Posted on by mwhybark

striped madras

in my childhood home and bedroom, the curtains and bedspread of my room were cool shades of blues and greens, and the occasional sweep of midnight headlamps across the wa’l is in memory blue as well.

my sister’s room and my parents’ room also had color-matched drapes and bedspreads, Suzy’s being pinks and mauves to my folks’ golden and yellow.

I somehow ended up with my sister’s bedspread and just washed it today. It, and those other, similar, lost pieces of cloth that accompanied it into our home well over forty years ago, are awfully cool and restrained. Modern. Made to last.

The blue sweep of those eleven o’clock headlights over the wall and ceiling of my room won’t outlast the chemical activity in my brain, of course. I’m not sure what it meant to me at the time, that I should keep it so clearly in mind. I do know that I had frequent and varied nightmares in that room and many others. I would guess that I found that luminous precession menacing and portentous.

There’s a late night state of mind I rarely find accessible anymore which I associate with observing those lights. I suppose I’m glancingly close to it as I write this, tonight.

Posted on by mwhybark

Snug


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Originally uploaded by mwhybark

Flickr set: Tauntaun Sleeping Bag Unboxing.

Back in April, I had showed Viv the ThinkGeek April Fools Tauntaun Sleeping bag and she was like to bust a gut.

So when I saw they were now available (as of Friday last week) I knew I had found the perfect thing to break my no-Christmas gift pledge on.

Much to my profane annoyance, the goddamn thing showed up on my doorstep well after 6pm tonight, on a night when I happened to be out and Viv happened to be home.

So when I got in, Viv is all, “What’s in the box?”

Presuming she’s referring to the smaller unopened Amazon box that came addressed to her, I said something like “How should I know, it came addressed to you.”

So then she’s all, “No, the BIG box.”

Whereupon I’m all what fuckery is this and such because, yeah, now I know what has happened, and I’m pissed, because normally I taunt Viv for a couple weeks with unopened and unlabeled boxes, and this one is BLOWN.

Especially when she reads the ONE INCH LETTERING ON THE BOX: “Tauntaun Sleeping Bag,” she reads. “What’s that?”

Argh, game over. So I tell her to open it. I had the presence of mind to take pictures.

The bag has many stuffed animal parts (arms, legs, head, tail) and all our REAL animals figured, logically enough, that meat it was really a present for them. As you can see in the final shots, Rocket in particular would appear to have a keen appreciation of the scent of Tauntaun guts.