The Palinode Rocks a Flowered Pashmina and Saves Kittens

Last night, I tweeted the following:



And then I tweeted:



There were some who doubted the veracity of my statements.

Ha! In your face, doubters. Behold the Palinode in all his kitten-saving, be-caped glory:



You know you're doing well when the man you married blossoms into a Do-Me-cape-wearing kitten-saver. I'm so proud.

A Jaw-Dropping Miracle of Meat and Electricity

One of the first conversations I ever had with the Palinode, a conversation which occurred over seven years before we finally started dating, was about books.



I may have been engaged to another man at the time, and I may have been fooling around with the friend who introduced the Palinode and I — I was, shall we say, a lover and not a fighter in those days — but damn if that Palinode didn't seem like a fine human being, and one of my tests for fineness back then was to ask about books. If a person hemmed, hawed, or looked in any way confused by the question, they were deemed Not Fine.

"What book should I read next above all others?" I asked him.

"Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian," the Palinode answered without hesitation.

And he was, indeed, deemed to be Very Fine.

More than seven years after that conversation, we dated, and almost a year after that, we were married, and about a month or two into our marriage, we were sitting around in our apartment together talking about books again when he suddenly looked like he'd remembered something important.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I just remembered one of my favourite passages in fiction," he said. "Would you like to hear it?"

"I would love to," I said.

I expected him to get up off the floor to find the book the passage was in, but no.

"It's from Blood Meridian, pages 51 to 53," he said, as though it were the most normal thing in the world to remember that kind of thing, and then his eyes looked up at the ceiling for a moment, and then he looked at me and recited this section of Blood Meridian from memory:

The first of the herd began to swing past them in a pall of yellow dust, rangy slatribbed cattle with horns that grew agoggle and no two alike and small thin mules coalblack that shouldered one another and reared their malletshaped heads above the backs of the others and then more cattle and finally the first of the herders riding up the outer side and keeping the stock between themselves and the mounted company. Behind them came a herd of several hundred ponies. The sergeant looked for Candelario. He kept backing along the ranks but could not find him. He nudged his horse through the column and moved up the far side. The lattermost of the drovers were now coming through the dust and the captain was gesturing and shouting. The ponies had begun to veer off from the herd and the drovers were beating their way toward this armed company met with on the plain. Already you could see through the dust on the ponies' hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armour of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god, said the sergeant. ¹

OH MY GOD, I thought in my head.

I stared at him in silence.

"Oh, you didn't like it," he said.

"No, I loved it. That was like incredible poetry."

I remembered our conversation about that book from eight years before and decided that I had just landed in one of three situations:

a) This was a sign that I had married the right person.
b) I was in way over my head, and he should totally divorce me for someone who knows stuff.
c) I had married either a robot or a highly intelligent alien-human hybrid sent to infiltrate the species.

Ten-and-a-half years later, a full eighteen-and-a-half years since we met, I think the correct answer was A. He still knows a ludicrous amount of information — really, his brain is a jaw-dropping miracle of meat and electricy — but he's kind enough not to mock me for having trouble remembering the word for butter, and that, my friends, is love.

----------------------------

¹ Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. 1985. p. 51–53.

Putting On Pants Is Really Boring, Apparently

Because this is a picture of Onion's reaction to panting, which is to bite whatever is near his mouth, I thought it was sideways related to the topic at hand.

Palinode: Whatcha doing?

Schmutzie: I'm taking off my pants...

Palinode: Really? [His face breaks out in a huge grin.]

Schmutzie: ...and I'm putting on some other pants.

Palinode: Oh. [His grin falls.]

Schmutzie: What?

Palinode: Well, it's just that your sentence started out really interesting, and then it ended up being really boring.

Next time I put on pants, I'll try to throw in a little soft shoe or something.

There's Some Good News Here At PaliSchmutz Industries

There has been a windfall of fantabulous news here at PaliSchmutz Industries. It makes us pretty happy if slightly more tired folks these days.



The Palinode went and got himself a new job!



Since last spring, aside from my very part-time glamorous shoe store job, we have both been freelancing from home.

From people's reactions to our work situation over the last year, I have been given to understand that both living and working together full time is supposed to test even the greatest of marriages, but that hasn't been the case here. I have loved our being at home together.



Of course, being at home together nearly twenty-four hours a day means that the little things he does that irritate me were present all the time — he places lids and caps back on bottles and tubes but never screws them down properly, he shouts stuff incomprehensibly from the other room and then acts annoyed when I don't understand what he's saying, he sits in front of his huge monitor in the dark sometimes like some basement-dwelling fapper — but those things are minor. They're humorous asides.

