"and me, the chirp..."

The Marlinspike Hall gang is home from the wilds of the Lone Alp, where we did some x-treme camping.

Oh, okay, so "extreme" as it gets when hoisting and foisting all the livelong day with such a diverse (rapidly becoming my least favorite of the Progressive Vocabulary, soon to join such Coastal Suck Speech as "artisinal," and, maybe, "regional") crowd as The Castafiore, Cabana Boy the Unexpected Tenderfoot, Marlboro Man Wannabe Sven Feingold, Fred I-Can't-Leave-The-Fire's-Embers-Alone Vanderbuck, and me, The Chirp.

For the second time in elle est belle la seine's history, let me explain my use of "The Chirp." The first?  I had to look it up and it made me laugh so much I got sick. It's called, "Yay, Us!" Largely, it celebrates the wisdom of myself and Grader Boob in not procreating, in ending the line.  Of course, not everyone Born of the Blood was so pessimistic and our streak was ruined.  Still, "yay, us" for doing our darned level best.  Anyway, the previous reference to "The Chirp" came midst that family-fortifying affair known as the Casey Anthony trial down Florida way.  One day, exulting in my family's accomplishments, I wrote a friend:

kept the tv on and watched the trial every time i took a break... lordy, lordy, lordy. you know... my family is/was dysfunctional but i am slightly cheered to think that we never murdered anyone, or covered up major crimes. we had loads of denial, silence, repression, enabling, and our share of abuse. but we never murdered anyone.   yay, us!

Believe it or not, the past few days have uncovered more reasons to ejaculate another "Yay, Us!" but the prospect of relaying the story makes me want to... you know, puke some more.  So we'll save the Weirditude of my "family" for better times.  I'll give you a hint, just enough to imperil my bleeding stomach:  an oil portrait of the Mother-Unit, kept hidden for over 30 years, presumably from the Nazis, now in my possession.  It's beautiful, she's lovely, and she's about to hit the Underground Railroad of Mother's Oil Portraits.

Back to "The Chirp."  It's a phrase from  Joni Mitchell's Miles of Aisles, her designation for her role in The Band -- in that case, L.A. Express, back during the Court and Spark tour.

That reference drew a weird amount of ink, and I wouldn't waste time explaining it again but for that irritating Urban Dictionary.  Their chirp is rarely a noun, and is as far from referencing my chirp as chirp can get.

So yeah, we're "home," though squatters we shall always be.

I'll talk more at you when the meds kick in, the ginger ale is sipped, and Dobby gets caught up on belly rubs.  I threw this vid/song in when composing "Yay, Us!" but mean it even more haphazardly now than I did then.

The Chirp:

My apologies

Dear Readers, Friends, and Odd Family Members --

Well, that greeting sounded nice in my head... but I guess it is too full of assumptions.  Then, O Misery, I would have to explain those assumptions, and would lose all my "Readers," most of my "Friends," and definitely the majority of those oddities known as blood relations.

So I shall keep it brief.

I just got released from the hospital, an unexpected stay, to say the least.  Nothing was accomplished and despite days of truly dubious treatment, I am home feeling about as bad as I did seven days ago, when the detritus hit the fan.

O, how I love the Manor and all of its art and tapestries, its bizarre twists and turns and unexpected staircases.
O, how I love Fred.
O, how I adore the Domestic Staff, whether genetically pre-determined as Marlinspike Hall servants or whether servants by the exercise of good old fashioned Free Will!
O, how I prefer The Big Round Bed with my Big Old Quilts, washed into soft submission years ago.
O, how I missed the Feline Remnant... all three demanded immediate brushing and kisses.  It's nice to feel needed, no matter how that need comes.

But I did pick a nice title, I think.  I do apologize -- for neglecting visitors to elle est belle la seine la seine elle est belle, and neglecting people I care about, the two sometimes not being mutually exclusive.

