Living in the Hospital

It’s a bonus post.

Papa refers to this house as the hospital—we are his patients. On occasion, I refer to myself as one of his beloved lunatics. It feels apropos, because we are lunatics (sometimes I think of us as precocious, if antisocial, children). He clearly loves us, given the amount of cleaning up after our hijinx he does.

If I didn’t know love is a divine current, I’d be filled with consternation. Ai, papa, the shit you put up with.

Journal note: I should not be fully trusted. I’m quite mad. Getting better, but quite mad. I’ve always enjoyed that I apparently look benign, even harmless, to people. I mostly am.

I started to realize I was giving up on appearing sane right about the time I had to get a goat head and ferment it for Guede. Nothing says crazy like driving home from a specialty butcher, cackling at yourself and talking to the whole, skinned goat head in the passenger seat about how you’re going to get into its skull with a hammer when you get home.

Getting a skull cracked with a hammer, without going through your countertop, is a challenge.

I needed to ferment the brain, you see. The butcher, when informed that I needed the skull whole, clearly made peace with his god before handing it over.

Goat heads are something of a theme with me. I made tchaka this summer and chased one of my roommates around, raw goat head in hand, waggling its tongue and flapping its jaw at her. Death is best faced with levity. The fact that she was yelling, running away, and gagging made it funnier.

I don’t have a mean streak, but I don’t like… avoidance. Come dance in the meat with me. Come face yourself.

Living in the hospital means many things, not all of which are funny. We are quite messy, as a group, and sometimes we can be hurtful or malicious. Many of us, myself sometimes included, run away when things get hard.

You’d think I know better, and I mostly do.

Today, sitting alone in this quiet house, I am reminded that we are patients of papa, but ultimately of the spirits. Whatever patience or impatience I might feel at the state of the house and the people in it, I possess them not. I won’t be laying in their coffin with them (to borrow a papa-ism), and their spiritual progress is between them, their spirits, and their doctor.

Someday, I will have my own lunatics to treat and won’t be able to hide behind that particular fig leaf. If I am eager to be sane, it is in the service of freedom, but I know the lunatics are coming.

I am trying to be sane enough to meet them where they are, as they need me to be. I am grateful to have this opportunity to practice.