Dad and Flowers

Oh, y’all, when I talked to my parents just now they were still so shook I couldn’t bear to even tease them a little bit about Dad being stricken by Bell’s Palsy by God for running over my flowers. Mom was all “It could have been so much worse. We’re so lucky… blessed, I mean, blessed.”

Dad was all complaining because he can’t hear out of his ear and he can’t drive because his eye isn’t quite right. But, if my dad’s complaining, you know he’s feeling better. It’s when he’s sweet that you have to worry something’s really wrong.

Thank the gods the Butcher went with them.

Anyway, in their honor, here are some of the new flowers in my garden. If you could identify these first ones, I’d appreciate it. I thought they were a weed, but they look like a real thing now.

Two Months

I have been thinking about, if I wanted to do the ghost stories as a book, how to organize them. I love that they are a month’s worth of stories and that they lend themselves so well to be read one at a time, one per night (on a side note, didn’t we decide that the time kind of sucked last time, that it was too late at night that they were published? Help me remember. I’m leaning more towards cuing them to go up at 6 p.m. but I’m hoping someone can remind me.).

So, I want to keep that structure, I think. But there’s no good reason to have two Octobers. So, I’m thinking of organizing the stories into two groups–April and October. April is the lead-up to Walpurgis Night, which is an excellently appropriate night to build towards by reading ghost stories. And October is, of course, October. Plus, I think that suggests some of the cyclical and mythic rhythms I’m trying to get at in the stories.

Just typing it out and rereading it kind of satisfies me, so I think that’s what I’m going to do.

Family Crap

The family is stuck in Albuquerque where my dad is in the hospital and the trailer is in the repair shop. The trailer needs new breaks. My dad, apparently, has Bell’s Palsy.

Well, fuck me, Martha. I knew he was speaking strangely when he was here. I thought he had a sore tooth or something. I even asked him about it and he kind of blew me off.

I feel a little helpless, even though the Butcher assures me everything is going to be fine.

Can We Have a Moritorium on the MLK Invoking?

Yes, I’m so sure that every day, Lou Ann Zelenik wakes up and thinks “Gosh, I wonder what a radical anti-segregation, anti-war, anti-poverty activist who regularly broke the law and social mores would say about anything?”

I mean, please, it’s laughable to think that, if Zelenik knows anything about King’s work beyond ‘he was a pastor who gave speeches’ that, even if she thinks the segregation of African Americans was a bad thing, that she would ever let his words come out of her mouth.

I don’t know. It’s sad, but it’s kind of hilarious that Dr. King has become the “safe” black man for Republicans to invoke. I mean, does Zelenik really expect us to believe that MLK would, of course, be on her side?

She’s oppressing a group of non-white people. And she thinks any words Dr. King spoke are fitting for the situation?

It’s hilarious. It’s scary, yes, don’t get me wrong. But it’s hilarious.

I wonder if King ever imagined conservative whites would embrace him like they were his legacy? I mean, how could it have, even in his wildest imaginings, been a possibility that the way they’d ruin him is not with his own failings or the murder, but with full-on co-opting him?

If someone had told you that 50 years ago, would you have ever believed it? I see it happening and I can barely believe it.