I have spoken of the idea that my mother suffered a birth injury that left her ever-so-subtly not herself, except that was herself, and her parents knew it and were the most wonderful HOWLERS imaginable.

DEATH IS NOT THE END, COWS. We are only just beginning.

I heard my grandmother PUDDENTAME tell the tale many times, while her husband sat silent. SMOKING, MOSTLY. 

GRANDFATHER spoke ten words on a good day. No one ever knew what he was thinking. Only the guy down at the PITTSBURGH PAINT COMPANY knew a thing about that FOOL. This is why I shop at WHY NOT HAVE THE STUFF? You have to have the right tools. 

His compressor was kept FOREVER beneath the canvas tarp he had used with four droplets, I think. We don’t understand how the old white working class was. It was an elaborate world of manners only UNDERSTOOD by itself. It had to be. If there is much hunger and pain, close quarters, and no way out, you had to figure out how to give people a lot of space while functioning as a team, and that way is manners. There is a way of presenting oneself, and that is never violated, for an entire lifetime. I have no idea who my grandfather was except for his handicrafts. He was elegant.

Here I am violating the rules, but in writing, not in WORLD. AND THAT IS WHY WE JEW WITH YOU. I’d get kicked out of Shul with all these DAMIENS on the loose.

Other JEWS call in, JUDAISM IS MANY THINGS, AND DEMONS IS ONE OF THEM, so we are Shul.

The tale of my mother’s birth goes like this.

It was in the era when everything about the medical establishment was simultaneously new, shiny, and full of destruction.

In 1944, they had not yet gotten far past the work of LEARNING CURVE, and since science really was so very capital, everyone was going along with the idea that if the doctor couldn’t save you, then you really shouldn’t get saved. It was a question of FAUX PAX.

This was a man world, and we generally thought that FATHER KNOWS BEST, and that extends to the act of birth itself.

My grandmother PUDDENTAME reports that the baby was just about to come out, and she was getting ready for the big push, when they gave her laughing gas and she passed out. PUDDENTAME was forever angry that she wasn’t there for the birth. The doctor evidently swooped in at the last minute with the forceps and expertly birthed the baby through the miracle of modern science and WHOOPS. 

I have spoken with other people on this subject and that CAN INVOLVE nurses pushing the baby back in if the doctor wasn’t BACK FROM HIS GOLF GAME yet. The man tribe had to be in charge or the thing just didn’t work out.

We don’t know how long it was before the doctor got there and what effect that might have had, but these two parents were perfect in everything they did, and no doubt constructed the clockwork world for this beautiful girl that involved pin curls, immaculately starched white peter pan collar shirts, back yard circuses with the black Labrador retriever, and a circumscribed life alternating between a little house in Marysville and the wild expanses of the beaches, forests, creeks, horse meadows, and many, many cousins in the old village on the Olympic peninsula where the prayers of the good with their hymns and their Bibles and the shadows flitting through the woods of the Indians and the old Masonic demons like RAM kept a watchful eye on everyone and everything and mostly it all went fine. YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT. 

My mother probably would have had a more conventional life and prettier things AND HORSES if they had stayed put, because it was all arranged, but, no, GRANDFATHER was restless, and wanted to work as a house painter more than four months a year, so when this girl was fourteen, he sat the family down at the dinner table with a map of California, closed his eyes, and put his finger down at random on the map.

San Jo-see. That’s where we’re moving. In 1957. Just across the San Francisco Bay from the Flower Power Revolution and the birth of the New Age with all those acid calls for KRISHNA who was simultaneously a Mason, a Jew, and the HORCRUX power of THOR. I do what I can, SHOUTS. 

This beautiful young woman graduated from Del Mar High School in 1962 with highest marks in clerical, her intended career.

She was the finest, most polished and genteel thing imaginable, and within a week of high school graduation, she scored a job at Lockheed Martin where cool guys were doing the math that put men on the Moon, and my father was one of them. She was so beautiful and presentable, so very fine in everything, they made her the boss’s secretary at eighteen. She styled her pale hair into a bouffant, buckled her slingback pumps, donned her matching sweater sets and her stylish skirts, and set off to be, her parents at last APLOMB and could concentrate on their handsome sailor son, who spent his entire career IN THE NAVY, WHERE YOU CAN SAIL THE SEVEN SEAS look me up, cows. We got through this.

MOSTLY. 

