Testimonial

I want you to imagine what would happen if Sapperton Old Age Pensioners Hall burned down.

We would lose our place of worship, our sound system, lectern, hymnals, aesthetics and chalice.

And somehow we’d still be here. We would be meeting somewhere else, but the church would still be here. Our principles would remain intact; our love for each other would be as firm; our resolve would be tested to the snapping point, but it would hold.

If you don’t give us any money, we’ll still be here. It will be as if we burned down and we’ll be meeting in people’s homes instead of here, but we’ll still be here in the sense that the work of this church will continue.

If you choose to give Beacon money we’ll have a more solid foundation upon which to do the work of the church.

What is the work of the church? To bring us together in fellowship and worship. To be a sanctuary for freethinkers and warriors for social justice alike. To create a safe space for our children and youth to stretch their agile minds. To perform good works in the community we share. To extend the promise of liberal religion to all who will hear it. To provide a pulpit for prophecy, truth, love. To provide a trumpet for the sorrows of the world and its creatures and its peoples. To illuminate the path that brings us in right relation to each other. To shake us from complacency, to turn us from greed, to open our hearts to song and art, to open our hearts to the beauty residing in each of us, and the struggle.

If you cannot give Beacon money, then I urge you to do one or more of three things. To choose and volunteer for a committee performing work you think is important; to plan to bring a friend or colleague to church, especially if the message is relevant to them; to try to come to church every Sunday you are able. For the gift of your presence is what makes this a community. The money is a red herring. We make joy from fabric scraps and leftovers. It is an accumulation of many things, money being the most difficult to speak of, that makes Beacon what it is. Bring your gifts, and bring your questions, and Beacon will be here.

 

Well that was odd

As soon as I finished the last post, this fell out.  Right after.

 

And Katrina knows about the barrel of clothes

And the man who was stolen for the hell-bound train

And the little girl who died, and the man who broke my nose

On a night when I had to wear my paint in the rain

Leave me be!  your tracts all belong in my past

And I’ll live my own life now, and make my own way

And if it seems to you that I live without a care

I’m waiting for the worst — it’s always waiting over there

I’ll light a cigarette and stand on my very own verandah

I’ll listen for the train, and I’ll think about him then.

I’ll think about him then.

 

That’s the missing bridge for Bootlegging Mary!!! I’ve been waiting freaking ages for that to happen, and it finally did!!!  It’s still rough, but I love it when it all comes out like that.  I am sure I’ll have to edit the hell out of it for singability.

Andrew Brechin remains among us, less corporeally, alas

He was ten years younger than me, a rotund Silenus who didn’t drink but a glass of mead once in a while, a champion of liberated lives, kink, glitter, poop, music, security, awesome food, Cthulhu, physics, cheesy sf, art, dancing for fun, wish fairies, lantern festivals, paganism, and above and around and in his shelter, his family, woven fine. I didn’t know him well, just well enough, god help me, to have a proper understanding of the devastation and resolve that has risen in the faces of those who loved him well. Tillie King, I salute you and your team for the simple, lovely, fun celebration of his life you all so carefully and lovingly breathed into being.

Any memorial service that has a zombie pirate belly dance in it is going to be, well, memorable.  As was he.

 

Intruder alert!

Video from the cat door at about 1am on October 31. Along with the alien cat intrusions, this explains why Eddie guards the cat door at night. The large object next to the door is not an albino Horta; it’s packing material from a TV box. Next step: install a motion-activated light outside the door.

Maybe there was something to Essiac…

Chipper sends word of dandelion tea and cancer…  and on November 2 updated me with this.  so NO dandelion in Essiac.  I always thought there was.

There have now been about thirty enquiries about the cafe… I know it’s a numbers game, but oh lord.

Here is a very good beginner level guide to layout and design.  

Velcro was developed for outer space, but it will be coming soon to an inner space near you…

And re resistant bacteria, more good news.  

Part of Miss Manners Has her Say, a song I wrote some years ago.

“You’re a very/religious person/offered drugs and porn/Enjoyment in/the evening is/repentance in the morn.”

And now there’s some science that is illuminating.

 

 

Projects!

Right now I am using Scrivener to assemble a book of all the small small things I’ve written over the years, snippets of this and that, some ranty, some funny, some just plain weird.  The project is already almost 20K long, so I am thrilled.  And I haven’t even started to draw in from the paper pile – this is all stuff from my blog, more or less.

I spent so much time complaining about Katie, I think with the cafe I got what I deserved.   That plus some other sincerely unpleasant things are what I learned.

