tidbits

readers of iGoddess know that, while not entirely cynical, delena isn't exactly the product of a happily ever after. there's a difference between cynicism and skepticism. one is healthy, the other is a fashionable illness built into a monolith of the modern culture.

i won't exactly look a gift horse in the mouth, but i will concern myself with where the gift came from.

after falling far too many times for all the wrong loves, perhaps i've gotten a bit too wary in admitting affection at all. oh, if you're my family, or a friend, be prepared for heaps and gobs of affection to be poured over you like rain on a portland day. there is no limit to my love, no ends to my devotion, and my affection is boundless.

however, i'm discovering that --in a completely different capacity of affection-- i'm a little reluctant to admit much of anything. and while, yes, pronoia is about joyful surrender to the uniquely bombastic, phenominal and funkalicious Supreme Jive within your own buddhalicious self, it's not about blindly jumping off a cliff with the rest of the blithe lemmings, either.

and lemmings don't really do that, so where on earth did that saying come from, anyway???

however, i suppose it's a testament to my own growth that i don't simply throw myself into the sacrificial bonfires of modern myth and propaganda as i was wont to do once upon a time. and yet i don't scoff at the possibility of holding the seeds of truly wonderous things, either.

i'm wiser.

-=[~]=-

have i mentioned my eyeball husky yet? no, seriously, i have an eyeball husky. it's a husky that lives behind my eyeballs and is constantly shedding.

most people's morning ablutions include brushing of the teeth, washing of the face. perhaps some people take showers before heading off to work. mine include peeling back my eyelids and fishing for stray dog hairs that have worked themselves behind my eyeballs to irritate the absolute fuck out of my eyes. i live with the now-constant and ever-present sensation of hair in, on, and poking out my eyes.

not to mention after brushing, washing, rinsing, and brushing my hair again, i still find fur floating off me in tufts...to include colors of dogs i hadn't touched in days!

franklin p. jones once said, "anyone who doesn't know what soap tastes like never washed a dog." not only do i know what soap tastes like, but i could identify at least a dozen bouquets in a blind taste test.

raspberry oatmeal: piquant, with a bittersweet aftertaste that lingers long after the shop has closed

medicated: sharp and acrid, but with an underlying verdant quality, as if real herbs might actually have considered being included in the recipe, then settled instead for the dirt the herbs grew in

almond: tasting of nothing so much as the bar of soap in the ceramic dish by your sink, let alone real almonds

aromatic: subtle at first, but with a full and underlying body not to be ignored. don't let the scent of windex when you first open the bottle fool you.

there are more, of course, but those stand out in my mind the most. whoever said grooming isn't a contact sport can kiss my well worked-out ass. i'd like to see them try to wrestle with one hundred and eighty pounds of solid and determined dogflesh...and win.

so ha.

-=[~]=-

if someone says they were strong enough to face their own fears, and someone else says that they didn't face their fear so much as fed and fed and fed their own monsters until they ate themselves to death is not entirely the same thing. one is a test of strength and will, while the other is a headlong rush into the destructive capacity of a black hole.

the end result, however, is the same. new and transformative life growing out of the death of the former, as new mosses and flowers will sprout upon a fallen trunk of a mighty tree in the rainforest.

however, i believe that in facing one's fears, the fears are slain, but live on in memory. in some fashion, they aren't killed at all. in the other, the monsters are well and truly dead. in the former, the fears are faced, acknowledged, even embraced and incorporated into the whole self.

in the latter, the dead falls away, like the shed skin of a molting snake. like a deer's dropped antlers and a cat's shed claws. greed and gluttony win to the point of utter destruction. such cataclysmic events catapult a soul into the sa of satori, upheavals in the soul's geology of death and rebirth, a massive volcano destroying in order to create a new tropical paradise.

volcanic soil is among the richest and most fertile on the planet. geological upheavals of the soul. death and life. fear, courage, and enlightenment.