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Mandy Patinkin, Claire Danes and Damien Lewis of Showtime's HOMELAND

Okay, HOMELAND.  We watched the two-part finale of season one last night.  I've been dreaming HOMELAND.  Just now I saw a promo for the second season which begins on Sept. 30, with this as the background music.  Well.


We who do not see the better shows on their original channels arrive at the party a little late.  Still, late is just fine.  It was a week that began with the season finale of BREAKING BAD,  concluded with HOMELAND and housed numerous DR. WHO episodes from season six, one of which contained my favorite scripted quote in a long time.

     "You have a time machine.  I have a gun.  What the hell, let's kill Hitler."

There are moments when I wonder at an involvement with fictional characters that is Pavlovian, salivating and everything.  Then I listen to how much more truth there is in the words they are given to say by people who can write and who do not go all Uriah Heep when the truth is required.  David Simon - creator of THE WIRE, TREME and GENERATION KILL  - was a guest on Craig Ferguson's show Thursday night and mentioned the tiny audience he feels is attracted to his series.  I say not so.  Many of us miss them first-run in our cable-free existence but become zealots as they are made more available.  The fan base for intelligent television is not small, it may just be a bit behind the overnight ratings.  Which reminds me, BBC's THE HOUR will reappear this fall.  See what you can learn from Vogue magazine's September issue?  But it will be spring, I understand,  before Mr. Cumberbatch returns as Sherlock Holmes.  Based on my relationship with time, that could feel like a week from Tuesday.  Meanwhile, we will prowl until we find new-to-us treasures with which to become obsessed.  Can't wait.

Extreme Parenting Video Project

On her Friday, August 31 blog Elizabeth Aquino posted the result of The Extreme Parenting Video Project.   The greatest gift a blog gives its author is the chance to share what is meaningful with whomever has happened by or chosen to be a follower.  I keep myself cheered along this journey by sometimes showing the work of artists whose sensibilities nourish mine.  We are not separate from what we create, yet there are some who model a seamless flow of living that is especially vivid.  Elizabeth is one of them.

"Published on Aug 30, 2012 by Elizabeth Aquino

Families of children and young adults with disabilities were asked what they might have told themselves on the day their child was diagnosed. This is what they said.

"Thanks to Patty Griffin for the beautiful song 'Heavenly Days.'"

Just answer yes or no

Unless we are defended against them, sandbaggings and other weighty misfortunes loiter above the paths we wander and will flatten our gratitude and sunny appreciation, snap.  Just like that.



Yesterday and today, like the silent journey of an earthworm, creepy meaningless stuff that is such a chintzy sliver of reality was burrowing toward me, foretelling gloom and that awful steamrollered flatness that may be depression.

So I looked for reasons, reasons that could make this a response to externals and not a true reading of the interior state.  Some options:

Heat - climbing and growing more humid.  Two days of not running the air conditioner was a reprieve, though possibly brief.

Politics.  Need I say more?

Perhaps too much stillness and separateness, though I become easily overwhelmed and quiet is peaceful.

What feels like a compass gone awry, magnetism or other fluxy tricks obscuring a clear direction.

September.  If there was a pop quiz, I'd have guessed April.  Time.  Sigh.

An almost complete absence of answers to any question, other than "I don't know."  Aren't we meant to be more certain, more fixed and drawn to one pole or another, aren't we just supposed to know if the WD-40 will work on that rusted fixture or the hard water marks will disappear with a product I refuse to research on Google?  Aren't we supposed to know (a) that this all comes out and (b) how that happens?

I am relieved to say that all sources consulted say the answer is no.  Just no.  And no makes whatever this is alright.  No becomes tomorrow's maybe.  No leaves enough air in the room to breathe and even laugh.  No means I can read through Julie Whitmore's blog, stare at her painted bluebirds and hollyhocks, her spring photo of wild sweet peas and pretend I can still walk around safely in shoes without laces and sturdy soles.  That I can still wear those pewter-color ballet flats and picture butterflies landing on my arms, in my hair.  All is not as it appears on television or, help us!, the internet.  There is dangerous subversion in distilled magic, disguised as color pencil shavings and painted faces no larger than M&Ms.  Better still, there is the simplicity of beautiful unknowingness.  No.  Just no.

In the pumpkin patch

For all the people and places in this hemisphere for whom autumn approaches, meet Julie Whitmore Pottery.  The piece shown is called There's A Bluebird in My Pumpkin Patch.  Her work has been described as French Faience style.  Each piece is hand-built and therefore one-of-a-kind 

Additional examples of Julie Whitmore's original art are here.

Don't you just want to go bake a pie or at least put on an apron and striped stockings?  I do and it's nearly 100 degrees here.  Her work is just that persuasive.

Once in a very blue moon

Today (still Thursday in California) would have been my cousin Sheri's 64th birthday.  Her stained glass sun, created from a sketch of mine, is next to me in the dining room window every day as I write.  This afternoon South Pasadena had showers, then a thunderstorm, then pouring rain for more than half an hour.  After four weeks of heat and humidity and not a drop of the oft-mentioned "monsoonal flow" through our neighborhood, it was as fitting a birthday gift as I could imagine.  The LA Times this morning reported that in the past two days, New Orleans had an inch more rain than Los Angeles for its entire so-called rainy season.  Living in a thinly disguised desert, I view rain as a blessing, welcome it, especially when not predicted.

