When I did yesterday’s drive-by posting of the link to the Belief-O-Matic quiz and my succinct statement of my own take on the current state of belief on this planet, I had no expectations.  If I made any assumption at all about the comments I’d be getting it was only that there would probably be some comments.

In that “belief”, I was quite correct.  Even the nature of the comments didn’t come as any great surprise; they were diverse, as Xangans are.  I refuse to deny myself the pleasure of responding to some of these, beginning with:

“Do you cherish your belief that belief is passe?

(The current time is one for strategies, rather than ideologies.)”

HomerTheBrave

The less you believe, the better off you are.  Belief was the keynote of the Piscean Age.  Here at the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, belief is hanging on for dear life as believers switch religious faiths or drop out of organized religion entirely for lives of pure spirituality without all the sociopolitical baggage.

If you haven’t transcended your beliefs, try this quiz to find out which group(s) most closely match your own beliefs.

The Belief-O-Matic

One of the little aphorisms of the culture I grew up in is that adversity is good for us–builds “character”, whatever that is.  I’m not sure I agree.  My agreement would hinge on definitions:  of “adversity” as well as of “character”.  My beloved old fart says I’m twisted because I welcome challenges that he would definitely characterize as “adversity”.  The way I see it, he’s soft and lacks some of my coping and survival skills because he had a relatively easy life.

By the time my kid woke up Friday morning, I was coping with the adversity of a crashed hard drive.  Singly and together, the two of us went through all the troubleshooting and diagnostic steps we could, before accepting the situation.  With “acceptance” that our computer was down and would need some expert care came a few minutes of reaction as near to panic as that kid and I ever come. 

One thing that clued me to our deranged mental state was my observation that we’d begun trying to assign blame for the occurrence.  Of course, we blamed the old fart–and why not?  He has the technological touch of death, just like Niels Bohr had.  He was the last to use the machine Thursday night, and he turned down the little space heater in this area when he went to bed, leaving the temp in here below the specified operating range.

Doug and I finally shook off the blame game and focused on getting the thing fixed.  I found an ad in the yellow pages:  the Computer Doctor, “We can do things others can’t.”  It was the only business listed there that mentioned data recovery.   Even now, after he’s become a family hero, the doc remains just a pleasant voice on the phone to me.  He was out on a house call when I delivered our CPU to his home, and was out on another call when I went back to pick it up.

He replaced our old 15 GB hard drive with a new 40 GB drive, with no loss of data.  The new one seems to run a little more noisily than the old one, but that could be the resonating effect of the metal file box the tower is now sitting on.  That’s to raise it higher above our cold and drafty floor.  Somehow, we’ve upgraded to a newer version of Outlook Express, and my personal links in IE were rearranged into alphabetical order, but otherwise my friend here is unchanged… except for that extra 25 gigs of storage.

I may recover… who knows?  I can’t deny that I missed this guy.  It was hell having to use the old PlayStation with the small-screen monitor because Doug was on the PS2 in couch potato heaven.  That was such a hardship that it drove me away from gaming and I got some real work done.  Now, in addition to the amethysts I showed here a few weeks ago, I have picked out pairs of lapis lazuli stones, aquamarine, celestite, citrine, rose quartz, and I’m working on jade now.  That leaves only the garnets to be paired before I start turning the stones into earrings.

For me, getting along without the computer for four days wasn’t the hard part.  My regular readers know how much I hate going to town, even the little town of Wasilla just 50 miles away.  The Computer Doctor lives in Eagle River, on the edge of Anchorage, two hours away from here.  Friday evening, I ended up coming home in the rush of commuters and weekenders fleeing up this valley from the city.  The first leg of that trip, between Eagle River and Wasilla, was bumper-to-bumper at 70 MPH.  Monday afternoon’s solo trip (Doug was with me the first time.) wasn’t nearly so bad, but plenty bad enough.  I’m glad my ‘puter and I are home and free.

