Today was an exercise, as all true days are. Get up, get nourished, ingest potions, armor up and get out the door, get experience, try to swagger through the buffs and debuffs of your most recently saved campaign. I'd the day off from work due it being the new year and the morning was a divinity of light and sun and the cat on the windowsill and a card that Ulybear and I made for his godmother, T, in thanks that she sent us a greeting and update on the necessary beauties of her own compartmentalized being. Once accomplished, I sat on the sofa and watched the mountain grow and mutate in the cresting sun. A went to the store and I put on music and slow swayed around my living room ingesting all of the beauty-terror of the day and my being in it. That has nothing to do with the Scoob here in his Christmas regalia but there he sits like some obese and profane satrap lavished by concubines and born along the yuletide snow drifts in an immense palimpsest born aloft on the shoulders of slaves of many races. It, the photo, is simply another mote in the ever growing gyre of absurdities in which we, all of us, swim.
Christmas happened, is happening, depending who you ask and we had the day ensconced in the living room, unwrapping gifts from locales near and far, myself with the added task of police calling the yard of waste generated by unboxing and unwrapping. Even with recycling, you fail to not make a substantive amount of trash but we persist in these rituals as they are older than memory can recall, developed at a time before which writing could chronicle. The weather is cold, it is dark, the spring may not come, I've been stuck in this motherfucking cave for a moon and unless we, as a tribe, make some diversion and spread goodwill then I swear I'm going to jab this antler tipped spear into someone, anyone, maybe even myself. My mind is prone to flights of idiocy, true, but I spend a fair amount of time trying to grind out what appears to be an inherent meaning between myself, the past, ancestors, my children, the stupidly unknowable future. Here is one of the nuggets, a high resolution raven blasted onto a canvas, courtesy of my two oldest. It attains primacy on the cave wall here, with others of its ilk, an important addition to the miracle of birds. Future archaeologists will ponder the meaning of this room of the cave. Did we venerate the birds because we believed them to be deities that would ensure the sun's return? What other evidence in the surrounding sediment layers support this hypothesis?
My special lady got me a horse for Christmas. It's beautiful. I love it. The plan is to take it to work and elevate it for all to see who should come visit my work cave. I've become obsessed by horses, have been for some time now. Just the other day, I sent a text to one of my dearest friends, J, who is herself a horse person, that read "I petted horses yesterday. That was god." The occasion to send such a text was Uly, myself, and A going to a horse farm event for Halloween and I remember the exact horse - a buckskin quarter horse whose name escapes this faulty tub of neurochemicals - and I looked into her eyes, into that strange ungulate space, back down into the history of it, of us conjoined together, our species as rivals, then theirs as food, then their impressment into the service of humans, now, largely, their role as pets and recreation. As I looked into this creature, and into myself, I was stricken by the remembered line from Blood Meridian "and everywhere... horses lay screaming" as the most horrific in a passage rife with violence, human massacre, scalping, evisceration, and unconsented and sometimes necrophilic sodomy.
