This morning the squinty-eyed, snot-dripping, drooling fright-mask gimp – which is to say, moi – tried out a breadmaker she hadn’t been able to use, mainly because Kohl’s had re-boxed a defective machine and re-sold it to her. No dough kneading paddle. Yes indeedy, yer Southern Baptist capitalism ideals hard at work in Kohl’s Department Store, boys ‘n girls! Screw the gimp and go straight to heaven! I’d finally found the time and energy to buy a replacement paddle off of eBay. The first loaf is underway. I’m still not convinced it will work properly, but we’ll see.
In any event, the second of the two Lammas feasts was last weekend, so the "home baked fresh bread" part of it was for that.
While doing that, I tried to teach myself to drink coffee in a diner without horrifying the other diners. I knew I looked like Stevie Wonder what with the head twists getting my mouth situated around the cup. Still dribbled, though. Kept saying, "F**k me," which ended up sounding like "uck knee" because I was having such problems with "f"s and "m"s, but fortunately, the only two people near me were grandparents, both of whom seemed to be hard of hearing. "Son of a itch" is also problematic, what with the "b" no longer pronounceable.
No drugstores carried a flat eye patch, only hard, plastic convex ones. I bought headbands to hold a satiny eye pillow over the right eye, in order to keep the eyelid closed, as I was having such bad reactions to adhesives. CVS only had eye bandaids.
I tried one, and within 3 minutes, the adhesive had begin to liquefy in the high heat and run into my eye, which couldn’t close. The chemical burning was appalling, and I frantically ripped off the bandaid, taking a lot of my eyebrow with it. Thinking: I know women who would pay a mint for an eyebrow wax like that – again, I’m not one of them. Yes, that was me in the CVS parking lot, muttering, "Uck knee, uck knee, uck knee!" while staunching the eyebrow bleed-out.
I swear, in a very short period of time I will look just like a browless Norma Desmond. Well, on one side of my face I will, anyway.
Later on, I got a call from one of my co-workers, based in North Carolina, who happens to be a nutball christian. I love her, but her condescension towards every other religious practice but her own is ... well, it’s sickening, really. Jesus himself never acted as disrespectfully towards others as she does. Her POV: iffn ida only axe Jaysis innew my hort, he’da healed me bah now!
I yell non-stop for ten minutes about any deity who blackmails deformed gimps just so he can pocket their membership dues, until I hear my friend laughing. I’m not sure if she’s laughing because I’m so measurably predictable, or because I sound just like Daffy Duck with my deformed mouth. "Dethpicable!!!" Fine. Now she can happily go tell her pastor she battled with a lisping heretic and score some brownie points. I need to learn not to pay self-righteous, condescendingly rude christians any mind. Really. When she insults MY deity, I hang up on her.
I have come to make the lower realities like the higher realities, and the outer realities like the inner realities. I have come to unite them in this Temple Space, where they reveal themselves through images and symbols.
Gospel of Philip, 69:1-4
Images and symbols. Hmmmm. See now, that’s the Jesus I could respect – the mystical and intelligent one from whom one might learn something worthwhile. 99.99999% of his followers strike me as your basic retards, or sex-starved pedophiliac demons. I swear, he’s probably hanging around doing regular Homer Simpson impressions - (clapping one hand to his head and yelping "doh!") – every time one of his followers does or says something that proves one (dumb as a doorknob) or the other (sex-starved sicko). Guy’s gotta have one hell of a headache by now.
It does make me think of Sekhmet, though. Sekhmet, the only deity who has ever healed me of anything. She’s never demanded that I "axe her inno my hort", but she’s one of those powerful deities that isn’t standing around waiting on me, either. I have no idea why I didn’t think of her first when I came down with this miserable palsy. Ever since the cancerous tumor on my forehead arrived, and the non-stop series of disasters and heartbreaks which followed it, I haven’t done much as far as "religious studies" go. I can barely remember the invocation ceremony. True, I didn’t need an invocation when she healed me of my lifelong phobia without even blinking, but with that, I was being told that either I lost the phobia or I died. With Sekhmet, I’m always mindful of her personality: she fully expects me to do what I can to heal myself before I invoke her. Otherwise, she regards me irritably as incorrigibly lazy. She’s not my handmaiden; she’s my deity. She’s the Blazing Eye of the Sun, the Lioness of Courage. I really love Sekhmet.
I start poking food into the right corner of my mouth instead of my left to strengthen the muscles on the dead side of my face. At the grocery store, I bought a box of those chintzy imitation New York soft pretzels. They’re nothing LIKE New York’s soft street pretzels of course (Damien! You’ll miss the pretzels!), but they are somewhat chewy once you nuke them for a minute or so. Chewy’s good. Chewy gives your face muscles a workout. I take all of my medications on schedule. I spend short periods of time without the eye pillow, to practice moving the eyelid. I begin to prepare an invocation. I watch Cinema Paradiso. (If you’re wondering what that has to do with anything, pay attention to the muscles in your face when you scrunch it up and start crying pitifully at the end of the film. That film slays me, every time.)
Sekhmet is a great healer, sometimes called the Great One of Healing, and her priests and priestesses were known as the greatest healers in the land.
In honor of Damien’s infectious excitement about the upcoming Harvest Moon, I downloaded Rosemary Clooney’s version of "Shine On, Harvest Moon" (there are maybe a handful of women singers whose voices I can tolerate – Rosemary Clooney is one of them) into my iPod and am listening to it.
"Witchcraft has always been a religion of poetry, not theology."
Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, Special 20th Anniversary Edition, p. 32
The sonnet cycle returned. Just when I think I’m crawling out from under the curse I’ve been under, I’m proven decidedly wrong. People I work with have commented on it ("You really do seem to be under a run of very bad luck!") My boss’s boss hugged me (he NEVER does that) and then asked jokingly if I needed him to kill a few chickens for their entrails – it made me burst out laughing, actually, until I wondered how HE knew about the age-old method of identifying and then lifting curses. He’s a scientist!
In a way, it made me feel better ... I no longer felt like I was being overly narcissistic and self-pitying. So many other people had noticed the serious run of accidents, injuries, surgeries, disasters, heart-breaks, odd illnesses, one right after the other ... it wasn’t my imagination at work. It FELT scripted, far beyond coincidence. People would say, "I’ll pray for you," and it was all I could do not to scream, "No! Don’t!" because that always made it worse. I just reeled from one horrible moment to the next, without much of a pause between disasters. The agoraphobia wasn’t a mental aberration – it was perfectly logical. Every time I turned around something horrible was happening.
It certainly felt like chaos, but I couldn’t find an explanation for it. Still can’t.
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