Last night, as soon as Doug helped me unload the groceries (I’m not gonna “waste” a trip to town without getting fresh goat milk, lemons, etc.), he brought in the CPU and connected it to this growing pile of peripherals.  I had flopped on my bed and was unwinding when I heard the glorious beeps and boops of the modem dialing up our ISP.  The kid was still on here when I went to sleep, but a bit later I was wakened by Greyfox’s voice asking if he could get on for a few minutes to check email before he went to bed.  Now both of them are still asleep and it is my turn at the keyboard.

Now that I’ve brought Xanga up to speed, I’m off for a wee Poppit! fix, before I get back to sorting little bits of jade into pairs.

I took this quiz… took a bunch of quizzes today, but only one really grabbed me as relevant to the inner me.  I took this one twice because there was more than one way to truthfully answer the questions.  Here are both results, so I wonder which I am…. 

 I Am

Which tarot card are you?

I Am

Which tarot card are you?

I’m either random chance, or I’m the controlling power behind the Universe… which could it be? 

Flare-Up

Have you ever dreamt of doing something, and then thought that you had actually done it?  I did that yesterday.  I had a dream about blogging, and thought after I woke that I had done a blog telling about my latest fibromyalgia flare-up.  I realized before long that it was a dream, as I thought over some of the details of my dream-blog.  Too much graphic stuff, grafx I mean, not graphic descriptions, for which I’m semi-notorious.  I just don’t do that much anime in my blogs, so it had to be a dream….

Even before I realized it was a dream, I wasn’t in any particular hurry to get online and read the comments.  When it’s an episode of the memoirs or a photo blog, I do rush to check the comments as soon as I can.  On these “health” blogs, sometimes I’d rather not read the comments.  Usually, you guys just don’t know what to say about all my ills and my pills.  The temptation, it seems, is to sympathize and that often comes off sounding like pity.  Some of my regular readers are my fibro-buddies, my companions in pain.  From them, there is empathy, true sympathy, but I find no satisfaction in that.  If anything, it hurts me more knowing that there are so many hurting people out there who understand my pain all too well.

Last week I added a few items to my left module, including a link to a “chronic invisible illness awareness” website.  As much as I would love to be able to hide my illness, as much as I hate the very idea of defining myself by my illness, the fact is that the illness has defined much of my life.  I hate that.  It’s not just that I don’t want to be handicapped.  I want to be seen and accepted as a whole person, able and capable.  I’ve worked extra hard at developing compensatory skills that would allow me to function at a higher level despite the illness.  I turned my unemployability into an asset of self-reliance.  To that extent, I’ve been successful.

However, there are still times when all that work and preparation fall apart.  When a bad flare-up hits me, my level of function drops dramatically.  At least, as of about three years ago, I no longer whimper and snivel with pain and run for the painkillers.  I’ve known the painswitch technique for close to two decades, but for the longest time when the pain was at its worst I would forget to use the technique to neutralize it.  Brain fog and forgetfulness go along with the other sensorimotor deficits of this damned disease.   The greatest hidden blessing in the severe exacerbation I experienced three years ago was the opportunity to practice the painswitch until it became reflexive.  Now I don’t have to remember to use it.  My unconscious mind takes care of that… which is great since my conscious mind has to depend on a flawed and dysfunctioning nervous system.  Wherever the “unconscious” gets its power, it’s a reliable Source.

Three or four days ago, when this latest flare hit me, I’d had an ordinary day.  There was no extraordinary stress, no strenuous activity, I didn’t get chilled, overheated, fatigued… nothing I could identify as a trigger.  So it came as a shock when I started to get up to get a glass of water that evening, and couldn’t walk.  I rose partially from the seated position, flopped back, struggled to my feet again, and shuffled (the “Igor” syndrome:  *drool* “Maaster…Maaster….”) to the kitchen, dragging one foot behind me.  I had begun to get used to coordination, long easy strides, grip strength… “normal” function, in other words.  There was some emotional pain added to the myalgias that night as it was brought home forcibly to me that I’m still a sickie.

