merrymaking in earnest.

saturday's yarbro-dill holiday potluck offering of fondue marked this season's final food obligation, now all that's left is to finish my brother and sister's birthday gifts. it's been a strangely stressful season. usually, i'm pretty adept at choreographing my gifts/baking/parties/etc, but this year, it snuck up on me.

but, i got to blow off a lot of steam saturday night playing music at my friend zach's place of employ. it was an impromptu, booze addled music session. but it was so much fun. i haven't played the drums in over a year, we had to sell our kit when we left galveston, and i ended up with bleeding fingers that still fucking ache, i loved it though. wakefield 'flash' gordon was on hand to photograph through his borrowed bubble eye. is it vain of me to be so in love with those photos? i don't know if i care.

things in the mirror are just as freaky as you feared.

i am totally jacked up on coffee and v8 right now.

a little background: i work in an office building downtown on monroe. it's 10 stories high. we're on the 9th. we're the only people on the whole floor. last week, i was surprised when i walked into the bathroom to find a lady in there with a duffle bag on the counter and the water running and her hands all up in her shirt. figuring she was a client of one of our attorneys, i decide not to be too weirded out. about an hour later (i drink a lot of water and coffee) i walk to the bathroom door and hear this bizarre buzzing noise. i press my ear to the door, it sounds a little like a vacuum cleaner. so... i decide to hold it rather than bust all up in some uncomfortable bathroom situation.

this afternoon, i was coming off of the two fisted coffee/v8 binge mentioned above. i blindly rushed into the restroom only to find the source of the whirring, buzzing, mechanical suck. it was a breast pump. that's right. a business woman in a severe pantsuit and sensible shoes was stripped to the waist with her jacket hung on a hanger on a stall door and implementing this artificial milker right there on the sink. she looked intentionally blase and smiled as if to indicate that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on, as though she were only washing her hands, not massaging breast milk out of her tits with an apparatus concealed in a black nylon bag and an air horn with a lab flask and hoses attached to it.

look. i know that motherhood is a beautiful thing or something. and maybe you want to breastfeed but still have to go to work everyday, or whatever happens that calls for this behaviour. i don't know, that's not the point. it's not that i find the act of breastfeeding disgusting or unnatural (just icky and weird, but i can deal with that), it's the fact that she came upstairs to OUR bathroom to do it! there's at least one bathroom on every floor of the building. and at least one floor has only one small all male office on it. absolute solitude to do your necessary deed! what's better than that?

am i just being neurotic here? or am i justified in wanting to go to her and say, 'ma'am, there are four women who work here and several female clients in and out of the office all day. i think that i can speak for them all when i say please, please for the sweet love of the gods, select a bathroom a little further away from all of us to celebrate this natural, if presumptuous, dance of motherhood and life'?

the virtues of the past are the vices of today.

this holiday weekend past was thoroughly painless. there was family, festivity, inevitable surplus ingurgitation. all in all, everything thanksgiving was meant to be.

the errant quince fruit found in my refrigerator combined with persimmon, garlic, shallots and butter made a quite nice turkey, i must say.

now that my home is empty of friends and siblings for a while, i feel like i can spread out and begin to truly live here after what has been, surprisingly, months.

i have started a few art projects, which i'm happy about in spite of the ever present irritation over my constant feelings of 'not enough space to work'. however, i've resolved to never complain about it again, because when we lived in the lofts in galveston, i had half of a 900 square foot studio space which i shared with a fellow artist and which neither of us utilized the way we ought to have.

aside from that, i've started piecing together what i hope will turn into a peaceful and comfortable christmas. i've made my list... i check it constantly, because i am more thorough than santa claus. i'm already in town, but i will consider mailing things to those who are far away (this means you, bigga!!).

also, i have become fascinated with joseph campbell's visage. i've read a few things he's written, but really nothing compares to watching his eyes swell and roll with this knowledge he can't seem to impart quick enough. i hope, one day, i find something inside me that electrifies me the way that he seemed to have. 'the purpose of life is to discover the spiritual potentiality within. to experience the rapture of being, that's all there is.' it reminds me of things i feel in the center of myself that i have known forever but lacked a vocabulary for. and sometimes, my inability to say 'don't get so caught up in the metaphor, realize that the stories in this book or that book are merely referential to the purpose and potential of man' has resulted in feelings of anger within myself. irritation, mostly, at not being able to help other people to see that all religions and systems of belief are true and valid insomuch as they are metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery. the message at the core is always the same, and beautiful. but, the myths themselves can be traced as parallels right down the line, starting with the first 'adam and eve'. not being originally from the judaic tradition, of course, but the bassari tradition. and then there are the side-by-side journeys of the buddha and the christ. each being immaculately conceived, each departing on a soul searching pilgrimage- one to the desert, one to the deep forest- each conferring with the top religious men of their day and each being tempted three times by deterrent forces- jesus' temptations being economic, political, and egocentric; the buddha's being lust, fear and an appeal to his social duty- and when they returned, each respectively chose disciples and began to preach. and so forth.

i am no evangelista, for any theory of faith. but i cannot, perhaps as a symptom of my own vanity, completely repulse the desire to show other people the hate, fear, homogeny, distrust, misogyny, anger, stupidity, and out and out misuse of their own religions. i see the failures of their so-called 'life line' and i want to shake them. god doesn't care if we are gay or straight or black or whether we go to college or have abortions or eat meat or run around naked all day or make a million dollars or tithe our last dollar so that the church can get re-roofed and the pastor can buy a new cadillac or are polite to people who offend us or gossip behind our friends backs or are pillars of strength or crumble at the slightest upheaval. in the end, i think it all has to be about what makes you feel like you've embraced all the joy in life that you possibly can. rejecting the socially questionable not-so-clearly-defined stuff based on god's instructions and opinions in some stupid book written by a bunch of xenophobic woman haters is kind of ludicrous.

good and evil are temporal apparitions. your eternal soul isn't hanging in the balance of anything here. be decent because it's the right thing to do, not because you're afraid of some fictional hell designed to herd you like cattle to the ideal outlined by megalomaniacs.