LJ Idol Season 7 Week 15 - Whirlpool
o/` "There was a swirling mass of water
That lived in a quiet pond
It asked permission from its master
To visit the lands beyond
And its master allowed it to fly
So the wind swept the
whirlpool across the sky
And it had the idea to fly' o/`
-- "Whirlpool" performed by They Might Be Giants
When a chaos god comes calling, generally no one wants to answer the door. As a novice Neo-Pagan whose fluffy tail and ears were still firmly attached, I didn't think I would be any exception.
So much for that assumption. There's a pretty good reason why I wear black and red so often now and why close friends refer to me as Loki's Child.
The trouble began, believe it or not, with a black and white speckled mutt. I don't remember exactly where we got him, and maybe that's what he intends, but one afternoon in autumn of 1996 I found myself lying on the bed looking into a pair of unusually intense amber eyes and trying to think of a suitable name. I'd say a name and glance at the pup in expectation. He'd cock his head to one side, as though considering the matter, and then resume ignoring me. "Beauregard." Ear flick. "Roy?" Ear flick. "Lance?" Ear flick, tail thump. "Hmmm...." Perhaps his former owner named him something beginning with the letter 'L'. Out in Montrose County, we had a significant number of Spanish speakers. Many of them kept dogs like this one for baiting or to act as guard dogs in the junk yards and auto parts shops in which they worked. "Lobo? Is it Lobo?" The tail wagged twice, lethargically, and then his long pink tongue lolled out in a yawn. Not quite right. I'm running out of ideas here and I can't just call him 'dog' or 'pup' for the rest of his life. "Loki's lingam," I shouted, "just what the Hel is your name?"
Wagging frantically, the puppy propelled himself into my arms and knocked me over backwards onto the mattress. The look on his face, of near-human amusement, seemed to be saying, "What took you so long?"
"No. I'm sorry, that's not a proper name for you. Not in this household."
He regarded me with another of those near-human expressions...and promptly peed all over my foot. Loki he was and Loki he remained; the damned dog would never answer to any other name.
Loki became an experienced escape artist. The old trailer had a small yard fenced off with livestock wire from the orchard on one side and the alfalfa fields on the other. Let loose in this enclosure, he promptly leaped over the six foot high barrier and escaped its confines. Once free, he disappeared like a shot. I learned early that combing the neighborhood in a vehicle in search of the dog would do no good. It wasn't that you couldn't find Loki; he would hear the car coming and bound toward you, tongue hanging out of a white toothed grin, and then jump through the passenger side window into the front seat. Evidently the dog learned to associate running away with getting a ride in the car. He seemed to consider that ride his just reward and the frequency of his escapes increased accordingly.
On payday, when I drove down into town to secure the month's provisions, I stopped in at the co-op and bought one of those dog leads of plastic coated wire which you fasten in place with a spike driven into the ground. The man who sold it to me assured me that the apparatus would handle a rambunctious seventy pound lab mix. Just to be certain, I purchased one which supposedly would restrain dogs weighing up to one hundred and eighty pounds.
Loki pulled that spike right out of the ground and then ran off with the whole shebang trailing after him.
I borrowed a thick length of logging chain from a neighbor, wrapped it around a heavy cottonwood stump, and then staked one end into the wood with a railroad spike. Reasoning that he couldn't possibly manage to do any damage to this set-up, I fastened the other end of the chain to the dog.
He somehow managed to snap the chain.
In a fit of pique, I fitted him with one of the electrical tags I normally used on the cattle and spent the entire day running hot wire around the top of the yard fencing. I couldn't help grinning in satisfaction the first time I heard a pained yelp and found him outside, glaring at me reproachfully, on his back in the mud. "Take that, you sneaky bastard."
I really ought to have known better than to taunt that particular god.
The hot fence became the bane of my existence. It had a tendency to sag for some reason where it paralleled the clothes line. Every time I bent over to get clothes from the basket and hang them, a breeze came up and the wire would brush across my backside like a demented lover's caress. The current isn't enough to be detrimental to animal or human, but it sure does hurt. I'd stand there sizzling with electricity and indignation, hair frizzled and tits standing on end, while Loki gazed at me with that near-human smile. Out of the corner of my eye, I fancied I saw a faint nimbus and the silhouette of a young with fiery red hair overlapping that of the dog. Dismissing it as an aberration caused by the electrical discharge, I wobbled up the back stairs and poured myself a stiff one. I didn't see that...did I?
Loki continued his truancy routine. Smelling of hops, which we had never planted on the property, he always returned from the direction of the north before sunset. I saw that peculiar halo effect at least once more and caught out of the corner of my eye the same nude young man calmly fettering himself in the dog run. He stopped in the act of fastening the collar, and winked. Just as suddenly, the glow faded and there was only Loki standing patiently on his chain and waiting to be let in. I'd have dismissed it to the realm of a tired but overactive imagination had it not been for two perfect, narrow human footprints in the mud right where the dog now waited. Faintly, I heard a strong tenor tinged with laughter say, "You can run, little fluff bunny, but you can't hide. You're stuck with me."
"I'm not," I said defiantly to the empty air. "You are not a being of love and light. I command you to leave my presence."
The chuckle sounded a little less lighthearted, more sinister this time. "Cute, but wrong. Oh so terribly wrong. 'Where the water stinks, I break the dam'." I felt someone beeping my nose. "You, little fluff bunny, are about to experience a flood."
That evening, I burned every single stick of incense I could find and hung the doors and windows to the trailer with purple pentacles.
It didn't matter. As I was going to sleep, the nimbus came once more with that maddening chuckle and I found myself singing:
Loki loves me, this I know
To Valhalla I won't go
I trip, I fall, my chest I clutch.
