Please, Please, it's only Poetry!

shoe-shue-shewy
nonsense is a human right
like any man I like mine tight
but wait....this rhymes
did I dare do the time?
for such a crime?
I dare say
yes, I did it, I dared
I done dared did it I did
and as I wrote this rote
I imagined
I imagined I thunk a thought
and that thought went THUNK
down down
down to the bottom of the well of my being
and being that as it may
(may I?)
I ventured onto this page
and smeared these really
REALLY
thin lines all about
and wouldn't you know..........
FONT
a whole FOUNT of FONT
all crowded together as if to make sense
of one another
and there you have it
did I lose my rhyme?
then fine
I'll do my time..........

"It's about Time, it's about Space...."

Time travel, interstellar travel, highway travel, the movement of the human consciousness through time AND space has always been taken for granted for what we so far have experienced. We continue to write stories and make films concerning the possibility of going backwards or forwards in time, or crossing vast expanses of space, yet in the grand scale of this cosmos, we have barely nudged ourselves, and no one that any of us are aware of has had any effect on time.

How bloody BORING!

If we put our minds to it, we could build a craft that could get us to the edge of the solar system in........well.......it would take too damn long. Forget getting to the next star. The size of our solar system alone is really hard to comprehend, much less the whole width of the known universe. Now, NASA is working in it's slow, diligent fashion on getting us back to the moon so that we can prance around on it, perhaps build a base, and from there finally start the long awaited journey to Mars. My bet is that we lose the first mission, and knowing the American people, there probably won't be a second. Once bitten, we can be pretty damn shy. So THAT, my friends, is where we stand on moving from point A to point B. So far the two points are so close as to be indistinguishable.

And time travel? Before we get any where near the concept, we have to first answer exactly how we are going to sense more than the three (or maybe four) dimensions we are equipped for. Scientists assure us that there are more, perhaps alot more, than the three we can observe. Yet, try and wrap your mind around another dimension. Try imagining how one is supposed to maneuver or observe a place that our eyes, ears, or any other awareness factor we might conjure up are not equipped to register. My guess is that if you dropped some really good acid, got drunk, went on a really nasty carnival ride, and tried to recite the Gettysburg address while twiddling your thumbs, you might be halfway to experiencing something akin to the disconnect you would have with any other dimension that the three we already seem to have problems dealing with. The hallway you'd have to walk thru to get to that other room marked "the day you punched out your chemistry teacher and screwed your future for good" is probably not even a good metaphor for the route you'd have to travel. If you have a clock somewhere near your computer right now, glance over at it and watch the second hand. You are watching it travel through time. That's as good as it gets, at least for homo sapiens at it's present level of evolution. But go watch a movie, it's fun to imagine anyway.

So, should we even keep coming up with concepts in zipping through time and space when so far the physics say it ain't happening?

YES!

WHY?

Because traveling through time and space is no less an exciting and uplifting mental past time as the idea that we are going to one day have awesome sex with a perfect partner, no matter how fat, ugly, old, or just plain nasty we happen to be. It's no worse than thinking that SOMEBODY is going to win the lottery, and it damn well could be US! It's no worse than thinking that humankind has the capacity, or even the right, to survive another two hundred years at the rate we are ruining our only home.

Because we CAN!

Gotcha!

What you are reading is a test of the EMERGENCY POSTING SYSTEM. Had this been an actual posting, you would have enjoyed yourself, probably chuckled a little , maybe even shook your head and said to yourself, "That MICHAEL, he's such a nut...."

The Bloggers in this household in cooperation with Blogger.Com have arranged these periodic faux-posts in order to provide your notification systems something to do during those periods when THE Michael can't seem to come up with something worth posting.

We now conclude this test of the EMERGENCY POSTING SYSTEM and return you to actual events in your lives that are occurring at this very moment, including reading actual posts on other blogs.


Vexing, vexing, from afar
I need not know just where you are
for you my friend have come to me
and for that, this is what you get

to read.



I run now.


Bye!

Spring Clean for the May Queen

Spring has damn near sprung here at Pendragon Hold, far earlier than it ought to. Now, that doesn't mean that we have passed the cool weather and occasional mild freeze, but the plants around here have pretty much assumed it's alot later in the year than it really is, as evidenced by this azalea, which normally wouldn't bloom like this till around THE Wife's birthday in March.



It was a beautiful day so THE Wife and I got out into the shade garden, our sacred space, and tidied it up a bit, raking up leaves and picking up fallen branches. This is OUR temple, the place where we talk to the God and the Goddess and ask for a favor or two when we feel the need. Not once have the turned us down. It was here that we enjoyed the sight of the lunar eclipse, a very powerful night for magik, thanks to the "blood moon" we cast our circle under.

