THE FEAST OF FOOLS IN EUROPE

In the above description may be seen that the principal actors (taking possession of the church during high mass) had on their faces daubed and painted, or masked in a harlequin manner; that they were dressed as clowns or as women; that they ate upon the altar itself sausages and blood-puddings. Now the word “blood-pudding” in French is boudin; but boudin also means “excrement.” Add to this the feature that these clowns, after leaving the church, took their stand in dung-carts (tombereaux), and threw ordure upon the by-standers; and finally that some of these actors appeared perfectly naked (“on voyait les uns se depouiller entierement de leurs habits”), and it must be admitted that there is certainly a wonderful concatenation of resemblances between these filthy and inexplicable rites on different sides of a great ocean.

-John G. Bourke, Scatalogic (!) Rites of All Nations, 1891

Loudon Wainwright III – Good Ship Venus

“It is a natural and well-known fact that the gods of one nation become the devils of their conquerors or successors.”

-William George Black, Folk-Medicine, 1883

Nedelle – Good Grief

An essay on color:

My knuckles are an insistent commentary on the rest of my skin. These concise little pools of blood seem to be permanently formed around them. Whatever variation on pale I’m donning at any point in the year is punctuated by eight rusty orange episodes of itself on the backs of my hands. When I was younger, I used to be embarrassed about it. Hands were supposed to be rippled with veins and uniformly saturated with brown and pink, like some routine topographic map of the southwest. I had fleshy paws that only popped with veins when I gripped my arm really tight and were forever stricken by these naïve reddish knuckles. I would try to press the blood out of the divots in the bone (which only irritated my skin) and clench my fists as much as possible when I thought people were observing my hands. I was worried that they betrayed some damning neglect or inactivity to my classmates. The discoloration did seem to me to deny my ability to appropriately circulate my own blood. I remembered learning about how the arteries could pump blood to any part of the body within a fraction of a second, but nothing about how it would linger around the joints of active children. Circulation is such an intimate personal activity, and here were my knuckles making transparent the pinking apathy of my vital fluids.

At the same time, I was fascinated by how the blushing accentuated the texture of my skin. I began to enjoy the idea that an aspect of my physical appearance would always appear alien to me. The sanguine smears across my hands were sometimes stagnancy, sometimes they commuted some integral warmth and mass inhabiting the tissue beyond my control. I’ve maintained the habit of running my lower lip over the dry scales at the bases of my fingers to feel every crevice at it grows taut around the bone. I do it automatically now, processing the color in tactile terms while my attention is focused on something else. If I hadn’t been so worried about it when I was a kid, I probably wouldn’t be so unconsciously fixated on experiencing the contractions and contortions of my knuckles in different vocabularies now. My insecurities have migrated elsewhere from my hands at this point, but what amazes me is that those tinted ellipses across my hands to me still carry with them traces of that juvenility I was once ashamed of. I was mapping out how to interpret so much sensory input at the same time I was becoming aware of my own physical presence that the ruddy tone of my knuckles must have indelibly come to embody the presence of so much I was unsure about. Hands occupy our visual field during most of the day, of course they become unwilling signifiers. In an indescribable way, I feel the presence of inactivity, stagnancy, warmth, mass, too many concepts to list when I rub my knuckles across my lips, the same way elementary schools always smell like fingerprints. The lazy blood has its own conflation pattern that transcends anything I could actively reassign to it. I can only imagine what that sounds like.

Aah(!). I like March because Eugene is back and I can eat food without Tuxedo Cat harassing me. Yesterday at 5:00…!!..!…we got scampi in a bowl and Tuxedo Cat got in Eugene’s way and he…!…shoved him out of the way. Then I ate two dishes of scampi and that!!! fucker just wiggled his stupid hitler stache at me with disdain.

I think I’mg! etting fat from all this scampi. OHMYSHIT……!..holdon…

….. Plus Eugene is literally swollen with milk after he’s done burrowing…I can (!!!!) just smell it.!!!!!…I kneaded his breasts for 90 minutes after my steak nuggets this morning but he shifted his leg and I lo!st everything in abject fucking terror.  I’ve gotta keep my eyes on that sweet sweet prize.  a couple days before !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think my whiskers are long enough to detect disturbances in the cosmic microwave background.

!….!!!!!!!

For my birthday, Tuxedo Cat thought he’d be a smart ass and got me a poster of a cat in a litter!box.  The caption reads “I’d be anal retentive if I could stop pooping so much.”  Har dee fucking harrrr!!!!RRR you bootsy wearing piece of shit.  !!! You know I have fecal issues and that I also hate you.  Why don’t you suck on your tail like you don’t wish it was your donger.  I ho!!ffuck!!pe it gets caught in the banister and you’re forced to admit to yourself that!!!you’re a eunuch..  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!holyv!!  He bit me again while I was peeing and now I have pee all over my leg.

!!!!!!!!!

-Mollie

Oh.

Mark Kozelek – Duk Koo Kim (live)

The original happens to be 14 minutes long, the number of rounds he lasted in his final bout. (source)

When I don’t hear about him for awhile, a special neuron in my brain alerts me to some imbalance in my physiology. I get all dizzy and colic-y and outright improper in speech and presentation. I’m righted by proving to myself once again that he exists, that he’s out there doing things and people have reinforced his behavior fervently enough to guarantee he will continue to do things. Yet, at the same time, he appears to require absolutely no audience. He is his own foil and a self-sufficient hemisphere of vast and varied topographies. I’m also pretty sure dark matter pumps through his veins, making him secretly responsible for 95% of the universe’s mass.

Onward Crispin Glover – Ballad of Wu Fei

I’m not even sure if I really like this song. But that is the most wonderful band name ever, even if it is a little redundant (Crispin Glover is progress in bodily form). He’s not actually in the band to the best of my knowledge, unless we’re speaking transcendentally.

Then yes, he’s in the band.