The Best of the So-So and the Mediocre--Revised

It's list season. Christmas lists, New Year's resolution lists, and best and worst lists. Because Wordlust : Paperfetish is by me, for me, and largely about me, so are my lists--with a couple of new categories since posting earlier today.

Here are my vainglorious calculations:

Worst Name for a Blog that I Hate Trying to Explain to People:
Wordlust : Paperfetish

Best Name for a Blog that I Wish I'd Thought of:
I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet A Wino

Best WLPF Title:
Wait--Come Back! The Bible--It's a COOKBOOK!

Best WLPF Title NOT Ripped Off of Anyone Else:
I Just Assumed You Wanted Me to Make An Ass Out of You

Post Most Likely to Provoke Litigation:
Letter To A Disgruntled Client

Post Most Likely to Convince Readers of my Dubious Sexuality:
Boyfriends Are For Women Who Can't Keep Their Cats Happy

Lamest Post Recieving Many Comments:
Brains...Must...Eat...Brains! (6 comments)

SuperCool New Yorker-Worthy Post--Ignored By The Masses:
A Bitch By Any Other Name

Why Jesus Has Spray-Painted and Broken Out the Windows in the House My Father Hath Prepared For Me:
Tie: Life On Earth: A Consumer's Report
Jesus Loves Me, This I Know

Why He'll Be Repainting My Heavenly Abode and Installing French Windows and Begging My Forgiveness:
Based On A True Story

Though It Was Hard To Choose, This Year's Best Post at WLPF:
Where There Are Lips...

Merry Christmas

To each and every one of you. Light is returning to the northern hemisphere as I write this.

Take your list of resolutions you determined to accomplish at the beginning of the year. Can you cross any of them off? Did you discover something about yourself this year? Maybe you didn't get close to any of those tasks of evolution, but you understand that the difficulty in the growth you so want must start deeper. Add this to last year's list and to every year to come: I will have at least one epiphany this year.

May the new year bring many revelations to all of us.


Cindy

Bah Hum Bitch

Crispy Bangs woke me up this morning at 5:30. She is a loud beast thing who stomps her way through the house, clamoring utensils in the kitchen as if it weren't the crack of fucking dawn.

She constantly hawks loogies into her throat, because she smokes, and because she is made up of little scraps of white trash like some papier mache creature. She has so much shit over here, this house looks likes it's packed up to go somewhere, and I finally threw out the crap she and my brother have had in the fridge over the last year. I'm afraid she's going to camp out here all fucking goddamn weekend and ruin what's left of my Christmas vacation. Goddamn motherfucking grifter cunt.

She uses my towels, and she's crusted over with god knows how many fungal infections. She brays like a jackass when she laughs and she's stupid. The combined intellect of she and my brother--a pairing I refer to as two wrongs don't make a couple, would total one retard. My brother's obnoxious lummoxing is bad enough, but when they get together it's an intolerable crash of 400 decibel stupidity.

I hate her. I just fucking hate her.

Seething,


Cindy

OK, Nevermind About the White Christmas

I should have known better--living in Portland my whole life. White Christmas. Ha!

Too broke and overwhelmed to shop this season. Everyone on my list was just a few dollars away from each getting a Fandango puppet. Or lottery scratch offs. Or baking. And even that requires nothing short of heroic life saving measures to get my adrenals and nervous system functioning.

Last night our clinic celebrated the season at Natasha's house, gnoshing on healthy dishes and lots of wine. Then we sat down to participate in our White Elephant exchange.

Funny. A room full of alternative philosophied-buddhist-pagan leaning lefties all wanted the same gift: A Jesus action figure--with glow-in-the-dark hands. Everyone kept stealing it. I was the last to pick, and I ended up with it, until it was snatched from my hands by a giftless gamer.

I ended up with a backpack containing a Beastie Boys CD, a Luna bar, and a headband flashlight.
They'll come in handy, I suppose. But they won't ever be a posable plastic messiah. Damn it.


Scroogiciously,


Cindy

Weather Girl

It's snowing here in Portland. Twenty-eight degrees, east wind ablowin', and frosted flakes stinging exposed cheeks and nostrils around town.

An annual Christmas outing enjoyed by two of my best friends and myself was cut short this afternoon when tiny pellets of freezing rain teased from the sky--a sky that only minutes before was clear and blue.

"We gotta go now. I don't drive in ice or snow," said one of my friends. By the time she and I reached the east side of town, and our other friend was negotiating curves along Sylvan, the city had become blanketed in white. We arrived at our respective homes just in time.

Whew!

This may be the year--the one year--that Portland gets a White Christmas.

Keep warm everyone, and get your cats and dogs in out of the storm.


If only real blizzards came in flavors,


Cindy

In Some Other Time/Space Continuum

...it's Friday. So, honoring diverse dimensions and realities, I'm posting poetry today for those inhabitants of the Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits.

Quantam Physically,



Cindy



Poems from The Grotto

(At Taize)

Maybe this time is just for me
to sing my pain, to hear its sweetness.

I am transformed here,
and stripped bare.
My ego dies to my purpose here,
and I participate in poetry.

And when I think
of all the red inside me,
I understand, at last, that
I don’t bleed; I burn.




(In the Peace Garden)

Found: A lush, green and
sun-dappled world.
Her trees exude a perfume of
spice and loam; it’s in my hair
and I am among the growing
things here, rooted in basalt
and stretching to heaven--
dancing with the stream
and becoming water.



