long walks*

It is so considerate of this storm to wait until the weekend to hit. Really. You just don't get that kind of old world courtliness from any old storm. I think they named it Noel after Noel Coward.

Who was kind of a bitch under all that charm, after all, so let's light some candles just in case.

I went out for coffee this morning with Saucy just to prove to her that I am not such a wuss as all that, that I can manage to go a mile away for coffee as prearranged, even with a big ol' northeaster bearing down on us.

And it was great, of course. It always is when I can arse myself out of my idiotic self-contained isolationism to actually be sociable with the people I care about.

I told her about that time when I was 12 and dressed up for Halloween as a Polaroid camera. It was a costume based on spite and bitterness, of course, as all the best costumes are.

There was a slot in the front of the "camera" and I would walk up to people -- the plan was to do this to people I didn't like, which was everybody -- and say let me take your picture I am a Polaroid camera and I would pretend to snap their picture and then I would take one of the "pictures" I had made the night before and feed it out through the slot for them.

Only I had made all these "photos" as premeditated insults -- mostly they were big sheets of cardboard paper with drawings of ugly faces, with warts and stuff, or an actual dog or a pig or a witch or a cow. Y'know, something insulting. And I would give the person my bitchy little portrait of them and turn on my 12-year-old little heel and leave them smoldering in the dust of my wit.

Course I don't recall that anyone cared enough to be offended, or even to notice. Alas.

I don't really ever dress up for Halloween anymore, having grown older and still more self-conscious. (hard to imagine, if you had known me as a kid.)

Now I just sit at home and drink tea and knit and blog and read Victorian fiction.

Good thing I didn't turn out to be a geek or anything.

{I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
-Noel Coward}