Friday Blogomore Stew of Stewy Goodness

Sometimes, I just title my posts random things.  Like, this post could EASILY have been titled, "Smagafrastic Smoodledeedoodle of Wampus Glimbitches."

No.  Not really.

I don't hang with any glimbitches, wampus or not.

Anywho, can I be honest with y'all?

People wear me out.  They just slap EXHAUST me and this week, people have been so exhausting that it is all I can do not to drag my sagging grey carcass out to the woods, prop myself up on the nearest tree, and wait for feral cats to eat me.  Or alternately, bring me dead fieldmice to eat.  Oooh, and then make me their queen.  And I'd sew myself a little suit of fieldmouse skins and learn how to leap nimbly from tree to tree and pee accurately in the woods.  And we'd have an EMPIRE and

What?

Right.  People wearing me out.  No, really, what I want to do is turn off every bit of electronic and/or electric equipment I have and go build a homestead in the woods with just my man and my dogs and my kids and me and we'd have gardens and beehives and, like, checkerboards and when the tax man came we'd pay him, but then we'd say, "Now leave us alone because we're trying to pretend that none of y'all crazy asshats exist."

Do you get arrested for calling the tax man a crazy asshat? Should I say tax person so as to avoid being sexist?  Omagodsabove, do I now have to worry about being called a SEXIST on top of everything?  WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT FROM ME?

Let me give you a quick rundown of the last ten days or so:

I "liked" (Facebook is honestly the lamest thing ever.  I will never make fun of people who snort drugs up their noses, because my drug is a fricking red square that tells me I've gotten a response.  FRIEND ME, DANG IT!  I NEED A FIX!!!!) a politician from North Carolina who acted in a preposterously rude fashion to Dr. Elizabeth Warren in order to tell him I thought he was preposterously rude.  Several (thousand) others joined me and at first it was all sweetness and light and THEN it became a sort of ugly contest to determine who could be the most obnoxious in putting down this very obnoxious man.  I politely shot down a few dozen of these folks, because I believe that calling a public official a "douche nozzle" does nothing to further political conversation, nor does it particularly make my side look, you know, not like teenage boys.  (No offense to teenage boys, bless your sweet little hearts.)  However, when my fellow reproachers started using the politician's rumored closeted homosexuality as a tool against him, I threw up in my mouth a little, because as a person who supports Teh Gays and knows how very hard it is to be Teh Gay in the South and who, frankly, does not see how somebody's decision to say he or she is straight even if he IS gay has anything to do with being rude to Dr. Warren, reading somebody say, "Why don't you go hump your gay lover, you jackass?"  makes me WANT to throw up in my mouth a little bit.  Way to go, progressives.  You really brought your A-game with that one.  Bleagh.

The next day, one of my Paganistas mentioned she was excited to be included in a contest for top faith bloggers.  And you would have thought that she had spraypainted "666" on her forehead, jumped on the back of a leviathan, and gone riding down Broadway naked, killing babies with well-aimed streams of her acid-laced saliva.  Because a Christian blogger who was also in the running lost her dang mind and went on a tidily nasty little spree, deriding my Paganista and ANOTHER Paganista (who has since also become MY Paganista, too), expressing shock that my Paganista went so far as to post pictures of herself holding her newborn child (because pagans aren't supposed to care for their children, apparently) and making some snide comments about witches with perfect teeth and blond hair (interestingly enough, the Christian blogger also had perfect teeth and blond hair.  I'm just saying...) and implying that if one practiced paganism, one should not be included in a group of faith blogs.

Now, look.  My spirituality is all over the board and I am in the middle of a veritable BOG of soul searching, but one thing I do know is that I am so damn TIRED of Christians acting like the only faith worth mentioning is Christianity (or Judaism, in a pinch, but only because Jesus was a Jew and we need to be nice to the Israelis because the Temple needs to be rebuilt or something involving covenants and possibly a whale swallowing a dude...I get confused...) and that any people who are NOT Christians are either A:  operatives of Satan or B:  attacking Christianity by expressing a different belief.  The last few days have been an eye-opening experience for me, especially in that I went back and read the Gospels again and, seriously, do Christians even READ the Sermon on the Mount anymore?  Or, you know, any of Matthew?  Or Luke?  Because, hey, y'all, those stones you are throwing HURT.  Also, when you want to pray in school, I am all for it and I will totes go to the mat for you and argue your case up in front of the Supreme Court if need be (although you'd probably be better off with a lawyer), but I'm not sure that your god would do that, since he said that praying in public was kind of obnoxious and you'd be better off going into your room and doing it in private. I'm just saying.  I'm just saying, you know, go read your holy book.  Because even PAUL, who argued that you shouldn't braid your hair or wear gold jewelry (one assumes the neon nylon WWJD bracelets are okay) and who mentioned some crazy stuff about marriage and celibacy, EVEN PAUL, while he was decrying witchcraft, also decried strife and discord.  Even Paul, who I sincerely wish had bumped his head and gotten amnesia instead of religion when he fell off his donkey, knew that spreading unhappiness and frustration amongst various groups of people was not cool.  PAUL, people.  GAH.

