perzephone: (Default)
I have nothing to do since WoW is offline again for the third morning in a row. Damn I wish they'd get their shit together. We watched Ghostrider & Rob went to bed. I've removed my profiles from so many networking sites in my effort to free up time for school, so now that I have no class this summer, I've got more time to aimlessly surf. Death & gore sites hold no interest for me anymore, except when I'm feeling particularly sick & twisted inside... I can only shop so much, there's nothing new on rotten.com, porn is blase, no new comics on PennyArcade... so I went by the Indiana Coyote Rescue Site & caught up with them.

This came from You Can Always Blame Coyote

"The world’s greatest omnivore

In a study covering coyotes in Yellowstone National Park in 1937-38, the legendary biologist Adolph Murie recorded the following among “miscellaneous food and non-food times” in 5,086 coyote droppings:

Horse manure
Garbage
Trash
Muskmelon
Apple
Corn refuse
Paper
Canvas-leather glove
Rag
Butter wrapper
Twine
Banana peel
Orange peel
Leather (one piece containing rivet)
Cellophane
Steak bone
Grape seeds
Mouse nest material
Seven inches of curtain
Pear
Prune seed
Match
Two square inches of rubber
Tinfoil
Shoestring
Mud
Paint-covered rag
Eight inches of rope
Three square inches of towel
Lemon rind
Bacon rind
Two pieces of shirt
Canvas
Gunny sack
Isinglass
Botfly larvae

All this was in addition to the usual diet of mammals, birds and invertebrates. In Murie’s study, a coyote was more likely to have eaten a canvas-leather glove than a mushroom."

You know, if these midwestern farmers are having such a problem w/coyotes eating their sheep, they ought to get more big dogs, perimeter lighting or emus. Emus up at Bonnie Springs did an admirable job at keeping the coyotes at bay.

I read a story not too long ago about a large male wolf who had been seen (and busted by an unbelieving cop) chasing cars. No more reports have come in since the cop spotted him... probably embarrassed that wolf to death.

Bad dog!

People like this give the rest of us Pagans a bad rap. Wotta fucking moron. Thanks, there, John Anderson, way to take one for the team.
Hey, everyone, I'm an obsessed, murderous Drood!
perzephone: (Default)
Sometimes I just don't want to do anything painful or inconvenient. Usually, I go out of my way to inconvenience myself - always looking for the hardest route, the most troublesome pathway... but right now, I just don't want to do. I just want to be.

Me bitching about my knee. Again. )

Oh, yeah, Rob broke his toe, confirmed by the doc this morning, with much exclamation over the swelling & fading bruises. And no, there isn't anything we can do for it, really - ice & ibuprofen. He's got to baby it. When you break your littlest piggy, you're just kind of stuck with it being broken.

Reading more of Coyote Medicine. Apparently, Coyote got bored once & together with Silver Fox, made everything on earth appear by singing it into existence. He was still bored after everything was here, so he told Silver Fox he was going to see if he could create something smarter than himself. That's how we got here... being smarter than Coyote ain't saying much, but Silver Fox knew all along we'd be trouble.
perzephone: (coyote)
I must be in a weird mood tonight. Started w/me reading something about vintage lesbian art... so I started looking up 'vintage lesbian art' to add to my screensaver art collection & somehow ended up looking up pictures of Johnny Depp. That led to me looking up pictures of Edward Scissorhands. Which led, almost naturally, to Robert Smith & the Cure. Which led to Siouxsie & the Banshees because for some reason, when I typed in 'Robert+Smith+The+Cure, I was only getting pics of the old, puffy, blotchy Robert Smith & those kind of reminded me of how Siouxsie used to look. Her eye make-up led me to screen shots & movies posters of A Clockwork Orange. And from there, for some unknown reason, I started looking for Trent Reznor.

Now, I realize that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of rocker chicks and former rocker chicks who probably feel some 'connection' to Trent Reznor, that "oh, he's so deep, he sings exactly how I feel, it's like he knows me", and I am embarrassed for falling prey to that goofy fan-girl mentality, especially because I am 33 years old, old - fat and virtual slave to my job and computer... I didn't know what Reznor looked like til I saw his picture in a N'Awlins newspapers, years after I had that dream about him telling me Coyote stole his bride. I have never even been to a NiN concert (shock, gasp, dismay!), mainly because I am kind of afraid about my own over-emotional response. I fear I would be one of those screaming fainters you see in old newsreels about Elvis or the Beatles. (Speaking of the Beatles, there is a fusion band called Beatallica who are supposed to be a combination of the Beatles & Metallica, and they are releasing an album soon w/songs titled things like: Leper Madonna, Blackened in the USSR and more... I'm intrigued and repulsed at the same time by the whole concept.) I'd be the only person crying at a NiN concert, and it wouldn't be because someone in the mosh pit kicked me in the head, either.

