Sunday, May 08, 2005
Return: What Happened to the Good Boy; and How We Celebrated the Redemption
hey good blog people, the chuckler is back and, if not better than ever, reasonably well-rested and ready to assume the onus of your entertainment needs again. it was hard to come back from my trip and see that the only thing on the site was our goodbye to the dog, but it’s been made so much more manageable to have undergone this loss with the support we have enjoyed from so many of you. To anyone I have not personally thanked, it’s not because I don’t appreciate it; it’s just been a very intense phase here and I have not been able to do all I’ve wanted to do, to write to everyone I’ve wanted to thank. you’re all in my hearts, and coz gives each of you a tender, velvety, sweet-scented lick on the cheek.
and for anyone keeping score, here’s what happened: we were feeding him supper and he came up, wagging his tail. he wagged himself off his hind feet and never regained use of his legs. we did what we could, carrying him up and down the steps, using the sling to haul him around every time he needed to be anywhere he wasn’t.... he was brave during the day but scared at night, whimpering and anxious unless we slept next to him on the floor. after three days and some excellent veterinary advice, we had to conclude that he most likely had a spinal tumor that had cut off the impulses to his legs. such tumors are inoperable and we ended his incapacitation, knowing it was distressful to him and that his quality of life had plummeted to unacceptable depths. he was a great, stalwart, loving friend right up to the very end. we miss him terribly and the house seems so empty now - it’s the first time in my life I’ve not had a pet.
I’m doing a crappy job with the entertainment, aren’t I? well that’s what you get from a goddamn free website so cram it with walnuts, my good friend. Okay here’s something a bit more entertaining: at the very beginning of the hiatus, before any of that cosmo stuff, we had a wonderful passover seder:
This is what it looked like when I drank the truly exceptional wine charles brought for kiddush - the blessing over wine. there are four glasses of wine consumed at passover and charles demanded that he fill my goblet with the very best. as always, he outdid himself. the event as a whole was a total success - several newbies got a good introduction to the runaway steamroller that is passover food, and the discussion of the symbols and history of the event was lively and entertaining. we had babies, grandmothers, strangers and good friends all working together for a memorable holiday. How memorable? here’s my shutterfly album if you really want to find out....
it did occur to me, though, that one thing I hadn’t mentioned during the seder (the official passover meal and celebration I’ve been going on about) that I hadn’t revealed the results of the important research I’d done into the ten plagues. I have done a lot of reading and thinking about the story of passover, and the big guidebook to the celebration that I wrote years ago (yes really) now needs to be updated with some corrections and amendments. One of the most important things I discovered was that the famous ten plagues were not actually the only plagues up for consideration at the time. The heavenly focus group had actually done a brainstorming session first, generating as many creatively oppressive conditions that they could before cutting the list down to a nice decimal-based size. I don’t think it goes too far to say that the entire course of history could easily have been changed if the final sequence had been very different. and by “very different”, please consider what the world may have looked like if the immanent shekinah, whose name exceeds our power to speak it, had imposed the following REJECTED PLAGUES ON EGYPT:
* wedgies
* papyrus cuts
* punditry
* weak outside shooting
* camel spit (more than usual)
* recap episodes
* cheap knockoff handbags
* obelisk envy
* pledge breaks
* walking like an egyptian
there you have it people. those were the rejects. yet here I remain to make fun of them. the chucklehut is back. I will see you here tomorrow. that is, if you’re not doing anything better. feel free to drop me a line if you are and I’ll see you there instead.
