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the works of Macaulay C. Hunter and Jordan Reece

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#STANDWITHWENDY

June 26, 2013 By pandaloonery Leave a Comment

I wouldn’t be here.

If abortion had been legal in 1945, when my maternal grandmother found herself with an unwanted pregnancy, she likely would have gotten an abortion. She was poor. She was single. The man wasn’t in the picture. Her family was quite conservative. It was Texas.

But it wasn’t an option, so she had the baby. Due to some shady legal footwork, my mother was adopted by a couple who had been turned down by several placement agencies as being too mentally unstable to be entrusted with a child. After a happy childhood full of hugs and pet bunnies*, my mother married my father, who had also had the fortune to come from a family of snuggles and rainbows**. Then they proceeded to have more children than their paychecks could cover, but fortunately we were raised in a child-centered home of kisses and butterflies***.

My mother was rabidly pro-life. Once a woman spread her legs for sexy times, she ceded all authority over her body. If a seven-pound bundle of punishment happened to arrive nine months later, it was her wailing, poopy cross to bear. The end. When I questioned this as a teenager, that perhaps it was not as simple an issue as she was making it out to be, she blew up. Didn’t I understand? If abortion had been legal in the 1940s, we would not be here.

She said it with absolute horror. Could you imagine a world without us? Without our family? How terrible. It was such a terrifying thought that she didn’t continue the conversation much beyond that, and the subject rarely came up between us again. Abortion was annihilation. We wouldn’t be here.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about it since then, and all I’ve concluded is that it’s okay. It’s okay if we aren’t here. We wouldn’t know the difference and neither would anybody else. I am not so important that the world would stop turning without me. My family is not the axis. How narcissistic it is to think that my creation was so very, very important that a world where Macaulay Cade Hunter did not happen is a horror flick we watch through parted fingers.

This doesn’t come from a place of depression, and I don’t have a time machine in my basement**** where I am trying to blast myself back to 1945 to offer my grandmother the morning-after pill. I’m here, living a perfectly fine life*****. If my grandmother had gotten an abortion, I wouldn’t be here. And that’s okay. I can’t miss myself or my family when we never were, and neither can anyone else.

And maybe my grandmother would have gone through with the pregnancy anyway. I can’t say for certain. But she should have had the option of termination. It was her body. It was her life. It was her choice. No one else’s.

Thank you, Wendy Davis.

* Munchausen’s by proxy and other abuse.
** Alcoholism and beatings.
*** The less said the better.
**** The dragon chained in there keeps setting my prototypes on fire.
***** Except for the insomnia, which is why I’m posting this at one in the morning.

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Filed Under: #standwithwendy, abortion, family, texas, wendy davis Tagged With: abortion, adoption, Wendy Davis

Dear Mother on the iPhone (Your Kids Will Be Fine)

May 1, 2013 By pandaloonery 1 Comment

Isn’t it annoying how a stranger can see a snapshot of your life, a few minutes in a park where you have looked away from your playing children to your iPhone, and write a letter to the whole of the Internet about how you are missing out on your kids’ childhoods?

Don’t you realize that when you had children, you lost yourself entirely? Every thought, breath, and movement must be directly related to them, or else you will turn out warped individuals who will one day sit in group therapy for adult survivors of abuse to bemoan that tragic day in preschool when their mother* did not watch their fiftieth Spin-Jump off the third step up on the playground equipment. Did I write sit in group therapy? I meant slouch, because you did not instill enough self-esteem for them to grow a healthy spine that allows them to sit upright.

My mom missed my fiftieth Spin-Jump off the third step up when I was four.

Heads will shake sadly all around the circle at your unshaven son, who does not even have the confidence to wear a clean shirt and zip up his fly all the way. And your daughter! What a mess she is. Since you didn’t admire her every exhalation, she became a Kardashian. Great job, Mom.

Long ago when my brother and I were demanding that our mother admire our fiftieth Spin-Jumps, she demanded that we leave her alone. iPhones did not exist back then, but if they had, she would have been on one. Instead she went back to her sleazy novel, or talking to someone else, or yelling at our father, or engaged in her own thoughts.

And I learned a shocking lesson: I was not the center of the universe. My mother was a separate person with her own thoughts and feelings and interests. And while I might be very interested in my fiftieth Spin-Jump, other people were not. So I went off to entertain myself.