Poor Shiloh. We had assumed that he'd been chewing on his own backside due to his painful hip, but I decided to take a closer look, and sure enough it seemed as though he might have been having problems with fleas. I had to shave the poor dog down to his skivvies, and sure enough, his entire back is covered in scabs and sores, and he did have a bad infestation of fleas, which I thought his thick coat was keeping at bay. Poor thing, he now looks like an overgrown Chihuahua on steroids, and he seems so ashamed to be walking around practically "naked". I had to do it, though, because I have to treat his sores with sulfadene in hopes of giving him some relief from the intense itching he has been suffering from. Forgive me, Shiloh, I THINK I know what I'm doing.........

OH, and while we were at it, princess Cricket also go herself a spa treatment in the form of a relaxing combing for fleas while reclined on her back getting her chin rubbed. This feline is shameless, I tell you, SHAMELESS!

I want to thank everybody for their feedback on the poem I wrote. I don't think I should be applying to be the next poet laureate, but nobody said it sucked, so I guess I don't have to give it up entirely. I promise all of you, however, that short of winning the lottery, I WILL keep my day job.












Might I dare say I love thee?
friends far flung and barely known to me
I dare embrace thee for thine being
in your lives that I am seeing
for seeing you so much like me
allows my mind to wonder free
unconstrained by all this life
that keeps me glued to home and wife
I wish for thee the best of all
all the things for which we call
and when thou layest down to sleep
my friendship is all of yours to keep


Blessed be!

Ditty if I May.......

Reading some of my favorite bloggers, none of whom you could call "professional" (With the possible exception of Ms C), I despair of ever being able to claim to belong in their esteemed company. It sadly reminds of my karaoke days, when despite wild applause, the look in my honest wife's eyes told me people were being incredibly polite for my sake. Yes, with enough over-dubbing and the right song, I CAN pull off a few miracles, but no, I would not make it past the initial audition of American Idol.

Now, I am beginning to wonder about another little thing I enjoy so very much that it would be another blow to my ego to discover I was again fooling myself. I love to write romantic prose. I used a bit of it on my wife during our courtship, but as soon as the "I do's" were said I suppose my poems got old fast.

People sing in the shower for a very good reason. There's only the soap-on-the-rope and maybe the loofa to judge you, and you can do no wrong. I never understood why we hear in our heads the sounds that convince so many of us we can carry a tune when sadly, we can't. At least in my case, when I play back a recording of my efforts, THEN I hear what I think is the cold hard sonic truth and I cease accordingly when necessary. When I hear one shred of musical hope, I persevere, but I don't get stupid about it. I am not, primarily at least, a singer. Life sucks, so sing in the shower and be happy.

I want to be brave here and throw something at you. This is not "romantic" prose but it does evoke emotion, at least I think it does. Try and feel the cadence, the emotion, the content as best you can and see how it feels to you. If it sucks, be a friend and say so. If it moves you, but does not bear repeating, I can live with that to. If it seems like I really have a talent for this sort of thing, even if only a little bit, that would exceed my expectations. Just be honest. Not BRUTALLY honest, now, but honest nonetheless. Here goes.........



I embrace thee all
for I am Divinity
not the god you bend to or despair of
not the omnipotent friend out to lunch
you need no appointment to know my truth
for it was always within you
as it is in me
I know I blaspheme
If one were to steal your thunder
I am sure the tantrum would be as nasty
but I have no fear
only love
for what I know allowed me MY me
This world suffers so much
of you and me and all who came before
and might not survive the coming horde
so in this meantime
this sad time of wars and dry winds and deserts spreading
think of what I gave your parents
what they tried to hand to you
tainted
with expectations and questionable achievements
horse power instead of horses
mach five instead of Bach
ethanol instead of sunshine
the worship of masochistic gods

I embrace thee all
even as you kill me



My name is Michael, and this is MY poem.

Fast Forward

I've been contemplating lately on whether, given the choice, I would trade my age and wisdom, such that it is, for the chance to be young again, with it's attendant ignorance and lessons needed to be learned.

I don't think so.

You see, it's amazing some of the intangible benefits derived from hanging around for awhile and catching on to a few things. And most importantly I have discovered that there are a multitude of things that used to be important to me in my youth that now have been degraded to "what WAS I thinking" status.

Fast cars. Yea, if ever there was one thing I, like any hot-blooded fighter ace my age lusted after in our teen years, it was a muscle car. There were quite a few beauties to choose from, from the fast-just-sitting-there 1969 Mustang Mach I, to the in-your-face, muscular Dodge Challenger, and all flavors of gas-guzzling, Hurst-four-speed shifting, "Yea, it has a HEMI!" between. We all HAD to have something to burn rubber with in front of women in the hopes it would get one in the back seat.

