To cheer you up. I have been listening to the National Short Story Entrants every morning this week on Today Radio 4. I am filled with a deep desire to parody. Oh God no -its irresistible.... Parody produced, would you like to read it anyone?
John G, I am just wiping up the coffee I have just spluttered all over me laptop. I am about as far removed from the 'God line' as you can get and I was merely saying that in times of tragedy it is good to have a faith/belief system of any sort.
Blacksburg is just over the state line. I attended a wedding there years ago. It's a sleepy little town, unassuming and quiet.
Thank you for posting this. We are all still in shock, but it is already starting to build into anger. I can not imagine what those families and those students are going through! My husband and I shake our heads in disbelief.
“Its was the falling of the petals from the first cherry blossoms of spring I always remember – like heavy snow down the track that lead to the farm and falling into drifts on the porch. Old Murgatgh was still living back then – and in the early spring sun he would sit like a polar bear on a berg wrapped in a fur on the old porch hand carving heart valve replacements from old pork bones. Them Bones! My old daddy was not one to let anything go to waste, he’d sell his pigs to the slaughter house and then late at night take his big old yellow pick up round the skips of garbage – in a fly blown courtyard round the back and he would get them old bones back!. Ma would boil them up for soup, or set them into a soup or serve with cherries and pistachios for delicious desserts.
Oh how Mam loved those desserts – and old Murgatgh loved them too. Slurping down great piles using a spoon made from an ear, stitched to a twig. Like I said nothing was wasted in the Belrooville Cottage. At the end we would all sit a-lickin at them plates like a canoe full of Tasmanian Devils in a raspberry jam factory. Other nights a piece of meat dipped in dung to resemble chocolate would be devoured in communal silence and sometimes toads which brother Rodney caught behind the wood shed where he went for a wank.
At the end of the road where Picking Petes Cottage stood obscuring the view with its seventeen stories of ramshackle building , the road forked and lead one way down into Scratsboro Village and the other up the hill, between already scorching fields full of pigs and lambs towards the main road.
Of an evening when I was home from school that spring and Old Murgatgh was carving surgical accessories I would screech on my bike down past Petes do it yourself skyscraper and stare for hours up the hill with the dingy roofs of Scratsboro firmly at my back. If I knew then what I know now I would have just turned and bolted home to the pig infested farm, its bizarre guests and disgusting puddings, and the porcine embrace of my old Ma’s arms. Then I was just full of yearning. To get away, to travel that busy road and to see the big city. Sometimes Rodney would join me for a while, his jaw slack and his eyes puzzled as he fiddled with his todger. But he never understood my passion, nor me his, and he never did get away or alter his devotion to onanism.
Johannes Belrooville that’s my name sitting by the side of the road 15 years old and yearning for adventure, Rodney is already trailing back down the road hand busy in his dungarees and Old Murgatgh is playing the harp calling in the family and the workers from the pig fields for evening Robustimo Feast . To me the planchett tones of the harp recall the later works of Debussy, or maybe a Lynyrd Skynyrd Ballad . – He had no musical training Old Murgatgh but he could work a harp tune as well as any other Red Indian I had ever met.
I haven’t told you about Pa Belrooville yet – but Robustimo Feast is a good place to start….and about how that fateful night set me – that shy sensitive 15 year old - off on my journey to Rwanda, Palestine, Tooting Bec and the depths of human suffering…” (continue in same vein for hours)
bwurghuuugh... sorry that was my reaction to reading the last comment. I was hearing about this on BBC World while on holiday and that New York bod was saying that these type of shootings are becoming so commonplace in the states that the only thing that distinguished this one was the number of deaths! Shit and then right across the border (to the north) unless Michael Moore completely lied to us all you have Canadians with their doors unlocked. When is that bloody country going to reflect?
Humanity seems to fear death far too much when perhaps we'd overcome all our fears if we embraced it... it is after all but the flip side of life, a natural coming and going, begining and ending and new beginning. That said, at the end of the gun would not be the nicest way to go - too much violence, as usual...
I do not follow the thinking that because you have a weapon of mass destruction then I should go and get a bigger one. However, if you would like to purchase this nice shiny gun then all you have to do is to get yourself a licence (or not) and then you can go and kill something. Easy, eh?
I have no fear of death Atyllah, but like many people I believe that our children should outlive us.
...we shouldn't send them out at the end of a gun. 
18 comments:
Well said, Minx! See my poem "a baby's blessing" on my poetry blog. Fits this thought perfectly.
We should not allow this. I am crying...again.
To cheer you up. I have been listening to the National Short Story Entrants every morning this week on Today Radio 4. I am filled with a deep desire to parody. Oh God no -its irresistible.... Parody produced, would you like to read it anyone?
amen to that!
this is one fear i have for my own little one.
but i know He is there for her.
It is good to have faith CS, whichever God you turn to.