I have loved being able to wander into the next room to share stupid pet videos, to get his advice about where to go next with a particular design, or just to sniff the top of his head. He has a delicious scalp, it's true.



This is only his second day at his new job, and I'm waxing nostalgic about our year of freelancing together.

I'm used to wandering into his office to kiss his head on my way by to make coffee. He's my second set of eyes when I'm designing, and I like being able to shove my work under his nose any time day or night. He tells me if my outfits look good, he stops for hallway cuddles, he is the maker of good tea.



You probably want to clobber me for going on about how the Palinode has to leave me for several hours a day like a normal person. I kind of want to clobber me, because, damn, am I ever actually living a blessed life right now.



Oh, hell. I wasn't intending to write a love letter today. I was just going to whine about what a travesty it is that I have to spend all day by myself wah wah wah call me a wambulance, and now here I am writing the equivalent of a mash note.

It's just that after ten years together and the health messes we've dealt with and working together so closely over the last year, I still like him, and I am unboundingly grateful for his presence in my life.



Also, now I have no one to yell out Is there any coffee left in the pot? to with the hope that they'll get up and make me some damn coffee already, and our cats are far too useless. Now a woman's got to do it for herself while her partner is out at his exciting new job.

Goddamn.

The Inimitable Dr. Deieuew And Our Tenth Wedding Anniversary

I was texting back and forth with the Palinode the other day, and because I was feeling somewhat nostalgic with the lead-up to our tenth wedding anniversary, I thought to mention the inimitable Dr. Deieuew.


This is the only picture of our wedding that I have access to on the internet. We did not actually wear moose heads at our wedding.

The inimitable Dr. Deieuew came into being while the Palinode and I were dating more than a decade ago. We were playing a round of Scrabble one afternoon...

I have to stop mid-sentence to point out that I look very fondly upon my memories of playing Scrabble with the Palinode. You know those jokes about how women never perform fellatio again after the wedding night? Well, if you replace "women" with "the Palinode" and "perform fellatio" with "Scrabble", it's true. After we were married, he confessed to not liking Scrabble at all and only using it as a tool to seduce me. This nerd who wears a Scrabble tile pendant feels so betrayed.

Anyway, we were playing a round of Scrabble, *sniff*, and he had the letters DEIEUEW on his rack, which struck us as a rather funny name for a Belgian doctor. Why? There is no why. There is only funny when it strikes two foolish people falling in love with one another. He became "the inimitable Dr. Deieuew", because what would Dr. Deieuew be if not inimitable, especially since the pronunciation of his name places emphasis on each individual letter while being drawn out long and snooty-like through the nose?

The inimitable Dr. Day-ee-yew-oo-ee-yoo.

I pretend that I look like a snobby, rat-faced, old lady with a lace collar up to my earlobes while I say it in order to get the pronunciation just right.

This memory all leads up to my texting about the inimitable Dr. Deieuew to the Palinode the other night. I had forgotten the exact spelling of the name, so I while I tried to work it out, my iPhone's autocorrect function was going through some rather mysterious phonetic contortions to try to figure out what I was typing, and it settled on "Furioso".



How autocorrect settled on Dr. Furioso, I have no idea — it is not ours to understand autocorrect's ways — but I have been thinking about Dr. Furioso ever since. Is he, too, inimitable? Does he know our inimitable Dr. Deieuew? Is he an Italian colleague of the inimitable Dr. Deieuew, or, perhaps, even an alter-ego, a clever flip-side foil to the inimitable Dr. Deieuew's inimitability?

It is deep matters such as these that occupy my brain when it comes to matters of love. It is my tenth wedding anniversary, and all I can write about is the inimitable Dr. Deieuew and the mysterious Dr. Furioso.

This kind of misdirection has long been an issue for me when it comes to matters of romance. The first time the Palinode told me he loved me, it went something like this:

"I love you," he said.

"My shoelaces are dirty. I think I need to bleach them," I replied.

I am a fan of love, and I am sappy as can be, but any direct mention of love and sweetness aimed at me has me pointing in the opposite direction and shouting Look over there!

By all of which — Scrabble, the inimitable Dr. Deieuew, Dr. Furioso, and my dirty shoelaces — I mean to say that ten years ago today, right now, the Palinode and I were saying I do just as two swallows swooped above our heads as though to say Yes, and I would never go back, I would never erase one moment of our ten years together, not the cancer, not the broken back, and not the myriad other slings and arrows that time has thrown at us like depression and alcoholism and whatnot, because I am, all of me, better and brighter and happier with him than I ever hoped I could be before I knew I loved him.

Thank you, Palinode. You have, quite literally, given me my life. You foster possibilities I could never find alone. I love you.