Brief Interruption

Kage Baker did not really believe the old saying Better late than never. She wanted things done on schedule, in a timely manner, and just the way they’d been advertised. If offered something “just as good” as something she really wanted, her usual reaction was rejection. She’d rather have done without than compromise. And she’d rather have stayed up forever than to have sought her bed with a deadline ignored.

I try to follow her directives in this, at least the timing parts, because it’s quite true: things do go better if they are seen to on time. It’s a lot easier, usually, to keep on at something than to put it off and then have to run like the Red Queen just to stay in one place. Besides, I have years of falling into bed late at night after some detailed project with Kage – research, editing, fruitcake, stained glass – only to have her rouse her me two hours later by sitting bolt upright and announcing, “They should all be dry now – back to the salt mines!”

But Kage was usually talking in her sleep when she did that, thanks goodness. I could tell her we’d already finished, and she’d go back to deeper sleep. It always unnerved me, though, that she was evidently working on those projects steadily in her head all the while.

But I not as stubborn as Kage was …

I’ve done nothing useful today, except take my brother-in-law to work when Kimberly was ill on waking up. Alas, by the time I got back home – though I was all eager to get to work a few hours early – I was also coming down with something. Chills, fever, shakes like a sobering alkie, headache, stomach ache – God knows what it is, because Kimberly brings home diseases unknown to science from her kindergarteners … poor little plague micelings.

I rolled back up in the bedclothes and became a cat habitat: which is apparently a career I could do well at if this writing business doesn’t pan out.

Anyway: did nothing, slept most of the day, only got up a while ago to get a blog entry in before the clock passed midnight. I could have as profitably filled the page with nonsense written in Wingdings – someone Kage used to threaten to do. She had this idea of turning in 5,000 words in unreadable gibberish, and then using it for readings at Cons: just making up a new story every time.

So anyway: this is a marker. I got it in, and now I am going to try some late crackers and milk, and see if I live through the night.

We Could Use Some Seasoning Here

Kage Baker was not personally fond of winter. She liked a lot of things that happened during winter – Dickens Fair, Christmas, early bulbs, sufficient rain, distant snow. But as she herself loathed being cold or wet, she only really enjoyed the winter through securely closed windows. And preferably in front of a fire.

She’d have been pretty comfortable this winter. It has not been especially evident in California, especially here in the South. Last winter – whoo hoo, we had frozen grass and mad storms even down here in Los Angeles! This year, not so much. In fact, it’s been getting slowly, steadily warmer all through January and February, as if winter is slinking away without anyone noticing it.

It was nearly 90 degrees today, and is still well over 70 as I write. The porch door is open, the Corgi trotting importantly in and out and making his nest in the shadow of the new wisteria leaves. The roses are all putting out new red growth, little flames on the canes I haven’t had the time to prune yet – I’m gonna be snipping frantically to avoid the growth nodes, which shouldn’t have happened for another month. Forgotten bulbs are putting up cautious little spear tips here and there.

Mind you, this happens in Southern California from time to time. I can recall many years when winter was a mild, halcyon season; everyone rejoiced then, with no fear of the onset of global warming. But a warm California winter isn’t a sign of global warming per se; seasonal fluctuations are not global trends. All this really means is we won’t have snow in the mountains, or enough water this summer.

Of course, March may yet drown us. That happens every few years, too – they always call it the March Miracle, and the newscaster weathermen have wild, grateful dance ceremonies where they sacrifice almanacs and interns. But it’s just that they don’t remember past years – it happens like this a lot. California has weird, custom weather, and the fact that we’ve all had to find our huaraches this month doesn’t mean we won’t be back in the mud boots come March.

I remember lots of years where Mamma draped us in drop clothes to get to church on Easter, lest the rain dissolve the starch that kept our outfits – from tiny veiled straw bonnets to little lacy socks – unnaturally crisp. Kage wore green, I wore blue, Anne wore pink, Kimberly wore yellow. We each had our colours and we were all 50% rayon and 50% Niagara Starch. Starched lace socks and petticoats and panties are a veritable purgatory through an Easter Mass, but not as dreadful as the sticky, clinging mess they dissolve into it rained upon …

So, anyway, it may yet rain like crazy. But not today. Today, it’s a balmy Paradise here. Birds are singing, including one lone and exquisite mocking bird that sweetens my nights of late. The camphor trees are thick with tiny white blossoms, and the warm days make all the street smell of incense and citrus from them. The hills are greening. Mock orange and real orange and lemon and tangerine and grapefruit are blossoming, creating banks of perfume like ocean fogs, with a scent you can drown in from sheer bliss.