However, I should really get going on the other two projects (Neil Gaiman “Make Good Art”), so I am going to put on a restorative cup of tea and run some laundry and get going on the other projects.

Immersion

What between getting sleep in two hour bursts (all I can manage with the cpap, which I put on and took off three times last night), donating blood on Friday, and somewhat inadequate levels of exercising, Physio Luce is telling me that my flex is good but my strength sucks.  He totally bought that sleep deprivation has slowed me down… and loaded me up with more exercises.  Ainsi soit-il.

Today I will be adjusting the moisture content and seating of the mask on the cpap.

Dishwasher is running, sun is shining, Eddie is feeling much better.  He needs a special diet so we are attempting to feed  the cats separately and it’s kinda sorta working.  His thyroid is wonky but there are meds for that.  He is SUCH a good kitty.  He despises being pilled so much that when Jeff puts the pill in front of him, he consumes it rather than go through the gharstly struggle.  He was also a sweetheart the last time I trimmed his nails.  (Kitties shouldn’t click on floors).

I am assembling yet another project in Scrivener – Broad Hints.  It will be selected songs, poems, essays (no homilies though, that’s another project), humour, blog posts, recipes and miscellaneous writings (like band names, movie and concert reviews).  I have a ton of stuff in there already and it’s going to be book sized by the time I’m done. At the following URL (ya hafta scroll down) there’s my third fave pic of my grandpa: He’s a real cowboy with real First Nations….

Holy crap! some twin engined plane just went over the house at about 500 feet.  I hate when they do that.

Church yesterday was great, excepting that the split pea and ham soup I took for the meal afterwards overturned in the car trunk.  Fortunately I’d taped the lid on and it was still so cold that only the condensation from the defrosting came off it, plus I put the crockpot in a large garbage bag, so there was some leakage but not the HOLY FUCK disaster I thought it was when I leapt out of the car to investigate the gharstly noise.  I did the aesthetics and screwed it up, but Rob rescued me by leaping up and getting a taper for the service leader (Donna).  I don’t think aesthetically it was too bad.  We didn’t sing enough and there was a congregational discussion afterwards grump grump.  I’ve had to lower my pledge because, HEY no INCOME! which cheeses me off, but other delights await, including my return to delivering homilies!  And getting to sing the compost song first service in 2014, more or less hopefully.

I am going to go back to chores now.

We’re number one! In pipeline accidents.

 

Unitarian humour address for canvass, circa 2002

Good evening, brothers and sisters of the Beacon community. I have been asked to present a humorous homily in a Unitarian vein, and I beg your indulgence as I outline how I approached gathering the material for this evening’s celebration of our community.

First I reviewed my previously delivered comedy routines. As one of them commences with my walking on stage half naked — I will leave to your imagination which half — you will not be surprised that I thought this inappropriate. Unitarians believe in freedom, not license.

Having dispensed with nudity as a means of encouraging people to laugh, or at least to pay attention, I then worked my way through the rest of my gags, one-liners, pithy observations, and so forth.

I made the considered decision to delete the references to sex as also being inappropriate to an intergenerational dinner. The prospect of having the children loudly explaining the jokes to their parents was too much for me.

Then I deleted all the drug references, as everyone knows that drugs are something Unitarians did years ago; we have all long since grown out of it, except for Ibuprofen, of course.

As we are eating, I thought it best to banish all scatological humour. I firmly believe that this is the best part of a family meal, but I have learned that not everyone feels the same way.

As you can imagine, this left me in something of a quandary. I had three jokes left, and while they are all reasonably funny, they didn’t take my audience into consideration.

I then resolved to visit a number of Christian humour sites, reckoning that I would find some jokes that would offend nobody. I now have proof that I am nobody, because I was offended by them. Anybody else who is offended by the inane and the sickly sweet will know exactly what I mean.

In desperation, I visited a Unitarian joke site. Of course I should have done that FIRST, but it’s traditional to check out various forms of Christianity prior to coming to Unitarianism. I came across this gem, which, is seasonal, now that Halloween is over:
(Sings)

Gods rest ye, Unitarians, let nothing you dismay; Remember there’s no evidence there was a Christmas Day; When Christ was born is just not known, no matter what they say, O, Tidings of reason and fact, reason and fact, Glad tidings of reason and fact.

Our current Christmas Customs come from Persia and from Greece, from solstice celebrations of the ancient Middle East. This whole darn Christmas spiel is just another pagan feast, O, Tidings of reason and fact, reason and fact, Glad tidings of reason and fact.

There was no star of Bethlehem, there was no angels’ song; there could not have been wise men for the trip would take too long. The stories in the Bible are historically wrong, O, Tidings of reason and fact, reason and fact, Glad tidings of reason and fact!

