A Few Tears Later...

So... last we left off I was doing a lot of drinking and crying and just starting to realize that was no way to live.

Funny thing about unhappiness... you can feel totally trapped in it one day, and another just feel like, "This blows and I'm not gonna do it anymore."

But the resolve is immediately tested by being forced to deal with all the bullshit you were trying so hard to be distracted from in the first place...

Well, for me that came in the form of getting rid of everyone but one best friend. (She lives in San Bernadino so she was never around for the unhealthy stage anyways.) And of course, the patient love of my life who had to deal with my... let's just call it... emotional apocalypse.

So, friendless (by choice, but it was a hard choice), I found myself stuck in a 6 month lease with no room mate (in the days before craigslist, how did we live??) in a ghetto as fuck, two story townhouse, aka The Isolation Chamber.

In order to afford it I had to work two jobs so I kept pretty busy. Still, I'd come home to whole lot of lonely, and it completely sucked being alone with my thoughts all that time!

But... it was honestly the best thing that ever happened to me. I recommend an Isolation period to anyone. It's awful and it's wonderful because alone with yourself you have no choice but to find out who you are.

One night I saw some old footage of the Rolling Stones in their acid-taking scarf-wearing glory days and thought: "See, they did something different and it worked for them." 

I wrote in a journal: "I'm different, I've always known it. Different people just have to do different things. I don't know what that means for me, but I hope it's fun!"

I started writing my first goals in the Isolation Chamber (I'm an obsessive goal writer now). The first two:

1) Never suffer another long term period of depression again.
2) Build a circle of friends who only bring good into my life.

I guess you can see where this is going....
Have a rad day today! Here's my parting gift:

Oh, and don't forget about this little guy!

Our world Tuesday: Big Christmas tree

http://showyourworld.blogspot.com/

We have some very big trees in the Park.

Bug's Bus and A Double Celebration

Well, this is a bit of a meringue-y melange of a post, but it's been a busy few days. Dumfries is Winter Festivaled up for St Andrew's Day, the youngest have three days off school for St Andrew's Day, and last night we were all (bar one) partying in The Museum of Anatomy in Glasgow for a graduation and magazine re-launch celebration.
I have yet to ponder the juxtaposition of my discussions with the youngest two on relative penis size in mammals, achondroplasia, acromegaly, cyclopia and anencephaly (an awful lot of things in jars, if you know what I mean) with getting home and putting a tooth under the pillow for the Tooth Fairy to do her stuff with overnight. I feel there's a message there somewhere for me.

Anyway, and first of all, Happy St Andrew's Day to you all. Wave your Saltires! Steam your Haggis! Ride in a Teacup! Etc.

Secondly, I was tipped off by a Dream Lizard this morning that today is also the birthday of Susan Sanford (ArtSparker). And what should arrive in the post this very morning than a package of wearable art by said artist. Yes, I'd been Christmas shopping online, and just look at these goodies (all T-shirts: standard wear for hardy Scots in the deep midwinter).
Sorry, I know I haven't ironed them yet...

There are gallons of designs, plus art, all by Susan available on RedBubble, here. http://www.redbubble.com/search?query=Susan+Sanford

So Happy Birthday Susan, and here's a cake-shaped fountain to celebrate.

Finally, I'm running after the Bus again. Now, The Bug gave us three options, and as the words 'argument' and 'God' don't actually exist together in my theology and there are at least three tree poems in Venti (amazed I've written that many) it was a no-brainer to go for the middle one. Where do you want to live?! If I could find a way of making a living visiting houses that are for sale and having a nose around them, I would. Hang on, Kirsty and Phil...

Anyway, I've incorporated a temporal element into my offering. The poem will, rather like my best one (about a lump of African rock), make no sense to anyone not into the whole Prehistory thing, so here's quick resume to help.

Cradle of Civilisation - Mesopotamia - Land between the rivers - blah, blah - Uruk period - First City - Modes of living - Warfare - Crafts - Administration - Writing = Civilisation. Catalhoyuk, Anatolia predates all this by two millennia.

Links to the other Bus poets are here: http://danabugseyeview.blogspot.com/2010/11/poetry-bus-is-driven-by-bug-buckle-your.html

Chavtastic!

Prehistory is song to me,
Dead sound signs, cities passed.
Uruk, Tell Brak, Adab, Akshak,
Kish, Sippar, Ur and Shurrupak.
Chalcolitic, literate.
Civilised.
But me? I’m just a Stone Age oik,
I wanna live in Catalhoyuk.

male woodpecker feeding for Ruby Tuesday

Obviously a male ( red marking on the back of its head) Woodpecker but which species? Hairy or Downy? We have both visiting, almost daily and I think this is a little Downy!
A woodpecker bonus picture! This I call a swirl of feathers , of a Hairy Woodpecker ( no sign of red so perhaps this is a female Hairy, as I was focusing my camera on a feeding woodpecker, it abruptly flew away.