Anyway, so I started looking to see if there were any stills from the Closer video, and I ran across this interview from 1994. He rented the Tate house in the Los Angeles hills - the scene of the Manson Family murders. I read this, and that goofy fan-girl connection got even stronger:

The first night was _terrifying_. By then, I knew all about the place--I'd read all the books about the Manson murders. So I walked in the place at night and everything was dark, and I was like, "Holy Jesus, that's where it happened." Scary, I jumped a mile at every sound--even if it was an owl. I woke up in the middle of the night and there was a coyote looking in the window at me. I thought, "I'm not gonna make it."

And speaking of Coyote and coyotes, I got my books, Coyote Medicine, Coyote Healing and Coyote Wisdom. Today in the bathroom, I read a story about how coyotes came to be. Apparently at one time, there was only one Coyote, not many. I've paraphrased it some.

Coyote talked Buzzard into taking him through the hole in the sky where the Skypeople lived. Buzzard made Coyote promise to meet him for the return trip before sundown made it too cold for Buzzard to fly. Of course, Coyote got to telling stories & gambling with the Skypeople, and he forgot about Buzzard until far after dark. Well, Coyote had gotten bored and frustrated with the Skypeople because they knew all his tricks, so he decided to go ahead back to the hole and see if by chance Buzzard had waited for him. Of course, Buzzard hadn't wanted to get stuck over night either, so Coyote was left all alone by the hole in the sky. He took a leap of faith then, wanting to get back to the old world where folks would fall for some of his tricks every once in awhile, and he fell for many, many days.

The people below were worried about how Coyote was faring with the Skypeople, and when he finally hit the ground in a broken, dead heap they figured the Skypeople had thrown him down the hole. Even though he had invented death, he didn't deserve to die forever, so all the other people gathered to pray to the Great Spirit that Coyote would be allowed to live in some form somewhere else. Well, late that night, after everyone had fallen asleep, the Great Spirit scattered Coyote's bones. Shortly after moonrise, all the creatures were woken by a horrible racket - where the bones had fallen, new little coyotes had sprang up and were singing their thanks to the Great Spirit.
perzephone: (coyote)
A friend of mine bitches that no one comes to her for help, while I, who don't like other living creatures, am constantly harangued, harrassed & annoyed by constant pleas for assistance. What's my secret? Uh, I'm that hermit atop the high, windy tor, w/vertical climbs too far up for the average mountain climber's rope to reach, no handholds, no footholds, and it's really bloody cold up here too... one of the last earnest knowledge-seekers froze to death before they reached my cave entrance & I've been using them for crushed ice for my margaritas... anyway, I replied to her letting her know my secret. Be aloof. Be cold. Appear uncaring & self-centered. Offer nothing when presented w/new ideas or concepts. People will think you know the secrets of the Universe as well as all the answers to all their problems & they will be drawn to you like white to rice.
I became determined to become more available & open, & I've had the quietest 2 1/2 weeks of my entire conscious life. One could say I'm a veritable persona-non-grata around work, certain sex-starved individuals excepted. Even Rob's been sort of self-sufficient. It's really weird. Coyote Magic at its finest.
Speaking of ol' Sedit there, I've found in 2 separate books from the library & heard something on t.v. recently about Coyote's involvement w/bringing death to mankind. I also read a charming little tome called "Hex & the City" by Lucy Summers which had a bunch of charming little urban-witch spells in it, some of which centered around divining your perfect career. I also told someone about how you know Who your patron deities or totem spirits are. It's really funny, because when Coyote came looking for me I had only a teenager's passing fascination w/all things deathly & morbid, and at the time I had never heard of Coyote's foibles regarding the introduction of death to life in general. So years later, I decide that I'd be a darned good mortician or medical examiner or something dealing w/dead bodies & I get a book called "Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies" by Ken Iserson. There's a little blurb at the beginning of the book about Coyote telling an assembly of no-leggeds & two-leggeds & four-leggeds & more-leggeds how if the rock floats, we'll all live forever, but if the rocks sink, everything will eventually die. Of course, he tosses the rock in the pond before anyone can say "No! Don't!" Weeelll, in this past week, 3 or 4 more such references have passed under my nose, & also some mentions of Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian deity of the afterlife, & in Egyptian lore, the jackal (as well as the hyena) are the equivalents to Coyote in Native American lore... & Anubis also was quite the saucy God of sex & dirty jokes, much like Coyote. So, even tho I bemoan the fact that Coyote came looking for me, every day I realize a little more how close to my Spirit Mis-Guide I really am. And career-wise, well, it's off to a slow start but by the time I finally get to go to a mortuary science school, I will know all there is to know about caring for dead people.

