Sunday, September 18, 2011

Changes at The View & Mary Dowser Reports




The awesomely fragrant Mary Dowser.






Stories are important, stronger than truth!
                                                                                                   Friar Tuck



TVFP will be undergoing some changes. We are feeling a bit stagnated and in need of a cliche to explain everything. A change is as good as a rest! What does not change is change itself. You can lead a leopard to water but you can't change its spots. Hmm, I might have got that one wrong. Nevertheless, a change is in the air.

The Blog author (aka Ourself) is acknowledging the need to concentrate more fully on literary projects, including a new novel and marketing our short stories on-line. We will continue to contribute to the Blog, just not on a weekly basis. Fortunately the awesomely fragrant Mary Dowser (Ted's Kitchen, June 19 and Ernesto Guevara's vacation from Hell, August 7) has agreed to send periodic updates on her adventures.


Assistant Commander Steve

As well Assistant Commander Steve of the Parkdale Liberation Front has offered
to help with the occasional Post.

We will also see, we hope, various guest contributors. (As an aside we are currently in negotiations with, amongst others, Charles, the Toronto Zoo's Silverback gorilla, who we hope will host a series interviews to be entitled, City Hall, the Inside Poop!)

To date this Post, during its brief life, has received over a thousand page views. Thank you and thank you and you and you! It sure helps to know that we are not speaking to the abyss.


Mary Dowser writes:

      The Yucatan is a place I would choose to live were it not for the many complications in my life. Hugh Firmin once said to me that in the West we are addicted to Happiness while in the East it is Opium. Both are doomed to end in sadness. Of course he was speaking in and of a different time. Hugh was guilt ridden over his failure to answer the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. He was, poor man, in love the Consul's ex-wife Yvonne. Perhaps that is what drew us together, the shared sadness of unrequited love. I shall never know. He has faded from me now, as I knew he would.
      Merida is a busy city of almost a million souls. The Spanish here is uniquely accented and Mayan influences are abundantly in evidence. The climate is serene, although one is liable to get blown away by a hurricane or swamped by a tidal wave. Still, for now, it suits my restless spirit, to sojourn here, to stay for awhile. The Santa Anna is wonderful and there I buy whatever I need to sustain myself.
     I rise early, with the sun and bathe while my coffee steeps. There are birds in my small patio and I must learn their names. I wonder if they are like me restless and yet resting here awhile. What shall I write, I say to myself? I shall write what I shall write whether it be trite or bright or simply nothing at all. Perhaps there might be some small pearl of wisdom or some anecdote of interest. If so all the better for I fear that the worst sin of the writer is to be found boring.
      My purpose in stopping here is to learn Spanish. Hugh suggested it. My plan is eventually to continue on to Chiapas. I have written the EZLN, that is the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, to offer my extraordinary word processing skills to the revolution. I desperately await a favourable response. In the meantime I occupy myself with my Memoir (Notes from the Quick Fingers of a Championship Typist) in the morning, my Spanish lessons in the afternoon. I shop daily in the Santa Anna.
     In the evening a certain man by the name of Don Juan Matus sometimes comes to call and if he does not a bouquet of flowers appears at my door. On those nights a jaguar haunts the borders of my dream land. It is black as the deepest night and in its eyes I see all the suffering of the world.

MD

Pic of Mary Dowser by TVFP
Pic of Assistant Commander Stever by TVFP