Day 256/365 Walkin' That Thin Line Between Love and Hate

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I'm a hybrid Southerner, raised first in the deep South in New Orleans, and then up north in Colorado, Iowa and Minnesota. My parents are both Appalachian Southerners, and my ancestors have been Virginians since the early 1700's, Scots immigrants before that, with strains of Irish and Cherokee mixed in there.

I love the South.

I hate the South.

Seriously, I go back and forth almost daily, sometimes hourly.

Some of my earliest memories are populated by mountain Southerners who are the kindest most welcoming people I've ever met - people that stop to help you fix your broken down car, then take you home and feed you, then drive you to wherever you need to be.

My other earliest memories are full of those same people, who for some reason felt the need to attack, spit on and intimidate people with a different skin color.

My most beloved cousin was a beer-drinking, truck-driving redneck good ol boy. From day one, he appointed himself my big brother, placing himself between me and anyone or anything that would ever harm his little peace-loving hippie cousin.

At the same time, with other people,he could be incredibly cruel and violent. Stereotypical redneck to the core, with absolutely no fondness for outsiders or Yankees.

The women in our family are the very epitome of steel magnolias, long before it appeared in movies. Southern women can be generous and kind, graceful and soft-spoken, classy and well-mannered.

They can also be ruthless when it comes to protecting anyone they love, and they do not tolerate stupidity. Nor are they shy about expressing their opinions, no matter how backward they may be perceived. They possess an unbending strength and preserverance in the face of seemingly insurmountable difficulties.

I have seen strangers trying to have a conversation with mountain southerners, absolutely unable to get much more than a short nod of acknowledgement, or a blank stare that gives away nothing to the outsider.

Hours later, around a family dinner table, those same blank faces are full of love and laughter, completely laid open to anyone in the room.

For every racist, there is a long-haired lover of the Allman Brothers. For every Confederate flag-lover, there is a reader of William Faulkner. For every Tea Partier, there is a former Freedom Rider. And for every puritanically rigid fundamentalist, there is someone who loves smokey jazz clubs and beignets in New Orleans.

There have always been two faces to the South, one of that Southern-hospitality-ya'll-come-warm-sunshiny face.

And the other -bred out of wartime defeat and Reconstruction- that reflects a darker defensive attitude of not-quite-good-enough, not-quite-smart-enough, not-quite-a-part-of-America-proper.

I guess the latter attitude is the reason the South continues to vote for and elect political cnadidates that use them, and then discard them. Candidates that mouth all the platitudes about "the little people" and then show up with the bulldozers to remove the mountaintops and pollute the mountain streams. Candidates that kiss babies and pretend they love NASCAR, and then cut school funding to educate those southern children. Candidates that show up to every small town 4th of July celebration to eat BBQ, and then disappear into the hallowed halls of Congress till the next campaign.

I can't understand why these incredibly smart mountain people keep voting for these political shysters.

You're all my family - all the good and bad, I'll accept it all.

What I can't understand is why you hate yourselves so much and sell yourselves so short.

Day 255/365 Burying Myself in Jazz

Because it may keep me sane for the next two years.

Join me, while America wanders through super gridlock and we all hitch a ride in the handbasket to the new corporate America.





Petite Fleur (LITTLE FLOWER)
(Music by Sidney Bechet, 1952 / Words by Fernand Bonifay & Mario Bua, 1959) (Music by Sidney Bechet, 1952 / by Fernand Bonifay Words & Mario Bua, 1959)


J'ai caché
Mieux que partout ailleurs
Au grand jardin de mon coeur
Une petite fleur
Cette fleur
Plus jolie qu'un bouquet
Elle garde en secret
Tous mes rêves d'enfant
L'amour de mes parents
Et tous ces clairs matins
Fait d'heureux souvenirs lointains

Quand la vie
Par moments me trahi
Tu restes mon bonheur
Petite fleur

Sur mes vingt ans
Je m'arrête un moment
Pour respirer
Le parfum que j'ai tant aimé
Dans mon coeur In my heart
Tu fleuriras toujours
Au grand jardin d'amour
Petite fleur
Quand la vie
Par moments me trahi
Tu restes mon bonheur
Petite fleur

Sur mes vingt ans
Je m'arrête un moment
Pour respirer
Le parfum que j'ai tant aimé

Dans mon coeur
Tu fleuriras toujours
Au grand jardin d'amour
Petite fleur

Day 254 and a Half/365 So Much For Samhain...