At least I can promise that my time spent attached to i.v. solutions and at the mercy of medicos was not a total waste.  I feel an onslaught of blog posts coming on...

making it to 6:30

i love the new (to me) blogger "stats." i can know, for instance, that someone from denmark is at present looking at the strange compline piece i wrote last week.

i am not alone! someone else is awake, online, and, quite likely, given his present activity, also suffering!

my mdvip go-to guy will field a call from me in one hour, as i figure that 6:30 am is a decent enough time for phoning in what is clearly a quasi-emergency. i've had my index finger primed for button-punching since, oh-h-h-h, roughly 1 am.

at roughly 1 am, though, i was hysterical. not "kind of" hysterical, or "hysterical" in a literary sense that has nothing whatsoever to do with gender bias. no, i mean: hysterical, as in, freud would be both bored and delighted.

there has been an onslaught of "oh god... oh god oh god oh god." i whined, in a particularly ugly whining voice: "heeeellllppppp me... oh god oh god oh god... heeeellllppppp me."

fred, sworn to take care of me, has managed to slip into his old ways and spend most of his time deeply asleep.

what is really irritating? oh god... oh god oh god oh god? well, that would be fred's insistence that he'll do whatever i decide to do. as in: drive us to the emergency room/department... or fill my water bottle... or feed the felines... or tie a knot in the warbling tongue of la bonne et belle bianca castafiore.

as she practiced her best, and only, aria last evening, how could i not feel... oh god oh god oh god oh god... that i was being mocked?

"ah, je ris de me voir si belle dans ce miroir?" i mean, really? as the muted dulcet tones of moi -- barfing and moaning, moaning and barfing, in full-fledged feminine hysteria -- served as bad moravian background singing from just outside detroit? pure mockery, pure mockery.

don't touch my sentences. any of them. attribution, even spelling, might be a bit off, but i am writing, clearly, from my death bed.


wow. i just plugged in "female hysteria" over at dear, dear wikipedia (and if you haven't been moved by jimmy wales to help out with a few bucks, what are you waiting for?), and i am stunned.

Since ancient times women considered to be suffering from hysteria would sometimes undergo "pelvic massage" — manual stimulation of the genitals by the doctor until the patient experienced "hysterical paroxysm" (orgasm).

yes, okay, [oh god oh god -- yaddayadda] so i was tossing around terms with which i am not really familiar. my connaissance of freud came from literary criticism classes at berkeley. worse, those classes were in french. what did make freud of acute interest, at the time, was the influence of that neer-do-well, jeffrey masson.

wow, that was a long time ago. what were we so riled up about? we filled auditoriums just to hear the guy, and this was when both foucault and derrida (as well as derri-da-da's son) were essentially in residence.

[it's later and i am rereading this, despite my eyes inclination to cross.  we heard him because he was "happening" at the time, because he'd published the assault on truth, was fired from the freud archives, had a libel suit ongoing against janet malcolm of the new yorker.

whatever. i am in pain, and laughing doesn't help matters any -- as it jiggles jiggly-prone body parts and, well, that hurts. still, for you, dear reader from denmark --(prince hal? hal? is that you?) -- we will share the aforementioned wikipedia's introduction to dr. jeffrey masson.

to whit, to woo:

Dr. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (born March 28, 1941 as Jeffrey Lloyd Masson in Chicago, Illinois) is an American author, residing in New Zealand. Masson is best known for his conclusions about Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. In his book The Assault on Truth, Masson argued that Freud may have abandoned his seduction theory because he feared that granting the truth of his female patients' claims that they had been sexually abused would hinder the acceptance of his psychoanalytic methods. (Several Freud scholars have disputed the traditional story that Freud's seduction theory patients reported having been sexually abused in early childhood, the basis on which Masson built his case.) He is a vegan and has written about animal rights.

oh god!  if you were in any way involved in what *must* be called the BROUHAHA (mwa ha ha ha!) surrounding his book, Assault on Truth, and the postpublication rock star tour, you must read the wikipedia entry for dr. masson.  Curious as to what... well, as to what happened to masson? where did he go, what did he do, in that post assault on truth phase?

Since the early 1990s, Masson has written a number of books on the emotional life of animals, one of which, When Elephants Weep, has been translated into 20 languages. He has explained this radical change in the subject of his writings as follows:

“ I'd written a whole series of books about psychiatry, and nobody bought them. Nobody liked them. Nobody. Psychiatrists hated them, and they were much too abstruse for the general public. It was very hard to make a living, and I thought, 'As long as I'm not making a living, I may as well write about something I really love: animals.'

my favorite comment over at amazon for when elephants weep was: "i loved it but it was way too anthropomorphic." mwa ha ha!
 
ouch.  ouch.  oh god.

and then, of course, it must be said: more power to him.

and thanks to him, my essential weirdness, an inspirational unknown visitor from denmark, the influence of anti-nausea medication, and high anxiety?  it is 6:28 am.  made it!