Fast forward.


The closest I ever came to a fast car was a '67 Chevy Nova with a six banger and a raised rear end. It didn't go THAT fast but it sure looked like it could. Today, I watch these people driving monstrous Hummers and Expeditions, no cargo or passengers, never leaving the pavement, burning fossil fuels like there's no tomorrow and heating up the atmosphere for future generations to enjoy. I admire the retro-sleek Ford Mustangs with their 400 horse power V-eights and know I could never justify owning one, even though I could if I really wanted. Instead, I lust after a hybrid Prius or just about ANY car that hauls as much as possible for as FAR as possible on as LITTLE fuel as possible.


A three-bedroom ranch in the Beaver-Cleaver suburbs. A bright green, perfect lawn with perfectly trimmed hedges, rose bushes, a swing set in the expansive back yard, a dog, and two point three children. In the high-tech kitchen a perfectly quaffed wife would be preparing my thick porterhouse steaks dressed in her paper miniskirt, her Doris Day beehive, and eyelashes thick enough to down an F-15 with one bat of her eyes. Of course, that would be accompanied by a martini and the promise of incredible sex.

Fast forward.


An acre of sand, no lawn, no shrubs, no roses, and no, I personally did not spawn those two point three offspring. In retrospect I am proud to have spared two souls the future I would have been leaving them. The ranch is instead a "manufactured home" which probably has more square footage but is just a tad flimsier in construction. The kitchen is not much of an improvement over the kitchen of the fifties except perhaps for that wonderful invention that cooks most of our food now under three minutes. There's a dishwasher, also, which half the time requires you clean the dish again anyway, but helps. The counters still have to be scrubbed, the sink cleaned, the floor mopped, the coffee grounds emptied, etc, etc, etc. And I do most of the cooking, and I don't wear a paper mini-skirt. And the sex? Well.........

A high-powered job on Wall street, or in the Insurance industry, or as a Pharmaceutical sales Rep............or maybe a fighter pilot, or a marine biologist, or...........the possibilities were endless.

No they weren't.

Pretty much every off-the-wall occupation I found myself involved in had precious little to do with anything I had ever aspired to. The jobs I have held down throughout these many years have all been the products of time, location, location, location. Some of these jobs sucked and I am truly glad they didn't last that long. A few I would have loved to have retired from, gold watch and all. Some payed pretty damn good, considering. Others......well......President Lincoln tried, really he did.
Right now I perform a job that I have to convince myself is a necessary evil that really does have a positive impact on the lives of the people I perform it for. Perhaps a little more per hour would REALLY convince me of the value of my contribution. It is what it is and it could be worse.


So, is there ANYthing I miss from my misinformed youth that I have lost somewhere on my travels to THE Now? Yes, there are things I remember I do indeed dearly miss, like the heady, no alcohol necessary high a young man with a crush on a girl endures. I miss the mystery of love, not the well-rehersed, been-there-done-that mechanics I have now. I miss the amazement of looking down into crystal clear water at marine life that is in no danger of extinction thanks to my hunger. I miss the phosphorescent light show the plankton performed for me while my submarine transited the the straits at night somewhere in the Caribean. I missed those days alone in the woods discovering things totally on my own because there was nothing better to do for a whole summer. And I miss that little girl whose name I can't remember who played doctor with me (only I was the patient) behind the shed when she and her mother came to visit for half a day. I miss my newly discovered ability to spin a poem that could melt a maiden's heart, until she tired of it and giggled while sharing it with her girlfriends, to my great dismay. THESE things I miss.


The world I live in today is NOT the world I envisioned those thirty-odd years ago when the future looked bright and I knew I was going to have to find me a really cool pair of shades. Instead, it is anything BUT bright, but it is warmer, and scarier, and indeed the very "end times" the religious loonies are running around screaming about but for entirely different reasons. Jesus ISN'T pissed, he's NOT coming back, and he's dead. He's fucking DEAD, people! WE, the human race, are making the end of this world a self-fulfilling prophecy, due to our stupidity, our arrogance, our aggression, our greed, and our refusal to keep our own nest clean.

Would I trade what I know for my youthful ignorance?

No, not for one second. I'm looking MY executioner straight in his eyes. I'm looking at YOU, mankind.

Pain

Well, folks, it's that time again.......yep, you got it! Time for an all-new episode of TTEM, the blog that 3 out of 27 Estonians described as "something the likes of which they had never seen before, since they haven't even had computers for very long, and what's a blog anyway?" That, my friends, is as opposed to a re-run, which we here at Pendragon Hold refuse......REFUSE, I tell you, to allow on these sacred pag.........what?..........we just ran one? Oh.........never-mind, you got a new episode, be happy.

