Fo Fum.

What's up, scanner? I thought we had a deal. You play nice with my lines and I don't grind your bones into meal.

The other side of the Seven Ravens. From where I sit, things are looking more sparrow than crow, but the metamorphosis isn't complete, and it's not quite October.

Crazy Grandma quote of the day.

She'd called the ambulance for what turned out to be vertigo, and phoned me afterwards to crow about her adventures. "Come tuck me in! I'm as tired as a pig in shit!".

I arrived to find her in the kitchen, grinning, berobed, and tucking away at an entire lemon meringue pie.

Me (panting, not a little sweaty): "--Grandma?"
Grandma (winking and gesturing with her spoon at the half-finished pie): "Want some Chinese food?"

And the fire with all the strength it hath.

"Ahead of her was a tremendous ryhthmic swirl of wind and flame, but it was wind and flame quite different from the cherumbim's; this was a dance, a dance ordered and graceful, and yet giving an impression of complete and utter freedom, of ineffable joy. As the dance progressed, the movement accelerated, and the pattern became clearer, closer, wind and fire moving together, and there was great joy, and song, melody soaring, gathering together as wind and fire united.
And then wind, flame, dance, song cohered in a great swirling, leaping, dancing, single sphere.
..."What was that?"
..."The birth of a star.""

--from A Wind in the Door,
Madeleine L'Engle (November 29, 1918-September 6, 2007)

Revelry.

Maybe not in the strictest sense, but spoonfuls can be quite enough. Spoonfuls of airy powdered-sugar fun.

And liters of body wash.

Because New Orleans stinks. Literally.

Perhaps it's the layers of heat--heat of a thousand categories. Or perhaps it's the irrepressible plant life left to rot and riot and rot again. Or the fluids produced by body and building--sweat and piss and beer and coffee and fourth-story runoff--travelling in milky rivulets down every street, over every stone, between unwary toes. But the smell has a presence, if not a name. And it clings to that fat insistent dance partner that is Southern summer.

A city of glorious excretion, but I fear it's never coming off.

As the crow flies, you fools.

Ravens everywhere yesterday. I spent the afternoon portioning off the sky to accommodate groups of seven. Sometimes--the auguries--they need a helping hand.

Sometimes not. Last night at Barnes&Noble, I'd seen myself off to the back aisles. Nothing so comforting as the serene ballroom progression from L's to M's in Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Le Guinn... McCaffrey... McKinley... and two-two-three, and three-two-three and bow. I blindly struck out a finger at the first spine, and withdrew--of all things--a retelling of The Seven Ravens.

Those odds? A little troubling.

M.F.E.O.

A: Come up and join me?
C: Thanks, but no.
A: Hmph. Then stop exhaling my way. Your breath is searing the upperairs.
C: And your arm is too short by at least an eighth.