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Sometimes I don’t know if I’m a naive, hopeful whale plunging with glee toward my inevitable death, or if I’m a pot of petunias thinking, “Oh no, not again.”

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Do you believe in God? Sometimes I’m not sure, but then my brain says, “Bullshit. Yes you do. Who else are you talking to in your head all the time?” I have a good point. But I don’t think I believe in God the way most people do. You see, I think of God like a parent. In my childhood religion we said Father/Mother God, but I tend to picture him as male since his decisions seem to be so bloody stupid all the time. If anything I believe in multiple deities or forces or spirits, because nature feels like a mother who rolls her eyes and tries to fix Dad’s mistakes. But here’s the thing about being a parent. We create our children, we guide them, we teach them, but we do not control them or anything around them. We have no say in whether or not they get sick or have good luck or get the job they always wanted. Things just happen. We help when we can and provide comfort, support, and wisdom, but ultimately it’s all out of our hands. That is how I see God.

What is the alternative? A dad who wants you to live a good, moral life so he gives you a debilitating disease? A dad who proves your loyalty by torturing you and killing everything you love, just to smirk with self-satisfaction when you come crawling to him in devotion anyway? (I have met that parent. It’s disgusting.) What kind of selfish monster would do that? If half the things in the Bible were true, that’s not a loving, benevolent God. That’s Jafar in his genie form. And I do not accept it. Hell, maybe there is a being out there who’s sprinkling cancer across humanity, but it’s not my Father God.

Speaking of Hell, let’s look at that one. If either of my children did something unspeakable – let’s say they tortured and murdered a baby – I still wouldn’t want them to burn in torment for all of eternity. I love them. I’d be devastated beyond words, but I’d want to help them somehow. I’d want to cure whatever ill lay within them. Yes, I’d acknowledge that society needs to be protected from their evil instincts, but nothing on this planet could make me stop loving them. Ever since she was a toddler I’ve told my eldest she could stab the neighbors and burn the house down and I’d still love her. Nothing could ever change that. What sort of parent would say, “Well, you didn’t go to church and get your head dunked as a baby, so now you have to live in endless torture for all of eternity. Sorry kid. Them’s the rules.” Her little three year old face would look up and say, “What’s church?” before going off to be stabbed relentlessly by a demon until the end of time.

FUCK YOU, RELIGION.

Of course, like the rest of humanity, I have absolutely no idea where we came from or if we have a purpose. I suspect our only purpose is to be kind and bring a little light into people’s lives before we die. I don’t know if God has some great plan or if he just watches us like ants in a farm (side note: all my daughter’s ants were left to their own devices and died of neglect), but I know there’s something out there. My life has been filled with too many strange experiences and weird coincidences for it to all be random. I swear I’d known one of my exes in a past life, or we came from the same star dust. SO much deja vu. I thought I was crazy, but he said the same thing. It was to the point that he actually thought I was spying on him or had bugged his phone. Then again he was kinda crazy, so… you know.

I could also talk about the month in high school when I could suddenly hear people’s thoughts. I’d be in the middle of a conversation, open my mouth to say something completely off the wall, stop and think WTF? and then hear a guy across the room say the thing I was about to. It was FREAKY. I actually had that happen to me once last year, too. A random, completely out of place sentence that was obviously not mine popped in my head, then assigned itself to someone else. What a useless superpower.

I could regale you with tales of the haunted house I grew up in. I thought I was losing my mind when I saw a man in socks, slacks, and an unbuttoned short sleeve shirt stroll down my hall and disappear, but when I called my parents and said, “Do I call the police?!” they said to wait til they got home, at which point, Surprise!, they said there are ghosts. They’ve yanked all the sheets off our bed. They move things around. They make the little mouse band play music even when it’s unplugged. You know, the usual stuff. You’d think I’d be pretty stoked since I’m all about the spooky and macabre, but NO. Uh-uh. I had ZERO desire to see entities walking around my place and playing my piano. The freakiest experience was when my mother and I were watching TV and the couch got very cold and we got the willies. She paused the TV and said, “Do you feel that?” Suddenly the cold, sinking feeling on the couch blew across the room and the dog yelped and the cat ran away. My mom stood up and declared, “This is MY HOUSE and a house of God, and only kind and Godly entities are allowed here, so if you’re not kind and Godly you can GET OUT.” It always made me feel better when she did that.

I made a similar declaration in my own home about four years ago. My daughter didn’t want to sleep in her room. She said she saw things watching her at night. We discussed sleep paralysis and such, and I stayed with her sometimes, but I never told her that when I stayed in there alone it gave me the total creeps. I didn’t see anything, but something was under the loft bed. I turned the light on and told it to GTF OUT. I also saged the place and made the MY HOUSE declaration a few more times. It stopped after that first year. I think spirits just get interested in new people and then become bored after awhile. There was a ghost cat too, with brown tiger stripes. I never had one like that, among the billion cats I’ve owned. At first I thought it was a living cat that had snuck in like a couple of the neighbor cats did before my Elvis beat their asses and claimed his territory, but I could never find it. And it always walked the same route. One day I was sitting on the kitchen floor beside my other kitty, Presley, when I saw it walk into the hall and turn to go up the stairs. Presley perked up and turned to watch it walking by, then settled back down once it had gone up the staircase. If I’m crazy, then my cat shares the delusion. (If you have any stories that would make people think you’re nuts, leave a comment. Solidarity, my fellow humans.)

So where am I going with all this? Well, at the end of my last blog I said I had cleared my head and done what I usually do in times of turmoil – I consulted the Universe. For me, this means reading my Tarot cards. My friend The Filipino thinks I’m quirky for reading Tarot and listening to K-Love when I’m falling apart, but they’re one in the same to me.