This is Halloween, this is Halloween...

Our house is decorated in early ghostie. Bobble heads in my office...

The sign up over my office (husband has been warned not to change any letters...)

Our resident mummy looking nervous about all the books...

The walking hand on the fireplace mantle...

Bathroom sconces and skulls (everyone has these right? No?)

Nice little homey sayings on the wall...

Dramatic shower walls and jet black shower curtain...

Bathroom attendant...

and vampire bats in the closet.

And that's year 'round before we start decorating for Halloween.

This morning the husband and daughter were up early putting together the tents for this evening's Halloween display. We fill our front yard every year with something guaranteed to frighten even the adults, and most definitely the teenagers. Barring non-cooperative weather, we draw anywhere from 150 -250 trick or treaters. Cars line the street, church buses dump their kids off, and sometimes too-scared kids wait on the sidewalk while their parents walk through our yard. A couple years ago we had a cop directing traffic when our artifical fog got too thick and rolled down the street.

Every year is a little different and little bigger. Our firm rule has always been "up and down in one day", partly because of time constraints and party because we don't want to leave our spooky collection out in the front yard overnight.

This year daughter designed a wooden set that would bridge a gap and double our space. So she and her dad built it this morning, while I unpacked the various props and put batteries in where they were needed.

Unpacking Halloween is better than Christmas. It's like seeing old friends again.

Some just throw up their hands and give me a quick bite.

I'm thinking of making this my new FB profile pic...

We have a weakness for skeletons and skull lanterns that glow.

Family portrait.

Together forever.

One of my favorites - always happy to get out of the box.

Nothing like a box o' bones...

And the matching jewelry.

Tiny skull fences, stacks of skulls, and that's a skull candleabra off to the right. Nothing weird about us.

This is part of the completed set built this morning. Right after this we hung black sheet panels to enclose the tents. Normally after this we'd start bringing down the full-size coffin, the animated skeletons, witch, mummy and the various electric props, then finally do costumes and remember to bring out the candy.

*But* today, the wind came up - as in, right after the sheets were hung. So between the tents and the sheets, it was like watching a beautiful,black-sailed ship rise up off the ground. Not good. Gusty wind is not good when you have a tent (soon to be a tent in the dark) full of expensive animated props and electrical cords.

So it all came down. No Halloween this year. And after taking an hour or so to tear it down, the wind decided to die down. By that time it was too late to start all over.

And yes, we had trick or treaters knocking on the door, wondering where we were.

Next year is another Halloween.

Day 253/365 I Think It's a Ghost, Scooby...

Did I grow up believing in ghosts? Is the Pope Catholic?

Give me a haunted graveyard, haunted house, haunted stretch of road, haunted car....even a haunted junk yard like Puckett's shown up above.....I'm happy.

It's not a belief I take lightly, nor does it come to me secondhand. I've lived in several haunted houses, done my share of amateur ghost hunting, heard my name called by invisible things in empty rooms, and felt the brush of fingers on my arm when no one was there. My great grandmother is a ghost, for crying out loud.

I've also read various theories on ghosts covering every possible angle of "what if", including the everyday explanation of a spirit-who-cannot-pass-over-for-whatever-reason, the haunting-as-revenge approach, the life-force-energy-left-behind-because-of-a-traumatic-death, the ghosts-are-demonic idea, and more recently a geologic explanation for supernatural sightings.