Stupid Las Vegas trivia factoid: Our mayor, Oscar Goodman, used to be a criminal lawyer, & in the mid '80's he was a defense lawyer for a woman named Sante Kimes, who was accused of keeping slaves in her Las Vegas home. Uh, she lost. (I'm reading the true crime book, "The Mother, the Son & the Socialite" by Adrian Havill.) In fact, I think I've seen the house involved, listed as being on Geronimo Way, behind the Sands - it's probably long gone due to the Sands Convention Center.
perzephone: (coyote)
Sometime around the whole WTC massacre, anyway. Gods how the years fly by.
You see, Coyote is perverse. Not perverted, at least, not all the time, but perverse. Coyote people are a lot of fun to be around, but it’s not always fun to be a coyote. Coyotes suffer from chronic foot-in-mouth disease. It’s not that we don’t want self-control, discretion and tact... Being a coyote means that eventually, the truth will come out. If you have to tell friendly lies long enough, a part of the mind starts to whimper and whine. It scratches at the sticky doggy-door of polite niceties, chews at the linoleum, and eventually runs out between your legs when opportunity knocks & you open the door. And once the sly coyote of truth is out in the streets, just try catching that little sucker.
As a coyote, I’m lucky to have the friends I have. Most of them are suckers for the truth. Most of my friends and lovers have been raised in polite society. Polite society only tells the truth as “constructive criticism” to your face. Meanwhile, everyone talks about everybody else in hushed tones and muted whispers. They cut each other to pieces and smile at one another the whole time. A coyote walks into the room & asks, loudly, "So who did you see picking their nose & licking their fingers? Oh, her... Wow, I would have never expected she was a closet booger-eater." When the accused walks into the room, a coyote will ask, "So, how do they taste, anyway?"
A coyote’s friends learn never to ask certain questions. "Does this dress make me look fat?" or "Do you think he’s cheating on me?" are questions just asking for a taste of coyote medicine. Coyotes have a knack for the inappropriate. I was laid off of work recently, and the assistant manager who had the task of breaking the news to people does not have very well developed people skills. As he proceeded to deliver his “I’m sorry, but due to airline cutbacks, yadda yadda yadda...” speech, I reached over, grasped his hand & asked him, "You know what this means, don’t you?" Panic rose in his empty little blue eyes as I stood up & stated, "I'll have to go get my Uzi now, sir." But being a coyote, I couldn’t keep a straight face. My own joke was too funny. A fox person would have waited until the boss wet himself before letting him off the hook.
Murphy was a coyote person, never mind being an optimist. I try really hard to keep from howling, to keep the scruffy yellow pelt hidden beneath my veneer of domestication. But really and truly, a part of me longs to run & sing under orange desert moons. That’s the part of me that can’t leave well enough alone. The part of me that has to get that one word in edgewise, that can’t let sleeping dogs lie. There is no muzzle out there that can contain a snappy comeback or a really, really good one-liner. And like all good hunters (even if it’s small prey), coyotes can’t resist people who leave themselves open to attack in any way, shape or form.

Sometimes when I close my eyes I see a grey Arabian stallion running across the ridge of a red sand dune. He is very real against the clear blue vault of the sky behind him. Sometimes he has all the trappings of some Bedouin’s lost mount, other times he is just there, bare skinned, but he is always racing. His mane and tail stream out like banners, and I can almost see the red of his nostrils flaring, and the deep brown of his eyes. There are no hoof prints in the sand behind him. I like having the horse running around behind my eyes, where no one else can see him, but I’m curious as to how he got there in the first place.

I had a dream once, where Trent Reznor came up to me & told me Coyote had stolen his bride, and I had to go & get her back. I still wonder, "why me, & why Trent Reznor?" I didn’t recognize the man in my dream as even being Trent Reznor until I went to Louisiana & saw his photo in a newspaper.