(In the Meditation Chapel)

Here is the bud
closed upon itself
believing that it is darkness.
In time, each petal leans toward
a white sun, peeling away the lie
exposing a buttery stamen at the
very moment of discovery.

"I am a skirt; I am a wheel and a sun
and I am a universe!" says the bloom,
splayed and spinning in exquisite realization

until another season comes to take
both the closing and the opening,
stripping every rooted creature of both
its dream and its awakening
leaving behind just a green
stem to shiver in the dirt, still
growing out of God.

--Cindy St. Onge
2005

Stop Crapping All Over My Holiday Depression, I Mean Season

Like a lot of people--perhaps an increasing number of people, I find the holidays depressing. Certainly, there are as many reasons to be bummed out this time of year as there are needles on a Christmas tree: The emphasis on family closeness abrades like sand paper on people coming from dysfunctional homes. The in-your-face, government-sanctioned Christian taintings of what was once a pagan winter solstice celebration insults non-Christians. The anti-Christian protests against those traditional taintings--like the word "Christmas" itself, cause the faithful to be on guard during every one of the final 30 or so shopping days.

Enough already. This world is full of monstrosities and injustices more worthy of disparaging. Sulk in private, stew in silence, or air your grievances around the Festivus Pole, but stop taking shots at a holiday that at its worst exploits commercialism, and at its best promotes good will.

People who fuck with Christmas are cowards who won't venture near real issues, are people who don't have a solid cause the rest of the year, are people who think they're taking a stand because they declare their hatred of seasonal music. Get over it.

Dysfunction was rife in the St. Onge household, but we were close and loving, and my childhood memories of Christmastime are rich with the magic, expectation, and the sensory feast of the season: the tastes and smells of gingerbread and spritz, egg nog and cocoa, the fascination of blinking lights, spicy odors of cedar and pine, the silver bite of snow, red and green and gold packages and paper. These are the things that get me through the bleak months.

Winter equals death in my family. My dad died five days before Christmas in 1978. I was 14, my brother, 12. Our mother died five days after the new year, 2001. My mother's mother died in November of 1955. I've mentioned before that the onset of winter triggered grief in my mother. Like her, this is the time of year when Joe and I can only think of all we've lost.

With just the two of us left, and my nephew who splits Christmas between two families, the effort to celebrate dissipates a little more every year. We always say, "No Christmas this year; don't feel up to it." Then about a week before December 25, we get a tree, trim it, and bask in the magic and the memories of happier Christmases.

We play carols, drive around the neighborhood admiring lights and decorations, and at the last minute our spirits are lifted. Joe and I realize that our innocence, our family as an intact unit, live on in the songs, the lights, the smells and colors, seeing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman, and The Little Drummer Boy for the zillionth time.

We talk about how Mom and Dad used to lock us in the bedroom to watch A Christmas Carol while they "secretly" wrapped presents on Christmas Eve. We remember favorite presents, and grieve our old, red and green stockings our Aunt Mary made that haven't hung on the mantle in twenty years. Then we vow to celebrate with vigor and earlier preparation the next year, but those intentions drown under seasonal grief and the everyday worries and frustrations that tax us.

You may hate Christmas, and maybe you have a legitimate reason. But all the things you hate--the music, the hype, nativity scenes and paper snowflakes--whatever, those are the things that resonate with a small part of me that hasn't become hardened and jaded. My childhood and the people I love and have lost are ghosts in candycanes and red ribbons, in blinking lights and Santa dolls, in verses of O Holy Night and Silver Bells.

And despite the sorrow their absence causes, I just can't hate them.

Adipocere Is One Of My Favorite Words

And saponify has a kind of sing-songy, ghetto-vernacular melody about it. One of these Fridays, you'll see both of those words in a poem right here.

Because it is still Friday, I'm not late with this week's poem, technically. I wrote the following ditty, oh, about 6 or 7 years ago I suppose. It has something for both ornithologists and seekers of lust mord alike.

All things to some people,


Cindy



ALARM

Two starlings at my window sill,
Tapping at the glass—
To announce today that Death had come.
I looked away at once.

They tapped again, louder still
As if I didn’t hear
Their awful news, delivered prompt
When they first appeared.

I heeded them
And thought I must
Promptly call on those
Dear to me, to see, alas,
Who, from me had gone.

Their message borne,
Their task complete—
The birds were free to go.
One flew away;
One stayed behind—
Oh, My God! What now?

I let him in,
He perched awhile;
I waited for a sign.
When he felt
The time was right,
He asked me for my soul.

I told him I
Was still alive,
My soul was mine to keep.
He asked again,
I told him no—
This went on and on.

I went about
My daily tasks
As if he wasn’t there.
I offered every now and then,
The door for him to leave.

He refused, then nighttime fell,
I asked if he’d be missed.
He said “By whom?”
--The other bird…
the one I saw you with.

He waited there quite patiently.
I, more restless grew.
The dreaded fate
Of which he spoke
Encroached upon me now.

My vision became cloudy,
I tired so at once.
My body became burdensome—
A thousand moments passed.

A transformation came about—
Then I stirred anew.
I felt so much lighter now,
As if I were a bird.

Be it bird or angel,
This guardian of mine:
That stubborn thing
Who waited ‘til
Deliverance had come.

And now that task
At last fulfilled,
We prepared to fly.
He went on, ahead of me
And opened up the door.