This was not abuse or neglect.

What do we expect from our mothers? I was fed and clean and supervised. She had admired my first and second, tenth and twentieth and forty-ninth Spin-Jumps, and my brother’s** first and second, tenth and twentieth and forty-ninth Spin-Jumps, and now she was claiming her own space. She’d been admiring us in various preschool pursuits all day before we hit the playground. And now she wanted some time to stop admiring us and do Adult Things.

I turned out fine.

Life is not about being admired with dewy eyes for every single thing you do, not by your boss or teachers or friends, not even by your mother. And she didn’t stop existing as herself the second she became pregnant. Sometimes instead of watching the fruit of her loins doing infinite Spin-Jumps at the park, she wants to look at her iPhone. Check Facebook. Play a game. Read a sleazy novel. Her children will survive the insult of having their fiftieth Spin-Jump unremarked upon.

I daresay they might grow from it.

Love,
A Stranger Who Saw You Looking At Your iPhone At The Park While Your Children Played And Wrote A Letter To The Internet About It***

* This letter would never have been addressed to a father, would it?

** She admired his only out of politeness since they were never as good as mine.

*** Which helped me to procrastinate on my actual writing. So thank you. For those of you waiting impatiently for Runemaster or the godforsaken Earth/Sky, I apologize, and will return to the final edits/writing respectively in short order. ****

**** Do some parents spend outrageous amounts of time on their iPhones, to the neglect of everyone else around them? No doubt. Some people overdo everything. But I can’t tell that about a mother or father from observing them one afternoon at a park.*****

***** And by the way, Mom, my fiftieth Spin-Jump that you missed? I added a clap to it!

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Filed Under: fun

RUNEGAME

April 13, 2013 By pandaloonery Leave a Comment

It’s out!
It’s out!!
It’s out!!!

RUNEGAME - 2500

Actually, it came out two weeks ago, but the announcement was overrun by 40+ lambs all coming out at the same time. Eight sets of triplets, ten sets of twins, and one singleton!
photo-1

Never release a book during lambing season. Lesson learned.

Runegame can be found on Amazon, Apple iBooks, NOOK and Smashwords. Or pretty much wherever else ebooks are sold. Also in paperback for you old school types.

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Filed Under: fun, publishing, Runegame Tagged With: lamb, writing

The Lamb Who Lived

April 5, 2013 By pandaloonery Leave a Comment

Sometimes in birth, everything goes wrong.

It is quite dangerous to be a recipient of pictures from Lady Friend. While there is a good chance it will be an innocuous shot of lovely flowers or a nice meal she is enjoying at a fine restaurant, there is an equally good chance that it will be a sheep’s ass. I received this as a text:

soon
Soon

The picture was accompanied by the message that the ewe named Mommy Dearest was starting labor. Mommy Dearest gave birth to Ke$ha last year, who as you all remember, was rejected at birth in favor of her brother and rammed away every time she tried to nurse. This led to her developing Stealth Lamb moves of sneaking up to nurse from behind, and consequently led to her being peed on so often that her wool turned a lemon yellow.

I didn’t find it a very promising sign that Mommy Dearest was the first ewe to be laboring in the flock. That seemed rather ominous. I also did not need to see that picture of her ass. (Nor did you, but there you go.) Because eight years in religious school has left me unable to deal with the mammalian process of birth, I sent back this as a rebuttal to Lady Friend:

Where lambs really come from . . .

That’s how it should be.

During lambing season, the sheep are checked on several times a day to see if anyone is standing apart from the herd and scanning the skies for storks. And just as Lady Friend arrived for the late evening check, Mommy Dearest delivered a dead lamb. It was a girl. Then she strained and strained, still in labor but making no progress, so Lady Friend saddled up with the Whole Arm Gloves and checked out her business.

Inside she found too many legs and a head all fighting for the exit at the same time. With a contraction a rear end was expelled, and beneath the rear end was the head belonging to yet another lamb. She gently pulled out the breech lamb, which was also a girl, and also dead. The mouth moved on the remaining lamb, still stuck in the chute. Lady Friend brought that one out, but it was no longer breathing.

