…HIT
THE
WALL

I hit the old wall yesterday.  I guess I actually hit more
than one wall.  I’ve gotta learn to pay more attention to cautions
and warnings.  Every time I’ve seen the Opening of the Key Tarot
reading mentioned in books, it has been described as difficult.  I
have never known anyone who uses the procedure or who has
mentioned knowing it.  Of course I thought, “Well, it’s hard for
them because they’re lazy idiots.  I can do it.”

Yes, I can do it.  I’m still in the middle of doing
it.  But wow, it’s a big one.  It isn’t one
spread.   It is a five-stage process, during which cards get
laid out seven different ways… or was it eight or nine??  I did
all the card work yesterday, and made detailed
technical notes.  I was working on writing out the
interpretation until late in the evening, when Doug and Greyfox were
getting ready to gang up on me and take me away from the
keyboard.  I’ll get back to it after I post this.

When I got up from my trusty ergonomic office chair here, I realized
that a fibro-flare had snuck up on me while I was otherwise
occupied.  I could barely walk.  Within moments after I took
off the headphones with their psychoactive shamanic trance sounds, I
started getting muscle spasms here and there.  I’m not talking
little tics here–ever had a HARD charleyhorse?  –or a cramp in
the bottom of your foot that tries to pull your toes down and back to
your heel?  That’s how those spasms were.

It hurt, but I can deal with that.  Making pain stop hurting
and start communicating is one of my areas of expertise.  It’s a
simple technique I teach to others, too, originally at my “painswitch” website until the hosting company went down, and now here on Xanga.  I was using the switch from the moment I got up from here and
hobbled across the room.  Dismiss the hurting part; it comes and
goes.

The part that’s a bit harder to deal with is the stiffness,
incoordination, and other such effects.  I fumbled around in the
kitchen, got myself a bite to eat and cleaned up what I spilled in the
process.  This was a bit more complicated than it usually
is even in a flare-up, since I wasn’t seeing straight.  Eye
involvement is uncommon for me, and I’m glad of that.

Last night some of my muscle spasms were in my head.  NO, not
my MIND, my skull.  The muscles in my eye sockets, the ones that I
use to look this way or that, cramped up.  Okay, no bedtime
reading.  Watch TV.  No, not that, either, with the eyes
crossed and the left one pointed a few degrees lower than the right
one, and then apparently all by itself with no participation from me,
being pulled by those spasming muscles until I’m looking at the tip of
my nose.

No cure for it but to shut the eyes and run through the progressive
whole-body relaxation routine.  So, I spent the remainder of my
evening as a body-shaped puddle, eyes closed and ears wide open hearing
the TV, Doug’s game controller clicks and his exclamantions of dismay
or triumph, and Greyfox’s keyboarding.  Mercifully, sleep came
soon.

Several readers asked about the procedure and significance of smudging.

It is a Native American ritual that has made its way into New Age
and NeoPagan practice.   Indians considered (and some still
do consider) smoke to be a way to send messages to the Great
Spirit.  Scented smoke was (still is in some places) considered to
have an influence on lesser spirits.  “Good” scents, the pleasant
ones such as sweet grass, are said to attract beneficent spirits. 
Such rationales are not unique to the Americas.  The use, in
Europe, Africa and Asia, of incense in religious ritual
predates Christianity.

One would think (at least this one here would so think) that if good
smells bring good spirits, bad smells would bring bad spirits. 
That’s not the way it is beleived to be in those traditions.  The
pungent smells of sage and cedar are believed to REPEL evil
spirits.  I’ll take this as evidence that I’m not an evil
spirit, because I love the scents of smudge, which usually mingle both
the pungent and the sweet.  For me now, the scents evoke memories
of medicine wheel gatherings, sweat lodge ceremonies, meditation
groups, and the many sacred and communal events I’ve attended where
smudge has been used.

As I wrote yesterday, I don’t do ritual, usually.   I
prefer my communion with spirit to be spontaneous, conscious, and
sincere.  For me, ritual does not provide that.  I would not,
for example, recite a canned prayer.  My contact with Spirit comes
from my heart, mind and soul, not from memory.  And yet,
there are some rituals I perform when I want to set a particular mood
for my work. 

