Beyond 2012

The link above leads to probably more about the Eschaton than anyone ever wanted to know.

While casting about for another interesting topic for a “bump” blog, I remembered that I have been asked on more than one occasion to tell more about the Timewave.

That led me to a web search, and that produced the general compendium above and many more specific references.  These are my favorites:

magicalblend.com/readingroom/1

magicalblend.com/readingroom/2

I also found a catalog of Terence McKenna’s works.

Enjoy!  I’m off to write down some more memories of Stony.

Historian Stephen Ambrose, author of ‘Band of Brothers,’ dies at 66 of cancer

Feminism moves forward into the twentieth century.

This just in: skunks stink.

I’ve been so generous with my photos lately that my site loads way too slow.

I could just bump–bump–bump them off the page with empty posts, but where’s the fun in that?

I’m working on another chapter of the memoirs today, while the meds-and-detox thing simmers on the back burner.   By the time I’m ready to post it, it should load relatively fast.

I can actually hear the sounds of Doug rattling dishes.  The washing hasn’t started yet.  That’s going to require a few reminders from me to keep him on task.  S.O.P. for A.D.D.

We’re back… did the water run.  The sunshine I caught around sunrise this morning was gone as soon as the sun rose above the layer of clouds.  Now it is raining again.

Before going to the spring, we went to our old place across the highway, to check on the food and water supplies for the feral cats over there.

I don’t enjoy going “home” so much anymore, now that the gardens are gone to weeds and the buildings are falling to ruins.  But I wandered around with the camera and got this pic of the dew still on this baby spruce tree.  The fire hydrant is a joke, a piece of junk from the dump, set up to mark our driveway, at least fifty miles from the nearest water main.

The only green I found besides the blue-green spruce trees, was the yellow-green moss.  These LBMs (little brown mushrooms) coming up in a patch of moss, couldn’t have been here when the frost and snow hit last week.  They are such ephemeral, fragile little things, a stiff breeze can knock their caps off.

Here stands Doug, beside the Scotch pine he planted when he was just a small boy and it was a wee seedling. 

The state department of forestry gives away seedlings of exotic trees that are adaptable to our climate, each year in their cabin at the state fair. 

I’ve planted dozens of Siberian larch and other things, and this one tree Doug planted is the last survivor.

When we checked on it right after the snow went away this year, it was only up to his shoulders.

On to the spring, with Koji.

Mark, the owner of this place we are housesitting, had a watch dog and recommended we get one too.  When Mark was away, Leroy was usually on his chain out in front, to keep intruders away.

Koji misses his pack members so much when we are away, even when only one or two of us are gone, that he would probably go off with any intruders who came around while he was here alone.

Besides, it’s fun having him along, and he can really use some training and experience at riding in cars and behaving in social settings.

So, evidently, could my kid.

He was dutifully trudging up and down the trail with the water buckets, and gazing off into space as they filled.  I watched and hoped for a pleasant shot of him at work, but it wasn’t in the cards.

That he would be rather sober of visage and plodding as he works is quite natural, considering that his parents both share those traits.  Work is what we do when we must, with as little fuss as possible.

As he set down the last two full jugs by the rear bumper, I asked him, “Do you know how to smile?”  The tongue above was his initial response.

Then came the expression at right, followed by a brief discussion of the difference between smiles and sneers and leers and grins and grimaces.

Now we have water, and he has no excuse not to do dishes, but all that means is that he’ll have to be openly defiant and uncooperative, without an excuse.  Since he has gone right back to his absorbtion in the new game, after about 24 hours without sleep, I see little chance of his willingly setting it aside for kitchen chores. 

We shall see.  I’ll keep you informed.

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood….

I took this shot just a few  minutes ago, as the sun was rising.

The weather guessers gave Greyfox about a six-hour window of acceptable temps and wind speed today.  While I was out there in my robe and slippers taking the pic, he was taking the tarp off Lassie and unplugging her engine heater.  Now, he is gone to Talkeetna for a day of business, he hopes.