Got photos with red want to share them?To check out other postings on Ruby Tuesday just click on the Ruby logo on the side bar or here:http://workofthepoet.blogspot.com/. My appreciative thanks to Mary/the teach for hosting this meme

Life Before Derby: It Was The Best/Worst Of Times (mostly worst)

I wouldn't say I was a total alcoholic or anything, but here's what life was like when I was 21, the year before derby: Love, drink, smoke, cry.

Yay!: I had just met the love of my life (now fiance). And I had got an awesome pair of skates at a thrift store that looked a lot like this:

Boo!: I was just beginning to realize how toxic my lifestyle was.

When you don't know who you are yet, life is just a series of distractions you use to fill the gaping hole within you that screams: You are NOT fulfilling your potential!!!!

My "friends" at the time were a bunch of punk rock wannabes and we were living in a toxic wasteland of drinking and drama. If I could sum it up in a picture it would be:

The only bright spot (besides meeting the love of my life) was that we had all started to do our bar hopping on roller skates. Something about rollerskating in the night just felt right. I seemed to be the only one in my circle who didn't totally suck at it, too.

On one such night of debauchery on wheels I reached back behind me, offering a hand to one of my "friends" and shouted, "I'll give you a whip!"

Which resulted in her looking like a drunken pile on the ground, but I was more stunned by this word that had just come out of my mouth... WTF was a "whip"???

Unlike most of the derby vets of my time, I had never heard of roller derby. Not one memory of it being on TV or anything. So where did this whip thing come from??

It would be another year of drinking and tears before I would ever hear that word from another person.
Was it destiny?? A memory of a past life?? I still don't know the answer to that mystery. All I knew was this roller skating was awesome, and I wanted to do more of it!

You might know me as a generally happy person, and I totally am! But you know what, that's not how I started out. It's been an evolution, and a conscious choice.

So I'm gonna be giving a little back story before we get to the magic...

Did you have any reference for roller derby before you were a part of it? Were you in a transitional period before you found out about it too?

Feel free to tell me all about it. Have a rad day today! Here's my parting gift:

Red is for Christmas celebration.

http://workofthepoet.blogspot.com

http://www.suelovescherries.blogspot.com/

Christmas at rocket park, my church Mt Albert Baptist Church organised this fun evening for the people of Mt Albert.

So.... how'd you get into that??

Pretty much every civilian (non derby skater) you meet will ask you this if you ever mention roller derby, right?

I wish I could tell you that 7 years later I tell the story with the same zest and enthusiasm as I had the first time I ever told the tale... But the truth is, I hardly ever tell anyone.

The reason is this: the story is, to me, pretty fucking magical. But takes time to tell and we're all so busy all the time. No one has the time to hear about how the universe conspired to bring roller derby into my life and on that fateful day the skies opened up and I made a 7 year decision based on one gut feeling.

So I usually just say, "Oh, I read about it in Jane Magazine."

Or something totally lame like that, that could nevereverever do justice to the series of synchronistic, serendiptitious events that lined up one after another to make sure that I understood roller derby is meant for me.

Do you remember "Jane"? It was awesome. And don't know how I got to be in the right place at the right time for it, but check out who graced its first cover... 

Yep, Drew Fucking Barrymore.

Anyone my age (30 next week) loves Drew. You can say you don't, but you'd be lying.
ET? Donnie Darko, The Wedding Singer... We grew up with Drew and she grew up with us.

Jane magazine never made it past it's first cycle. But that was just enough time to bring roller derby into my life. With the woman who later made a movie out of it on the cover.

It's a  magical story, and I will tell you all about it. But not now, cuz this feels like a lot of words already and I know you're a busy person.  : D

I don't know how much room the "comments" box has, but if you have a magical "How derby and me found each other" story, I wanna hear it! I lovelovelove those stories.

I never get tired of them, and I have much more important things to be procrastinating from doing, so feel free to share the FULL story. : )

Have a rad day today! Here's my parting gift:

bloggety blog blog!

I've never "blogged" before.

It's such a weird word!!!

But.... I'm considering it. 

Cuz.... I've been in derby for a long time now (since October 2003) and I feel like I have a lot to offer. A lot of experiences, stories, history, skills, strategy... I mean, a lot of it will be irrelevant a few years from now I'm sure. But right now I feel pretty relevant. AND... I'm a Sagittarian. If you don't know what that means: I have an intense need to share.

