Arg, Matey, Where’s Me Bone?
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Category Archives: holidays
Love is a Many Splendoured Thing
…when you can find it…which is rare…and it can lead to other things. Like marriage, a baby carriage, and auflagen. Lots and lots of auflagen*. So be sure that’s what you want.
Maybe this is a safer way to play it: 
*If you can guess what this is, you get a prize.
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Lists Are Good For You
And now a tribute. To the mighty, the daunting, the beloved…the list.
I don’t have a real bucket list. If I did, Disney World® wouldn’t be on it; I didn’t know it was any good. I went to Disney in my 40s by chance. When most people hear, “I’m goin’ to Disney World!” they think Sooperbowl. I think: time capsule, spinning teacups manned by deranged nieces, and Christmas parades with “princes” in wigs with many hair follicles per square inch. Also: pack well. Unexpected weather and unplanned befoulment demand backup.
While a winter trip to a theme park ain’t exactly Christmas in New England, a good way to steel yourself is to get a flu shot then go to one. Disney’s a good bet because as the sweat of many nations and the sputum of the Lands settles upon you, you are exposed to virtually every germ currently available. It is, after all, a small world, certainly for a microbe. And as you build character standing on lines for rides and hear songs that won’t leave your head ever, you leave the prior year behind entirely—often a good idea.
Before I get into a favoured list of deep importance, the annual Fake New Year Predictions, here a short list of things overheard at Disney World:
-Will all the lines be this long?
-I don’t think this line actually goes anywhere.
– It makes the line longer.
-We’re definitely under surveillance.
-Disney World is a young man’s game.
-I don’t want to go peeeeeeee peeeeeeeeeee! (said by more than one child from more than one nation in more than one Land on more than one day.)
– Did you say “teeming thong?!” NO, teeming THRONG.
-This. Line. Is. Going. Nowhere.
Lists! Weekends generate lengthy lists. Line ‘em up and knock ‘em down. Dump? Check! Tenny? Check!! Margherita – rocks – salt at Richardson’s Tavern? Checkarooni. Another…good day.
On to the prescient populist predictions for 2015, submitted by you the people from ME to FL, NH to CA:
North America will break up along the Mississippi and drift apart.
Angelina Jolie will have an affair with Jennifer Aniston.
Office betting pools explode on which former Disney child star will implode next.
Congress will be fined for not working; fined members will be unable to run again.
3D printing will be applied to implants from cheek to calf.
Jenna Bush Hager and Chelsea Clinton will decide to run for president in 2016.
With cheap gas, the price of vintage Hummers will strengthen.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will steal the rights to his own life story from himself, then turn it into a multi-billion dollar video game called Zuckerville, a place where he has the rights to all players’ personal information. Suckerville?
The first smart refrigerator will arrive, voicing the caloric, fat, sodium, sugar, protein and fiber content inside. It will lock after 8pm and won’t admit entrance until 6am.
Texas will secede.
Quebec will secede.
Killington will secede.
Punxsutawney Phil will be canned when he is bitten by a vampire and no longer casts a shadow.
ISIS will splinter off into new factions, one of which by year’s end will become the world’s most popular boy band.
More people will buy VW campers and park in Walmart lots to avoid campground fees, accumulating decals for amusement parks, roadside attractions, and states.
Americans will be required to rescue an animal by paying for its care or adopting it.
Vladimir Putin will be poisoned by an elite squad of journalists.
Putin will come out as gay, step down as President, and marry figure skater Johnny Weir.
The inane patter on award ceremony red carpets will worsen.
People will leave [followed by unintelligible gibberish].
I will be befuddled by new social media I’m supposed to master (Yik Yak?).
I will not gain weight (glad you said fake.)
I will stick to my New Year’s resolution to be happy and smile at everyone I meet.
I’m going to have sex every day.
Due to Equatorial Vortex Irene, we’ll have 90-degree days at the end of February.
Candidates vying for the presidency will optimistically fund new dog breeds, the Dachsoodleman (dachshund, +poodle + Doberman) and Cockzerstiff (Cocker Spaniel +Schaunzer + Mastiff) for his/her Whitehouse dog .
And my ties for Personal Favorite:
Rather than “predict, I “wish” we could all just slow down, get our faces out of electronic devices and embrace the outdoors…but silly me, then corporations wouldn’t make bank.
We will have weather.
A unifying figure will emerge.
With that, I wish you great list-making, great outcomes, great incomes, and good day.
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Blow Your Horn…of Plenty!
Hopefully Dear Reader is enjoying his horn of plenty during this, the season of thanks.
