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Welcome to the Weird Issue
by Oren Pierce, Guest Editor

I was born in the bathtub in which my poor mother also did the wash, as were my ten or twelve brothers and sisters that lived. The home shack was on the edge of the Camp Drum military reservation and had two bedrooms, but one was strictly for my dear mother’s soldier appointments, so when each of the resulting children became old enough to toddle, the child was moved to the chicken house out back. We raised each other there and took care of the chickens too. Did a pretty good job of it I think; went to school looking clean enough, brought home books, and read to each other. Don’t ever think that our mother was not a saint of a woman, because she was.

But I strongly suspect that the reason I have been tapped to write the guest editorial is because I am being cast as weird. I was not given the honor so that I could select the authors and articles. I am told that the weirdness theme is not meant to imply that the subjects or the authors themselves are to be weird. It is just supposed to be an everyday back of the mind thing …but both the man and the story in the case of Davy Weathercock here seem over-the-top weird to ME.

Weathercock (I feel) has presented us not with just an honest meditation on the uncanny nature of everyday life that an unsensational treatment of the theme requires, nor is it either fact or fiction, but just plain fake news.
Not wanting to be too negative, I won’t get any further into that. Read and judge for yourself.

Just about everything else in this issue is fine with me and I recommend the writings to you without further doo doo.

But as guest editor, it is my responsibility and my opportunity to tell you about the NEXT issue of the Metaphysical Times: the FOOD issue, in which I myself will have a featured story; but I will not be the guest editor then, so then I won’t be able to introduce my own story in it, which is a relevant chapter from the Nowella and Threadbear saga. It’s about condiments and you are going to love it.

If I HAD been asked to contribute an article of some sort here for the Weird issue, I would have written about my brother Armer. Most people know about my other brother, who grew up mostly in David S. Warren’s family, after wandering away from our place and into that household where he was given the name, William Bonaparte Warren, William was born with abnormally short legs on a (mostly) otherwise normal sized body, and there is a weird story right there, but I am speaking now of my brother Armor. My family was not exactly a nest of freaks, but there were a lot of us kids, freaks happen and my brother Armer was way stranger than William.

Both of them were made quiet and clever by their own oddness.

At school, at home, and otherwise, Armer came to be called Armor, Armoire, Ermine and a subset of derogatory nick- names: Worm head, Dick Head, Pig’s Ass, and so on, all on account of he was born with a fleshy extension from the area of his baby-head soft spot: a coil of tapered, twitchy, nervous tissue, which - despite the socks, stockings, and stocking caps he wore on his head - all the local kids knew about.

To go where nobody knew his head, Armer wandered away early and we didn’t hear about him for many years, and assumed he had died.

I did finally hear from him: got letter ten or twelve years ago. A long one. No room for it here, but I will just tell you that he was and probably still is out in Utah, happily married to a woman he encountered in a dollar store. He had complemented her on her hair style, which was like a particularly beautiful sea shell, not entirely unlike, what was under his hat.
As I said, I have no room for that story here, and Armer never sent any photos of the happy pair, but it should suffice to say that they really hit it off and the story is a heart-warmer. But for now I have tried to picture the happy couple by using two odd eggs produced recently by the Dog’s Plot chicken family.

 

Anyway, please enjoy this Weird issue, and be on the lookout in three months or six, for the next Issue of Metaphysical Times, which will be on the theme of food. I won’t be guest editor for that issue, and for that reason I won’t be able then to give any introduction then, so for now I will just remind you to read my own story set to appear in that issue.

By the way, be sure to check at the Inns of Aurora events site to see when, where, and If my Zen of Badminton and or my Tobacco as a Sacred Herb classes are listed for later this year or the next.
Wsh had mr sp ce, bt no,
Yrs Trly
Or.Prc.
MSG, LSMFT


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from
Metaphysical Times
Volume VIII Number 1
Winter (February) 2013



 

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