Knowing something isn't really all that fun unless someone wants to share it with you.

I like to write and I like to share, but who likes to read? Before I go full tilt in dishing out a derby diary of epic proportions**... Is there anybody who would wanna read it?

**the use of the word epic may be an epic exaggeration in this b.l.o.g.

It's such a weird word!!!  Please go to the poll up a bit on this side to let me know if this is worthwhile?
                                          ----------------------------------->

I wanted to end this with something magical, here's what bing.com came up with:

Weekend bridge: Mangere Bridge

http://bayphoto.blogspot.com/

Managere Bridge from Hillsborough Park. A new bridge was built along side the old bridge so when you travel on it, you don't realise that there are actually two bridges.

Over at another Park, I want to show you how Christmas is celebrated Down Under in New Zealand. It is summer here, and we have lots of Christmas in the park and Candle light in the park. This one is taken at Rocket Park where my Church Mt Albert Baptist Church entertained a crowd of four thousand last night.

Broken Conversations: The Monster, El Monstruo

This is a SBE. This is an SBE. This is an SBE.

For those unaware of the initialism above, it stands for Simultaneous Blogging Experiment. At the exact moment, 12.00hrs BST, that this post first appeared, another 11 blogs also appeared. And they all link to each other.

This genius idea comes from Mairi Sharratt, who blogs at A Lump In The Throat.

It is an international experiment. The twelve participants are neatly divided into two camps geographically, and most probably linguistically: six are in Spain and six are in Scotland. We unify in theme, and that theme is Broken Conversations. There are no restrictions on what anyone posts – it could be poetry, prose, pictures, who knows? Just follow the links, all at the end of this post, to find out. That’s what I’ll be doing.

Meanwhile, here’s mine.

Broken Conversations

The Monster, El Monstruo

In the ‘wet, ungenial’ summer of 1816 four extraordinary people found themselves together on the shores of Lake Geneva, in the Villa Diodati. 1816 was the ‘Year Without A Summer’, this being the effect of the massive volcanic eruption of Tambora in 1815.
I shall let one of them, Mary Shelley, continue;

‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron, and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori has some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole – what to see I forget – something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task.
I busied myself to think of a story…’

But the story did not come.

‘I thought and I pondered – vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations…’

Until an evening’s talk about the ‘experiments of Dr Darwin (I speak not on what the doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him)’ led to the nightmare vision:

‘I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken…’

And so Victor Frankenstein, and his monster, were born.

The novel ends with the suicide of the ‘being’, the ‘creature’ the ‘monster’, who says,

‘…I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch who would create another as I have been. I shall die… He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish…’

It was not to be so.

Below are a mere dusting of images of Frankenstein’s monster as imagined, and used, by artists in the two centuries following the publication of Mary Shelley’s book. The most terrible being the anti-Irish political cartoons.

Now, excuse my presumption, but I know what you are thinking. Where is Frankenstein’s monster? The Monster I Know.

For just as the combination of four extraordinary people holed up during that wretched summer in the Villa Diodati led to the original creation, it was the combination of three extraordinary people in Hollywood in 1931 that led to this, the monster that will, I suspect, forever be the one we see when we shut our eyes. This, now, our acute mental vision.

Those three people were James Whale, Jack Pierce and Boris Karloff: the untried director, the respected make-up artist and the unknown actor. Two Englishmen and a Greek in an emerging Hollywood, who together were responsible for one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century.





Broken Conversations in Scotland:

Mairi Sharrat - A Lump In The Throat
http://www.alumpinthethroat.wordpress.com/

Rachel Fox - More about the song
http://crowd-pleasers.blogspot.com/

Russell Jones - Russell Jones
http://poetrusselljones.blogspot.com/

Alastair Cook - Written in my hand
http://alastaircook.blogspot.com/

Peggy Huges/Scottish Poetry Library - Our old Sweet etcetera
http://scottishpoetrylibrary.wordpress.com/

Broken Conversations in Spain:

Roger Santiváñez
http://junin381.blogspot.com/

Cisco Bellavista
http://bellabestias.blogspot.com/

Jesús Ge
http://elgritocapicua.blogspot.com/

Ana Pérez Cañamares
http://elalmadisponible.blogspot.com/

Felipe Zapico
http://narcisoelvalvulista.blogspot.com/

Martaerre (Marta R. Sobrecueva)
http://miraletras.blogspot.com/

I thank you for your attention. Gracias!
Enjoy the tour...