This one was a bad one.  I stumbled and fumbled through the fog, struggling to remember to eat right and take my meds.  I made a few sad and stupid attempts to write.  I was even nuts enough to get the new camera out, take some pics, install the software… and fail dismally to get the pictures saved to my computer.  I’ll have to get back to that sometime.  I had been putting off the paperwork of paying a few bills and so I had to do that chore in my impaired state.  I fervently hope I got it right.  I spent a lot of time at the PlayStation, going mindlessly through one of my oldest and least demanding games, just killing time.  I’ll be getting back to that as soon as I’m done here.

In addition to the usual pains, this time I had one I’ve experienced only rarely before:  vulvodynia, the dreaded VV as it’s usually abbreviated on the fibro forums.  It’s a tearing pain in, around and through the crotch, and I thank all the gods that I have the power to make that pain go away.  But nothing takes the stiffness and incoordination away.  Even without pain, this crap is plenty bad enough.  This time my eyes were also involved, with the “sticky tears” phenomenon, the blurring, difficulty focusing, and pain behind my eyes.  My balance was off, I was dizzy and dopey (which might have been okay if I’d been doped up, but is just distressing and inconvenient when there’s no euphoria to accompany it).

Anyway, troops, it’s a better day today.  I’m still not one hundred percent… I wonder how 100% would feel… never been there.  The worst is past.  I’m back.  Watch out, world. 

I’m forcing myself to post another pics-that-got-away blog.  I hope that the public humiliation and self-ridicule will impel me to start using my slick new digital zoom camera.  I’ve been rationalizing my reluctance to tackle the complex menus and all those buttons and knobs and shit… I told myself I’d wait until it warmed to above freezing so I won’t be voiding my warranty–never mind that I could take pics in here…duh!  No one is more gullible than the self-deluded.  I’m just lazy.

You see lots of nature photos here, but not many wildlife shots.  That’s because trees and berries hold still.  It’s easier to get a shot of an ermine trail than one of the ermine.  I was thrilled today when I saw a bald eagle sitting in a tree, and had my camera with me (yeah *blushes* the old Kodak point and shoot). 

I had ridden into Willow with Greyfox to get his “new” car and roadside stand.  I took Koji because the dog needs to get used to riding around in cars.  He freaks… gets stress diarrhea, and howls until we find a place to turn off to let him clear his bowels.  After that, he’s just his usual excitable self, without so much howling. 

In the parking lot behind the thrift store where the old fart bought the car (1988 Mitsubishi Dodge Colt, dark blood red, almost maroon… wine, maybe–over $1k under Blue Book because of cosmetic body dings), I waited.  While he negotiated inside, I walked Koji around to smell the latest news.  That’s when I spotted the eagle in the trees beyond the long low building across the parking lot.  (Above, it’s directly over the double doors.)

I was moving nearer, looking for a way over or around a snow berm, hoping to get near the base of the eagle’s tree, and had just got this shot of the eagle barely over the roofline.

Then a raven flew in and bumped the eagle, and it spread its wings.  Koji, whose leash was looped on my wrist, lunged and I almost dropped the camera, missing the shot, of course.  I watched the eagle rise and fly out of sight, chased by the raven.  If I had learned how to use my new camera, I could have had a movie of that… or could have dropped the thing, I suppose.   I’m scum….  And I haven’t been spending enough time on dog training, either.

We  had a power outage here this morning, just as I was headed toward a place to save my game on the PS2 and Doug was getting up from the computer to get his dinner before crawling in the sack.  Due to circumstances beyond my control, our kitchen range is electric… sorta long story… I may tell it some day, or maybe Sarah can… I think she was here when the propane stove fell out of the back of Mark’s truck.

