A Pilgrim’s Digression

All week, I have dreamed about writing.

I can’t remember much about these dreams, except there is a desperate feeling to them. In the one dream I recall the best, I am back in school again. Grade level, or even my age, is kind of ambiguous. I feel like I am 33, but my classmates are all young pre-teen children.

I have to write a paper and deliver a report on a science topic that I find incredibly boring and incomprehensible. I don’t remember the topic, but it has something to do with plants. I procrastinate.

All night, I dream about trying to write this paper. There is nothing more to the dream than that. I worry and fret in my dream because I can’t write this paper. When I finally become desperate to produce a finished paper, I write two pages, but it is crap plagiarized from my textbook. I decide it will have to do, because I am simply not able to do any better.

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I got on an elevator about an hour ago, and just as the doors were closing a well-dressed, sweet-smelling woman quickly got on board as well. Instead of pushing the button for her floor, or pushing the button to close the doors, she stood there smearing Burt’s Beeswax lip balm on her lips.

She didn’t seem to care that she had just delayed the departure of the elevator for another ten or fifteen seconds, long enough for someone else to get on and delay it further. She kept dipping her index finger into the lip balm and smearing more of the waxy stuff on her lips. Then all of a sudden she realized the elevator wasn’t moving, and with the same finger she was using to apply the balm to her lips, she pressed the button for her floor. Then she went back to applying her lip balm.

Looking at the greasy spot on the button, I thought to myself, “I am so glad I got on the elevator first.” All I could think of was a big, fat cold sore arising on the upper lip of some unsuspecting, otherwise herpes-free soul who unfortunately got on the elevator after this woman.

How many germ-laden elevator buttons have I pushed? How many snot or spittle-smeared hand rails on Metro and public bus have I gripped, then wiped my eyes or mouth? I feel ill just thinking about it.

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The past few weeks, Brendan and I have made How the Grinch Stole Christmas a regular part of our bedtime reading. He has also watched the cartoon version more times than I can count. In my many re-readings, I’ve noticed a few things that escape the reader/viewer who has heard these words so many times since childhood that they have stopped having any meaning.

For one thing, I believe the Seuss book is probably meant as a parody of “The Night Before Christmas.” The rhyme and metre are the same. Some of the rhymes in Seuss even directly mock some of the rhymes in the Victorian poem: “chimney” becomes “chimbly” in Seuss’ lexicon, for example; and instead of a “right jolly old elf,” in Seuss’ version Santa becomes a Grinchy Claus, an “old liar” as Seuss calls him who can think up a “fib” as quick as Santa can fill stockings.

Because we have always impressed on Brendan how sinful it is to tell a lie, Brendan always acts shocked when we get to the part where the Grinch lies to little Cindy Lou. Yet for all his almost devil-like maleficence, the Grinch was essentially right about Christmas, if we take his perspective as inherently Christian. Society is too materialistic, too pagan. Christ is never once mentioned in the Whos’ celebration.

Did he not do them a favor by stripping their homes of their presents, trees, and food for their feast? And by returning those things, after hearing the Whos singing, was that not a sort of surrender to the materialistic forces that by all accounts ruin Christmas?

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Whether for good or ill, I came to the World of Warcraft rather late in the life of the game. Two years late, to be exact. It wasn’t until I started reading about it in the New York Times a few months ago that I decided to give the game a try. According to some veterans of the game, it is already getting long in the tooth, at this point.

To me, it remains fresh and exciting, but I have begun thinking about what could be better, and what I’d like to see in the next generation of this type of game. I’ve also been looking at a couple games that are due to be released next year, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, and The Lord of the Rings Online. The latter in particular has engaged my interest, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately, I will not be able to play it. Ever. Or at least until I upgrade my Mac to one of the new Intel machines. LoTRO is a Windows-only game and the company states bluntly that it has no intention of developing a port for the Mac. Nonetheless I find it interesting to see how these games develop in the wake of the success of WoW. What are they going to do differently? Where are they taking chances? Will those chances pay off? Given the secrecy with which the developers guard the details of these games, answers to these questions become little more than guesses or opinions.

However, guesses, assumptions, and opinions are what I am best at.

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I weep for David–he is dead!