I was taught techniques for “grounding and centering”, for adjusting
my mental focus, for relaxation… even the painswitch can loosely be
termed a ritual because it is a learned technique repeated by
rote.  I use those techniques, things which other people might
consider a sacred ritual or a magickal rite, in the same way that I
follow recipes in cooking or the procedures in computer
troubleshooting, etc.

This morning, Doug was reading yesterday’s blog and the
comments.  He asked what smudging does, how it’s supposed to
work.  I told him the folklore, and then said, ”It’s
superstitious rigamarole.”  That’s how I see it. 
Then Greyfox spoke up and said it’s the power of the
placebo.  I’ll buy that, too.

However, when something happens such as having that “Authority of
Ritual” card flip face-up while I’m shuffling a brand new deck, I
pay attention.  Most of my professional colleagues have elaborate
rituals they follow each time they remove the silk wrap from their
Tarot cards.   My various decks are kept in everything from
leather pouches to the cardboard boxes they came in from the factory.

Some readers never allow others to touch their cards, and keep
them locked away in a hidden place.  I let my clients in my booths
at fairs shuffle the cards.  Beliefs differ, traditions conflict,
and my way of dealing with the conflict long ago was to eliminate the
rituals and use common sense in the care of my cards.

But I also work with crystals, and I do psychometry.  I have
learned by experience that “vibes” or psychic impressions can pass from
person to person through the medium of objects.  Crystalline or
metal objects pick up and store these impressions better than organic
matter, but almost no Tarot reader would use a new deck of cards
without some sort of purifying ritual.  So, I smudged my new
deck.  Might not help, but it can’t hurt, right?

Enjoying the evocative scent, I went on and had some fun with
it.  I tuned into Spirit and made the ritual REAL for
me.  Any spiritual power in ritual is in the INTENT, the way we
focus our attention.  After smudging myself and my cards, I stood
and waited for the next impulse.  My dog Koji came over, so I
smudged him.  I heard a snore from Doug, and walked over and
did a purification ritual for my beloved son.  It seemed only
fitting to turn and waft the scented smoke at the war news on TV. 
Then I felt an impulse to step outside and do the usual wind-and-sky
gestures.

I’ve watched those movements performed by Native elders in buckskin,
beads and feathers, and by various Pagan or New Age
practitioners, skyclad or in flowing robes.  I’ve grown
and gathered the herbs and tied bundles of them into sticks for
smudging.   To me, none of that is any more sacred than the
rest.  The sacred herbs grow from the sacred earth and we light
them with sacred fire.  We draw in the sacred scents with our
sacred breath.  Reality is sacred, to me.

I smudged.  I don’t smudge every time , but this time….

I was shuffling my new tarot deck for the first time.  The cards are both stiff and slick, of course–they’re new.  I shuffled a flurry of them onto the desk, inadvertently.  All landed face down but one:  Princess of Sabres, “Authority of Ritual.”  Duh, ritual… wazzat??

It’s something I know, have done, generally dispensed with but not entirely.  Sometimes, something tells me to observe the Old Forms.  So I smudged… I lit a brand new stick of Southwestern “cedar”, really three-seed juniper from Sedona, and a stick of artemisia from my own garden.  The scent took me to a different mindspace.  It’s still here, lingering….

I took down my smudge fan made of three big feathers:  turkey, peahen, and great horned owl.  It doubles as a feather duster for my rock collection.  I smudged myself, my new cards, the computer, and the dog.  Since Doug was oblivious and defenseless, snoring in his bag on the front room floor, I smudged him.  While I was in the neighborhood, I smudged the war news on the TV.

Then I went out and smudged the winds and sky.  When I looked up to smudge the sky, I noticed there’s a big paper wasp’s nest under the eaves of the little cabin beside the trailer.  Note to self: there’s a wasp nest….

