It Is What It Is Day

I make lists. Lots of them. Lists can break otherwise daunting tasks into specific, clear elements.

You don't build a barn or give a dinner party without making a list.

Then there's the other benefit of lists---the forgetting. Once something is put on paper, under the unauspicious heading of "Tuesday" or "To Do", you can stop worrying about it. You don't have to remember once it's on the List. You can dump it right out of your brain for now.

What a relief.

It's like that with journaling. Still, try as I might, I've never been able to fill a journal, though I'm very fond of notebooks. Hardbound with narrow, crisp lines, I must have a dozen of them on the bookshelf, none of which have more than a quarter of its pages filled. I'd like to complete one front and back, top to bottom-- fill it with ideas, private thoughts, drawings and lists. No success yet. I begin quite well but, eventually, will furiously scrawl an idea that comes too fast for neat, sane lettering. I end up with ten pages that will be meaningless in six months. Or worse, I'll shortsightedly tear out a page or two----generally sketches to pin to the easel.

The Purist in me (not the one who will only mat paintings in white or won't buy a cover or tribute CD, and who is totally sane, but the other Purist, who occasionally gets lost in details, and whose sanity is questionable), will deem the notebook voided, game over.

I've tried folding the offending pages, or marking them off with a paperclip. Nope. Even then I can't ignore the missing pages. That's a little crazy. But only a little.

Personally, I'm referring to today as Mostly Reading and Eating Various Forms of Dark Chocolate Day.

The flowers are nice too.

In our backyard is an object Pete named "The Ghost of Thanksgiving Past." He refers to events which, when told, make a longish, weird story I may tell someday.

I'll tell you now though, that the aforementioned events left me with two things:

One is a fairly strong aversion to ever consuming pork again.

The other is a a pig's skull inside a bird's cage, which has been drying in the desert sun of our back yard for several months.

In addition to being Mostly Reading and Eating Various Forms of Dark Chocolate Day, I'll refer to today as The Day the Pig Had His Due Day. In other words, I know, today, exactly what the skull wants to be.

Damned inconvenient. Then, as the button sent by Lord Daecabhir says, It Is What It Is.

It's not like I didn't know this was coming. Creative storms are preceded by warnings.
And I knew, eventually, that fucking pig would talk.

Still, it's damned inconvenient.

In Stephen King's short story "Everything is Eventual", Mr. Sharpton says to Dink;

"Because creative people aren't always in charge. And
when they do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge. They're just sort
of rolling along with their eyes shut, yelling Wheeeee."

So it turns out that one of the things I did this Valentine's Day was to float a pig's skull and jaw bones in a large doubled ziplock baggy of bleach solution, which will send billions of microbes currently living on the bones to that wondrous potato salad in the sky. The smell alone should keep cats and raccoons away, but just in case, I put the whole thing back in the birdcage, out of reach.

The whole defies photos. Do your imaginary best, and know it's even more gruesome.

Tomorrow then, will be time to unwrap a new notebook. Wheeeee!

Lovely.
Hope your day has been at least as good.