Supposedly many hauntings are located over areas with basalt or magnetite, either above or below ground. A quick search turns up Edinburgh Castle -one of the most haunted places on earth -sitting -sure enough -on a giant bed of basalt. Tower of London, chock full of ghosts and walking appartitions, again, sitting on and full of stones of basalt. Even the Stanley Hotel in Colorado sits atop a huge bed of magnetite. The existence of magnetite plays havoc with EVP recording devices, but aside from that there is the idea that these sort of rocks fall along fault lines, and fault lines generally have a higher electro-magnetic field (which might account for that feeling that one's hair is standing on end, or someone is watching).

And then there is a pesky experiment by a university in Canada that involved participants and electromagnetic fields. They found that the higher the EMF level, the more participants report seeing shadow people or ghosts with several even hearing voices. The immediate conclusion is that EMF's cause hallucinations.

Of course, there's another way to look at that. Is it possible that a high EMF level simply allows people to see what is actually there?

I mean, there is that whole other theory that what we call ghosts are simply a glimpse of a parallel layer of reality, where people are going about their business in the next dimension, completely unaware we are viewing them.

And people have differing EMF levels in their brain, depending on exposure, which could account for some being more "sensitive" to hauntings,etc. than others.

One of these days, science will explain ghosts down to the nth degree, putting all the theories to rest.

I'm dreading that day. Somethings are simply better unexplained.

Day 252/365 Let Sleeping Mummies Lie

When I was little, I was allowed to do my homework while watching a late afternoon TV show called Count Macabre. Count Macabre was a grown man who dressed up like Dracula,talked to a skull named Eric and introduced a different horror movie each afternoon. It wasn't enough that I had Appalachian relatives that told ghost stories and then we moved to Louisiana with its implied presence of voodoo and loup garou. Nope, my folks topped all that off by allowing me to be scared witless every afternoon while doing 3rd grade math.

I LOVED IT. (and yes I had an autographed picture....).

However, the Count led me directly to the creature that would inhabit my nightmares for years. Literally years. Frankenstein didn't bother me, I thought the Wolf Man was cute, the various giant creatures that threatened Tokyo and New York were conquered by science, and Dracula was....mmmm....interesting (the vampire thing still holds my interest).

But there was one other monster that I couldn't handle.

Right outside my bedroom window there stood a tree. That tree had long branches. The kind that scrap at your window if there's even a light breeze. Or if some wandering animal climbs up the tree at night. Or if the mummy tries to get in your window. Yep. The Mummy.

Thanks to the Count and Boris Karloff, the 1932 version of The Mummy terrified my 8 year old self with his never-relenting slow shuffle, the disintegrating bandages, the fixed stare, and worst of all - the extended arm. It was the stuff of nightmares.

At first the dreams were "I opened the tomb and now I'm cursed and here he comes." Then they shortened down to "run fast, here he comes." And rather quickly they compacted into dreaming that I was sleeping, and a huge bandaged hand was reaching for me.

Had that one for years and spent many nights lying awake, listening for the Mummy coming in the window, almost able to smell the dry Eqyptian mummy dust.

Loved every minute of it.

At least once I was fully awake and realized I wasn't Princess Anck-es-en-Amon being pursued by her lost lover Im-ho-tep (which makes sense on account of *I* wasn't the one who opened the tomb, now was I?)

Day 251/365 Full Moon

2000 B.C. .....The Epic of Gilgamesh is written down, including the first literary references to werewolves

500 B.C........ The Scythian people recorded as believing the Neuri people to be werewolves

400 B.C....... Damarchus, an Arcadian werewolf is said to have won a boxing medal at Olympics

55 A.D......... Petronius composes Satyricon, the first full fledged werewolf story

170.............. Pausanias visits Arcadia and hears of Lykaian werewolf rites

1020 ...........First use of the word "werewulf" recorded in English

1101 ...........Death of Prince Vseslav of Polock, alleged Ukrainian werewolf

1182 ..........Giraldus claims to have discovered Irish werewolf couple.

