dolores666's photos with the keyword: Birthdays

And so another birthday looms, descends and pouff! it’s gone. (77 is not a boring number but it’s perilously close to 80.) The Family insists that I have a good one but the prevailing winds are not auspicious and the atmospheric conditions are pretty crappy. Too many bad news personal and political. Too much stupidity in the air and too many deaths or impending deaths all around. Still, a girl tries, doesn’t she? Be it only to please my wee monsters.

Birthdays! The Shoggoths are ten years old this autumn. They burst into my life at the end of a particularly interesting October in 2008, evolved from a Japanese frog that then became my third Cthulhu. But the Great Old Dreamer subsequently acquired a more traditional shape, with tentacles and claws and wings and all things properly Cthulhian. The Shoggies were in them very brief early days cast in the role of minions of the catnapper of R’lyeh, but almost immediately became self-regulating and took a life of their own, which event delighted me no end. Mind you, it helped that I had re-read At the Mountains of Madness again and finally made up my mind that the Shoggoths had had such a bad press, up to that moment, because H.P. Lovecraft was barking up the wrong tree, the silly old xenophobic bugger. To cut a long story short, the Shoggoths were re-cast in the part of heroes. My kind of heroes: freedom fighters, rebel slaves, free radicals; a regular bunch of protoplasmic Maroons one and all. They’ve come a long way since then. They have established their uniquely personal world and taken over mine. They have made art and music, written poetry, developed the Shoggy Brotherhood Tango and invented their own highly unorthodox version of Sumo wrestling. They have morphed into ill-behaved sub-atomic particles, starred in remakes and alternative versions of several movies, including Battleship Potemkin and Spartacus and posed for famous paintings like Velazquez’s Las Meninas and Goya’s Los fusilamientos del 3 de Mayo. Rosie has even written a sequel to Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? They also triggered a stampede of Lovecraftian spoofy pastiches (collectively renamed Myffos), so that not only Shoggies emerged but also Cthulhus, Shub-Nigguraths, Old Ones, Deep Ones, Yithians, Mi-Go, a Mother Hydra, a GorgoMormo and a Yog-Sothoth or two. They have been the best compost my mind’s garden has ever known. They continue to grow and multiply, with no signs of exhaustion in sight. Happy birthday, my rubbery darlings. Scribe’s Note. As well as the customary birthday card, I break my own rule of never posting anything longer than the mini rants that often attend my doodles and I’m posting a link to the rejuvenated version of an uplifting, stirring account of how the beloved monsters came into my life, all those ages ago, in another time and another place and when the wench I then was is now not exactly dead but certainly closer to the grave that she’s ever been. Sic transit gloria Gorgon. :-) The story so far. www.gorgs.co.uk/gossip-column Plus: The full graphic version. www.gorgs.co.uk/a-brief-history-of-shoggoths-first-cycle

So, we got to be seventy. Unbelievable! According to the Indian palmist who read my palm in a deserted train station in a godforsaken town somewhere in South India, I should have been dead good ten years ago (and he considered 60/65 to be a good, long life, too, bless his saintly chappals). So, here we are. Old, fat, shapeless, unseemly, disabled, female, foreign, grumpy, cynical, pessimistic and fonder of puncturing balloons than ever. Hardly anybody likes me and most folks hate my politics. But a couple of amiable souls love me and the Shoggies & Co. love me and, were I to believe in him, Jesus would love me, be it only because he’s supposed to love everybody, even Henry Kissinger. And so, rather than go eat worms, I make friends with them and invite them to tea. And they repay me with their secret jokes and infinite kindness. And although I have more than one regret (sod off, Edith Piaff!) and I know we are born to die anyway, I scorn pomp and defy circumstances and take great comfort in the poetry of a 15thC Spaniard who really knew his poetry from a hole in the ground. Here’s to you, don Jorge! And here’s to you, young Gorgon. May your next birthday find you as unrepentant. Or find you at all, really, the way things are going… :-)

The Tunnel. aka La ley del embudo. (The Law of the Funnel. See link) Here's a little something for a dear friend's birthday: his very own space craft, the good starship Persiflage. May it help him navigate the hideously dicey times that will follow the enthronement of the Hellary Harpy, that fast friend of everything that's wrong and vile and stupid and illegal and underhand and ............... (enter your atrocity of choice here). If you thought the Obama regime had narrowed the funnel's neck beyond the practicable, let alone the tolerable, wait and see what she'll do to the world. Mothers of America and its little British minion, start packing the wargames kit of your children, soon to be sent to the Baltic, or the Med, or to Syria, to fight the Red Putin Devil and shed their expendable blood in yet another fraudulent conflict with an imaginary enemy. Oi, are we fucked... es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_del_embudo It can roughly translate as “One law for the rich and one for the poor”. Or as the ineffable gaucho Martín Fierro had it: La ley es tela de araña, y en mi ignorancia lo explico, no la tema el hombre rico, no la tema el que mande, pues la rompe el bicho grande y sólo enrieda a los chicos.