At his best, things do not happen to the artist; he happens to them. ~ William Saroyan ~

I have ripped the screen from my door by accident. In the South, the U.S. at least, this means I will be deluged by mosquitos eventually. The unicorn meat eating cats don't care, but I do. I must smell good to bugs, and we have a lot of them here. As the poet says, there are 10,000 kind of spiders and 9,999 live in Virginia, plus a couple a kinds that no one has heard of. And flying insects...don't get me started. I already have the welts to prove it...

A friend died the other day. I am getting to the age where this is happening more and more. One day it will happen to me. I want to be cremated and spread at Hollins University, along Tinker Creek. How do you want to be disposed of? Let me know at alisestewart@yahoo.com.

Shall Earth no more inspire thee, Thou lonely dreamer now? Emily Bronte

Now that I have my mojo back on...I have a friend who wants to hear about pedestrians stepping out into traffic. It reminds me of being in Cairo, Egypt in 2002. I was visiting a lovely friend who indulged my passion for Lebanese food by taking me to the same restaurant everyday. To get there, we had to cross a four lane road, only in Cairo, that is a sixteen lane road. Cairenes will squeeze a vehicle into spaces no car is meant to go, which made it seem like we were living on the edge all the time. Which we were, being pedestrians.

My friend has a problem with pedestrians who step out into traffic in front of Carilion Roanoke Memorial. Maybe they are dazed by the coffee the hospital serves, or news of the impending death of a loved one, making them insensitive to their own approaching death. Me, I am heartened by the hoards of smokers clustered under the underpass bridge. At least Carilion provides shelter for all those people in wheelchairs...

More on this and Cairo after some coffee.

We live in a world we ourselves create. ~ Johann Gottfried Herder ~

O, if only that weren't true, I could blame everything on someone else...The earthquake the other day was pretty interesting. Virginia is known for it's karst topography, that is, holes in the ground with caves underneath. Not shifting plates, which is what an earthquake is. I heard the quake ran along the "it's your fault" line that runs out of Washington.

My friend River Laker, is upset by some of the small minds that comment on blogs about him. Stripping down in a nightclub for charity in Virginia is as earth shaking as it gets. Virginia today tends to take it's cultural mores from the 1950's. We have not always been a pillar of rectitude, and River is an example of why. All those English immigrants were a pretty raunchy crew, as we are today. After all, John Smith didn't invent porn, it has been contemporaneous with all of human kind. Look at the ruins at Herculaneum...
in Australia, River would have been given an award for nicest ass of the night, or a full moon. Look at "Petunia, Queen of the Desert" as an example. The Puritans did us more damage than we thought. And now, all we have is hound dogs and okra.

Hope is Gone, but not Abandoned

The kitten I was fostering for the SPCA, who I named Hope, has gone back to the SPCA in her search for a forever home. Echo, one of the unicorn meat eating cats, has returned to her rightful home, with me and the other two and the dog.

I went searching for my favorite pair of earrings the other night...my beloved mother bought them for me...gold knots that suited me perfectly. I didn't know young dogs could mangle gold like that, although it IS a soft metal, and their teeth can crack elk bones. I'm grateful it wasn't the foster kitten. But I loved those earrings dammit.

Finished the blog for Gwenda Kellett today, about the award winning, short film "The Porcelain Unicorn". It's a truly lovely, three minute piece about the meeting of a small member of the Hitler Youth, and an even smaller Jewish girl in hiding. You should really google and watch...

I have been told my comments on this blog have been disabled, and I can't turn them back on: feel free to write me at alisestewart@yahoo.com or facebook me at Alise Stewart.

Please, no profanity.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat...Douglas Adams

One of the unicorn meat eating orphans is missing. Someone in the neighborhood has her trapped, puree-ing her ostrich meat, no doubt, instead of merely shredding it. They don't know how cruel they are being, keeping her small, shining soul from my view. Undoubtedly, that's why they are keeping her...her love.

Onto news of the world...the manic dog is still manic and the other two cats still return at noon and dusk to receive their ostrich meat, shredded. I have committed to writing an arts blog every month and realize how outclassed I am after reading everyone else's blog. It's not that I can't blog, although sometimes I can't. It's just the realization that my appreciation of the arts is limited to Shakespeare's plays, Monet, and Bach and Mozart...this is a small fraction of the arts world, people.

I would like to address real people...instead of my stats. That means feedback. Come on, send me something I can address.