And now, NOW, ohmygoodness, there are Christian bloggers--Christian MOMMY bloggers--who are declaring this some kind of holy war.  No, really.  They are calling it "spiritual warfare."  Now, I'm not trying to be glib, here, but given that Israel IS, you know, actually at war with guns and mess, and people are starving in this country and around the world and there are tornadoes and drought and all matter of unhappiness and turmoil going on right now, I am not sure that the Master of the Universe (sorry, did anybody else have a flash of Jesus in a furry bikini with a sword?) is worried about what blog wins a damn contest.  I mean, I know his eye is on the sparrow and all that, but REALLY?  Honey, please.  The Crusades were spiritual warfare.  Hell, even the Snopes trial was spiritual warfare.  This is a popularity contest.

Let me be honest:  good has come from this. First of all, several Christian bloggers have come forward and called their sisters out and exhorted others to show the love Christ showed everybody, and I think that is SPIFFY.  *Edited to add:  Unfortunately, some have have been treated badly because of it.  Miss Julie is one of them, and I have to say that I'm not sure I've ever been witness to a woman so loving and humble and strong in her faith.  For serious.* Second, I have been reading the Gospels and, seriously, Jesus was so cool.  I mean, even if he was simply a crazy man wandering around the Middle East proclaiming himself the son of God, he didn't hole up in a compound with a bunch of guns.  Instead, he went around preaching love and faithfulness and basic decency and if we had more people saying EXACTLY what he said today, the world would be a wonderful place in which to live.  Third, I am so proud of the community of faith I belong to.  For many, paganism conjures (snort....giggle...ahem) up images of evil and darkness and weird people in cloaks and black eyeliner.  For me, it means a belief system that flows with the earth and the cosmos, that celebrates individuality and reciprocation and the understanding that one's spirituality is an intensely personal thing, even as it is somehow part of the collective.  That and fairies.  I mean, come ON.  Who can't get behind a faith with fairies?  Anyway, the pagan community rallied around the ladies who were attacked and most pagans tried to be respectful in their responses to the women who continued to voice extreme displeasure about sharing a contest with anybody other than Christians.  (Some pagans, I'll be honest, were asshats.  We can't all be Lady Godiva, my friends.) (Was Lady Godiva a pagan?)   (Okay, no she wasn't.  She did, however, ride a horse nekkid.)  (Which has nothing to do with paganism.  Or Christianity, frankly.)  (I'm not sure where I'm going with this.)

But then, y'all, my Paganista got death threats.  Really?  Is THAT what Jesus would do?  Let me tell you something about the woman receiving the death threats.  Kris heard that my little girl was feeling sad because she didn't ever get any mail.  So you know what my friend did?  She mailed River a card.  Now, how awesome is that?  That is SO awesome.  You know who else sent my girlie a card?  My Christian cousin.  The cards arrived on the same day.  And I remember thinking how cool it was that River got two cards from such disparate yet equally lovely folks and how beautifully the Universe was teaching us a lesson about how kindness and human decency HAS no spiritual boundary.  But the Universe is teaching me another lesson about kindness and human decency this week that is not nearly so beautiful.  If you'd like to support my friend, go here:  she's one of the good guys.  (Honestly, all of the Pagans in the contest are.  And most of the Christians are actually fine, too.  The one who started this mess?  Claimed she dropped out--and then we found out she was actually disqualified because she violated contest rules.  Which makes her a liar and a coward.  Which, you know, Jesus totally wasn't. Has actually used a fellow Christian's blog to apologize to my Paganistas.  Don't know if she did it in person to my Paganistas, but good for her for taking the time to apologize for starting this mess and restating her beliefs in a less incendiary fashion.)

And THEN a couple of days ago, one of my friemily members passed off one of those "this is what conservatives are and this is what liberals are and we love America more because we like guns and the Bible" things that are so popular on Facebook as a joke.  But, you know, I just wasn't up to laughing at it.  I just wasn't.  I was so dang tired of arguing and defending and being polite and struggling for spiritual guidance and reading the Bible and the Constitution and Robert's Rules of Order and getting angrier and angrier and more and more exhausted until when I got to the part about how the conservatives would keep the name "America" and the flag when we divided the country and the liberals could keep Islam and the hippies...I mean...y'all.

Could people just PLEASE for the love of all that is star-spangled and/or holy read the damn documents they claim to build their lives on?  And then maybe THINK about what the words say before taking action?  Or, you know, you could pray about it.  I'm easy like Sunday morning when it comes to this.  I don't care what you do as long as you stop wandering around like a certain Sicilian in one of the best movies ever because seriously, I DON'T THINK IT MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS.

Look, it's not like "my" side is frothing over with wholesome goodness all the time.  Pagans can be real asshats, too.  So can liberals.  So can women.  So can farmers.  So can writers.  So can Southerners.  So can feral cats.  Asshattery abounds on this planet.  But, you know, when you come up against roughly nine million attacks on the various parts of yourself over a span of ten days, it is enough to make you want to lie down under a blanket of fieldmouse skins in a ditch and wait for the tax man's truck to drive over you.

Well, no, it's not.  But did you SEE how I tied that all together?

I'm a professional writer, yo.  Check out my mad skilz.

Oh, do NOT get me started on how "z" has somehow become the hip new way to pluralize stuff.

Then I really WILL get angry.