Anyhooo, Doug was fussing over not being able to nuke a sausage when we got into a hilarious exchange on the topic of electricity as luxury or necessity.  He has lived fifteen of his twenty-one years off the power grid.  It’s a luxury to him as it is to me, but I pointed out that to some people, on respirators, etc., it is necessary to life.  I don’t recall how that seguéed into his idea for a sketch on SNL about a bunch of old folks with portable respirators at a rave, but we were slaying each other with our respective contributions to the script.

I had reminded him that we had fire in the woodstove, and was holding the flashlight for him to find the foil for wrapping his sausage, when the power came back on.  So the sausage got microwaved, as did my leftover coffee, and I got to log onto Xanga and see what you guys had to say about my threesome blog. 

This comment is from BettyC:

“…I love hearing about your sexual appetite.  And I am curious about how you tie it to your hair color.”

Betty, it wasn’t me that made that connection.  All my life I have been hearing from others the twin redhead stereotypes:  hot temper and hot pants.  After many discussions with redheads and redhead afficianados, I concluded that there was a kernel of truth at the roots of both stereotypes.

During the ‘seventies, my physician was a redhead, an old friend of Charley’s.  He, Martin, confirmed something else I’d been observing about redheads:  our tendency toward certain genetic weaknesses such as skin disease, allergies, sinus problems, clotting problems, etc.  That last thing is one I have mercifully escaped, but every time I’ve checked into a hospital some nurse has asked me if I’m a bleeder, because they just expect it of redheads.

Martin, Charley and I hashed out a theory to account for all three things:  the genetic flaws, the hot tempers and the healthy libidos.  We even came up with a source that explained how we ended up with those unearthly genetic traits.  In his book, Star People, Brad Steiger listed red hair along with a bunch of physical anomalies or weaknesses, as characteristic of the Star-Born, descendants of ET visitors.  By whatever route we redheads came to be here with those anomalous traits, there is some sound genetics that would explain how the genetic weaknesses led to hot pants and hot tempers, as well as another redhead trait that is not so widely recognized.

In the general population, because of the recessive nature of the gene involved, red hair is the rarest of ethnic types.  In organizations such as Mensa, Intertel and the Four-Sigma Society, red hair is represented by numbers much greater than the percentage in the general population.  When I started attending Mensa get-togethers in Anchorage, four out of twelve local members who met regularly had red hair.  Three more apparently carried the recessive gene because they had red-haired offspring.  So, in that small population, we were in the majority.

I have taken this theory that Martin, Charley (a carrier of the recessive gene, all three of whose wives and two out of three of whose offspring are redheads), and I developed to the forums at The Realm of Redheads.  Our discussions brought forth one redhead who claimed that none of that stuff fit her, and who became incensed at any suggestion that she was of extra-terrestrial stock.  (maybe she dyes )  The vast majority of those who contributed to the threads reported having some of the anomalous physical traits, and admitted to personally living up, to some degree, to the sexy and hot-tempered stereotypes. 

Here is our Darwinian theory of redheadedness:

The genetic anomalies or weaknesses would tend to shorten the lives of individuals in this population.  Over the course of many generations, the weakest individuals would be weeded out.  The survivors would include the most intelligent members, the ones who were quickest to jump to a defensive stance when threatened, and the offspring of those who reproduced youngest and most often.  Thus, hot pants, hot temper and high IQ would be more concentrated in the red-haired population than in the general population because the others would not have needed such traits to survive.

One other peripherally related thing:  recent medical research, in which some Realm members participated, showed that it takes more anaesthetic to knock redheads out for surgery than it does for the rest of you.

How I Spent my First Saturn Return
(Part One: Sex)

This comment is from Angie:

“Charlie must of really chilled out a lot to be willing to stay with you when Hulk came. Did they get along well?”