I’m not sure why the horn of plenty amuses the modern brain. Maybe its cutesy “The people of the Land had enough to eat!” artistic rendering looks generally corny. And that old-tymey wording, “horn of plenty.” Whatever the reason, a horn of plenty is a wondrous and comical thing.
For it we give thanks. As a people of many nations, we are thankful together for the bounty of this yearly American feast. And for old movies we will watch afterwards with lines like, “It’s just not right, I tell you!” sputtering from earnest and exasperated men in hats fighting for justice with the charming naïveté of tymes gone by. Who knows if tymes were ever really like that…let us think so and be content. We are thankful for every moment of contentment we can squeeze out of anxiety-provoking modern tymes. Those of us entering the Big Jewelry Years (due to growing knuckles, noses, ears) are grateful for a holiday function whereat we can wear same. And that we’re getting old enough for such parts to grow, which means we are in fact still alive.
There is much about gratitude in print these days. So I conducted an informal poll of the Land. The query, “What are you thankful for?” reaped interesting and heartfelt responses, largely from strangers, including:
Family; my cozy bed; the farmers who grow our food, especially the organics; books; my companion, 
The Schluffer (a cat); snow; the community in my church; that I’m able to walk; people blowing horns; how humans can overlook their differences for the sake of community; my family both at school and at home; the parents’ wallet; I have a hot husband; gluten; the opportunity to immigrate to the United States and my happy life here; that my son has a dog; girl scouts; my beautiful wife; “to eat”; my family; the pleasure of making the letters J and F in cursive, which may become obsolete; that spiritually bankrupt people have consumerism to fill the void; sarcasm; young faces eager to learn; my beautiful daughters and that I have a job; my health; my ear muffs; music. The front runners? Family and community.
My family and community includes the crazed nutters I call friends, including the illustrious and sharp-dressing Viscomte de Villainy, who have stuck by me through thick and very, verrry thin. I am thankful for them, and for how people’s faces change when they smile. And for my blood family, who are definitely nuts. And for a special chipmunk at Silver Lake this summer, an alert little feller named Scamp who roamed the grounds freely with a cheerful, magical insouciance in broad daylight– no shady rock walls for him! We are not thankful for the raptor that likely picked Scamp off, loveable easy target that he was.
With the holidays approaching, I am among those thankful for the opp to spend money. It’s always scrimping and saving in modern tymes, isn’t it? Wondering if the income will stop, what new disaster will cripple us monetarily. Gift giving becomes an even more guilty boggler when in magazines and TV and radio, it’s all, “Have less stuff. Get rid of your stuff. Stop having stuff. No stuff!” I for one like to wrap stuff. And give it. As a present. My solution? Gift people with experiences (tickets to a show, a subscription to something) and other stuff that can be used up. I’ll stop or Dear Reader might guess his gift. Can’t have that.
I add in closing sincere thanks that humans can’t think of everything all the time, try as we might. So some bad things get little air time. Like that tiff at work or the altercation at the dump. When we think on it, it’s galling (Treated unfairly? Flubbed a reply? Acted rudely?), but eventually, well, other thots encroach. Thank you, Lord. Because we do not need to dwell on dumb garbage.
We prefer pleasant thots. Thots about…cornucopias. Or: Maybe I won’t dress so shabby for the big meal this year. Make an effort. Do something new. A new charitable effort. Giant earrings. Angel food cake instead of pie. Something.
Wherever you are, blow your horn – with a charming naïveté, a magical insouciance…however you want to play it. Blow a few notes my way. I’ll be listening for you. Good birdin’ and good day.
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Come to Vermont
After a fresh dumping by Mother Nature, your ski weekend awaits. Or just drive up for a post-T-day recovery weekend at an inn and sleep — or snowshoe off your holiday blubber — in our winter wonderland. Vacation states are for doing what you want. And nothing you don’t want.
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Fill Your Bag
Fall reminds us that life’s short and getting shorter. Maybe that’s why we all get in drag in October and stuff ourselves silly in November and pile gifts on one another in December. We’re not stupid. We know how to have fun.
The garden is put to bed. The state park is closed. The sun sets earlier and earlier. Time for reading and crafts and deep thots. Like: what to wear on Halloween? I love when kids roll old-school and you can tell what they are (astronaut, umpire, cowgirl) without having to know a (modern) cartoon or kiddie movie, and I dig adult attire that mystifies the young people (Ben Hur, say, or The Hunchback of Notre Dame…cue the Million Dollar Movie theme…on WOR-9!,) plus dual costumes you can’t buy in a store (Napoleon and Josephine; John Snow and Ygritte – “Archery Kit Not Included”; more).