Smudging done, I smoked and brewed a fresh pot.  I thought over what I have planned.  For the second day in a row, I’m using a new deck of cards to do a Tarot spread I’ve never done before.  This one is challenging, lengthy, and I saw myself in a dream, doing this spread this way….

I’m putting on the headphones, spending a few hours in Theta, and doing an Opening of the Key spread with the I Am One Tarot, a reading focused on the (current) war.   It will be at http://www.xanga.com/KaiOaty as soon as it’s done.  Bye-bye.

aaaaah, Spring….

Delightful afternoon here, Charley stopped in.  He’s Doug’s dad, my ex, for those of you who don’t want to be out of the loop.  He’s also my best friend and a good person to have on one’s side, the sort of guy who does take sides and is mean when pissed off.  Good friend.  But a man, an opinionated, idiosyncratic maverick of a man who plays all the standard primate dominance games.

He would have come in, delivered his message, traded a few paperback books, and gone, if Greyfox had been home.  Those two rub each other the wrong way and Charley tends to avoid prolonged time in Greyfox’s presence.  It’s more than just that one of them is my emotionally estranged but physically present current legal spouse and the other is my best friend and former common law husband. 

They have a personal history, too, from the time when Doug wanted to move back in with me from his dad’s place because of abuse there, and Greyfox decided that if the kid was moving in he would move out.  He moved into Charley’s cabin with him.  It’s legally Greyfox’s cabin, but Charley lives there rent-free and everyone (except Greyfox) considers it Charley’s cabin.  It’s a long story and this one is pretty long already.  Cut to the chase….

Having this odd east coast cheechako move into his one-room cabin was bad enough, from Charley’s perspective.  Then Greyfox, drunk, fell off the loft and broke his heel bone and Charley and Doug and I did for him and put up with him the better… make that greater, major… part of a year as he healed.

With him gone, I had a pleasant visit with Charley.  Doug’s even awake and got to share a few laughs with his Dad.  Some of them were at Greyfox’s expense.  Nobody around here understands Greyfox.  He simmers, he cringes, he grimaces and growls, cackles and howls and all this non-verbal communication, not to mention the desperate and hostile vibes that we have to remind him about sometimes, it’s all at odds with that mask he wears.  He thinks he comes off as a benign and civilized man, but he’s only fooling himself around here.

Greyfox would do fine in a community of the third-eye-blind.  He gets by pretty well out in public, in the general public.  But around here he’s often “in trouble” as he puts it.  It’s not for WHAT he’s thinking, it’s for trying to hide what he’s thinking.  He guards his thoughts, holds them close, judges them “bad” and “noir” and loves being evil while he dances as hard as he can to seem bland and harmless.  It wears on one after a while.  Then he does a flip or flips a switch and he’s all sweetness and light and that can tend to shake a person up as much as the other extreme.

Anyway, Greyfox is in Talkeetna and so we had a smoke, a cup of joe and some conversation on this peaceful afternoon.  It has been peaceful a few days this week, with Greyfox gone to Willow one day, for the Old Fart’s Feed at the community center and some errands at the post office and such.  He passed on the lunch, something not to his taste, I dunno.  He told me but I wasn’t listening.  It’s easier to tune out the vibes if I just tune out the whole phenomenon.

A few other days, Greyfox drove to Talkeetna and set up his stand on Main Street.  It seems to make him feel better, and it’s not too expensive, really.  Not enough business yet to pay expenses, but as he says, he is “showing the flag.”  But he goes out of here in the morning vowing he has no expectations, he’s just getting out there to see what comes in.  And he comes back in disappointed and pissed off and talking about the ratty be-backs that don’t come back and his “fan club”, the local citizens who want street vendors kicked out of town.

We will be finding out soon who came out ahead in that battle.  The Land Use Planning Board held all their hearings, everyone including Greyfox had their say, Greyfox turned in a few hundred signatures on his petition to be allowed to stay in business, and the new borough land use ordinance has been drafted.  We will know what it says as soon as we go through the Records Request Form procedure and get a look at ordinance #03-051.

