he remembers me? Mom said that when I first went in the hospital that he went upstairs to look for me for a long time.

I have insomnia. I think it is because I'm bored. I'm ready to be out of the hospital. I hate it here.

Fewer Believers in Fox Holes

Are there fewer believers in the world today? You better believe it. There are many reasons for this, but I suspect that the biggest reason for this trend is the fact that church services tend to be an hour long infomercial explaining to believers why they need to cough up their money and give it to the church.

Jesus tells us that we are to go out into the world and tell people the good news that all men are redeemed through his sacrifice and heaven awaits those who believe in this salvation. He also says that in the end of days, there would be no physical place called the church, that not one stone would rest upon the other. We are told that those who are left behind will have to find the church in their heart because there will be no physical building, that the kingdom of God will be the people of God, not the churches.

In the film Jeremiah Johnson, this crazy man Jeremiah encounters tells him that the hills and the forests are the cathedrals of God, that the mountains bear witness to his glory, that the prairies are the great gathering places of the angels. This is the cathedral I believe in too. Not some ugly square building. The magnificence of the sunrise, the solitude of a starry night, the choir of the winds and the thunder of God's sermon and the baptism of the rain. No sacrament is greater than the sacrament of one's own presence in the face of such beauty and power. No virgin so sweet than the unsullied stand of great cedars, no child so wondrous as a new born fawn rising up to take suck from it's mother, no saint as holy as the solitary mountain raising itself up to the glory of heaven.

If I die, I want to go to the creator of the seas and the storm, the winds and the rain, the warming sun and the "dark, sacred night". I want to go to the God that makes personal covenants with each of us when we put seeds in the soil, causes the robins to break into song, and blessed me with the love of a man who covered me in the darkness and held me close to him afterwards, under the blankets, making me feel small, warm and cherished and contented.

And this is from a woman standing at the valley of the shadow, on the edge of the jumping off place. How can you, the whole and the living, doubt the glory of God? I understand about religion. Religion is a construct, faith is your inheritance. I never asked you to believe in a religion, kneel in no chapel, partake in any sacrament, but I ask you, when you behold the glory of creation, how can you deny the presence of the Creator?