The Successful Thistle Sifter

I so wanted to be the first to trumpet the lovely re-launch of my dear friend Andrew's site Thistleshrine, but I am not. Only his photography link is active so far (and is as highly recommended as anything can be) but check back all too frequently and impatiently for his words and leather to appear and give you even greater cause to love.

Thirty-Five Years of Paranoid Flapdoodle

Only now, three days later, am I picking through the various omens and weirdness that popped up during what ended up being a very long birthday. Tops: I woke up at 6:30 a.m. to the house across the street blazing away, eventually to burn out completely and take part of the tree with it. The SFD eventually put it out, and no one was killed or seriously injured (though someone's Trivial Pursuit "Genus Edition" got pretty waterlogged). We decided to watch the fire on TV, maybe to have an insulating layer of objectivity between us and our early morning fears . . . anyway, every station covering it kept giving out our address, not our blazing neighbors’. Sure, they likely couldn’t read the proper address through the smoke, steam, water, flames—but it’s just bizarre that they decided to blatantly give out the wrong address instead. We laughed this off in the morning, but later in the day, alone and worn out, I started getting spooked by it. What sort of omen was it? Was there really no fire across the street? Was this all a grotesquely exteriorized metaphor, and if so for what? And how did that broken broom later blocking my path on the sidewalk fit in?

That night I got drunk, and all this fangy angst subsided properly for a time. But during the drunking, I experienced my first and stupidest episode of real precognition, and started anew the silly second-guessing. Dig: this curly-headed drunkard one booth over and I started talking, and suddenly I was hit with the inspiration: “He’s gonna start talking about the Kinks.” Sure enough, with no lead-in, no context, no warning, he began a ten minute friendly tirade about th’aforementioned Kinks (his oft-repeated point being that I should love The Kink Kontroversy as much as he, an impossible feat). At the risk of boring my only reader, then, I ask: what accounts for this? Does the alcoholic suppression of the forebrain allow messages from ten seconds from now to leak through? Does it help the telepathic broadcast of fanatic single-minded interests? Some combination? A big pissy delusion? And why, why so stupid a message?

Into the Mystic Menstrual Mistrial Night We Go, Hey Ho, Hey Ho

I, Sleeve Consefuckingquences, hereby dedicate this branding, spanking new weblog as a birthday present to Ian, whose loyal pseudonym I have been since the turn of the century at least. Please, gentle public, consider everything within to be provisional, including the wretchedly un-purple pink-ass borders hereupon; there ain't much I can do about that shit right now, 'fraid to say.

What shall be the nature of this entertainment? Likely much as before: politics, occult, attempted satire, merry jests & boastings & all such rat's-ass claptrap. Gone of course is any pretense at furthering the non-existent agenda of Purple Ass Press, now defuncter than ten Buffalo Bills. Perhaps, with a renewed purity (and pinker-than-christ borders), a genuinely blessed agenda'll emerge, one dedicated to th'uplift of all those beloved souls under the "loyalists" heading to the right, then to th'upswell of those they love, and the beloveds of the latter, and so on till all are just a wee fleeting bit elevated though they know it or not. . .

Or, at least best, I'll find a better reason to stay awake till one a.m., drinking the barley pop, digging the hushed roar of my cityscape from my Capitol Hill balcony, reflecting on the beauty of my family and yours, keeping my eyes off the solitaire program for a while, and shrinking my cynicism into little flitty flecks I can brush brashly from my lapels with the usual insouciance of an overgrown adolescent. Or some such silly helplessness, yes, gods, yes.