She gave it mouth-to-mouth and swung it through the air, as one does with non-breathing lambs. Still slippery, the lamb squirted right out of her hands and landed in the hay. Then it gave a weak baa. It was a very small boy, who lay dazed in the hay as Lady Friend gave it some warm maple syrup and water to perk him up. She did not know if he was going to be brain-damaged from the traumatic birth, or from being dropped on his head. Then she milked the ewe for colostrum. Finally the baby rolled around and got himself up to nurse from the bottle.

Meanwhile, as the clock turned to midnight, Mommy Dearest engaged herself in not passing the placenta, possibly having uterine tears, and being in general misery. She received a dose of antibiotics and pain drugs. Lady Friend graduated the lamb from the bottle to the actual teat, with which he had no idea what to do. The night wore on with him still in bewilderment about where food comes from, and finally Lady Friend left for the night and hoped to find two living sheep in the lambing jug in the morning.

He was still alive when she got there at six. And so was Mommy Dearest. Not an energetic fellow, his lungs sounded froggy. That was not a good sign, yet he plugged on through the day and at last put together that the large creature in the stall with him was supplied with a food attachment. The next day his rear end was full of the craps, which is yet another bad sign. And still he plugged on, determined to live, and so did his mother. She (thankfully) developed no spite to him as she did with Ke$ha. All of her spite now goes to Lady Friend.

Now it is days later, and they have been released from the lambing jug. And while The Lamb Who Lived soldiers on with amazing physical resilience, his deficits have proved themselves in the mental department. He is a cheerful chap, and perfectly able to go about most of his lamb-y business, but he cannot differentiate his mother’s baa-aa from any other ewe’s baa-aa. This skill usually comes fairly swiftly to the little fellows, but it has not yet dawned on him. And so he spends his days running around the pasture like a toddler at every baa-aa wanting to know if it came from his mother, and his mother chases after baa-aaing that she is behind him. She is very tired by the end of the day.

We’ve named him Mensa.

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Filed Under: sheep

Lamb Watch 2013

March 17, 2013 By pandaloonery Leave a Comment

Flock Stats: 24 Ewes

Number of Pregnant: 20

Non-Pregnant Elderly: Gramma Cheat and Gramma Piss Ninja

Non-Pregnant Yearlings: Ke$ha and Billy Madison

Give us grain or give us death!
Jedi formation

No lambs as of this evening, nor are any ewes separating themselves from the herd to watch the skies for a stork.  Lady Friend has a different explanation of where lambs come from, but as I went to religious school for eight years, I refuse to believe her disturbing claims.

Gramma Cheat and Gramma Piss Ninja are the mothers and grandmothers of the herd, and through these two matriarchs, the progeny has mastered the Jedi trick of the Woolly Intimidation Stare.  They used it to great effect during our visit to the pasture to check for lambs, and we ceded to the subliminal demands for grain.  Then Gramma Cheat used her Jedi powers to win a thorough head scratching.

Ke$ha continues to be the most disgusting sheep alive, and the filthiest one in the pasture.  While shaking her head to rid herself of her latest collection of debris, feces flew in a projectile fashion from her rear.  Her exact opposite, Billy Madison believes that cleanliness is close to godliness.

One of the pregnant ewes has lost her ear tag, earning her the name Hole In Her Head.  Lady Friend does not care for this name, but since she did not suggest a better one, Hole In Her Head it is.  The light from the setting sun shined right through it.  Hole In Her Head as well as several other pregnant ewes have swollen backsides, and crass Lady Friend offers this up as proof that deliveries do not arrive by stork.  I can’t argue too much because she always polishes off the hoary old chestnut that SHE majored in BIOLOGY, while I majored in Greek and Latin.

Well, te Iuppiter dique omnes perdant, Lady Friend!  I paid thirty thousand dollars for that completely useless degree!

So we wait and watch, and pray that this year comes and goes without a visit from The Grim Sheeper.  We have had visits occasionally, summoning away little fellows like Aqua-Lamb, Trogdor, and The Burninator too soon, but last year saw only one grisly death in Pancake, who died crushed under his mother’s ass.

Lambing Season, here we come.

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Filed Under: Billy Madison the Sheep, fun, Ke$ha, sheep Tagged With: Ke$ha the Lamb, sheep

Start Your Monday (Early) With a GAH!!!

February 24, 2013 By pandaloonery 1 Comment

give_up_meme

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Filed Under: fun

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