Baba Marta

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It’s March!

 

 

Are you wearing red and white? I certainly hope so.

 

 

Otherwise, you’ll make Baba Marta angry.

 

 

Baba Marta is the Bulgarian spirit of the month of March. She is a mean old lady who’ll rain on you, and freeze you, if she doesn’t like you. February is her brother; he’s a drunkard, and lazy. He depends on Baba Marta so much that she made him give her some of her days (which is why he has twenty-eight, and she has thirty-one).

 

 

Here’s more information:

 

 

In folklore Baba Marta is presented as the wife or sister of Big Sechko (January) and Little Sechko (February). She is constantly unhappy with them; in different tales they drink her wine or do different mischiefs. She gets really angry and as a result the weather breaks.

 

One of the most popular tales tells us about an old lady, who took her goats out in the mountain. It was the end of March, the very last days of the month.  The old lady was counting on Baba Marta for blessing her with good weather – she is as ancient as I am, the old lady thought to herself, she will have mercy. Baba Marta did anything but. She got so mad, asked her brother April to land her a few days and got them. These days are what we call “borrowed days”.  Baba Marta set free all the blizzards and snowstorms and the old lady and her goats were frozen. They then became a pile of stones, from which healing water started running.

 

 

This version neglects to tell you that the old lady was frozen sitting down, and that the “healing water” was flowing from her crotch.

 

 

Happy March, everybody! And don’t forget to wear red and white. You do not want to piss off Baba Marta.

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I am Loki, the Troublemaker

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I have already posited that I am the earthly avatar of Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles.

 

 

Having gone this far into blasphemy, why should I stop there?

 

 

Maybe I am also Loki. You know: the trickster. The killer of Balder The fellow who caused Ragnarok.

 

 

Like him, I am perverse. I enjoy stirring up dissention and trouble. Even as a kid! I told my barber that my poor sister Susan, who had to drag me there and sit with me until I got my haircut, that she had “fat hams and a big butt.”

 

 

Now where did that come from? A flash of divine inspiration, obviously.

 

 

I love telling people the endings of books and movies, as I've documented before.

 

 

Sometimes – and this is really horrible – reading bad news makes me feel good. Go ahead, I think. Make it worse. Make it really nasty.

 

 

I dunno. Maybe this is positive, in some way, or some manifestation of some deep counterintuitive force in the universe, like antigravity, or dark energy.

 

 

Or maybe it means that entropy is working on the human level too, and that we're all anxious to work downward, back down into the mud, until we've burnt ourselves out completely.

 

 

Or maybe I'm just mentally ill.

 

 

At the end of “Das Rheingold,” one of the last things that Loge (Loki) sings – after having helped Wotan trick Alberich out of the Ring, which soon turns out not to be the smartest thing Wotan might have done – is:

 

 

Bedenken, will ich's;

Wer weiss, was ich thu'!

 

 

“I'll think about it – who knows what I'll do?”

 

 

I repeat those words to myself every day, gloatingly.

 

 

Who knows what I'll do?

 

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