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Archive for April, 2013

In the Queendom of twinklysparkles, the women look like this:

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though some of the women look like this:

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The women are always naked unless of course they want to wear ribbons or bows or bikinis or braids. They wear whatever the fuck they want whenever the fuck they want.*

The sun is shining. There is a slight ocean breeze. The daytime temp hovers between 55 and 85 degrees depending on the season. Of course these temps don’t apply when the Queen orders snow.

In the autumn and in the spring, the Queen has her way with the air; like everything in the Queendom, it is subject to her whims.

After every transaction, the bank tellers let the residents of the Queendom know that they are awesome customers. The customers let the tellers know that they are equally awesome.

Cell phone use never occurs at meals; while walking; while conducting face-to-face financial transactions. There is no law governing this because there is no need for such a law. The residents of the Queendom get it and live it and breathe it deeply.

Men and women of the Queendom hold open doors for each other, regardless of need. The children and youth have impeccable manners.

There is no plastic surgery in the Queendom, but you knew that.

All glass in the Queendom is unbreakable unless an emergent situation requires it to be broken.

If there is broken glass, it is gathered and used to make The Pretty. Same for broken ceramics.

All rocks are tear-drop shaped or heart-shaped except when they are not.

There are no TEA partiers in the Queendom, for when they cross its threshold, all sense returns to them.

The word briolette is never used in the Queendom. Never ever.

A honeybee does not want to sting you, says her Majesty, for to do so is to lose its life.

Sometimes Bette Midler sings in the Queendom. Sometimes the Queen herself sings. Sometimes all of the residents sing. The singing is good and heartfelt. There is an abundance of lullabies for children, even the almost-grown-up ones.

Performers in the Queendom do not equate the appearance of emoting with genuine emoting. Layers of false emotion are laid bare, kicked out, and a fresh start is made, tabula rasa.

Sometimes, Anthony Hopkins narrates the Queen’s day, for his Welsh accent and the dulcet tones of his mellifluous voice please Her Royal Highness.

Dancing of all kinds is encouraged in the Queendom, but the Queen is partial to getting down and getting funky and prefers a heap of soul to little or no soul at all.

If you are gonna do it, do it right, says the Queen. This means, do it with gusto. This is not the same as the popular bumper sticker which states “speak even if your voice shakes” because the Queen knows the Alexander Technique. Also, sometimes you need to know the difference between what is worth speaking even if your voice shakes and what is not worth speaking even if your voice shakes.

Fucking A, says the Queen. Pink, says the Queen. Blue and raspberries and violets, says She.

The Queen needs help with motivation and that’s where her handmaidens come in. They encourage her to go to the Royal Yoga Class and to put her Royal Ass on the Royal Bike Seat for the Royal Bike Ride. They indeed help her to clean up the Royal Dog Poo as well as to scoop the Royal Cat Urine from the three Royal Litter Boxes which are lined up oh-so-neatly in the Royal Basement.

Each spring the cherry blossoms bloom and die. The cherries burst out and the cedar waxwings pay visit to the Royal Cherry Tree for one week during which the residents celebrate Fleeting Time.

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And of what does the Queen dream in her Royal Bed? Under clean cotton sheets and soft, down comforters, and with the Four Pillows of Royalty, she dreams of the ocean. She dreams of kale, curly and dark, almost black in its nutrients. She dreams of centipedes and millipedes and other crawly creatures in the cool soft earth. She dreams of iron and steel, minerals and bone. She dreams of death and she dreams of freedom from pain.

♥ ♥ ♥

*this is a link to something I found on Facebook which I believe had something to do with a call for women to submit photos of themselves in bikinis on HuffPo. The passage sounds a lot like Caitlin Moran could have written it and I wish the author would say more about her inspiration. In Caitlin Moran’s excellent book How To Be A Woman, she coins the term human-shaped, at least I think she is the first to have done so.

Thanks to my many blogger-chick pals who inspired me to write this post, though my contact with them has been scant of late. I drink from the fount of their fortitude more often than they know. I also hope I didn’t steal too much of my idea from Erin O’Brien at the Owner’s Manual, but she is also probably too humble to see that it is so. She is the original Queen of the Blogosphere to me.

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Recently spotted in Provincetown:

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We drove past this sign in Provincetown last Monday on our Capril trip. We understood that it could not be a real traffic sign. The next street is a one-way and who can drive in a beehive pattern anyway? The next day, we drove past again and snapped some photos. That night I pondered and pondered the image in my mind’s eye. I figured it out. It is a woman; yes, a celebration of the feminine.

