He lights up my life. Corny, but no kidding.
My apartment is small and it faces north, so it’s always dark. Even the full-spectrum light I have over my small eating table doesn’t offset the amount of time I spend in the shadow of aging and ailing hearts.
He gives me hope. Makes me laugh, want to hug and giggle and hide and seek. Reminds me that sweetness still is.
It’s also sweet to see b!X making his mark in and on Portland OR, as he uses this technology’s “print-on-demand” capacity to send his virutal Portland Communique into the real world in paper form. I haven’t mentioned his entrepreneurial Communique Press experiment before because I hadn’t had his 500+ page Volume I book in hand. But now I do, and so now I am. With photos he’s taken and included to give visual vitality to his posts, he has cleverly chronicled an action-packed six months in the lives of Portland’s unique politics, policies, and procrastinations. His Volume II, recently made available, follows the stories into the second six months of this past year. I haven’t bought that one yet, but I intend to.
I probably won’t buy his reprints of public domain, rare and/or out-of-print books about Portland, but it seems to me that all of the stuff he’s making available will be of great use for research purposes, and I would imagine that libraries would want to own them. He makes a momma proud.
We who write (whether here or there) leave a legacy of words and ideas that we hope will be meaningful to others. At least I think that’s what most of us would like to do.
Even Rage Boy, who, it seems to me, is going about it all the wrong way as he tries to model the “use it or lose it” approach to holding the line on freedom of speech. In response to a recent email of his bemoaning the lack of response he apparently is getting to whatever he is writing, I was inspired to write a rap.

The Crone Raps the RBoy
just because you feed it….doesn’t meant I eat it….I read it and delete it…speedy one-click…smack the dick
in a universe speaking…hours of power….here too much snide sneaks…through the mean streaks…disguised as wise
we all have choice of voice…(turds are true words, too)…but some myths in the making…just aren’t worth taking…to heart and home
thus spake the Crone
I wonder how many copies of his compiled current blog posts he would sell if he went the print-on-demand route. Probably not as many calendars as the original now-famous Calendar Girls sold. I can’t wait to see the movie. (Which reminds me that I think Halley’s take on pin-ups is so much more sexy and engaging than all that rather unappetizing RB-flaunted porn.)
On the eve of the Solstice, my women friends and I made “Ya-Ya” hats using the legacy of hats and costume jewelry that one of their (recently deceased) mothers had left. Heh. Maybe we should do our own “hats-off” nude calendar. Or maybe not.
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While I was on my forced hiatus from blogging, I did an enormous amount of reading. Just about all of the novels I read used mythic analogies to tell stories that, for me, became even more real because of their connections to those larger-than-life legends. Carol Goodman’s The Seduction of Water and The Lake of Dead Languages. Daniel Wallace’s The Watermelon King (I want to see his Big Fish movie, so I didn’t read that one). Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, The DaVinci Code, and Digital Fortress. And, of course, several books in Terry Pratchett’s DiscWorld series — which I’ll probably be reading for the rest of my life.
Finally, I just finished Alice Hoffman’s Blue Diary, which was different from the other novels of hers that I’ve read in that it didn’t have all of those undertones of magic. But it was full of her usual lyrical writing and soul-stabbing truths — like: the ones who love us most are the ones who leave; and no matter how well we think we know our mates or our children, chances are we really don’t know them at all.
Which brings me back to my grandson, who lights up my life and gives me hope. Who will someday leave, and whom I probably won’t really know at all. Like b!X and my daughter — and all of the others who now only haunt my shadows. But I love them all anyway. That’s the real, important point.