Doug was up all night playing his new PS2 game, Kingdom Hearts.  He has already been informed that I want him to save his game as soon as he can, so we can go to the spring for water.  If we don’t get water today, he’ll just use that as an excuse not to wash dishes tonight when he’s awake again.  Pretty good excuse, I guess.

Now I must go get dressed, so he’ll know I’m serious about this water run.  Seeya later.

I did nothing at all today toward getting my meds together.  The flats of bottles are still where I stowed them behind my bed last night.  I can explain that.  (Pardon me, that last is a bit of an in-joke.)

I could be defensive and say it was Greyfox’s birthday and I joined him in an all-day video fest instead of “working”.  I’m not saying that because it isn’t true.  He’s in his chair at the foot of my bed watching movies, and I could be on the bed putting pills into little bottles, right behind him.

I spent my day on the other side of the room, at the PS2, playing Ehrgeiz, on quest mode, a no-brainer with a minimum of finger work.  I zoned out and procrastinated, willfully with premeditation.  Such behavior might go unremarked in a different household.  Not here; we are not just addicts around here, we are professional addicts.  I worked with street people at a free clinic, many of whom were addicts. 

I studied addiction, as did Greyfox who had a career at the policy-making level in state government, in drug and alcohol programs.  He started his own chapter of SOS, Secular Organizations for Sobriety… but of course he was drunk at the time.  If anyone knows addictive behavior, we do.  What I see when I look at myself right now is a woman dragging her feet on the way to detox.

Not until that birthday cake and ice cream are gone and the family is back from this little holiday and into our more ordinary pursuits, am I going to try again to get serious about this new health kick.  If I were to doubt my seriousness (and I do question my motives all the time; if I don’t, who will… they’re all scared of me and in awe of my brilliance and powers of persuasion), I can be reassured by the fact that this is the first time I’ve announced an impending detox.  I usually spring them on my buds as a fait accompli.  I’m making commitments and setting up expectations here.

Meanwhile, today a very odd phenomenon has been distracting me.  That’s another thing I could use if I wanted to tap dance with weasel words and rationalize today’s lapse.  But it’s unrelated, so I only relate it as an oddity.  It’s this weird smell-thing, like perfume, all day.  My first flash was that it’s an olfactory hallucination.  I get them about as often as I actually perceive real smells.  Anosmia:  dysfunctional nose.  But when it works my sense of smell is keen. 

What I smelled early today was a scent that could be a masculine cologne, mostly ambergris and citrus.  Later in the day, I got a heavy scent of rotting gardenias.  I got the impression after a while that someone was trying to communicate with me through scent.  Nutty thought but each different scent really did carry some complex impressions.  I’m seeing two people.  Intend to explore this more tonight.

Thanks for hanging around as I spill my guts and a few brain farts, guys.  Now to make this therapy group work, you need to give me feedback that supports my detox and healing, not my procrastinating and indulgence.  Wanna play group therapy with me?

A pair of news stories caught my eye today.  The latter one is readily available on national news services, but this first one may not come to your notice if you aren’t in Alaska:

Villagers call alert when coveted fruit vanishes.

“It was unlike anything the village of Emmonak had ever experienced: All over town salmon berries, blackberries and blueberries were disappearing from freezers.”

I suggest you follow the link and get the rest of the story.  It’s a doozy.

Zookeepers suspended for eating animals.

When I read the headline above, my first thought was that they shouldn’t have been suspended; they should have been fed to the lions.

With a little thought, after reading the article, I want more details.  Were these guys poor and hungry?  Is Germany having hard times?  Or were they just sleazy creeps looking for a free meal?  I’ll be checking this out, you can be sure.

Got my ducks in a row, almost….

Yesterday, off and on, I worked on getting my 150 little bottles organized for the five-a-day doses of supplements and neurotransmitter precursors.  Toward bedtime, I heaved a big sigh of relief and told Greyfox that I was almost ready to start portioning out the pills.  Instead of an atta girl for my efforts, he expressed his surprise that, after two days of work I was “almost ready to start.”  Oh well, it was his honest response, and I do value that.

