Perle Champion

Do you have friggatriskaidekaphobia or paraskavedekatriaphobia – fear of Friday the Thirteenth, or just or just triskaidekaphobia – fear of the number thirteen.  You’re not alone.  It’s not so much a fear these days as a superstition handed down through the generations.

No one knows exactly why 13 or Friday the 13^th particularly is unlucky.  In numerology, the number twelve is considered the number of completeness.  Consider the things that come in twelves: months in a year; hours in a day; tribes of Israel, apostles (Judas was the 13^th).  Thirteen obviously throws off the whole and bad things happen.

Historically, the 13th Street and 13th Avenue are often omitted in street numbering; the 13^th floor skipped in tall buildings.  As if the not naming it 13 belies the fact that it is 13 carrying another label. 

Personally, I have adopted it as a pseudo holiday.  I don my all black attire, pat my black cat on the way out the door and wish everyone a happy Friday the 13^th.

Amy Tan wrote,  “I did not lose myself all at once.  I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carving on stone are worn down by the water.”

She is right.  That is why the process is so insidious.  One day we simply do not know who we really are because day by day, year by year, layer by layer that unique individual – that child who was I – is buried in the silt of life’s rushing river.

There is no sound so soothing as rain.  The steady drops’ rill on the window’s sill sing to me.  It is best at night before sleep comes and even better at dawn as sleep leaves.  This is when the mad dash of our lives is still.  The tide of distant traffic has ebbed or yet to flow.

It’s raining now this afternoon, and from my aerie I hear then see the passing cars sluicing down the glistening black way that is 11^th Place.  Already dusk comes and the blue Christmas lights I strung this Christmas in homage to Mark Roberts on my balcony shimmer in their subtle brilliance mirrored by the clear plastic barrier against the screening that shields me, my cat and plants from winter’s elements.

The weather persons assure me, the rain will last through the night and I hope they are right.  I could wish for no sweeter lullaby.

“A year from now you will wish you had started today.” -Karen Lamb

That’s the thing about resolutions, until you begin, you haven’t a chance of getting anything accomplished.

Trouble is, it is so easy to make the resolution, make the plan to accomplish it, to ponder the plan and refine the plan.  The difficult part is to start and then one step at a time keep moving.  If you mess up here and there along the way, no big deal.  The toddler falls and gets up and tries again.  Take a lesson from that.

So quit planning, from wherever you are, just begin.  Take baby steps until you can take bigger ones.  I’m talking to myself as much as you.  These daily blogs are my baby steps.

I’m taking the 365 Blog challenge.  I committed to posting one Blog a day for 2012.  Some will will be good, some not-so-much, but if I wait for each to be perfect, few would get done.

I don’t want to wake up in a year and look back at this day wishing I had started today.

There’s no doubt in my mind that my smoke alarm saved my life last February, and that of the neighbors downstairs that I was able to awaken.

I was so thrilled to finally have a new apartment 6 months later, that it never occurred to me to check the smoke alarms.  They’re supposed to work.  Right?  Yes, they’re supposed to, but sometimes in readying a apartment for a new tenant, things get over-looked.

I took some cold medicine Saturday afternoon which made me groggy enough to fall asleep on the couch.  I woke (cat loudly meowing) to an apartment filled with smoke,  I quickly got the chicken soup off the fire, covering my mouth with a kitchen towel, opened the back and balcony door, turned on the air conditioner and retired to the back porch landing with the cat, iphone and a cold beer.

It was there I realized what was wrong with this picture.  There are 2 smoke alarms in this apartment and neither of them went off.  They’re being replaced as I type.  I would not have burned to death, the chicken would have slowly become ash in it’s deep pot, but the smoke may have sent me to a more permanent sleep.

So here’s my PSA:  Whenever you move into a new place, immediately test the smoke alarms and of course

When, you change your clocks; change your smoke alarm batteries. Working smoke alarms increase the chance of surviving a home fire by 50 percent.

For more safety info:

he drank and drank and sought oblivion – none came.

there was no euphoria, no altered plane

just a steady numbing

yet he heard it all and saw all – missed nothing,

he was indeed a poet of no mean proportion

a short-lived van gogh of words

bent to self-destruction on his path to knowing.

lips a line drawn thin – no resemblance to a mouth.

lids distort the sound of eye and crepe covers the brittle bones

dry laughter dying, dying pall.  might as well not have been here at all.

times he wonders why we bother.  what’s the draw?

raw pleasure of flesh, the painful parallel of love and hate.

do we want too much to feel or taste anything that we take it up so easily?

do we expect more of it than what it is that we so desperately seek the siren’s call?

© Perle Champion

Once again, I find myself at a crossroads, wishing for the scarecrow to point the way to Oz?  He is nowhere to be found; and if he was ever there, he’s left the field without me, and I’ve no idea which path of the yellow brick road he took. Somehow, I don’t think he’s coming back, and once again the decision is all mine to make.

There are endless forks in the road whose choices forge the person we become. If we had more time to pause and consider each, would we do better, end up wiser or fail to move forward at all, stymied by the hesitation?

How many folks just sit and wait pacing a rut back and forth between the paths, never daring to risk either?

Vindication. I’ve been seeing more and more print and tv  stories about ‘obesegens’.

Friends and family have long looked askance at certain of my so-called fetishes.

Long before the bad news started coming in about the artificial sweeteners, lite this and light that, I declared ‘Give me the Real Deal or No Deal.  I want real chocolate, real beer, real coffee, and a real Coke, and most definitely real cheese, etc.   Yes, I buy Lean Cuisine, but I remove it to a glass cooking dish with top and cook it in a real oven.

I’ve always refused to eat or drink from Styrofoam at all costs, and plastic as much as I can avoid it.  When my favorite Duke’s Mayonnaise (one of few I could find with no sugar added) went plastic, I stopped buying it and opted for an almost comparable albeit more expensive brand that still came in glass at Whole Foods. 

My friend asked what I’d do when they all come in plastic.  I’ll make my own from a Martha Stewart recipe, I told her.

I saw few die of hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand.- Benjamin Franklin

Good old Ben and his common sense, speaks the simple truth. Most disease is directly attributable to over-eating and wrong eating.  This temple that is our body is abused by our many vises, not the least of which are food and drink. From cradle to grave it is the single thing that is in our grasp to change if only we would.

I truly hate the mudslinging side of politics, all those people against this and against that even each other.  We’ll soon be queueing up to vote again and I’m looking for  some positivity out there.

Negative people never learn the rules.  Give your attention to what you are for, not what you are against. I want to know what you are for.   The mind focuses on the thing; it doesn’t discern if you want it or don’t want it.  So give your attention to what you want.

If you think you are surrounded by thieves, you will be robbed.  If you think you will fail, you will more often than not.

I want someone in office that is optimistic about our future.  I want to stand in line to vote knowing I have a good choice.  I’m still looking.