THAT DAY

Read two books. First: Royce Rolls, by Margaret Stohl, a farce (she claims it's a bit autobiographical) about a Los Angeles reality-TV family with absolutely no privacy. Teenage Bentley wants out, and does some ingeniously drastic stuff to get out. Funny. A solo departure from the Southern fantasy-horror that Stohl did with Kami Garcia--whose solo work just keeps repeating that same ol' devilism. Stohl's following her bad-girl thing down a different path here. The risk paid off.

Watts Martin, Why Coyotes Howl. Science fiction & fantasy tales, mostly furry. Not all--Still Life With Espresso is a Charles de Lint-ish fantasy on a painter who reads others' memories; her historical murals start revitalizing her 'hood. But many are straight wish-fulfilling furry/xenophilic romances. The story-structures and prose aren't always polished, but the emotions and issues he raises hit home. Bentley in Royce Rolls was fun, but I'm not a media-saturated human. This book makes it clear that skin or not, I am a fur.

Mainstream critics judge the artistry in depicting their human-consensus world. It's not that I MIND a great style, but... minorities like me are hungry to read about our issues and experiences outside that world.

Go to bed half-satisfied and half longing--my hunger for otherness sharper than ever. But then, Tolkien, in "On Fairy-Stories", his definitive essay on the function of fantasy, says that's the job of such tales. Mundane fiction polishes the doors of (normal) perception; fantasy cleans the doors of desire. We're too reasonable; think too small.

THAT NIGHT

She's tall. Gawky tall. As only a teenage girl Is when the child's outgrown. Marshwades in her shimmerblue shirt until She finds the secret stone. Cloth frays to feathers. Legs to leather, and Marsh-reed slender. Blue heron! Everglades. Everglad. I feel Her joy in flight. And selves. Return to hands, to human lands Whenever you like. But the dream veers. On this fork she died Along with her stalkers four. Or At least the cops, who have no faith in bird, Think all are bog-corpses. I Tag along, with a slouching Private Eye. He and I, mudweary, try To track the flown. Ovid or Oblivion? My mind, Open-winged, concedes Black drown could be. And yet those four Trod her track. Black stone! Wild cranes could bloom. Would they Find avianity a joy, as she? In the reeds, Obsidian winks. Old crocodilian Come-hither smile. I dread That stone. One tread. O how I long! So... Dare I step, let go?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Leggy nonhuman girl in blue; swamp-stone-portal: Reli in Watts Martin's Traveling Music--an Everglades portal-stone sends a leggy catgirl in blue into our ape-run world. She finds, unexpectedly, love. Meaning: Loneliness, love unsought?
• Human-to-marsh-bird: echoes The Blue Flamingo by Hannes Bok (expanded ed. titled Beyond the Golden Stair). The flamingo guards a gate to paradise; our tough-guy narrator shoots the bird to get in. He's caught and given the flamingo's job (and form)--can he learn restraint? Patience? Respect?
• Girl grows feathers: in Watts Martin's Going to the Dogs, a man wakes up part mutt. His wife: "You're not the man I married!" True. But as she walks out, she sheds a feather. Changing too. Denying change underway?
• Sleuthing: in Royce Rolls, to escape her smothering family, Bentley fakes her own death; at last her brother & a cop track her down. Trying to reunify?
• Four men vanish, not one as in Bentley's staged death: in Watts Martin's Without Evidence, a sapient tigress killed her four abusers. Justified, but now when flashbacks haunt her, she finds a bar and lures, kills & eats a jerk. Not a kidnapper; just a jerk. Unhealed trauma, passing evil on?
• Cops can't imagine transformation so they see thuggery: I've wondered if my abuse knocked my sexual orientation from human to furry? But gayness isn't post-traumatic stress; why should xenophilia be? And the heron was joyful, and able to return at will. Just as I fly the oneirosphere but nest in your human world. Shamanic dreamwork!
• Heron-people: recurrent! Three heron-dreams this month alone. Whatever they mean, it's important:
  1. Three weeks ago, a brown gawky heron-headed guy in a suit ran an architecture magazine. My first thought was Thoth, Egyptian god of scholars & scribes--Creativity. But I'd just read Nagabe's The Girl From The Other Side: a gawky beaky mutant raises an orphaned human child. Responsibility, nurturance!
  2. Two weeks ago, a cat-raven-heron girl flirted with me. We petted and purred. We didn't go all the way, but I found her adorable--in all her shapes, she had such happy sexy energy. Sensuality?
  3. What's this third heron mean? Joy, dreamwork, art?
• ACTION: For millennia, illness has pried shamans out of the comfy human egg. The trauma that unstuck me from the human world did leave scars--a feral wariness. But trauma doesn't only scar. I gained too--independence, intuition, creativity, sensuality, and soul-flight. Judge myself with shaman eyes.

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