Today, if nothing goes terribly wrong, I’ll get at least the 90 little bottles of “empty stomach” dosages filled.  Last night I sorted the “with a meal” meds from the others, calculated dosages, and put away all the surplus, to minimize confusion today.

I got an unexpected number of great comments on yesterday’s addiction and pill blog.  I can see that I need to clarify a few things.

My concern about losing readers had nothing to do with any fear that people might judge me as a pizza addict.  I was more concerned that the tale of my illness and pills and all would be terminally boring.

I also need to clarify one big issue regarding my diet.  I’m not doing any of this to lose weight, although I understand that is the first thought that usually comes to mind at the word, “diet”.  Being slender was a big issue for me in my youth, and I did myself a lot of harm in that pursuit.

I had no idea, back in my teens and twenties, that dieting and fasting could put my body into “famine mode” and cause it to store all the fat it could whenever I ate anything, just in case of another famine.  Consequently, my physiology is permanently set on “famine”, storing every calorie it can spare, contributing to my chronic fatigue by stowing away a lot of energy I could use in the present moment.

Another area of ignorance that did me a lot of damage was the mistaken (but widespread) belief that dietary fat:  grease and oil, were the main culprits in fat deposition.  In fact, it is much easier for the body to turn carbohydrates into fat, than to convert dietary fat into body fat.  I ate a lot of “lo-fat” stuff that substituted sugar for oil, contributing to my obesity and my hypoglycemia and sugar addiction.

Three years ago when a severe illness rendered me virtually immobile for almost a year, it did nothing to reduce my appetite.  Eating the same and exercising a lot less led to a sudden gain in weight, but that wasn’t my main concern.  My main reason for dieting, since the mid-seventies, has not been to lose weight but to gain energy and better health.  There simply came a point back then when my function became more important to me than my form.

Those two golden months leading up to 9-11-2001 (yeah, I blew the diet in the wake of the stress of the shamanic healing work I did in the emergency) when I was eating frequently to keep my blood sugar stable, and was avoiding all my addictive foods, I actually gained two pounds.  It didn’t worry me at the time, because I knew that if the diet worked to restore my stamina and energy, I’d be able to dance the pounds off.

I love working out.  Shortly before my health crisis in the fall of ’99, I had added some Tae Bo videos to my workout collection.  I look forward to being able to kick and punch and jump and dance again, but for now even my old Jane Fonda Easy Going Workout is too much for me.

Kabuki generously provided a helpful mental image in her comment, of a “slug trying to have sex with a cat turd.”  I’m placing that slug and his beloved feline fecal matter right in the middle of the imaginary shit pizza I’ve concocted to arouse an aversion to my most dangerous addiction.  Thanks, sweetheart, that was priceless.  I really needed the laugh, too.

Greyfox‘s birthday cake just came out of the oven.  He heard the timer sound and finally got out of bed.  Now, he’s on his way to the little general store down the road, to buy some birthday ice cream.  The cake isn’t going to be anything elaborate, just a box mix German chocolate, single layer, with canned coconut pecan frosting.  It was his choice, and I applaud it.  If I’d done something special, such as a 3-layer spice cake with butter cream roses and all, as was once my habit on special occasions, then I’d have had a much harder time resisting, and there would have been more layers to feast on.  It’s better this way, better that the cake isn’t a better one.

I’m not going to torture myself by abstaining totally from the cake and ice cream.  They might actually help me get through that job of taking the pills from the big bottles and distributing them among all the little bottles.  When that job is all done, and I’ve had a night’s sleep, then I’ll start my new diet, with the support of those neurotransmitter precursors to help eliminate the cravings that sabotaged my efforts before.

If this works, you’ll hear from me about it.  Everyone is going to hear from me if this works, because during those two months I white-knuckled it on the diet last year, I took the matter of the cravings to several egroups and other forums, looking for solutions to these cravings that were making my life tense and unproductive.  Nobody had any helpful advice, and I was clueless before I found the book, End Your Addiction Now, by Dr. Gant.  I’ll be talking it up if it works.

