Saturday, August 18, 2012

My Kingdom for a Pensieve

Thoughts.  Too many.  Once again, I find myself wishing for a Pensieve, à la Dumbledore.

It was only a few days ago that I learned "dumbledore" was not just the name of Hogwart's best ever headmaster, but also designates a bumblebee.  One day, this will pay off in a fierce game of Scabble. Or maybe Scrabble.

"Scabble" has the sound of a promising game, but more of a physical one, involving grabbing, slinging, or incessant itching, than a sanitized board game.

Or it could all be more fodder for the Pensieve.

I wonder if geniuses (of whom we are aware) -- who always seem to have a little extra cranium working for them -- have less need of a Pensieve than those of us with normal sized heads.  Ah, but sometimes their lop-sidedness makes them tip over, endangering their expertise in areas like... Scabble.

Yeah, so the big news in the smallest hectare of Twitter is that I confessed to bullying a person.  She made the mistake of being a prissy-panted smart-aleck who is more passive-aggressive than even... Fred.  She's mean.  And I'm a bully!  I love algebra, and mathematics, in general, and I am pretty sure that together, she and I are Low Common Denominators, as well as, on occasion, rational and irrational -- but above all, in algebraic language, she is a constant and I, a variable.

What I haven't confessed to are my feelings of real friendship, and even kinship, for the person she fearlessly picks on -- not to elevate things too suddenly (Word: They say that applying a cold spoon to your upper back will help to stop sudden nosebleeds brought on by incredibly ridiculous unexpected ascensions... Where the hell is that Pensieve?).  Where was I?  Ah.  Not to elevate things too suddenly, but I, like Saint Peter, denied -- and a good deal more than three times, always out to fool that triune-obsessed crowing cock -- my friendship.  Did my friend suffer for it?  I don't really know.  Because we are a lot alike, it may actually have helped her, as anger is an unparalleled fuel for some of us.  Just think of Mitt Romney's clenched jaw and alien, half-choke of a laugh in interviews when he's p.o.ed at the small-minded, repetitive questioning, and I think it will become clear to you that he is running for President because he is so intensely pissed off, he just can't stand it anymore.  I await Chris Matthews call -- put me in, coach, I'm ready to play Hardball.

Right, so, summing up:  There is a passive-aggressive bully that I have bullied, and a woman that I would like to befriend but don't really have the required strength necessary to be her friend.  She is high-maintenance, and since I am, in Fred's lexicon, "overwhelming," this looks like another case, Batman, of a Gordian Knot.

Okay, since truth-telling is the order of the day, the Milanese Nightingale jiust jabbed her knife pointy nails into my thigh -- her favorite acrylic nail style, with glitter and artful white patterns over a black base coat of shellac so brilliant and intense that her nails cease to grow out at all, but do, in fact, retract.  The truth is that Gordian Knots are a breeze to undo and I have simply chosen to stay all tied up.  It's easier that way.  "You want me to do what?  Sorry, can't, I'm all tied up..."

The appearance of complication, in other words.  The last refuge of the boring.

Aw,. I'm depressing myself and that might mean a trip to the helpful and uplifting Dr. Phil's Depression and Grief "Support" message board, where I'd undoubtedly run into that paranoiac, who would both anger and make me bust a gut laughing, and then where would I be?

But I might also find news from the almost-friend, whose husband is dying of lung cancer.  They are all still smoking, but even that doesn't arouse enough rage to stop my caring.  I mean, a good deal of my bone issues were brought on by corticosteroids, and were they forced down my gullet?  No, I took them, I took them eagerly, even, at times, as sometimes they were the only workable solution against pain.  I figure that cigarettes have the same function for some.

Shoot, I remember sitting on the back steps at our Mathews Avenue back yard (which you had to see to believe... we could have supplied a panda clan with bamboo), smoking one short, fat fag after another -- Gauloises, back when they were still a French cigarette.  Now, I'd have to boycott them, because they use Syrian tobacco.  (Pensieve!)  I'd be armed, as well, with high-octane italian roast or a Diet Coke.  And the pain that brought me to perch on those warped wooden steps was rapidly subsumed -- or sublimated -- by the better feelings of nausea and dizziness.   Then, as soon as I was able, I'd jump up, refreshed, ready to go impart knowledge of French nineteenth century literature to young minds, or wash the dirty clothes of homeless men, or maybe cook Fred a real American breakfast, or prepare a revelatory reading lesson for my literacy tutoree. You get my self-sacrificial drift.

The better thing woulda been to grab our well-maintained kaiser blade and sling blade the hell out of the bamboo, and haul it to the panda exhibit at the zoo, coughing and puking all the while.

I don't *feel* any different for having confessed to bullying this delusional and nasty woman.  I am so far from an apology, at the moment, that images of what form my Citizenship Award will take is far more interesting a train of thought.

Ah well.

It's a quiet Saturday morning here in Marlinspike Hall -- at least, once I escaped the moral rectitude of The Castafiore.  Sven came in for some refreshment -- he's trimming some of the Labyrinth that tends to get a bit wild in the final days of ManorFest -- and the two of them promptly disappeared into her private apartment.
Fred is fast asleep, having been up all night playing his new ukulele and tending a sick cat.  The Genetically Indentured Domestic Staff has the morning off, and almost everyone, it seemed, headed for the underground tunnels, the straightest distance between The Manor and Tête de Hergé's best West Lone Alp pub.

I haven't been able to bathe -- not even take a thorough sponge bath -- in two days, so that is on my mind.  Oh, I used medicated wipes around incisions and what my dear StepMom called the "hot spots," plus I did do a half-hearted treatment with hibiclens here, and with acetic acid solution there -- but all in all, I feel gross.  But as I have again begun to do headers into the walls, getting in the shower hasn't seemed wise.

Ah, but cut the Gordian Knot, eh?  I am going to take both cane and grabber with me into the torture chamber and darned if I will climb out before every bit of not-me detritus is washed away.

That's the attitude!

I also need to clean a bookcase, and somehow, the paperbacks that were stored there.  As I was culling offerings to the Militant Lesbian Existential Feminists' annual book sale, I arrived at one of the old Mission book cases that is rarely visited, and stuck in a corner.  It seems that this must have been one of Sam-I-Am's favorite spots to mark, that dear dead feline, and it has dried to a gummy and thoroughly gross consistency.  The bookcase I can clean, easily.  But what to do with the books?!  It feels a sin (more sinful even than bullying that Dr. Phil Fanatic) but I may have to throw them away.  By which I mean, of course, carting them to the paper recycling bin.  The books Sammy so loved seem to be an odd mix of Maeve Binchy (bless her dear departed soul), Dean Koontz, and, sadly, some Dennis Lehane.

Today's mail may bring something I've been dreading.  Brother-Unit Grader Boob informed me recently that my stepmother intended to write me a thank you note for the card and the boxwood I sent her when my father died in early July.  As I told him, receiving a thank you note for *that* may well break my heart.  But it is Her Way, and therefore I will take the nasty tasting medicine in one quick gulp.

I kind of hope it rains.  The Cistercian's orchard needs it badly, and maybe the drone drone drone of it will keep the household either asleep or happy to remain perched on a bar stool.  After I clean me, the bookcase, and any salvageable novels, I think another cup of coffee and a chapter of the book I just started reading will be lovely.

Bully and Pseudo-Friend, signing off.




Uploaded by  on Nov 16, 2011

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