This little song charmed me because I believe it accurately reflects our Unitarian principles and it scans. I hate things that don’t scan.

Then I cruised around some more, and landed with this one,
Q: How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: …well, first you’d have to know whether it’s a fluorescent, incandescent, or halogen bulb, but even then you may have made a false assumption because not all UU’s necessarily even find electric illumination useful, or even believe in Electricity or BC Hydro, although I’d guess most BC Unitarians don’t want to see it sold, whether they believe in it or not… Did that answer your question?
(Helper in the audience. No! How many Unitarians does it take to change a light bulb?)
Well, it dePENDS. Look, I take the question seriously, but I think we should seek consensus on this one. Do you want to strike a committee?

A Christian friend of a Unitarian once remarked that UU’s tend to take a couple of months off during the summer with some churches completely closing. Other denominations might question this practice, by saying “God doesn’t take vacations.”

The response to this is that UU’s are the only ones that God trusts enough to let out of his sight for a while.

Does anybody here know what the four UU sacraments are? (Helpers in the audience.)
– Dedication,
– Marriage,
– Memorial Service,
Allegra: And, of course, Moderated Discussion

What 2 things do UU’s and Dracula have in common?
They both have origins in Transylvania and they both shy away from the cross.

I had a bit of a run-in with a Fundamentalist Christian recently. After getting increasingly irritated by my flippant responses to her dogma, she demanded, “Do you know what’s going to happen when you stand in judgment before God?”
I grinned and said, “She’s gonna have some ‘splaining to do.”

I note that the following hymn is NOT in Singing the Living Tradition; I am willing to believe that it might have been an honest error. (To the tune of Holy, Holy, Holy)

Coffee, coffee, coffee,
Praise the strength of coffee.
Early in the morn we rise with thoughts of only thee.
Served fresh or reheated,
Dark by thee defeated,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.

Though all else we scoff we
Come to church for coffee;
If we’re late to congregate, we come in time for thee.
Coffee our one ritual,
Drinking it habitual,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.

Coffee the communion
Of our Uni-Union,
Symbol of our sacred ground, our one necessity.
Feel the holy power
At our coffee hour,
Brewed black by perk or drip or instantly.

As I say, this should probably be in the hymnal but I am sure that it was an understandable oversight.
I would like to close my homily with a few words on the subject of the canvass.

When I first came under the benign influence of the CUC, it was at the Lakeshore Church in Montreal, with the Rev. Joan Montagnes presiding. (She’s now with a congregation in Idaho.)

When the canvass was announced, the canvass chair got up, brusquely told us that there wasn’t going to be a canvass that year, and sat down. After a brief, rustling pause, suddenly, from all over the church you could hear purses and pocketbooks snap open, making a joyful sound of thanksgiving and support. This is a sound which I hope we will all be able to hear in this community as we continue our journey of discovery and service. It is a strange quality of money that, like people, a little of it with the right intentions, in the right place, really can accomplish great things.

There is no grit…. like that of a teenaged girl.

There is no grit like the grit of a pre-teen girl. It is a combination of testing her own power and mute ignorance, of not knowing what she is or is not capable of. When I look at my daughter, who turned ten this past week, I see the way she constantly flings herself at life, how she can be so serious and responsible one moment and so goofy and intemperate the next.

Already her downy skin contains a crone. Sometimes she is very patient and wise. Life has already taught her how to choke back fear and grief in case she upsets adults. There are times when things family members have done that will make her cry in bed at night, and she won’t say anything for fear of offending.

I’ve tried hard not to hide the good and bad things about adult life from her. I try to stay one step ahead of that agile brain. It’s hard to judge when you’re doing a good job, but every once in a while Kate will do something that will tell me I’ve not done badly.

When her brother was home sick and I had to work, she kept him hydrated and gave him a wet washcloth and made sure he got some sleep. She’s amazingly sweet to her frail great grandmothers, and when Grandma Hinde forgets who she is, she’ll say things like, I’m one of your descendants, and Grandma Hinde will ruefully laugh and then keep guessing who she is.

She has the strong stomach of a healer and the keen eye of a naturalist, always looking for something special and interesting on our walks, a Western garter snake or a purple mushroom. She’s very observant. When it suits her.

And when she decides she wants something or is going to do something, she’s able to show an unearthly tenacity. She has four different volunteer jobs at school. She monitors the kindergarten class during brief teacher absences, she is a library monitor, she’s a crossing guard and two weeks out of four she helps with the lunch program. The first time she described what it’s like on soup day she had my husband and me in hysterics, but she was as serious as anybody gets, talking about work.