I hope the rains come, I do – we need them. But one cannot ignore the glory of this early spring, either, or this confused winter, or whatever it is. The weather is marvelous. Kage would be rejoicing and out in the garden like the Entwife she was at heart, encouraging order and new life from the wildness in the flower beds. I’ve at least opened the doors and windows so the scents come inside to spend the day with me, and I can watch the late light on the new grass.

I figure, take it while we can. In a week it might be winter again.

Pancakes!

Kage Baker always celebrated Shrove Tuesday. That’s what it was called, in our Roman Catholic childhood: the day before the long Lenten fast begins, the day you go to confession, get shriven – and then swear off sensual pleasures until Easter, so your soul stays clean. And so, by natural progression, it’s also the the day you have a big party and eat goodies you won’t get to eat for another 6 weeks.

This is why they’re going nuts in New Orleans today and tonight (though the majority of the bare-breasted, beer-swilling, bead-lusting crowd don’t remember the cause). It’s why the vestment colours in traditional RC churches change to penitent purple. It’s why generations of Christians ate pancakes on this day – because those succulent cakes of white flour, sugar, milk and eggs are composed entire of mortal sins. Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras – it’s pancakes, all the way down.

Mamma always made pancakes for breakfast on this day. They tasted better, knowing that we wouldn’t see them again for at least 6 weeks. Sometimes she made them for dinner, too; with the addition of meat – which would also be in short supply through Lent – it was a feast. I guarantee we realized the difference between Lent and the rest of the year, though probably not with the pious enthusiasm the nuns hoped for …

When Kage and I were kids, Lent was a serious affair. We went to Mass before school started at least 3 days a week – having fasted since midnight the night before. Mamma met us outside the church in the precious 20 minutes between Mass ending and class starting, some brief breakfast – muffins (butter, but no jam), or plain doughnuts, or grits; hot cocoa or black coffee in a thermos. A few fast gulps and swallows and we were charged for the morning. It always reminded me of the scene in Nicholas Nickleby where the boys make a hasty breakfast before being shipped off to Dotheboys Hall.

Nowadays, no one fasts at all, I think. It’s none of my business anymore, of course – Christianity didn’t take with me, and I long ago ceased identifying myself as one. But I was raised that way, and I do remember clearly the sense of pageantry and importance the old rituals imparted. How special can pancakes taste now, when there is no Lenten fast lurking on the other side of that sweet horizon?

Anyway, Kage and I always ate pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. And then not again until after Easter, just … because. Because it was the way it was done. And Kimberly and I made ‘em tonight, too, with the extra indulgence of bacon on the side.

It was fantastic.

The Mumpening

Kage Baker developed her personal theory of mumping in our teens. It basically involved the sort of boneless, low energy semi-depression that sets in on late winter afternoons. It’s the vacuous state that leaves you fit for nothing but sitting and staring at the telly.

Give-away symptoms include spending the day in your jammies or sweat clothes;  a decreased blink rate and a glassy gaze; general blurred fecklessness; and leaning at an acute angle in your seat. One is usually rather cross, but too vague to actually quarrel or bitch. It’s a regression to a basal fungoid state.

We learned later in life that “mumping” is also Brit slang for begging or mildly official graft – doughnuts or the odd pint for the local constable; the co-worker who hangs around your desk and eats all the best stuff in your candy dish. Kage’s kind of mumping wasn’t that active, and didn’t ever actually get you anything. It just absorbed all your energy and turned you into a sort of low-level fog bank …

When we were young, she’d announce gloomily: “I’m mumping. I am now a mump sprout. Nothing will be done today.”

When we reached middle age, she decided she was no longer a sprout of anything. She matured into a mump blossom. She favoured shawls and lap robes, then; rum and Coke in tea cups, and plates of nicely buttered toast. They were consumed without any apparent enthusiasm – enthusiasm has no place in professional mumping – but kept her alive to eventually recover from the malady.

After watching enough television, she’d get incensed at the limp plots and idiotic dialogue, and be driven back to writing in a frenzy. So mumping in front of the telly eventually led back to something useful. Unless she found vintage cartoons or classic film noir, or some of those insane Mexican soap operas. Kage could watch any of those for hours.

I’ve been veering into a state of mumpishness for a couple of days now. I think I’d have  dissolved completely if not for accidental life savers thrown into my stagnant pool by the local world. What passes for reality around here has been throwing pebbles at my window, trying to get my attention.

