Okay so I pay 600 bucks

for this crappy web site and they won't even let me log in. Finally I get in via Facebook. How much are these geeks getting paid per hour? That is just unacceptable.

Well shit. As long as I have the page I might as well type.

The dysfunction increaseth. Nobody in the family can remember how old my grandmother was when she died. I thought for years she was 26. Now come to find out I had her birth year all wrong. She was born in 1920 according to the picture of the gravestone that my mom just texted me. Not 1921. Making her a Year of the Monkey person and therefore by the Chinese zodiac, a Leo, at least according to the book I read on it. I'm Year of Snake = Taurus. And it goes by Jupiter and I have Jupiter in Taurus and my grandmother had Jupiter in Leo so there you have it. There it is. May 20, 1920 to May 23, 1944. She had just turned 24 when she died and had she had astrology, she would have known that it was her Jupiter return and she was supposed to have good fortune that year, not to DIE, fer chrissakes.

Oh well.

More poems by my Grandmother Madge:

ASK WHAT?

What more to ask of thee, my dear, Than pain and many a stifled tear?

What more than thou wilt give to me--? A heartache and a memory.

May, 1939

(I might have typed that one in already. In her notebook are also several repeat copies of several of the poems. I'm skipping around also, so I might forget what I'm doing. It's also a pandemic so I'm kinda forgetting what day it is. I'm also retired and I therefore am also kinda forgetting what day it is.

Sometimes I have to check. Now here's more from Grandmother Madge.)

Three Thoughts to You

I

My love for you is past all understanding. I did not wish it -- and, yet, I did not wish it not. It is just one of those rare things that happens to a person once in a lifetime. It is a dream come true! A fairy-tale in life! It is as fragile as a spiderweb and, yet, as lasting as eternity. My love for you is past all definition. It is an intangible miracle surpassed only by that greater miracle which is your love for me.

II

If someone told me that tomorrow Prince Charming would come to me on his white charger to carry me away to share his throne in some enchanted fairy kingdom -- I should be filled with a horrible desire to hide until he passed. For what would Prince Charming and all the fairy kingdom dare to offer me to replace you and our love?

III

If, when I die, God takes me to His Paradise and gives me that for which men strive -- a heavenly home! If, he should say my life has been well spent and set a star for me in that great Sky! If he should give me all that Heaven has to offer and, yet, you were not there -- I think I'd know full well that he's not God, and that not Heaven but Hell!

July 1939

(This must have been for little old Harold Thomas who lived down the way in Calera, Mama said he was just a local boy, and I don't think my Great-Grandmother Mabry...her name from her second marriage, after her first husband Hugh Hall died...approved very much of Harold. He was an airplane mechanic and a Leo. Also he came from the Thomas family, and they was not as educated as the Hall side of the family.)

(So there's that. And I never knew my Grandfather Harold either but I've heard some shadowy things about him that are maybe a little bit disturbing.)

(And how much are you supposed to tell about your ancestors, anyway? If you wanna get 'em on your side, for Voudou purposes, -- well we don't do that kind of magic, I guess --but it's nice to think about getting some kind of help maybe...only I suppose people would be inclined to explain it, if you did get any help from them, in a more rational and scientific and genetic way, than by any means of magic...and Taoists would explain it (or not) with by no means...yes with by is what I meant to type...but how accurately about your family are you supposed to tell the truth? Inasmuch as you know it, considering how dysfunctional the whole family pretty much is, anyway? Yeah pretty much. Not complaining or criticizing here, just sayin'.)

(And it's always these little writer people who are anxious and depressed, haven't you noticed? It's that left brain frontal lobe overstimulation, too many words in your head, they come too fast and agitate your thoughts, and usually the story ends up on the bad side, that's my theory anyway, people are always telling you exactly what's wrong with them, over and over really, if you care to listen...)

(I pretty much believe that...how could it be otherwise?)

(And how in the hell are you going to ever get somebody else to love you, with all THIS going on? Maybe you don't really want to fool with it, being the great Western Disneyfied social construct of LIES that it pretty much is...and you know as well as I do that it's all about keeping the money in the family, anyway...and if you're spiritual at all, then you'll have some kind of clue that we never know what we need anyway, according to dreary old Tolstoy and his WHAT MEN LIVE BY book...and relationships are even more of a pain now than they ever were, what with boundaries and cellular phones and all that...and the fact that those things have to exist just shows the pure lack of respect anyone has for anybody else, and I don't know what-all...why don't we just eat the other people who are taking up our air space and our space-time and be done with it. Dinosaurs all, anyway. Or sheep or ants. Shit.)

(But then you've gotta get up in the morning and turn all that shit into gold, right? What the hell else is there to do with it?)