Well, I’ve got some work to do.  CoalMinersDaughter got back to me with the focus for her reading, so I’m going into my headphones and down the rabbit hole with Ursula.

Dear Raed

A few days ago I heard a reference on TV to “Salam Pax” (trans:  Peace Peace), an Iraqi on the web who had been communicating with journalists.

I went out there in cyberspace trying to track this person down.

The blog in question is here:

Where is Raed ?

I found the following at SFGate.com  

What’s happened to Salam Pax this time?
Chatter

Since the war started in Iraq, Where Is Raed?, the diary/blog of a 29-year-old man in a suburb of Baghdad (whose identity is disputed, but generally considered to be legit), has been written about in over 40 newspapers (and probably more, but that’s what I found with a Nexis search), including The Hindu, The New Zealand Herald, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The Guardian was so captivated by the man who calls himself Salam Pax’s vivid descriptions of life in Bagdhad during the months leading up to the war that it published extensive excerpts.

All the current buzz I found suggests that the guy was real, and that he hasn’t been heard from for a few days.  If anyone knows more than I do, I’d appreciate a heads-up on this.

Derangement update:

Mystery solved, I guess….

This might have occurred to me sooner, I suppose, if I had not been just-up and not fully awake and alert when that derangement hit me this morning.  But, it’s also likely that such a thing would not overtake me had I not been off-guard and not fully awake.

I even mentioned the lapis lazuli in the last post.  It is right here at my elbow now.  With a bit of a swivel and a little push I can move my office chair from the computer desk to the worktable and pick stones.  I do that off and on all day when I have a pile of stones on the table to be paired.  A break from one job lets me get something done on the other one.

Lapis has a reputation for opening the third eye, increasing psychic receptivity.  Half asleep, I’m largely in the Theta brainwave frequency range, and very susceptible to psychic input.  Most of the time I’m a Theta person in a Beta world anyway, but I do know how to ramp up to Beta when I need to do math or drive a car.

That was all I had to do this morning to break the mood.  I feel fine now.  Thanks for the empathy and concern shown in comments on that last blog.  Now, my skeptical side (those two maverick brain cells that occasionally rub together and spark a coherent logical thought) says, “If it really was the influence of the lapis, then what’s making Marian and the others go weird?”

That’s a question.  You didn’t expect an answer, did you?

Bummed out…
Depressed…
Manic…
…or what???

WTF!?
Shit.  I’m used to derangement.  I’ve had occasional times of weird brain chemistry throughout my life.  I have learned to recognize the dangerous onset of a manic phase and have learned tactics for lightening depression before it plunges to a suicidal level.

Reality testing has become a routine for me.  When I’m not in my “right mind”:  when I notice bizarre mentation or unaccustomed, unaccountable feelings, or if someone close to me points out that I’m not my usual volatile, irascible, but generally rational self, there is usually some past experience on which I can draw for insight at least, and sometimes even for a remedy.

If I’ve ever been HERE, in this frame of mind, before, I don’t recall it.  This one is new, and I don’t even have a ready name for it.  I feel mildly pissed off and bummed out, and maybe the world news and some household hassles can account for that at least partially.

But why won’t my mind hold STILL?  Sure, there have been times when my ADD seems to flare up and I flit from one idea to a new interest and on to the next enthusiasm in a flash, but often that is accompanied by an elevated mood, not this pressured and DOWN, grinding grumpiness….

Aaah… well, either the old tactic of pouring it all out and seeing what it looks like lying there on the page, or those first two cups of coffee, or the passage of some time and/or a moon or a planet or two, had some effect.  I still feel kinda dull and foggy in the head, but I’ve stopped trembling and grinding my teeth.  Attention is still flitting around, but there’s nothing new in that….

Well, I guess I’ll live.  I just managed a brief sardonic laugh at myself.  It’s a start.

Work was a mixed bag yesterday.  I still haven’t found a single pair for earrings in the pile of lapis lazuli on my worktable, but I’ve managed to sort about a third of the pile by color and have discarded many bits that were all or mostly matrix.