I think that by the time Hulk got here, Charley had realized he’d never be able to keep up with my libido, so he was receptive to my suggestions that we try a group marriage.  We hoped to find a few others to join us.  Charley was especially hoping to find a curvy little blonde to join us.  It was an idealistic New Agey idea that was being practiced by some of our generation, and had been discussed by virtually everyone in the Hip subculture.  Hulk and I had talked about it a lot during those Saturday morning visits when he was in the big Big House and I was next door in the little one.  We were three kinky people, and I was bonded to both of the men.  If I had chosen one or the other, there would have been an amicable but uncomfortable (and inconvenient, considering our economic interdependence) parting of the ways.  I chose both.

Early in the morning after our first night as a threesome, Charley lay asleep on the side of the bed by the window, and Hulk was on the other side of me.  He was awake already, on his back staring at the ceiling, when I awoke.  I snuggled up to his side, put my head on his shoulder, and we started catching up on each other’s lives since we’d last been together.  He talked a little about how he had been living since he got out, and then he asked me what happened to Stony.  I talked about the abuse, and the stillborn son, the final blow and my abortion to cut the last tie I had to Stony.  I said I guessed he was still around town, I hadn’t seen him for a while.  I told him that Steve and Skip had talked to Stony, told him that if he messed with me, he’d have to mess with them.  Not that I’d asked them to do it, but they were macho guys and took it on themselves.

About at that point, I could tell that Hulk was getting steamed and was contemplating taking some avenging action onto himself.  Then, Charley stirred, turned over, and joined the conversation about Stony.  So, instead of just lying there and enjoying the tired and sore sensations from the night’s activities, or stirring up a little more action, I ended up arguing with the guys.  I finally told them they’d be welcome to stand between me and Stony if he ever tried to attack me, but otherwise I hoped they would just leave him alone.  He was history.

Below is the only picture I have of the three of us together.  We took a lot of shots of each other, but always with one of us behind the camera.  Those shots are almost the only pornographic pictures ever taken of me, and the only ones in my possession.  One weekend we went to a flea market and had three pictures taken and turned into “button” badges.  I wasn’t sure how the scanner would do on this, since the surface is convex, but I’m happy at how it came out.  When we got the three buttons, I took the best one.  I now have it, and Charley’s, in my button collection; I wonder if Hulk still has his.  I suppose I could call him and ask. 

We didn’t have much time or energy, but when we did, we had fun.  Cheap thrills at home, or burgers at the White Spot, and the rest of it was work.  I had found Charley a series of jobs and he had offended and alienated each employer in turn.  He’s about as unemployable as I am.  Hulk got here just in time to go to work, along with Charley and a bunch of my other New Start clients, at Reconstruction, Inc., the contracting business that had been organized by New Start Center and the Palmer C.C. Jaycees.  It was being run by a pair of brothers with contracting experience and drunk driving records.  One of them was missing several fingers from accidents on the job.

My two guys competed for my attention all the time.  I’d tell them to knock it off, and they would try, a little, for a while, maybe.  It was irritating, but not intolerable to any of us.  We worked out some accomodations to make things go more smoothly.  Charley is deaf in one ear from an accident with a can of black powder and a cigarette, so he wanted always to walk with his good ear toward me, and that was the side of me that Hulk was accustomed to walking on, but we worked it out.  In the traditional nature of addiction, the more we got the more we wanted, and each of the guys generously cut the bottom out of one of his pockets, on the side nearer me, so I could reach in for a surreptitious public nut fondle occasionally.

It has never seemed to ruffle Charley’s feathers when he and I get into a screaming argument, but he couldn’t stand to listen to Hulk and me yell at each other.  One night, he rammed his fist through a wall and broke some bones, while suppressing (!?!—let’s make that diverting, sublimating…) the urge to punch Hulk.  Considering the challenges involved, and the various individuals involved, the guys behaved with admirable self-restraint.  As for me, I just let it all hang out.

10 AM Jan. 16

I had just settled into checking my email and such, after Doug gave up the computer this morning just before sunrise.  He had gone out to bring in a load of firewood before retiring for the day.

