The death of a childhood fantasy...

I just spent the past 45 minutes enduring the pulchritudinous-spewage that is ABBA: The Movie.
I was a child of ABBA. I cut my teeth on their album. I wasthat girl , I did dig it. So with all the recent hubbub over Mama Mia I was pleased to see the the quartet had a movie they were actually in. So I turned right to it.

But now. I have to ask myself now, what was I really digging?

This saccharin-sweet, mock-u-mentry is an all out assault on all my sweet dreams of the Swedish foursome. Where my memories we all about best friends, and hair-brush microphones, I am now left with a sensation not too dissimilar from that of
Alex, when he is forced to endure the Ludovico Technique.

Yes, I suppose I could have just "changed the channel," but I was transfixed.
The performances reminded me of something wormholed from the gay 1890's smack to the middle of a cocaine-steeped age of disco. Pure ickiness. Concept performances like "Get on the Carousel" and "I am a Marionette" merged into one horror-show blend of bad back-up, too much tenor, and costumes that, well I just haven't the words to describe the costumes. I will only touch on that with this quote from my husband, who was busy surfing-the-light-fantastic (i.e. internet) when he asked from the kitchen "Are they wearing their homemade costumes?" Nuff said.
My bemoaning was enough to drag my husband into this whirlwind of badness (in the tradition usage of “bad”). As we watched this, ice-cream social gone awry, we realized that ABBA, is the yin to KISS's yang. They should have toured together.

Lookey what I did!

In the immortal words of AC/DC.....

"...I'm back in the saddle ag-a-in..."

Or at least I think it was AC/DC. I could be wrong on that. All those "metal" bands blur together to me much like mid 80s Trans Ams, Cameros, and Firebirds. Which I dubbed "trans-fire-mos" in an effort to apply some sort categorization to them.
at any rate, I am here. School let out two weeks ago. I spent the first week in a frenzy of activity that had been neglected for the last few weeks of school when we ran back and forth to "the big city." My parents were coming to visit, and I didn't want to have quite such a nasty house. Also, I was apparently fighting some nasty flu bug, because once the dust settled, my husband developed it full on. He's been down with a bad bug for four days now. Fluctuating fever (very high at the beginning 103.5), cough, congestion, headache, body ache. General yuck. Today he is apparently feeling better because he is talking with renewed vigor about the state of the nation.
At any rate; Here we are.

"Modern Spiritual"

We are on our mini-break (more on that later) and last night Mi Espouse woke me up to tell me of the included video. My response...
"Oh well that would explain the nightmares I was having...."

I just realized our landlord's initials are the same as "butt hole"

...and it's apropos, because he is. Completely. We are moving, of course you know this by now. But I awoke this morning after nightmares of trying to escape a house inhabited by demons. Full--on blood from the walls kinda stuff. We were trying to get our cats and our son out without any trouble, and I awoke as we were pulling away from the house. As we were sipping our morning beverages, we talked about our dreams and my hubby also was plagued with bad dreams about moving ( you can read more here).
I've enough introspection and education to know that our dreams are simply means of filing away our current anxieties and daily thoughts, but it's still annoying as fuck. We've felt haunted in this house from the get go. I don't know if it is actual spectral energy, or all the shit that BH left in and around the house. It has been a crap place to live, and I'm glad to get on the move. We currently have about 1/4 of our stuff over at our new digs in the gigantic storage building that we have. As we were unloading, I said to hubby "If we live here for too long, this gigantic storage building could be bad."
"Why is that, you ask?"
Well, gigantic storage building, means gigantic space to fill. We could antique, and whatnot for years, and barely fill the thing. Hmmmmmm......
The potential for onerous future moves aside, I really can't wait to get into the new house. After we unloaded, we hiked out into the pasture and tears came to my eyes as we stood on the high bank of a pond, overlooking our new home, and the sun as it began sinking into the distance. We were all three bliss struck with the farm smells and sounds of silence, sprinkled with calls from various birds.
It's gonna be grand.

Happy. New. Year.

Happy New Year folks!
Here we are birthed naked and shiney into a whole new year! A whole new (symbolic) life! Why do people always make those grandiose "resolutions?" Because we are symbolic beasts. We love the idea of a new beginning; and new chance; new lease on life; starting over; born again..... all these ideas for what is really a imply means of keeping track of time.
I have a secret I am going to share with you folks, shhhhhh, it's not really a new start.
Nope. Sorry to bust that bubble. It's still the same old you, that you were born with. The same nasty habits, same smelly feet. To quote Mr. Miyagi "Same, same."
But what is different, is our approach to the shiney new calendar on the wall. Don't misread, I think it is extremely important to mark the turning of a year. We have to be made aware of the passage of time. Otherwise, we'd never get anything done. It is important to be aware that time does "keep on slipping, slippin, slippin-into the future."

Last night marked the first year that my husband and I kept our son awake to ring in the new year. He was all hopped up on sugar and ready to drink his sparkling cider and go to bed by 11:20. We convinced him to stick it out to see the shiney ball drop, and he did.
It was a new thing for us. New, shiney and new. Our son. Not a baby anymore. Toasting in the new year with us. I had cried earlier in the evening at something I'd said to him, that made me realise he isn't a baby anymore. It hurt. My baby is not a baby anymore. Such a sad realisation for a parent. All that sweetness, and little preciousness is just gone. It's like you wake up and it's gone. But in that is a newness, a newer sense of reality. Older and more of a smartass yes, but special in it's own right. We rang in the New Year with our son. It was special.
So even though we are all still the same, there is newness.