Dark Hearts Love Too: for Lafayette

Showing posts with label for Lafayette. Show all posts

Monday, October 30, 2023

Lafayette Forever

You stole my heart the moment I first saw your picture

I fostered you virtually in hopes of finding you a good home

Soon I knew I wanted your home to be with me.

You are forever my friend

I will always love you

Never forget you.

The scar on my broken heart

Bears the shape of you

Always.

A few people have told me my tattoo is cool.

I'd rather not have a reason to have it.

notes

Here's today's prompt.

https://experiencewriting.com/2023/10/30/oct-30-prompts-cats-are-so-familiar/

I wrote an ode to my little buddy Lafayette.

The first two photos are the property of Cara Hartley/Ornery Owl. I ask that you do not use the first photo. I am okay with you using the second photo as long as you do so in a respectful fashion. I really can't imagine what reason anyone would have for wanting to use it.

Any comments about how much you hate tattoos or think that women shouldn't have tattoos or about my body are immature, inappropriate, and will not be published. If you don't like tattoos, don't get one. If you don't like how my body looks, find something else to look at. Simple.

I was forty-nine years old when I got my first tattoo. I wasn't drunk or high and it wasn't an off-the-cuff decision. It was something I'd been considering for about a month. I have seven tattoos and all of them honor someone or something important to me. I would get more if I could afford to.

Lafayette was very special to me. He had multiple system failure, and I had to make the horrible decision to have him put to sleep on his sixth birthday. Any time I write about him, I cry. He was a funny little guy who made me laugh, like when he photobombed the shoot I was doing with the dolls sent to me by a friend from back in my early blogging days.

I still have Lafayette's little half-sister or cousin Tara. I adopted them together. They both came from the same feral colony. They were both very inbred and had health problems and subtle physical abnormalities. Lafayette was small for a male cat and had remarkably long toes.

Tara is unusually long. She has a condition called mast cell disease, which is more common in dogs than cats. She had to have a huge tumor removed from her brow near one eye. She looked like a juvenile Skeksis following the surgery. Fortunately, the tumor hasn't returned.

After the surgery

If you have multiple blogs, there will come a day when you create a post on the wrong blog. I figured it out when I was doing the tags and OctPoWriMo didn't come up. Fortunately, it was easy enough to move the post to the correct blog.

~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~

Instead of the usual Owl pic, I wanted to share this image of my two favorite Lafayettes, created for me by my friend Kamidiox. You can also find her on DeviantArt or check her out here.

https://kamidiox.carrd.co/

Nelsan Ellis was a great guy gone too soon. He wasn't Lafayette Reynolds, but nobody else could have brought Lafayette to life the way Nelsan did. Much love and respect to this talented actor always.

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Tattooed on my Heart

This is the tattoo on my left shoulder

The picture was taken by my son

You're welcome to use it if you do so in a respectful manner

Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you can't bring yourself to be respectful, you can fuck off.

my plush, furry friend

how you made this hard heart soft

life coarse and cruel

losing you made me grow cold

although my dead heart still beats

~cie~

http://www.octpowrimo.com/2020/10/octpowrimo-day-20.html

You Need the Notes

I really can't abide the kind of person whose first comment upon seeing a picture of someone's tattoo is "ew, I don't like tattoos." I'm quite sure they didn't get the tattoo with you in mind, Sunshine.

I got my first tattoo at 49 years old. It is on my right deltoid.

To me, it's fairly obvious that a tattoo like this is done to honor someone, which, in fact, it was. But some sanctimonious sort had to point out their dislike of tattoos to show how saintly they are because they don't have any tattoos.

I've known heavily tattooed people who embody what I think are the characteristics a saint should have, such as empathy and tolerance, and people with no tattoos who are caustic and judgmental. I know whose company I'd rather keep.

When I was living in downtown Denver at nineteen, it wasn't the punks who made me feel so uncomfortable that I spent most of the summer hiding in my apartment. It was the clean-cut guys who thought it was fun to follow me, whistling at me like they were calling to a dog.

I judge people based on their behavior, not their physical appearance.

To link to more poetical ink, this is the place you should go, I think.

https://bit.ly/getmorepoetry

This poem was posted to these places:

http://poetryofthenetherworld.blogspot.com

https://lbry.tv/@poetryofthenetherworld:9

LBRY is a decentralized content marketplace. I price the PDF versions of my work at approximately half of the Kindle price because I receive the entire amount rather than a royalty percentage.