I also dreamed, or fantasized, of being a deer-herding girl from a tribe of people who herded deer for whatever arcane reasons people herd animals in the first place, and the herd stag had mated with me. I had twins, a boy & a girl, and even though they looked like humans, they had big brown deer eyes, & were covered in deer hair, & they could run like the wind. I knew somehow that when my son got old enough, he would challenge the herd stag, and one would die. This still kind of bothers me, not so much the challenge part, but the fact that in my dream I didn’t mind having twins. Especially because I know my dream self probably breast-fed them, and that grosses me out to no end.

I’m back in Las Vegas now, and it’s pretty much like I never went to Louisiana at all. I know a lot of this has to do with Rob, because I knew he would hate it, and he did, and now we’re back, but that doesn’t make it any better, because I know I gave up. So tomorrow I’m going to go stand in line to get my TAM card & my sheriff’s card, all so I can go to a job that I know I’ll hate, only because we need the money to survive. And it’s back to survival. I worry about the bills piling up, and the rent, and the fact that we don’t have a lease means they can raise the rent any time they want. And believe me, $590 a month is already WAAAAY too much. Especially for not having enough hot water to take a shower, no matter what time in the day you try to take it. And of course Rob went right back to his $6.50 an hour job, so it’s up to me to rake in the big dineros, even though I had a job in Louisiana that was sort of paying the bills. And Rob claims he’s waiting for the County to start hiring again, but to me the County rhymes w/Coyote, especially because every time I try to type County, my fingers try to type Coyote. And Coyotes and County jobs are both unreliable, and prone to laugh at you for trying so hard.

I feel like the fox in the story I just read, "Dreaming Among Men." Maybe I am really a coyote, and my mom & dad picked me up somewhere between here & Fontana, & saw a resemblance in my furry little face to a human child, & they tried to instill humanity in me. But it never really works right, especially when a dog teaches you to walk & your best friend’s a cat that’s not really a cat, and one of your human sisters is a Satanist & the other one’s trying to be a different color than the one everybody else wants her to be, and your dad’s not all the way grown up & has 5 different social security cards, none of them his, & your mom’s a different sort of animal altogether, who wounds just to wound, & never quite finishes playing w/her emotional prey. And I find myself in the desert again, under rain that smells like canals & drunkenness & darkness that is actually darkness, and the sad thing is that I knew I wasn't at home there, but I wanted to be. I think I could have gone from Coyote to Armadillo in 5 or 6 easy lessons. Maybe even learned to be a Nutria if I tried hard enough. I think Nutrias are actually mis-named Capybara, now that I think about it.

I think a lot about running away, and not just running away in space & time, but running away to the ultimate end. Just give up fighting & worrying, give up trying to make things work, running away from trying to put broken things back together. I know it’s because I’m a broken thing, and the only one who can ever put me back together is me. But I don’t know where to start, because there are so many pieces laying around, & I think a few vital parts of me have gotten lost, swept under the couches of memory, or eaten by the dryers of time like so many left socks. I think that’s why Coyotes run w/their tails between their legs - us Coyotes know we’re beaten from the start. Us Coyotes know we’re losers in the game of life. But Coyotes can survive anywhere, and seem to be able to go on living, even w/porcupine quills in their noses, gunshot wounds festering in their flanks, dog-bitten, disease raddled, toothless from biting open old tin cans & chewing off their own legs to get out of traps. I just have to wonder, how many legs do I have left? How many more times can I get shot or eat poisoned bait & survive?

I like the story of La Que Saba, the Wild Woman. I’d like to think that one of these days I might be able to breathe life into old bleached bones, watch them go from bones to wolf to woman, flying off across the washes & mesas, howls turning into laughter & tears. I’d like to be the wolf who comes from under there into the world up here, through the hole in the sky, to rebirth myself in a new skin and sing a new song. I know one day I might actually be free, but at times I don’t think I can wait til I’m old & wearier than I am now. I’m so tired now that I can’t think straight anymore.