I got a new volume of the intermittent Vogue Stitching Dictionary – this one on knitted trims. It’s gorgeous; the mere sight of all the cunning little edgings makes ones hands itch pleasantly. For unknown (but doubtless stylish) reasons, the editors of Vogue have released each one with photos in a specific colour range. This one is in purples. It’s sumptuous.

The new flock of parrots that has swept into our neighborhood decided to settle down for a late afternoon snack in the camphor tree on our front lawn! I was finally able to see the little buggers up close – a fine big flock of Red-Crowned Amazons. They’re sometimes called Mexican Red-heads, and are hilarious to watch in the trees. Noisy and messy, but I do dearly love Amazon parrots; I’m glad they’ve decided to live here.

I have red Jello, and Belgian chocolate pudding. I have my Kindle. A good friend is making noises about maybe collaborating a story (neat!) and I’m selecting a Kage story to go in another anthology. I’m getting in a blog entry.

So while I may be a mump blossom today, I think I’m going successfully to seed. It’s the best fate for a mump blossom. My petals will decorate the grass, and a passing parrot can snip off my stem and whittle into a whistle for the spring wind to blow through; I can hang in the trees like an abandoned trumpet, and be the voice of dreams.

Writing on the Walls In The Dark

Kage Baker sometimes used that phrase to describe the days when you simply cannot connect to the world.

For her, that meant writing; but it applies to anything. There are days when one can neither get any ideas across to other people, or understand what they are saying. I am infamous for this, for the days when I wander around saying “What?” to every remark. In fact, the kids in my theatre group say it isn’t really a Fair until I start doing this …

But from my side, it’s a drag. My eyes are ringing and my ears are blurred.

Days like this, everyone you call is out. Incoming calls seem to be all from telemarketers speaking Basque. Nothing you go shopping for is in stock; or, in fact, presently even exists. Your favourite radio station is having a polka festival or a fund drive, and your cable TV has reformulated its lineup so that BBC America has been replaced with BassMaster. You don’t know what you want to eat, but it’s certainly none of the bizarre and unlikely foodstuffs that are somehow inhabiting your pantry … when on earth did you buy lichees in orange syrup, and why? They look like larvae in Dayquil sauce.

The world is a horrible mystery, and you are staggering through it in a state of intellectual deshabille, looking for your underwear.

I woke up at 11 this morning, and managed to stay awake until just past the meridian. I’ve been asleep most of the time since then, coming to the surface dimly from time to time. I manage to stay awake just long enough to realize, in horror, that I have once gain been felled by the narcolepsies.Then, glub, I’m gone.

Suspecting I will soon feel the black syrup of sleep slipping over me once more, I am sitting here scribbling a hasty message to the world. I’m here! I’m alive! I am going to stay awake for awhile, come hell or high water, in the hopes of sleeping the night through – that may kick my system back into something normal. You know: awake by daylight, and long enough to accomplish something? It would be nice.

It’s A Three Day!

Kage Baker loved 3-day weekends. And really – who does not? It’s like a snow day for grownups, but you don’t have to pay it back. But Kage loved ‘em even after she had left the pink collar ghetto to work at home. The glee of that extra day just never wore off.

Also, when you live in a holiday town – as we did for years – three day weekends always assume the aspect of a broad-spectrum festival. The ordinary weekend tourists are thicker, more crazed, dazed and amazed. Merchants stay open later, the sidewalks are crowded, the beach is a festive field of holes and sand castles. People walk around with ice cream cones. There are banners, and the bars leave their doors open so music spills out; and people are lined up at the takeout windows, visibly jonesing for barbecue and clam strips and kebobs and chow mien and cheese pizza slices.

In good years, we usually had a nice assortment of friends and family camped out in the back yard. The Fourth of July was most crowded, but Presidents Day usually drew a nice lot of refugees, too. Our tiny cottage was crammed with loved ones, and it was bliss.

Even when no one came to visit, Kage was in bliss – writer’s bliss, where the time meant nothing and the hours flew away as she fell through the magic portal of her monitor screen into the worlds inside her head. When that happened, the characters tended to come out and relax in our living room; Kage’s invention would spread like the tide running up the beach and the story would fill our house. Prose became performance and the narrative got tangled up in our daily life; meals were based on what Lord Ermenwyr liked, or Mendoza’s favourite torta recipe, or things Kage invented to be representative of the cuisines of the yendri or the Children of the Sun …

I swear I have shared home-made egg rolls with Dread Gard – though Kage left out the caustic oils that the Sun-born favoured. I’ve shared sardines in severely deformed tortillas (in the absence of a tortilla press, Kage put my vintage Grey’s Anatomy on top of them and jumped up and down)  with Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax. All Kage’s worlds were plotted out over meals, around fires, while ferrying pancakes from the stove stop to the plate; the eccentric physiologies of The Magnificent Variable Erdway and the Company Operatives were plotted at picnic tables in a dozen turn-offs above Highway 1.