1521 ..........Werewolves of Piligny burnt

1541 ..........Paduan werewolf dies after having arms and legs cut off

1555 .........Olaus Magnus records strange behavior of Baltic werewolves

1589 .........Peter Stubb executed as werewolf at Cologne

1598 ........."Werewolf of Chalons" executed in Paris; Gandillon family burnt as werewolves

1603 .........Jean Grenier tried as a werewolf; sentenced to life imprisonment

1610 ..........Two women condemned as werewolves in Liege

1692 .........The Livonian werewolf Theiss interrogated

1824 .........Antoine Leger tried for werewolf crimes;sentenced to lunatic asylum

1880 .........Folklorist collects werewolf tales in Picardy

1913 ..........The Werewolf (film) uses a real wolf in transformation scene

1914 ..........Sigmund Freud publishes his "Wolf Man" paper.

1935 .........Werewolf of London (film)

1940..........Pat Shirley, Kent,England, reported that her grandmother saw a huge werewolf with red hair while walking in the woods.

1941 .........Wolf Man (film) starring Lon Chaney Jr.

1967..........In Oban,Scotland, a driver on the roadway spotted a wolf-man traveling along the road in the other direction.

1972..........In Defiance, Ohio the Ohio Crescent-News reported that police were on the lookout for a "wolf man" who had attacked three people near the railroad tracks. Two railroad brakemen also reported seeing the creature lurking along the train tracks several times.

1975 .........Surawicz and Banta publish the first two modern cases of lycanthropy

1979 .........An American Werewolf in London (film) with first four-footed werewolf


There's a full moon every month.

And they've been around a very, very long time.

Day 251/365 Now You're Here, Now You're Not

Ambrose Bierce was an American journalist and short-story, best known for his short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and his satirical dictionary The Devil's Dictionary.

In October 1913, Mr. Bierce departed Washington, D.C., for a tour of his old Civil War battlefields. By December he had traveled through Louisiana and Texas, and crossed into Mexico, which was in the throes of revolution. In Ciudad Juárez he joined Pancho Villa's army as an observer, actually participating in the battle of Tierra Blanca.

Mr. Bierce is known to have accompanied the army as far as the city of Chihuahua.

After a last letter to a close friend, sent from there December 26, 1913, he vanished without a trace.

Unexplained disappearances appear throughout history. Most, although often repeated, are eventually proven to be hoaxes.

But there are those few instances that have no explanation.

Consider the Mary Celeste, discovered sailing in December 1872 abandoned and unmanned in the mid-Atlantic. The crew were never seen or heard from again, and their fate remains unknown and unexplained.

Or the four B-47 Stratojets that left MacDill Air Force Base (near Tampa, Florida)on March 10, 1956, for a non-stop flight to an overseas air base, completing their first aerial refueling without incident. After descending through solid cloud to begin their second refueling,one aircraft (manned by Captain Robert H. Hodgin- 31, commander, Captain Gordon M. Insley-32, observer, and 2nd Lt. Ronald L. Kurtz 22, pilot) failed to make contact with the tanker. Neither the aircraft or wreckage from it were ever found.

And, finally, the odd disappearance of Frederick Valentich in 1978. While piloting a Cessna 182L aircraft to King Island, Australia, Valentich reported an unusual aircraft was following his, and his last words were "It is hovering and it's not an aircraft". No trace of Valentich or his aircraft was ever found.

Some theorize that unexplained disappearances might be the result of tears in the fabric of reality, with people or objects passing out of our world,and into another,simply falling into the fourth dimension.

Others propose that there are certain locations around the globe that are linked to magnetic vortexes,places where the boundaries between our dimension and the next is thin enough for people to pass through given the right conditions.

One wonders whether the 19th century crew of the Mary Celeste, the crewmen of the B-47 Stratojet, Frederick Valentich, and, of course, Ambrose Bierce, all ended up in the same "other" dimension.

Was it in the past? The future? Or side-by-side with our time? Are they are watching with their faces pushed up against a glass wall of time, as our world goes on without them?