Gaytheist Christmas Card 2013

Meme-ish smartassery courtesy of our family’s answer to Banksy: Auntie.

The glow emanating from this, the Gaytheist Christmas Card 2013, is golden– a butterscotch, if you will.  Like butterscotch, its sweetness is undermined by its stickiness.  It’s the kind of stickiness you encounter when handling a “live” Christmas tree: the sap is snarlingly soap resistant, rendering  you a laughable Edward Stickerhands. 

Take heart, my sticky babies– at least you don’t smell like you have a Pine-Sol problem!  Your problem can be solved by a small child– a child who personifies the salvation of this hectic, overextended, and overwrought season, a child who redeemed us all  by casually handing Santa’s candy cane and his “be a good little girl” jive back to him–in several small, symbolically potent pieces.  In the spirit of this holiday miracle, the Gaytheist Gospel Hour wishes you and yours a very merry Up Yours, Christmas!

Summer Scrapbook 2011

Click to magnify the majestic mightiness that is this self aggrandizing landscape photo.

The Summer of 2011 has been a most majestic and mighty season, rife with victory, spiced with bravado.  It is a rump roast sliced from the hind quarters of a noble beast (perhaps a liger), turning on a spit over the fires of glory.  As we savor it, our hearts swell with secondhand triumph made bittersweet by the piquance of sorrow, for despite its lush and verdant beauty, its free-floating firefly constellations at night, the dancing gold of its lakes, ponds, and oceans by day, each succulent bite consumed brings us ever closer to the simultaneous bitch slap/nut punch/horrifying full nelson of winter.

For me, the Summer of 2011 was a barely-averted altercation with a stranger at a camp store.  It was hiking the rocky bluffs at Devil’s Lake in Wisconsin.  It was almost getting my ass kicked at the Am Vet’s Lodge in Higgin’s Lake Michigan. Yet it was so much more. This summer brought the Resurrection of Santa’s Village kiddie amusement park, a jaunt to the Circus World Museum, an encounter with John Muir‘s clock, as well as the Ghost of Peter Falk.

Without a doubt, my particular cut of this delicious creature was rich and rewarding.   I pay tribute to it today in the only way a middle-aged midwestern woman such as myself knows how: in scrapbook format.

My Daughter, The Tortured Artist

If you’re this brilliant, you can smirk all you want.

Mabel turns 4 this week.  When she was first born, it did indeed seem like yesterday.  All parents say this, and it’s absolutely true.  I remember her; all slick-faced, her squirming little body swaddled up tight in a hospital blanket, screamingscreamingscreaming like a banshee burrito.  She was clearly pissed, and who could blame her?  To start out as a sparkly dream of life, flitting about the infinite cosmos, only to end up cold, wet, and naked in the burbs is pretty much the let down to end all let downs.

Friday Goulash (Sunday Edition) 03-21-10

“There are no words…none.” –Hedwig Robinson.

Once upon the 1980’s, a divorced working mother in the midwest performed the same ritual every Friday: she would collect all the dinner leftovers of the week and toss them in a pot with some elbow macaroni, Clamato, and a mysterious thickening agent.  She would refer to this concoction as  “Goulash.” “Friday Goulash” is a tribute to this woman and her potful of weariness. It’s in her spirit that I serve up a week’s worth of tidbits slow-cooked to dry-yet-strangely-sticky perfection.  It goes great with Kool-Aid!

Mabel’s Debut

Mabel stands at the crossroads of Ballet and Badassery

The list of things I never thought would come to pass in my life is getting longer with each passing year.  I never thought I’d be a mother, for example.  I never thought I’d ever stomach the sight of pink outside a bottle of Pepto Bismol.  I never thought I’d find myself surrounded by a hundred hip-high, shrieking ballerinas who were not the swarming side-effects of mind-altering drugs or too many slices of jalapeno and bacon pizza before bed.  My daughter Mabel, by her very existence, has shown me the limits of my imagination and made the inconceivable, a dazzling reality.