Raising Hell is a new perspective on family life. If Erma Bombeck and Ozzie Osbourne had a bastard child and added caffeine, it would look a lot like Raising Hell. Raising Hell looks like a typewriter and sounds like a lawnmower. Raising Hell is red meat at a vegetarian restaurant. It’s the dispeptic hippopotamus at the tea party. Raising Hell is about finding love and beauty in chaos and panic.

It’s about parenting. It’s about bad parenting and good parenting and the grey area between. It’s about our kids and your kids and our neighbor’s kids. It’s about sibling rivalry and gum wads under the kitchen table. It’s about video games and school concerts and temper tantrums. It’s about being parents or knowing parents or wanting to be parents or not wanting to be parents.

It’s for everyone. We can learn from each other or laugh at each other and swear we will never do these things with our own kids even though we know we will. We can ask questions and get answers and maybe not get any answers but still get a few laughs.

Finally, a parenting magazine for everyone – devoted parents and child-haters alike. My brainchild, like the shoe project, only, uh, different. Serious this time because parenting is a serious thing. Which isn’t to say that it can’t be funny. Featuring Michele, Melly and Pat, designed by Sheila, born from the sweating brow of kd. Go there now.

There was something I was trying to say with that last post but, eh. I’ll have to circle around it I guess. This morning Alpha and I are enjoying a few hours of leisure. We dropped the kids off at friends last night and they won’t be back for a few more minutes, noonish. Meaning we had a morning to ourselves, meaning sleeping in and then lying around staring at the ceiling, hungover. At least one of us, I’m not saying who.

I always found hangovers most bearable with ice-cold Pepsi and old Star Trek re-runs or Elvis movies on TV with the sound off, Pink Floyd on the stereo. Now we have children, and no TV, so I try to avoid hangovers. But leisure. This morning wasn’t bad, sitting around, talking, with nothing much to do.

Soon the world will come crashing back over our heads so we enjoy this quiet. Well, enjoy is maybe the wrong word for a person with a bad hangover, I’m not saying who…

Last night we got to be adults for a while. We were invited to a friend’s for dinner. She cooked Thai food and served much wine. I just had a beer because I was driving. There was another couple there as well. The guy was an outgoing smartass, a lot like the way I act here on this site. It was interesting to watch. In person I am quiet, so we got along, no territorial pissing contests or anything.

It’s interesting being the only sober person in a room full of drunks. At one point Alpha told an emotional story. I decided not to interrupt because it was, first of all, a very good story, and second, I think it’s fine to talk about serious things in social situations, rather than try to stick to polite, innocuous topics all the time. Then they all got into an argument about something, I’m not exactly sure what and neither were they. For a while I played referee, saying things like, “well, on the one hand I agree with you, but I can see what he’s trying to say as well, and she has a good point…” but ultimately I gave up and concentrated on keeping my eyes open. My eyes get small after 9 pm.

Then we drove home. It was a good night. We weren’t exactly the house guests from hell, although we did initiate drunken arguments and we were the last to leave. I would invite us again, if I were our hostess.

And now we’re enjoying a few more minutes of leisure.

Leisure as a noun and not an adjective. Leisure not as leisure-time, time off work when you can take care of your private things, run errands and take busy vacations. Leisure as time empty of plans, goals and duties. The German word is “Musse” and believe it or not it’s less obsolete than the English expression, at least here in Austria. The freedom of bums and artists, or philosophers and mystics. Leisure as empty space filled by an expanding soul. Not the crushing depressive empty time of unemployment or boredom. A lightness, a mysterious space of discovery and experience and existence beyond language where life comes to you and stretches out at your feet.

Yesterday, I was emailing back and forth with a friend who couldn’t IM from work and I got all nostalgic about the old pre-IM days when e-mail was cutting edge.

It finally dawned on my that I didn’t have my own shoes at the Feral Living Shoe Project. I just went and fixed that. They are here.

Good description of kd here.
[Go there now.]