Today I realized that I should not hate the way I look.

I look like the Earth herself; my insides are reflected in the outside. I am round as the Earth is round. I am full and generous, spilling light like the bowl of the moon. I am sensual and giving. I am the soil that longs for the rain. I am summer and winter and all the seasons between. I embrace those that care for me in return. I provide, and I repay.

I need to go and get new clothes when I’ve the money to do so. Out with everything frumpy and/or in ill repair. Let me know everyone (always in a tasteful way) that I am a force of nature. I am a Renaissance beauty. I am filled with mystery.

There’s a low undercurrent in all this, of desire and melancholy, of reaching for joy just beyond one’s grasp. Saint Cloth makes the best music of the spheres for this sort of emotion. Used to be his hymns were angry and his psalms rebellious; now they are more often reflective and melancholy. Often I’ve wanted to ask him why the change. Is it the simple matter of growing older (as some saints manage to do, if not martyred first)? Was it some horrible event that he’s still dealing with? A shift in the world, a birth or a death, a love or a hate?

But these may be pert questions to ask of a saint. I don’t know whether he’d smile or frown or turn his face away from me.

In this last month I’ve felt a fear of my saint’s return. His teachings demand bravery of his adherents – they require life to be lived and not merely endured. They cause one to embrace all that one is.

And sometimes it’s hard. It’s hard to be brave.

But I am brave. I realize this now. I’m still breathing, even after all the times that I would have ended myself, even after all the times I wanted to die and I got no help to live. I go on with my art and work towards my dreams, despite discouragement in my youth from those that should have supported and uplifted me.

Were my saint here with me today, I’d be far from these walls. I’d love to sit with him by a fountain, and share a companionship like that of the rumored Messiah and his disciples. I’d tell Saint Cloth a thing that will not surprise him: that it’s easy to ride a white tiger, and difficult to dismount from it. But what would life be without these various addictions?

And should he ask me my drug of choice, I must respond in low tones: the only addiction that fuels itself and is never satisfied.

Then I would close my eyes and pray.

Some cravings last forever. All we can do is ask the gods for patience.

We’re wild when we run, when we dance. Saint Cloth commands a crowd of Maenads; always a moment away from tears or an instant away from mayhem. He plays our heart-strings like a harp of agony. We are bound; we are crushed; we are flagellated by his catharsis. Never have I wept such joy to be beaten thus.

And when the relief hits, I sigh. I stand in the cold and light a clove in the darkness – the star in my hand calling the stars in the sky.

I alternate one vice with another, the stars with the waters, and between it all the motion of my soul.

There’s something delightful about the emptiness. The dark in the sky is reflected in the dark of the streets. The light of the stars finds verdant mirrors in my eyes.

I wonder if the saint completely understands the carnival at his control. “Carnival” has a root in “carnal”, the flesh. It is a delight to everything sensual, everything worldly. When I’m poised between the light and the dark – when I’m an empty flask filled with only his voice – that is the sensation that binds like a rope cutting the skin.

It’s then that my saint presses his lips to my cheek, right at the corner of my smile.

Does it free me? Does it chain me? With a glint in my eyes I can answer: does it matter? All I know is that I still crouch, overwhelmed by the memory, in my own religious ecstasy.

Saint Cloth, come bless me once more…

And this straight white man said, right, because it’s Christmas. It’s not “the holidays”.

I said: Do you know to whom you speak, all the time? Perhaps they’re Jewish, Kwanzaa celebrants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Pagan, Agnostic, Check-marked “Other”, or Just Plain Don’t Care.

He said: This is a Christian country, and it’s a Christian holiday, and so we should say “Merry Christmas.”

I do so love straight white men with their easy sense of entitlement and their occasional bouts of astounding ignorance. Especially if we define “love” as “find myself mortified, embarrassed, belittled and enraged by”.

We (the Christian White Men) were here first, he said. I replied that I didn’t know he was Native American. He responded that even the Native Americans got here from Russia/China. I didn’t know that the Native Americans massacred and displaced a indigent population to take over this continent, but I kept *this* thought to myself.

And the first 13 colonies were Christian colonies, he said. Trying to keep more and more quiet, I thought yes, maybe, but they weren’t the RIGHT Christians in the eyes of the lands they left (amazing how often that happens) and so many people came here in search of religious freedom. Other popular reasons to come to America were love of money and conquest, and because you didn’t have a choice (referring to the English criminals who were planted in the prison colony of Georgia, and all slaves of all colors).

As for Christmas being a Christian holiday… really. Even though Jesus’s birth can be placed by the scripture ITSELF as being July/August due to the fact that shepherds don’t have flocks out in the fields during winter? This reminds me very much of Eostre — oh, excuse me, EASTER — where the ignorant but devoted celebrate Jesus’s triumphant return out of a chocolate egg laid by a rabbit. No, not at all pagan.

