Yesterday I wrote a little blog entry about a happy Christmas memory.
Your can read it here or you can just take my word for it.

This morning my mom calls. I can hear in her voice right away she is uneasy about the blog. “I read your blog” She says…and I suddenly remember that while telling my cheerful little tale, I digress into a casual mention of someone masterbating to my photograph….. Hmmm this is going to be an awkward conversation. I berate myself silently for the unnecessary tangent…It’s like I’m addicted to gratuitous inappropriateness.  It really wasn’t necessary to the christmas blog, however when I think of boarding school, I think of my roomate, and when I think about my roomate, I think what an amazing photographer she is, and then I think I should have been a playboy bunny…that’s basically the train of thought every time..I wonder if my grandma has read it…jeesh..I should just write everything from now on as if I was writing to my grandma. ” well yeah, about that”..I start … and my Mom says with a twinge of panic ” Did you really cut the tails off of squirrels?” …..no it was more like ” For the Love of all things sacred you didn’t cut off squirrel tails did you, ED ..why, why? WHY…you know sociopathic maniacs do things like that.” And for a brief moment we sit in silence both aware that my mom thinks there is a possibility that I am completely deranged.

  Um. Well yes I cut the tails off of dead squirrels. ” Oh they were already dead ” she says sounding relieved…and again silence as we both realize My mom thought I was chasing around live squirrels and hacking their tails off. And then I panic…OMG does everyone think I was cutting the tails off of live squirrels?

I just need to clarify…The squirrels were already dead and from what I could ascertain…very old..I don’t know why so many old dead squirrels fell in my path during highschool… it was a pretty woodsy area?  And…  I didn’t actually cut the tails off myself, I asked the maintenance man to do it.

OK…now here is the part I glossed over. Why. Why would anyone do that to begin with. Well I think part of my lumberjack phase morphed into my mystic shamanism phase.  Not only did I really really want to be a medicine woman, I believed I could heal people…like a little bit at least, with massage and Reiki and concoctions that I concocted. I was obsessed with medicinal plants and animal totems and I must have thought that a good mother-earth-healing-medicine-woman would have such woodland accoutrements. It wasn’t meant to be corrosive or derisive..If anything I was honoring the power of the animal totem, a talisman of luck and beauty.  Honestly if I could have gotten away with wearing a fur cloak with a a wolf head hood and carrying a giant staff bejeweled with crystals….well I would have.

Now that I look back on it…It seems completely ridiculous.  Especially now when I realize I just creeped out my own mom…what kind of healer does that?

Fortunately for everyone it was just one of my many phases sandwiched between … the “nunchukas and leopard print” phase…and the “I want to be a mime” phase.

I have drawn the conclusion that youth is a suit made of velcro. We ease on down the road, rolling in this and that, we catch what is thrown our way, and eventually we lose our stickyness. If you have ever had a velcro sneaker you know what I mean. I consider it great fortune that much of what I rolled around in so passionately when I was younger has fallen to the side of the road…and I can stand up, just me, sans squirrels and just be.  Let it be known to all that My mom is a great mom and that my shreds of sanity are woven nicely together.   I apologize if I gave the impression of being in any way unhinged especially since I do wear a lot of black and a lot of dog hair….given our world today it is not an area to tread flippantly…. and I hate that I went there when all I really want is to uplift the spirit.