Weather report:  Yesterday the morning snow turned to rain.  The rain has continued all day and all night.  It is still raining.  I hope I didn’t give anyone the impression I don’t like snow.  It’s Greyfox and Doug that don’t like snow.  I love it as long as it stays in its place.  I’m going to blog about that sometime.  Meanwhile, I’m watching the smoke from the woodstove drift down over my window and across the yard, where it is being beaten to the ground by the steady drizzle. 

Quiz Diva’s latest:

I’ll be damned. You ARE bisexual AFTER all!

You sees “31 Flavors” as the ideal place to work.
You can get unequivocally turned on by eating Cheese ‘n Crackers -
taking the little sticks from the wrapper and sliding them into the cheese.
You are definitely a sexual glutton, taking as much as you can

Are *You* Bisexual? Click Here to Find Out!
More Great Quizzes from Quiz Diva

Yesterday, I got out the pill bottles.  That’s how far I got with the job.  This task keeps getting more complicated and time-consuming.  For over twenty years I have been doing a month’s worth of meds this way, portioning them out into film canisters and prescription vials so I get what I need after every meal. 

Then I started taking neurotransmitter precursors (“smart drugs”, brain food, cognitive enhancers) which had to be taken on an empty stomach.  At first that only added one dose a day, as I cut the “after meals” doses back to two a day and added two “empty stomach” doses.  I began color-coding the packages so I’d get the right nutrients at the right times of day.  This started over ten years ago, and the best evidence I have for the efficacy of the meds is the way my condition deteriorates in a downward spiral if I neglect or “forget” to take my meds for a while.  Any little crisis or break in my routine has the potential to turn into an extended slump for me.  That I hate taking pills is just one of the complicating factors.

Over the course of decades, I’ve learned a lot about my own peculiar allergies and sensitivities, and about those common to my blood type.  I’ve also learned a lot about the specific medical conditions I have and the relationship of dietary deficiencies and toxins to them.  I worked out a strict diet that, when I could manage to stay on it, made me feel better physically, but left me with strong cravings for the forbidden foods.  Part of the problem was that when I kicked some drug addictions, I replaced the drugs with food addictions.

Now I’m trying something new, some neurotransmitter precursors that are supposed to alleviate the addictive cravings that turn all my attempts to eat healthily into brief, white-knuckle times when I obsess on food and get no creative work done.  The plan comes from a book:  End Your Addiction Now by Charles Gant, M.D., Ph.D.

My food addictions are what I wrote about in my first Xanga blog.  These addictions, to sugar, casein, gluten, caffeine, etc., were what I was obsessing on when I had the dream in which an old wise woman came to me and told me I needed to keep a journal.  I had already determined that getting those substances out of my diet relieved some of my symptoms, and gave me more physical energy.  The problem was that I craved them all the time and the effort I needed to put into eating right left no attention or consciousness to spare for any creativity.  The two months I stayed on the strict diet was a miserable time of complete creative block, even though the physical improvements were undeniable.

I caved.  When I went off the diet, I went farther than I had for many years.  I allowed myself indulgences I had “kicked” decades earlier.  I had a burst of creative energy, until the indulgences caught up with me, my breathing once again became difficult, the sleep disturbances came back and the chronic fatigue syndrome worsened to its greatest extent ever.  And this is where I sit now.

At this moment, pizza has no appeal for me.  When I went off the healthy diet after two months, a bit over a year ago, my mind was endlessly repeating a jingle, “pizza, pizza, gotta have a pizza.”  I had been questioning whether life without pizza was worth living.  I had conveniently forgotten that this crap doesn’t kill me, it just renders me helpless, useless, and immobile. 

I think the lunch buffet experience on the recent town trip was part of what I needed:  bad pizza.  Pizza is my most dangerous temptation.  It contains all of my worst addictive food substances (casein, gluten, sugar), plus tomatoes and peppers, both members of the nightshade family, toxic to anyone with my blood type (A).  Any aversion therapy I can devise is bound to be helpful.  I’m helping the buffet disappointment along by visualizing shit pizza, turds with diarrhea sauce.