But in the end I received a flurry of denial from the straight white man about how this is how he thinks, this is how he’s going to do it, this is how it should be done, directly from the Great White God to his ear, and that’s all there is to it.

Let’s pause for a moment and imagine the welter of mortification and anger inside your humble host, Vox Mortuum. Let’s pause and consider how hotly my blood demanded a curb-stomping. Even though I should be used to such shabby treatment by those who have that *direct* line to the Big Invisible Sky Judge, it still comes as such a shock to experience it. “Never surprised, continually amazed” is my motto.

It wears me out, too. I’m hyper-vigilant and easily provoked, as are most of the people who share one of my many psychological conditions. As he was muttering his rant forcefully under his breath my hackles raised, adrenaline coursed through my veins and I prepared to fight or run. Being at a civilized office environment, however, means that one can do neither. Even if your feelings and sense of self are belittled or lessened by others.

But still I demurred, as a well-trained Southern Woman is bound to do, and backed away from the topic. There’s no convincing the ignorant, the red of neck and belligerent of mind. I’m sorry that I did it now, that I rolled over and didn’t stick to my guns. I’m sorry also that I don’t have the bravery to report him to HR. I don’t want to make my workplace hostile, and when you are a minority of whatever flavor that is sadly always a possibility.

Now I’m sure at this point all the family members and my thousands of ex-husbands stalking mefollowing me through this journal are wondering: Just what does Vox believe? “Does it really matter?” I would respond. Opinions are like sphincters; everyone has one but usually it’s better if we don’t share them with others.

I can tell you *A* belief though; a story, a myth, a dream just like all other human beliefs.

The earth, the mother of us all, grows tired and weak after giving the bounty of the harvest. Her energy recedes. The leaves fall, the sap sinks, the grasses die, flowers fade, and the weather grows cold. She dies her annual death and on the darkest longest night of the year her god-husband sacrifices his life to revive her, lest we all perish with her.

We remember this yearly event by the arrival of the man in blood-red, bearing precious gifts in the snow. Unfortunately in this consumeristic saccharine age we’ve gelded him and his sacrifice, and we call him Santa Claus.

I bemoan this weakening of our primal heritage, at the same time I say “Could I have a Nintendo DS game?”

Merry Godsdeath, ya’ll.

Who would I summon if we had a seance? That’s a difficult question. Assuming in mortem veritas (and pardon my probably atrocious Latin), who WOULDN’T be good to call? Death leaves so many questions unanswered to the living. Michael Jackson (or Marilyn Monroe, or Anna-Nicole Smith, or Janice Joplin, or Elvis, or any of those that died young under odd circumstances), was it an accident or did you mean to do it? Shakespeare, did you really write all these plays, or was it someone else? Lee Harvey Oswald, were you the only shooter or was someone out there on that grassy knoll? John Lennon, seriously, Yoko? Seriously?

If seances were real (and I’ve never heard of one that was), they’d be incredibly useful. Very few murders would go unsolved; very few wills would be challenged. There could always be one last goodbye.

Although I think it best that some things are allowed to *die*, and that some relationships come to an end. Being married several times in a very Southern Gothic sort of way will do that to a girl. I know that there are definitely some people I would not mind never hearing from again, whether in this life or the next.

On this All Souls Day, I’d also like to mention my two fur-children, Midnight and Dusk. They are both male black cats; Midnight is around 8 years old and Dusk is around 2 1/2. Dusk was a shelter kitten, Midnight was an “oops” by a co-worker’s indoor/outdoor not-yet-quite-spayed-but-we-were-planning-to-do-so cat. No matter how they got here, they have been so worth keeping. Nothing makes you feel more loved than a good cat. A good cat is what a dog should be: smart, independent, but loyal to the end, affectionate, gentle, and delighted just to be with you.

Two black cats cross my path every day, but I don’t believe it’s affected my luck at all unless to improve it. I don’t know what I’d do without my boys. Their unquestioning, unfailing love and devotion has saved my heart more than once.

And if I had more space in the house (and if the husband had someone else to help with the litterboxes), I’d get at least one more black cat because since people are stupid and superstitious, black cats are less likely to be adopted. I’d like to give as many black cats as I feasibly can a good happy long and loving life. And I know that when my cats pass away (may the gods delay that day for many many years), they will be followed by a long line of more black cats — the brilliant, insightful, fuzzy terrible toddlers of my world.

They’re currently curled up on the couch, not destroying anything (for the moment), asleep and SNORING delightfully. I love my boys.

So there’s this bizarre idea that I might actually have an entry that only talks about *one thing* at a time. I don’t know where anyone got that idea…