He poked his head back in to tell me there was beautiful light out there.  I glanced out a window and it was pink, lovely.  By the time I had my coat, hat, boots and gloves on, the pink was gone.

To avoid making this another “pics that got away” blog, on my way back in I caught a few shots of Doug at the woodpile.  In this one, the maul in his hand has vanished into a blur of motion.

Here, he’s crouching to pick up the wood he split, building an armload.  Greyfox might, on occasion, carry in one or two sticks of firewood.  His hernia doesn’t allow him to do more.

I stack wood along my arm and carry as much as I can in one trip, to avoid extra trips.  Doug carries amazing piles of wood, seeming to enjoy seeing how high he can stack it.

Doug is skilled with the axe and maul, too.  This morning we were talking about his first axe, a small cruiser-style axe I gave him for Christmas when he was seven or eight.  It was years before he could swing the heavy maul to split the big logs, but from the time he learned to swing the little axe, splitting kindling was his job.

He does a good job with the wood, and does it a lot more willingly than he does dishes. 

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Anchorage, Spring, 1974

Background to this episode of my memoirs is here and here.

Working two demanding jobs, putting in at least 96 hours a week, didn’t leave much time or energy for anything else.  The only people I really knew were my co-workers and clients.  I was not supposed to party with the clients, and whenever the Klinic staff was partying, I was working.  The closest thing to a social life I had was the time every Thursday evening as the therapy group dispersed, when we chatted and sometimes a few of us would go for a snack before heading home.  Conversation then was very similar to that in Open Door Klinic staff meetings; we talked shop.  The other members of the therapy group were firemen, cops, parole officers, nurses, paramedics, social workers, DAs and public defenders.  Our work absorbed us, monopolized our lives.

One of the volunteers I supervised at the Klinic asked me if I’d allow him to do some tests on me as part of his graduate practicum, the same thing that brought him to the Klinic as a volunteer.  Harvey was never comfortable at Open Door with the street people who were our clients and the hippies who worked there.  He was what the bikers called a straight citizen.  He even came to work at the Klinic in a suit and tie until Kevin, the Executive Director, asked him to dress down.  Then he started coming in wearing creased, pressed Levis. 

He had been anxiously observing the walk-ins, hoping to find one whose “chief complaint” would justify administering a personality inventory or intelligence test.  Students practicing on each other was okay, I suppose, but he was hoping for someone with some real problems to address.  One night when we were sitting around during a slack time, I said something about being a “burned-out speed freak”, and he jumped on it.

He administered the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.  When he was done, he gave me his conclusions and all the forms I’d filled out, etc.  I kept them, and a short while ago when I read all this for the first time in decades those papers aroused both amusement and disgust.  It’s kinda funny, when one can get past the more negative responses, to see how far astray such psychological tests can go.  The MMPI is designed to find psychopathology whether it is present or not.  Subjects are forced to choose one of four answers to each question, even when none fits, or when more than one answer would fit equally well.  The WAIS (in that edition) cheated me out of a few IQ points because I knew that the world population was nearer to 4 billion than to 3 billion, but the test insisted it was 3.  Harvey sympathized, and conceded I was correct, but couldn’t fudge the test just because it was out of date.

While he was administering the IQ test, I was working.  We were interrupted several times by crisis phone calls and drunks walking in for coffee.  I didn’t expect to score very well.  I had been indoctrinated to the spurious fact that amphetamines destroyed brain cells, and as I was nearing thirty my ability to learn new languages, to learn anything new, had slowed down.  I was feeling dumb, no longer the whiz kid I had been.  I got my first hints that I was still somewhat of a whiz while he was still testing me. 

