Essential Eccentricity

After a somewhat brief and very limited immersion in consensus reality, I have decided to get back to subverting the dominant paradigm.  By, "limited," I mean that I got a toe wet, didn't even go knee-deep in pop culture.  I didn't start watching TV, going to first-run movies, or renting videos, for example.  My only two magazine subscriptions are still Archaeology and Smithsonian.  I don't tweet -- don't even own a wireless device. 

My radio stays tuned to NPR, so I get exposed to a bit of pop culture that way.  Facebook, when I signed on a few months ago, brought me closer to the mainstream.  My first FB friends were old friends from Xanga.  Some of their FB friends became my friends.  One indication of how far I've moved into that sidechannel of the mainstream is that I no longer put quotes around, "friends," in that context.

I got swept along with these people into the culture of Facebook.  It's similar in a way to my initial enculturation as a child:  I accepted and absorbed what came at me from my environment.  Even so, I maintained some discrimination.  I learned how to hide some people's posts from my newsfeed, and how to hide or block apps.  But all that was reactive, and I didn't really start to take back control of my mind until I got proactive in seeking out new facebook friends.

I can't claim much personal credit for having initiated this.  To start with, I was guided by Spirit.  That unmistakable Voice in my head suggested that I reach out for a different kind of input.  I started searching for names of people with whom I have had enlightening or uplifting contact in the past:  people like Dick Sutphen, Antero Alli, EJ Gold, Claude Needham, and some New Age authors and practitioners that I respect.

I told Greyfox about my encouraging early results and with his concurrence I searched out for him some of the people from the Pagan community with whom he had been associated while he published The Shaman Papers and lived close enough to attend Pagan gatherings.  In this way, each of us acquired a set of Facebook friends more in keeping with our ideas and our intentions for ourselves.  There has been crossover and overlap between our circles of friends.  I spend probably more time with his friends than he does, since he's still only getting an hour or two on library computers a few times a week, but the change has affected us both.

Every day since I made that move, my Facebook newsfeed has brought me more and more enlightening and uplifting contact with like minds.  I did not drop any of the other friends.  I think it is healthy to be exposed to a variety of views, to get some reality testing from comparing and contrasting them.  There is also the chance that I can serve to do some cross-pollenation of ideas among friends and friends of friends.

Fittingly, this change in my mind and life coincides with a retrograde station of Uranus, which is stationary retrograde in my birth chart.  The station of Uranus at the beginning of this month occurred opposite my natal conjunction of Sun and Chiron, so some spiritual healing and radical change is in order for me.  The current astrological intensity, with Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus and Pluto all retrograde now, and a Full Moon/Lunar Eclipse coming up tomorrow, has me on an incredible high of connecting with other minds, working together in alternate realities, and pulling energy into the mundane world.

Can you tell I'm digging it?  Yes, I am.  I'm also looking forward to spending time with my beloved soulmate, lawful spouse, and partner in crime, the Old Fart (AKA "Greyfox") in Wasilla tomorrow.  It's time for the trip:  our fridge is empty and his space is filling up with things he has been picking up for us.  I didn't plan for the trip to coincide with one of the biggest astrological events of recent days.  It just happened that way, the way so many of the most interesting parts of my life do happen.

The kings are in!  It's salmon season in our neighborhood.  The local general store is one of the weigh-in stations for a salmon derby.  We stopped in there today before going to get water, so that we wouldn't be hauling a load of full jugs and buckets all the way down to the store and back.  The odor of less-than-fresh fish hung over the parking lot.  Inside, on the counter, were laid out half a dozen or so photos of proud anglers holding up their fish.

One was beautiful, silvery and not very big, good eating size.  The rest were huge spawned-out red things, hardly fit to eat but impressive trophy fish anyway.  I had the camera with me and thought a picture of the collection of photos would be suitable to illustrate this blog entry.  I was setting up the shot when Dennis, the owner of the store, stopped me.  He said some of those people wouldn't want their pictures on the internet.  He pointed out one photo of just a fish, and said that fisherman wouldn't even allow them to photograph him.  Since the guy's name was in the margin of the photo, Dennis wouldn't even let me take a picture of the fish picture.