I’m sitting here watching a program on the Discovery channel about tattoos, and having tattoos does make me feel like I’m part of some arcane society... I’m looking at these tribal Maori facial tattoos called “moko”. I think when I am old and no longer have to worry about my job potential, I’m going to get facial tattooing. I love the photos of the women from the ‘30's & ‘40's who were prostitutes & circus side show acts, & I wish it was that easy now, & that inexpensive. Here’s a 72-year old woman being tattooed by her daughter - it’s her 2nd tattoo, and she’s not even flinching. I can’t wait til we start making some money again, because I think now if I’m gonna waste a bunch of money, it’s going on my skin.
perzephone: (coyote)
I don’t know why Coyote chooses to come & visit me Especially considering that I’m a short, fat white woman; completely bound to concrete and sidewalks, flushing toilets, that sort of thing. I never really was a wild-woods kind of child. You’d think that Coyote would be out harassing some weather-beaten old Paiute or Apache elder somewhere. But no, he shows up on my doorstep, drinking my Guinness & looking around for leftovers.
Anyway, for some reason Coyote came to visit me, in his dusty blue jeans & sprung boots, floppy leather cowboy hat shading his ancient amber eyes. He squatted down on his haunches & scratched himself in places better left unsaid. After telling me a few of his dirtier jokes & reacquainting himself with the novelty of television and good Irish suds, he looked at me sideways & said, "You know, I’ve got a dirty secret."
Now, knowing Coyote like I do, this wasn’t a big surprise. He gets blamed for everything. And there are a few things he’s been blamed for that he really didn’t do. Before you laugh, notice I said a few things. I don’t think Coyote’s to blame for the religious right. Or Republicans. But the platypus and tumbleweeds and sticker-bushes... those are all his idea. So are handicaps and death... but that’s for another time. I wondered exactly what kind of secret Coyote would consider being dirty. So I asked, "It must be pretty bad if you’re calling it a dirty little secret."
He smiled his toothy grin, "Yeah, so don’t tell nobody else. I’ve got a reputation to maintain."
At this, I laughed. A great big belly laugh came up from my toes. He waited for me to regain my composure. It’s hard to know when he’s serious or about to tell one of his nastiest cathouse stories. Even when Coyote was known as One Big Angry, he kept a grin under his nose.
“You see, once, way back when, back when there were still more buffalo than white people, I made that little joke about the rock."
“I remember you telling me how you voted Death into office."
He nodded. “I didn’t know how widespread it would be, though. Until one day I looked up & saw there were more people than buffalo. And that clued me in. Right away I noticed there was something happening. It wasn’t just the buffalo that were gone. Other four-leggeds, and six-leggeds, and no-leggeds were coming up missing every day. And more and more of your kind were taking their place." his yellow eyes glared at me briefly, and I just shrugged.
"Hey, man, this was before I even got here."
"I know, I know. But let me finish. I roamed the plains and the hills, and saw more & more people, and more & more dead buffalo. And then almost no buffalo altogether. No mountain lions or wolves. No big hunters. Only us coyotes and foxes... a few rattlesnakes. Saw a lot of cows and sheep and white folk, though." He polished off his third Guinness and held out his paw for another one. “You guys do make great alcohol, gotta give you that much. So, I’m out walking somewhere a little East of the big hills you call the Rockies, and I hear someone crying, and I go to look & see. Maybe there was something dead I could finish off, once their grieving was done," he licked his chops in reflection of road kill.
"When I got to the source, it wasn’t anything left to eat. It was a den full of wolf puppies, starving and scared. Someone had probably done away with the parents, or maybe they found poison bait or stumbled into a trap left for someone like me. I don’t know what happened to ma & pa wolf, but I knew then I was looking at the last of my cousins." He looked off into the distance past my porch, his yellow gaze taking in the early colors of Las Vegas sunset, "now you know how I feel about my family. I mean, they hate me and I hate them. But we’re still family."
"Been there, done that... So what did you do?"
"Well, I took up those pups with me, and starting them looking for sturdy sticks and twigs, and some pointed rocks, and feathers, and I started making arrows."
"Did you plan to hunt down whoever did away with the adult wolves, or were you going to have some shish-ka-bob?" At least Coyote had the decency (or pretended to have the decency) to look mildly hurt by the last comment. But what did he expect from me, compassion? Especially with my last beer in his dirty paw?
"No, ya stupid white woman, I took those arrows, and I built a stairway into the sky. I called together all the wild folk I could find to help me. It took a long time; too, because the higher I built it, the more of my help disappeared. But eventually I built that stairway all the way into the sky so those wolves would have somewhere to go. And if you look up, you can see them chasing the buffalo up there, too."
"And that’s your big, ugly dirty secret?" I tried to keep from letting him see me wipe the tears out of my eye - he’d never let me live it down.
Coyote only grinned, "Yeah, so don’t tell no one, ok? Especially where that stairway is. You & me, we might need it some day, too."

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Rainbow Serpent Woman

August 2014

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