A couple days ago I asked about Girl Eyes in general. I had nothing specific in mind, just “Tell me about Girl Eyes.” It was interesting. There was mention of overcoming his past, conflict with authority, and facing judgment. On the plus side it said he’s going to achieve financial stability hitherto unknown by the generations that came before him. He works really hard and he’s also good at poker, so I wouldn’t be surprised. Then I asked something general about having a relationship with him. Also interesting. For one thing, the card he had chosen as his own significator (Five of Swords – conflict, deception, theft, self-sabotaging behavior) came up reversed in the “tentative future” spot. In this case it means conflict resolution, inner peace, and lack of deception – having all your cards on the table. No surprises. In the “definite future” spot I got Justice reversed. That’s just what it sounds like. Injustice. Life’s not fair. Maybe you are standing in your own way, creating your own problems, or being your own worst critic. Maybe it’s a legal complication. Whatever the case may be, it’s a hard row to hoe.

A few days later, when I was in a calmer frame of mind, I asked a couple more questions. Would he make me and my children happy? Surprisingly, it was all pretty positive. Basically it said if we communicate well and keep the drama monster at bay, things would be nice. I was like… say what now? What’s all this happy shit? This can’t be right. There were even four major arcana, which means Fate is at play. So I got a little more specific, and asked about the thing he keeps harping on: marriage. I have no intention of ever getting married again. Ever. EVER. Okay, maybe if my kids are grown and we’ve been together twenty years and he’s got his heart set on it, MAYBE. So I asked the question. What would our marriage look like?

I concentrated hard on this one. I cleared my mind and connected with my gut, cutting and shuffling and turning until the slight queasy feeling dissipated and left me with “this is right”. The layout was uncanny. There are 78 cards in the Rider Tarot deck, and ten in the Celtic Cross, which is the spread I like to use. Again, four were major arcana. Fate. The Universe. The Empress also showed up again, for the third time out of four readings, this time reversed (overmothering, smothering, co-dependency). Let’s just say the opinion and influence of family and friends won’t be a positive one. (I can see it now. “Don’t talk shit about my man!”) The forces working against me were confusion, indecision, and the allure of greener pastures. The future card was nonconformity, a non-traditional life, or an unconventional marriage. But the final outcome… it was The Star. It’s a beautiful card. It stands for peace, hope, healing, connection with the universe, overcoming your past, and balance in your life.

So now here I am, dumbfounded, wondering why I am willing to accept what the Universe tells me right up until it says I’ll be happy, at which point I call bullshit. My inner Spock says this is all highly illogical. I’m inclined to agree. But I’ll be damned if the happy little sperm whale inside me didn’t get all excited at the big, round thing hurtling toward it. Will it be friends with me? The bowl of petunias thinks I need therapy.

I think there is one clear answer here. I need to CHILL THE FUCK OUT. You know, I went into this looking for fun. But then Girl Eyes had to be all “I want a relationship” and once he had a relationship it became “you should be my wife”. He also needs to CHILL THE FUCK OUT.

If I didn’t have kids I’d be like fuck it. Move in come March. Let’s see how it goes. If I hate you I will kick your ass out. Problem solved. But I do have kids. So rather than leaping into something crazy, I think we both need to step back and quit being so goddamn dramatic. Can he learn to be a good partner at 32? I don’t know. Maybe. He learned to stop doing heroine and going to jail every other week. My dad was pretty racist when my mom met him, but he learned the error of his ways. It just took exposure to a different way of life.

I had some shower thoughts on the birthplace of racism. I think it comes from feeling unsafe. Hunted. We have an inherent need to be part of a tribe, and when we feel our lives are unsafe we need a faceless “other” to blame. Imagine being a child whose parents didn’t know how to provide what it took to make you feel safe, seen, soothed, and secure. What if you didn’t feel safe in your home? In your country? In your skin? What if you didn’t even feel safe in your own mind, because that’s where the demons and addictions lie? What if you didn’t feel safe in your body, because you had overdosed? What if you wound up in jail? We need to feel part of something bigger that will protect us. Where does one turn? To family? To a gang? Perhaps we know we only have ourselves to blame, but if we accepted that blame we’d probably jump off a bridge, so we’ll blame these people who don’t look like us instead. If your skin color is your chosen tribe, then those who look different become the faceless other.

I experienced this myself, in a way. When I left my first husband, who was a cop, he stalked me. He abused police resources and trapped me behind the thin blue line and tortured me psychologically for years. I never felt safe. I carried weapons. I put alarms on the doors and windows. If he came to kill my daughter to punish me, as he said he would, who would I call? The police? The same ones who told me I was just being histrionic and called him to get home quick when I asked a couple officers to stand guard while I collected my belongings from the house? He lived in SC so I moved to CA to be as far away as possible, without telling anyone I’d left, and I still kept a baseball bat by the front door and jumped any time a pickup drove by. He didn’t even have a pickup anymore. And do you know who I hated? Cops. I am well aware that there are a LOT of police officers in America and not all of them are bad, but I automatically dislike them. I hate racial slurs, but I’ll sure call a cop a pig without batting an eye. Because I felt unsafe everywhere I went, and ashamed. Someone had to take the blame. Even now it’s there inside me. I hate cops.

Except, I don’t. Because I choose not to. That hatred may be inside of me, but I don’t wish ill upon any officer I meet. I might speak to them with disdain when they pull me over, but they’re just people. You can’t lump every cop together any more than you can lump together everyone who is white or Hispanic. We’re all just human, and human beings are garbage and beautiful and everything in between.

Well. I think that’s enough philosophizing for one night.

Until next time, I’m just a happy whale hurtling toward the ground.

Will it be friends with me?

The Silly Girl