On the 31st, we can all frolic beneath the blue moon, the last until 2015.   Do we make a wish, plan a ceremony, eat cupcakes as an artist friend has announced?  It seems we are being called to watch the sky, even if just for a day.  I tend to watch it rather more often than that.  A rare summer storm may signify nothing, as may the blue moon of song and story.  Regardless, both are happenings outside the ordinary which remind me how fond I am of that which falls beyond the ordinary. 

Alterations

It may be the age I've reached, it may be due to years of quiet and contemplation.  It was illuminated yesterday by a friend's recounting of hospital procedure-induced trauma and its aftermath.  I know I am not who I once was.

In the uninformed ideal, at least my version of it, life had a trajectory without extended pauses or interruptions, diversions onto forgotten sidings, explosions, erosions and participation, not willing, in molecule-altering experiments.  The things they don't tell you.

I could sense in my friend's narrative and the recent memory of a family member being pulled through a similar breach in the continuum that in each of them essential, cellular-level change had taken place, change that left them startled and disconnected.  I am acquainted with startled and disconnected and misplaced.  What I think I now know is that the plan had always been for adaptation and mutation.  THAT was the assignment, not the slow evolution into upgraded versions of a self that remained mostly unchanged, only better.   More worldly success,  material dreams realized,  embarrassing habits cured, nothing untidy remaining to be swept under the rug or shoved in the leaky dishwasher when company dropped by.  Nothing we had to stop ourselves from trying to explain.

It is life, before books, before the theater, before movies, that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.   One possible premise, one place to begin, is to assume that none of this is a hideous, irreparable cosmic mistake.  The quantity of disbelief that needs to be suspended to reach that point can barely be calculated.  Watching the Tony Scott-directed episode of NUMBERS the other night and staring with rapt incomprehension at the mathematical solutions to all conundrums reminded me that understanding the ways of numbers, along with time, is best left to the conjurer or identified genius.  In my hands, time evaporates and numbers beyond a dozen or fewer zeros lose all meaning.  Those of us who find our way by intuition, and forgive me if I over-generalize, cannot navigate by equations.

Why then does there seem to be no mechanism of preparation - coaching, to use a word and job description that cause me to frown - for the magnitude of change we will not escape? How are we to find peace in our mutant bodies with our altered states of existence?  My life is not different from others in its list of the awful, scary, dangerous, unwanted, traumatic, sorrowful, discouraging, shaming, regretted, painful and how-did-I-survive-them? events.  Each event takes us further from Point A, former comfort zone for a sunny outlook and a trust in calm waters, to wherever we are now, a complex and baffling locale, part Ayers Rock, part gulag, part comfy chair with a good reading light.  We are here, where we glimpse the sacred, the familiar, yet know there will be no vessel returning to carry us home.  Stranger still, we begin to recognize the illusion.  Home is only here, only now.  We have, once again, become the new version of us inhabiting what is now to be considered real.

Oddly, I found peace in yesterday's awareness.  I find peace in anything that seems to tell me I haven't been doing it wrong.  All wrong.  Forever.   Having identified so strongly with my friend's alterations I was given a different perspective.  This is what happens to us all under pressure, in tight spots, after each apocalypse.  By witnessing and comprehending the profound change we undergo as the result of events, I felt less isolated, less odd in my decades of involuntary cellular response to life being life.   I felt I was taking my formerly strange self in and welcoming me home.  I have so much to tell me.

Able assistants, helpmeets and muses

We of the cottage industries have specific requirements for amiable assistants.  Since they and we are here, together,  throughout the livelong day, possibly squeezed up tight in conditions un-roomy, mutual regard and compatible tendencies are essential.

Denise Litchfield has shared photos and some background on her helpers, especially the ones recruited during a recent European stay.  Her current blog banner features two of them.  Others may be found in the newest post or at her Facebook page.

Photo from grrl + dog, Denise Litfchfield.

The rat awaits your instruction.

Taking an even more active role in the day-to-day of a small business is Ratty, sales manager for Penelope Todd's Rosa Mira Books. Yesterday they made a "reckless" offer to which I could only say an enthusiastic yes. I hope you decide to do the same. How would you like to find The Rat perched on your letter box? Drinking from your favourite mug or hunkering down in your armchair? Flying a copy of your book cover, or a friend's? Reading your grand/child's favourite bedtime book, or disguised as an unopened magnolia blossom in your garden? For the rest of August, anyone buying an ebook from Rosa Mira Books is entitled to a free copy by email of Ratty holding, wearing or doing something pertinent to the buyer. August buyers will be contacted by email within 24 hours of purchase, to discuss rodent manoeuvres.Check out a few of Ratty's previous antics here. Rosa Mira ebooks can be read on any kind of reading device, including a Kindle. Or they can be downloaded as PDFs for comfortable reading on a computer screen.

My own muses come in all dimensions.  The flat, yellow Button Bunny is press agent, stunt double and licensed to practice law in California.  Here are the most elderly, but by no means the least enthusiastic.  Where would any of us be without someone to play Amelia Pond to our Dr. Who?