In early afternoon, I quit picking rocks and spread on top of them the Tarot cards for Dunazade‘s reality check on KaiOaty‘s site.  I spent maybe three hours with the headphones on and the shamanic sounds keeping me in Theta as I typed the reading.  It was a great one, a glimpse of a fascinating person during an interesting, pivotal time in her life.

When I was done, I clicked “add image” to sign it with my butterfly moniker, and lost the whole thing.  Everything froze.

I took off the headphones.  I sat here and stared at the screen a while, waiting and hoping for a miracle.  Then I pulled myself out of the funk and restarted the computer.  While it was coming up, I broke the news to Greyfox and told him I’d be here for at least another hour reconstructing the reading before he could use the computer.

Back in the headphones, I think I did an adequate job.  It worked, but it truly didn’t sing as the original had.  The message was the same but the delivery was a bit flat, I thought.  They can’t all be masterpieces, I consoled myself.  Oh how I hate delivering less than my best, but with nothing for comparison how can there be a “best”?

This morning, local, national and world news provided an interesting mix of things to think about:

A local woman, fatally stabbed in face and chest, lived long enough to identify her 27-year-old son as her killer.  He’s a diagnosed schizophrenic, supposed to be on meds, but… he’ll probably end up in Alaska Psychiatric Institute, arguably a worse place than our local jails.

Not very far down this highway through our valley, a badly decomposed body was found, probably female to judge by clothing found nearby.  Total mystery there, at least for now.

Big fireball in the sky and chunks of meteorite hitting the ground down there in the part of the country where my daughter lives… and when I checked her Xanga site this morning I learned that her last post, a couple of days ago, reported that she’s in a severe fibro flare.  My poor baby….

One of the latest military units to reach Iraq, armored infantry from Fort Hood, could include one of my son’s best friends.  Matt had just finished his training there as a mechanic on Bradley fighting vehicles, last I heard from him.  Wherever he, Joe, and Sephiroth are, my thoughts are with them.

Hell, my thoughts are scattered all over the planet.  No wonder I’m such a mess today.

I considered making this a private post, thinking, “It’s no concern to anyone but me.”  Then I looked over at the contents of my left module and asked myself when I ever let that stop me.

Well, here goes nothing….

Lessee… where was I?

Oh, the keyboard.  It’s working just fine since I cleaned all the cat hair, crumbs and stuff out of it.  Only problem I see… uh, make that “hear”… now is that without the cushion of cat hair under the keys, it’s a lot noisier when Greyfox hammers on it.  For me, getting a new keyboard will be delayed as long as possible, and preferably when we do need one we will find one with large print keys.    Believe me, for a perfectionist, getting all those large-print stickers aligned just right on the keys so her myopic old fart can see to hunt and peck, is an all-day job.  This picky Virgo has better ways to spend her time.

My work table is now occupied by a few thousand bits of tumble-polished lapis lazuli, to be sorted and paired for earrings.  That will not keep me from doing readings in between the work on the stones.  I’ll just lay the cards out on top of the lapis.

I was bursting with a rant last night while one or the other of the guys was at this computer, so I banged this out on the laptop:

Was it ignorance, stupidity, greed, or what?

I ask silly questions like that and Greyfox laughs at me.  He likes to laugh at my naiveté.  It’s fair, I know.  I get enough laughs at his expense, so it balances out.

The three of us in this household irritate and hassle each other on a regular basis, but we give each other lots of laughter as well, so it evens out.  One of the things we enjoy sharing a few rueful laughs over is our mutual bafflement bordering on puking revulsion at the political crap in our state.

It had to be ignorance, stupidity, greed, gullibility, cupidity, demagoguery and chicanery that got the current Republican administration into office.  The previous Lt. Gov., Fran Ulmer, lost the election by talking truthfully about the problems the state faces.  Murkowski told these compatriots of ours what they wanted to hear, on the “promise ‘em anything” principle.  He promised jobs and no taxes and new schools.

