The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

This is pretty much how I feel today, March 9, when I’m sick of winter and spring seems very far away.

Poem: “February” by Margaret Atwood, from Morning in the Burned House. © Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

February

Winter. Time to eat fat

and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,

a black fur sausage with yellow

Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries

to get onto my head. It’s his

way of telling whether or not I’m dead.

If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am

He’ll think of something. He settles

on my chest, breathing his breath

of burped-up meat and musty sofas,

purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,

not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,

declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,

which are what will finish us off

in the long run. Some cat owners around here

should snip a few testicles. If we wise

hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,

or eat our young, like sharks.

But it’s love that does us in. Over and over

Again, He shoots, he scores! and famine

crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing

eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits

thirty below, and the pollution pours

out of our chimneys to keep us warm.

February, month of despair,

with a skewered heart in the centre.

I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries

with a splash of vinegar.

Cat, enough of your greedy whining

and your small pink bumhole.

Off my face! You’re the life principle,

more or less, so get going

on a little optimism around here.

Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Neil Gaiman’s blog refers his readers to an article where Russian fishermen recently caught a squeaking creature that looked like an alien and squeaked at them. They proceeded to eat it. Yes, eat it. (They say it was the best food they’d ever had.)

Do they always eat what they catch, I wonder, even if it turns out to be an old boot? Don’t they take lunch bags to work like the rest of us??? Are they at sea for so many days that there’s no chance of ducking into the nearest Perogy Hut on their way home from work as a better dinner option???

Most of all, weren’t they the least bit curious as to what this strange thing with a face was that was squeaking at them???

Didn’t keeping it alive and taking it to scientists to have it analyzed occur to them.

So ends the possible first attempt to communicate with extra-terrestrials–or sea creatures along the line of mermen, etcetera.

http://english.pravda.ru/science/mysteries/07-02-2007/87167-alien_monster-0