Some columnists didn’t get their September column in on time and important events went uncovered. Like the New World Festival (magnifique!), the Tunbridge World’s Fair (kudos, 4-H’ers, Ambassadors, and handicapped transpo!), and a spectacular foliage season. Hopefully Dear Reader was too busy having fun to notice this humble column’s absence; New Englanders read weekly papers with listings of aws local goings-on and load their calendars accordingly. As a friend’s sage older brother commented recently on life, “It’s all experiences and relationships.” His point being, I imagine, that resumes and possessions don’t matter so much. Unless it’s a big old Heath Bar sliding into my orange plastic jack-o’-lantern. That matters. Treat, please!
One treaty experiential idea a brilliant friend had: get together with other people that like to sing for a singing weekend. If you’re like us, you’ll talk and hoot more than you sing, but you’ll have the time of your life. I offered a name for ours: Croonfest. Because of our age, a soprano quickly countered with Cronefest. An alto suggested, in an unrelated conversation, a new reality show: Keeping Up With The Kevorkians. Which is what many wish the Kardashians would do. Anyway, your weekend will go like that, with some actual singing thrown in. I highly recommend.
Is the planet in utter turmoil? Pretty much. Are we on rubbery ground economically? Maybe. But when I had connections to the “monument” industry, I’d planned to buy my tombstone, inscribed in advance except for the final date. It was to say, perhaps with an etching of a beacon, “I remain hopeful.” Not only because that rich irony would give the occasional visitor (and naughty graveyard shennaniganer on All Saints’ Eve) a snicker, but because I do in fact remain hopeful. You know how, even if stuck in nasty traffic, when you think of someone you love, like a pet or child or your aunts, your whole chest cavity feels good, and then you smile and your face feels good? Humans have this universal response ‘round the globe. That’s something. And so I remain hopeful.
A friend who is Dialed In to otherworldly sources had this to say: we on earth are being summoned now to let go of the past and do things a new way, with joy. That means, to me, not doing things (experiences and relationships) you don’t want to do that make you feel mostly crappy, whether for dollars or out of some sense of obligation. Actions initiated with unpleasant thoughts behind them never turn out right; the energetic impetus is all wrong. Yuh-oh, am I waxing cosmic on Dear Reader?! Well. If not on the Eve of All Saints, with its possibly pagan progenitor, the Feast of the Lemures, when then?
Dust off your figurative orange plastic jack-o’-lantern, polish your conceptual horn of plenty, and fill ‘em up, with the best “treats” – experiences and relationships. Is effort involved? Nice work if you can get it, I say. Don’t waste a minute on any that bring you misery, like the awful Mary Jane candies one neighbor routinely forced on us in the 60s. Throw those ones out, man. Keep the good ones. Re-gift the good ones. Good cross-dressing, and good day.
Bumper Sticker Inadvertently Suggested by Choir Director
Get Your Alto On
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You Never Know What You’ll Find
…on Green Up Day, when Vermonters comb the Land for garbage and citizens with trucks (not uncommon in Vermont) haul it off to the dump. Literally tons of garbage statewide.
I found the usual assortment of party implements plus mystery stuff. Like Spider Man underwear (size: extra extra small; they make underwear this little?) and a shoe so badly destroyed you had to wonder what happened to it (threshing machine? Two bears fought over it?) Also a sign th
at said WATCH IT GROW (watch what grow, the cubic volume of garbage? A Bud Light tree?) The kindly lady I worked with had somehow hauled a mattress into her truck, after days of rain. New Englanders are tough, man.
As I passed other Green Uppers later in my car, I gave them the same double-honk and thumbs-up out the window we’d gotten earlier. Good work, keepers of the Land!
See the refuse of Green Up Days 2013 and 2012.
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Help me! Help me!
…or “May Day!”, possibly from the French “M’aidez!” (“Help me!”). It’s not likely that captains of flaming planes and sinking ships are thinking about the first of May. But then, who knows?
While pagan America is getting its jollies skipping around a beribboned pole today, some of us are crying May Day over the decline of the English language.
That George Orwell thought English was going down the flusher some 80 years ago is a comfort. This article covers that nicely in its analysis of weird, annoying language in the workplace. The Comments reveal how workers across the Land have secretly played Corporate Jargon Bingo during meetings. Hats off, keepers of the language! And way more fun than a silly Maypole.
But we’ve only just broached this topic. Stay tuned.