While eating Funyums and drinking Mr. Pibb.

The diet and the rigours of this kind of adventure would likely kill me at the moment. Still … I think I’ll pack a couple of out-of-season Chilean lemon plums and a nice bottle of filtered water, and drive up into Griffith Park. Maybe round some curve under the sea-foam walls of the Observatory I’ll come up on a red-haired girl walking hand in hand with a Very Tall Person.

It’s worth a try. It’s a three-day weekend.

Fuzzy ≠ Cute

Kage Baker had a low tolerance for cute. Especially among animals. Not only did she not like most animals, she was almost completely lacking in the Squeee! response. The few animals she thought were cute, though, were baby things; because what she lacked in Squeee Sensitivity, she made up in Neotony Appreciation.

Kittens just passed muster – she could always see the cat under the skin, she said. She was fonder of foals and ducklings, for their artistic merit; and puppies, because they usually grew up to be useful citizens. Most of her limited cute tolerance was reserved for human babies.

Raccoons didn’t make her list.

I’m a lot more tolerant than Kage was: and I HATE RACCOONS! There. I said it. Screw you, Mikko and all those extras in Bambi and Snow White. They are malign, vicious demons, out to destroy our way of life and our vermin-proof garbage cans. Nature has equipped them with all sorts of traits that should add up to cuteness, but just don’t.

Merely having big eyes and hands is not enough. Neither is being fuzzy. Fuzz is not, in and of itself, attractive; recall the last time you had to clean out a lint trap. Big eyes, ditto – I invite you to contemplate the Humboldt squid, who will happily gaze into your eyes with its goggling own as it eats your face. And hands might even be a sign of inherent evil.

Not fat starfish baby hands, all dimpled and soft. Those are charming. But raccoon hands are  skeletal and twitchy; they look like black gloves. They explore hinges and locks and handles with a ceaseless destructive energy, constantly testing for the critical weakness – even when they sit up (am enchanting posture in an otter or a Corgi) those nasty little  hands hang there at belly level, ready to lash out and grab you … they’re not washing their food, you know. They’re drowning it.

And they make noises like microphone feedback.

And they run around at night but apparently have poor night vision, which is a hell of a way to be nocturnal. It means they run into walls and trees and one another, and fall off roofs, and all the while they are squealing like a cheap audio setup in the high school gym. When they run into cars – and they do – the car alarms go off and then you get raccoon feedback and whatever hysterical noises have been programmed into your pretentious neighbor’s BMW.

And then the dogs bark. All. Night. Long.

Someone up the block keeps beagles. Even on a good day, beagles sound like they’re being murdered; three or four hours into a raccoon-fest night, they sound like they’ve been killed, reanimated and are now being roasted undead. Someone else up the block keeps chihuahuas, who shriek like human children. And we have a Corgi: a brave, determined, Corgi with OCD, who will bay and howl at raccoons for as long as it takes to drive them away. Even if it takes 4 hours. Even if the sky is getting light and his mistress is sobbing on the couch before the raccoons get far enough away to satisfy him. Even if you bribe him with marshmallows and cheese; which really ought to be enough for anyone …

I am sure you have detected my gist by now. We had raccoons all night, which is like having malaria – every time you start to relax, it comes back.

Of all the animals unjustly regarded as cute, racoons are prime. Just because they have fur and comic haberdashery, they have an undeserved reputation for being adorable; when in fact they are Lords of Lesser Evil and minions of the Greater. Somewhere, I am sure, hideous chthonic hybrid raccoons lurk in the dark, washing their horrid little hands with tentacles, sending out waves of their brethren to dance obscenely and clumsily on my roof.

Try going to the bathroom at 5 AM, and having a raccoon plummet past the window while you sit there exhausted in the dark. It kicked and clutched at the window, too, as it went squealing past; and the house shook, I swear, when it hit the ground … good thing I was sitting where I was.

Fuzziness is not enough to make them tolerable. Because, because, you know because why? Under the black masks and stripes and fuzz, there is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montauk_Monster

That’s right. You’ve all been warned. Do not be fooled by fuzz. Now I’m gonna go make a jelly bread sarnie and load the big squirt gun, and take a wary nap. ‘Cause I know they’re out there.