Oh go on then Mut. Fire away.
Tomorrow my dear,the muse is upon me!!
Minx, I sympathise with all the families of those tragically killed, but please don't go down the God line. Sorry.
Mutley, I hope that the muse is a skinny thing, one would not wish you to be squished when she is upon you.
Anyway - can't wait.
John G, I am just wiping up the coffee I have just spluttered all over me laptop.
I am about as far removed from the 'God line' as you can get and I was merely saying that in times of tragedy it is good to have a faith/belief system of any sort.
Fair comment, Minx.
Belief systems (private, communal, concrete or flimsily created)...they support us
MOst people have something, even if it is almost nameless.
Dear Minx,
Blacksburg is just over the state line. I attended a wedding there years ago. It's a sleepy little town, unassuming and quiet.
Thank you for posting this. We are all still in shock, but it is already starting to build into anger. I can not imagine what those families and those students are going through! My husband and I shake our heads in disbelief.
It shatters all of my beliefs.
“Its was the falling of the petals from the first cherry blossoms of spring I always remember – like heavy snow down the track that lead to the farm and falling into drifts on the porch. Old Murgatgh was still living back then – and in the early spring sun he would sit like a polar bear on a berg wrapped in a fur on the old porch hand carving heart valve replacements from old pork bones. Them Bones! My old daddy was not one to let anything go to waste, he’d sell his pigs to the slaughter house and then late at night take his big old yellow pick up round the skips of garbage – in a fly blown courtyard round the back and he would get them old bones back!. Ma would boil them up for soup, or set them into a soup or serve with cherries and pistachios for delicious desserts.
Oh how Mam loved those desserts – and old Murgatgh loved them too. Slurping down great piles using a spoon made from an ear, stitched to a twig. Like I said nothing was wasted in the Belrooville Cottage. At the end we would all sit a-lickin at them plates like a canoe full of Tasmanian Devils in a raspberry jam factory. Other nights a piece of meat dipped in dung to resemble chocolate would be devoured in communal silence and sometimes toads which brother Rodney caught behind the wood shed where he went for a wank.
At the end of the road where Picking Petes Cottage stood obscuring the view with its seventeen stories of ramshackle building , the road forked and lead one way down into Scratsboro Village and the other up the hill, between already scorching fields full of pigs and lambs towards the main road.
Of an evening when I was home from school that spring and Old Murgatgh was carving surgical accessories I would screech on my bike down past Petes do it yourself skyscraper and stare for hours up the hill with the dingy roofs of Scratsboro firmly at my back. If I knew then what I know now I would have just turned and bolted home to the pig infested farm, its bizarre guests and disgusting puddings, and the porcine embrace of my old Ma’s arms. Then I was just full of yearning. To get away, to travel that busy road and to see the big city. Sometimes Rodney would join me for a while, his jaw slack and his eyes puzzled as he fiddled with his todger. But he never understood my passion, nor me his, and he never did get away or alter his devotion to onanism.
Johannes Belrooville that’s my name sitting by the side of the road 15 years old and yearning for adventure, Rodney is already trailing back down the road hand busy in his dungarees and Old Murgatgh is playing the harp calling in the family and the workers from the pig fields for evening Robustimo Feast . To me the planchett tones of the harp recall the later works of Debussy, or maybe a Lynyrd Skynyrd Ballad . – He had no musical training Old Murgatgh but he could work a harp tune as well as any other Red Indian I had ever met.
I haven’t told you about Pa Belrooville yet – but Robustimo Feast is a good place to start….and about how that fateful night set me – that shy sensitive 15 year old - off on my journey to Rwanda, Palestine, Tooting Bec and the depths of human suffering…”
(continue in same vein for hours)
Mut, you're a genius and, of course - this story must be told. Heh. Shall we?
If someone had had a gun then they would all be alive. As it was only the loon did .
We get a shooting a week here and its getting to the point when I am thinking about some judicious protection
bwurghuuugh... sorry that was my reaction to reading the last comment. I was hearing about this on BBC World while on holiday and that New York bod was saying that these type of shootings are becoming so commonplace in the states that the only thing that distinguished this one was the number of deaths! Shit and then right across the border (to the north) unless Michael Moore completely lied to us all you have Canadians with their doors unlocked. When is that bloody country going to reflect?
Humanity seems to fear death far too much when perhaps we'd overcome all our fears if we embraced it... it is after all but the flip side of life, a natural coming and going, begining and ending and new beginning.
That said, at the end of the gun would not be the nicest way to go - too much violence, as usual...
I do not follow the thinking that because you have a weapon of mass destruction then I should go and get a bigger one. However, if you would like to purchase this nice shiny gun then all you have to do is to get yourself a licence (or not) and then you can go and kill something. Easy, eh?
I have no fear of death Atyllah, but like many people I believe that our children should outlive us.
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