One segment of the WAIS involves strings of up to 9 digits.  The tester reads off the numbers and the subject is supposed to repeat them, first forward and then backward.  It starts off with just a few digits and increases the length of the sequence until the subject fails, or until “S” correctly repeats nine digits both ways.  I aced it, and was eagerly waiting for the next string, anticipating a fun challenge, when Harvey put down his clipboard, took off his glasses and polished the lenses.  The guy was already developing the shrink’s displacement techniques to avoid displaying surprise or any other emotion.

Apparently, such a memory as mine is extremely rare.  He couldn’t make comments during the test session.  We finished up the testing and he said he’d bring back the results the following weekend.  I guess I failed to meet his expectations.  Maybe that was good for the man, good for some of his future patients.  He learned that one judges such things as intelligence by appearances at one’s peril.  One of the little facts of my life that never fails to please me is that I nearly always get more respect after people get to know me than upon first meeting.  I’d hate for it to be the other way ’round.  When Harvey brought me my test results, he was effusive, fulsome, in his praise and admiration.  It was easy to see from his attitude that his IQ was nearer to normal than mine, and that such crap really meant something to him.

Harvey urged me to go back to school.  I had already seen academia for the institutional obstacle-to-evolution it is, and had decided that I’d be better off learning from the public libraries.  I was much too involved with real life to go back to school.  Harvey also urged me to join Mensa.  When I was a kid, one of my brilliant redheaded cousins, Norma Jean, had told me about Mensa, the High IQ Society.  I was long familiar with the idea of Mensa, but had never been to a get-together, hadn’t looked into joining.  All it took was sending them my test scores and paying my dues.  I think the annual dues at that time was $8.00.  A few years later, I dropped out when the dues were increased to $12.00… but there was more to it than that and that comes later.

I started receiving Mensa newsletters, and got a phone call from one of the members of the Anchorage Local Group inviting me to a get-together (Mensans get together; they don’t have meetings.), but work prevented me from attending for a few more months.  Meanwhile, now that I was getting into being a joiner, I joined Intertel.  Mensa accepts the top two percent based on IQ test scores;  Intertel accepts the top one percent.  Intertel had an interesting series of member publications, papers written by members which I enjoyed reading, but there was no local group to meet.  It seems that that second percent of geniuses, the low half of Mensa’s target population, comprises the majority of the members.  Super geniuses, to judge by the respective memberships of Mensa, Intertel and the Four-Sigma Society (for the top tenth of one percent) don’t tend to be joiners.  It’s just as well, anyway, because we’re all nuts.  In a group, we might be dangerous.

The Sunday following my visit to the Palmer Correctional Center, I had some reason to call my co-worker Steve, some stress I wanted to vent.  Charley was there, and Steve asked him to answer the phone and say he wasn’t home.  Who can blame him?  None of us ever really got a day off on that job.  We took the work home with us, couldn’t help having those dire crises and the ongoing troubles of our regular clients on our mind all the time.  Anyway, Charley and I chatted impersonally but pleasantly for a few minutes, then hung up.  On his end, after we hung up, Steve told him to go on down to the Klinic and get acquainted with me.  With nothing better to do, he walked across town to see me.

We sat in my sunny little fishbowl of an office and schmoozed until the volunteer came in to relieve me for my dinner break.  We had already established that we both had an appreciation for the sacred herb, so on my dinner break we walked on farther across town in another direction, to my place, for a smoke.  It was miles of walking, nothing new to me but hard on his jail-atrophied muscles.  We had time for one doobie, then headed back to the Klinic.  He was slowing me down, and when we got to an intersection where one way led to the Klinic and the other way to Steve’s place, I suggested he turn and go on “home”.  I hadn’t been back at the Klinic very long when the phone rang and it was Charley.  We talked on that line for hours.  I put him on hold every time another call came in, and he kept me company most of the night.