She didn’t do her math homework, which is not a hanging offence in these parts, and Mr. Tanner, her teacher, suspended her from serving on the lunch program. From her reaction, you would think WWIII had been declared. It was her intention to march into school the next day and tell him to jam it in his ass. Paul and I whipped around, and she smirked delicately at our expressions. “I won’t say it like that, I’ll ask him to reconsider.” And he did and she was reinstated the next day.

I think of the other times she’s shown grit, when she at the age of eight watched her beloved cat be anaesthetized to have her teeth cleaned and two teeth extracted. It was too bad the vet nearly said no. I told him this was not an ordinary 8-year-old, and if she posed the slightest problem, I’d whip her out of the O.R. and take her home. She ended up helping the technician.

She shows her grit all kinds of ways, the way she defends her friends and her own rights, sometimes yelling and sometimes very quietly when I am overstepping my authority. I hate it, but it’s part of my own growth, letting go in the right places and times. I do sometimes want to be a domestic tyrant, and right now I am the stand in, along with her dad, for every authority figure who will ever try to injure her for her own good, or dominate her for the sake of being able to. If she cannot defend and articulate her rights to me, how limited she’ll be when the big moments come.

They say in teen development in girls, the grit dies out in the face of feminizing social pressure around 12/13. I want Kate to have grit forever, even if I have to be ground up a bit myself in the process.

November 1998

 

I wrote this at the Artist’s Way course I took from a friend of Ellie’s named June.

The Parking Goddess

A monograph on the Parking Goddess, a Twentieth Century Deity

Parking Goddess hear my plea
Find a parking space for me
Make it deep and make it wide
and make it on the proper side.

This invocation, which dates to the summer of 1993, beseeches the Parking Goddess, whose worship dates back to 1991, to find the supplicant a parking space. The Parking Goddess deserves a place of honour in the urban pantheon.

Religion has a boundary layer of power. This power over the seen and the unseen is what causes people to worship, or log on to the power. Conventional religions – those with accretions of dogma, institutions, warlike clerics and hysterical followers – still have power to the extent they can:

1.Bring focus and peace of mind to their adherents;

2.Grant wishes;

3.Provide easy, formulaic and widely acceptable rituals for life’s moments of transition;

4.Provide easy, formulaic and widely acceptable social occasions;

5.Provide easy, formulaic and culturally approved answers for such questions as “Why did Daddy die?” and “Why am I superior to the vast majority of Earth’s inhabitants?”

The Parking Goddess is a minor deity. Her shingle does not say “All life’s problems solved, Lost Love, Business, Bad Luck.” Her gracious bounty adheres strictly to urbane matters. Thus it is she has jurisdiction over:

1. Vehicles, insurance, gas, coffee, repairs, and the presence or absence of the local gendarmes;

2. Parking spaces;

3. How fast the tow-truck comes;

4. Restaurants;

5. Hospitals;

6. Government buildings;

and

7. Any domicile where a ceramic likeness of her is put into a shrine.

Since the Parking Goddess has not actually become incarnate yet, as all of the Big Cheese gods eventually do, this ceramic likeness may take the form of any female figure who inspires awe and amazement.

Worship at the shrine may take any consensual form. Ritual copulation, burning incense, consumption of food, piercings, quiet meditation, speaking in tongues, inverting cats and computer repair are all acceptable to the Goddess, provided one consciously dedicates the activity to her first.

It may interest ethnologists to know who the Parking Goddess is. Like most deities, her origins are shrouded in mystery. It can be authoritatively stated, however, that she:

1. Is the second cousin of Quan Yin;

2. Attends booze cans with Tet, Minerva and the Corn Maiden;

3. Is most likely to appear in physical form to her followers as a lamé-clad transvestite;

4. Is transported from place to place by car radios;

5. Causes minor cases of possession in traffic reporters;

and

6. Will not be able to hear the pleas of her acolytes if she is wearing her headphones while working out.

At present the epicentre of Parking Goddess worship is the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada, which represents the mystical union of male, female, concrete and media which is the essence of her appeal to her followers.

Followers of the Parking Goddess, when asked as to the rationality or propriety of contributing to the development of a religion, during a period of human history when religious wars are pandemic, are likely to give one of two responses;

1. I know it’s irrational, but it works;

and

2. t’s okay, she’s a Unitarian.

The correct response to the prayer is:

“The Parking Goddess heard my cry, V – I – C – T – O – R – Y!”

Allegra Sloman
Hallowe’en, 1993