Now not only has the man put his daughter into his vacant US Senate seat, he has put a fat half dozen or so of his political cronies into high-paid do-nothing jobs (doing nothing but making life hard for the career bureaucrats now under their command, who have to try to keep their departments running despite the new boss). He also instituted a one-two combination of a long list of new “user fee” taxes together with cuts in services.

But worst of all, in our opinion, he has set the foxes to mind the henhouse.  We laugh at the absurdity of it, but it’s not really funny.  The previous “game board”, that body that makes fish and wildlife policy, was a balance of business and industry people, subsistence and sport hunters , commercial and sport fishermen, and environmentalists.  Now all the environmentalists are gone and sports and commercial interests are predominating over subsistence concerns. 

There is a “wolf problem” in the interior.  The plan I heard the other day was to appropriate money for a few weeks of intensive helicopter wolf hunting this summer, and if that doesn’t take care of the problem… well, hell, people… that’s the place where I tuned out the report.  I don’t know what their second phase is going to be if shooting wolves from helicopters for a few weeks doesn’t do the job.  Do I want to know?  I’m sure I’ll find out; no hurry.

This is a disastrous plan not just for the wolves.  Our fisheries used to be Alaska’s biggest industry.  Then the fisheries were overfished and the ocean has been warming up and going toxic… so oil supplanted fish.  Oil and tourists are almost all there is to bring money into this state.  Already, there is a tourism boycott being organized in sympathy with the wolves.  As if that would stop the killing.  AS IF….

And it isn’t just the governor and his appointees making nasty plans.  The legislature in Juneau is considering a new tax on tourists, a $100 head tax for all cruise ship passengers.  Lobbyists for the cruise lines are trying to discourage this, feeling that it will cut into their business.  It is a powerful lobby, so there’s some hope on that one. 

The lobbyists are warning the goverment that it’s cutting its own throat.  People are calling the government in Juneau from all over the planet, telling them they won’t be spending their summer here because we’re shooting wolves from helicopters.  From what I hear from that bun-faced asshat Murkowski, I don’t think he cares.

We already have depressed tourism because of terrorism and the security backlash that makes air travel more of a nightmare than ever.  Now the administration seems bent on putting one of the state’s top two industries out of its misery.  Murkowski’s interests aren’t in the tourism field, apparently.  He is, however, showing a lot of interest in oil development.

What we have here is a state with the biggest remaining wilderness on the planet, a fragile ecosystem already compromised by human predation, global warming and resource exploitation.  As threatened as our wilderness is, people come here from everywhere to be awed by it.  It’s awesome.  We could regulate the tourism, protect the land and wildlife from human pressure, and for a while we were moving in that direction.

Now, the push is on for development and resource exploitation.  Visitors are welcomed out of one side of the mouth and repulsed out of the other.  White man speak with forked tongue.  There’s a joke in there somewhere, but I’m not going in after it.

Doug has been saying we need a new keyboard.  He is lobbying for a wireless one, probably so he can sit comfortably in Couch Potato Heaven and play the PS2 while he posts to his chats.  He posts and plays at the same time now, but has to sit here at the computer desk and use the controller extension cord.  How he would read the computer monitor from a seat on the sofa, I don’t know.  Maybe he sees the wireless keyboard as a toe in the door toward getting one of those computer interfaces you wear.

I don’t think a new keyboard is coming soon, and if one does become necessary, it probably won’t be wireless because that costs more and makes one more layer of technology to go wrong.  Besides, for me this ergonomic office chair is the most comfortable seat in the house.

I was almost ready to give in and buy a new keyboard when the “e” key started needing an extra hard stroke or two.  Doug had used his canned compressed air to blow out the keyboard and he insisted the key was “worn out.”  AHA!  Gotcha geek-breath:  it’s not broken after all.

I took a pair of fine tweezers and picked a pound or two of cat hair, dandruff, sesame seeds and other fluff from the spaces in, under and around those keys.  Then I blew it out with compressed air and picked out a few more ounces of detritus.  The “e” key works fine now… but the space bar is getting balky.  Hmmm… only eight screws holding the bottom plate on this thing.  Where’s my little phillips?

“Want a reading?

