Bits and bobs

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’ve received lower readership today than most days — two poems and three audio pieces from a wannabe musician.

Och weel, as I like to pretend my criminal ancestors might have said. You win some and you lose some. But be forewarned, I do intend to put out at least one more piece in the coming days, so if you are adverse to seeing a SoundCloud link to a Mission UK cover I did with the same guy singing as the last tune I shared… cover your eyes over the next few days or scroll very very fast. It’s a cover of a B-side For Ever More, and I’m surprised I got it past all the religious censors in attendance at the wedding, but I don’t expect they actually listened.

That was a strange affair, even by my standards. I wore a Victorian-style ruffle shirt with leather slacks, and my bride was in a velvet royalty outfit a la Renfest. We were married by a druid (with other druids in attendance) dressed in long white robes and a gold-thread sash around his waist, in a de-sanctified church that had been converted to a theatre. The bridesmaid had hot pink hair at a time it was still a rarity and she belted out some techno tune her band had written and my best man was Mike, and he sang a re-recorded dub of the aforementioned song with backup vocals of his own making (we also recorded a version prior to the wedding with the main vocals intact for the memories). He and I had curly-assed blonde hair down to our mid-back and the temperature went from 35°F the day before to 90°F the day of. And then we did the handfasting thing and jumped a broom. The evangelicals in the audience were rolling on the ground in outrage. But not because of the song, strangely enough.

Anyway, the lyrics go like this:

I can taste your lipstick
I can feel your breath
I can feel the shivers running down my spine
I can feel your heartbeat
I can feel your hand
I can feel your fingers dancing down my spine

I give myself to you, heart and soul, flesh and blood
For ever more

I can taste your sex
I can feel your heat
I can see the fire burning in your eyes
I can taste your sweetness
I can feel your joy
I can see the flames dancing in your eyes

I give myself to you, heart and soul, flesh and blood
For ever more

Maybe they were too busy hating on the other stuff to notice Mike singing “I can taste your sex”; and I mean, he was belting it out on a hot May evening. Beltane, specifically. Och weel.

Going back to my wayward ancestors, the clan came from Scotland, although I had always been told we came from Ireland until I did a wee bit of research. My DNA supports the whole Irish as a waypoint prior to coming to the Americas, but it actually has a higher percentage of DNA associated with Scotland, specifically the area near Edinburgh. I discovered this quite accidentally in a trip there to visit a friend who wanted me in his wedding and his bride was from the area near Edinburgh.

Well, in one of his many rude faux pas, he’d promised me transportation to and from the airport, but was too busy bedding his new wife to see that I could get back to the airport. I hitched a ride with some other Americans from the wedding party, but they’d wanted to do some sightseeing at ruins along the way there first. I’d really hoped to have the afternoon in the city to explore unfettered, but they had a car and I did not.

We ended up at the Melrose Abbey ruins, where I was looking at gravestones, plaques and gargoyles. One of the Americans wanted dragged us to see a plaque on the ground marking the burial place of The Bruce’s heart. On it was noted those knights who’d brought it back from the misguided Holy Wars, which just so happened to have a name from one of my near relatives. Turns out they were fairly important around that time, in large part because they were trusted with Robert’s life. Had a castle and so forth, and were lairds, apparently.

Well, it turns out that the family later on got wrapped up in some assassination attempt a hundred years later and had those lands taken from them as a result. The actual participants were hanged or otherwise made dead. The rest of the clan was exiled to… Ireland.

Fun stuff when you get to digging. I find it amusing that one of the descendants has been trying to have the title returned to the family, but has thus far been unsuccessful. Not that it would mean anything, for the castle is in ruins and it would take an act of the government to steal the lands back for him, something they are obviously loath to do. My own blood is far too diluted to matter, so I look at it with a sense of humor — how absurd to worry about a castle more in ruins than in any kind of other condition on a jut of land that is regularly eroding as the sea reclaims it. I mean… there’s a pile of blocks. If you look sideways, cross your eyes, and dance widdershins, maybe you’ll see a castle. Och weel.

The twins are off to school for the first time in nine months tomorrow. I wonder if I should start a dead pool to guess how long it is before the class is quarantined due to contact with someone with coronavirus. Like I said before, too many folks have a hard-on to get the kids back to school and I’m tired of fighting a losing battle. Och weel.

Hopefully they don’t bring it home and I end up dying for it and there’s no one at a funeral that I have sworn a haunting for if it happens and then more will die because my ghost will wreak retribution. So it goes.

Och weel.