Oh, Hey!

OMG I nearly forgot! Today is St Rita's Feast Day, which I mentioned in an earlier blasphemous post. How auspicious that I decided today to finally post the photo of myself with the little brain-topped pencils that has been part of my cluttered desktop for months. I scroll down my page and what do I find? Yes! A reminder!

St Rita is patron of lost and impossible causes (as many are), and her attributes are as follows:

Forehead wound, Rose, Bees, Grape vine. And a skull, the great memento mori. Like Yorick's. 

I should think that in a practical sense, one may wish to celebrate this day with a glass of wine and a bouquet of roses. Almost (but not quite) in a bourgeois, LIFESTYLE sort of way. I say almost, because I'm a big fan of the wine, and I think roses are not bad. They aren't as nice as daisies, but they smell nice and the petals taste good. So I grow 'em.

St Rita when she thinks about LIFESTYLES.

But have I expressed my feelings about LIFESTYLES? They make me sick. I have a life, I have style, but I don't have a LIFESTYLE. LIFESTYLES are for wankers who sit in their purchased LIFESTYLE gardens with nice little heating lamps and expensive specially-woven outdoor cushions and impeccably delicate foot-high stemmed wine glasses and plates of lamb drizzled with some sort of reduction or another, and chitchat about how they personally sacked some low-level nobody at the office for photocopying the wrong page earlier that day. That's what my neighbours do in their LIFESTYLE IN A BOX garden.

So let's reformulate this. To honour St Rita, tear some roses from your neighbours' garden, grab a box of wine (preferably this one, if you can), and shit in your neighbours' honey (as an acquaintance of mine once did. Ahem). But perhaps leave out the head wound. Or draw one on if you like. A good smear of red lipstick will do.

Thinking what to write next...

...and it will probably be a discussion of Giddeon Burrow's Brain Tumours: Living Low Grade, which came out a couple of months ago and which I immediately purchased directly from his website (why buy from Amazon when you've got the option to support small publishers), but I just haven't got around to writing about it with the care it deserves. It surprised me with the accuracy of its insights and its intimate knowledge of the alienation that is specific to those of us who live, basically, from scan to scan, always uncertain and in constant limbo about what direction a slow-grower might take, i.e. malignancy lurks at every turn. I suppose that in the meantime I will say that I highly recommend it to anybody who knows anybody with a low grade glioma. Kinda explains a few things very lucidly. It's a super quick, easy, and meaningful read.

Giddeon also has a blog, although I admit I have not spent much time perusing it, just for lack of time.