With me, you have no need to worry that I’m going to predict some scary thing you don’t really want to know.  I don’t do that sort of thing….”

I have posted the entire disclaimer along with instructions on how to request a reading, on my other Xanga site:  KaiOaty.  I will be working on a reading for LuckyStars today.

I took care of my sleep deprivation–spent about 12 hours in bed.  I felt rested this morning, but had the dull headache that often comes when I sleep a long time.  I think I must have exceeded the dream limit or something.  My skull’s too tight today.

All day today, I’ve been soothing my aching head with warm colors and wry humor, working on my other Xanga site, getting it ready to be the place where I do readings.  I moved the State of the World reading over there, and posted a reading that I did recently by email for Kabuki.  She gave me permission to post it publicly.

I want my other Xanga site to become a place for doing readings, teaching oracular techniques, and discussing metaphysics.  That will leave SusitnaSue’s place for rants and photoblogs and memoirs and such, solving that “buried blog” problem that keeps me from getting all the props I have coming.

The next step, for me, will be to compose a blog full of instructions and disclaimers for potential subjects.  It’s is largely written already because I sent much of it to Kabuki in an email before I did her reading.  The rest of that blog will be answers to the questions such as, “How much will this cost me?”

That question was asked recently by CoalMinersDaughter, and I haven’t answered it or any of the other readings-related questions yet because I’ve been cooking up this other Xanga site scheme.  If you have any questions about readings, or if I’ve ever mentioned doing a reading for you and you want to do the prudent thing and remind me, please wait until I get that disclaimer-blog posted.

After you’ve read the disclaimers, if you want a reading, just follow the instructions I will include in that blog, which I will be posting at http://www.Xanga.com/KaiOaty (my other Xanga site), just as soon as I get it written. 

I may be ill.  Gut cramps and nausea could be stress and sleep deprivation, or I may be coming down with something.  I know I’m ill-tempered this morning.  Don’t cross me.

I was crashing last night, in my bed here in this big open room that includes the woodstove (which it’s my job to monitor while we all sleep), our kitchen, the “dining area” (where we placed the computer desk next to my worktable that was once a dining table), Greyfox’s TV/VCR, and “couch potato heaven” centered on the big monitor for the PS2.  Doug was on the computer and Greyfox was watching the same old movie he’d watched on broadcast and taped the night before.

I’d been up since about four ayem.  Consciousness was fading about 9:00, despite the TV sound’s being loud enough to wake the dead in order for the deaf old fart to hear it, when I heard Greyfox speak to Doug from his armchair at the foot of my bed.  He asked if he could get on the computer, “for a couple of minutes to check something.”  Doug acknowledged the request with a “yeah,” and went on with what he was doing, which is usually participating in three or four chatrooms while he is playing games or working on grafx.

Greyfox knows, or should know by now, that to get Doug’s attention and have any hope of something more than the reflexive “yeah” with which the kid shrugs off the voices of distraction, that he needs to move closer, loom over the kid from behind, get inside his aura, touch him or crowd him… all those tactics I learned from the special ed resource teachers and have been trying to teach Greyfox ever since he moved into this household.

But the old fart’s parents reared him to believe that youth should obey their elders.  Never mind that even if Doug didn’t have ADD, and weren’t the cocky Leo born in the year of the Rooster that he is, he has a mother who reared him to question authority, talk back and take his own path.   One of the bonds my son and I share is our contempt for arbitrary authority. 

Any authority his step-father has around here is either arbitrary or associated with Greyfox’s twin areas of expertise:  English literature and creative incompetence.  A career in state government taught him all the tricks of getting out of work by making a mess of whatever he was assigned to do.  The alpha animal in this pack is the eldest of the three cats.  Among the primates, Greyfox is the one who is dominated by the dog:  the bottom of the pecking order, in other words.

I was fading out again, when a heavy, whining sigh from Greyfox woke me.  I detest that sound.  The kid wears headphones at the computer, so he didn’t hear it.  Greyfox was aiming his petulant whimper at me, hoping I’d rouse sufficiently to yell at the kid to share with the old kid.  I growled at Greyfox, instead.  I’d had it with his petulance.

