Went to the bookstore today–James insisted I go get a book I hadn’t read a dozen times already, since I’ve been re-reading, as Xmas left us financially tapped for the nonce. He points out, quite rightly, that twenty bucks never bankrupted anybody, and it’s undoubtedly true that a Dean Koontz novel rarely gains anything with age, so off I went. (James takes better care of my mental health than I do.)

Picked “From the Beast to the Blonde” up at random off a table–I’ve read reference to it occasionally, usually in some of those Terri Windling dark fairy tale anthologies. While I can generally sink my teeth into a good analysis of fairy tales, I wasn’t quite sure what the tone of this was, so I flipped it open at random, in the age old fashion of bibliomancy, and let my eye fall on a passage. St. Augustine of Hippo supposedly converted to Christianity based on this technique, so I suppose I was running a risk there, but I rather doubt St. Augustine ran across anything like this chunk of an Inuit myth:

…she was so powerful that she could lift a kayak on the tips of three fingers. She could kill a seal merely by drumming on its head with her fists…Sometimes this Sermerssuaq would show off her clitoris. It was so big that the skin of a fox would not fully cover it. Aja, and she was the mother of nine children, too!

I rolled that mental image around my brain for a minute or two, glanced idily around me to see if anyone had seen my brain twitch inside my skull just then (I mean, it must have been obvious!) and then shrugged and took it up to the front. Some mental images are just so…graphic that you can’t argue with it.

Don’t anybody even THINK of asking me to paint that…