At the Wednesday staff meeting, Steve took me aside and quietly asked how I’d feel about having Charley move in with me.  Charley wanted to, Steve said, but they thought they should ask me first.  I’d already found him a job, so he could pay his share of expenses, and it seemed to me like a good idea.  That afternoon Steve moved the rest of the funny-looking guy’s belongings to my place.  I still had that box he had given us that day at the jail.  We were roommates only a very short time before we became lovers.  We’d have been lovers that first Sunday afternoon in the fishbowl, if it hadn’t been such a PUBLIC fishbowl.  He had been locked up for six years, and I’d been without a partner for more than that many months, and a month without sex, for a redhead, equals several years for anyone else.  The only thing that delayed our coupling so long was lack of opportunity.  Work took precedence; I had responsibilities.

When I told Charley about stupidly frosting my kneecaps the preceding winter, he assured me that he’d make sure I was equipped and prepared for the next winter.  When I complained about the gloom in my little basement apartment, the long dark hours of winter, and the lack of greenery, he scrounged up a fluorescent light fixture for me and turned a dark alcove in the living room into a growing space for plants.  I started studying horticulture, so I could have a hope of keeping some green things alive.  It didn’t take me long to realize that I’d killed off a succession of houseplants by overwatering them.  I’d found a new passion… two of them, if you count Charley.

Not long after he moved in, we had a little clash of wills.  My landlady’s brother had been putting moves on me every time he saw me.  Every time I saw him he was drunk and that was a turnoff for me, so the guy hadn’t a hope in hell of getting into my apartment or my pants.  One night I heard the landlady’s kitchen door open and heard his step on the stairs.  Charley was closer to the door, so he answered it.  I finished what I was doing, then wandered back that way to see what was up.

There was a hushed conversation going on, and the reek of testosterone was thick in the air.  Male primate dominance games.  About the time I reached the door, Charley shut it and the landlady’s brother started back up the stairs.  Charley turned to me with a smile and said that guy wouldn’t bother me any more.  He saw it as a gallant move, I’m sure, rescuing me from the bothersome drunk. 

I saw it as a proprietary move, moving in on my prerogatives, asserting his dominance over the other male and his ownership of me.  I laid into him (verbally, of course) so bad he was still telling the story decades later.  It took me years to only partially decondition him from his chivalry and gallantry, and I don’t suppose anyone will ever turn the man into a feminist, but he did back off a bit.

We discovered that both of us liked to fish.  He was delighted to learn that I could handle a gun and wasn’t afraid of them.  We also discovered an intriguing psychic connection we shared.  The first hint came one day we had planned to meet at a sporting goods store on our lunch break.  It was about midway between our jobs, but I got there first.  I was at the far rear of the store, looking at fishing gear, when something cued me to look up, and I saw him open the front door to enter the store.  As soon as I spotted him, he looked up, straight into my eyes. 

I had been playing around with esp games and tests for years, and introduced him to them.  Within a couple of years of such play our rapport was so good that we blew away a guy who had a booth at a flea market, selling little briefcase-size electronic esp testers.  We sat down on opposite sides of the booth for the guy’s “demonstration”, and proceeded to get an unbroken series of hits, first with Charley as sender, then with me sending and Charley receiving.  We aced the telepathy thing for as long as the man was willing to stand there and let us, then we aced the precog part.  When the man got really antsy, we switched off his little machine, got up, and holding hands and laughing, walked away.

Charley and I were already bonded and still in the first flush of a consuming passion when I got a phone call from Hulk, in Oregon.  He was out of the pen, on parole, and we had been exchanging occasional letters.  He knew about Charley and I knew about Little Linda, his main squeeze.  We were still officially man and wife, and I was using his last name (the last time I took my husband’s name–my divorce from Hulk restored my maiden name, and I’ve kept it through two more marriages).  Hulk knew that I worked for the Alaska Department of Parole and Probation, and he asked me to try and get his parole transferred to Alaska.  He was certain that if he stayed around Eugene and his old associates, he’d be back in prison in no time.  Within weeks we had arranged the transfer and I sent him the money for plane fare, and we were sleeping three to a bed.