You can get a free LBRY account through this link. You can earn LBC for viewing content on LBRY as well as from selling your content.

https://lbry.tv/$/invite/@naughtynetherworldpress:d

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Sunday, February 16, 2020

Carpe Diem Love Month: Rainbow Bridge to the Dreamlands

Image by navallo from Pixabay

in a place beyond

over the storied rainbow

you and I will meet

perhaps in the land of dream

imagined by Lovecraft

~cie~

I will never get over this

I wish he was here with me

notes

I know nobody gives a flying toss about my notes, but since I'm pretty sure no-one will read this post anyway, what do I care?

I am recovering from a mental breakdown and from a TIA. I am trying to move back in the direction of writing what I want to write rather than what I think will make money. My health is precarious and I don't really know how long I have left on this planet. I worry like hell about developing vascular dementia. I'm not too worried about Alzheimer's because there isn't a history of that on either side of my family. My father had vascular dementia. My aunt on my mother's side probably had Lewy body dementia, although nothing was ever really confirmed. Hers seemed to onset more quickly than Alzheimer's tends to, although I have a feeling she was hiding her memory lapses until she couldn't anymore.

The TIAs I have had exacerbate my ADD. I don't have any short-term memory loss, but there is a change in my cognition. I blame this most recent episode on not having adequate insulin (thanks, Medicaid). My P.A. changed up my prescription so hopefully, this won't happen again. It probably could have been changed sooner but she was on maternity leave, and I am reluctant to see another provider. It is critical that I have a provider who treats me with respect and looks at numbers such as A1C, blood glucose, blood pressure and triglycerides (all things I'm taking medications for) as opposed to focusing on the damn number on the scale, which only triggers episodes of self-loathing and restrictive eating. Anyone who thinks that shaming large people (or anyone else) reinforces positive behavior is dead wrong. All that sort of behavior does is makes people avoid seeking medical care for fear of being shamed.

I write a segment called Henry and Henry for the Fetch universe. Henry is my female protagonist Pepper's beloved cat, who passes away suddenly. He is modeled after my Lafayette.

Henry Kalmar is the spirit of a flamboyant, openly gay New Orleans blues musician who commits suicide on the tenth anniversary of his beloved half-sister's death. Henry is modeled after Lafayette Reynolds, my favorite character in the show True Blood. Lafayette was the namesake for my Lafayette. He was played by the very talented Nelsan Ellis, who died on 8 July 2017 at the age of 39 from complications of alcohol withdrawal. Nelsan's sister Alice was murdered by her husband in 2002. This was something that Nelsan never got over.

Nelsan attempted to stop using alcohol on his own because he was ashamed to seek help for his addiction. This, unfortunately, created deadly complications. Here we have an example of how shaming people for addiction doesn't work. If shame worked, there would be no addicts, no fat people, and no smokers. I repeat that shaming doesn't work, it only makes people reluctant to seek medical care for fear of being shamed by ignorant health "care" providers.

I adopted my Lafayette's half-sister or cousin Tara at the same time that I adopted Lafayette. I suspect that both of them were very inbred. They came from the same feral colony. Both of them had to have most of their teeth removed because of feline stomatitis. Lafayette had problems with his fur falling out and scabby skin which I attributed to a grain allergy and began feeding him grain-free food which seemed to help somewhat. I later misattributed some of the signs of system failure to a return of the feline stomatitis and assumed that he would need the rest of his teeth removed. I had no idea, and I will go to my grave blaming myself for being so wrapped up in working that I missed critical signs. I will never forgive myself.

Henry the Cat meets Henry Kalmar in the Dreamlands, and together they become part of the team trying to save the Cosmos from an ultimate threat headed by Nyarlathotep, the smartest and trickiest of the Outer Gods. This ragtag group of reluctant heroes also includes a snarky Swedish spectre, a benevolent Yithian, a sweet-natured but foul-mouthed Scotsman who departs his cognitively impaired body at night to join the fight, a terminally ill British prog-rock icon, and a couple of good-natured ghouls.

I let the story languish for five years in favor of attempting to write stuff that I believed would sell. It didn't, and I'm not going to back-burner my beloved project any longer. Would I like for it to have an audience? Sure, I suppose, but sometimes knowing that other people are watching prevents me from unleashing my creativity. So, whatever.

Generally speaking, I am not the kind of person that other people gravitate to. I have kind of a prickly, defensive personality from years of having to defend myself, what do you know? I can count on one hand the people who will respond to this post, and I thank you in advance.

Thursday, August 1, 2019

Heeding Haiku: One-Bun: Clouds

I did not think about your passing on its fourth anniversary because I was so terribly busy, but I think of you and miss you each day and will for the remainder of my life.

do you walk the clouds

sweet soul so terribly missed

do you see my tears

~Cie~