He had been trying since morning to figure out what was going on with his account at totse.com.  Before leaving for work, he had tried to log on, but his password wouldn’t work.  While he futzed around here at the keyboard, I amused myself at the PS2 playing Final Fantasy.  He asked me if I knew how to type a letter on that keyboard so that it showed up “like a power.”  I said the word was “superscript”, and, no, I didn’t know how to do that on that keyboard.  I knew better than to try to introduce him to the character map.  Novelty throws him for a loop, and he only had a few minutes before he would leave.

He had spent a few minutes at the computer again after he got home, sighing and whimpering and hammering the keyboard, jiggling the mouse… all that stuff he does to express his frustration at the machines that have it in for him.  Totse still would not yield to him.

Now, after getting no response from me (I’m playing dead, courting sleep) he gets up from his chair and walks into the kitchen, pacing the floor.  I finally speak up and ask him to turn the TV off if he’s not going to watch it.  I’d have been better off leaving it on. Things got quieter in here, so I could clearly hear the exchange between the kid and old fart.  Doug was wrapping up whatever he had been doing, moving at his own pace, preparing to let Greyfox have the computer for his “couple of minutes.”

As soon as Greyfox got on the computer, all hope of sleep abandoned me.  Another of his sounds I have learned to despise is the, “Uhmmm….” with which he asks for help while preserving (he thinks) plausible deniability.  Heaven forfend that he should actually admit he needs help.  And why should he?  Doug and I both would rather help him than listen to his whimpers, sighs and other distress signals.

Now the details were revealed.  Not just his password had changed, but some of the “profile” data wasn’t as he’d left it.  For example, his posts now said they were coming from Korea, instead of “27 miles south of Trapper Creek.”  Doug suggested that the site was having database problems.  I said maybe someone had hacked his profile.

As it turned out, I got it right.  Once Doug showed Greyfox how to log in, he learned that some of his posts had been edited, too.  The code kiddie who did it had even bragged about it, so there was no mystery at all.  The motivation was no mystery either.  It was karma, pure and simple.

Greyfox has been spewing venom and bile on totse for weeks.  He’d sit here at the keyboard snickering and cackling as he responded to naive posts from those young people.  In all his time there, he never found another totsier of his age or older, and few of them even in middle age. 

I can understand inadvertently offending people with frankly expressed views.  I do that all the time.  But Greyfox went beyond that to meanness and cruelty, two of his specialties.  He heaped scorn and contempt on the kiddies and one of them got him back.

Doug doesn’t blog much—-only when he has something he needs to express.  Here’s how he put it at LiveJournal:

Date: 2003-03-24 03:56
Subject: Ugh…
Security: Public

My stepfather is a complete idiot when it comes to computers. Well, not complete. He knows the basic terms like “click” and “icon”. But. Get this:

He has a little problem where a password sent by a forum has non-standard characters in it. He gets the password mailed to him. All he has to do is copy and paste, right?

“How do I do that?”

Cue facepalm on my part.

I walk him through, doing it and telling him what I’m doing at each step.

“Okay, first you select it. Got that?” “Uh-huh.”
“Now right-click, and select Copy.”
“Now we go over here, right-click, and select Paste.”

“…”

“…”

“…How did you do that?”

At this point I turn slightly to my right and begin beating my forehead against our scanner.

(The facepalm was well-justified.  Doug and I have jointly and separately walked Greyfox through copying and pasting at least a half dozen times.)

Around that time, I sat up in bed and participated in the conversation.  Around eleven o’clock, two hours into Greyfox’s “couple of minutes”, I got up to get some warm milk in the hope of getting to sleep.  This damned disease I’ve got includes sleep disorders and sometimes if my sleep is delayed or interrupted, I can be wakeful for many hours before I get it back.

I was still awake, but trying to sleep, at 2:30 AM.  I did doze off a couple of times.  Then around 5:30, I gave up and got up.  I’m grumpy.  Don’t cross me.