Could you NOT love me quite so much?
That lived in a quiet pond
It asked permission from its master
To visit the lands beyond
And its master allowed it to fly
So the wind swept the
whirlpool across the sky
And it had the idea to fly' o/`
-- "Whirlpool" performed by They Might Be Giants
When a chaos god comes calling, generally no one wants to answer the door. As a novice Neo-Pagan whose fluffy tail and ears were still firmly attached, I didn't think I would be any exception.
So much for that assumption. There's a pretty good reason why I wear black and red so often now and why close friends refer to me as Loki's Child.
The trouble began, believe it or not, with a black and white speckled mutt. I don't remember exactly where we got him, and maybe that's what he intends, but one afternoon in autumn of 1996 I found myself lying on the bed looking into a pair of unusually intense amber eyes and trying to think of a suitable name. I'd say a name and glance at the pup in expectation. He'd cock his head to one side, as though considering the matter, and then resume ignoring me. "Beauregard." Ear flick. "Roy?" Ear flick. "Lance?" Ear flick, tail thump. "Hmmm...." Perhaps his former owner named him something beginning with the letter 'L'. Out in Montrose County, we had a significant number of Spanish speakers. Many of them kept dogs like this one for baiting or to act as guard dogs in the junk yards and auto parts shops in which they worked. "Lobo? Is it Lobo?" The tail wagged twice, lethargically, and then his long pink tongue lolled out in a yawn. Not quite right. I'm running out of ideas here and I can't just call him 'dog' or 'pup' for the rest of his life. "Loki's lingam," I shouted, "just what the Hel is your name?"
Wagging frantically, the puppy propelled himself into my arms and knocked me over backwards onto the mattress. The look on his face, of near-human amusement, seemed to be saying, "What took you so long?"
"No. I'm sorry, that's not a proper name for you. Not in this household."
He regarded me with another of those near-human expressions...and promptly peed all over my foot. Loki he was and Loki he remained; the damned dog would never answer to any other name.
Loki became an experienced escape artist. The old trailer had a small yard fenced off with livestock wire from the orchard on one side and the alfalfa fields on the other. Let loose in this enclosure, he promptly leaped over the six foot high barrier and escaped its confines. Once free, he disappeared like a shot. I learned early that combing the neighborhood in a vehicle in search of the dog would do no good. It wasn't that you couldn't find Loki; he would hear the car coming and bound toward you, tongue hanging out of a white toothed grin, and then jump through the passenger side window into the front seat. Evidently the dog learned to associate running away with getting a ride in the car. He seemed to consider that ride his just reward and the frequency of his escapes increased accordingly.
On payday, when I drove down into town to secure the month's provisions, I stopped in at the co-op and bought one of those dog leads of plastic coated wire which you fasten in place with a spike driven into the ground. The man who sold it to me assured me that the apparatus would handle a rambunctious seventy pound lab mix. Just to be certain, I purchased one which supposedly would restrain dogs weighing up to one hundred and eighty pounds.
Loki pulled that spike right out of the ground and then ran off with the whole shebang trailing after him.
I borrowed a thick length of logging chain from a neighbor, wrapped it around a heavy cottonwood stump, and then staked one end into the wood with a railroad spike. Reasoning that he couldn't possibly manage to do any damage to this set-up, I fastened the other end of the chain to the dog.
He somehow managed to snap the chain.
In a fit of pique, I fitted him with one of the electrical tags I normally used on the cattle and spent the entire day running hot wire around the top of the yard fencing. I couldn't help grinning in satisfaction the first time I heard a pained yelp and found him outside, glaring at me reproachfully, on his back in the mud. "Take that, you sneaky bastard."
I really ought to have known better than to taunt that particular god.
The hot fence became the bane of my existence. It had a tendency to sag for some reason where it paralleled the clothes line. Every time I bent over to get clothes from the basket and hang them, a breeze came up and the wire would brush across my backside like a demented lover's caress. The current isn't enough to be detrimental to animal or human, but it sure does hurt. I'd stand there sizzling with electricity and indignation, hair frizzled and tits standing on end, while Loki gazed at me with that near-human smile. Out of the corner of my eye, I fancied I saw a faint nimbus and the silhouette of a young with fiery red hair overlapping that of the dog. Dismissing it as an aberration caused by the electrical discharge, I wobbled up the back stairs and poured myself a stiff one. I didn't see that...did I?
Loki continued his truancy routine. Smelling of hops, which we had never planted on the property, he always returned from the direction of the north before sunset. I saw that peculiar halo effect at least once more and caught out of the corner of my eye the same nude young man calmly fettering himself in the dog run. He stopped in the act of fastening the collar, and winked. Just as suddenly, the glow faded and there was only Loki standing patiently on his chain and waiting to be let in. I'd have dismissed it to the realm of a tired but overactive imagination had it not been for two perfect, narrow human footprints in the mud right where the dog now waited. Faintly, I heard a strong tenor tinged with laughter say, "You can run, little fluff bunny, but you can't hide. You're stuck with me."
"I'm not," I said defiantly to the empty air. "You are not a being of love and light. I command you to leave my presence."
The chuckle sounded a little less lighthearted, more sinister this time. "Cute, but wrong. Oh so terribly wrong. 'Where the water stinks, I break the dam'." I felt someone beeping my nose. "You, little fluff bunny, are about to experience a flood."
That evening, I burned every single stick of incense I could find and hung the doors and windows to the trailer with purple pentacles.
It didn't matter. As I was going to sleep, the nimbus came once more with that maddening chuckle and I found myself singing:
Loki loves me, this I know
To Valhalla I won't go
I trip, I fall, my chest I clutch.
Could you NOT love me quite so much?