Back at the spring, before I started filling jugs, I captured a few images of the surroundings.  The first three are the little stream that runs off from the spring, down into the muskeg, toward Sheep Creek.  (As usual, click to enlarge, especially the ripples in the third one down.)


Next is a patch of clover, and then a fireweed flower spike.  Click the fireweed for an explanatory caption about how we know when summer begins and ends around here.

After we filled our water containers and loaded them in the hatch, I turned the key to start the car and nothing happened.  I popped the hood and tried magic first:  Blur (successor to another old silver Subaru station wagon named Streak) likes having his fluids topped up.  There have been times he wouldn't start and no amount of wire wiggling and other fiddling would do it, until I topped up his oil and coolant.  This time, that didn't do it, nor did the wire wiggling, so I got serious.

Doug moved water jugs out of the way so he could get my tools out so I could remove the battery cables and clean the terminals.  It was after I'd loosened the bolt and asked him to dig my knife out of my purse, so I could scrape the terminal and inside the clamp clean, that we discovered I'd set my purse down during the abortive photography at the store, and left it there.

I improvised with the jaw of an open-end wrench, removed enough corrosion that the electrons were free to flow, and the car started.  Back at the store, Becky, Dennis's wife, had seen my purse on the counter where I left it beside the fish photos, and stuck it behind the counter for me.  Geez-- if I'd not left my keys in the car, I'd not have been able to drive off without the purse.  Must remember that.

Thanks to a double layer of insulated mylar bags inside a cooler, the ice cream we'd bought during our first trip to the store was still frozen when we got home.

When I woke today, my body didn't respond to the usual mental command to move.  That's a little unusual, but not so unusual that it's alarming any more.  I know that if I concentrate on individual muscles, and really work at it, I can move, then once I get started things begin to work more normally after a while.  After I started stirring around on the bed, working up the strength and coordination to sit up and find my glasses, I spoke to my son, Doug, and asked him to start a pot of coffee.

First thing he did was reach for a remote and start the CD that he had cued up ready to play.  As soon as I heard the opening of "Summer" from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, played by David Garrett, I realized why Doug had been going to the mailbox every day this week.   He had been anticipating a shipment from Amazon.  We had heard David Garrett interviewed on NPR a while ago, and listened to some clips from his music.  Both of us liked it, and apparently Doug decided to buy it.  Of course, while he was at it, he ordered an expansion pack for one of his favorite games, too.

The morning paralysis was just the beginning of a day that has turned out to be one of the biggest M.E. flareups in recent months.  One body part or another has been either malfunctioning or hurting or numb or tingling all day.  The best thing I can say about all of that is that it has been affecting mostly my skeletal muscles this day, and not my eyes or my breathing.  I'm thankful for that.

Other than the annoying physical symptoms, it has been a wonderful day.  One small joy was finding another reasonably amusing and watchable movie in the box of 50 Drive-In Movie Classics that I recently borrowed from Greyfox.  I have watched a couple of stinkers, and have viewed the first ten to thirty minutes of a number of films I just didn't want to sit through in their entirety.  This one today was originally titled The Polk County Pot Plane, changed to "In Hot Pursuit."  With an unknown cast and production company that's not been heard of since, full of chase scenes, corny country humor and both accidental and murderous death, I still found it watchable if not especially praiseworthy.  In that collection, just watchable is high praise.

I have listened to the David Garrett CD at least half a dozen times and won't tire of it for a long time to come.  That's one of the bigger joys of the day.  I also got a first look at some of the concept art from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.  This alone is worth the price of admission to this mixed up mess of a day for me.


Another pleasure throughout my day has been an occasional nibble broken off my super special homemade chocolate bar.  It's truly ugly, but tastes so good!  I used the cheapest chocolate I could find, Baker's Unsweetened, melted it in the microwave, stirred it up with a little bit of goat milk, an even littler bit of butter, maybe 20 or more packets of Splenda and some pure vanilla extract, and ended up with over half a pound of guilt-free chocolate.  Doug agrees that it is both ugly and tasty.  Unfortunately, the bite he tried contained some bitter chocolate that hadn't gotten thoroughly mixed with the sweetener and stuff.  I need to perfect the recipe now that I know it works, and need to come up with a better prep method.  One moment, please, while I go break off another chunk....

Mmmmm... all in all, on balance, it has been a great day.  Life is good.