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Total Eclipse of the Mud
The universe
deals people some pretty bad hands. Whether it’s a physical affliction making life a living hell, or a heart so broken you can’t inhale, it almost doesn’t matter whether it’s happening to you or someone you love. When you love someone, their pain becomes yours. As anyone who’s watched their beloved person die will tell you, at some point they wished they could trade places with their suffering person. Even though watching it unfold—and enduring its aftermath in a daze—likely hurt worse.
Now that’s a dire way to start a column, especially one you’ve come to rely upon instead for laffs, seemingly unrelated topics woven together, questionable spellings, and general disregard for propriety. You shall have that, dear Reader. But if Holy Week and Passover aren’t about death and mayhem and baffled onlookers, I don’t know what is, so try to run with this. I write on seasonal subjects and, well, here we are.
When it comes to religion, I pretty much believe all of it. M
eaning I think that people at the time believed these things were happening, and whether they did or did not occur is not important to me. What matters to me is that humans today get together to honor those that were beacons of kindness a really long time ago, to give thanks to something bigger than we, to whisper wishes for those in need, and that there’s a place you can go where you can leave your purse unattended and probably no one will go through it. Our religious affiliation is typically decided by our parents; that a single religion is The Right One is to me as perverse as the notion that Christians were born sinners whose sometimes unbaptized children languish in Hell or Limbo eternally. I don’t believe there is a Hell outside of Earth proper. We have plenty of Hell right here at home.
Whether Jesus was a son of God who performed miracles and rose from the dead is, in my opinion, anyone’s guess. But I 
believe he was a real and good man and that, as with other religious figures, some things he said and did were accurately recorded. There could well be a God, as anyone who’s seen a live moose up close, smelled a lemon blossom, or shot a hole-in-one will agree. I had to “block” an unruly scarf this week, and while the travel iron my boyfriend bought me in 1987 is adorable, it doesn’t have steam. I borrowed my neighbor’s. While blocking, I thought, “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind owning a steam iron.” An hour later at the dump I found on the FREE table a steam iron for the taking. Coincidence? Proof of God?
Or Gods! The pagans will surely have rocked Tuesday’s full moon by this column’s printing, what with the Blood Moon total eclipse. Having missed March’s Worm Moon (?) entirely, I’m paying closer attention. CNN Tech claims the moon will be red-orange like a “desert sunset”; one NASAn preferred “reddish, ugly-looking.” I’ll settle for dishwater gray, as we have been let down repeatedly by scientists promising a spectacular celestial event that turns out either a dud or obscured by clouds. Although, as with religious followers (which they kind of are), I do believe scientists think it to be true when they say it.
America, you’ve got another chance. On October 8, then April 4 and September 28 of 2015, there are three more Blood Moons visible from the entire US. Four in a row, according to effusive CNN, is “like drawing a rare lunar poker hand.” Which I didn’t read until an hour after starting this column’s first sentence. Coincidence? You decide.
One thing is certain: mud is upon us (lit. and fig.). As its mellifluous downhill oozings and the soft, sweet hum of cluster flies lull us to sleep at night, may we dream of ways to slog through mud and life with grace. God shows [its] face from time to time, seems like. If in fact real, God apparently lets us do whatever we want. Which a lot of the time is no good at all. So it’s up to us manage our relationships, communities, and planet with brains and respect. If there is a God, I do hope we haven’t been too much of a disappointment because I, for one, am trying my damnedest. And I see you out there, too, people. I see your deli slicer-sharp minds, strong hands, and big hearts at work. It hasn’t gone unnoticed. Good day.
Up Next Month Evidence of the Devil: Black flies, BP, and the Disgraceful Home Printer Ink Scandal of Modern Tymes
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Erin Go Braless
This holiday reminds me of Darby O’Gill and the Little People, a terrifying movie to show to children, which is exactly what the Rome Theater did in about 1972. I don’t know which was scarier, the Grim Reaper’s death wagon or a young Sean Connery singing.
lilithvampiriozah.deviantart.com
Wikipedia describes St. Patrick’s day as “a cultural and religious holiday.” Not sure if anyone’s waxing religious about it. Here in Vermont we’re waxing our skis while elsewhere the shillelaghs are shurely being shellacked. This day’s commonly excessive boozing is foul, but with Irish heritage a whiskey or beer is in order if you can handle it. It’s much easier to see leprechauns after a green beezer or two. The key is not to have too many or you see a banshee instead. It seems modern banshees are on the busty side, and wicked braless.
How they filmed Darby’s little people is described here. You could probably do it at home. If you have giant furniture and a young Sean Connery in your barn.
uppervalleygirl 