The second day at work, she spotted a shining gregarious fellow with a big laugh aged at First Saturn Return, and said to herself, That is the man I am going to marry. This Mexican-American computer programmer’s skin was so dark he was darker than most African-Americans, and no doubt her parents took one look at him and said, What has possessed you to choose this one?

I never heard any overt racism from these two precise and impeccable people, but I can’t imagine them not falling over in shock as their fair Desdemona introduced a blackamoor as the future father of their grandchildren. 

As GENGHIS KHAN points out, Off is a door. 

LEYA adds, I am anNOUNSed.

At Mom’s First Saturn Return, she put on moccasins and got on the horse GRANDFATHER bought her upon the birth of her third child, my brother. She let the house go and everything relaxed into a casual state of fun. The ancestors had called in to bestow upon her the world she needed, and that was the farm. She was now also partly an Amerindian ANDROGYNE in a white woman’s shell. In the deep worlds her others were in fetal alcohol syndrome and a variety of social ills, the Japanese internment camps had taken their toll on the ancestral village, her husband was a deep world Holocaust Jew-turned-Mexican, her children Mormon, there she was in the Texas redneck twang, slipping toward slum as the her smoker father’s health declined. But in WORLD, our ramshackle house was the place where all the kids came to hang out and have a good time, just normal. She went to all the games, all the shows, all the stuff, and cheered so loudly for the home team they all perked up when she got into the stands. Everyone loved THE FUN MOM. 

My astrologer father must have been curious — quaking — as the age of 29 1/2 approached, but there it was, course correction in the form of an animal he had worlded in his youth. Caballos. Also the chickens, goats, and a variety of dogs and cats who came to inhabit our world and dream with us still. 

In the tumultuous opening of marriage, the Moon, and the coming world of hippies, she must have looked at his dark skin and felt that it was normal. He was a beautiful fellow and convention not important.

Everyone else thought we looked funny, and we weren’t fully accepted by family on either side. WHO ISN’T RACIST?

In some ways, we were never fully accepted even by our parents. It is a long haul to have a life with weird kids. There is no respite from the unceasing WHAT THE DEVIL? And for the kids, most humans require that you choose. I have rehearsed my life in Prison — thanks for the various misdoings of Mr. One Board Per Job Site — ANYONE WITH A PICKUP TRUCK WILL KNOW WHAT I MEAN — it is part of the SYSTEM called work — and know I have to choose Hispanic, whereas I really need to spend a lot of time with whites. When I hit puberty and joined the Mormon Church, with all of those strict Germanic whites, Mom wasn’t quite taking to me. She didn’t like this clubby do-gooder who didn’t play right. It wasn’t until I got involved in the drama squad and fancy dancing on the stage that she felt for me again. She needed a fun kid. 

SEND IN THE CLOWNS.

My father was a Mexican-American political activist with a dirty secret called an American wife. He took the olive-skinned kids to political rallies, but Mom was too awkwardly white to really work in his scene. 

So she was stuck home with her parents and her kids, a horse or two, but it wasn’t enough for her nervous system. 

It was too small a social world for Mom’s athlete’s body and her neorological smoke and mirrors that took the form of an extreme extraversion trending toward psychism and dependent upon a large number of happy and right social collisions. THE RIGHT FIELD, says RAM. I wish I had understood her. She needed her genius sondaughter to just sit there and stare at her about stuff. We’re going to do this. OKAY. Mom is part of my soul in ways that are not controllable. 

Mom was a witch whose witchcraft was being herself. 

A lot of people might ask why I didn’t do witchcraft sooner and get in sync with woman magick and more guides. 

I didn’t want to. I just wanted the lodge. THE THEATRE. Today’s witchcraft is predominately Latino, and my Anglo mother was not really shaped like that. 

SO WE THOR. 

The old working-class manners were pitched so low that anyone could chime in and be involved. The widespread malnutrition, birth defects, parasites, injuries, stress, and the backlash against seeming too high made it necessary to shuffle.

So it is we call on THOR and he goes to fight the giants looking as DREADFULLY WRONG as any of us. Armed with a hammer — a tool of construction, not of war — he submits to being punked by the powerful and is usually helped in the end, for who doesn’t like THE FUN MOM?

OFF is often better at death, and her entire life in many ways was an energy working but not of a Western mind. I see her now mostly with SIFF — Mom became bald in cancer treatment, and sometimes with the gods it is how you look — in her library and her high world of OWLS, with the enormous knowledge built from the finest education our family could afford and a great big pile of the think-y magick called CEREMONIAL.