OCTOBER: A SPECIAL MONTH FOR SPECIAL PEOPLE

When you are married to a witch October is a special month.

October 

Damn my hair has turned white.  

But, I still have some black in my mustache and my pubes are still black.

 The season for witches - and this one is mine

The baby is always watching the mamma witch

The Older Cat - My wife's familiar 

The exercise bike sits idle behind the chest: perhaps she can cast a spell that will make us want to use it next month.

Double bubble toil and trouble...

Counting down to Halloween

Look into my eyes...

The witch's broom -  hand made by an artisan in Kentucky.

Something evil this way comes

the Ol'Buzzard

A POX ON THE CONGRESS

It is probably my age.

                                       

Or perhaps it is the month of October: a month of ghost and goblins and ghouls – Oh my! 

                             

But, the debt ceiling fight and the government shutdown seems totally out of place at this time of the year: a time of harvest – a time of food and friends and fairs and celebration from a year of toil.  

I have said before that I can’t seem to get goaded into depression about what seems now to be business as usual in Washington.   

People are posting dooms day scenarios on what Rachel Maddow calls the internet machine.  

But in reality: all of this will end in just one way.   We will grow old and infirmed or diseased or suffer an accident – and then we all die.  We will get put in the ground, or cremated and have our ashes in an urn – or some not so lovable relative will flush us down the toilet.   Whatever the outcome; when this happens, we won’t care about the debt ceiling or governments or political parties. 

And then two or three generations in the future – when we are long forgotten – people will still be exasperated with their politicians; liberals will be disgusted with the way the rich treat the poor; and people with hearts and brains will be protesting the next war. 

Things move on but stay the same.    You can’t walk in the same river twice, but the river is still there.  This slipstream of time that man has created – and mankind him and her self – are relevant only in the small self-centered ego of our species.

We change the things we can and accept the things we can’t change. 

We are approaching the season of All Hallows Eve when the dead can walk - in our minds.  We should use this season to put things in perspective.  

Celebrate this season.

A pox on the Congress.

the Ol’Buzzard

IT IS A MOUSEY DAY IN OCTOBER

The day is overcast and grey, the leaves have fallen off the trees and the temperature is in the fifties.    This is the kind of day I love.   I could be perfectly happy living in a black and white Edward Gorey world.  

                   

Sherlock Holmes stories have been a passion of mine since early teens.   To me the Jeremy Brett portrayal is the epitome of my vision of Sherlock Holmes.

However, when I read Holmes I always picture the stories in black and white. 

It is the same when reading Dracula.   If you haven’t read Dracula you should read it.  

However the best, in my opinion, vampire book ever written (and the worst vampire movie ever made) was Stephen Kings Salem’s Lot. 

                                          

I first read Salem’s Lot when I was in the Navy.   Salem's Lot supposedly took place in the vicinity of Maine where I was living.   I had been on a night flight and had been reading the Lot on board the aircraft.   I got home about one-thirty in the morning, the house was quiet and empty; I poured a glass of whiskey, settled in my favorite chair and picked back up the book.   I was just at the point where a young man was dead in an upstairs bedroom and the old man that owned the house was hearing noises from that room…fearfully he started up the steps…

BAM!

The toile seat in the bathroom slammed down.   That noise, at that time of night, while reading Salem’s Lot, scared the hell out of me.   I threw the book down and went to bed. 

My wife and I read the book together after we had moved into an old decrepit 1832 farmhouse located in the woods one mile off a main road.   The house had no electricity and no plumbing – it had been vacant for twenty years.   We read ‘The Lot’ aloud each night, in bed, by lamp light; while the wind blew outside and the old house creaked. 

Salem’s Lot holds a special place in our memories.

I have been a horror movie fan since early childhood.  My grandmother and I moved to a small Mississippi Delta town when I was eight.   The movie house was three blocks from our house and a movie ticket cost ten cents.   I always went to the horror movies even though they scared me.   Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, The She Wolf of London: I would often hide my face during the scary parts. 

 But the real scare was the trip home.   There were no street lights and I had to cross the bridge spanning Deer Creek.   I would walk nonchalant as far as the lights in front of the movie house illuminated – and then I ran – it seemed my feet would never touch the ground – through the town with its dark store fronts, across the bridge, and a final sprint to my house and up the steps.   

 I remember those movies, and those nights as black and white. 

the Ol’Buzzard

GHOST AND GHOULS AND ZOMBIES AND GOBLINS AND THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT.

This is the month that I have always loved – better than Christmas.   This is the witching month – the month that the spirits of the dead occupy a parallel universe – a sheer membrane away - from the living. 

All around us the world is dying: leaves are falling from the trees and the grass is turning brown; and the chill in the air portends snow which can turn our visual world into a skeletal realm of black and white.

You can’t explain it, but you can feel it in your soul, at night, when the moon is shining…that something wicked this way comes.  

I do not believe in ghost, goblins, angles, devils; or gods for that matter.   My mind is too logical – but – there is something witching in the month of October.

the Ol'Buzzard