I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.  No twelve-step dogma is going to help me.  Been there, done that.  There are traps waiting for me in just about any therapeutic modality I choose.  It is far too easy to slip from loving and nurturing myself into pleasing and indulging my perverted appetites.  Fighting the addictions leaves me at war with myself.  That won’t do. I must just let it go.

My son tries to help.  When he sees me go for candy, he reminds me I’m not supposed to eat that.  But he doesn’t know all my dietary bugaboos, and it’s not his job to know.  It’s not his or Greyfox’s responsibility, either, to deny themselves the things most tempting to me, just so I can keep temptation out of my reach.  I have to learn to pick only those things I can tolerate off the pantry shelves, and to refuse the tempting little gifts of candy and pastry Greyfox brings me to encourage my indulgences so that he can justify his own.

I know how complex and challenging a task this is.  It makes kicking amphetamines or barbiturates seem effortless by comparison.  I also know that I’m in this alone.  Those nearest to me lack both the skill and the motivation to help me.   Those at a distance who care about me and/or realize the magnitude of my task, can offer only words of support.  The Great Spirit has already given me all the wisdom, love, hope, insight and such that I can absorb.  The rest is up to me.

My bed is my workspace.  There is no other horizontal surface in this house big enough to set out the little bottles, sort them by type and color coding, select the appropriate things to fill them and do all the uncapping, collating of pills and recapping of bottles.  Last night I moved my collection of flat boxes full of bottles off the bed near midnight so I could sleep.  Today, I’ll put them all back out there again and see how much progress I can make.

It has gotten to be a bigger job than ever before.  These new neurotransmitter precursors have to be divided into three daily doses, all to be taken on an empty stomach.  The usual vitamins that go with food have to be divided into at least two doses.  I really ought to divide the precursors into four doses, but I decided to combine the before-dinner and bedtime doses.  The with-food things really should be taken three times a day, but as it is I’ll be making up 150 little bottles of pills.  I simply don’t have enough little bottles to do 210.

I try not to dwell on the knowledge that once it’s done, I’ll have only one month to acquire another month’s supply and get it set up, in order to avoid the kind of crash I’ve experienced this summer.  I try to focus on desirable possibilities.  If these things work, I might get some jewelry work done.  I might get the furnace fixed, or at least diagnose the problem.  I might get that backlog of readings that I’ve promised done.  My sense of smell WILL come back… it always does, and it is always the first gratifying reward I receive for my abstinence.

Affirmations and little self-pep-talks seem to work against me, so I’m not trying that any more.  I can’t take that little voice inside that replies, “Yeah, right,” when I affirm some unlikely thing.  If I could devise a way to force myself to take all my meds on time and not sabotage my efforts with a momentary indulgence, I would.  If there was a bridge I could burn that would assure my compliance, I’d torch that mother.  This latest effort toward better health is like a thin wire high above the abyss.  And down there in the pit, I can hear Lorelei’s song. Maybe shedding these tears that have just come to my eyes will help.  At least that will get rid of the damned lump in my throat.

I just stood in the doorway to take this picture.  The day is as bleak as my mood.  Koji is the only member of the household who is happy about the snow.  His mother was a sled dog, and he loves the white stuff. 

The flakes falling now have just changed from big and wet to even wetter and mixed with rain.  I’ll like it better when it makes up its mind to just stay frozen and pile up for half a year, instead of toying with us this way.

Tomorrow is Greyfox‘s birthday.  He will be 55, officially a senior citizen (I made that milestone three years ago.) and the only thing he said he wanted for his birthday was a good sunny weekend so he could open his stand and make some more money before winter closes in.  That will take a miracle… one about on a par with the one I’ll  need to get through the task of baking his birthday cake without licking the spoon, cleaning the mixing bowl or sampling the finished product.

I made this a private post, at first.  Then I decided to go ahead and turn off my readers with a dose of my current reality.  I know you guys enjoy the dramatic memoirs and the local color.  Nobody (least of all me) enjoys this tedious addiction shit.  But I needed to express this, and it’s just not the same when I’m only talking to myself.  So what if I lose a few readers, eh?