O, weep for David! Though our tears

Thaw not the frost that binds so dear a Hamster’s head.

Brendan’s hamster, David, died today. Brendan has been home sick with strep, so there was really no way around telling him, even if I wanted to keep it from him.

This morning, he asked me if he could pet his hamster, so I opened the cover to David’s home. His little pink foot was sticking out of his hut door. Before lifting the hut off him, I touched him lightly to wake him. He didn’t move.

“He’s sleeping,” I said.

I lifted the hut off him. He looked rather stiff.
“Um…”

“Can I pet him?” Brendan asked.

“Um…just a minute.”

I touched him. His fur was cold. I couldn’t discern any movement.

“He must be really sleeping!” Brendan said. “Here, let me pet him.”

“Uh, no, let’s just let him sleep. For now.”

I needed some time to think. Later, after lunch, I took Brendan into his bedroom and said, “Brendan, I’ve got something sad to tell you. Your hamster has died.”

“No, he’s just sleeping.”

“No, I don’t think so, Brendan.”

I showed him how the hamster wasn’t moving.

“Can I touch him?”

“No, better not,” I said. Why do we become so repulsed by a corpse that was, not long ago, living, breathing, warm with life?

We talked about it for awhile. Since Brendan was old enough to experience my grandmother’s death, this is quite a bit less tragic for him, and he seems to be rather non-chalant about it. Maybe even too much so.

“What are we going to do with him?” He asked.

“I suppose we’ll have to bury him.”

“Can’t we let kitty cat eat him? She’d like that.”

“Um, no. That’s disgusting. It would make kitty sick.”

“No it wouldn’t. You said cats like to eat hamsters.”

“Yeah, but this is David, not just any hamster. We will have to bury him.”

As of yet, we haven’t done so. We are waiting for mom to come home so we can all pay our last respects.

He will awake no more, Oh! Nevermore!

O weep for David Hamster for he is dead!

Cnn has a story today about the dismay some Conservative activists feel over Mary Cheney’s pregnancy. The following quote struck me as quite funny:

Carrie Gordon Earll, a policy analyst for the conservative Christian ministry Focus on the Family, expressed empathy for the Cheney family but depicted the pregnancy as unwise.

“Just because you can conceive a child outside a one-woman, one-man marriage doesn’t mean it’s a good idea,” Earll said. “Love can’t replace a mother and a father.”

“Love can’t replace a mother and a father.” Tell that to the child raised by a loving grandparent, divorced mother or divorced father, aunt, uncle, foster parent, or adopted parent.

The absurd implication of what Earll says is that two-parent households are always better for the child than single-parent, loving households. Anyone raised in a two-parent household where one or both parents are abusive or psychologically distant will tell you, love is preferable simply to having two parents in the house.

My previous post was not meant as a farewell to blogging, but more as a farewell to my writing of fiction, as well as a farewell to my carefully preened, but naive ambition to write serious works that will be taken seriously by serious people.

In no way am I abandoning my blog. I am writing more irregularly these days primarily because I’d rather be playing World of Warcraft in my free time; but I will still post here as frequently as once a week or so.

I have often written of my love for the fall and winter months, but I have rarely written about what I dislike about this time of year. Besides the frequency of colds, above all I dislike the dryness of this time of year.

My hands turn to chalky sandpaper in winter, and moisturizer rarely has more than a minimal effect lasting an hour or two. When we go to my mother-in-law’s for Christmas, staying a week in an old house heated by radiators, the dryness of my skin increases many times over.

I hate getting out of a warm shower and feeling my skin crawl, as if my body were itchily shriveling up like a desiccated snake skin.

Winter is a dry season.

My grandpa, a bird lover, used to tell me that people often overfeed birds in winter while neglecting to make sure birds have enough water to drink. Finding water in winter is often more difficult for birds than finding food, yet people put away their bird baths or let them freeze over.

The other morning, Lynn noticed birds pecking at the ice in our bird bath. I filled a pitcher of warm water from the sink, took it down to the bird bath, and poured it over the ice.

My brain, too, feels dried out, frozen over, mummified and coated in the dust of the tomb. Writers often refer to going through a ‘dry spell’ when they don’t seem to have much impetus to write. I am in a drought, lasting who knows how long. Months? Years?

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