So, what has happened to justify staining the internet with yet another posting about the goings-on here in the midsts of rednecks and alligators?

That I'm not sure I can answer..........

However........
That old demon that used to haunt THE Wife is rearing it's ugly head again. Yep, after quite a long period of relative inactivity, her "spasmodic torttacollis", as they like to call it in doctor speak, has returned with a vengeance and we have returned her to the neurologist for another round of botox injections to calm the effected area and put a stop to these constant headaches/migraines/hell-on-earth for non-masochistic types.

The GOOD news?

Well, it seems that instead of our firstborn child, lots of money, and an arm and a leg, our prescription meds carrier seems to only want a rather standard $20 for a "thirty-day supply"...wink, wink.

I asked the rep if she fully understood the drug I was inquiring about and she assured me (wink wink) that she did.

I ceased arguing with her.

THE (well, not THE, but one of the) daughter starts her new job with AT&T tomorrow and will soon be bringing home bacon so that we will not have to deport her elsewhere. Actually, we do enjoy her company and will enjoy even more what her EMPLOYED company can contribute to the household. I must point out, however, that she HAS done some cooking and cleaning and such around the house which has saved us from having to hire an undocumented Canadian to do it for us, even thou we never have been able to afford that anyway.

We got a nice chunk of tax refund from Uncle Sammy this year, but Aunt Property Taxes promptly ate almost all of it, so we are going to have to wait for cousin DUBYA to send us more money to spend. I'd like a brand new Imac, but I'm married, and I wouldn't be for long if I scratched THAT itch. You husbands out there, say 'AMEN, BROTHER".

So, for this episode, just to shake things up a bit, I would like everybody to write their comments on a small piece of paper and tape it to a nice 7 mega-pixel digital camera that uses AA batteries, has excellent low-light performance, and mail it to Pendragon Hold, RR1, somewhere in Florida.

And have a blessed day!

OK, I know that all of you, my loyal fans, have been waiting with baited.....no.....bated......is that right?.......whatever....breath......for an exciting new episode of TTEM, but I am afraid that instead you are going to have to settle for one of those mundane updates....you know, the kind in which I tell you what's been going on since the last post, and you go......."I come here for THIS?"

Seriously, folks, it has been a rather interesting couple of weeks. Last night, I got to meet my youngest cousin for the first time when her and her significant other accepted our invitation for dinner. As I mentioned on my last post, my Aunt June had tracked me down after many years of disconnect, and Angela was THE relative that just happened to be living in the same city/town/locality as me.

It turns out that Angela and Rick, or "Silver", as she likes to call him, also happen to be following the Wiccan path, and so we had some very good things in common right off the bat. Also, Rick happens to be in the Navy, which is the service smart people go for, since we get to stand out to sea and pummel the enemy without getting our fingernails dirty. They are quite the pair and it was a pleasure meeting them.

Yesterday the evil twin's car decided it wanted to go on vacation and conked out on her while she was making a grocery store run. So, we had it towed across the street and parked it at a garage, hoping they can fix what ails the car without charging the poor girl and arm and a leg. She IS getting money back from Uncle Sam, so hopefully it will find it's way into the bank so she can pay for the repair.

We've already had to blow our entire tax return on our property taxes, which together with the new garbage collection fee they imposed on us is actually higher than before our esteemed Governor "cut" our taxes. What a joke; I'm sure this is working out just fine for those folks who own those half-million dollar homes. The same thing will happen with the homestead exemption they doubled. They actually make you SKIP the next 25000 before allowing you the second exemption, which again only helps those with far more expensive homes while not helping us poor folks at all.

Meanwhile, back in the goat pen, my neighbor's pit bull, a friendly little chap with jaws that could snap a telephone pole in two with no effort whatsoever, has been digging under my wire fence and prancing around with the goats. He hasn't made any real attempt to ATTACK the goats per se', but then again, he might have been held at bay by Billy and those wicked horns of his. Whatever, I am out there installing new posts and running some electric wire along the bottom. That should do the trick. I would really hate to have to shoot my neighbor's dog.

Don't ever let anybody tell you that Wiccan ceremonies are immune to hilarity. During our Imbolc service meditation, Lolla, the confused cat, decided to join us on top of the table while we sat, eyes close, hands held in contemplation, while he/she backed into THE Wife's face and rubbed her nose with it's butt! So much for THAT meditation, after we all got over the side-splitting laughter! Hopefully we didn't offend any deities.......

I will be adding a few more links to the list over there >>>>>>>, new reads I am thoroughly enjoying, and hope you enjoy to, if you aren't already.

Well, like I promised you, this post is so exciting you are even now propping up your eyelids with toothpicks to get through the whole thing, but, it was worth it, every word of it, wasn't it? Smile......