The Great Margery Kempe

Well. I have been on a long journey across a great plain, and now I am in Chicago, and I adopted a little cat from the Animal Shelter, and her name is Margery Kempe.

Margery Kempe was this medieval English travelling mystic broad (she lived 1374 to 14-something) who expressed her devotion to the Lord by going on these huge crying jags whenever she thought about the Passion of Christ, or whenever the minister referred to it in his sermon, and she would fall on the ground and twist back and forth and weep and roar, 'I die, I die," and people were like, "Gurl, you CRAZY!" and they banned her from certain towns but she kept travelling anyways, and she made scenes and wreaked havoc all over England and the Continent and even the Holy Land (her travel companions kind of hated her, becuse she was always making scenes when they went on tourist visits to, like, the Mount of Olives, because it brought the Passion to her mind).

So anyways, she got a scribe to write about her experiences in The Book of Margery Kempe, which is one of the defining works of 15th-century English literature, and it is a great work. I read it in the spring for a class, and I loved it so much that I wrote a lot of papers on it.

And so my cat is named Margery Kempe in honour of her. I thought about a lot of names, like Bathsheba, and Beatrice, others, but finally I called out, "Margery! Margery!" from my bed to see what would happen, and the cat came running and leapt up onto my bed next to me, and then she was properly named. So now we live in my apartment together, and we peer down upon the world from our window like queens.

After buying wine the other day, I took the empty paper wine bag and put it over my hand like a puppet and made it say, "Margery! Margery!" in a raspy old-person voice, but she looked at me in horror, and was not entertained.

Only 5 people have seen my most recent tattoo (all were broads), and 3 of them were named Jen. And I did not even plan that.

Haa, some telemarketer from the New York Times just called and addressed me as Mrs. Steele, and as soon as he paused I shrieked, "Mrs. STEEEEELE?" and it caught him off-guard.

Tonight Margery and I listened to Black Sabbath and made broccoli while also smoking, and it was a great endeavour.

That is all.