Even less amusing

Out in the yard the deflated palm trees droop languidly across the stump of the birch tree and discarded grass skirts languish in the crotch of the apple tree, like frat boys and debutantes after a long night of debauchery.
Thus we survived the birthday party. No one sustained major injuries on the Slip ‘n’ Slide, a cheap plastic gizmo designed for the very purpose of encouraging children to do things that will cause injury. There was only one scrum of grass-skirted little girls around the largest palm tree that resulted in tears and Time Out. Being the one who needed it the least, I was probably the only one to finish her plate of cake, lick it clean even. I don’t especially like cake, but I love chocolate buttercream filling.

My daughter, who has previously sworn up and down the steeple that she would never waste her time reading my blog, whose favorite cyber interaction with her mother is to change all the settings on my Facebook page to indicate that my favorite activities include belly dancing and henna tattoos and my favorite musicians are Kesha and Lady Gaga, broke precedent today and read my most recent blog and pronounced it “Not okay. TMI.”
“But you don’t even read my blog,” I informed her.
"It sucks to be the child of a writer," she said churlishly.
She is right of course; it is not remotely okay to whine and complain as I do, especially when blessed as I am with delightful and truthful offspring, the perfectly sweet and perfectly kind CSB and all the dogs, chickens and bees. Not to mention ripe raspberries and peaches.

I like to think that I have respected my children's privacy and refer to them in these pages either obliquely, or in such loving terms that their only objection could be of the eight-year-old's "Don't kiss me in public" variety.
But they disagree. At least my daughter does. My son really does not read the blog.
And her objections fill me with self-doubt and self-loathing. Why do I have to write anything at all that would offend anyone at all, even if they never read these virtual pages?
Mostly I write about bees and books, saints and chickens, but it is true that I sometimes venture into more personal tales. And why is that? In some cases because if you can tell a story about an uncomfortable situation, if you can elicit even a grudging chuckle, then you have mitigated the pain and transformed sheer misery into narration.

In the case of the most recent blog - to articulate one’s fears is to take away some of their power. The worst things are the unspeakable things. I have a – perhaps misguided, perhaps simplistic – belief that talking about a problem is a giant step towards solving it.* If I can simply say: All my blood has drained out and been replaced with liquid panic, then I feel that I have gained a slight edge in the battle with that panic. I have not capitulated to depression’s omerta.

We are fainting and fading in this heat. The chickens glumly stare at the cloudless sky, then retreat to the shadows of Clucker Hall. The grass is as brown as a monk’s habit. The bees beard the outer walls of the hive. The ferns flop like laundry. The tiny black ants would like to move, but instead they are moving the earth.

*Obviously both mistaken and foolish; nothing in my life thus far has proven the truth of this adage, yet I persist.

Sad fish? It's in the water

First they give the bees cocaine and discover the obvious, then we have to worry about depressed fish.
What do you do with your old medications? The Benadryl a decade past its expiration date, the Bactrim that gave you hives, the countless antibiotics that – never mind the strict injunction to do so – you did not finish? You flush them down the toilet.
Not so fast. Y0u could end contributing to piscine melancholia.
(A while back, post knee surgery, I had a stash of pain medication so vile & nauseating I wanted to remove it post-haste from my presence and the house. In a fit of compunction I asked one of my brothers, the über-environmentalist among them, what was the environmentally correct way to get rid of prescription drugs. The answer: Huh? Flush them down the toilet. )
Nothing is that simple. In 2006 chemists found antidepressants in the brains of fish downstream from water treatment plants. Experiments with larval FATHEAD MINNOWS showed that fish with trace elements of Effexor failed to react quickly enough to predatory behavior, and hence, did not survive long. So when hybrid striped bass gobbled up the mellow fathead minnows, they too got a dose. In other experiments, when the bass were exposed to Prozac they started dieting and went vertical in the fish tank:

Which leaves the question of what to do with our old Effexor, Prozac, Zoloft and other drugs of choice wide open.
One thought: feed them to squirrels. Apparently the latest delicacy in Britain. But I am thinking that happily medicated squirrels would be less likely to leap valiantly onto my bird feeders. Or maybe not.

Down for the holidays

Is there a weird medieval saint who woke up each morning in a panic? Or is that very panic what drove a girl to the convent and its rigid hours of prayer and silence?

All I know is that it’s the holiday season and I am falling fast into that state I refer to as holiday gloom. I attribute it to the sundered family and the fractured self. (And maybe just a little bit to the short days, the tinny muzak and the plastic Santa and his eight ungulates on our neighbor’s lawn inflating and deflating like clockwork.)

Is there a divorced person out there who genuinely looks forward to the cheer-infested shoals of the holiday season? Foolish optimism leads me to believe that there is, but I don’t know you. I don’t even know of your existence.
You’d have to be brain dead not to recognize that the unifying theme of all these end-of-the-year holidays is family togetherness. And for those of us who are divorced, that is exactly what is not. Even for those of us who divorced for all the right reasons and have gone on to make happy lives for ourselves, the holidays are when you doubt yourself. The holidays remind us of our failure to keep the family intact. Even if our expectations were unrealistic we still failed to meet them. Even halfway.

So, because it just might cheer me up, I will keep looking for the patron saint of depression. There are several patron saints of mental illness (Dymphna and Christina the Astonishing come to mind) but they tend to be possessed or have ecstatic leanings, or else they are practitioners of the arts of levitation and bilocation (think Drogo and Benedict Labre).

Photo by Andrew Or