On our last day, on the way out of town, a woman outside the adjacent gallery said, yes, it is a woman, the Venus of Willendorf, to be exact.

Although I do have proper feet, I know just how she feels.

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Lesson One: Word Recognition

It is well known that dogs can understand up to 40 words.

Today, you will choose the first ten words you would most like your dog to learn.

You will see that some of these examples contain more than one word; for our purposes, they function as one multisyllabic word.

Here our the first ten we’ve decided on for Tweedy:

1. GOOD BOY!/G’BOY!

2. COME, TWEEDY, COME!

3. BAD DOG!

4. OFF!

5. NO!

6. TREAT?

7. OUTSIDE?

8. DOWN!

9. DROP IT!

10. in your crate

You know how helpful it is to encourage visual recognition when a young one is first learning words. To facilitate this, we have taped note cards with each word or phrase in boldface letters on corresponding objects around the house.

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Good luck with your pooch. Don’t forget to lead every lesson with the three Cs: confidence, calmness, and consistency.

Remember that no matter how many shoes he ruins, no matter how many $100 vacuum cords he chews, no matter how many wool rugs on which he poops, your dog’s ultimate goal is to please you, his loving owner.

NEXT WEEK: Lesson Two: Is Fido Ready for a Second Language?

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Until we meet again, rrrrrrruff from twinkly and Tweedy!

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Tweedy

I have only ever had one dog, my baby, Agatha Bean Glatter 1992-2008. She was an 8-week old pup when I got her and I crate-trained, housebroke, and leash-trained her. It wasn’t perfect and she was never great on the leash, but she was good and definitely manageable. We tended to hike exclusively in places where no leash was required and that’s how we rolled; “city” walking wasn’t too important. Also, for her entire life we had a fenced-in yard. Digging was a bit of a problem when she was a pup, but she quickly gave it up.

This one? He is 7 months, a rescue of sorts (he was turned over by his owners from Virginia and shipped north to Massachusetts; not an abandoned or abused dog like many of the “Dixie dogs” that find their way from several Southern (RED) states to our true blue Massachusetts. I am tired of the ignorance that seems to extend from the political climate in the South even into how people care for their pets (or rather don’t care for their pets)—no spaying or neutering, over-breeding of certain types of dogs, abuse.

Anyway, he is getting a bit used to the leash after 4 days. Has been peeing outside fairly successfully. Pooping? Def not an outdoor activity in his mind. Whining in the crate and being let out immediately because the family cannot sleep? Yup. We are instilling a BAD BAD habit.

I don’t know how to get through the feeling that I have an infant again. I hate the feeling of being chained and controlled by HIS needs and schedule. I hate being sleep-deprived. And even though I love him, I need a lot of encouragement to remember that it’s temporary, that sleep does eventually come, that creating a bad, quick-fix habit is no substitute for a few days’ suffering to gain a lifetime of better behavior. Yup, just like babies.

Dog-adoption PPD? I’d say that’s about right.

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grammer grammer

I woke up with a peace settling over me: for the time being, I do not care if I’m not writing poems.

I also do not feel compelled to submit poetry to anyone or anywhere right now. It’s so great! I feel especially confident that journals which include in their submission information statements such as “if you can/can’t, do/don’t x, y, or z, then don’t bother submitting to us” are assholes and do not deserve my work. It almost makes me want to write some purposefully crappy sappy maudlin shit and submit it just to make their eyes roll, clench their sphincters, and congratulate themselves for having a completely relevant and hip publication. But hey, I’m sounding bitter and bitter only hurts me.

from my blog’s spam folder:

obviously like your web-site however you need to take a look at the spelling on quite a few of your posts. A number of them are rife with spelling issues and I in finding it very troublesome to tell the truth nevertheless I will surely come back again.

You can pretty much tell me anything if you throw a bucket of charm on it. To the credit of the author-bot, I just found a post from 2 years ago in which I misspelled grammar. Twice.

Here is a photo of my cat:

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XO, twinkly

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The birds never take the string that I leave for them.

I put various pieces on the porch railing every year: a green drawstring from an old, zip-up sweatshirt; a small length of berry-red wool yarn that was tied like a ribbon around a gift long ago; strings from clothing tags.

Now it is cold again and we saw snowflakes meekly flying across the yard this morning. The snow looked like ashes.

Maybe the birds don’t come because I have cats. Maybe I need to set the string out as early as January. Maybe anyone who partakes in this ritual is always left with string.

And maybe Spring will come.

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